I blog weekly on one of the above three topics, alternating between them. This week, I’m blogging on Creating. Specifically, we’ll be talking about the theme of your novel. How do you find your theme? Do you even need a theme? This is not a huge topic, so this blog post will be shorter than usual. 

Three Strategies for Dealing With Theme

First, let’s define what we mean by “theme.” When I talk about theme, I mean the deep meaning of your story. It’s the message behind all the shooting and kissing and car-chasing and wand-waving and shouting and whatever else is happening in your story. So when I use the word “theme,” I don’t mean merely some controversial subject. I mean the actual stance that you take on that controversial subject. 

I can think of three strategies that authors use with their themes. There might be more, but these are the ones that jump out at me:

• You come up with the theme first, and then you create a story that sends that message. 
• You come up with a story first, and then a deep theme emerges from the story. 
• Your story doesn’t have a theme. There’s no message. 

Authors have used all three of these strategies effectively. There’s nothing intrinsically right or wrong with using any of these strategies. You get to decide what kind of novel you’re writing. But it’s a good idea to know what your decision is, and why you came to that decision. 

So let’s talk about each strategy and give some examples. 

Strategy 1: The Theme Drives the Story

Some authors have a theme in mind, and they create a story to illustrate that theme. The hazard here is that your theme can come across as heavy-handed. The upside is that reader who already agree with the theme of your story will love your novel and may help promote it, and that may turn out to be very good for sales. 

A classic example of a theme-driven book is Uncle Tom’s Cabin, by Harriet Beecher Stowe. This was the best-selling novel in the US in the entire 19^th century. The theme was that slavery is evil. This is not controversial today, but it was in the 1850s. Some people loved this theme. Others hated it. The story was created solely as a vehicle for the theme. The book had a lot of flaws that make it much less popular today. It had a sentimental style that is long out of date. And it glorified the servility of the main character, Uncle Tom. It’s now an insult to call someone an Uncle Tom. And yet, for all its problems, the book had a huge impact. 

A modern example of a theme-driven story is The Shack, by William Paul Young. The theme was that God is good, even though he allows evil in our world. This is highly controversial. The question of the goodness of God is hotly debated, and the problem of evil is one of the two strongest arguments used by those who don’t believe in the existence of God. Some people loved the book. Others called it stupid or heretical. The book sat at #1 on the New York Times bestseller list for more than a year and has more than 10 million copies in print.

If this is your strategy, then own it. You have a theme. Send your message. Make it clear. Be ready to take some heat for it. Be hopeful that bad publicity will lead to good sales. Sometimes it does. 

Strategy 2: The Story Drives the Theme

Some authors just set out to write an interesting story, and a theme emerges. The upside here is that the theme naturally fits the story, because it grows out of it. But you may find that once you’ve found the theme of your story, you may need to rewrite it extensively so that the theme is fully woven into your novel. 

So far as I can tell, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn fits this model. The book follows on The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, a light-hearted book about a boy growing up in the South. It took Mark Twain about seven years to write the Huck Finn book, and things evolved as he worked on it. A strong anti-racist theme eventually emerged organically from the story. But the theme is not perfectly developed. The book is a 19^th century novel, and it contains 19^th century stereotypes and racial slurs that don’t sit well in the 21^st century. 

In my own novels, I’ve never started with a theme in mind. I usually just try to write a story and see what comes out of it. In my City of God series, a theme has emerged organically from the hard questions one of my characters, Ari, asks about the problem of evil. Ari rather reluctantly believes in God, but he’s not at all happy with the common explanations for why God should allow evil in the world. I am three books into the series, and the theme as it now stands is that the problem of evil is not solved. 

If this is your strategy, then own it. Watch what your characters find disturbing—that’s your clue for the theme that may emerge. Once you identify the theme, take care to keep it consistent through the story. This may take a lot of rework. Do the work. If you don’t feel the need to hammer the theme hard, then don’t hammer it. A message can be subtle, if that’s more your style. Or it can be bold, if that’s what you want. 

Strategy 3: There is no Theme

Some authors set out to write an interesting story, and no theme ever emerges. There is nothing wrong with this. A novel isn’t required to have a message. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, and sometimes a story is just a story. 

I’ve read most of the Jack Reacher novels by Lee Child, and I don’t think any of them had a theme. Reacher travels around with nothing but a wallet and a toothbrush and the clothes on his back. He gets in fights. He catches the bad guys. He moves on. There’s no “moral of the story.” Fans of Reacher don’t seem to mind, and it’s certainly never bothered me.

If this is your strategy, then own it. You don’t owe your reader a message. You owe your reader a story. Your novel doesn’t have to carry some deep meaning. 

Homework:

• Pick five of your favorite novels. What is the theme of each? For each one, do you think the theme was designed in from the start, or did it emerge organically? 

• Did you start out with a theme in mind for the novel you’re working on right now? If so, what’s the theme, and do you hope that it’s controversial enough to drive big sales?
• Has a theme emerged organically from the novel you’re working on? If so, are you willing to put in the extra work needed to make sure the theme is consistent within your novel?
• Does your current novel have no theme at all? Are you good with that, or do you feel that it needs one?

The post 3 Strategies for the Theme of Your Novel appeared first on Advanced Fiction Writing.

