Light-bulb moments. Aha moments. Flashes of recognition. Revelations. Call them whatever you like. I like to think of them as clicks.
In the writing life, the best kind of click is that moment something makes you realize exactly what’s been missing from the not-quite-right scene you’ve been working on. Or the instant you put two plot points together and suddenly have a clear view of what’s really beneath your character’s behavior. Or the random tip on plot structure that magically conjures for you a map of how everything in your messy draft might fit together after all.
Clicks. They’re satisfying, exciting, inspiring, invigorating. And they’re the stuff writers live for.
The January 2015 Writer’s Digest—devoted to all things novel writing—releases today, and I’m so excited to finally be able to offer you a preview of what’s inside. We’ve done our best to fill this issue with the types of craft advice and writing techniques that help things click into place. Because whether your own moments of realization are quiet head nods or loud exclamations of triumph, as subtle as the click of a key in a lock or dramatic as a stack of papers launched into the air, we know it’s the bits of advice that resonate that can make all the difference for your novel-in-progress.
First, award-winning novelist David Corbett shares what made his own characters finally click on the page—and how you can paint more effective pictures of the players in your own stories, too. Then, longtime contributor Elizabeth Sims details techniques for mastering one of the most notoriously difficult elements of fiction: dialogue. Bestselling novelist Steven James shows you precisely how to manage the flow of tension and conflict in your story—through multiple plot points, climaxes, subplots and more. Therapist-turned-writer Tracey Barnes Priestley delves into the real reasons “Why So Many Writers Give Up Mid-Novel—and How Not to Be One of Them.” And four bestselling series writers take you behind the scenes with their iconic characters to show you what it is that gives a novel that special something that makes readers want another installment, and another, and another.
We all know that writing a novel isn’t easy. But in those moments that something clicks, suddenly anything seems possible. Here’s to many ahas on the pages—and in the new year—ahead.
Get your copy of our “This Is the Year You Write That Novel!” issue on your favorite newsstand starting today, or download the January 2015 Writer’s Digest and start reading right now.
Happy Writing,
Jessica Strawser
Editor, Writer’s Digest Magazine
Follow me on Twitter @jessicastrawser.
I was reading through some of our older science fiction titles, and I came upon Worlds of Wonder by David Gerrold (published in 2001). As I was flipping through the book, I read an opening line that intrigued me:
“All writing is list-making. Nothing more. The trick is knowing what to put next on the list.”
This seemed a puzzlingly simple notion–that developing the plot of your story was in some way akin to the act of jotting down your grocery list. And yet, as I started to read further, what the author was saying made a lot of sense:
The thing about Lego bricks is that you can build just about anything you can imagine–if you’re patient enough. People have built whole cities out of Lego bricks. The problem is that you have to figure out yourself how to put the things together. While there might be instructions on how to build a specific kind of Lego castle, there are no instructions on how you can build the castle that exists in your own imagination.
Planning your story is the same experience. You have a sense of what you want it to be, how you want the pieces to fit together, but actually getting this brick to fit next to that one…. Pretty soon, you start to wonder how the hell Arthur C. Clarke and Larry Niven and Frederik Pohl and Richard Matheson and Jack Finney and Anne McCaffrey and C.J. Cherryh and Connie Willis can make it look so easy.
David goes on to suggest this exercise, which I share with you below. (A sidenote: What’s particularly amusing about it is that he is the writer of the episode “The Trouble with Tribbles” from Star Trek: The Original Series, which is, in my opinion, one of the best Star Trek episodes ever.)
Get yourself a stack of index cards. Write a one-line synopsis of each specific scene that you think should be in your story, one scene per card. Don’t worry about writing them down in any specific order. Just write them down as fast as you think of them:
- Lt. Uhura brings a tribble aboard the Enterprise.
- Lt. Uhura first gets the tribble from a local merchant.
- Uhura’s tribble has a litter of little tribbles.
- Scotty discovers tribbles in the air vents.
- Kirk finds a tribble on his captain’s chair.
- Kirk and Spock beam over to the space station. Kirk opens up the storage compartments and lots of tribbles fall down on his head.
But this isn’t enough for a complete story. You need a second plot line too, something to complicate the first one:
- The Klingons want shore leave, but what they really want is … to disrupt the plan for Sherman’s Planet.
- The Klingons are on the speace station. A barroom brawl breaks out.
- Kirk investigates the fight. He bawls out Scotty and restricts him to quarters. Scotty is glad for the chance to read his technical manuals.
- The plan for Sherman’s Planet is that Earth will plant a new grain. If nothing earthlike will grow, the Klingons get the planet.
- The Klingons are here to poison the grain.
- The tribbles eat the poisoned grain, reproduce like crazy and fall on Kirk’s head, but McCoy discovers that they’re dying.
