“Write an article on ‘What is payment gateway?’” I recently typed into a ChatGPT window. ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence-powered writing generator, quickly obliged.
The result was impressive. Sure, the tone was inhuman and the structure as sophisticated as a college essay, but the key points, the grammar and the syntax were all spot on. After a bit of a punch-up, it was perfectly passable as a sponsored content article designed to drum up business leads for a software provider – an article like the one that I, a professional copywriter, had just spent hours writing.
My amusement quickly turned to horror: it had taken ChatGPT roughly 30 seconds to create, for free, an article that I charged £500 for. The artificial intelligence software is by no means perfect – yet. For businesses that rely on churning out reams of fresh copy, however, it’s a no-brainer, isn’t it?
In other words, there will soon be no need for people to perform any corporate writing.
This includes all business writing, such as marketing copy, info copy, legal copy, and journalism, as well as all mainstream (i.e. profitable) entertainment writing. Novels, screen plays, journalism again hahahahahaha: it’s all going to be generated by machines, not people.
When that happens, there will be no longer be tangible reasons for people to learn how to write.
Why bother learning how to write, when you can click a button and whatever you need will be written for you?
A writer’s journey can take us in such unexpected directions…
When I was working on the cover for my last Marion Flarey book, I came across a photograph of a castle that had the perfect “fairy tale” style I needed. (Marion, if you haven’t met her, loves fairy tales and views the world through fairy tale allusions.)
It wasn’t until after I’d finished the cover and was poised to release the novel onto the world that I thought to do a little research about the castle and its history.
And what a crazy and tragic story I found.
Neuschwanstein Castle. He didn’t live to see it finished, but today it is a major tourist attraction and source of revenue to the king’s beloved Bavaria. Photo by Felix on Unsplash
Neuschwanstein Castle is located in the Bavarian region of Germany, and was built by a young, romantic, homosexual (most likely) king—whose obsession with building fantastical and hugely expensive castles ended horribly when he was deposed in a coup and (most likely) murdered.
I’m not going to transcribe all the details about his life here. There’s plenty about him already published on the interwebs if you’re curious. Ludwig II, The Swan King. There’s also at least one biography (which I’m going to buy because one’s TBR pile can’t be too big, right?) and at least one movie.
What I want to work out here is what Ludwig’s life tells us about writing.
I hang out on twitter primarily for the writer community. It can be a lot of fun, but it’s also a learning experience.
For one thing, I encounter quite a few newer writers who have come into “the business” with unrealistic expectations.
Unfortunately, they’re setting themselves up for disappointment.
I know. I’ve made many of these mistakes myself.
So I thought I’d list a few of the ways that writers inadvertently sabotage themselves. Hopefully this will help us avoid at least some of the bumps in the road that we encounter as we write, share, and publish our novels.
The first few words are the hardest to write–and the most important to get right
So as you may know, I am currently living in a tent.
What I’m working on — when I am near an electrical plug :)
Most of the time. The routine my sweetheart and I have fallen into, since we sold our house and moved, is about five days in the tent, then two or three nights in a hotel or AirBnB.
I am loving it. My sleep quality is the best it’s been in years. Not sure if it’s the fresh air or the hours (we are basically sleeping sunrise to sunset) but I am feeling so rested when I wake up, almost every morning.
And being immersed in nature for hours and hours every day is pretty amazing as well.
That said, both of us work, so we need to connect to the Interwebs and recharge our devices every day. So rather than brew coffee in the wild, we’ve been driving into town every morning to one of several different coffee shops.
And as I’ve settled into this routine, in addition to my contract writing work, I’ve been editing Happily Flarey Ever — the third and probably last of my Marion Flarey books.
Specifically, I’ve been working on the first 3-5 pages.
Photo by Kyle Glenn on Unsplash. This is nothing like the Weekes-Flarey dome. Or the San Antonio family’s dome. But I would definitely camp in it :)
One of the things that is the most fun about writing is when an idea just pops into your head, and the further into the novel you get, the more you realize how well it works.