I blog weekly on one of the above three topics, alternating between them. This week, I’m blogging on Marketing. The question for today is how do you launch your novel without having a panic attack? Even if you are years away from launching a book, there are things you can do now to prepare for that happy day. 

Why Most Authors Feel Massive Anxiety in a Book Launch

We authors put a lot of pressure on ourselves. It’s easy to think launching a novel is a huge, gigantic task that’s going to be expensive and risky and force us to act salesy. And it’s easy to believe that if we don’t run a good launch, then our book is going to die. That’s just not reality. 

You can massively lower your anxiety level in a book launch by remembering one thing. In a book launch, you are not trying to sell your book to the whole world. You are not even trying to sell your book to your entire Target Audience. The ONLY people you are trying to sell it to are the people who meet all three of these criteria:

1. They already know you exist. 
2. They already know they like your fiction. 
3. They already have given you permission to let them know when your book is available.

That may be a very small set of people. It might include only your family and your close friends. 

But your circle of influence is probably broader than that. If you have followers on social media who know you’re writing a novel, then some of those people may be in that set. If you have an email newsletter about your fiction, that’s ideal. 

If you remember my recent blog post  on The Three Pillars of Marketing, you are launching your book ONLY to people you have already Attracted and Engaged. Attraction and Engagement are the first two pillars of marketing. In your book launch, you’ll execute the third pillar—Conversion. This simply means that you’re going to give them a good reason to buy your book RIGHT NOW.

And this step is stress-free. If people already know you and know they like your fiction, then they’ll be happy to buy your book. So the task of launching your book is just a matter of contacting them with an incentive to buy it right away. And how do you do that? That depends on what road you chose for publishing your novel. So let’s review those roads…

The Two Roads to Publishing a Novel

There are two methods authors commonly use to publish their novel:

• Traditional publishing—you sell the rights to your book to a publishing company that manages the editing and production of the book and pays you an advance and then later pays you royalties.
• Self-publishing (also called indie authoring)—you manage the editing and production of the book yourself. You don’t get an advance, and you have to pay the up-front expenses, but then you get all the the money the book earns.

Both of these are valid routes to publishing a novel. Both of them can be extremely successful, and both can be extremely frustrating. Neither of these is “the right way” for all authors. Some authors like working with a publisher that handles all the production and editing hassle, so they can focus on writing. Some authors like doing it all themselves because they feel like they can do a better job. 

I’ve published both fiction and nonfiction books by both of these routes. I started out my writing career working with traditional publishers. I later transitioned to indie authoring, and that’s worked out better for me. (Translation—I have earned more money as an indie author than I did as a traditionally published author. And being indie has caused me a lot less stress.) 

Choose the method that works best for you. I can’t go into all the ins and outs of how you make that decision in this blog post. That’s a topic for another day. The reason I mention these two options is that your approach to launching your book will depend somewhat on which route you take. So let’s look at how you run a book launch for each case.  

Launching a Traditionally Published Novel

When you work with a traditional publisher, they will set the publication date far in advance. They’ll work with you on the editing. They’ll hire a cover designer and proofreaders. They’ll ask you to keep to a schedule that they set, and if you fail, they have legal recourse, because you signed a binding contract. 

Your publisher will expect you to help out a lot with the launch. They may give you a long list of tasks they think you should do. Most of these will be impossible to do in the window of time you have available. So don’t feel obligated to do everything they ask. But you should definitely do something. Let them know what you’re doing, because they may be able to help you a bit, and they’ll be grateful that you did anything at all. 

There are two main things you can do:

1. Send free copies of your book to “influencers”—people who read widely in your category and who have some sort of platform for promoting books.
2. Email all the people you have Attracted and Engaged and give them a reason to buy the book now. 

Let’s talk about those two tasks.

Free Copies For Influencers

Publishers will often give you free copies of the paper edition of your book to send to influencers. Maybe these influencers have a blog. Maybe they moderate a Facebook group or a Goodreads group. Maybe they have a large following on TikTok or Instagram or whatever. Publishers know that this can be very cost-effective, because paper copies probably cost them around a dollar apiece. 

When I launched my book Writing Fiction For Dummies, I was part of a large online group of novelists. I offered a free autographed copy of the book to anyone in the group who wanted it. 60 authors sent me their mailing addresses. Almost all of them were friends of mine, and I knew that most of them taught at writing conferences and would be good influencers for years to come. My publisher sent me three cases of books, and I did all the work—signing the books, packaging them, adding mailing labels, and taking them to the post office. The publisher offered to pay the postage, so my only cost was a few hours of boring labor. This worked out massively well. 

Emailing Your Followers

In the launch week for your book, it’s way too late to try to put together an email list. Building an email list is one of your lifelong projects as a writer. You will never stop building your list and cultivating it. And the sooner you start, the better. List-building is a giant project, and I can’t cover it here. I’ve blogged about it in the past. If you want to know how it fits into your overall marketing strategy, I can recommend my post A Virtuous Cycle for Marketing Your Books. For the nuts and bolts of how to build a list, I can recommend the book Newsletter Ninja, by Tammi Labrecque. 

