I love the way Anne Lamott described writing. She said,
“Writing is like driving at night with headlights: you can only see a little bit.”
Should you outline your novel and make sure you know everything that happens before you write, or do you take Anne Lamott’s advice and drive in the dark?
Could it be possible to do both?
Let me tell you a secret: Universal characters are boring. Everyday characters are dull. Trying to create universal characters doesn’t work.
Rather, the opposite: the more unique you make your characters and their surroundings, the more universal your story becomes. Janet Burroway calls this the universal paradox.
So how do you make your characters more unique and less generic?
Some people write stories where nothing much happens. The main character sits around thinking of things that happened in the past. The hero doesn’t do anything heroic.
The only thing that matters in your story is what the characters do. What they think, feel, or see is just the whipped cream, peanuts, and cherry on top. The ice cream, the core of your story is what they do.
Do you know what a logline is? If you’re not a screenwriter, chances are good that you don’t. And that’s a shame, because loglines are great tools for any writer.
Allow me to enlighten you. A logline is a very brief summary that gets across your story in the smallest possible space.
Most importantly, when you story starts to get confusing and messy, loglines can help you get your story back on track.
Is there one secret for success when writing stories? Yes!
Just as the secret in retailing is location, location, location, so the strategy for enduring success in fiction writing is Structure! That seems odd if we consider that real life has little or no structure, other than that imposed on us.
We need a sense of form in our lives just as we need food. It seems to be engrained in our genetic structure. The perception of form creates meaning, all by itself. If we look at a flower, a miracle of structure, we infer a sense of meaning in its creation.
I recently finished writing my first book—an action-packed thriller that’s a 110,000-word whopper of a tale.
It was the most fun I’d ever had, but I learned a lot during the process (as we tend to do when we write a book for the first time!).
Part of the process for me was in structure, outlining, and building characters that didn’t seem like cardboard cutouts, but what I want to talk about today is the idea of pacing.
In a thriller, like Dan Brown’s or James Rollins’ stuff, pacing is everything. Lose the tempo, and you lose the reader.
Arguably, it’s no different in any kind of fiction, so I thought this might be a helpful topic to other writers. Here’s a breakdown of things to keep in mind as you write:
