I want you to take any famous writer and find the shortest sentence in their book and the very longest sentence in their book. And now go to a piece of your writing and look for the very shortest sentence in your book and the very longest sentence. 99% of the time, you will find that the established writer has both shorter sentences than you and longer sentences. That’s because they’re really good at sentence variety, and sentence variety is one of those things that every writer can get better at.

Now, we’re not gonna deal with long sentences today. That’s a video for another time. But today, we are gonna focus on short sentences, like really, really short sentences. Here are 7 tips on how to write short sentences that will have readers obsessing about your book.

1. Use Contrast

What’s the perfect place for a short sentence? It’s after a very, very, very long sentence. Why? Because the contrast makes the short sentence seem even more shocking.

You probably know Cormac McCarthy because he wrote The Road and No Country for Old Men, and he is renowned for writing very long sentences. But you know what? He doesn’t shy away from very short ones either. In Blood Meridian, there’s one short sentence he repeats again and again and again. It’s very short — it’s 3 words: “They rode on.” Repeating it multiple times makes it feel like the journey is endless, like they just kept on riding and riding.

But the placement of where he puts this very short sentence is very telling. The sentence before it is 89 words long. Then he says, “They rode on.” And then the sentence after it is 78 words.

So use contrast to your advantage and have a very long sentence before and maybe after a very short sentence. Also, it should be a bucket list item for you that you should try to write a 3-word sentence in your book. It’s a good goal to have.

2. Make a Catchphrase

Kurt Vonnegut has a 3-word phrase he uses again and again in Slaughterhouse-Five: “So it goes.” You get this sense of resignation, like, “Eh, what can you do?” And when Vonnegut uses that phrase again and again against the backdrop of World War II and the carpet bombing of Dresden — one of the most horrific events of that entire war — it creates this crazy contrast between that sort of lackadaisical attitude and the horrific events actually happening on the ground.

So I ask you: what 3-word phrase captures the spirit of your novel, and what character could repeat it throughout?

3. End Your Book on a Short Line

George Orwell’s 1984 is about a man fighting a totalitarian government named Big Brother. He spends his entire life resisting the authorities and trying not to submit. But after loads of torture and social conditioning, the novel ends with one of the most chilling lines of all time: “He loved Big Brother.” Only 4 words.

Could you imagine if this had been a longer line? Just imagine if Orwell had gone on for another full sentence explaining that the struggle was finished because he had won the victory over himself. Ugh. The wordiness would diminish the sadness. When readers get blindsided by that sparse, forward reply, they wanna cry.

So don’t feel like you need long sentences to convey complex emotions. Sometimes you just need a gut punch of a very short sentence.

4. Make a Funnel Shape

Sometimes a short sentence works really well as the climax to your paragraph. Joan Didion has this great essay about marriage, specifically about the relationship between her husband and her family. This paragraph is made up of 6 sentences, and every single sentence gets a little bit shorter until finally we reach the climax of that last sentence, which is the point of the whole paragraph: “Marriage is the classic betrayal.”

The first sentence is 104 words, then 57 words, then 50 words, then 12 words, then 12 words, and that last sentence is only 5 words long. So the whole paragraph is shaped like a funnel, starting large and then funneling you down to that tiny, powerful sentence.

5. Cluster Short Sentences Together

Usually, you don’t want too many sentences of the exact same length in a row because then it’ll seem redundant. But over and over again, I see authors put 3 very short sentences in a row because it hits you like 3 quick punches.

Roberto Bolaño uses 4 short sentences in a row: 5 words, 5 words, 6 words, 4 words. And what it does is it really forces the reader to slow down and actually look at these tiny details. The sentences are very matter-of-fact, and they’re all concentrating on different colors of shoes.

Clustering is a wonderful technique to use when you wanna slow down the pace of a certain paragraph or when you really want to emphasize something. And I should also point out that the sentence before those short sentences and the sentence after are both longer.

6. Open Your Novel

It is so difficult to decide on the very first line of your book. There’s so much at stake. There are so many possibilities out there. But instead of trying to cram a ton of information into that first line, why not start with a very short sentence?

If you think about it, a ton of famous novels start with very short sentences:

• “Call me Ishmael.”
• “The old man was dreaming about the lions.”
• “Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins.”
• “All this happened, more or less.”
• “I am an invisible man.”
• “A screaming comes across the sky.”

All right, bonus points if you can name the authors or the book titles for those lines. Well, maybe a couple of them should be pretty easy, at least.

So there are at least 3 advantages to starting your book with a very short line:

1. It’s difficult to misinterpret. It’s a very clear start line — the reader’s not gonna be confused if you start with a three- or four-word sentence.
2. The reader is immediately inside your world. We immediately know there is an old man, and he is dreaming about lions. Or with the last one about screaming across the sky, we realize there’s a missile coming.
3. A short first line is easy to quote, and it’s very memorable. “Call me Ishmael” and “I am an invisible man” — they’re quoted so often.

Gabriel García Márquez said that he used to spend months trying to get that very first sentence right, but once he did, everything flowed out from there.

7. A Short Sentence Allows You to Change Your Writing Approach

David Foster Wallace has a short story I would not recommend you read — it is probably the most horrific short story I have ever read. It’s about a man accidentally spilling a pot of boiling water on his baby. Ugh.

The short story is everything the father does in the minute afterward to try to save his baby’s life. It has some very long sentences as the father is picking the baby up and putting him in the sink and running cold water all over him as the baby’s screaming and crying. The long sentences are just filled with the sounds and sights and smells and the frantic, wordy energy of the father.

But after all of that, David Foster Wallace switches to a very, very short sentence. It’s not anything about the description of the event, what’s happening in the scene — it’s much more about an abstract idea or a commentary upon the scene. Here’s the line: “If you’ve never wept and want to, have a child.”

Oh, kill me. If you have children, you know this is true. And it’s true in the big picture — yes, children will break you — but it’s also true in this particular circumstance with this father and this child.

So you might adopt this strategy if you have a short declarative sentence that comments on everything that’s happened beforehand.

If you’ve enjoyed this and wanna learn more about sentences, you might enjoy my course, How to Write a Splendid Sentence. The link is in the bio. In it, you will learn things like the 2-3-1 rule, the leaning standalone rule for sentences, and how to break free of common sentence guidelines.

Happy writing.

The post Your Sentences Aren’t Short Enough (Here’s How to Fix Them) appeared first on Bookfox.

So I’ve spent more than 15 years coaching writers and editing their books, and over the years I have slowly and methodically collected the absolute best strategies to end novels. The 9 strategies below aren’t foolproof, but one of them will probably be right for about 99% of novels. So let’s get into it.

1. The Thematic Ending

What’s your book about? Is it about injustice? Is it about the betrayals of love? Because if your entire book has been discussing a theme, then you probably wanna end on that note as well.

In The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck, the entire book’s about hunger. This is during the Great Depression and everyone’s out of a job and no one can find food and everyone’s starving. So it’s very fitting that the novel ends on a scene that shows hunger dramatically. The Joad family finds a man who is starving to death in a barn, and in order to save his life, one of the new mothers has to breastfeed him. That is an ending you will not soon forget.

So to copy this strategy: 1) figure out the main theme in your novel, and 2) figure out a scene that demonstrates that main theme.

2. The Cliffhanger

This is probably the best-known strategy of all endings. You cut off right as the action gets going, which leaves all the readers on the edge of their seat, or they’re extremely angry at you.

The main worry is whether cliffhangers leave the reader feeling cheated, whether it’s kind of extortion for them to buy your next book. And the way to solve this problem and keep your readers from getting angry is to resolve most of the plot threads that you have going, and then just keep, say, one as a cliffhanger. And I’ll also note that cliffhangers work much better for series rather than for standalone books.

At the end of Hunger Games: Catching Fire, we learn that District 12 has been firebombed and now the revolution has begun. It is a huge cliffhanger that makes every reader super eager to read that third book in the series.

Or check out this cliffhanger by Roberto Bolaño in Last Evenings on Earth. The very last line of the book is about a fight beginning. Imagine ending a book right as a fight is actually breaking out.

3. The Ambiguous Ending

Ambiguous endings offer at least 2 different interpretations of what happened, and let the reader come to their own conclusions.

Let’s take a look at the end of The Giver by Lois Lowry. At the end, does Jonas find a town and he’s saved, or is he hallucinating and about to die? And the very best ambiguous endings will convince a decent portion of your readership that it’s not ambiguous at all. Casual readers of The Giver walk away thinking, “Oh, it’s a happy ending, yay, he found a town.” Only after a second read or after thinking about it a while will those readers think, “Huh, I wonder whether he was hallucinating because of hypothermia.”

Another good example of an ambiguous ending is Life of Pi. Did Pi really survive on the open seas with a tiger for months, or, as a coping mechanism, did he substitute animals for humans and spend a lot of time with his mother and a guard on the boat? With an ambiguous ending, there is not a right answer. Readers get to embrace what version they think is right, or they get to embrace both.

4. Humor

No one hates a joke — I mean, at least if the joke is good. And if you’ve had at least some comedic elements in your novel, you might wanna end on a joke.

