Insight from some of the top names in publishing:
Jennifer Silva Redmond, Editor-in-Chief, Sunbelt Publications
Matthew Pallamary, Author, Teacher, Writing Guru
Sally Van Haitsma, Literary Agent
Molly Lewis, Publisher, ZOVA Books
Marisa Corvisiero, Literary Agent & Attorney
Recorded at the Southern California Writers’ Conference.
Premature E-publication: Are You Publishing Too Soon? from Ninety Degrees Media on Vimeo.
If you’re a writer wanting to build your author platform, you need to be on LinkedIn.
When asked which is my favorite social networking site I can’t choose. Facebook offers photo albums, videos viewable in the news feed, and connections to old friends and family. Twitter gives me short bursts of information from many different directions. LinkedIn links me to the business community. YouTube provides videos on just about anything you want to learn. If I had to make a choice, I’d say LinkedIn just because it supplies me with something very important – traffic to my website.
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Because writers like to write a lot of us have blogs, but just because a writer knows how to write doesn’t mean they know how to blog. I’ve visited more than one blog maintained by a writer that did not capture my interest and probably didn’t rank high in search engine results.
Key 1: Keywords and phrases To have a successful blog it needs to be found among the millions of others out there being crawled by search engines like Yahoo and Google. So the first key to unlocking the success of your blog is keywords. These are words and phases you use especially in your title and first paragraph, as well as throughout the post, that let search engines know what your blog entry is about. To figure out which words and phrases are key, use a keyword look up tool, like the one Google offers for its AdWords. Yes, this goes against what we learned as writers – to try to vary our words and phrases, and not repeat any one of them too many times. But writing for online is not like writing for print.
I’ve been so busy lately producing videos that I haven’t had a chance to write a blog post, and blogging is something I have to do to build my author platform. Having video about you, and your books is another good way of building your author platform. Book trailers and author pitch videos are popping up all over the web, so I thought I’d blog about how authors can make videos to help them market their writing.
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Writing for magazines can be fun and sometimes you can even get paid to write an article. First you need to brainstorm some ideas. In On Writing Well William Zinsser says, “No area of life is stupid to someone who takes it seriously. If you follow your affections you will write well and will engage your readers.”
Before forming an article idea take a look at yourself and those around you. Make a list of your own skills and interests, and a list of the interesting people you know—including friends of friends. What and who do you deal with in your daily life? Even if you work in a car wash others could benefit from your experience, because you could write about how to avoid damage to a car when it goes through the mechanism. Everything, even the simplest tasks, could result in a writing prompt. A friend of mine sold a piece to a glossy magazine about organizing family photos. If you don’t have an exciting career or a fascinating hobby, look at the people around you. I knew a lady who owned a massage school, so between interviewing her and the contacts she gave me, I wrote something about the benefits of massage.
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If you’re looking for a literary agent or want to get published, you should have a Facebook page for either yourself or your proposed book. This is an essential part of building your author platform. It’s like when you’re trying to sell a product you have to establish the brand. Which soda would you buy, a Dr. Pepper or a Mr. Teddy? You’d go for the more familiar brand. In the same way, literary agents and publishers look for an author people already know, like and trust.
In “Building Your Author Platform” book marketing coach Dana Lynn Smith said, “To sell books in today’s marketplace, you need to be connected.” One of the connections she recommends is online communities such as Facebook, which is a popular choice. Facebook is now used by one in every 13 people on earth, with over 250 million of them logging in every day.
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The beginning of a new year is a good time to think about how we begin our stories. When you pick up a novel or short story where do you start reading? Most people start on page one, so when you’re writing a story you want a strong beginning to get your reader invested. Ever read the first paragraph and not want to stop? Which books were those?
In teaching we begin a lesson with an “anticipatory set”, which means we try to relate the concept we’re gong to teach with one the student is already familiar with. For instance, if I were to give a class on weather, I might start by asking, “What do you see when it rains?” This gets the students thinking in the right direction and gets them to wonder where I might be going with that setup.