With my Marion Flarey books, an impulsive idea I came to love was to make her parents’ home a geodesic dome.
Click the link to see the photos. It’s a gorgeous home. (A far cry from Marion’s parents’ rather messy dome with the leaky roof!)
The article also mentions some of the things I’d picked up over the years about the advantages of geodesic domes. They are energy efficient and relatively inexpensive to build.
So, to my point about choosing a dome for my Marion Flarey books:
Marion’s stepfather, Winchell Weekes, is tight with money (a character trait that becomes particular important in the second book, Fo Fum Flarey), so of course he would pick something cheap to build and cheap to heat.
Geodesic domes peaked in popularity in the late 70s or so. Winchell started building his dome around 1987, after the peak, but he’s eccentric enough that the timing makes sense. He’s the kind of guy who would still think domes were cool ten years after the trend had petered out :)
But from my perspective as a writer, the best thing is how I was able to incorporate the dome as an aspect of the novels’ setting. I can “shorthand” the Weekes-Flarey home by calling it “the dome,” and readers know exactly what I’m talking about. Because the interior has an open floor plan, it’s easy to “force” characters into conflict. They can’t easily escape from each other.
And because the dome is fairly unique as a dwelling place, I can create quick visuals to help draw readers into the story. I can talk about the challenges of placing furniture on a wall that isn’t flat — something Marion notes when she tours her tower apartment in Once Upon a Flarey Tale — or the way the shingles have darkened with age, and (hopefully!) readers start to form a picture in their minds of what the Weekes-Flarey home is like. Even the word “dome” is visual. You can’t read the word without picturing the general shape of the Weekes-Flarey house.
This experience has taught me something as a writer that I’ll carry into my future novels: make the buildings unique, in some way that is easy to visualize and easy to shorthand.
How about you? Have you ever set a story in a building that you could use in this way?
And have you ever seen a geodesic dome house — or been inside one? I was, many years ago when I was in my early twenties back in Chenango County… someday I’ll have to see if I can figure out where it is :)
If ever there was a book that the world needs right now, this is it
Let me start by saying that I’m not fully on board with the title of this book: Cleaning Up Your Mental Mess(subtitle, 5 Simple, Scientifically Proven Steps to Reduce Anxiety, Stress, and Toxic Thinking), by Dr. Caroline Leaf.
The title suggests that the book is only for people who are struggling. That, IMO, is a mistake.
Back up a couple steps to how I learned about the book. It was a Dave Asprey podcast. Leaf was a guest, and during the interview she mentioned that she’s helped people with traumatic brain injury — people who other medical professionals had written off as permanently disabled — to not only recover from their injuries, but excel (in areas like academics, where highly functioning brain power is a prerequisite).
I thought, whoa. If her techniques are that powerful, imagine what people who aren’t recovering from physical injury could accomplish.
So I didn’t buy this book to deal with anxiety, stress, and toxic thinking. I mean, I’m not perfect and my life doesn’t always run smoothly, but I’ve been around for a while, I’ve done the work, I’ve cultivated coping skills that do the job for me.
In fact, that is kind of the point. I’m not trying to fix huge problems. I’m looking for ways to set and reach stretch goals.
What, exactly, can I accomplish in whatever time I have left on this planet? What seeming limits can I break?
You can grow brain cells — intentionally
What grabbed my attention in the Asprey interview is that Leaf (a neuroscientist and speech pathologist) was an early believer in neuroplasticity. “Early” as in back in the 1980s.
If you’re old enough, you probably know that there was a time when Science told us that the adult brain could not grow new cells. Once we hit a certain age (mid twenties, I guess, or maybe they thought it was late teens) we would supposedly hit our peak number of brain cells. From there, it was all downhill. Over time, our brain cells would start to die off, and since they could never be replaced, we’d lose cognitive function.
We were fated by nature, the Experts intoned, to a sad, lifelong slide toward mental and physical enfeeblement.
