If you are not one already, you are all set to be the next breakout novelist.

If not, however, this post is for you….

In the course of the current project I’m working on, one of the best tips came from renowned literary agent, Donald Maass, who says in his “Writing the Breakout Novel”:

“Without doubt the most common flaw I see in manuscripts from beginners and mid-career novelists alike is the failure to invest every page of a novel with tension. Low tension equals low interest. High tension equals high interest. The ratio is mathematic, the result positive…”

In short, you need to keep the reader hooked throughout. This will bring you an agent/ publication/ sales. That does not necessarily mean cliff-hangers on every page (though that works for some people)!

So what works? Other than the obvious advice on “making your character suffer” and “how can things get worse?”, here are a few things Maass has to offer:

No low tension scenes: Axiomatic, this one, but all of us have such scenes in our first drafts. The protagonist should not be caught mulling over things or summarizing them in the shower/with a cup of coffee/ while driving/ (fill your scene of choice here). Unless, of course, there is an interior monologue that introduces some sort of conflict.

So, sequential narratives are out–no factual descriptions of a character’s routine from dawn to dusk, except cases where he or she is being followed by a hired killer staking them out!

Use premises with inherent tension and gut emotional appeal: If your hero turns out to be the anti-hero, or if your heroine is trying to hide her child from his father fearing abuse or kidnap, to use a few cliché examples, the story has inherent possibilities of tension. Take it to an original level, and you have a tension churner.

Include conflict, however under the surface, or small: It could be a daughter who is not letting on to her mother that she feels hurt, or the heroine failing to hail a taxi–each of your pages ought to be the playground of two forces/attitudes/desires/ opinions/ clashing against each other, with drama or without.

Give your character high human worth, then test it: Sometimes it works to put a character’s morals in danger instead of her life. If you build up the character’s moral stance on a subject and then challenge it, you can raise the stakes and retain tension over a range of pages.

So the next time you are revising your novel, check each page for tension quotient. If a page scores 2 on a scale of 1 to 10, it is time to rethink the scene/ episode/ dialogue/ description, and introduce tension into the equation.

Bookmark This

Writing “who you are” is equally important, and here’s why:

Let’s face it, there aren’t many original plots left. If you analyze the books and films we have till today, the number of plots boil down to seven different types. The immortal Shakespeare stole all his plots, so what are the odds of any  ordinary mortal not doing so? But how is it then that successful writers tell us the same old story so as to pique our interest?

They tell it from their own perspective, of course. From the way they perceive reality or constructed reality. They know what pushes their own buttons, what hits a nerve, and why they want to tell a specific story in that particular way. They know themselves, and according to James Scott Bell, they create their “personality filters” in order to create an original story based on one  or more of the seven plot types.

So, how does Bell reckon you know yourself? According to him, here are a few of questions all writers should answer when they approach the plotting of their novel:

What do you most care about in the world?

If you were to write your own obituary, how would you want it to read?

What is your physical appearance? How do you feel about it? How does it affect you?

What do you fear most?

What are your major strengths of character?

What are your major flaws?

What are you good at? What do you wish you were good at?

If you could do one thing and know that you would be successful, what would you do?

What are the three events from your childhood that helped shape you into the person you are today?

What are some of your annoying habits?

What secret in your life do you hope is never revealed?

What is your philosophy of life?

————————————

I am plotting my first MS, and I sat and wrote down the answer to all these questions. All I can tell you is that it made me re-think quite a few aspects of my work, and how to change them in order to make my work more resonant.

So pick up a pen and paper, or your laptop, and take a few minutes to answer these questions. You might be intrigued by what you find, and how it can affect your next novel.

Bookmark This

“I somehow thought it was…”

“I think it might be…”

“You are right, perhaps…..”

Do any of your characters talk like this, or perhaps the narrator?

If they do, it is time to figure out why they lack assertion. In all cases other than writing about a teenager coming into his or her own, or a character one of whose traits is that he or she lacks confidence, you need to weed out words like perhaps, almost, possibly, maybe, somehow and so on. These are indefinite modifiers. If used in excess they can make your writing weak, surround it in a cloud of vagueness, make it less crisp.

If you notice you tend to use such words, try doing without them for an entire page. Compare it with a page that is riddled by these modifiers.

What do you see?

Bookmark This

I’ve been reading Lost Horizon by James Hilton, and what I really liked about the story is the way Hilton has created a world–a hidden, legendary lamasery in remote mountains, the Shangri-la, where people live longer lives, where the lamas devote their time to contemplation and academic preoccupations.

I particularly love the descriptions:

“To Conway, seeing it first, it might have been a vision fluttering out of that solitary rhythm in which lack of oxygen had encompassed all his faculties. It was, indeed a strange and half-incredible sight. A group of coloured pavilions clung to the mountainside with none of the grim deliberation of a Rhineland castle, but rather with the chance delicacy of flower petals impaled upon a crag…An austere emotion carried the eye upward from the milk-blue roofs to the grey rock bastion above, tremendous as the Wetterhorn above Grindelwald. Beyond that, in a dazzling pyramid, soared the snow slopes of Karakal.”

So what have you been reading recently? And what has moved you the most in the books you have read?

Feel free to post an excerpt from your reading in the comments, so we may all get to know new and exciting, or old and undiscovered books for our future reading lists!

