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.

I’ve been working as an editor with Jim Roberts for many years now, and it’s so wonderful for him to get the validation and honor of having his debut short story collection published by Belle Point Press. (It’s also a finalist for “Book of the Year” by Foreword Reviews!).

He’s truly a wonderful writer, full of wisdom and stories that surprise you, and I knew from reading his very first story that he was going to be successful.

His book “Of Fathers & Gods” comes out today, and you should definitely pick up a copy.

Here’s what I said about the book for a blurb:

“These are stories haunted by father figures, both present and passed, and by the many ways they’ve failed their children. Through stories about kidnapping, prosthesis creation, family secrets and mass shootings, Roberts never loses sight of the thumping, bleeding hearts of his characters, yearning for better lives. If you’re looking for the firm, no-nonsense truths of Flannery O’Connor and the raw, hardscrabble edge of Denis Johnson, this is your book. You would be wise to pick up a copy.”

Jim and I spoke over email for this interview:

I absolutely love the title for this collection. Can you tell us how you came up with it?

Since my book deals with fathers and how they relate (or don’t) to their children, the “Fathers” part of the title was self-evident.

As for the “Gods” part, that was inspired by the Biblical story of Abraham and Isaac, a story that deeply disturbed me the first time I heard it as young child. The story is always told from the POV of Abraham, but I can never stop thinking about it from poor Isaac’s POV, marched up a mountain by those he trusted as protectors and then finding himself under a knife wielded by not one but two fathers, his earthly father and God.

Also, a reference to Abraham and Issac plays a key role in the finale story of the collection titled “Late Fiction.”

Speaking of knives, they seem to pop up in my writing from time to time (see how many you can spot across the nine stories in the collection).

Look at the cover of Of Fathers & Gods for example. I had no hand in that design. Never said anything to anybody involved in the cover creation about knives. Knives just seem to materialize here and there as I write. Coincidence or deep subconscious? Or is there a difference?

What was the process like for writing these stories? 

About thirty-five years ago—yes, you heard that right, I’m old—against all reason and common sense, I started writing a novel. I’m still working on that same mofo. I use the phrase “working on” loosely.

Back then, I was absorbed into a career in the marketing research industry, working insane weekly hours and flying all over the U.S. and Europe, and I had two young sons at home. So, I’d often go months and sometimes years in between writing sessions. The first draft progressed at a sloth’s pace.

But here’s the good news. I never stopped thinking about it even if I wasn’t actively typing words into a PC. Thinking about the story arc. Strategizing. Envisioning scenes. And all that thinking about the novel threw off some valuable byproducts: lots and lots of ideas for short stories. Characters and situations I liked but didn’t belong in the novel.

As for physical process, I work best early in the morning. I roll out of bed and grab a drink and don’t let anything get between me and my keyboard and write until I burn out, usually about three hours.

Eat lunch, exercise, run errands in town, distract myself until about six p.m. Then read what I wrote that morning (I always edit on paper) and mark it up. Sometimes type revisions before bed, but otherwise make revisions the next morning. Rinse and repeat.

Oh, and I only work on one story at a time, although I might jot down a sidenote if something worthy pops into my head related to different story I have on my to-be-written list.

What stories didn’t fit into the collection, and why?

Okay, it’s true confession time. I did what writers are told not to do. I had nine stories and put every damn one of them in the collection.

My entire inventory at the time. Now, in my defense, they were all written with the same theme hovering over my head: the relationships between fathers and their children—the good, the bad, and the awful.

My age drives a lot of writing decisions. I had what I thought were nine good stories in hand. Might I have written some even better ones on this same theme in the future, and displaced one or two of the original nine? Sure, but when you’re within spitting distance of age seventy, you must take that word “future” very, very seriously.

As any writer in the trenches of seeking publication knows, the lead times in publishing are loooooong. Years to write, re-write, edit, re-write again, research publishers, submit, submit, submit, rejection, rejection, rejection. And if finally accepted, up to two more years before the publisher births the book out into the world. If you’re thirty, no biggie perhaps. If you’re seventy, you might miss the birth of that baby.

What was the process like in finding a publisher?

Long, time-sucking, tedious, frustrating grunt work. And that’s just the good parts.