Think of The Princess Bride by William Goldman. The grandfather waxes on and on about the greatest kiss of all time, making the grandson squirm and get super awkward. Or at the end of Some Like It Hot, Jerry removes his wig and says, “You don’t understand, I’m a man.” And Osgood smiles and replies, “Well, no one’s perfect.” And the very last line of Coconut Cowboy ends on a joke about corn dogs, which is a little too risqué for me to repeat here.

5. The Tieback

A tieback just means that the ending refers to something previously in the book. And the further back that thing is — say, the first chapter or the second chapter — the better.

There’s a number of things this could be. The first thing is it could be an object. Think of the spinning top at the end of Inception. That top has been crucial to the whole story in helping them determine whether they’re dreaming. And it’s also an ambiguous ending because you see it spinning and you’re like, “Does it begin to wobble or doesn’t it?”

Or, a callback could be to a phrase that’s used throughout the book. The Hebrew phrase timshel means “thou mayest,” and that phrase is repeated in a heartbreaking moment at the end of East of Eden.

By referring to something that’s previously mentioned, the reader’s gonna feel like the whole book is being tied up and concluded. And comedians even use this technique when they do stand-up routines — they’ll reference a joke they made all the way at the beginning of their set in order to end the session.

6. The Skip Ahead

This type of ending often finds its happy home in epilogues. With this strategy, the author fast-forwards time and lets us see what the characters are up to 5 years, 10 years, 20 years in the future. And it’s usually removed to some degree from the main story, like the mighty warrior has retired and is farming in some quiet village. This strategy gives the author a chance to show how the main character has sort of recovered from the events of the novel and how they’ve changed.

Think about the end of Harry Potter, when J.K. Rowling shows what her wizard heroes are up to 19 years after the end of the book — who married who, who had children, et cetera.

Now, a related version to the skip ahead is the skip back. In The Road by Cormac McCarthy, which is set in this apocalyptic wasteland where everything is bleak and dead, the ending is a paragraph about beauty. It’s talking about the beauty that existed before the apocalypse — describing this beautiful trout swimming in a pure, clean stream. Unfortunately, in the world of the book, all the trout have gone extinct. So the book ends on this bittersweet note of remembering the beauty that used to exist in this world.

7. The Happy-Sad Ending

You might have seen the greatest baseball movie of all time, The Natural. It’s about a man whose baseball career was cut short by a terrible tragedy, and then he tries to pick it up later in his 40s and try out for a professional baseball team. It’s based on a book by Bernard Malamud, but then Hollywood made a movie, and what’s interesting is that the endings are completely different.

In the movie, in typical Hollywood fashion, it’s a happy ending — he hits a home run and all of his wildest dreams come true. In the book, though, he strikes out and he’s absolutely crushed. I spoke to a person who watched the movie first, and he was so demoralized when he read the book.

That’s ’cause happy endings are an easy hit. If you write a depressing ending, you’re gonna get some flak from readers, but it still might be the right choice for your book. Sometimes stories end in tragedy. There’s nothing wrong with that.

But if the happy ending is too cheesy for you and the sad ending makes you think, “I think I’m gonna alienate my readers,” I would go for a middle route: the bittersweet ending. To pull this off, simply end one of your storylines on a happy note and one of your storylines on a sad note. For instance, the hero loses the big promotion, but ends up finding love. I feel like bittersweet endings capture all of the emotional notes that readers are looking for in an ending, and they never come off as unrealistic or cheesy.

8. Description

When you end a story, you are trying to help the reader transition from the fictional world back into the real world. Sometimes that transition is easier if the last lines of the story don’t have to do with the characters or the plot or the themes, but instead a description of the natural world.

To pull this off, try to describe something in your story that resonates with the main themes of your book. If your book is about father-son relationships, then end your book with your main character watching a father and son walk in a park. If you have a character who sacrificed absolutely everything in the hopes of a big payday, then show that same idea in the animal world — for instance, pelicans dive bombing for fish, like in this Taylor Antrim example:

Boom splash. The pelicans take these kamikaze plunges into the water. The way they hit, not one should survive, but of course they all do. They come up with their beaks full of fish.

The reader’s smart enough to know that the author’s not really talking about pelicans, right? They’re trying to talk about what the humans have done in that story. It’s just this nice resonance and metaphorical connection that ends the story strongly.

9. End on Dialogue

A powerful short line of dialogue might be just the right way to close out your book.

The Count of Monte Cristo ends on a positive line of dialogue — Alexandre Dumas closes the book with Valentine reminding us that all human wisdom is contained in two words: wait and hope. That ends on such a positive note. This is a book about unjust imprisonment for years and years and years, and plotting revenge, and so “wait and hope” is such a positive vision of what he’s gone through.

Hopefully, you can pick one of these strategies for ending your book. My recommendation is to try writing, say, 3 different endings — think of 2 of them as director’s cut endings — and then give them to a friend who has read the book and ask them, out of these 3 endings, which one’s your favorite?

Good luck with writing your ending.

The post These 9 Strategies to End Your Novel Are Game Changers appeared first on Bookfox.

I spent nearly 4 months scouring Publisher’s Marketplace looking for all the books that had just sold. Most of these books won’t be published until 2025. Some won’t even be published till 2026. In the end, I read more than 1,000 book descriptions. It was truly eye-opening, and it forever changed the way that I think about book concepts and marketability and how to get a book published.

I wanna pass on 6 super helpful tips for writers that I learned during this process because I think it will massively help you in your writing career.

1. Brand Yourself

The author is usually the first thing listed in the Publisher’s Marketplace. That’s because agents and publishers wanna know who this author is and why they deserve to have a book published. What that means is you need to work on making yourself sound like a somebody rather than a nobody.

So here are some common ways that authors were pitched as being the type of person who deserves to have a book out:

1. Author of a previous book. Obviously, this doesn’t help you if you haven’t written one yet, but once you do have a book out, it really helps to stand on that platform.
2. Expertise in another field. Podcaster, YouTuber, standup comedian, environmentalist, TikToker, historian, chef, singer. Any experience that you have in a different field ends up making you seem like the type of person who has the expertise to publish a book.
3. Any award or residency that you’ve had. These are often used as justification for, hey, this person deserves to publish a book.
4. Attended an MFA program. If you have, you can list that.

Now, if you don’t have any marketable identity, that’s fine. You’ll just go into the debut authors category, and people don’t expect debut authors to have a long track record, so it’s perfectly fine.

2. Perfect Your Pitch

I cannot emphasize enough that this is the most important thing for your book. The pitch is the most important way to get an agent, the most important way to get a publisher, and the most important way to get readers. If you cannot make me want to read your book in a single sentence, then either you’ve written a bad book or you don’t know how to pitch.

My advice would be to take your pitch and to practice it on dozens of strangers and friends, and pay very close attention to their reaction. Do their eyes light up? Are they like, “Oh, I really wanna read that,” or do they politely say, “Oh, that’s interesting”? Wah-wah. You wanna practice that pitch again and again and again until you get it to the point where every single person is giving you positive feedback.

Here’s the basic formula for a pitch: premise plus promise of conflict.

For an example, let’s look at The Three Lives of Kate Kane. Here’s the premise: an elusive mega bestselling author has kept her real identity a closely guarded secret. And now here’s the promise of conflict: until she receives a letter that upends everything she thought she knew about her past. This is wonderful. We have mega fame, we have secrets, and we also have an inciting incident — a mysterious letter that arrives and destroys her life as she knows it.

For a second example, let’s look at The Last Gladiatrix (and yes, gladiatrix is like a female gladiator). Here’s the premise: a female warrior is taken captive by the Roman Empire and sold to a gladiator school in Rome. Okay, I’m interested. We got a strong female lead, we have an interesting historical event. And here’s the promise of conflict: with a band of warrior rebels and a monk, she must perform mortal combat in the arena that brings an end to Rome’s gladiator games. So here we have the promise of violence, here we have some supporting characters, and we get to see what’s the end result of this — she ends up succeeding and changing gladiatorial combat in Rome.

Look, you can write the most perfect book in the world, but it’s not gonna get published if you can’t pitch it well. Just try 50 variations of your pitch until you finally get one that has the desired effect on your listeners.

3. Add a Mashup

A ton of books listed in Publisher’s Marketplace, and usually the ones that had the biggest advances, ended up comparing their book to other media. So here are the 4 most common ways that I noticed authors were comparing their books:

1. TV shows. Parks and Recreation meets Only Murders in the Building. I think this works really well for commercial fiction. It might not work so well for literary fiction.
2. Compare to other authors. “For fans of Fredrik Backman and Matt Haig.” This works really well because if the agent or the reader knows one of those authors and likes one of those authors, they’re immediately interested in your book.
3. Characters. “What if Jack Reacher had a baby with Johnny Rotten?” There’s a little bad boy element there. There’s a little bit of promise of violence. I mean, that book sounds fun.
4. Famous references. “A contemporary retelling of Korea’s Romeo and Juliet.” Immediately gives you a sense that this is romance, and there’s gonna be star-crossed lovers.

And a mashup like this — it doesn’t even matter if it doesn’t get into the Publisher’s Marketplace listing. If you list it on the back of the book, it’s going to help readers get interested in the book.

