The Art and Business of Books: tips for new writers
- 21 hours ago
- 2 min read
By Ian Glennon
I'm about to publish the first part of a trilogy. The biggest lesson I learned? You need a plot before you start writing! It doesn't need to be detailed but, like driving from coast to coast, you need to have an idea of the route, and mark down the major places you want to stop and see along the way. Driving aimlessly wastes words and, worse, time. I wrote forty thousand words before realizing I had no idea how to link the beginning and end of the story. Twenty years later, I nailed it!
How to turn a book into a lasting brand? That's something that I'm going to be working on. I have a plan, which fundamentally involves building a social media presence, as well as asking published authors to give my book their blessing (=validation). It turns out that spending two decades writing the thing may turn out to have been be the easy part!
One mistake that new writers can make is not having the ending in mind when they start; or having it too much in mind. The excellent advice I received from my creative writing professor was to have between 68-72 percent (he was, of course, being somewhat sarcastic) of the ending in mind when you start. Too little, and you may end up meandering around rather than getting to the finale. Too much, and you've put on a straitjacket that constrains you for possible changes in direction that the writing process may throw up. I'm about to start work on a new short story and I don't have the ending yet, so nothing's going to happen until I get that ending settled(ish).
Another mistake is to be immune to seeing echoes (repeated words in the same sentence, paragraph, or page). Even when you're trying to look for them, they slip can slip through. I find that they are easier to spot on the printed page vs. the screen. Somehow, the eye is drawn to them when you're holding them in front of you. Weeding them out, with the help of a thesaurus, creates a cleaner experience for the reader. The brain flinches when it sees a word repeated close to a sibling.
I would say new writers should stick to he/she said when working with dialogue. The odd variation may be okay; however you can't go wrong with s/he said. Definitely avoid things like 'she winked,' or 'he smiled'. Put the narrative tag after the character has spoken, or use it to break up long dialogue.
Finally, look for prose that falls victim to 'show vs. tell'.
When you notice it--and you will try to convince yourself that it's not there!--it's a pain because, unlike using a thesaurus for echoes, you have to put effort into showing. Such is the curse of being a writer. But telling the reader how a character feels, or what their motivations are treats your valued reader as if they were dumber than you. Trust the reader to interpret a character's actions and words.
Of course these are rules, which are there to be broken. However at the start I would say sticking to the tried and tested methods will stand a new writer in good stead.
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