Book Brouhaha

Here's a harsh publishing reality: the reader does not have to care about your book. Yes, it's your book.  Your brain child.  The thing you spent hours on every day for years trying to perfect.  But you know what?  There are millions and millions and millions of books out there.  If your goal is to sell  this brain child then it is now your job as the author to make  the reader care about your book. The best books are the ones that trigger an emotional response in the reader.  This is a tough pill to swallow because of said mentioned reasons.  You as the author already have an emotional response to the book because you are invested in it.  But when someone reads your story for the first time every single character is a stranger.  The goal is to turn those strangers into friends. "Well, if they get through the whole story then of course the reader will be friends with my characters!" Not true. Consider a news article about ...

Plot, by definition, is the main events in a story or play.  A key thing to note here is that plot shapes the story like the framework for a house.  Details should be filled in but without logical framework the structure will collapse. Something that I see during the beta reading process is the trap of directionless plot.  To continue the construction metaphor, the author gets so fixated on putting one  piece of framing in a particular space that he fails to notice how it might affect the entire structure. Every piece of plot should build off each other.  Do the characters really  need to explore that mysterious tomb?  Or do you just want to have a scene where it might be cool to fight the living dead?  How does exploring that tomb add to the other  plot points? Now, this is not to say that there cannot be subplots that veer away from the main plot.  In longer stories, subplots and character development are what make a story memora...

World building is a tricky subject because there is no one-size-fits-all solution to the problem.  Ask ten writers how they attempt to make their fantasy world rich and immersive and you will probably get ten different answers.  And this is not necessarily a bad thing!  World building is what gives a story its flavor. When I work on beta reading projects I would say that world building issues usually falls under one of two categories: 1) The Information Dump or 2) The Assumption The information dump is exactly how it sounds.  Instead of creating a rich, sensory experience for the reader in gradual pieces, the author dumps everything the reader needs to know about a character/place into one huge blob of text.  Why is this a problem?  It's boring for one thing.  For another, a huge blob of text does not necessarily enhance the reading experience.  Just because the reader received the explanation once does not mean that he/she will retain a...

I brought up in a previous post the idea that writing is like an RPG game .  For me, I like the Role Playing Game comparison because it uses numbers and strict rules.  Numbers and rules are not ambiguous like plot. This idea of strict rules continues when it comes to spacial awareness.  If a character can only move three spaces per turn then it would take two turns to move six spaces.  This is a limit to movement and actions. The same is true for characters in a book.  Unless a character has magical abilities or super powers, there is a limit to what the standard human can do.  If the character is on one side of the planet in one chapter, that same character cannot suddenly appear on the other side of the planet that same day.  Enough story time must pass that allows for the character to travel that journey. This is a trap that I see authors fall into quite a bit while beta reading.  All too often I see the movement and actions of characters...

Creating characters is like playing a role playing game.  In fact, now that I think about it, games like Dungeons & Dragons or Pathfinder are  fantasy writing.  The point being that you have to create your characters with abilities and limitations and then adhere to them in order to create a believable adventure. Continuing with the RPG (Role Playing Game) example, if a character has 20 health left and a sword with 5 attack, that's all that character gets.  It's very straightforward.  It means that once that character's health gets below 20, he's dead.  If that character is facing a monster, the maximum amount of damage that he can inflict with one hit is 5.  So a monster with 10 health would require two hits. I'm using the RPG example because it involves numbers.  Numbers are simple and creating an immersive world for readers is not.  However, the "environmental logic" is the same.  Characters must adhere to a set of rules--th...

They say that more than half of our communication comes from non-verbal cues.  Naturally, this has led to a hundred studies trying to figure out exactly  how much communication is verbal.  But you get the idea.  Suffice to say that if you were to watch a movie and put the sound on mute you could still generally tell what sorts of emotions the characters are experiencing. Unfortunately, this is something that tends to get easily lost during the writing process.  Writing is about words... the verbal part of communication, right? Wrong. To me, the most memorable books are the ones that create a world for you to become lost in.  You love the characters because they seem real even if the setting is in an alternate universe.  In order for that setting to become real the writer must give the reader non-verbal details to latch on to. For example, telling the reader that a character is angry doesn't create much of an impact.  How angry ...

I've been beta reading for authors for quite some time now.  It has been an interesting process, to say the least.  I love that it allows me to meet fellow authors that are all in a different stage of their writing career.  The process of helping them has, in turn, helped me a great deal.  Beta reading forces me to take a much closer look at the flaws in my own writing and to try and figure out ways to fix these issues. What's interesting to me is that many writers suffer from the same mistakes while working through that first novel or short story.  I've done enough of these beta projects to now see patterns in what I come across.  So I thought it would be useful to do a blog series on these common mistakes. In each blog post in this series I'll address the mistake and a possible solution to this type of mistake.  However, I feel the need to add a small disclaimer: I'm not a best selling author that makes millions of dollars from my writing.  ...