I had several things working against me that had to be factored into a “how to get published” strategy. Forget the Big 5, or Big 4, or Big Whatever-they’re-called today. You need an agent for them, and paradoxically it’s more difficult to get an agent than a publisher. And no sane agent would want what I was offering: (agent thoughts are italicized):

• A literary (low demand)
• short story collection (seriously, nobody buys short stories)
• from a completely unknown, unproven author (how many TikTok peeps you got?),
• who is old (wait, is this guy gonna live long enough to create an ongoing revenue stream?).

So, I went after small, independent presses who don’t require an agent as intermediary. Untold hours surfing the web and reading “market book” listings of such presses, flagging the ones who accept short story collections but don’t have specific identity requirements such as “author must be a left-handed dentist born in the state of Iowa.”

I eventually built a spreadsheet with fifty potential small presses, then started submitting (a long, slow process customizing cover letters to each one and rejiggering the manuscript to meet various, unstandardized submission requirements).

As expected, the rejections started rolling in, but I kept submitting and eventually connected with a press whose mission fits perfectly with my fiction.

What advice do you have for authors seeking to publish their first collection of short stories?

Learn as much about the craft of writing fiction as you can. Got an MFA? Great. If not—and I don’t—then read some carefully selected craft books (I especially recommend ones that illustrate key lessons with real world examples) and attend some writing conferences that include craft lectures and workshops.

Try to get into a good writers’ group of no more than 4-5 writers. This is hard to do, because some writers’ groups and workshops can do more harm than good. If you don’t get good vibes after the “settling in” period, abandon ship and try another group. I was in 2 or 3 before I finally hit a great one.

The hallmarks of a great one are what I call “civil honesty” and camaraderie. You need people who will tactfully tell you your baby is ugly, or you’ve got spinach in your teeth. False praise or jealous nitpicking do no one any good. Try to develop a Jedi sense for determining which advice to take and which to ignore. It’s difficult to know and you’ll never get it 100% correct.

After arming yourself with great skills, write some killer stories and hire a good developmental editor, ideally someone with a lot of short story experience, to assess and critique your stores. Rework and then submit, submit, submit to lit mags and ignore all the rejections.

After a few are published, research “how to organize a short story collection,” (again, a developmental editor can be helpful with this part.) Now, at long last, you are ready to begin submitting your collection (or seeking an agent, if you decide to go that route). I sound like a broken record, but you must be psychologically prepared for a long, long, winding road and settle in for that odyssey.

If you could tell your younger writing self anything, what advice would you give?

Liquidate all savings and assets and buy Bitcoin the first day it becomes available.

Oh, you said writing self. Easy—read more and procrastinate less. Time is precious. Maybe you don’t hear the clock ticking when you’re thirty. But it ticks nonetheless.

When do you know a story is finished?

They’re never finished. Every time I revisit one that’s been published, I want to tweak or polish or change something somewhere. They’re like children, you can’t hold on to them forever.

There reaches a point where they must be released into the world. My wife and daughter-in-law are painters, and they tell me they feel the same about their paintings.

We worked on these stories together for several years — can you describe the experience from your end?

Excruciating hell. No, just kidding!

If I had to put it into one word, then the experience was educational. Highly educational. This is going to sound like hyperbole, but I’m serious when I say I learned more from your critique summaries and marginal notes on my stories than I learned from hours of reading craft books or attending craft lectures at writers’ conferences.

Why? Because I learned specific skills at the exact moment I could apply them to a work-in-progress. When that happens, it sinks in deeply.

What are your favorite literary journals?

Honestly, I’m not a consistent reader of literary journals. I read from them, but it’s infrequent and helter-skelter.

Because of time and money constraints, I prefer to read short stories from classic collections (such as Raymond Carver, Alice Munro, Flannery O’Connor, etc.) or from annual, curated collections such as Best American Short Stories, The Pushcart Prize Winners, Best of the Net, Wigleaf 50, etc.

Can you recommend three short story collections that authors need to read? 

Only three?

• Cathedral (Raymond Carver)
• Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage (Alice Munro)
• and The Things They Carried (Tim O’Brien).

If you had said “name five,” I’d add Knockemstiff by Donald Ray Pollock and Jesus’s Son by Denis Johnson.