Leaf was a practicing neuroscientist during this period. She disagreed with the consensus.
She was right. She proved she was right in her practice.
Cleaning Up Your Mental Mess explains, in detail, the techniques Leaf teaches to help people stimulate their brains to grow new cells and form new neural connections.
How cool is that?
Now let me also say that, if you suffer from anxiety, stress, or similar issues (and if you do, you are far from alone) just go buy the book. (That’s an Amazon affiliate link but you can order it from any bookstore.)
But there is also a lot of material in the book people simply looking to enrich their personal development by integrating the principles of neuroplasticity.
There is some great lay material, for example, on neuroplasticity itself — how it works, what stimulates it, and how it can be detected via changes in brain waves, brain activity, and neurotransmitter levels.
First mind, then brain
There is some terrific insight into the relationship between the mind and the brain. The brain, Leaf explains, arises from the mind — not in any magical sense, but because our thoughts, feelings, and choices literally stimulate neurons to either emerge, grow, and branch or to prune, fade, and disappear.
And the book details the steps that Leaf has developed to help people use neuroplasticity to address a variety of challenges, including: replacing unwanted habits with desirable ones; something she calls “brain building,” which relates to what I referenced earlier about enhancing one’s cognitive abilities; and improving relationships and communications skills.
Writing, it turns out, plays a huge part in her approach. Leaf’s protocol is based on bringing existing thoughts, feelings, and choices into full conscious awareness, and then “re-conceptualizing” those thoughts/feelings/choices as a way to re-shape or replace associated neurons. Writing is useful during each step of the process by encouraging us to unlock suppressed thoughts, consider them, and find new ways to contextualize them. Interestingly, she states that “writing can even improve immune system function,” citing research she’s conducted that showed patients’ cortisol and homocysteine levels drop when they perform her Reflect step, which involves writing.
It makes me wonder what impact journaling has had on my life. I’ve kept a journal since I was a teenager, and while I instinctively turn to it during periods when I feel confused or stressed, or need to make some sort of major life decision. On the other hand, I’ve also thought of journaling as something of a writerly indulgence — a variety of navel-gazing. Perhaps I shouldn’t have been so self-deprecating? Perhaps my lifelong habit of journaling has had a major benefit to my overall well-being …?
One thing is for sure: I’ll be applying Leaf’s program to some of my life goals, and as part of that, I’ll be more deliberate in how I use my journal.
Bottom line? Great book. Highly recommend to anyone who is curious about tackling life’s challenges, whether that means healing from trauma or pushing personal limits.
* * * * *
Pssst. You know who really needs to clean up her mental mess?
I’m getting close, with my work on Scratch, to a kind of writing that is very close to dreaming.
Full disclosure: I have crazy-good dream recall, and always have. I remember dreams I had when I was five, six years old. I remember dreams I had when I was a kid that talked to me, helped me understand things about myself, about why I was in conflict with people around me.
In my teens and twenties, I started writing down my dreams, and from time to time I do it consistently–every night or every other night.
I often remember multiple dreams. I remember them in great detail. I sometimes skip writing out my dreams because it’s not unusual for the account of a single dream to run two or three pages, and before I know it I’ve exhausted the first two or three hours of my day recording dreams.
I type out my dreams, any more, because that’s faster than writing them by hand. And I keep them in binders. Scary.
And then there’s interpreting them. Also time-consuming. And quite honestly, it’s taken a lifetime to get even marginally decent at that. I’ve come to realize that dreams are a language. They are a language that use “images” but not, needless to say, images of the eyeball. James Hillman, in Dream and the Underworld, wrote about this. “Psychic images are not necessarily pictures and may not be like sense images at all. Rather they are images as metaphors.” They not a function of the “front of the eyeballs” but “the flickering patterns within that physical reality, and within the eyes themselves.”