While writing the beginning of your story, consider what questions will be raised in your reader’s mind. Wanting to discover the answers is what will keep them reading. The trick is how to get them to ask themselves those compelling questions. The three common ways writers accomplish this is through character, setting, and action.
Sometimes you meet a person and within seconds you know you want to get to know them better. If your character shows a lot charisma in the first paragraph, you’ll hook your reader. My favorite example of this is in Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Begin the story with a character the reader wants to spend time with and they’ll stick around.
Maybe your characters aren’t enough to hook your readers, in which case you can intrigue them with the setting. Create a place where people will want to hang out in a corner and watch what’s going on, like the small town lunch spot Fannie Flagg describes on the first page of Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café. The reader will keep reading if they feel a strong connection to the setting, but they won’t read much more if nothing happens.
Watch the opening scene of a TV crime show like, Law & Order, and it’s usually not the character or the setting, but the action that gets the viewer’s attention. Remember a story comes about from how your character reacts to a situation, and the reader can’t see that unless you create the circumstances. Sara Megibow, literary agent at the Nelson Literary Agency, says, “The story must begin with tension, trouble or an interesting scene. Description and detail should leak out over time.” But avoid cliché beginnings like a phone ringing or somebody being shot without first setting up the scene.
Also, please don’t begin your story with “It was a dark and stormy night”, unless you’re going to teach a lesson about weather.
Santa Barbara Writers Conference founder Barnaby Conrad talks about using setting in the beginning of your novel at the June 2008 conference.
Writing better dialogue starts with character development. What does their voice quality and style of speech tell your readers about the character? Now think about their educational background, favorite subject, personality type, and basic nature. How can these influence how you write that character’s dialogue?
Do any of your friends have distinctive styles of speech or use certain phases consistently? Most people have favorite expressions and they can tell a lot about the person: where they’re from, how old they are, how educated they are, what they like, etc.. In some parts of the country it’s called “pop” and in others it’s called “soda”, some people call their mother “Mom” and others call them “Momma”. A scientist might say “scat”, where a child would say “doo doo”, and somebody else “dung”. A person who idealizes a celebrity may try to imitate their speech patterns.
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Once you’ve fleshed out your characters you have to decide how to tell the story. Whose eyes will the reader see through and how much information will they get? This is a question of Point of View (POV). Types of point of view include first person, third person, omniscient, objective, and second person.
First person is when the story is told with an “I” voice. Usually the “I” is the protagonist or hero, but doesn’t have to be. For instance, in To Kill a Mockingbird the narrator is Scout and the protagonist is her father. The advantage of first person is it allows a potential for a greater degree of intimacy with the character. The drawback is the reader can only know what the narrator knows. In a first person story be careful of using phrases like “I smiled” because a smile is a visual we don’t see ourselves doing. Instead the first person character could tell us how she felt—“a warmth filled my whole body.” Also consider the narrator’s background. If he’s under educated, it would be out of place for an “I” character to use big, fancy words.
Third person takes a step back and lets the reader see the character from the outside. This viewpoint can vary in its limitation. “He” or “She” may be used like the “I” in first person where we see through the eyes of the character and know only what the character knows. If you establish this internal third person perspective, you don’t have to worry about including phases such as “he thought” or “She felt”. You could also limit the third person POV so the reader sees the character from the outside and has only partial access to his thoughts. But remember the reader isn’t privy to any other characters feelings, except through what is seen on the outside. This is a common POV error. It jolts the reader when you are in one person’s head then you jump into another character’s head.
Omniscient is the POV to employ if you want to go inside all the characters’ heads. Other advantages include the ability of interjecting storyteller judgments about the characters and comments about events the characters are unaware of. Omniscient POV is found mainly in classic literature and short stories. Most modern mainstream authors shy away from it because it’s difficult to engage today’s readers with a truly omniscient novel. What you do see are novels written from the perspective of a group of characters. But in that case the author stays in one character’s head at a time, and changes the POV to another in the next scene. Sometimes exceptions are made when a scene is in one POV and another POV character’s thoughts are heard, but the interjection of those thoughts should be in a separate paragraph.
Objective POV is when the reader is not allowed into anybody’s head, neither the author nor the characters. The only information given is through description, dialogue and action. It’s like seeing it on the screen or acted on a stage.
