Pagan Writers Community

“Plan for the extraordinary,
Make room for the extraordinary,
And you will be extraordinary.”

~ Holly Lisle, How to Think Sideways

Now that we have an idea about we are writing about, we need to begin thinking about the people that are going to populate our world of fiction – the characters.

Since I write mostly romance, my stories usually have a heroine and hero that are trying to overcome some sort of obstacle to be together. This obstacle can be a villain, an evil organization plotting to take over the world, a natural disaster or all of the above – like in my NaNoWriMo winning novel in 2009, Escape from Atlantis.

It has been said to “write what you know” since you have experience with the subject matters at hand and it is more believable. I take this further and say that readers read what they know. They look for characters that they have things in common with and keep returning to their stories because they become attached to these great characters.

So how do we create characters that come alive on the page and bring readers back wanting more?

Every person has wants and needs and your characters are no different. What do they want from life? What do they need to live? When your protagonist’s wants and your antagonist’s wants don’t mesh, you have more conflict in your story.

Check out the hierarchy of needs below:

The needs at the bottom of the pyramid are the ones that your character is going to fight for the most. If you villain is trying to take your heroine’s home, she is going to put up a bigger fight than if he is trying to get her cup of coffee (unless that person is my coffee-addicted little sister).

Your characters need to be consistent in their actions throughout your story, but they also need to have the capacity for change or growth. This is especially import for your main character(s). If your heroine cheats on her husband with the villain and does not learn anything from it, the readers are going to be in an uproar.

Your characters also need history, or a back story. This gives the characters more of a 3-dimensional feel than if they just magically appear on the page from nowhere. The readers are going to want to know why the hero cries every time he sees a bunny. They want to know it is because his evil Aunt Margie cooked his pet rabbit when he was 5.

If you are using The Snowflake Method, Step 3 involves designing your characters and figuring out their storylines.  Randy Ingermanson, creator of this method, believes that if you put the effort in at the beginning, your characters will be well-rounded and believable.

• Character’s Name
• Motivation (what does he/she want abstractly?)
• Goal (what does he/she want concretely?)
• Conflict (what prevents him/her from reaching this goal?)
• Epiphany (what will he/she learn, how will he/she change?)
• One-Sentence Summary of the Character’s Storyline
• One-Paragraph Summary of the Character’s Storyline

Here is a copy of my Step 3 from The Lost Enchantress:

• Name: Maeve (Mae) Icera
• Ambition: To be allowed to make her own choices and find a place where she belongs.
• Goal: To save her people from the Dominion of Sania.
• Conflict: The emperor of the Dominion of Sania is trying to kill her or marry his son off to her to get his hands on her country.
• Epiphany: She will learn that she has to stand up in the face of opposition and fight for what she holds most dear.
• Sentence Summary: Mae learns that she is the ruler of Aradia and must make wise decisions to save herself and country from the Domion of Sania.
• Paragraph Summary: After spending most of her life as an herbal apprentice, Mae learns her true identity – she is the granddaughter of Aradia’s fallen ruler. She enters a world of danger and greed unprepared and finds herself under attack. She must learn to balance what she knows with what is expected of her. The assassination attempts throw her into the arms of a warrior named Bren. She must come up with a plan to save herself and her country or end up spending the rest of her life running or marrying the heir of Sania.

The starting gate to National Novel Writing Month 2010 is just a little over 7 days away and the anticipation is building.  I can’t wait to get writing!

During our last encounter we created a “big picture” sentence that described who and what our story was about.  In today’s shorter lesson we are going to add a layer of description on top of that sentence to give us the overall structure paragraph of our story.

“… expand your one-sentence summary to a full paragraph describing the story setup, major disasters, and ending of the novel. This is the analog of the second stage of the snowflake. I like to structure a story as “three disasters plus an ending.” Each of the disasters takes a quarter of the book to develop and the ending takes the final quarter. I don’t know if this is the ideal structure, it’s just my personal taste.”

– Randy Ingermanson in Snowflake Pro’s Lecture Notes for the One-Paragraph Summary

Here is the paragraph that I came up with when working on my 2010 WIP, The Lost Enchantress:

Maeve is an apprentice healer in Aradia, a country with a weak hold on its own independence from neighboring countries. She is thrown into the mess of her country’s politics when it is discovered that she is the heir to the throne. She dodges assassination attempts, which push her into the arms of a warrior named Bren. She has to find a way to get out of marrying the son of her enemy, ensuring the continued freedom of her people. She comes up with a plan that pushes her enemy back into his own country, saving her home and allowing her to be with Bren.

In my example, the first sentence tells you who the main character is and gives you some background on the story.  The second, third, and fourth sentences describe the “three disasters” that push the story forward.  The last sentence describes the ending.