Dreams draw on “pictures” that we store while we’re awake; these pictures are analogous to the letters of a written language. I have a stored “picture” in my mind of a blueberry. Many pictures, in fact, of many thousands of blueberries, sine I’ve encountered blueberries countless times in my life: fresh, frozen, in pancakes, on the bush, in my hand, in the store. And so my dream takes a blueberry, but then adds to it. The blueberry in my dream is enormous, the size of a softball. It’s in my parents’ kitchen, in a bowl. It has a soft spot — it it overripe. It belongs to someone else, not me. She is pleased by it. I seem to have tasted it, eaten it, but it’s still there — the tasting and eating was, within the dream, a thought rather than an action.
My dream has taken a blueberry, and added to it. A blend of contextual and fantastical elements. The blueberry is literally distorted, and in the distortion and the context it is transformed from a thing-in-itself to an element of thought-stuff. And that element is so loaded with meaning that it becomes meaning itself.
It’s backwards, to try to figure out what a dream means. Dreams are meaning. They are nothing but meaning.
The difficulty is that we are like dogs listening to English. We’re aware, dimly, that there is some reason this primate that feeds us is making odd noises with its mouth. We grasp, at times, that some of the noises correspond to actions. “Want your dinner?” corresponds, generally, to food being dumped into our dish.
But there’s so much more, there. And we know it. We can’t understand it, but we know it. (My dog stares at me. Stands and stares at me, as I talk to her in my long babbling incomprehensible sentences. She can’t understand me. She’d like to — maybe — but she can’t. The old Far Side cartoon. blah blah blah GINGER blah blahblah.)
So it takes work, to interpret a dream. To stay with it, long enough, to consider every image and every nuance of every image, and then how the images fit together — because they do. The images are words and the words, together, become sentences. Dreams are replete with “if this, then that.” “First this, then that.” Replete.
I’ve been recording my dreams for years. And at first, I did it because I felt there was some glamour to it. It was exciting to find, in dreams, hints of future events (and sometimes, more than hints. I dreamed my father was going to die weeks before he became sick). It was exciting to become lucid in dreams, to wake up and find myself in a fantastical, shimmering world of only thought, only ideas, to know I was at the same time both sleeping and awake.
But over time, I felt sometimes weary of it all. So many dreams were a re-telling of what I know, anyway. This relationship is problematic. This other relationship is a comfort to me. I’m afraid of this happening. I am seeking God. I wish we didn’t have to die. I’d rather die than not find God.
So why bother? Why record dreams? Why, after recording them, go through the tedious exercise of “interpreting” them, trying to figure out what they are saying?
But then recently, it struck me that the value in this exercise is the same as learning another spoken language. Have you ever tried to learn another spoken language? Have you ever gotten to the point in your work where you’re no longer “translating” as you try to read or interpret it? When the other language is suddenly on its own track in your head, its native vocabulary and syntax suddenly suddenly have meaning in your head, without having to first be corresponded to your native language?
I noticed, one day, that this was starting to happen to me as I “interpreted” my dreams. Suddenly, I was no longer looking at a dream image with its distortion and context and saying to myself, “okay, this means this, and this means that.” Suddenly, a string of images — distortion and context and all — were “speaking to me” directly. I didn’t need to mediate them through English, through the metaphor of Waking Reality language. I knew what the dream was saying without that intermediary step.
And I thought, okay. That’s why I’ve been doing this, all these years. To get to this point. To get here. To where the gap between me and my dreaming-self begins to dissolve, to merge.
I read a novel last year. Well, I should say, I finished it last year. I started it in 2019.A Glastonbury Romance, by John Cowper Powys. I took my time, reading it, because from the first page I knew it would be, for me as a writer, a momentous book. One of those books that when you start to read, you think, “oh wow. What the heck is this guy trying to pull off, here?” And so as you read you’re enjoying it as a novel, but there’s always another part of you thinking about that question. What the heck is Powys trying to pull off, here?
There are probably a lot of ways to answer that question, but I’ll tell you one answer: he was trying to dream. The novel is a dream.
I’m working on Scratch, now, as I’ve mentioned, and it’s a different kind of project than my Marion Flarey books.