–Damyanti

Bookmark This

Waiting....

I have all sorts of errands and assignments chasing my tail today, so I’ll do another “link post”. Sigh. I hope I’m better-organized next Monday! So, here goes:

I’ve never been very patient in most things I’ve done. While in my kitchen, it irks me no end that some cakes take ages to bake once in the oven, or that the pasta takes 10minutes to boil. But patience is a virtue I’m having to learn, with every story I write.

Sometimes, it is all about waiting for the idea to ferment, at others it is waiting for the next scene to form in my head.

At others, it is about putting away something I’ve written to look at another day. And this is the hardest kind of waiting. It is also the most essential. To know why, read more here.

Bookmark This

I’ve been using mind-mapping for my upcoming project, and it has helped me a lot. I thought I would link you to a post I’d done some time back, which explains what mind-mapping is, and how it helps in writing.

So here’s how to Mind-map your way to writing!

I hope the tips help you as much as they helped me, and till next Monday, Happy Writing!

Bookmark This

Some of the simplest methods to know my characters, for me, are these:

1. I sit down and speed-write for a specific amount of time, from that character’s POV. If Adam is a character I need to get to know, I time 10 minutes on the stopwatch in my cellphone and then write about anything at all, always imagining I am Adam. I do not analyze or think, because I do not let my hand stop, or look back and read what I have written. I have explained this kind of speed-writing session here. Sometimes Adam would tell me things about himself in this way I would not have known otherwise!

2. I sit on one of the chairs in my balcony, and pretend my character is on the other chair. I do an interview. I ask him/her a question, and then move to the other chair and answer it, but this time “in character”. It helps to write down a few of the questions in advance. I know it must look crazy to someone else looking at me (which, in my case, is the fish in the aquarium), but it works like a dream.

3. Another tool that really helps is the Character Profile Sheet. Pasting all of it here would make this post a mile long, so here is a link. Once you have answered as many of the questions on this sheet, you will have a pretty good feel of who your character is. Some of these questions can also be used for the activity in point 2 above.

4. The last idea that I use often, to create characters and to describe them is a Character Writing Exercise. I choose someone I know, very well or in passing, and create a character based on that. It may not work for the piece I am working on, but such exercises become a sort of database. I write more about it here.

I hope this helps.

Please add in your tips, ideas on characterization, and feel free to discuss or post questions in the comments. Happy writing all…and hope this was a useful Monday post!

Bookmark This

Back in Malaysia, it is rain and sun all the time, and nary a sign of winter. So yesterday, I dragged a reluctant hubby (who has never stayed in wintry places) along the Huang pu river, for a walk on the Bund. It was 4 degrees C but felt a lot lower cos of the freezing wind, I loved my nose getting all cold and runny, my hands turning numb the minute I took them out to click the fairy-tale- science-fiction skyline, which includes the Pearl tower, the Jing Mao tower and the Shanghai Trade Center, the second-tallest building in the world.

I breathed in the dank river, walked past brightly lit stalls with grilled corn cobs, vegetables, octopus, squid, and things to which I could not put a name. I would’ve tried the lot, but hubby dear took me to a tiny KFC tucked under the Bund, and I re-emerged with a tame glass of milo.

Before we returned back to the hotel, we dined at a tiny two-storied restaurant with red wooden windows on strips of pork and mushrooms cooked sichuan style with lots of sliced red pepper, a veggie soup that struck all the right notes of green, sour and sweet, and ate white steamed fish strips drowned in chili-oil, perfect for the weather. Washed all of it down with cha, the local tea, and walked home with lips that were equally numb from the heat of the chili and as from the cold wind.

Now, the internet in the room is not working, so am clicking away at the Business center on a keyboard that has mandarin characters for Tab and Caps Lock.

After I’ve written a page or two into my notebook, (all this grey, rain and people walking and cycling 20 floors below in colorful umbrellas makes for a stimulating view) I plan to take to the road myself, shiver a little and breathe in the damp cold, and munch on a few steaming barbecue sticks of things I cannot name *greedy laughter*.

Bookmark This

Write a long detailed passage in continuous time that includes opening car doors and turning the key in the ignition and putting the car in gear, or maybe someone getting up in the morning or going to work or putting on his socks and shoes. Write in super-detail.

Lay this aside and come back at least an hour later. What part do you definitely want to cut away? Does some of the detail actually seem interesting and worth saving? Can you revise it in a way that shows what is happening inside the character so that the boring detail is the merest scaffolding for the real interest. You might make it funny, or perhaps as the character cleans his teeth he has a flashback.

————————

I scrolled down and read Gunnisac’s post. I tried to comment, but the comments keep disappearing. So, I’ll leave my comment in this post.

Hi,

You sound just like me. Sarah will tell you that I’ve been in despair the last week, have not done much writing. Yesterday I tried speed-writing and that helped (this is the only way for me to un-block myself). Sometimes the strangest things will set you off.

So maybe you can take Sarah’s writing-prompt in the last post and let yourself into a burst of speed-writing and see what comes out? I’m hoping it will work for you just as it does for me, like magic

Hope you go great guns again soon!

Best,

Damyanti

Bookmark This

Cold arctic air slammed into my face….

And now, take it and run!

Bookmark This