But my recommendation is to be as specific as possible and don’t choose books that are too popular. “Harry Potter meets Divergent” is probably something that agents sort of have heard a thousand times, and they’re gonna roll their eyes. You’re trying to find a new mashup that feels fresh and original.

4. Highlight the Tie-In

In the thousand books that I looked at, more than 100 of them rode to publication on the coattails of other famous people or events. Think about it — it’s really smart to link your book to something that the publisher or the agent or the reader already knows. More readers are gonna buy your book because they feel like they already have knowledge about that person or event.

Here are 5 good ways to do it:

1. A famous historical person. If you link your book to Thomas Edison or Augustine or Houdini, it’s gonna be easier to sell, and you don’t have to have them as a major character. You might have them as a minor character, and then their spouse is narrating the story.
2. A connection to a historical event. Set in the days before Krakatoa exploded, during the Qin dynasty in China, or during the 1992 LA riots.
3. Holidays. Christmas, Easter, Thanksgiving, Ramadan, Hanukkah. It gives this emotional touchpoint for the reader or the agent to sort of latch onto your book.
4. Sporting events. World Cup, a championship cricket match, Grand Slam in tennis, or you could go super rare and dorky, like bowling or darts.
5. Popular stories. For instance, if you’re reinterpreting a famous myth like Madeline Miller’s Circe (which is excellent, by the way), or if you’re retelling a well-known story from a different perspective.

A quick quiz

Okay, so now it’s time for a quiz. I’m gonna give you 3 pitches for actual romance books. One of them is a book that actually sold, 2 of them are real pitches on Twitter that, to my knowledge, I don’t think they sold. Your goal is to guess which one is the winning pitch.

1. Zaire is secretly in love with his sister’s best friend, and now there are 2 of them locked up on a train while the winter storm is raging outside.
2. A professional rower has a single summer to win back her spot on the national team, but her new coach’s unusual training strategies, and their growing attraction, threaten to derail her Olympic dreams.
3. Ahiga’s story is just the beginning. When war rages through centuries of magic born and gods, only the blessed will survive, and they will need the damned to save them.

Got your answer?

If you guessed number 2, you’re correct. We were just talking about tie-ins, right? And that has a very clear tie-in to the Olympic Games. That famous event made it so much easier to sell that book to agents and to publishers. The first one has a train and the third one has magic and gods, but it’s not clear to me what those books are about.

What the middle one does so well is it presents the 2 areas of conflict: 1) there’s a problematic romance — she’s in love with her coach, and 2) there’s an unusual training strategy, which is a bit mysterious. It’s also key that that middle one is a single sentence. If you can’t get your pitch into a single sentence, keep on working on it.

5. Go High Concept

When I was reading those 1,000 book descriptions, there were an awful lot of them that sort of made me stand up and be like, “I want to read that.” They were crazy, they were wild, they were memorable. In the film world, this sort of story is called a high concept film. It’s a big, ambitious concept that you can hang all these minor stories on, and it’s immediately memorable.

We’re gonna look at 3 examples and we’re gonna take them apart piece by piece so we can figure out how they wrote a pitch that was so mesmerizing.

1. Kelsea Cox’s Party of Liars, centered around a lavish sweet 16 party thrown deep in the Texas Hill Country at a mysterious estate where everyone is invited in, but not everyone will get out alive. For starters, there’s a great tie-in — sweet 16 birthday party. That is an event. Then we also have wealth — it’s a lavish party. We have a mysterious estate, which makes us wonder what’s going on there. And the stakes are super high — people are gonna die.

2. Meg Serena’s Annapurna, in which a woman returns to mountainous Nepal 20 years after her best friend fell to her death there on a post-college trek, both to honor her friend’s memory and confront long-buried secrets and the mysterious circumstances of the death. What makes this high concept? 1) It’s adventurous — we have traveling to Nepal, that’s exciting. 2) We have a mysterious death of her best friend, and there’s 2 very key words in this pitch: it’s secret and mysterious, both very loaded terms.

3. Isabel J. Kim’s debut Sublimation, a literary speculative thriller set in a version of our world where instancing splits a person into 2 distinct copies when they cross a country’s border — one who moves and one who remains. This is tapping into a very trendy, popular theme talking about immigration, and it’s such a magical, otherworldly concept of people splitting: one who stays in the original country and one who goes on to this new life in the new country.

Even though we’ve only been talking about it for 10 or 15 seconds, I would wager that you would remember this probably for years. High concept ideas have a way of worming themselves into your brain.

It would be a fantastic idea for you to read hundreds of books’ descriptions so you can train your author instincts. You want to be able to tell when you hear an idea: is it a high concept idea, or is it a sort of forgettable idea? And if you train your instincts like that, you will be better at writing a pitch for your own book.

6. Find the Trends

If you read the amount of book summaries that I did, which was a lot, you start to see certain themes pop up again and again. Now, if you describe your book using one of these keywords or buzzwords, I think it has an easier chance for the agent to say, “All right, this is trending, I think I’m gonna have an easier time selling this to publishers.”

So here are 5 buzzworthy topics that I noticed:

1. Trans or queer — currently anything to do with this is extremely popular. Your book has an automatic edge.
2. Artificial intelligence — pretty hot right now, as you can imagine. It used to be AI was just for sci-fi, but, you know, ChatGPT is in all of our lives now.
3. Climate fiction — hot, hot, hot right now, pun intended. Anything environmental or climate related has a fantastic chance. There’s even a genre called cli-fi, which refers to climate fiction.
4. Foreign settings, immigration, or minority communities — books about these are reliably popular.
5. Race or racism — anything to do with this has an edge. There was a ton of “me too” books sold a couple years ago, but I find that trend has really ebbed away.

Now, it’s usually a bad idea to try to follow a trend, because by the time that you’re done writing the book, the trend could be finished. But sometimes you just need to unearth what’s already inside your book so you can frame it in a way that makes it easier for the agent to sell.

Okay, so now I need to take a break from Publisher’s Marketplace because my eyes are glazing over and I’ve just gone through too many book descriptions. Still, if you want to get a subscription for $25 a month, it’s well worth it to get an education in what’s currently selling.

And of course, none of this actually works if your writing isn’t actually good. A good concept and a good pitch is necessary, but it’s not enough to get you over the victory line of publication. But if you have a good book, then it is worth your time getting a good pitch and a tie-in and comparisons to help you land a contract with the Big 5.

Good luck.

The post I Read 1,000 Book Concepts to Help You Create the Perfect One appeared first on Bookfox.

So last year I edited 51 novels. Yes, I was a busy guy. But after going through that experience, I came away with these 9 insights that I think every writer should know. These are insights which will help your writing career, they’ll help you write your novel, and they’ll just help you feel happier about yourself as a writer. Ultimately, by reading this, you’ll be set up to write a better novel.

1. What Writers Think Is Wrong With Their Book Is Often Not What’s Wrong With Their Book

When writers come to me and they say, “Oh, I really want you to pay attention to X, Y, Z,” I usually know that those parts aren’t gonna be a problem. The writer was so concentrated on those things that they gave a lot of attention to it, and they ended up doing it very, very well in their book.

Usually, the biggest problems in their book were things that weren’t even on their radar, and I have to be like, “This needs revision.” On the other hand, I at least got to tell them, like, “Hey, that stuff you were really worried about? You were fantastic with that.”

2. Writers Often Underestimate Their Skills

I always spend the beginning of each feedback essay talking about what the author did well. And usually, the first thing they write back to me is, “Oh, thank you so much for that praise. That was so reassuring.” And I’m like, “I was just being honest.” And they’re always so surprised, as if they weren’t aware of their own awesomeness.

But look, as a writer, you need to be just as knowledgeable about your strengths as you are about your weaknesses. And let’s be honest, writing can be a soul-crushing business, so of course when writers come to me, I want to tell them all the things that they’re doing really, really well, all the things that they’re talented in, all the things that their book is succeeding in.

3. Writers Underestimate the Amount of Revision Required

Look, I know this can be a huge downer, and I don’t mean to be a Sad Sally all over you. But by the time you get your work to an editor, you might only be halfway or two-thirds through the process of writing your novel.

I know, I know, you wanna reach through the camera and punch me right now. But if I can prepare you now for the knowledge that there’s gonna be a lot of revision you have to do, then you’re gonna be psychologically prepared and be more willing to hear the feedback, and be more willing to do the work of revision.

4. The Dirty Secret About POV

POV is just point of view. When writers come to me, they’re often worried about whether their plot makes sense, or whether a particular character is cliché, or whether the ending works. And yeah, those are all normal things, and those are all things that I can address in feedback.

But almost never does an author come to me and be like, “Hmm, I don’t know whether this point of view is working.” Honestly, I kind of wish they would come to me with those type of concerns. But sometimes I say, “You know, in certain sections you veer more into omniscient, and other times you’re more limited third.” Other times I say, “You know, in two chapters you go into this other person’s point of view, and I don’t think it’s working. I think you should stay with the main point of view.”