It’s a dream.
For who ever began a dream? People always find themselves immersed in the the middle of some dream or other. The essence of sleep does not lie in dreaming; it lies in a certain dying to the surface life and sinking down into the life under the surface, where the other life — healing and refreshing — exists like an immortal tide of fresh water flowing beneath the salt water of a turbid sea. It is sufficient to remember the lovely and mysterious feeling of falling asleep compared with the crude, raw, iron spikes of the unpleasant things that happen in dreams to realize the difference. Between the process of going to sleep and the process of dreaming exists a great gulf. They seem to belong to different categories of being.
John Cowper Powys, A Glastonbury Romance
And because Scratch a dream, I have to let go as I write.
And that’s a horrible feeling. It’s scary, viscerally scary.
I’m not talking about the way writers use fiction to create fantasies about scary things. It’s no secret that stories work when they induce and then relieve anxieties. If a novel is any good, it’s because something is going wrong. A protagonist is in trouble, therefore the writer is, by necessity, plumbing the depths of human experience to explore “things that go wrong,” whether that takes the form of a dangerous international spy ring, an evil monster, a lost love, a serial killer on the loose, a natural disaster. Good writers face our fears and bring them to life on the page.
I’m talking about something different: the sensation I feel in my body when I write fiction. It’s a feeling that I have to let go; that what is happening as I write is not me, controlling things. It’s a not-me, coming through.
The characters in Scratch aren’t “characters,” they are dream-things. Dream-things crawling across a dream-scape.
I’ll be honest. I avoid writing, more than I care to admit, because I don’t like the way it feels. It’s a loss of control. Yes, there are periods when I’ve let go that I feel a kind of ecstasy, as well, which I suppose is the flip side of giving up control.
But ugh. The feeling of writing.
Do you know what I mean? Have you felt it, yourself?
I built this guided notebook originally for my own use, to help me create, document, and track characters as I write my novels. Now I’m making my Character Tool for Novelists available to other writers.
Built originally for my own use, Character Tool for Novelists has space to help you brainstorm and document up to twelve characters, including everything from their names, physical features, and family trees, to major life milestones and unconscious needs. The dimensions are 5×8.5 inches to make it easy to carry and store.
I use notebooks to plan and work out my novels. I know not everybody does — some writers do everything electronically. But for me, notebooks work.
One reason may be that I’ve kept journals my entire life. When I sit down with notebook and pen, something happens in my brain. I can ask myself questions and get answers back. It works great for my creative process.
Another reason is that using notebooks gives me a break from screens. I like being able to move around, sometimes, while I’m working on a novel. I like being able to switch from my desk (stand-up) to a chair once in a while.
So the system that I’ve developed over the course of my fiction career (five published novels, a half dozen in process, numerous shorts) is to use blank notebooks — usually around 5-6 x 8 inch size to make it easy to carry around including when I travel — for brainstorming novels, working out problems, and early drafts of key scenes.
Ugly but it worked: one of the Moleskine journals I used to work out the characters for my three Marion Flarey novels.
This proved to be a breakthrough for me as a fiction author. I’ve come to appreciate how important it is to fully imagine my characters before I get too deep into drafting an actual novel. It makes them come alive, which helps me enormously with everything else, from plotting and conflict to voice.
Having dedicated character notebooks imposed additional discipline on my planning process. It forced me to go through the foundational work of creating my characters and bringing them to life in my mind. As a result, before I began drafting my first Marion Flarey novel, every major character for all three books was fully developed in my head, including physical appearance, personality, backstory, and their hopes and dreams.
I have no doubt that one reason readers are enjoying Once Upon a Flarey Tale so much is that I “put in the work” on character development.
My dedicated character notebooks also helped me in practical ways. If I forgot a detail about a character — eye color or last name — I could easily look it up. It’s saved me both time and hassle.
But — speaking of saving time! — what I didn’t like about my system was that I was using a blank notebook, which meant I needed to replicate my character template by hand over and over and over.
