Where Was I Going Again? The Benefits of Re-Reading During a Revision

By Janice Hardy

A re-read might be the right path to find your story and fall in love with it all over again.

Many writers shudder at the very thought of revising their novel. Others curse. But I’ve always enjoyed the revision process (don’t hate me). I’ve found it’s where my best writing happens, because I know how my story turned out and I have a much better understanding of who the characters are and what they want and need to do.

Even if you’re a meticulous outliner, your final draft rarely matches your original plan exactly. And if you’re a pantser or discovery writer? Well, your manuscript may resemble your initial vision about as much as a squirrel resembles a spaceship. Though honestly, that can happen to plotters, too.

Because things change as we write. Motivations shift. New ideas pop up halfway through and suddenly alter our understanding of the plot. Characters do things we didn’t plan, and sometimes what sounded brilliant in Chapter Eight feels like a complete mistake by Chapter Twenty.

What Makes Your Protagonist Heroic?

By Janice Hardy, @Janice_Hardy

The protagonist is the hero of his or her story. That “hero” could be a shinning knight out to save the world from evil or an assassin who sets out to avenge the death of his wife. Hero and anti-hero, good and bad, noble and justified. Being the hero doesn’t necessarily mean being the good guy.

Yet we love our heroes no matter where they fall on the good to bad scale. We cheer for the assassin just as loudly as we do for the hunky guy in colorful tights. It’s not their profession we find heroic, it’s what they’re doing with those skills.

You killed the puppy his dead wife sent him? Oh dude, you gotta die. (John Wick)

Balancing the Number Characters and the Scale of Your World

By Janice Hardy, @Janice_Hardy

We’re winding down on reader questions (at least the ones that don’t involve guest authors, those are still to come), and I should have the rest answered by end of next week.

Q: How do you match the number of named characters with the sense of scale you are aiming for in your world?

For example, the story I'm trying to tell at the moment involves a fairly closed off community. I originally had a number of different characters but felt that some of them were too similar, so I combined them. Now I feel like the world feels smaller than it should, but I like the number of central characters I have. Do you have any tips for creating a greater sense of scale without also overburdening the reader with a deluge of characters to remember?

My other concern with this is that I imagine my MC would know the names of all the others in the community, but I don't feel the reader necessarily needs to know. They aren't a faceless crowd but equally as individuals they aren't central to the story either.

Balancing World Building and Pacing

By Janice Hardy, @Janice_Hardy

Q: The feedback I've received is that I skimp a little too much on World Building - I trust the reader a little too much. My pacing is also a little too quick. I've read a lot about world building and pacing, but how do you know how much is too much or too little and too fast or too slow? Beta readers are one good way, but as an author, is there another way?

A: When you're looking at world building and pacing, it helps to think about the different facets of world building itself. The first thing that likely comes to mind when you hear "world building" is setting, which slides right into description. Description tends to be slow paced, so it's easy to make the conclusion that world building = slow paced.

But that's just one aspect of it.

Painting Your Story World

By Janice Hardy, @Janice_Hardy

Just like the color of a room affects what people think and feel when they walk in, details in a scene affect how a reader experiences your world. The wrong details can create false assumptions and cause a disconnect between your reader and your world. The right details can start both reader and story off on the same page.

Wanted: One Character Willing to Work With No Questions Asked

Molly Quinn, the perfect Aylin

By Janice Hardy, @Janice_Hardy

For a lot of writers, the character comes to them first. They hear this person’s voice in their head, dream about them, and then they find their story. For me, it’s different. I usually find the problem first, then find someone whose life I can make miserable.

Because of this, my characters rarely start a novel fully developed. I usually only know the bare bones of their past, how they got to be where they are, what they like and dislike. The plot is the crucible I toss them into to get to know them. How they react to problems is what tells me what I need to know to write them.

What Are Your Secondary Characters Good At?