Now, the second most common piece of advice I give about point of view is POV switching. When you’re in roving omniscient POV — meaning you’re writing one chapter from this particular character’s view, and then the next chapter from another character’s point of view, and the third chapter from a third character’s point of view — what I find is writers often need help knowing when to switch and how to switch. And they often need to know how often to switch as well, ’cause sometimes they’re switching too frequently, sometimes they’re not switching enough.

5. Writers Take Criticism Incredibly Well

I don’t know whether you were expecting me to say the opposite. I know that I’ve feared over the years many times when I give feedback that, oh, they’re gonna hate my guts. But I don’t think that’s pretty much ever the case.

And maybe I’m just working with really fantastically talented authors. But in general, I’d say they are humble, they listen to feedback really well, and most of the time they’re pretty excited to do the revisions. Now, I am trying to give suggestions that flow with their vision of the book — I don’t want to impose my vision of the book onto them. So ultimately, I want them to create a book that they’re happy with and that they can stand behind.

6. Writers Tend to Be Wildly Optimistic

Now, I don’t mean to say that that’s a bad thing. I mean, a certain dose of optimism is very healthy. Clearly, you want good and happy things to happen to this book that you are pouring your heart into.

But sometimes I doubt whether that optimism should always be directed towards having your book become a movie or become the next international bestseller. It’s not a question of talent. I edited so many books this year that I absolutely loved, and I have excellent taste, of course. I mean, but really I do. Look, the vast majority of novels sell between 200 and 2,000 copies. And I think most writers should be happy with that kind of range. Now, if the stars align and you happen to sell a million copies, then hey, bust out the drinks and celebrate, and I will toast you to the end of time.

I think it’s just important to remember when authors say to me, “Hey, I want you to edit this book so it becomes a blockbuster movie,” and I’m like, “I think you’re just gonna be disappointed, to be honest.” It’s really important to remember that your book can be a wild success in non-traditional ways. Maybe success should be measured not in terms of, oh, I got a big advance, or oh, I sold a million copies, but if someone emails you and says, “Hey, I read this book to my dying grandmother, and it was the last thing she heard before she passed, and thank you so much. It was so inspiring.” You are a success, my friend. You have won the lottery.

What I mean to say is that writers just need to be more open to measuring their success in unorthodox ways.

7. The Idea Is Never as Important as the Execution

So out of the 51 books that I edited this year, a good percentage of them, when they described what the book was about, I thought, “Oh, that sounds interesting, I am going to enjoy reading this.” And some of the ones that had great pitches ended up just being okay and needed a lot of revision.

But the execution of your concept is 95% of a book — how the scenes were structured, how the details were chosen, how the characters were drawn. A lot of authors, and a lot of would-be authors, have excellent concepts for a book. The trick is to be able to execute those ideas in a way that’s good fiction writing.

That’s also why a lot of unpublished authors are way too worried that an agent or publisher is gonna steal their idea. The ideas aren’t worth much. It’s the actual execution which is worth something, and that’s the part you can copyright, not the idea.

8. Structure Is the Hardest Thing to Nail

Out of those 51 books, a lot of them had wonderful line-by-line writing. My jaw was dropping. I was so impressed sentence to sentence to sentence with how the writing was progressing.

But for every single novel that I edited, there was always some large-scale structural thing that needed to be tweaked or changed in some way. A chapter that needed to be shifted to a different place in the novel, or a chapter that needed to be deleted entirely, or a chapter that needed to be written. Sometimes their ending needed to be expanded or needed to be condensed. Sometimes it floundered in the middle, and I had to say, “I think you should do this instead of that.”

That’s because for writers, structure is the most difficult thing to see neutrally. You’ve built this lovely beautiful thing, and it’s so hard for you to get enough distance that you can see it through disinterested eyes. And really, that’s the place where you have to trust an outside reader, like a developmental editor, to give you feedback on it.

What that means is writers are often very good judges when it comes to the micro: whether a paragraph is working, or whether a sentence is working, or whether a couple lines of dialogue are working. They just struggle to have an eagle-eye view of how everything’s fitting together and what should be added and taken away.

9. There Are So Many Talented Writers Out There

I am constantly amazed at just how talented and how smart and how wonderful writers are. I have laughed at books, I have cried at books, I have been floored by the sheer imagination of authors.

And if you’re a writer, don’t be intimidated by the number of other writers out there. Yes, you’re competing with thousands of other people who are writing in the same genre as you. But you have a unique story. You have a story that only you can tell.

I’m incredibly grateful to work with so many talented authors, and I can’t wait for their stories to find audiences and readers in the world.

The post I Edited 51 Novels Last Year. These Are 9 Things Every Writer Should Know. appeared first on Bookfox.

Let’s talk about plot.

Plot? What’s plot?

You know. It’s the way a story moves from beginning to end.

And you think that is going to help writers?

Yeah.

I mean, everybody talks about plot.

Sure they do.

They do.

But is it the most helpful way to talk about a story?

I think so. What, you got a better one?

What about story shapes?

What in tarnation is a story shape?

Oh, my dear, dear friend.

If this is about triangles and rectangles and tomfoolery like that, I leave that to the 5-year-olds.

Do 5-year-olds write the best-selling novel of their generation? Do 5-year-olds write screenplays that make you weep? Do 5-year-olds write graphic novels that you read until the binding wears out?

Not my 5-year-old.

I’ve got 5 story structures to help you structure your novel, and you won’t wanna miss a single one.

1. The Freytag Pyramid

Have you heard of the Freytag Pyramid?

Everyone’s heard of that.

Remind me what that is.

It’s a 5-part structure: exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, and denouement.

You mean the de-now-ment?

It’s French. You only pronounce a third of the letters.

Sounds like a perfume brand.

You’re not wrong.

It simply means the resolution of the story. So the Freytag Pyramid looks weird. Must be super rare, right?

Oh, yes, super rare. The only ones who use it are ones you’ve never heard of: Frankenstein, The Great Gatsby, Romeo and Juliet.

But how’s it work?

In the exposition section, the Montagues and Capulets are feuding, and Romeo and Juliet are slated to marry other people. Then the action rises when Romeo falls in love with Juliet, and then they marry in secret. The climax, or turning point of the story, is when Tybalt kills Mercutio and Romeo kills Tybalt. Then the action falls toward the ending, with Romeo killing himself because he thinks Juliet is dead, and Juliet killing herself because Romeo is dead. The resolution, or denouement as the French would say, is that the two grieving families end their feud.

That seems easy, but I feel like I would screw it up.

You probably would. I mean—

Let me give you 3 tips to help you out.

1. Don’t take too long on the exposition. You want to get to the inciting incident, which happens just before the rising action, as quickly as possible.
2. The climax happens in the middle, not the end. For Freytag, the climax is the turning point after which you can’t go back.
3. This story shape works best with tragedies. If you’re writing a happy ending, you might wanna choose a different shape.

What are you doing on the roof?

It’s a common position of teaching, lecturing the thousands who yearn to hear my instruction.

It’s just me.

Look, do you want to learn the second shape or not?

2. The 7-Point Plot Structure

The second shape is the 7-Point Plot Structure. It’s simpler than some of the other ones we’ll discuss, but it works fantastically.

I love the snake shape. Can we call this one the snake?

No.

Please?

Hard pass. More undulation than serpentine anyhow.

Hmm?

A good story to understand the 7-Point Plot Structure is Star Wars IV: A New Hope.

You start with a hook. This is the premise of the story — Luke Skywalker works on his uncle and aunt’s moisture farm on Tatooine.

Here is plot 0.1. Luke chases after R2-D2, meets Obi-Wan Kenobi, and hears Princess Leia’s distress call.

And here is the first pinch. Luke doesn’t want to help Obi-Wan, but then Imperial soldiers slaughter his family.

At the midpoint of this story, he teams up with Han Solo to rescue Princess Leia.

The second pinch is key. Darth Vader kills Obi-Wan, Luke’s mentor, which is devastating.

And in the second plot turn, which is the climax, Luke attacks the Death Star and destroys it, just like bullseyeing womp rats back home.

The resolution is the medal ceremony, and it’s a happy ending.

What’s the difference between a pinch and a plot point?

Great question. Pinch points are outside events that force your character to take action. Plot points are actions that your character takes.

I think I got this.

I appreciate your confidence, but here are 2 very common mistakes:

1. Forgetting character arcs. These are just as important as plot arcs. For instance, Han Solo is a rogue and an anti-hero, but he proves he’s a decent guy by coming back at the last second to save Luke.
2. Missing the subplot. Don’t forget to include a subplot in your story. Luke’s journey to learn the Force is one of the strongest subplots in Star Wars.

This is all amazing stuff.

Oh, I know. Let’s move on to the third story shape, the Snowflake.

3. The Snowflake

Oh.

The advantage of the Snowflake is that it’s the most natural and organic way of structuring a book.

You start by writing a single-sentence pitch that captures the story in a nutshell.

Ooh, I’ll try. When a young orphan discovers he’s a wizard, he’s whisked away to a magical school.

I think that’s been written.

Next, you expand the sentence into a full paragraph. It’s a good idea to have it be 4 parts: 3 disasters and an ending.

Next, write a paragraph answering these questions for your major characters:

1. What does this character want, and why?
2. What stops this character from getting what they want?
3. How does this character change by the end?

But where does the plotting happen?