Assuming you have an email list, when you launch your book, you will probably send out a series of emails beginning a few weeks in advance to let your people know that your next book is coming. You can do a cover reveal when your cover is designed. You can send an email weekly in which you talk about your story. If you want to include any part of your novel in your emails, you’ll need to get permission from your publisher, because you sold them the publishing rights. Usually, they’re happy to give you permission, so ask. Then on Launch Day, send your fans an email announcing the book. Add links to the usual online retailers. Add any incentives you can think of to buy the book right now. 

What do I mean by “incentives?” There are a couple of types of incentives. You might be able to convince your publisher to lower the price during the first week of sales, especially for the e-book version. But don’t count on it. Few publishers will do this. I have seen it happen, and once it had absolutely spectacular results. But one cost of working with a publisher is that they set the price of your book, and you don’t. 

There’s a second kind of incentive, and you have complete control over this. You can offer your true fans in your email list some sort of free electronic download if they buy your book during Launch Week. I did this with my book Writing Fiction For Dummies. I asked my publisher to put me in contact with similar authors who might provide electronic freebies. We put together a list of 8 free goodies that I put on my website for anyone who bought my book during Launch Week. And I added a 50% coupon code for all the products that I had on my website. I didn’t ask for any proof that they bought my book. That would have been a nightmare to check. I trusted people to be honest. When you treat people as trustworthy, they live up to your trust. The launch went extremely well, and I had a nice sales bump on my website from the coupon code. 

But what if you’re self-published? In that case, you have more control…

Launching a Self-Published Novel

When you self-publish your novel, you control everything. You set the deadline, and if you miss it, nobody will take you to court. You will know your publication date at least a month in advance. Which means you can start actively promoting your book to your email list weeks before the book is available. And you have the same general methods of promoting your book. But there are some differences from the traditional-publishing case.

Free Copies to Influencers

You can still send copies to influencers, but now you have to pay for them yourself—you don’t have a publisher to give them to you for free. If you use Amazon’s Print-on-Demand for your paper copies, you can make individual orders for the book at a reduced cost and send them directly to each influencer. You won’t get any royalties on these copies, but it’s nice to let Amazon deal with the shipping. 

Emailing Your Followers

You can also promote your book in advance to your email list, and now you have a bit more latitude as a self-publisher. Here are some of the advantages you have that your traditionally published author lacks.

• You can email your followers for weeks in advance with any amount of excerpts from the forthcoming book, and you don’t have to ask your publisher for permission. Because you’re the publisher. 
• You can set up preorders on Amazon up to a year before publication and notify your followers so they can buy it in advance. 
• You have complete control of the price and you can change it at any time, and use this to create an incentive to “buy now”. As an example, suppose you want the regular price of your e-book to be $4.99. You can tell your followers that during Launch Week, the price will be set to $2.99. And you might even offer a low-ball price for preorders of $1.99 or even $0.99. At that price, any of your followers who cares about your book will order. It’s a no-brainer. Note that you can’t go that low with the print version of your book, because paper costs money. 

The Common Thread—Your Email List

A major part of your book launch is your email newsletter. If you don’t have an email list when you launch your book, you can still use social media, but don’t expect great results. Successful authors know that social media converts a lot worse than email. Please note that it can take years to build a good list, so it’s way too late to think about building your email list when your book is weeks away from launch. If your launch is coming up and you have no email list, then focus on the things you can do and keep your expectations low. 

Your book launch should not be stressful. Stress comes from trying to sell to people who never heard of you and don’t know anything about your fiction. There are ways to reach these people, but Launch Week is not the time to try. Launch Week is for your true fans. And there’s no anxiety when promoting your work to your true fans. They want you to let them know when your book is coming out. They’d be angry with you if you didn’t tell them.

Homework:

• When is the approximate date of your next book launch? This might be more than a year out, and if that’s the case, you don’t really have a date, you have a range of dates. This might be years away, and that’s OK, because it gives you time to build an email list. 
• Do you have influencers in mind for your book? It’s OK if you don’t, but it’s nice if you do.
• Do you have an email list for your true fans? If not, then now is a good time to start thinking about building one. It’s never too soon.  

The post How to Launch Your Novel Without Stressing Out appeared first on Advanced Fiction Writing.

I blog weekly on one of the above three topics, alternating between them. This week, I’m blogging on Organizing. We’ll talk about the amount of clock time it takes to write a novel versus the calendar time. 

Clock Time and Calendar Time 

If you were a machine who never got tired or bored or had to eat or deal with a family, then you could just work straight through on your novel. If it takes you 500 hours to write a novel, then you could divide that number by the 24 hours in a day to get the calendar time—a bit less than 21 days. 

But you’re not a machine. You can’t work 24 hours every day. So the actual number of hours you log “on the clock” to write your novel are going to be different than the required number of calendar days. 

In this blog post, I’ll show you how to estimate both the clock time and the calendar time for your novel. We’ll assume that you have already learned the craft of fiction writing, which means you know how to do all the stages of writing a novel, so it’s just a matter of executing each stage. Let’s talk about those stages first… 

The 7 Stages of Writing a Novel 

Nobody just writes a first draft of a novel and then publishes it. Well, nobody who writes well. There are other stages in the process. Not everybody needs all of those stages, but most writers put some time into each. 