By Janice Hardy, @Janice_Hardy

In one of her sessions at Springmingle '14, editor Cheryl Klein said one trait of a compelling character was that they were good at something. I immediately thought of Dwight from the Origami Yoda series by Tom Angleberger--the weirdest kid at school who really creeped everyone out, but he did amazing origami.

This skill made him not only interesting to the reader, but interesting to the other characters and ultimately created the core conflict of the novel's plot (Was Origami Yoda real and could they trust his advice?) Sure, Dwight was weird, but everyone could get past that because of his skills. He could do what none of them could and that made him special.

How Do You Cross "the Line" and Take Your Novel to the Next Level?

By Janice Hardy, @Janice_Hardy

There's been a question sitting in my to-answer pile for a while:

Any tips you have on getting just the right amount of description, plot/subplot tangles, and internal thoughts will be appreciated. Now that I've reached the higher side of the curve, the 'line' seems to be the capstone I need to make it to the next level. It's so hard to be objective about exactly where that 'line' is.

This isn't an easy question to answer. Well, that's not entirely true, it's easy to answer but that answer isn't very helpful.

There is no line. It depends on a multitude of factors that's different for every book and every writer.

Like I said, not very helpful.

Five Ways to Grow Your Novel

By Janice Hardy, @Janice_Hardy

Last week I talked about what changes in your scenes, and reader Maria D'Marco made a wonderful comment about how stories grow in all directions. This is something that's easy to forget as we try to get from the opening scene to wrap up closer, and it's worth further discussion.

Much of writing a novel is about forward momentum, so we often think of our stories as straight lines, or lines with curves and arcs. But they're really more like trees growing solidly in one direction at the start, then branching out into a tangled mess (in a good way). Branches merge and split, they cross over each other, they rub together and leave scars, and they come up against things they can't grow past or get around.

Finding the Balance When Writing About Violence

By Janice Hardy, @Janice_Hardy

There was a lot of chatter about the violence in Mockingjay, the final book of Suzanne Collins's YA blockbuster The Hunger Games series. I paid attention because at that time, I had just finished my own struggle with how to portray a realistic war in my The Healing Wars trilogy. The challenge was to be authentic, but not make it so horrific I'd freak out my younger or more sensitive readers. Or bore those who aren't so sensitive. Every reader has a different tolerance level for violence.

Is Your Novel Too Much Work to Read?

By Janice Hardy, @Janice_Hardy

My mother is a voracious reader, reading one to two books a day. We were talking about books once and she mentioned she'd stopped reading one because it was just too much work. It wasn't a bad book, in fact, she said it was a great idea and well written, but it did some things that made it hard to read, and she'd found it just wasn't worth the trouble.

Ouch.

Not worth the trouble? That's a hard blow for a well-written book.

Great Characters vs Great Plots. Which is a Stronger Hook for You?

By Janice Hardy, @Janice_Hardy

Anna Staniszewski did a great post recently on Six Reasons I Stopped Reading (And How to Avoid Them) and it triggered an interesting conversation on Twitter. The discussion was on how flat characters can kill a great premise, and I realized something interesting.

If I don't care for a character, I'll stop reading the book, but I'll often skim ahead or check the end to see what happens.

If I don't like the plot, I stop reading even if I really like the characters.

Does this mean the plot is a stronger hook for me than the characters?

Should You Maintain the Same POV Distance Throughout the Novel?

By Janice Hardy, @Janice_Hardy

It's a bit of a POV week, with some follow up questions to Monday's post.

Is it acceptable for different characters through whom a story is told to have different degrees of closeness in their POV, according to their importance to the story?

Yes, as long as you establish that fairly quickly and be consistent. For example, you might have one POV is first person and another in limited third (Skin Hunger does this), or mix first and omniscient third (the I.Q. series does this), or even change styles per book (The Old Man's War series does this).

Handling Cliffhanger Scene Endings With Multiple POVs

By Janice Hardy, @Janice_Hardy

In the good old days of movies serials, the story would end with the hero literally hanging off the edge of a cliff. If you wanted to know what happened, you had to come back for the next episode of that serial. A great way to get folks to come to the movies, and even a great way to get readers to turn the page, but this doesn't work quite the same with multiple points of view (POV).