From this point, you can begin to really see the structure of your novel take shape.  Whether you continue to work The Snowflake Method, write an outline, make plot cards, or take the route of the “pantster,” it is up to you.  See what works best for you and stick with it!

To plot or not to plot?  That is the question!  Today we are going to explore a few theories behind novel preparation and begin working with our idea to come up with a one-sentence description of your novel.

Authors approach this topic from many different directions.  Some write volumes of pre-work before sitting down to pen their tales.  Others, lovingly known as “pansters,” simply sit down and start writing their hearts out.  Personally, I fall somewhere in between these two extremes, approaching my writing with some degree of organization and planning.

My own plotting methodology is a mixture of several other popular ones, chiefly The Snowflake Method, developed by Randy Ingermanson, and Holly Lisle’s How to Think Sideways.

The Snowflake Method is a method for “designing” a novel.  You start with some simple information and begin building your story, one layer at a time.  I highly recommend checking out Ingermanson’s website because he explains it much better than I can.  I also purchased his software, Snowflake Pro.  This program is not necessary to employ this method and is rather expensive.

How to Think Sideways is a complete writing course.  Author Holly Lisle walks you step-by-step through coming up with your idea, plotting, writing, revising, submitting, and marketing your book.  The class is excellent, with the information applying to more areas of life than just writing.  However, this class is long (6-month and 12-month plans) and a little on the expensive side.

When it comes to choosing your own plotting process, I suggest doing some reading, but focus on trying the different suggestions out.  Only you know what is going to work for you and you will only find out by experimenting.  Take the parts you like about each method and morph them into your own.  Tweak as needed to become a streamlined novel-writing machine.

By now, you probably have an idea of what you are going to write your novel about.  It may still be an incomplete idea that doesn’t sparkle like a Cullen vampire yet, but you believe it has potential.  So, where do you go from here?

To start, let’s write our idea down as one sentence (Step 1 if you are using The Snowflake Method or Holly Lisle’s “The Sentence” technique).

• This sentence should tell us who and what this story is about.
• It should be no more than 35 words, but 15 – 20 is better.
• Don’t use the character’s name.  Instead, be descriptive.  (Ex. unwed mother or dyslexic superhero).
• Take your time on this step.  Don’t throw the first thing that comes to mind on paper.
• It may not be perfect at first.  Go back and modify it as needed.

Here is what I came up with for my sentence while starting to plot my fantasy work in progress (WIP) from the 2010 NaNoWriMo,  The Lost Enchantress:

An orphaned girl comes to learn her true place and finds love while trying to save her country.

It is pretty vague and underwhelming, but it was a decent start.  It tells us that the main character is “an orphaned girl.”  By the end of the novel, this girl is going to save her country while learning the lesson of who she is and falling in love.  That is the big picture in the story.

Try your hand at coming up with a sentence for your own novel.  Feel free to post it here or in the Facebook group if you like.

Once we have it written, we will be ready to tackle the next layer of the story.

One last thing that I would like to touch on before ending this lesson is over-planning your novel – don’t do it!  This can kill your novel before you even start and in my case, promotes procrastination.  You want to be prepared enough to stay writing throughout the month, but not so prepared that you want to bang your head on the desk if you have to write your character’s name one more time (at least too early in the month).

Finally!! The start of National Novel Writing Month is just 19 days away. We are pumped and ready to take it head-on! Why won’t it just get here already?

In “No Plot? No Problem?,” NaNoWriMo founder Chris Baty added to the end of the first chapter a contract for all NaNo participants to sign. This Month-Long Novelist Agreement and Statement of Understanding is a way to officially pledge yourself to the contest. Post it on your FB wall or blog to let everyone else know what you are doing!

“I hereby pledge my intent to write a 50,000-word novel in one month’s time. By invoking this absurd, month-long deadline on such an enormous undertaking, I understand that notions of “craft,” “brilliance,” and “competency” are to be chucked right out the window, where they will remain, ignored, until they are retrieved for the editing process. I understand that I am a talented person, capable of heroic acts of creativity, and I will give myself enough time over the course of the next month to allow my innate gifts to come to the surface, unmolested by self-doubt, self-criticism, and other acts of self-bullying.”

“During the month ahead, I realize I will produce clunky dialogue, cliched characters, and deeply flawed plots. I agree that all of these things will be left in my rough draft, to be corrected and/or excised at a later point. I understand my right to withhold my manuscript from all readers until I deem it completed. I also acknowledge my right as author to substantially inflate both the quality of the rough draft and the rigors of the writing process should such inflammation prove useful in garnering me respect and attention, or freedom from participation in onerous household chores.”