Character journeys are plots. But to make it feel more plot-centric for you, take that paragraph and expand it into a full page. Include all the obstacles in your hero’s way, and include the ending. And once you’re done, you have an outline for your book.

I think I was close.

You sure were.

4. The Story Embryo

The 4th story shape is the Story Embryo.

Why are you in a hammock?

It’s embryonic, like I’m in a womb. Get it?

For the Plot Embryo, you start at You and you progress clockwise around the circle. For this example, let’s use Harry Potter.

I’ve heard of him.

1. You. Harry is an orphan living in a world of Muggles.
2. Want. He learns he’s a wizard and wants to be trained.
3. Go. He goes to Hogwarts.
4. Search. He adapts by learning magic, makes friends, finds a mentor.
5. Find. He joins the Quidditch team and finds success.
6. Take. He comes face to face with Voldemort.
7. Return. He returns to the Muggle world.
8. Change. Harry’s now confident knowing his wizard powers.

This is my favorite so far. I think I’m gonna use it.

You like it because you’re a Potterhead.

5. Save the Cat

Now it’s time for the fifth and final story shape. This one is called Save the Cat.

It looks like a rollercoaster.

To the untrained eye, yes.

And why is it called Save the Cat?

That refers to a good act that the hero does at the beginning of the story. The hero could give money to the homeless, help an old woman cross the street, or save a cat.

Mm, I’m more of a dog person.

In that case, I guess we’ll skip this one.

No, wait. I’m interested.

Hmm. I thought so. And you won’t regret it. This is the most detailed story shape we’ve covered so far, with over 15 separate parts. Now, Save the Cat was originally written for screenwriters, but it works just as well for novelists. And the story example we’re going to use for this one is The Matrix.

1. The opening image. This is a cursor blinking on the screen, a symbol that reality is controlled by computers.
2. Set up. We see Trinity bending the rules of physics and agents chasing after her.
3. Theme stated. Neo is told he looks tired and needs to unplug. The whole movie is about plugging in or unplugging.
4. Catalyst. This is also known as the inciting incident, and this is when Trinity tells Neo that he’s in danger.
5. Debate. This is when the hero doubts whether he should go on this journey. This is when agents come to Neo’s building, but he doesn’t take Morpheus’s advice to escape.
6. Break into 2. This is when your hero chooses to go on the journey. Neo chooses the red pill instead of the blue pill.
7. B story. A subplot is essential. The subplot in The Matrix is about Trinity and Neo’s love story.
8. Fun and games. Stories should be fun. Here, we see Neo training in martial arts and jumping off skyscrapers.
9. The midpoint. This is when Neo goes to the Oracle to see if he’s the One.
10. Bad guys close in. The team is betrayed by Cypher, and agents capture Morpheus.
11. All is lost. Morpheus is being tortured by agents to reveal the location of Zion.
12. Dark night of the soul. Neo and Trinity realize they have to kill Morpheus.
13. Break into 3. Neo instead decides to save Morpheus, which seems impossible.
14. Finale. Neo takes on the agents and wins.
15. Final image. Neo flies like Superman.

Won’t my story seem formulaic if I shove them into this shape?

You would think that, but they won’t. Save the Cat is a little bit prescriptive, but it will give you an excellent outline for your story.

I just have one final question. Will I write better if I get a pipe, glasses, and a newsies cap?

Obviously.

The post 5 Story Shapes That Will Change Your Book Forever appeared first on Bookfox.

Writers, do you wanna be a rule follower? A nice little meek writer who follows all the commandments out there on social media?

I hope you’re a bit of a rebel and wanna write some stories that break rules. If so, keep reading and I’m gonna tell you exactly how to do it. Plus, if you’ve broken one of these rules, make sure to comment below on which one.

1. Characters Must Change

This rule is so important that it’s at the heart of the hero’s journey, which shows the transformation of a hero changing from zero to hero. And every writing guru out there pounds this idea into our heads. Characters must change by the end. Without a character arc, do you even have a story? Or so we’re told.

Yet with episodic fiction, sometimes we see characters who are exactly the same at the beginning as they are at the end. Take, for example, Lee Child’s Jack Reacher. In all 28 books, he is exactly the same character: loyal, honorable, stoic, laconic — I mean, the man barely talks. Independent drifter who owns nothing but a toothbrush, and violent. Oh, did I mention violent? Violent.

But notice that these are episodic stories told in series. That is usually the storytelling form that allows for a lack of change. So in general, most characters should change. It’s a rule for a reason. But if each story starts over and doesn’t build on the previous ones, then you can have a static character.

2. The Main Character Should Solve the Problem

This honestly seems like the most foundational writing rule of all time. If the main character doesn’t solve the problem, are they even the main character? Do you even have a story?

Well, look at War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells. Specifically, look at the ending where aliens are defeated. Normally, we would assume that the human protagonist defeated them in some way. That would be the most emotionally fulfilling storyline, the one that readers would expect. But nope — all the aliens get sick from Earth germs and they die.

This is a perfect deus ex machina ending, which means “God from machine.” Basically, in old plays, God used to come down into the set and resolve all the issues. But that’s not a very satisfying ending. So basically, people fought aliens for the entire book, but nothing they did made any difference, and then the aliens died not as a result of humans doing anything at all.

So how does this still work? Because it’s one of the most famous books of all time. It’s been made into multiple movies. So the book is basically saying: well, we can’t fight a superior alien race, we would lose for sure. And yet H.G. Wells didn’t want the aliens to win, so he broke the storytelling rules to allow the humans to win.

3. The Protagonist Should Be Active

This seems pretty common sense, don’t you think? I mean, if you have a protagonist who isn’t doing much of anything, it’s not a very exciting story.

But Donna Tartt breaks this rule. In her novel The Goldfinch, there’s a pretty good chunk of the book where the main character’s not really doing anything at all. He’s sitting in a hotel room being very passive, isolating. It’s kind of boring. His friend Boris solves the main problem — Boris is the one who goes out and actually gets the Goldfinch painting back, and it happens off-screen, so we don’t even get to see his friend getting the painting back. We hear about it later, third-hand, through Boris telling him.

This truly breaks all the storytelling rules about making your main character active. I think it works though because of this character’s personality. They are extremely indecisive, and they’re also kind of depressed. If the protagonist had switched into, like, action hero mode and gone out and rescued the painting, that would’ve been very out of character. Plus, it’s also a decision by the author not to neatly tie up the ending.

4. Your Protagonist Should Be Likable

I hear this tired rule trotted out all the time by workshop leaders and by authors online who think they know more than they do. But in their defense, does it make it easier when readers like your main character? Well, yes. Yes, it does. You’ll probably sell more copies.

But is it possible to write a great book where the main character is unlikable? Absolutely. The examples are almost too many to count, but I’ll just name a few:

• Ignatius J. Reilly in A Confederacy of Dunces is one of the most unlikable characters of all time, but I can’t stop enjoying that book.
• Amy Dunne in Gone Girl — ugh, she was horrifying.
• Humbert Humbert in Lolita — sexually abusing minors is not exactly heroic material.
• Alex DeLarge in A Clockwork Orange, who’s committing ultraviolence against innocent people, but the book is still a really good read.

If you choose to break this rule, then your goal is to make your character fascinating, not likable. Readers keep reading fascinating characters. A morally repugnant yet fascinating character will keep your reader’s attention.

5. Your Character Should Have Flaws

Every character has to have flaws, right? If your character is flawless, then they seem fake and unrealistic, and readers aren’t gonna believe that they’re an actual person. There’s even a term for this — if your flawless character is female, they are called a Mary Sue (not to be confused with Mary Jane).

But even this rule has been broken. There are some flawless characters out there, and they actually work. Take, for example, Prince Myshkin in Dostoevsky’s The Idiot. The prince is genuinely flawless. There is nothing wrong with that man. He is the nicest person ever. Really, the only thing wrong with him is a medical condition — the man has epilepsy, but certainly no character flaws.

And yet Dostoevsky makes the story work by having everyone hate him. See, if you have a perfect character, you still have to create conflict, so just have all your other characters resent this character’s superiority, and voila, you have a story.

6. Don’t Head-Hop

This is basically a point-of-view mistake. Even when you’re writing omniscient, you’re not supposed to tell the reader about the thoughts of one character and then jump into another character’s thoughts. That’s because hopping between heads ends up confusing the reader.

And yet, I do see this rule broken sometimes, particularly in genre books. Consider Philip K. Dick’s sci-fi novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, which was made into the movie Blade Runner. Philip K. Dick isn’t obnoxious about it — he just tells us what the main character’s thinking and then what his wife is thinking, and then jumps back and forth.

If you want to break this rule, I’ll tell you one thing: I almost never see head-hopping between a whole group of people. When this rule is broken, it’s usually just two characters in a scene, and you momentarily drop into a second character’s brain. So the goal is to stay mainly in one character’s brain and then briefly dip into another character’s thoughts.

Still, I gotta say, out of all the rules on this list, this is actually the one that I refuse to break. I’ll consider breaking all the other ones, but this one’s actually sacred to me. Still, you make your own decision.