I love every one of those collections! Great choices. What’s a craft book that every writer should read?

Although I’ve never read much of his fiction, Stephen King’s On Writing is fascinating and eye-opening regarding the “writing life” and many other issues.

And this may sound like pandering—but I swear on all that is holy it is not; it is my true opinion—The Linchpin Writer by John Matthew Fox.

Aw shucks, thank you.

Based on the subtitle, one might think it applies more to novels than short stories, but I found the advice, and especially the examples in Linchpin to be highly applicable to the craft of writing any type of fiction.

What are the main themes that keep coming up in your book?

The relationships between fathers and their children: the good, the bad and the awful. Parental actions have lifetime consequences.

It’s no secret fathers can be notorious missing pieces—whether missing physically or emotionally—and it is often the missing piece that weighs heaviest around the neck, a lost part of the puzzle that spells “love.” Drop the “e” from love and you can still sort of spell it. But it’s not the same.

What story was the most difficult to write, and why?

I’ll cite two stories that were difficult for me, for different reasons. The first is “The Jackshit Bastards,” the first “real” short story I ever wrote (and the only story I’ve ever written that was never rejected, having been accepted by the first literary journal where it was submitted).

It was also the first time I had worked with a developmental editor (John Matthew Fox). Although I had conceptualized a good story, I made a lot of executional mistakes, and a lot of rewriting was required. I rewrote some sections of it over a dozen times, and at times almost abandoned it because I didn’t think I’d ever get it right. I’m very proud of that one, because I persevered and pulled it off eventually, and because it is my wife’s favorite story from the collection.

The other difficult story was “Tender, Like My Heart,” because the father in that story shares many similarities with my own father (the only father in the entire collection to do so). In the story, Digger Shay—the father of the protagonist Tedi—dies from lung cancer, just like my dad. Tedi’s grief and anguish are drawn from my own personal experience, so yeah, that was hard to write. I will never read some of the scenes from that story at a public reading, because I can’t get through them without tears.

What’s your writing journey been like? 

Schitzephrenic, circuitous, and disjointed. I read Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man when I was eighteen or nineteen. Invisible Man didn’t just tell a story; it challenged conventions, shattered stereotypes, and dared to confront uncomfortable truths. By the time I reached that last page, I said, “I want to do this. I want to learn how to write fiction like this.”

In high school and even junior high the thought, the fantasy, of being a writer passed casually through my mind from time to time. But so did a lot of other half-baked ideas and daydreams about the future.

None of them really stuck until I read that book. When I finished the last paragraph, I was both exhilarated and terrified because I was convinced I could do it. I could write a good book of fiction. Nothing as great as what Ellison had accomplished. But something respectable. If Ellison was The Beatles, maybe I could do something akin to Badfinger. 

So, Invisible Man fell into my lap and turned me into an English Major. I was a star student of literature and writing. But it only lasted about three semesters before FSD set in. (Fear of Starving to Death). My wife and I came from humble backgrounds and had to beg, borrow, and steal our way through college. The prospect of walking away with a questionably valuable English degree into a future that was no different from my past, a future of scratching and pecking for dollars, scared me. “The FSD is strong in this one,” said Darth Vader.

Okay, if we’re going to continue the Star Wars analogy, I crossed over to the dark side and suppressed my desire to write for decades until I awoke recently to discover I’d grown old. When did that happen? I thought there would be plenty of time. Wrong.

I gave up an early passion for writing and instead spent my life successfully defeating FSD. And I’m glad I did because none of us, late in life, are the same as our nineteen-year-old selves. I certainly had the passion at age nineteen to be a good writer, but I didn’t have fifty plus years of my own experiences, and the experiences of others close around, to draw upon to craft interesting and compelling stories.

Which one of these stories — you can only pick one — would be the best one to be turned into a film, and who would play the main characters?

“The Jackshit Bastards” because I think it contains sufficient characterization, conflict, and other content to fill up two hours of screen time. Interestingly, this story was a finalist—along with “Tender, Like My Heart”—for the Screencraft Cinematic Short Story Award. So, there’s some evidence that others see at least a modicum of “film” potential in it. Actors?