Here are some typical stages that professional novelists go through:

1. Research and worldbuilding. This is optional. Some kinds of fiction don’t require you to do any research. Others don’t require you to do any worldbuilding. Fantasy typically requires a lot of worldbuilding. Science fiction and historical fiction often take huge amounts of both research and worldbuilding. Your mileage may vary. 
2. Story planning. This is also optional. If you’re a Seat-of-the-Pants novelist, you don’t plan your story—you just start writing. If you use my Snowflake Method, you spend a fair amount of time planning your story. If you’re an Outliner, you spend even more time planning. Your brain is wired to be somewhere on this spectrum, and I don’t think you can change it. So work with your brain, however you’re wired. 
3. Writing the first draft. This is not optional. Everyone writes a first draft. There are different ways to do this. You might write every scene in sequence. You might write scenes as they come to your mind and then piece them together later. You might write part of the draft, then replan the story, then write more of the draft, and so on until you finish. You might write a page and then polish it many times before moving on (this is called Edit-As-You-Go). All of these are valid ways to write. It’s on you to find the process that works best for you. 
4. Editing your manuscript. Most writers put their novel through several revisions. Edit-As-You-Go writers may possibly produce a publishable manuscript in their first draft, because their process combines editing with first-drafting. Again, it’s your job to decide how many revisions you need to make your manuscript its best. 
5. Working with editors and proofreaders. If you work with a traditional royalty-paying publisher, they’ll assign an editor to read your manuscript and send you a “revision letter.” This will tell you what you did well and what you need to improve. Revision letters typically run several pages, but they can go to many pages if there are a lot of problems. Professional novelists who self-publish their work often hire somebody to review their work, or they may ask a friend to do it, or they may hand it off to alpha readers or beta readers. Once you’ve got feedback, it’s up to you to make new revisions in light of what your editors or readers say. The final stage of editing is called proofreading, and it’s often done by a professional and returned to you for review. Strictly speaking, this entire stage is optional, but successful novelists rarely skip it. 
6. Producing your book. When the book is finally declared done, it still needs to be produced. If you’re publishing a paper edition, the book needs to be typeset, printed, bound, and shipped. If you’re publishing an e-book edition, it usually will be typeset and exported in ePub format. (The one exception is that some self-publishers who only publish e-books will simply upload their Word document directly to Amazon. But even in this case, the Word document has to be formatted the way you want the e-book to look.) In either case, a cover needs to be designed, and it’s different for the paper edition and the e-book edition. So this stage is not really optional. If you’re working with a publisher, they do this work. If you’re self-publishing, then you do it yourself or hire someone to do it. 
7. Launching your book. Once you’ve got your book produced, you usually want to spend some time letting the world know it’s available for sale. A few authors do nothing to launch their book, but most successful authors spend some time on it. 

So how long do each of these stages take? That depends on a lot of things. Which stages are you executing? How long is your book? How fast do you write? How many hours do you have each week to work on your novel? Are you working with a publisher or doing it all yourself? 

A typical novel runs 60k to 120k words. You can write shorter, and you can write longer. In what follows, I’ll assume a round 100k words and make estimates based on that. Then you can scale my estimates up or down, depending on whether your novel is shorter or longer than 100k.

Estimates for Research and Worldbuilding

If you don’t need to do any research or worldbuilding, then lucky you—this stage will take zero time. Or if you’re writing a series, then every book after the first one can use all the research and worldbuilding you invested into that first one. 

A reasonable amount of clock time to put into your research is 50 to 100 hours. Some novelists put in much more. (I plead guilty to this. That’s just the way my brain is wired. Research is part of the fun, and ditto worldbuilding.)

How much calendar time does this convert to? That depends on how many hours you spend per week. If you have 10 hours every week, then that 50 to 100 hours is going to cost you 5 to 10 weeks. 

Estimates for Story Planning

If you don’t do any story planning, then this stage will also cost you zero time. It’s tempting to skip this stage and just “get to the good stuff,” but if your brain is wired to need story planning, then you need to do it. You’ll end up writing your first draft quicker, and you’ll save a ton of time on editing and probably on working with editors. 

For those who plan their story, it’s again reasonable to budget a clock time of 50 to 100 hours. Snowflakers will take less time than Outliners. Neither is right or wrong for everyone. Both are right for some people and wrong for others. Part of your career management problem is figuring out how your brain is wired so that you can collaborate with it to be as productive as possible. 

To estimate the corresponding calendar time in weeks, again just divide your estimated clock time by the number of hours you have in a week. 

Estimates for Writing the First Draft

Everybody has to write a first draft. Some writers are faster than others. I have known writers who produce 100 to 200 words per hour. I have known others who write 2000 words per hour. Writers who dictate their first draft claim speeds up to 5000 words per hour. I have my doubts on that. 

I typically write about 1000 words per hour if I’m in the zone, and about 500 when not in the zone. I can’t control being in the zone. Some days just click. 

If you are an Edit-As-You-Go writer, you may write just a few hundred words and then go back and edit it many times. This reduces your speed at writing first-draft copy, but the payoff is that you may spend very little time in the next stage, editing your manuscript. Don’t make this decision based on speed. Make it based on how your brain works best. If you need to Edit-As-You-Go, then do so and be happy. If you don’t need to, then don’t and be happy. You are who you are and you can’t change that. 