7. Show, Don’t Tell

Come on, you kinda knew I was gonna cover this one, didn’t you? This rule could also be phrased as create scenes, not summary. In general, it’s a good rule to show the reader what is actually happening and not tell them about a vast swath of time.

But out of all the rules on this list, this is the one that’s been broken most often and by most of the greatest writers who have ever lived. Certainly, South American writers break this rule all the time. The first one that sprang to my mind was Roberto Bolaño’s 2666. The man summarizes wildly — entire dinner conversations in a paragraph, months of time in a single page. He tells you constantly rather than showing you.

Another good example would be the four-book Neapolitan series by Elena Ferrante. She lets you hear the ticker tape of her characters’ thoughts and summarizes these grand swaths of time rather than immersing you in set scenes with definite beginnings and ends.

And when you break this rule frequently, your book stops feeling like a movie and starts to feel like something only a book can do. It gives you more access to the characters’ inner sanctum of thoughts and fears. So there are a lot of really good reasons to break this rule, and if you only wanna break one rule on this list, this is it.

8. Don’t Switch Points of View

It is widely considered a mistake to switch points of view in the middle of your story, especially from something like first person to third person. It’s disorienting for the reader because one minute they’re being told about these characters, and the next minute we’re hearing directly from the characters themselves.

But check out Barbara Kingsolver’s The Bean Trees. You might have heard of her more famous books, The Poisonwood Bible and Demon Copperhead. But in The Bean Trees, the first chapter’s in first person, and then the next chapter’s in third. They keep alternating like that throughout the book.

So to break this rule well, you really need a chapter break. As long as you can create a chapter break, then you can alternate between first and third, and it will be less confusing. Also, another piece of advice is making sure you have different characters for first person and for third person — it’s much rarer to find this rule broken when you have the same character speaking in both first person and third person.

Honestly, at the heart of a lot of these rules is the golden rule: don’t confuse the reader. So as long as the reader understands what you’re doing, they will come along for the ride.

9. Don’t Have Too Many Characters

Confession time: I have told a lot of writers to follow this rule, and it’s usually because I’ve edited a lot of novels where I say, “This would be a better book if you took out such-and-such a character.” And here’s why I give this advice so often. Fewer characters make your book into an easier read because readers will simply find it less challenging to understand. It won’t confuse your readers because it’ll be less likely that they forget who is who, and it will make the story more cohesive because you’ll have fewer plot lines jiggling all around.

I know, I sound like I’m trying to get you to follow this rule, but let’s look at someone who breaks this rule in fantastic fashion. George R.R. Martin is sitting over there giving me the stink eye. In Game of Thrones, good old George doesn’t seem to hold back from naming almost every single person that seemingly is alive in his universe.

So what are the advantages of breaking this rule and having characters galore in your novel? Well, having a gazillion characters does make the world feel real and populated. It also gives you tons of opportunity to explore complex family and group relationships, and you have the opportunity to build all these characters across a lengthy series.

So populate your world as much as you want to. Just be wary of the downsides: it can be harder to end that storyline, it’s harder to maintain control over all those storylines, and it can be harder to win over the readers.

All right. Happy rule-breaking, and please subscribe.

The post 9 Authors Who Break the Storytelling Rules appeared first on Bookfox.

You can’t have a story without an antagonist. You could, it just would be really boring.

My goal in this post is to radically expand your vision of what an antagonist can be. In my work as an editor, I’ve found that writers tend to get into these ruts and keep on writing the same exact type of antagonist. But by the end of this post, you’ll be equipped with a whole range of antagonists that you can draw on and deploy in your novel.

1. The Ally Antagonist

An ally antagonist is a friend who becomes the antagonist. Honestly, this is one of my favorite types of antagonist because you get three things:

1. Fantastic character change — because we get to see a friend transform into an enemy.
2. The surprise of a major character reveal — there’s gonna be fireworks when the protagonist learns of this betrayal from a former friend.
3. A strong emotional reaction from the reader — because they’re shocked by the betrayal.

Look at The Social Network, which examines the way that Mark Zuckerberg and Eduardo Saverin start off as friends and business partners, and then we see Zuckerberg use lawyers to cheat Saverin out of all of his shares in the company.

A popular version of the ally antagonist is when a trusted mentor turns into the antagonist. For example, look at the Star Wars prequels, where we see Chancellor Palpatine turn from a respected leader into the main antagonist. Or in a romance, it’s when the best friend ends up cheating and sleeping with the love interest.

2. The Inner Saboteur

You don’t have to have external antagonists. You can make the protagonist into a self-saboteur.

In the movie Good Will Hunting, Will Hunting is his own worst enemy. He is a bonafide math genius, but he refuses to use his gifts. He could win a Nobel, but he’s stopped by his identity issues and abandonment fears. For example, instead of going to interviews with really prestigious companies, he sends his friend instead, Chuckie, who is played by Ben Affleck, and who just screws with the interviewers. At every step along the way, Will is self-sabotaging, and he can’t help it.

But if you’re gonna do this in your own book, I will tell you to watch out. It’s rare to find a book where the only antagonist is an inner saboteur. That results in a lack of dramatic action because it’s all in their head. Usually, you need external conflict as well, so make sure you pair up the inner saboteur with another one of these antagonists.

3. Antagonistic Entities

Antagonists don’t have to be people. They don’t even have to be living. Instead, consider using one of these antagonistic forces in your book:

• Nature. That iceberg in the Titanic is quite an opposing force.
• Disease. In Emily St. John Mandel’s book Station Eleven, we see a plague has wiped out most of humanity.
• Animals. Jaws is honestly one of the most terrifying antagonists out there.
• The supernatural. In Ghostbusters, ghosts are the main antagonist.
• Groups. Most people don’t consider this one — in Ayn Rand’s novels like Atlas Shrugged, government can be one of the antagonists.
• Technology. Consider all the Terminator movies, where machines are the threat.

I hope all these options expand your notion of what an antagonist is. It’s any opposing force.

4. The Plural Antagonist

Usually, when you have more than one antagonist, they’re in different categories. For instance, in The Revenant, a bear is the antagonist when he mauls Leo DiCaprio, and then John Fitzgerald, played by Tom Hardy, is the other antagonist.

But what about having multiple people who are antagonists? This is clearly more difficult to pull off than a single antagonist. So if this is your first book, I just say be wary of biting off more than you can chew. Your goal should be to create a book that works, which means you prioritize simplicity.

But if you’re dead set on having multiple antagonists, then your book should meet these qualifications:

1. You’re writing a big series or a long book. You need a lot of space to develop multiple antagonists. Harry Potter, for example, has a main antagonist, Voldemort, but then multiple minor antagonists — the Dursley family, Draco Malfoy, Snape. Plus, then J.K. Rowling adds an additional antagonist for each one of the books, like Dolores Umbridge. But just remember, this is a seven-book series, the longest of which is 870 pages. Pro advice here: do not make your first book 870 pages.
2. You have a huge cast of characters. For instance, in Game of Thrones, it wouldn’t make sense to have just a single antagonist because you have characters all over the landscape and lots of different storylines. We need the Night King at the end, we need Ramsay Bolton torturing somebody in some little prison, and we need Joffrey Baratheon acting bratty on the Iron Throne.
3. You use one antagonist for the subplot and a different antagonist for the main plot. Your goal should be not to have antagonists overlap in any way. Each antagonist should be opposing the protagonist in different ways, or else you should cut one from the book.

A little sidebar here, but the desire of every single one of your antagonists needs to be opposed directly to the desire of your protagonist. For instance, in the television show 1923, we see the Harrison Ford character. He wants to keep his Yellowstone Ranch while the antagonist wants to seize it for himself. They both can’t get what they want, and that creates narrative tension.

5. The Good Antagonist

Antagonists aren’t necessarily evil. In fact, if you have an anti-hero, the antagonist might be the most moral person in your story.

But there’s a danger in writing a good antagonist: you don’t want your reader cheering for your antagonist rather than for your main character. So most of the time, your antagonist is gonna tend toward evil because most of the time the protagonist is going to be a decent person.

The question then is how evil or good do you make your antagonist? Thankfully for you, I have an easy metric to figure this out. It’s basically about time on the page. The more intimacy we have with the antagonist — meaning the more time we spend seeing things from their point of view or spending time in their brain — the more the antagonist will need to be likable. On the other hand, if the antagonist is kept at arm’s length, we see them occasionally, then make them as evil as you want to. Evil antagonists are perfectly entertaining. It’s just that most readers don’t want to spend an entire book in the brain of a very evil character.

6. Partial Antagonists

This is probably the trickiest one to pull off for your novel. Can’t say I didn’t warn you.

Partial antagonists are friends with the antagonist, but they have different goals. For example, look at Professor X and Magneto in X-Men. They’re friends, and they both love and seek to protect the mutant community, but they have radically different ways of protecting mutants, and this sets them at odds. Professor X seeks peaceful coexistence with humans while Magneto often resorts to violence to achieve mutant domination. Because of this ideological difference, Professor X often has mutants fighting Magneto, making Magneto into a kind of partial antagonist.

You might be saying, “Wait, John, this sounds a lot like ally antagonist.” With ally antagonist, there’s a character arc — they change from friends all the way over to enemies. With partial antagonists, they are uneasy friends the whole time, but they’re simultaneously fighting each other because of their different goals and values.