So I decided to harness my Indie Author skills as a book designer to create and publish a “notebook” that would come pre-printed with the template — and Character Tool for Novelists was born :)
A tool for writers
I published Character Tool for Novelists using Amazon KDP and set the price at $7.99 USD; at 233 pages it’s roughly the cost of a similarly-sized lined journal, and at that price I make around a buck per copy. I chose white paper to make it as bright as possible; I personally wish the paper was a little thicker/higher quality but I’m limited by Amazon’s parameters, and in any case I wouldn’t want to make the tool any more expensive.
The tool has two parts. The (very short) first part provides space to let you list all of your novel’s primary and secondary characters by name, including nicknames/aliases. One section (pictured below) is a straight list of primary and secondary character. Another section is more of a workspace to brainstorm names and track them alphabetically. This ensures you don’t use the same first letter for more than one character (generally a no-no for modern novels).
Character Tool for Novelists includes space for you to list all characters in your novel by name and nickname/alias. A separate section (not pictured) lets you also list them alphabetically. I use the alphabetical listing to avoid using the same first letter for more than one character (giving multiple characters names that start with the same first letter can make it harder for readers to keep track of them).
The second part of the tool comprises the character template itself, with space for 12 characters altogether. Each of the 12 templates includes space for: names and name meanings; family trees; friendships; major life milestones; physical features; dress/clothing styles; personality traits; skills, abilities, and talents; occupations and finances; possessions/properties; social identities; habits, tics, and pet peeves; interests and hobbies; conscious aspirations; unconscious needs; journeys; archetypes; and thematic roles.
Here are a couple more pictures to show you what the interior looks like.
For every character, the first page gives space for the character’s name and other general notes you want to capture. The rules are pretty narrow (analogous to college-rule notebooks) to give you around 30 lines per page depending on the section.
Here’s a pic to give you an idea of how other sections of the template are organized. This section is for notes on Character 2’s archetype and family tree. The headings use a numbering system (Character 1 – Character 12) to make it easier to refer back to the characters later. (I plan to also add tabs to the pages to make it easier to look up characters; will upload a pic of that when I have it set up.)
I left room on the spine for you to write the novel’s title so if you’re working on multiple books you can track which notebook goes with which novel. And that is my sweet girl, Tessa, in the background, looking to be petted :)
But wait! There’s more! Since many of us need space for more than 12 characters, I’ve also built a companion notebook, Character Tool for Novelists +15. This notebook doesn’t include the part one described above; it comprises only the character template, replicated an additional 15 times. It will be out by the first week of January The USD price is $8.99 since it’s a little longer at 279 pages.
Need space for more than 12 characters? This companion tool replicates the Character Tool for Novelists template an additional 15 times.
I’d also love writer’s feedback, so if you try the tool, let me know. Have I left enough space for character elements? Should I add sections to the template? Anything else I could do to make the tool more useful?
If there is one thing I’ve learned about trying to “be” a novelist — more accurately, trying to pursue a career as a novelist — it’s that you get knocked on your ass. A lot. Over, and over, and over…
Revised edition coming out this month!
And since I follow a few writers on Twitter, I see a fair number of who are crumpling. In real time.
I can relate. I’ve been there more times than I can count.
The lessons this business teaches are hard lessons, and the tools it uses to teach those lessons can be brutal.
Been There, Done That
One of the worst lessons I’ve had to endure started shortly after I published one of my first novels, When Libby Met the Fairies.
It was 2012. Self-pubbing was still pretty new.
I ran a KDP giveaway. A successful giveaway! A 23,875-people-just-downloaded-my-book giveaway! And I thought I’d made it. I thought that, with that many people reading one of my novels, my future was a gleaming bright golden road with golden coins showering down around my ears from endless sparkling rainbows.
From the days when running a KDP giveaway was so easy, a total newb could do it…
Boy, was I wrong.
Readers hated the book.