The clock time to write your first draft is just your total word count divided by your hourly speed. So if you are writing 100k words and you write 1000 words per hour, then your clock time estimate is 100 hours. 

The calendar time again depends on how many hours you write per week. You know the drill, so I won’t repeat it. 

Estimates for Editing Your Manuscript

If you skip editing, then this stage will cost you nothing. Edit-As-You-Go writers may be able to skip this stage. I know a fair number of professional novelists who’ve written many novels and feel comfortable skipping this stage. I am not one of them. I usually put my manuscripts through 5 to 10 rounds of editing. The early rounds are slow. The later rounds are fast. 

Most writers can edit their work quite a bit faster than they can write first-draft copy. But if you rushed the first draft, you may find yourself spending more time on the second draft, and probably also the third. 

The clock time to do each round of editing is again easy to calculate by dividing your word count by your speed. If you have 100k words and you can edit 2000 words per hour, then a round of editing will cost you 50 hours. 

And again, the calendar time just depends on your clock time and the number of hours you have per week.   

Estimates for Working With Editors

This stage is different because now you’re working with somebody else. Your editor can’t send you a revision letter instantly. I’ve had an editor who once got a revision letter back to me in 3 days. That’s practically a miracle. But most of them will take weeks or even months to respond. When I worked with traditional publishers, it usually took them 1 to 3 months to return a revision letter. I’ve heard stories of much longer wait times. Yes, really. 

While you’re waiting on your editor, you are spending zero clock time of your own. But the calendar continues to turn. This can be frustrating. It’s probably a good idea to have another project to work on while you wait. 

Once you get your revision letter, you then need to edit your manuscript again, based on your editor’s comments. (The editor doesn’t make the changes; you do. Their job is to guide you in what needs reworking.) When you work with a publisher, they may well hand you a revision letter and ask for revisions within a few days or weeks. Yes, they really can give you only days to make revisions. If you complain, they’ll point out that you signed a binding legal contract and they invested a lot of money in your book, and now it’s time to buckle down. This can get very uncomfortable. 

After you do revisions, a traditional publisher will always send the manuscript to a proofreader, who will catch all the last little Punctuation, Usage, Grammar, and Spelling (PUGS) issues. Most publishers will send the final proofs back to you for a final read-through. They will often give you a short fuse (“Can you get it back to us tomorrow? Thanks! You’re a prince!”) Again, this can be not-fun, especially if the proofreader decided to change your wording. I’ve heard horror stories of proofreaders making drastic changes that wrecked the dialogue or the author’s voice. I’ve not experienced this myself. Self-published authors have a lot less pressure here. They can always just throw out what the proofreader did. But trad-pubbed authors may have to grin and bear it. 

It’s very hard to make estimates here, but when I was traditionally published, I figured about 40 hours to do edits based on the revision letter, and another 10 hours to review the final proofs to catch the errors the proofreader missed. I tend to put more time on the edits now that I am self-publishing, but that’s probably because I have no deadline and I’m a perfectionist. So for me, 100 hours is about right. 

Estimates for Producing Your Book

If you are traditionally published, your publisher will handle all the production. So this stage costs you almost zero clock time. (The only time you take will be an hour or two to complain about the awful cover your publisher created for you. This will get you nowhere, usually. Also, you will be asked to approve the terrible back-cover copy that a marketing intern wrote, which will cost you another hour to rewrite.) 

A traditional publisher may take a few months to over a year to work through production. The wheels of traditional publishing grind slow. You should have other projects to work on while you wait.

If you are self-publishing your work, then production is your job. You have two tasks:

• Typeset the novel. You can do this yourself in an hour or two using Vellum (a Mac-only piece of software that is fantastic) or Atticus (runs on Mac OS and Linux and Windows and Chromebook, and I’ve never used it, but I hear it’s very good). The calendar time here is typically one day.
• Get a cover designed. If you have excellent graphic design skills and excellent marketing skills, you can do this yourself in a few hours. Otherwise, you should hire a freelance cover designer. This will take an hour or two of your time to create a cover design brief that tells the designer what you think you want. Then you’ll spend a few hours telling your designer what they got wrong. This can take weeks to months of calendar time to get right, so it’s a project you should launch long before you’re ready to publish. 

Estimates for Launching Your Book

Whether you are traditionally published or self-published, you will probably spend some time on your launch. The main thing here is letting people in your Target Audience know that your book is available and giving them incentive to buy it right now. The list of possible tasks you could do in your book launch is gigantic. Pick a few that mesh with your personality and do those well. Don’t let your publisher steamroll you. I had a publisher once give me a list of 25 things to do. I had a talk with my editor and the head of marketing and the head of publicity and told them the 3 things I was actually going to do. One of my tasks was not on their list—they didn’t know you could do that. We had a terrific launch. 

It’s reasonable to spend anywhere from 1 to 50 hours on your launch. The calendar time is usually compressed. Most authors commit no more than a week or two to a book launch. 