How Do You Teach Writer's Instinct?

By Janice Hardy, @Janice_Hardy

Before I dive into the post, a heads up that I'm guest posting today at Query Tracker, chatting about what your query letter says about your novel. I invite you to pop on over and say hello when you're done here. It's a great blog (and site) if you haven't discovered it yet.

I had a fantastic writing day last week. One of those sessions where everything clicks and pieces fall into place, and your fingers fly across the keyboard.

I was writing a scene where my character, a twelve-year-old boy, sneaked into a fellow boy's room. He gave the room a looksie, and I needed a few quick details to flesh out the setting. Boy stuff. Something normal, something embarrassing the POV could tease the other boy about, and something that would be impressive. These details weren't planned, just things I conjured up right then and there that would be A) details my POV would notice, and B) things the owner of the room would have. I wrote the scene and moved on.

Rules, Schmules: Don't Follow the Rules, Tell a Great Story

By Janice Hardy, @Janice_Hardy

This might sound odd on a blog that is dedicated to ways to improve your writing, but if you're more concerned with the technical rules of writing than the story itself, you're hurting your chances of ever getting published.

Radical, isn't it?

To write well, stop trying so hard to write well.

What I mean by this crazy statement, is that we can ruin our writing by trying too hard to adhere to a lot of rules that aren't rules at all. Rules like:

• Never use adverbs
• Never start a story with dialog
• Never use backstory in the first fifty pages
• Show, never tell  

The Eyes Have it: Are You "Over Looking" Things in Your Manuscript?

By Janice Hardy, @Janice_Hardy

Our characters do a lot of looking in our stories. It's their job to describe what the world looks like, what people look like, what's going on and who's doing what. But are we overlooking the amount of times we use the word look?

I bet if you did a find for how many times look is used in a manuscript the number would be high, especially in an early draft. Same with saw, gaze, and even eyes. Eyes typically get quite the workout.

It makes sense since seeing is our primary sense for gathering information, but when you think about it, everything a character conveys to the reader is something they experienced. If they describe what it looks like, we know they looked at it.

Are You Trying to Write a Well-Written Book or Tell a Great Story?

By Janice Hardy, @Janice_Hardy

Great stories typically sell. Well-written books get rejected every day. It's a weird contradiction, but the books that captivate readers and get them talking aren't always the one with the most polished prose. Love them or hate them, those mega-sellers all have something in common.

The resonate with the reader.

I think this is a tough and murky area for writers. We're told how critical it is to write well, have a fresh idea, create interesting plots, but it's that sense of story that will make or break us in the end.

And that's hard to quantify.

Read On: Do Your Read Like a Reader or a Writer?

By Janice Hardy, @Janice_Hardy

I've had some interesting conversations lately with a few people about the difference between reading like a reader vs. reading like a writer, and how that translates to writing a novel. Because let's face it, we've all read a mega-bestseller people can't stop talking about and thought..."Eh? Really? They think this is good?"

Readers and writers read things differently.

I remember my father raving about a series. I tried it, it was painfully slow, but he told me, "Oh it doesn't really pick up until about 100 pages in, but after that it's fantastic." (For the record I never finished it)

Get Your Head in the Game: How Character Moods Affect the Scene

By Janice Hardy, @Janice_Hardy

Knowing where your characters are emotionally is a critical aspect of understanding that character. It's what gives them the depth to make them feel real, and not just two dimensional cut outs. If you've ever gotten a critique back that said "the characters just didn't feel real to me," chances are this emotional level is missing, or it's not as developed as it could be.

No one has just one thing on their mental To-Do List. Think about your own day. You get up, you have things to do, you have things you want to do if you can. You feel a certain way, and that will affect everything else you do and how you do it. Wake up in a bad mood, and all those little things that need doing suddenly become huge irritants in your day. Wake up smiling and happy, and you're doing things you might not have done otherwise.