7. The Villain

This is the one you’ve all been waiting for: the villain.

So aren’t villains and antagonists basically synonyms? Well, no. The difference is that an antagonist can be a relatively decent human being who just opposes the protagonist in some way. Villains, on the other hand, are outright evil. This is a good rule of thumb to remember: all villains are antagonists, but not all antagonists are villains.

Here are the three most common mistakes that writers make when writing villains:

1. They forget to give their villains admirable or sympathetic qualities. The reason that the Joker movie with Joaquin Phoenix works so well is that we sympathize with him.

• A backstory makes your villain sympathetic.
• Giving your villain motivation for their action also helps us to sympathize with them.
• Showing them suffering helps the reader to empathize with them.

And here’s a little secret technique: make your villain smart. Even if we don’t like your villain, we will admire their ingenuity and intelligence.

2. They often forget the details. So many writers concentrate on the big, world-ending, disastrous things that villains do, and they forget the tiny little details — but it is details which make villains so memorable. One of my favorite villains of all time is the Judge from Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. He is a huge and hairless pedophile who murders indiscriminately, but my favorite little detail about him is wherever he goes, he collects artifacts and plants, sketches them in his notebook, and then destroys the object. He wants power through knowledge, and so he wants to destroy everything so no one else can observe it, and in the end, he destroys the sketchbook as well. He’s just this anarchist that wants to destroy, destroy, destroy. So your goal should be to give your villain a little habit that shows us the true extent of their depravity.

3. They often make their villain completely unlike their protagonist. The most memorable villains reflect some darker nature of the protagonist. For instance, they embody the path that the hero could have taken under different circumstances. For example, Moriarty is an inverse mirror image of Sherlock Holmes. He is just as smart, but he has chosen to use his intelligence for evil rather than good. So you don’t just want your villain to be the opposite of your protagonist — you want them to reflect or resemble your protagonist in some sick or twisted way.

Good luck writing your antagonist, and don’t forget to subscribe for more great writing advice.

The post These 7 Types of Antagonist Can Save Your Novel appeared first on Bookfox.

If you eat a diet filled with movies and television and only nibble a few books, your storytelling will suffer.

A lot of novelists claim they don’t need to read books. They argue that you can learn storytelling from manga, plays, video games, or movies. But that’s like thinking you’ll become a better basketball player by playing football. Sure, you’ll become a better athlete, but there are techniques you can only learn from your own sport.

When I read books by people who learned all of their storytelling from movies, I see three main problems:

1. Single-speed pacing
2. Few internals
3. Getting stuck on visuals

Let’s talk about each of those mistakes, and then we’ll look at what writers should learn from movies.

1. Single-Speed Pacing

Movies have a very limited range when playing with time.

There’s an occasional slow-motion shot and an occasional montage or fast-motion sequence. But by and large, 99% of movies move at real-time speed or clock time.

Authors who learn primarily from movies tend to get stuck in a single speed. They don’t speed up. They don’t slow down.

That hurts their books because they don’t slow down for the most exciting parts of the story, and they don’t speed up through the boring parts.

One superpower of fiction is that it can very easily summarize a week, a month, a year, or even ten years. It can also linger on a detail for pages.

Even during a single dinner conversation, a novel can change pace ten times. It can summarize dialogue, fast-forward through ten minutes, slow way down to describe food in detail, and then return to clock time.

What Writers Should Do

Don’t construct your entire book around scenes.

Scenes are wonderful, but they’re single-speed, and they shouldn’t be your only storytelling technique.

Try speeding up and slowing down throughout your book. If you write a page of dialogue that isn’t particularly exciting, summarize it with a single sentence instead.

For example:

They talked about the weather, the war, and their ex-wives.

2. Not Enough Internals

Normally, you can’t hear what characters are thinking in movies.

There are exceptions, but in general movies avoid invisible thoughts and focus on dramatic action and events.

As a result, authors who watch a lot of films often forget to go into their characters’ minds.

One of the greatest advantages of going into a character’s brain is that it creates intimacy with the reader.

Internals help readers understand character motives.

They make characters more relatable.

And they allow readers to experience the story in a way that movies simply cannot replicate.

If you focus on internals in your book, you’re doing storytelling in a way that books do best.

3. Getting Stuck on Visuals

Movies are fantastic at visual spectacles.

Futuristic cities.

Car chases.

Fight scenes.

Writers influenced heavily by movies often hyper-focus on the visual sense, but they can never truly match a movie’s visual strengths.

A panoramic shot of a cityscape can communicate an enormous amount of information in just a few seconds. A book might need an entire page to accomplish the same thing.

Here’s another example.

A movie can communicate emotion through an actor’s facial expression. An actor wrinkles their face in a particular way, and the audience instantly understands what they’re feeling.

In fiction, however, it’s usually more effective to describe a character’s movement, feelings, or thoughts.

The Senses Books Do Best

Instead of focusing exclusively on visuals, remember that books can excel at:

1. Smell
2. Taste
3. Touch

Try this writing challenge:

Spend an entire paragraph describing a smell in great detail. It could be unpleasant or wonderful, but describe it thoroughly.

What Writers Should Learn From Movies

Movies should be one important tool—not the only tool.

Here are three things novelists can learn from them.

1. Camera Movement

Pay attention to the way a camera moves because it can teach you how to describe a scene.

At the beginning of The Dark Knight, we start with an establishing shot of the city. The camera then moves closer to a criminal breaking a window and firing a grappling hook. Then it moves even closer to focus on a specific detail: a mask.

You can use a similar strategy in fiction.

Or you can reverse it.

Start inside your character’s mind. Then describe what’s in their hand. Then the room. Then the larger environment around them.

Fiction can go closer than movies by entering a character’s thoughts, and it can go farther by exploring abstract ideas and philosophies.

2. Scene Cuts

A scene cut is any break from one scene into another.

The magic happens where the two scenes meet.

Every time a movie or television show ends a scene and begins a new one, pay attention.

Writers have scene breaks too:

• Chapter endings
• Chapter beginnings
• Section breaks
• Hashtag or pound-sign breaks

Each one is an opportunity.

A scene cut can create contrast, humor, suspense, comparison, or surprise.

The transition itself becomes part of the storytelling.

3. Dialogue

If there is one writing technique that films are exceptional at, it’s dialogue.

Think about how many lines from movies and television you can quote from memory.

Now think about how many lines from books you quote in everyday conversation.

The number from movies is probably much higher.

Every time characters are speaking on screen, ask yourself:

How can I be inspired by this for my own book?

A Dialogue Exercise

Pick your favorite movie.

Find a scene that is mostly dialogue.

Then sit down with a piece of paper and write down every single line the characters say.

This exercise gives you a fantastic representation of what strong dialogue looks like on the page.

Final Thoughts

Movies can absolutely influence your writing.

The problem comes when movies become your primary teacher and books become an afterthought.

Books and films are different mediums. Each has unique strengths.

Movies can teach writers about camera movement, scene transitions, and dialogue.

Books can teach writers about pacing, interiority, and sensory experiences that extend beyond the visual.

If you want to write great books, study books first—and then use movies as a complementary tool rather than a substitute.

The post Don’t Let Movies Sabotage Your Writing appeared first on Bookfox.

A lot of prologues are bad, and a lot of them shouldn’t even exist.

But the truly great ones do something that no first chapter could ever do.

Here are the prologue traps you need to avoid, seven ways to pull off a good prologue, and how to determine whether your prologue truly earns its place in your book.

1. The 20-Page Prologue

If you gain nothing else from this article, remember this:

Prologues need to be short.

And not ten pages short. Not even five pages short.

For most books, a prologue should be one to two pages.

Yes, there are exceptions.

Ken Follett’s The Pillars of the Earth has a six-page prologue. But the novel itself is roughly 1,000 pages long. If you’re writing a 1,000-page novel, you can probably get away with a six-page prologue.

For a normal-sized book, however, a one-to-two-page prologue is usually the sweet spot.

Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code follows this principle. Its prologue is only three pages long.

One technique that helps writers keep prologues short is the flash-forward. The prologue shows a moment that occurs later in the story, and Chapter One then returns to the beginning.

Donna Tartt’s The Secret History is a good example. The two-page prologue opens with the revelation that Bunny is dead and that the group has killed him. The novel then goes back in time and follows the characters toward that eventual murder.

2. The Ancient Past

Does your prologue open with the protagonist’s great-grandfather?

The founding of the kingdom?

A wizard war from 3,000 years ago?

If so, ask yourself whether you’re giving readers backstory when what they really want is the present-day story.

Another useful question is:

Am I writing the prequel, or am I writing the actual book?

There is nothing inherently wrong with beginning in the past. The key is ensuring that the past event has a strong connection to the story unfolding in the present.

Consider Tana French’s In the Woods.

Its prologue is only two pages long and focuses on three children who disappeared in the woods decades earlier. Two were never seen again. One survived and grew up to become the detective who serves as the novel’s protagonist.

The prologue works because those events continue to shape the detective’s decisions and emotional life throughout the story.