Hard Numbers

For reference, here are a few hard numbers from my own life, which show how much variance there is in the real world:

• The fastest I ever wrote a traditionally published book was about 300 hours, which took only 9 months from signing the contract to seeing books in the store.
• The slowest I ever wrote a traditionally published book was about 500 hours over 12 to 15 months (I don’t have good records on either of these numbers, so they’re estimates). 
• The fastest I’ve written a self-published book was about 150 hours in 3 months. 
• The slowest I’ve written a self-published book was more than 1000 hours over more than 5 years. 

A lot depends on where you are in life. If you have a demanding day job and young children, you may not have much time and energy to put into writing. As you get older, your energy level may drop, but you may also find yourself with more time for writing after you retire. 

Homework:

• What is the expected word count for the novel you’re currently working on? 
• Which of the 7 stages do you need to do? 
• What is a reasonable estimate for the clock time for each of these stages? 
• What is a reasonable estimate for the calendar time for each? 
• Multiply all estimates by 2 and add them all up. That is a pretty decent estimate of the amount of time you will actually spend on your novel.  

The post How Long Does it Take to Write a Novel? appeared first on Advanced Fiction Writing.

I blog weekly on one of the above three topics, alternating between them. This week, I’m blogging on Creating. We’ll talk about the Storyworld of your novel. 

What is Your Storyworld and Why Does It Matter? 

The Storyworld of your novel is the stage on which your story plays out. It might be a room, a building, a city, a region, a nation, a planet, or a galaxy, depending on your story. Every Storyworld has rules that govern how it works. The physical Storyworld has physics, chemistry, biology, geography, cosmology. Your characters have physiology, psychology, sociology. Usually, they have government, economic systems, philosophy, religion. 

Your Storyworld matters because it sets constraints on your characters. There are actions your characters can’t take, places they can’t go, things they can’t buy, ideas they can’t think. Humans living on earth can’t jump 10 feet in the air. They can’t go to Mars (not yet, anyway). They can’t buy a galaxy. They can’t know what it is to be a bat. 

Constraints are important, because they create conflict in a story. Without conflict, you don’t have a story. 

It’s your job to know your Storyworld well enough to create an interesting story. It’s also your job to inject enough of your Storyworld into your reader’s brain that your story is understandable and believable. 

Some Comments on Worldbuilding

The process of figuring out how your Storyworld works is called “Worldbuilding.” Writers who write science fiction or fantasy or historical fiction often spend a lot of time on Worldbuilding, because they work with Storyworlds that may be wildly different from the world their readers live in. 

Worldbuilding is a very large subject. I’ll leave the actual process of Worldbuilding for another day. Every novelist has to do at least some Worldbuilding. Even if you’re writing about life on planet earth in the present day, you still have to pick some part of the world to show to your reader. And you have to know what rules apply. 

The rules of your Storyworld may be just the rules you’ve lived by all your life. If that’s the case, then you don’t need to do any extra work. But that’s only because you’ve spent your entire life doing the work, just by living. 

If you’re writing about a Storyworld even slightly different from the one you live in, you’ve got to spend some time figuring out the rules of your Storyworld. 

How far should you go in building your Storyworld? That’s a tough question. J.R.R. Tolkien went pretty far in constructing Middle Earth. A lot of what he created never made it into The Lord of the Rings. He created it because he enjoyed it. And he undoubtedly used parts of his Storyworld that he never imagined would be needed. Until the moment when his story needed something extra, and he realized that he already had built in a little chunk of Storyworld that would provide that extra something.

A reasonable rule of thumb is to build enough of your Storyworld that you can figure out what the constraints are that your characters face in any given situation. If you know the constraints, then you can throw new obstacles in their path in every scene.  

How Much Storyworld Should Appear In Your Story?

Some authors choose to show just a little of their Storyworld. Others choose to show a lot. That’s a decision you get to make. The readers you attract will be those who like your choice. 

But you can’t possibly show your entire Storyworld. You have around 100,000 words for your novel, plus or minus. A full explanation of your Storyworld, even as you know it, might run into the billions of words. You don’t have the word budget to show it all. You have to pick and choose. 

Here’s another rule of thumb: If your Storyworld creates a problem for your characters, then you should explain to the reader the part of your Storyworld that creates the conflict. A few examples should clarify this:

In Pride & Prejudice, by Jane Austen, the five Bennet sisters are in a tough spot because the estate their father owns is “entailed”—meaning that it can only be passed on fully intact to the closest male heir of their father. The entailment could be broken only if there were a Bennet brother who signed a legal document, along with the father, to end the entailment. But there is no brother; the nearest male heir is their stupid and selfish cousin, Mr. Collins. So the five sisters can only hope to inherit their mother’s smallish dowry. They have poor prospects for marriage and worse prospects if they stay single. The entire novel is about this quandary, which is created by this one small legal aspect of the Storyworld of Regency England. 