The twins would be Jason Bateman and Laura Linney.

Oh, those are fantastic choices. I can totally see them in those roles.

Laura Linney’s character’s love interest would be Margot Robbie. And the father would have to be either Brian Cox (from Succession) or Pierce Brosnan.

Have you ever taken a literary pilgrimage?

Yes, but not intentionally. Our family was on vacation visiting Gettysburg and D.C. and we made a day trip to Baltimore. While there, pretty much on a whim, I decided to walk maybe a mile to pay homage at Edgar Allen Poe’s grave. We were at the Inner Harbor and no one else really wanted to do a long roundtrip walk to go to a cemetery.

I asked a street vendor about directions, showing him my map, and he advised me to maybe take a cab instead of walking through a dicey neighborhood. A rickshaw driver (bicycle rickshaw) overheard our conversation and offered a ride.

While I can’t prove it, I like to tell people I may be the only person, or at least one of the very few, who’s taken a rickshaw to Poe’s grave.

Turns out the rickshaw driver was an aspiring writer. Of course he was.

What are you working on next?

Two novels. One novel is finished and awaiting one last look by the developmental editor (that would be you, Mr. Fox).

For the other novel, I’m a half dozen chapters into the first draft, gathering feedback from my writers’ group now and then when I come up in the rotation. I have lots of notes for yet another piece, but I don’t yet know if it’s a novel, novella, or short story.

Finally, I’ve become enamored with flash fiction lately, and have three or four pieces ready to send out to lit mags, so down the road I might try to publish a collection of flash. But as I stated earlier, time is not on my side.

Want to hear God laugh? Tell Him your plans.

Jim Roberts is the author of the short story collection Of Fathers & Gods (Belle Point Press). His fiction has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and twice named to the finalist list for the Screencraft Cinematic Short Story Award. Short stories by Roberts have been published in Prime Number Magazine, Rappahannock Review, Snake Nation Review, Flash Fiction Magazine, and ArLiJo-The Arlington Literary Journal.

His essay “Fiction is Trouble”—a hybrid personal and craft essay about the writing of Of Fathers & Gods—is forthcoming in Reckon Review, May 29, 2024.

Roberts was born in Amarillo, Texas but grew up in rural East Texas. After college, he lived and worked briefly in Houston before moving to Cincinnati, Ohio to pursue a business career. Now a full-time writer, he splits his time between Ohio and Texas, depending on whim, changes in the weather, or the beckoning of distant haints.

Find him on Facebook and Instagram and learn more about his writing and works-in-progress at www.jimrobertsfiction.com.

The post Jim Roberts Wrestles with Difficult Fathers (Interview) appeared first on Bookfox.

Ah, the dreaded comp titles.

You know you need two similar books to your own when you send a query to a literary agent, but how are you supposed to find them?

And how can you figure out which ones to choose?

I’ve helped a lot of authors land agents over the years, and I’m going to tell you all the mistakes that you should avoid (yes, there are a lot of mistakes to avoid).

You THINK you’re communicating one thing when you choose a comp title, but you’re actually saying something completely different.

1. Popular Books Choice

The Popular Books choice is one of the most common mistakes that authors make when choosing comp titles.

They think: How can I go wrong if I choose Harry Potter and Hunger Games? Those books were fantastic!

But these are almost always the wrong choices. Agents would get laughed out of the publishing house if they brought these comp titles to publishers. Publishers are usually looking for more mid-level books, not the crazy bestsellers.

• What you think you’re saying: My book is going to be popular like these bestsellers
• What you’re actually saying: I have wildly unreasonable expectations for how my book will sell

You’re also telling the agent that you’re not a very big reader, if these are the only books you could come up with.

2. Old Books Choice

By “Old” books I mean books that are older than 3 years.

Yes, when doing comp titles, more than 3 years is considered old.

That’s because comp titles are meant to give publishers a sense of how this book might sell. If you’re choosing books from a decade ago, the publishing landscape and book buying market are completely different.

And if you’re choosing classics from twenty or forty or sixty years ago, that’s SUPER unhelpful.

• What you think you’re saying: My book is going to be a classic
• What you’re actually saying: I’m not reading any books that are being published now

3. Slightly Different Genre

Let’s say you have a memoir.