A different timeline and a different period can justify a prologue—but only when that past directly influences the narrative readers are about to experience.

3. Chapter One in a Trench Coat

If your prologue has:

• The same protagonist
• The same timeline
• The same tone

then you may not have a prologue at all.

You may simply have Chapter One.

A prologue should differ from the rest of the story in some meaningful way. It should feature a different character, a different timeline, or different stakes.

A simple test is to rename your prologue “Chapter One.”

If nothing changes, it’s probably not a prologue.

One of the most common and effective prologue structures is the “doomed stranger” prologue.

The story opens with a minor character who dies, disappears, or is otherwise removed from the narrative. This allows readers to experience the threat that will later confront the main characters.

George R.R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones uses this strategy. Three rangers venture beyond the Wall and encounter the White Walkers. Two of them are killed, establishing the threat that hangs over the entire series.

Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park does something similar. A minor character is attacked by a raptor, immediately communicating that danger exists long before the main story begins.

4. Misleading Genre

A prologue should prepare readers for the experience your novel is going to deliver.

If the prologue feels dark and grim, but the rest of the novel is lighthearted and comedic, readers may feel misled.

That said, many successful prologues initially feel different from the opening chapters.

Why?

Because they deliver the core pleasures of the genre before the story is ready to fully explore them.

Readers of a mystery want to know there will be a mystery.

Readers of a fantasy novel want reassurance that magic is coming.

Readers of a horror novel want evidence that horror awaits.

A prologue can make that promise.

It buys the writer time to establish characters and setting while assuring readers that the genre elements they came for are on the way.

5. The Info Dump

This is one of the most common prologue mistakes.

The prologue becomes a history lesson.

A worldbuilding guide.

An encyclopedia entry.

A detailed explanation of magical systems, political structures, or fictional races.

In other words, worldbuilding disguised as story.

Most writers solve this problem by focusing on plot instead of exposition, which is usually the right choice.

However, there is another option: the atmospheric prologue.

Patrick Rothfuss’s The Name of the Wind provides an example.

The prologue is only one page long and begins by describing a silence in three parts. Most of the page is devoted to atmosphere and mood.

Yet it works because it does two additional things:

First, it introduces a character with flame-red hair.

Second, it reveals that this character is waiting to die.

Those details create anticipation.

The reader begins asking questions.

Why is he waiting to die?

What happened to him?

How will his story unfold?

A good prologue leaves readers with questions.

A bad prologue gives them answers they never asked for.

6. The Clichéd Prologue

Some genres rely on familiar prologue formulas.

In crime fiction, it may be the discovery of a dead body.

Readers recognize these patterns immediately.

The danger is that they begin to feel predictable.

However, familiar setups can still work when they’re executed thoughtfully.

Delia Owens’s Where the Crawdads Sing opens with the discovery of Chase Andrews’s body in the marsh.

But before revealing the body, the prologue spends time describing the difference between a marsh and a swamp. Throughout the novel, that distinction becomes a metaphor that enriches the story’s larger themes.

William Kent Krueger’s Ordinary Grace also opens with a murder.

Yet the prologue goes beyond the crime itself and raises larger philosophical questions about suffering, faith, and grace.

The lesson is simple:

Don’t rely solely on the event.

Use the prologue to introduce atmosphere, theme, or deeper questions that make the familiar feel fresh.

7. Being Cryptic

Many writers believe mystery comes from withholding information.

In reality, good mysteries often arise from providing information that creates new questions.

A deliberately cryptic prologue can frustrate readers because they feel excluded rather than intrigued.

Your goal is not confusion.

Your goal is curiosity.

One way to avoid this problem is through direct narration.

N.K. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season opens with the narrator speaking directly to the reader:

“Let’s start with the end of the world, why don’t we?”

The novel immediately establishes a relationship between narrator and reader, creating clarity rather than confusion.

Erin Morgenstern’s The Night Circus uses a similar approach. The narrator addresses the reader directly, guiding them through the arrival of the circus and inviting them into the story.

Because the narrator is speaking openly to the audience, the prose feels intimate rather than cryptic.

Final Thoughts

Your prologue is not an excuse to explain your world, hide information, or delay the beginning of the story.

A strong prologue earns its place by doing something that Chapter One cannot.

Keep it short.

Make it distinct.

Create intrigue.

Raise questions.

And above all, remember that readers turn pages because they want to know what happens next—not because they want a lecture on everything that happened before.

The post If Your Prologue Does Any of These 7 Things, Cut It appeared first on Bookfox.

Breaking Bad has invaluable lessons for storytellers, regardless of whether you’re writing fiction, graphic novels, or screenplays. Let’s break down the first episode to understand what makes this masterpiece work.

1. Start with Action

It’s a great idea to start fast in the middle of the action. Breaking Bad opens with wild driving of an RV, drugged-out thugs in the back, and a protagonist wearing a chemical mask while his partner lies unconscious. This scene actually occurs about 85% through the episode chronologically but is shown first for two reasons: it creates mystery about what’s happening, and it starts with an exciting scene that buys time to set up the story.

2. Establish Your Protagonist’s Uniqueness

Early in the episode, we see Walter White teaching chemistry, and it’s immediately clear he’s not your average high school teacher. This is crucial because if he were just average, the entire show wouldn’t work. Smart protagonists (and antagonists) make interesting story twists possible—dumb characters usually make for uninteresting stories. When possible, make your character smarter than average.

3. Build Sympathy Early

One of your primary goals as a writer should be getting readers to feel sympathy for your main character. We see Walter White in a humiliating scene washing his student’s car, and we learn he’s very sick with lung cancer. Once we feel sympathy for Walter, we’re on his side and ready to go on his journey.

4. The Power of Contrast

To make the ending emotionally satisfying, you need to establish the opposite at the beginning. Breaking Bad does this by depicting Walter at his weakest: awkward with guns, wearing geeky sweaters and glasses, essentially an egghead opposite to the swaggering, masculine Hank. He’s even shown struggling with intimacy. This early weakness makes his later transformation more impactful.

5. Plant Seeds for Future Payoffs

When Hank shows off video of his drug bust, Walter asks, “How much money is that?” This brilliant foreshadowing connects to his future empire and massive cash stockpile. It also establishes character motivation—while Walter claims he wants to provide for his family, what he really wants is power, with money as its symbol.

6. Creative Dialogue Solutions

Sometimes, less is more. We don’t hear the doctor tell Walter about his lung cancer diagnosis—we just see the mouth moving and infer what was said. Instead of focusing on the obvious, Walter fixates on a tiny mustard stain, showing his inability to process the devastating news.

7. Raise the Stakes Continuously

A cancer diagnosis alone isn’t enough—the story piles on complications: mounting bills, a pregnant wife, and a son with cerebral palsy. Experienced writers know you can always make things worse to raise the stakes and increase the challenge for your character.

8. Use Lies to Create Tension

When Skyler asks Walter about his day after his diagnosis, he simply says “fine.” Lying creates tension in two ways: we anticipate the eventual exposure of the lie, and it rings psychologically true—it’s often difficult to reveal devastating news.

9. Show Character Change Through Action

Walter’s transformation begins with small rebellions: blowing up at his car wash boss, standing up to bullies threatening his son. These changes surprise those around him, particularly Skyler, showing his evolution from meek teacher to something more dangerous.

10. Include Symbolic Moments

The show pauses for a quiet moment of Walter lighting matches and throwing them into a pool—a perfect symbol of life’s fleeting nature and his shortened future. Such symbolic moments also provide a necessary break from the episode’s rapid pacing.

11. Drive the Story Through Decisions

Walter doesn’t just dream about cooking meth—he takes concrete steps: going on a ride-along with Hank, showing interest in the meth lab details. This represents his turn from mild-mannered teacher toward future drug kingpin.

12. Combine Story Elements Efficiently

The SWAT raid scene accomplishes two goals at once: showing dramatic action and introducing Jesse Pinkman. Single scenes doing multiple jobs make for efficient storytelling.

13. Balance Serious with Humor

Even in serious drama, include moments of humor. Walter standing in his underwear in the desert provides comic relief and contrasts with the heavy themes of cancer and death, giving viewers a needed breather.

14. Create Memorable Villain Introductions

When introducing the villain Crazy Eight, instead of the cliché of kicking a puppy, we see him training a dog to attack humans—a fresh take on establishing a character’s brutality.

15. Use Contrast for Impact

The episode brings Walter to both his highest point (outsmarting the drug dealers with chemistry) and his lowest (attempting suicide in the desert in his underwear). This contrast makes both moments more powerful—the highs aren’t as high if the lows aren’t sufficiently low.

16. Show the Cost

Never let your characters emerge unscathed. The episode ends with Walter puking and Jesse sporting a black eye, showing the physical toll of their actions. These visible costs make their accomplishments feel earned.

The episode concludes with Skyler’s famous line “Is that you?”—indicating not just Walter’s renewed virility but his transformation into someone his wife doesn’t recognize. This masterful pilot episode serves as a microcosm for Walter’s larger transformation throughout the series, demonstrating how to craft compelling character change within a single episode while setting up a larger narrative arc.

The post One Episode of Breaking Bad Will Change Your Writing Forever appeared first on Bookfox.