In Artemis, by Andy Weir, the Storyworld is a small colony on the moon, sometime late in the 21^st century. The moon has a gravity about 1/6 of earth gravity. Because of that, it can’t hold an atmosphere, and the colony lives inside a set of connected pressurized domes. You can venture outside only in an EVA suit, and only for a limited time. The lead character, Jazz, came to the moon as a child, and her adult body was formed in moon gravity. If she were to return to earth, she’d face severe physical challenges because her muscles and bones could not handle earth gravity. Jazz is a smuggler, and her greatest fear is that she’ll be deported to earth. This is one way in which the low moon gravity affects the story. But there’s another consequence of low lunar gravity that drives the main storyline of the novel. I won’t reveal this consequence because it’s a plot spoiler. Go read the book if you really want to know. (I enjoyed Artemis even more than The Martian or Project Hail Mary, and that is saying something. I think the main reason is that Artemis has a more complex social structure in its Storyworld.)

In The Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins, the evil Capitol has created a mutated species of wasps, the “tracker jackers.” These have a horrifically painful sting that causes hallucinations. If you’re stung by several tracker jackers, you’ll probably die, and you’ll definitely wish for death. Tracker jackers play an important role in only one scene of the novel, Chapter 14, where the lead character Katniss uses them to get herself out of a jam—at the cost of being stung herself. While tracker jackers are only a small part of the Storyworld of this novel, the fact that they exist illustrates why the Capitol is so widely hated by the Districts. And tracker jackers are just one example of the Capitol’s “muttations.” Other muttations cause problems in other parts of the novel, and the Capitol’s technological supremacy is the main reason it’s able to dominate the Districts and force them into slave labor. 

So how do you put your Storyworld into your novel? You have two options, Showing or Telling…

Showing Your Storyworld

I discussed the difference beween Showing and Telling a few weeks ago, in my blog post What “Show, Don’t Tell” Actually Means.

You can Show your Storyworld using any of the five tools of Showing—Action, Dialogue, Interior Monologue, Interior Emotion, or Sensory Description. 

These tools work best when you’re trying to Show your reader some small aspect of your Storyworld. You’re relying here on your reader figuring out your Storyworld by the things you Show. 

Action works nicely for Showing the reader the physical facts of the Storyworld. In Artemis, the characters can jump a lot higher than anyone can on earth. But they have to spend a lot of time putting on an EVA suit if they want to go outside. The problem with Action is that you can’t explain laws or religion or philosophy using character Actions. 

Dialogue can work well for explaining the ideas that rule your Storyworld. But you have to be careful. If both characters know the rules of the Storyworld, it looks dumb for one of them to explain it to the other. So this works best when you have a child or a foreigner who doesn’t understand the rules and demands an explanation. Even in this case, beware of infodumps. It’s better if one of the characters argues that the rules are unfair or stupid. Then you have some conflict to keep the story going while you explain the Storyworld. 

Interior Monologue can also be useful for Showing your Storyworld. But you can’t put in long explanations like you can with Dialogue, because nobody ever explained something to themselves. 

Sensory Description can be great for showing the physical parts of your Storyworld. Again, you don’t want to do an infodump. When you Show your Storyworld using Sensory Description, highlight the things that create problems for your characters.  

Telling Your Storyworld

There are times when Showing just won’t work to explain part of your Storyworld. In that case, if the story depends on your reader knowing something about your Storyworld, then Tell it using Exposition. 

SF writers and historical novelists are especially susceptible to the disease known as SeeHowMuchResearchIDid. Do your best to avoid getting this disease. Readers get bored with infodumps. Tell what’s essential, and leave the rest out. And “essential” usually works out to be a whole lot less than the author thinks it is. 

How do you know how much to leave in or take out? Get someone to read the scene. If they’re confused, you need to put in more. If they’re bored, you need to take stuff out. 

Homework:

• How well do you know the Storyworld for the current novel you’re writing? 
• What parts of your Storyworld create the conflict that drives the main storyline for your novel? 
• Have you given your reader enough information about your Storyworld so they understand your main storyline? 
• Have you Shown or Told your reader things about your Storyworld that don’t drive the conflict? If so, this is not necessarily bad, but it creates an opportunity. Can you use those aspects of your Storyworld to increase the conflict in your story? 

The post The Storyworld of Your Novel appeared first on Advanced Fiction Writing.

I blog weekly on one of the above three topics, alternating between them. This week, I’m blogging on Creating. We’ll talk about three critical decisions you must make when you’re choosing a viewpoint character for a scene. 

Before You Write Your Next Scene…

A scene is the fundamental unit of fiction. It has a beginning, a middle, and an end—it’s a small story in its own right. Each scene is like a brick that you use to build the larger story of your novel. If you can write one good scene, you can write a hundred, and that’s a novel. So it’s crucial to get each scene right. 

Before you begin writing a scene, you need to make three key decisions:

• Whose story are you going to tell in this scene?
• Where is the video camera you’re using to show this scene, and which way is it pointed? 
• What tense will you use for the verbs in your scene?

Let’s talk about each of these, in turn.

What is a Viewpoint Character?

First things first. Every scene is a miniature story about somebody. That somebody is called the “viewpoint character.” They are also sometimes called by other terms—the “point-of-view character” or the “POV character” or the “lead character.” These all mean the same thing. 

In your scene, you’re going to show your reader a movie in which they find themselves inside the skin of the viewpoint character. The scene is a small story about one particular incident in the life of the viewpoint character. The incident usually lasts for some minutes, but it can last mere seconds, and it could in principle go on for hours. 