Make sure you pick comp titles that are firmly within the memoir genre, rather than ones that are lightly fictionalized. For instance, “Everything Sad is Untrue” is a fictionalized memoir, so even though the front cover says it’s a true story, it’s not a good comp title for a memoir.

Or if you have a fantasy subgenre, like Anthropomorphic fantasy or Gaslamp Fantasy or Urban Fantasy, then …

You don’t want to pick comp titles that are fantasies, but are in a slightly different subgenre. The comp should definitely be in the narrow subgenre of your book.

• What you think you’re saying: my book is cool
• What you’re actually saying: I don’t understand what genre my book is

4. No Comp Titles

I know, I know, it’s incredibly difficult to come up with comp titles.

But the choice is never never never to avoid the comp title paragraph. It’s better to at least attempt to put some books down as comp titles, because then the agent can tell that you tried.

And my recommendation is to set aside 5 or 6 hours to find the right comp titles. It’s truly a herculean task, to come up with a list of 10 or 15 and then slowly narrow them down until you have *just* the right ones.

It’s completely natural to start sending a query letter out to agents, and then realize your comp titles could be improved, and switch them. I’ve even switched them multiple times, and have several different comp titles for different types of agents.

• What you think you’re saying: my book is original
• What you’re actually saying: I’m not a reader

Don’t be afraid to customize your comp title for a specific agent (for instance, listing someone they represented as a comp title).

5. Focusing on Content

It IS possible to choose books that are actually too similar to your book. But similar in a particular way.

For instance, it’s a bad idea to focus too much on the content of the comp titles rather than the container.

Perhaps you have a husband/wife relationship in your novel, so you look for novels that also have husband/wife relationships.

That would be great, but it’s not the most important thing. The most important thing is nailing the:

• Genre
• Length
• Tone

Your comp titles are cousins, not siblings. They don’t have to have big elements line up, they just need to have enough genetic material in common that the publisher can see that your book might sell in a similar way to the comp title books.

That way they’re not flying blind when they’re offering you an advance, they’re basing it off the sales number and profitability of your comp titles.

Oh, you didn’t know your comp titles could end up factoring into how large your advance is? Well, consider yourself informed.

6. Too Many Comp Titles

The standard is two.

It’s pretty rare to see only a single comp title or to see three comp titles. If you want to play it safe, simply stick to two.

If you go full bore and whip out six books that are comp titles, the agent is going to blink and shake their head and you’re going to be one step closer to a form rejection.

Whittle your selections down until you only have the best two. And don’t worry — if you’re unsure, you’ll probably be able to talk it over with the agent before they send your manuscripts to publishers, and if they think your other picks are better, they’ll use those.

• What you think you’re communicating: I’m well read and my book fits so well in the publishing firmament
• What you’re actually communicating: I’m indecisive and I couldn’t choose which books were best

Final Thoughts

Lastly, don’t put too much pressure on yourself. If the agent likes your book, they’re still going to take you on, even if your comp title suggestions are terrible.

Agents often do their own research and choose their own comp titles to send to publishers, so don’t sweat it. Do your best, and hopefully it will be good enough to pique the agent’s interest.

Don’t forget to leave a comment about whether these tips worked for you!

The post What Your Comp Titles Might be Telling Agents appeared first on Bookfox.

Guest post by E. S. Foster

What do you know other than writing?

While it’s the norm to specialize in one area and perform one specialized set of skills, understanding the mechanics of fields outside our typical scope can be highly beneficial.

You can’t just be a writer. You have to know another field.

Being able to understand and work in more than one area earns you the title of a “polymath,” a term slightly akin to a “jack of all trades.” Like Benjamin Franklin and Leonardo da Vinci, polymaths use their skills in one area to advance themselves in other areas.

But what does the polymath perspective look like to a writer?

Here are some major fields of study that writers could benefit from overall.

1. Mathematics

This might seem a bit counterintuitive. How can a field devoted to a specific set of rules have anything to do with getting creative and writing a story?

But authors like Lewis Carroll was a mathematician first before he was the children’s storyteller. Not only did he include math riddles and math problems, but a good portion of his Alice books were dedicated to counteracting the latest advancements in mathematics.

