Keeping the Pace: Making sure you finish the story

Hi everyone, and welcome back to Too Many Books to Count! It’s so nice of you to stop in! I sincerely hope that you’ve all enjoyed our series this month, as we’ve discussed first drafts from the point of view of the new writer. I’ve personally learned a few things along the way, and reminded myself of some things that I really need to keep in mind while I’m getting deeper into my latest work-in-progress.

But today, we have one final topic to discuss, one last thing that I find incredibly important for every writer, whether you’re established or not. Why? Because somehow, we all struggle with this, from time to time.

Keeping the Pace: Making sure you finish the story

There’s something about keeping the pace, while you’re writing, that sometimes makes the process drag on. There’s something about writing at a consistent pace, writing daily or every other day or whatever your schedule might be, and writing at a constant clip, that just… well, it tends to make us all slow down and just want to stop, sometimes.

You know what? That’s okay.

There’s nothing wrong with having times when you really don’t want to write. There’s no problem with taking a day, a week, even a month off if you’ve burned yourself out. It happens to the best of us. Even the greatest novelists in the world have occasionally burned themselves out and needed a break (even if they’re too proud to admit it).

But, it’s (slightly) important that we make sure that doesn’t happen while we’re in the middle of writing our novel. At least, we need to make sure it doesn’t happen to so great an extent that we don’t know what to do with our book when we finally get back to it.

For me, it’s hard to take more than a week off from my book at a time. Yeah, I can take almost a whole week. For some of you, that’ll seem like an insane amount of time. For others, that’ll seem incredibly short. We all have our own processes, after all—and there’s nothing wrong with it. But, it’s also important that we know our limit. You need to know how much time you can take off, how much time your brain will let you take apart from your book, without losing the story completely.

So, I have a few pieces of advice for you, when it comes to keeping the pace. Call it sage, if you will. Just some things I’ve learned along the way, that I’d like to pass to all of you.

• However much you can write today, is enough for today.
• The same goes for tomorrow, and the day after.
• Don’t think of your book as a word count—trust me, it’ll just get too stressful.
• If it helps you to have word goals for a day, use them. If it doesn’t, don’t. If that changes from day to day, you do you. 
• If it helps, give yourself a deadline. If it doesn't, try estimating one. 
• Have someone you’re accountable to, for how much you’ve written and how your story is going. Tell them everything they’ll let you tell them (bonus points if you can find someone who doesn't mind you spoiling the book for them). Use them for advice on your plot, if you need help along the way.
• Find your tune. By which I mean, find what music inspires you most, and play it on repeat while you’re writing. When it gets old, change it. But that’ll take a while.
• When you do reach the end, celebrate! Seriously. Go out. Get some champagne. Do something fun that you couldn’t do while you were trying to reach your deadline (assuming you had one).
• Most importantly: give yourself some time off. Let your brain breathe. Do something else creative, if you like.

That’s my advice, however simple it may be. I think those are things we all need to hear, time and time again.

I hope I’ve been some help to you, over this month’s series! I still haven’t decided what we’ll be discussing for the month of June, but I can promise you that it’ll be fun! ;-)

[love]

{Rani Divine}

Things Are Heating Up: Writing your inciting incident

Hi everybody, and welcome back to Too Many Books to Count! I’m so glad you stopped by, as we enter our final week in the month of May. Is it just me, or does every year seem to go faster than the one before it? In any case, we’re already incredibly near to the end of the month, which means on Thursday we’ll be finishing out this month’s series!

As you know, all month we’ve been talking about first drafts. But instead of looking at them like we usually do, like we writers tend to do after we’ve already written a single first draft of a book, we’re looking at it with the viewpoint of helping authors who maybe don’t really know what they’re doing when they’re writing their first draft (which, by the by, is an incredibly useful thing for even seasoned authors to do, from time to time).

Thus far, we’ve discussed everything from writing styles to discovering your protagonist and antagonist, and today, we’re getting into the meat of the matter.