“I acknowledge that the month-long, 50,000-word deadline I set for myself is absolute and unchangeable, and that any failure to meet the deadline, or any effort on my part to move the deadline once the adventure has begun will invite well-deserved mockery from friends and family. I also acknowledge that, upon successful completion of the stated noveling objective, I am entitled to a period of gleeful celebration and revelry, the duration and intensity of which may preclude me from participating fully in workplace activities for days, if not weeks, afterward.”

________________________________________
Signed

______________
Date

______________
Novel Start Date

______________
Novel Deadline

What we are going to discuss today is the quality of writing that you can expect from yourself during the competition and how to begin building your support structure for this crazy month.

50,000 words is quite a daunting task. Thirty days doesn’t feel like very long. We will have to adjust our personal standards to make it to the finish line…

If you are anything like me (and for your sake, I hope not) the process of writing is very slow. Each word, sentence, and paragraph is checked by my Inner Critic to make sure it is perfect. He does not let me move on until it is, sending my Muse (that mythical creature in the back of your mind that gives you those wonderful ideas) to go pick flowers or get her hair done. By the time that I am able to correct the problem, my Muse is elsewhere, I’m annoyed, and the Inner Critic is rubbing his hands together like a comic book villain.

For the duration of NaNoWriMo you will need to write for quantity instead of quality.  Forget the spelling errors. Ignore the sentence fragments. Say “see ya” to the run-ons and passive sentences. Your job this coming month is to just get the words on the page!

Once the event is over, you can feel free to let your Inner Critic loose in your playground of mediocrity.

And for some people, having a deadline is not enough to keep them going when it comes to National Novel Writing Month. They need some human interaction to remind them that they are not crazy (or that crazy is more fun) and to be held accountable for meeting their quotas. For this lesson we are going to break the people participating in your writing process into two categories: The Pack and The Fans.

The Pack are other writers participating in NaNoWriMo. They too are on the prowl, looking for kindred spirits to cling to in the desolate novel-writing wasteland. You can find them online at the NaNoWriMo website, Twitter, Facebook, and in the PWC NaNoWriMo-ers Facebook group. You can also find them locally through the local NaNo meetups in your region, which you can find by joining your local region on the NaNoWriMo website.

The Fans are the non-writers around you, cheering you to the NaNoWriMo finish line. They are the friend posting on your Facebook wall to see if you have met your quota for the day. They are the parent, calling to make sure you are still alive and have been eating during the NaNo turmoil. They are the co-worker asking about your weekly word count in the hallways at the office. All you have to say is, “Hey! I’m writing a novel this month!!” That is when The Fans begin to mob you.  You might even be able to talk some of them into bringing you food while you write if you promise to list them in your novel dedication.

“If there’s a book you really want to read but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.” ~ Toni Morrison

Welcome to the first day of our preparation month for NaNoWriMo!  We will be posting some tips to help you prepare and get the most out of your experience every couple days.  If you are interested in getting more personal support during your NaNo journey, please check out our Facebook group.  Whether you are new to this event or a regular participant, I hope that this event will transform your life as much as it has mine.

To get started, let’s look at what National Novel Writing Month is and some of the history behind it…

NaNoWriMo is an intense novel-writing experience.  It is an opportunity to both push your boundaries and chase those dreams of writing a book.  It is a month to put your creative foot forward and leave everything else behind (including cleaning, laundry, and other non-artistic pursuits).

NaNoWriMo was founded in 1999 by Chris Baty.  He and 21 other fearless novelists of the San Francisco Bay Area began this phenomenon to make a statement (and because they had nothing better to do) in July of that year.  I believe that only six of the participants met their goal that year, but it was the beginning of an event that would span the world.

In the year 2009, 167,150 people participated in NaNoWriMo, 32,173 of which met their goal.  Collectively, we wrote 2,427,190,537 words.  The experience was amazing!

So, let’s move on to the rules of NaNoWriMo…

Like any other competition, National Novel Writing Month has rules. There are not many cute or clever things that I can write to make this one more interesting, so please bear with me.

As we are doing now, October is when NaNoWriMo preparation usually begins. The geniuses at NaNoWriMo.org wipe the forums clean of last year’s stats and forums, re-launching a bigger and more awesome website each year (October 10th is the date this year). This is when the NaNo Addicts start getting feisty and the NaNo Virgins start making their way towards becoming NaNo Junkies.

However, any serious plotting or other pre-work should not be started until the last week of October. This keeps you from over-preparing and burning out on your story before the actual writing commences.

You may not write the first word of your novel until 12:00 am on November 1st. You have until 11:59 pm on November 30th to get to 50,000 words with your novel. That works out to about 1,667 words per day for the entire month of November.

It is that simple – 50,000 words in 30 days! Or is it?