Second Person, where the author uses “you” as a character, is rarely employed but I’ve seen it work in short stories and poetry, or interjected into portions of a novel. In this case the “you” is not used as comments to the reader, but as the same as the “I”, “he” or “she”. When the POV is “you” the effect for the reader is a bit surreal because it forces them to see the story as if they were the character. This makes this POV even more intimate than first person.
What does this mean for your story? A lot of factors play into which POV you chose. One element to consider is who is the story being told to? If it’s being told to another character the teller might censor. But if it’s being written as a diary, the teller may assume their thoughts are entirely private. This brings up the question, how intimate you want your readers to be with your characters? And how much information the audience needs to know to hold their attention? For instance you’d use first person for a detective story because if the reader knew more than the detective the mystery might not be as mysterious.
An advantage of third person is the writer can vary how we see the character, sometimes internal like with first person and sometimes stepping back for an outward view. But be careful not to accidentally slip into another character’s POV, unless you have more than one POV character. Multiple POVs can give the reader more information, but at this point you may not want to venture into this difficult form of writing. But as you read fiction take note of how the author uses multiple viewpoints. In a 2004 bestseller, one character assists the protagonist (hero) then turns out to be the antagonist (villain). I won’t mention the title in case you haven’t read it, but we don’t know the antagonist’s true intent because we are not in his viewpoint until the crucial moment. In this case the author’s choice of POV characters upped the tension.
When the time comes for you to enlist multiple viewpoints, keep in mind that all of the POV characters should have a parallel, contrasting, or complementary goal in order to keep the story going.
The main concern for selecting a POV is which character will be a focal part of the action. Review the goals you put down in your Character Profiles, and decide which one has the most at stake. Chances are this will be your protagonist and your narrator. Even if he isn’t the hero, the POV must come from somebody who will experience the conflict raised by the struggle to achieve the agenda, and who will be changed by the outcome. After all stories are made by characters taking action to get what they want.
When asked what makes a story tick, Jack Canfield, co-author of the Chicken Soup for the Soul books, said he’s noticed a common tread. “More dialogue and more character development. It’s the way somebody is described, often in only a few words, that makes the character stand out.”
Here’s an example from The Travels of Jamie McPheeters by Robert Lewis Taylor: “When it came to balkiness of disposition, there wasn’t scarcely anything to choose from between her and a mule. Not that she wasn’t sweet; I think probably her sweetest expressions were when she was having her bullheadedest notions.” In just two sentences we already know quite a lot about this character.
Author Rita Mae Brown compares creating characters to distilling liquor. She says we take bits and pieces of people and boil them down into a composite that becomes a character.
An exercise I give my students is I hand them each a card with a couple of sentences about a character I’ve stolen from books, television, history, or movies. By the time my students have written a page based on the few words on the cards, you’d never guess where I’d gotten the characters. So remember, part of writing is creative theft.
Once you conceive a character you have to flesh them out, and reveal them through action, dialogue, and conflict.This is where my 50 questionCharacter Profile PDF comes in. A lot of the questions have to do with what the characters do and where they go, especially numbers 15 and 20 through 24. This is how they SHOW their personalities. Do they camp on their vacations or do they go to an amusement park?
Number 6 asks about their style of speech and their favorite expressions. This gives the reader an idea of the character’s background, education, age, and state of mind. Do they have a low self-esteem? Are they ex-hippies? Do they project themselves on other people? All this can be shown through dialogue.
The plot of the story can be taken from the answers to questions 29, 30 and 31. What does the character really want, and what gets in the way? The essence of character is their ability to care about something. The protagonist cares about their goal, and the antagonist cares about keeping the protagonist away from that goal. This is one way to build conflict in your story, and conflict in turn strengthens the plot.
Another way to provide conflict is to show how character react to each other—see question 38.
Answer these fifty questions for each of your main characters. When looking over the results of the profiles you need to carefully select the details to go in your story. What will cause action and reaction? Don’t try to use all the information from the profile or you’ll overwhelm your readers. But every answer to the questions is valuable because it will remind you who your character is.