Things Are Heating Up: Writing your inciting incident

Now, being that we’ve also had a topic on knowing where to start your novel, you probably have a bit of an inkling on where to begin with this already. But I’ll still ask you this question:

What’s your hook? What’s the incident that’s going to draw readers into your book, and make them never want to put the thing down?

That’s what you need to know, when you first start writing. You need to know what that incident is, and you need to write it as close to the beginning of the book as you can. If your inciting incident is in the first chapter, you get brownie points. If it’s in the first five, you’re still doing good. If it doesn’t happen until the middle of the book… well, then you’ve got some issues.

This is a time when you need to work with your outline, if you’re one of those crazy outliners. You need to have an idea of what’s going to draw readers into the story, and it needs to be one of the very first things that you write.

For Coetir, the inciting incident happened within the first couple pages. It was a death. And within the new two chapters, it flowed into an even bigger incident that really started the ball rolling within the story.

So what’s going to start your ball rolling? What’s really going to get this story started in the best way possible? What hook can you give your readers, to make sure they won’t want to put the book down?

For me, this is the best way to start a book. Start with that hook, that line, that incident that’s really going to drive your point home. Start with something that will fascinate your readers, something that will get them thinking, something that will get their hearts pounding. If you can do that, then you’re one step closer to keeping them through the whole book.

Next time, let’s talk about the final step in writing your first draft—making sure you actually finish!

[love]

{Rani Divine}

The Danger Side: Discovering your antagonist

Hey everybody, and welcome back to Too Many Books to Count! I’m so glad you stopped by. As you know, all month long we’re talking about those first drafts. We all have to write them, and we all know the struggle of doing it well. This series, however, is slightly geared toward the newer writers out there (or, toward the experienced writers who might feel like they need a bit of a refresher). This month, we’re talking about the checklist of things you’ll need to work on while you’re writing your first draft.

So far, we’ve talked about choosing a genre, really locking down the setting of your world, figuring out whether you’re going to outline or write by the seat of your pants, knowing where to start your story, and meeting your protagonist. Today? The logical continuation…

The Danger Side: Discovering your antagonist

While protagonists are (usually) the characters that come to us from the very start, antagonists generally take a little bit of doing. They’re not always the easiest to work on, not always the simplest to come up with from the beginning—and sometimes, that’s completely okay. There are times when the primary antagonist won’t show up until over halfway through the book, though they’ve always been around and mentioned offhandedly through the first half.

So, how do we come up with them?

It always starts by knowing your protagonist. If you haven’t already, make sure to go back and read Tuesday’s post to work on that part. Why? Because if you don’t know your protagonist, then it’s really difficult to shape the character they’re working against. Antagonists tend toward being the opposite, in many ways, of the protagonist—even if it’s in subtle ways that most readers won’t pick up on immediately. So if you don’t know your protagonist, it’s much more difficult to create an antagonist out of nothing.

That’s what makes creating the antagonist a little bit harder to quantify. You’ll need to decide what the antagonist is doing, and why they’re the antagonist. Who are they antagonizing? Why? What drew them into this life? Why do they think they’re the hero of the story?

Yes, that’s the thing that really makes an antagonist. Every antagonist is the hero in his or her own mind. They really believe that they’re doing the right thing, that they’re fighting on the side of good and that the protagonist is the evil one. That’s what makes a really good antagonist. They’re not evil just to be evil—that’s boring. So, what’s their reasoning for doing what they’re doing? That's one of the first questions you need to ask yourself.

From there, you’ll be able to work backward, just like we did with our protagonist, to come up with a character that completely fits your purposes. Yeah, it’s a little bit roundabout. Yeah, it’ll take you a little longer to come up with your antagonist this way, but I promise that you’ll end up with an antagonist who’s more believable and fluid than any other you’ve written.

Why? Because this one was tailor-made for the story you’re writing, of course.

[love]

{Rani Divine}