Why do you need a viewpoint character? Because the viewpoint character provides the emotional yardstick that tells your reader how to feel. The events of the scene only have meaning when the reader knows who is “the good guy” that they’re rooting for. 

Suppose you’re writing a scene about the 100 meter finals in the next Olympics. Here are some options for viewpoint characters:

• The 17-year-old phenom who wins, shattering the world record in the process. A year ago, he was nobody, and now he’s on top of the world.
• The 35-year-old veteran runner just behind him, who also breaks the previous world record, but comes in second. He’s spent his whole life dreaming of a gold medal, and now he’ll retire with only a silver, because he was one millisecond too slow. 
• The sportscaster calling the contest on TV, who is secretly battling Alzheimer’s and mixes up the names of the runners as they cross the finish line. He’s been lying to his network about his condition, and now he’ll lose his job. 
• The new CEO of a failing shoe manufacturer, who hopes to sign an endorsement deal with the winner of the race. He doesn’t care who wins. What he cares about is saving his company from bankruptcy. 

The story you tell in your scene depends critically on which of these characters you choose as your viewpoint character. If you choose the winning kid, it’s a story of sudden, life-changing victory. If you choose the second-place guy, it’s a bittersweet story of running the best race of your life and still losing. If you choose the sportscaster, it’s not about the race at all, it’s about losing your livelihood while all the world is watching.  If you choose the CEO, it’s a story about dollars and cents and brutally real dog-eat-puppy capitalism. 

Choose your viewpoint character so as to tell whatever story you want to tell in your scene. You can use different viewpoint characters in different scenes if you like. Or you can write all the scenes in your novel using the same viewpoint character. It’s up to you, and there’s no one choice that’s always right. 

What is a Viewpoint, and Why Does It Matter?

Once you’ve chosen your viewpoint character, you still need to decide how to show that character on the page. Your goal as a novelist is to create a movie in your reader’s brain. And a movie requires a video camera. A camera has to be placed somewhere. It has to point somewhere. The choice of where to put your camera and which direction to point it is called your viewpoint.

There are six commonly used options for the viewpoint of your scene:

• First person viewpoint. You put the camera inside the viewpoint character’s head, using the pronoun “I” to refer to the character. The camera points outward, showing only what the viewpoint character knows. This is a fairly common viewpoint. 
• Second person viewpoint. You put the camera inside the viewpoint character’s head, using the pronoun “you.” Again, the camera points outward, showing only what the viewpoint character knows. This is a very uncommon viewpoint. 
• Third person viewpoint. You put the camera inside the viewpoint character’s head, using suitable third-person pronouns, such as “he” or “she” or “they”. Again, the camera points outward, showing only what the viewpoint character knows. This is the most common viewpoint.
• Third person objective viewpoint. You put the camera outside the viewpoint character,  not inside. Again, you use suitable third-person pronouns, but you can no longer show what the viewpoint character is thinking or feeling. You can point the camera at the character or at anything else, as you like. You can show things the character can’t see, such as the smudge on his forehead, or the spider walking across her hair. But you can’t show what’s inside the character’s head, because you’re outside. You have to suggest the character’s thoughts and feeling based on their facial expressions and body language. This is a very uncommon viewpoint. 
• Head-hopping viewpoint. You switch the location of the camera to be inside the heads of multiple characters at different times in the scene. Typically, you use either third person or first person, but now you’re doing these for multiple viewpoint characters in the same scene. Some writers think this is a horrible thing to do, and others think it’s perfectly fine. You get to make your own decision on this. 
• Omniscient viewpoint. You can move the camera anywhere in the universe or outside it, popping inside the heads of any of the characters, inside the head of God, or anywhere else you feel like. This viewpoint was more popular in the 19^th century than it is now. It can be amazing when it works, but it’s difficult to do well, and it’s easy to do badly.

Past, Present, or Future?

The last decision you have to make is what tense you’ll use for your verbs. This is very simple. You have three choices: past, present, or future. 

Past tense is most common, and it’s easy to do. 

Present tense has become more common in the last couple of decades. It takes a bit more work, but it’s also relatively easy to do. 

Future tense is rare, but you can imagine cases where it makes sense. If you’re writing a scenario for how to deal with a nuclear reactor catastrophe, you might write a scene in second person future tense, like this: “You’ll see a safety switch below the main shutoff valve. You’ll switch that to Override. Then you’ll turn the valve all the way Off. Then run to the escape hatch. You have a maximum of 8.4317 seconds to get there. Approximately.” 

Further Reading

If you’re interested in reading more on viewpoint characters, viewpoint, and tense, see Chapter 4 in my book How to Write a Dynamite Scene Using the Snowflake Method. 

Homework:

Look at the most recent scene you wrote in your current novel. 

• Who is the viewpoint character (or characters)? 
• Why did you choose that person, and might your scene be better if you had used a different viewpoint character?
• What is the viewpoint you used? (Where did you put your camera, and which way did you point it?)
• Why did you choose that viewpoint, and might your scene be better if you had used a different viewpoint? 
• What tense did you use, and why? 
• If you’re inside the head of your viewpoint character, did you show the reader anything that the viewpoint character can’t know? This is called “breaking point-of-view,” and it’s considered bad because it can disrupt the movie you’re creating in your reader’s brain.

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