Specifically, he disliked the shift away from Euclidian geometry, so the nonsense aspects of Wonderland reflected his view of what a world without this mathematicswould look like.

Madeleine L’Engle wrote A Wrinkle in Time with many of the mathematical elements includedas part of her growing interest in math and science. She didn’t necessarily have mathematics in mind when she wrote the book and its subsequent sequels, but this interest helped advance her perspective on the major themes prevalent in her work, and it helped build her world too.

2. Music and Art

A song, a symphony, or any instrument cranking out a tune is more than just notes and sounds put together. A painting, even an abstract one, is more than just colors and shapes.

• Did you know Hans Christian Anderson was a paper cutting artist? He once stated, “Paper cutting is the prelude to writing,” in an 1867 letter.
• Bob Dylan is primarily known for his music, but he also won a Nobel Prize and the Pulitzer Prize for his poetry. His perspectives on poetry and music came together to garner him such an achievement.

Don’t waste any moment thinking that “distracting” yourself from your work by focusing on other creative outlets is going to harm you. Not only do writers need a break sometimes, but they also need to discover their expression in any way they can.

Craft your creative expression by painting a picture or writing a song. As you come back to your writing, you’ll better understand yourself and what matters to you.

3. Science

Science focuses on what we know and what we don’t know about our world. The same thing goes for writing. Sure, we can take creative liberties when we create new worlds, but understanding the features of our own is beneficial.

Some people were scientists before they were writers:

• Carl Sagan was an astronomer and astrophysicist who wrote Contact, his only novel, in 1985. Using his background in various scientific fields, he crafted a hard science fiction story. Even though his work contained extraterrestrials, the science behind the fiction was accurate thanks to his scientific study.
• Andy Weir also writes hard science fiction. While he mainly worked in computer science, he studied orbital mechanics when he wrote The Martian. This work has been lauded for its scientific accuracy.

Our world functions in a specific way and stepping away from that diminishes the accuracy you want to strive for. Readers won’t take your story seriously if you throw inaccurate science into an otherwise believable story.  

When writing in any genre, you want to stick to the facts. If you create a new kind of physics in your world, stick to the rules you created. If you want your work to be accurate, study as much as possible. It takes a lot of brainpower, but a believable story is always vital.

4. Philosophy

Many works have philosophical undercurrents, whether writers realize it or not. A good book does more than simply tell a story. It makes a statement of some kind, and it’s up to readers to analyze the work and figure out what it is.

Philosophy focuses on the why of our reality. We ask ourselves big questions, which we don’t have the answer to. Why are we here? What are we meant to do? Writing asks those same questions. They take on the confusing nature of our world and offer a solution.

Writers may be interested in philosophy or philosophers in their own right.

• Figures such as Voltaire and Goethe wrote their own fiction, which placed philosophy at the forefront of the story.
• On the other hand, genre authors such as Philip K. Dick and Terry Goodkind are better known for the fiction aspect of their stories, though there is still plenty of time spent on the philosophical aspects to their work.

You aren’t likely to ever completely understand the world. That’s fine. As a writer, you can speculate and come up with your own answers. Not everyone will agree with you, but this is your chance to examine the world around you.

5. Religion

Some writers are known for being religious. Others are interested in one particular religion despite not sharing that faith, or they critique religion as an institution in some way.

Examples include:

• Writers such as C. S. Lewis, who was also an apologist and a theologian after converting from atheism.
• G. K. Chesterton was also a writer and apologist, as well as a philosopher whose fiction often focused on religion.
• Ursula K. Le Guin, on the other hand, included Daoism and other Eastern religions in a lot of her works, stating that both Buddhism and Daoism helped shape her perspective on life.

You don’t have to be religious to be a writer. Like any other field, religion might inspire you in different ways in your work. You might want to tackle the issues the world faces or ask the bigger religious questions.

It’s also not uncommon to create your own religion if you’re writing fantasy or science fiction. Often created religions metaphorically examine the issues we witness today or contribute to powerful worldbuilding.

6. Psychology  

Psychology involves looking into the mind and understanding how we think and feel. It’s not uncommon for people to approach a story through a psychological analysis. Some writers are better known for how their work influenced today’s views on nature and society.