Okay, not all of them. And maybe “hate” is too strong a word. But in those days, Amazon used reviews in its ranking algorithms (although I’m told that’s no longer the case now) and I got slapped with enough 1- and 2-star reviews to kill the novel — and with it, my dreams of eeking out anything like a living self-pubbing novels.
At least in the near-term.
I tried to be brave, but in the end, I crumpled. I cried. I (stupidly) tried to argue with the critics on this blog (post since deleted).
And, eventually, I just gave up and unpubbed the book. It wasn’t selling anyway, and those reviews hurt. Better to pretend the novel had never existed …
But this post is about lessons, not mistakes.
Specifically, it’s about a lesson that was once so painful to my ears that I refused to believe it could be true.
I don’t remember where I read it. Probably on one of the lit agent blogs that were all the rage back in the early 2000-teens. It went something like this.
Write your first novel. Set it aside. Write your second novel. Set it aside. Then go back to your first novel and and re-write it.
I remember my reaction when I read those words. It was something like, “Are you kidding me?
“Do you know how much time and effort and energy I put into writing my first novel? Do you know how HARD I worked to make that book as good as it could possibly be? How can you tell me that there is ANYTHING I can do to make that novel any better?”
And so I made my peace with deep-sixing Libby forever. After all, I believe looking forward, not back!
On the other hand, I’ve always loved the novel’s premise. And it’s my favorite type of book to write: a book that set in the real world but admits to paranormal elements. And has romance. And family.
Kind of like real life ;)
So this spring, I picked Libby up and looked at it again for the first time in seven years. And guess what?
The readers were right.
Not in their specifics. They’re readers, not writers. They didn’t really understand why they didn’t like the book.
But since pubbing Libby, I’ve written several other novels and a ton of short fiction. And — even more important — I’ve read, and re-read, dozens of books on the craft (which I’m slowly reviewing for my blog; if you’re interested look here and here).
I’ve learned things. And because I’ve learned things, I could now see huge problems in Libby that I’d missed back when I was laboring away at the novel in 2010, 2011.
So this spring, I took that long-ago advice and began a re-write. Practically from scratch.
I changed a lot.
I switched the voice from third person to first.
I did a major deep-dive into my characters’ motivations — especially Libby’s — and re-wrote plot points to better articulate why they do what they do. (This was critically important with regard to one of the reasons readers disliked the last edition of the novel. They didn’t think Libby showed agency. This criticism baffled me at the time. After all, I knew why she made the choices she did! But I hadn’t done my job, as a storyteller, to reveal her motivations — so to readers, she came across as weak — a pushover.)
I tightened scenes that dragged. I created new scenes to add more texture and depth to the story.
And I found a designer (Lara Wynter) to re-do the cover.
And on October 23, I’m re-releasing Libby.
I have mixed feelings, to be honest. My experience in 2012 was incredibly humbling. I’m one of those writerly people who’s been told, my whole life, how good I am. “You’re such a good writer.” I’ve heard that a million times. It was hard to find myself being pilloried — to find myself being told that I was a total loser.
But I’m also hopeful that I’ve made enough progress as a writer that I can redeem this failed novel and turn it into something that readers will love.
Because, after all, that’s what I’m trying to do. Write books that readers will love …
Welcome back, Libby … wishing you the best of luck.
Some two decades after its original publication, this how-to by an industry insider is still well worth a read.
While my 2001 edition has bits about the industry that are somewhat dated, there is a lot to be learned from this book.
I met Donald Maass, once. It was at a writer’s conference, a few years after he published Breakout — which gives you a clue about how long I’ve been at this crazy business. Amazon had not yet released the first Kindle. You had only two choices, if you wanted to become a working novelist. You could land an agent. Or you could send your manuscript to a publisher and hope it didn’t get lost in the slush pile.
I was at the conference in the hopes that I’d find an agent for Loose Dogs, and I managed to schedule a pitch meeting with Maass, which felt like a huge deal at the time.