Now, take all these separate cards and shuffle them together and start laying them out on the kitchen table in the order you think they should go. First organize each plot line in its own thread. Then you can go back and forth between separate threads, picking up the next appropriate scene from each.
When you have all the cards laid out in order, go through them as if you’re reading a comic book or a storyboard and see if they re
Every writer knows crafting a great story revolves around plot–one of the essential elements of storytelling. But do you know what exactly plot is? In the following excerpt from The Nighttime Novelist, author Joseph Bates explains what plot is and gives examples of common plot problems.
What is Plot?
Plot begins with a big-picture arc that includes (1) want, (2) what stands in the way, and (3) eventual resolution and then becomes more complex as we find new ways to explore and complicate that arc: paralleling internal and external arcs, putting major and minor conflicts in the protagonist’s way, introducing secondary characters and subplots, and so on. And as we begin adding these new layers of complication—as our imaginations run more freely and our fingers fly across the keyboard—it can be easy for our novel, which started out tightly focused, to become cluttered, in a state of perpetual distraction.
Common Problems When Writing Plot
If you feel your novel has begun to lose its forward momentum as a result of a plot that’s got too much going on, you’ll want to do what you can to get it back on course, beginning with looking at the following common plot problems and seeing which might be affecting your storytelling:
- Mistaking inaction or digression for suspense. The suspense required of an effective plot is about teasing the reader, true. But an effective tease isn’t about intentional delay or digression, suggesting the character really needs to know something, or do something, and then having the character purposely not do or discover what’s needed. Every scene in the novel must be active, even if the action is primarily emotional or mental, and each scene must seem like an attempt to solve the problem or question at hand. If you’ve set up that what the character needs to do is discover who rented the car that was found by the side of the road, and what the character does instead is go eat waffles, then the only suspense you’ve created is directed back to the author … as in a reader wondering, “Why are we wasting time eating waffles?”
- Mistaking character quirks for character deepening. Quirks only feel real if they also feel relevant to the story in some way. It’s great that your police sergeant enjoys classical music as well as NASCAR, is addicted to reality television, builds model airplanes, was a cheerleader in college, and operates HAM radio on the weekends, but perhaps be should be more concerned with that homicide …
Buy The Nighttime Novelist now!
Read 10 solutions to
One of the most common plot problems writers face is mistaking minor characters and subplots for the main character and primary plot. In the following excerpt, Joseph Bates, author of The Nighttime Novelist, discusses overactive or inactive characters and subplots and how they can impact your story.
Overactive or Inactive Supporting Characters
If in the second act you find your novel veering off course either because a minor character has come in and tried to run the place, or because your minor characters seem to be doing nothing but sitting on your couch, eating your food, not really contributing, you should put them to the test: determine why they’re there, if they can be brought in line somehow, or, if not, how you might excise them from the novel.
Minor characters who become personal “darlings” for the author can be very hard to kill, and often a writer will find some way to justify keeping around an inactive but favorite minor character based on very thin reasoning, such as saying that the character adds comic relief (yes, but comic relief to your depressing post-apocalyptic Gothic revenge story?) or that the character adds a romantic element (yes, but does your chainsaw-murderer bipolar anti-hero really need a love interest?) or, or …
If an inactive supporting character does indeed seem to fulfill some function like this—but is otherwise inert—you might see if another and better-established supporting character might fulfill that role just as easily. Or you might consider streamlining several supporting characters into just one who does the trick.
Ultimately what stays and goes is not up to you as the author but up to your story. When in doubt, try to listen to what the story is telling you to do and follow that advice; it’s almost always going to be right. As for overactive secondary characters—those who seem intent on making their story the novel’s big one—see the section on overactive or inactive subplots [below] for tips on getting them under control.
Overactive or Inactive Subplots
Subplots exist to tell us something about your protagonist and his quest. They’re like a side mirror, offering a quick, new (and helpful) perspective and allowing the readers to keep moving forward unimpeded. Thus a subplot becomes problematic when that function breaks down, when it becomes either overactive—trying to take over the main plot and tell its own story instead—or inactive, meaning that it has no clear, compelling connection to the protagonist and the main arc; it’s simply there.
An overactive subplot behaves almost like a virus. Its ultimate goal is that it wants to live, like everything else on earth, but in order to do this it invades something healthy–your main plot–and tries to take it over. It might be that the subplot is auditioning for its own novel—it isn’t unheard of that a subplot becomes so alive that the author eventually decides to tell that story on its own—but it can’t be allowed to take over this one (unless, of course, you come to the realization that the subplot is the plot you actually wanted to explore all along, in which case, well, it’s back to the drawing board).
An inactive subplot isn’t nearly as aggressive; it’s not doing anything to take over your novel, or much to advance it, either. In fact it’s not doing much
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