For example, H. G. Wells wrote a variety of books dedicated to humanity and science together. While his works speculated on the growing advancements in science and engineering, he also focused on human nature and conflicts between humanity and nature. His book The Island of Doctor Moreau is an amazing example of man vs. nature, society, and himself all at once.

Other writers have used fiction and nonfiction to examine their own psychological state. Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar is essentially a poetic biography about Plath’s own mental illness.

By looking inside ourselves, writers can evaluate their own history and recognize the importance of telling their history. And speaking of history….

7. History

Historical Fiction has always been a well-rounded genre. With all the different time periods available to study, there’s plenty of material to write about or take inspiration from.

Some more recent historical fiction books include:

• Daisy Jones & The Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid
• All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr.

In both cases, the author examined a period they were inspired by and crafted beautiful stories out of them.

Examining history has also helped writers when creating their own history for their own world. George R. R. Martin was inspired by the War of the Roses when writing his Song of Ice and Fire series, along with several other historical events.

Your personal history isn’t something to be ignored either. Many works are dedicated to a writer’s past, their experiences, their pain, their joy. Every life is a story. And every story deserves to be told, even if it might seem like no one wants to hear it.

Sometimes, the first place you can find inspiration in is yourself. Writing your life story down may be difficult, but it helps you work through your emotions and reconcile with your past. It may even be that your personal experiences help someone else out in the long run when they read your story.

8. Mythology and Folklore

Like history, mythology offers a wealth of stories to reexamine or recreate. Myths passed down for centuries have been told and retold in multiple ways.

Many cultures have similar types of stories, while others have stories unique to them. Some mythological stories, such as the myth of Icarus or the myth of Pandora’s Box, are well known, but there are plenty of other stories in all countries.

Look at the specific places that interest you. Or look at the myths from your own country. Plenty of writers have taken different myths and retold them:

• Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson series
• J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Silmarillion (which used myths as inspiration for creating their own stories)

These stories are often the basis for new and exciting ideas. Besides retelling them in a new way, writers have found ways to touch on modern issues through the myths whose teachings are universal.

9. Politics

The political climate seems forever turbulent, but that shouldn’t stop a writer. Stories don’t have to be overly political, but they can touch on political topics through metaphor or allegory, as well as touch on a specific issue of the current time.

A great example of the first is Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, which tackles topics such as a fictional government’s influence on the human body and mind through a society that is made up of a specific hierarchy. One of the reasons Brave New World is still timely today is because of how it tackled the issues in 1932 that we still face today.

Like the second, many writers have examined the political issues prevalent in society at the time and wrote to combat it. Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 may have been set in a futuristic society, but Bradbury examined the idea of censorship and the shifting tide of entertainment through the novel.

One doesn’t need to look far to find any political headlines. It might seem overwhelming and tiresome to constantly hear about politics, but like any other major field, navigating an issue through a story might help others out in the long run.

10. Culture

Lastly, think about your culture. Where do you come from? What people groups belong to your heritage? What stories have they told in the past?  

Stories from and about other cultures need to be told. A lot of history—how people live and what they believe in—has been pushed to the side for a long time. These are stories that need to be told. Books such as:

• The House on Mango Street by Sandra Sisneros
• Kira Kira by Cynthia Kadohata

These books depict a specific culture and how the characters navigate various triumphs and challenges.

There’s more to it than we think when it comes to culture too. Everyone has been or will be part of a community or area that is unique. Think of books like Marjorie Kinnan Rawling’s The Yearling, set in the communities in the Florida Everglades, for example. 

The best way to study culture and community is to speak with others about their experiences or look back on your own experience in those sectors. Additionally, reading books by an author from that culture will give you firsthand experience of the culture you wish to study.

Conclusion

In the end, writing isn’t just writing. Look for inspiration everywhere you can find it.

This doesn’t mean that you need to become a “polymath” or master multiple fields of study just to write, but feel free to examine any of the opportunities around you to learn more about the writing craft.

Take the time to look at your own experiences as well. While being a jack of all trades means researching more than one area, you shouldn’t ignore how you got to this point. Writers should take inspiration from anywhere they can find it.

The post 10 Non-Writing Topics that Writers Should Study appeared first on Bookfox.