He didn’t take me on. Therefore no, I’m not typing this on a solid gold keyboard. But I also attended a talk he gave that was based on Writing the Breakout Novel, and after I got home I ordered a copy.
And then recently, I picked it up again and realized (cliche alert!) that the book has stood the test of time.
Break-out success = word of mouth
My edition of Breakout was released in 2001; there are industry bits at the front of the book that are definitely dated. But there’s also plenty of material, even in the introductory chapters, that’s as true today as ever. For example, at the time two-thirds of all book sales were going to “name-brand authors” — but even unknown novelists could potentially achieve best-seller status, because, Maass writes,
The next biggest reason folks buy fiction is that it has been personally recommended to them by a friend, family member, or bookstore employee.
“Savvy publishers,” he adds, try to seed this process via ARCs, sending out sample chapters via email, websites, etc. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? And uncanny. It’s exactly what self-published writers do, today, to prime the word-of-mouth pump.
Premise and Stakes
Once the book moves from “why write a break-out novel” to the how’s, Maass tackles what he calls premise, which he presents as more of a process than anything else — a process, by the way, that you should start before you begin writing your actual novel. Maass advises that you consider a number of elements that are key to the break-out novel, like originality and gut emotional appeal. It makes for a useful checklist that, in my opinion, can help us novelists become more clear-eyed about our work (and potentially help us avoid creating problems in our novels that will be a lot more challenging to fix 80,000 words in).
The next chapter is about stakes, another thing we need to understand because it’s so fundamental to conflict. Our characters need to care about what happens to them, and they care what happens to them because there is a price to be paid if they don’t get what they want.
Time and Place
Maass then does a chapter on what he calls “time and place.” And you might be tempted to think he’s just found a new way to say “setting” but it’s more nuanced than that. There’s a section on the psychology of place, for example–a concept that fascinates me and that I try to consider in all of my fiction; I think of it in terms of places being characters that impact my human (or humanoid!) characters.
The next chapter, Characters, covers another handful of concepts that you’ll find in other craft books. For example, “dark protagonists” should not be two-dimensional, but have sympathetic qualities, and all stories are ultimately character-driven.
But there are some unique nuggets here, too. For example, one tip (which I’ve internalized since I first read Breakout) is to look for places to combine characters’ roles. In When Libby Met the Fairies(which I’ve revised and am re-releasing next month, now on sale for pre-order! $4 off!) I made Libby’s boyfriend her employer as well. That let me simplify the book in terms of cast of characters (I didn’t have to create a separate character to be her boss and work him into the plot) while also enabling me to add interesting conflict to the dynamic of Libby and Paul’s relationship. She was dependent on him for income as well as intangibles like emotional support. More better stakes!
Plot
The last third or so of Breakout mostly digs into plot. There’s a chapter on plot basics, one titled Contemporary Plot Techniques, one on elements like viewpoints and subplots, and one titled Advanced Plot Techniques.
In a way, I suppose plot is the real heart of the book, because one thing that is probably true about all break-out novels is that they are plot-driven. They are stories that grip readers from the first page and then keep them interested until The End.
And to my reading, this is where Maass’ background as a long-time industry insider pays off. For example, there’s some excellent material about types of plots (fable, frame story, facade story, visitation plots) that I’ve not encountered elsewhere. Depending on what kind of novel you’re writing, there’s some rich veins in the sections on subplots and advanced plots as well.
Theme
Which brings us to the closing chapter, which is on Theme.
“Have something to say,” Maass writes. “Allow yourself to become deeply impassioned about something you believe to be true.”
Which is interesting advice, considering that Writing the Breakout Novel is a book about crafting commercial fiction, and when we think “commercial fiction” we think about money, don’t we? We think about sales and bestseller lists and the sound of corks popping out of expensive bottles of champagne.
But it’s possible that we writers (with a lot of work and a bit of luck) can have it both ways: we can be commercially successful while also exploring Big Ideas that potentially enrich readers’ lives or even change hearts and minds.
Do you agree?
And have you read Maass’ book? What did you think?
