Category: How to

Why We Critique

~ Philip Shepherd ~ Leave a comment

It’s simple to avoid giving this kind of feedback for a lot of reasons. It can be incredibly time-consuming. This morning at 9 am I started to critique three separate chapters from three different people. Each chapter was around four thousand words long. I had not only to read but understand and interpret the chapter. After that, I had to find two things I liked so that I could sandwich the constructive critique between them. It can also be challenging to provide a robust feedback to a writer you don’t know very well or at all. It would be easier just to say, “Great story!” but that is not helpful, in any way at all. When you give feedback to an author, you help them develop and learn more about what styles and interactions help information to be passed on to the reader.

Different Characters in a Novel

~ Philip Shepherd ~ Leave a comment

PRIMARY CHARACTERS
I enjoy this part. I do have a folder with pictures of people I found on the web. It’s like getting to know a good friend. Once you have your primary characters, give them an A4 sheet of paper each. Write down everything about them. I have a questionnaire on their details.
Their name, appearance, personality, relationships, friends, motivations, the past, present, goals, significant events in their lives, where they live, their religion, culture, family, etc.
Just get to know them. You do need back stories of what happened to them before the time of your novel. I love doing that with the characters I create, and I get to know them very well.

SECONDARY CHARACTERS
These are the characters that are important to your story, but not as important as your primary characters. Write up about a paragraph for each of them. This is to give you an idea of their attitude, personality, back story and motives, as I also have photos of these people.

TERTIARY CHARACTERS
These are the characters that only appear once or twice and are never heard from again. Now, although they are tertiary characters, all of them are still significant, and you should stay in touch with what happened before the story. Note down all of their names on a piece of paper and their purpose, so you don’t forget them. Again, I keep photos and outlines of every character in Scrivener.

There’s More to Writing a Book Than Just Writing

~ Philip Shepherd ~ Leave a comment

So, I’ve always loved the spy or crime genre.
I prefer reading mostly fiction.
That’s fine but, I didn’t spend much time reading non-fiction subjects outside my personal comfort zone.
Now, reading an easy book is okay for somebody whose career doesn’t involve moving around words and ideas, but it’s poison for the new and want-to-be author.
Here’s the truth of the situation:
When becoming an author, then reading and research on the subject area is part of your role.
You must spend time reading outside of your comfort zone, reading the work of authors you admire and the books of authors you detest.
You must take notes, write down and learn to arrange your ideas before you start your book.
Once you start a novel, I just lept into it and was a pantser. I got to about 14,000 words and sat back and thought, “Oh, what happens next?”
Also, after writing just one sentence, I looked at it and edited away. It is so hard to read some text and find the grammatical or word errors and not correct the text.

The First Line Fears

~ Philip Shepherd ~ Leave a comment

The first sentence in a novel is more critical than it appears. What is the author’s intention when a reader starts a book of a few hundred pages?
I intend to create a reader that starts to use their imagination and brings up questions that arise when the subject of the story takes them into areas that intrigue them. I’m writing in first person narration and found a few opening sentences that are remembered worldwide:
“I’m pretty much fucked.” – The Martian by Andy Weir.
“Call me Ishmael.” – Moby Dick by Herman Melville.
“I am an invisible man.” – Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison.

A first sentence should give the reader an insight as to what is going to come within the story and a few questions.

Your Target Audience

~ Philip Shepherd ~ Leave a comment

What is Your Target Audience?

Without your target audience, you cannot market and sell your book to specific readers. For a significant amount of the time writers consider that they can target a broad group of the population. This is not precisely correct. The genre you want to write has many sub-genre groups. The best way to attract your target audience is to focus on the medium between the broad and narrow.

A way to find this audience is to ask yourself these questions:
* For who am I writing the novel?
* How old are they?
* What gender are they?
* Where do they live?
* What is their financial situation?
* How much education have they obtained?
* What films do they like?
* What tv series do they watch?

A tip: Don’t be afraid of a small target audience. The audience that meet all these questions are the people that are going to be 100% devoted to you and your novels if you do your research correctly.

100 Days to a First Draft

~ Philip Shepherd ~ Leave a comment

Next week begins the 100 days course that should help me produce my first draft. The WritePractice is helping me.
My novel did start its way by pantsing. I got to about 14000 words and lost my way. It was at this time I sat back and thought I should outline, and do some research into the subject areas within my story.
Firstly I did a Creative writing course on Udemy and found out my English was fairly bad. That needed some work and practice. My comma splices were plentiful but that got corrected by sentence diagrams which I learned through the English Grammar Revolution.

As my intended protagonist was a private investigator; I did a foundation course on being a private investigator by Rockwell Private Investigators.
Being sure my P.I. was going to encounter dead bodies; I did a Forensic Science and Profiling course, that was very interesting and cheap as I got it from GroupOn.

While all this was going on, I researched what was favourable about Shakespeare and why his work is still popular after four hundred years. I came across the rhythm of English and the Iambic pentameter, that was used by William Shakespeare, the master of the Iam.
I also looked at memorable characters in movies and tv and why they were so accepted. For instance; Basil Fawlty, the worst, hateful owner of a hotel in history, but he was admired so much, why?

Word Counts & POV

~ Philip Shepherd ~ Leave a comment

WORD COUNT
The word count is how long you want the finished manuscript. It’s always beneficial to have a rough guess of this, as it helps you outline and plan your story as a whole piece of work. Much of the time it ends up to the writer themselves and how long they envision the story being. However, there is a rough estimate for word count lengths of adult fiction stories:
– Short story: 500 – 10,000 words.
– Novella: 10,000 – 40,000 words
– Novel: 40,000 – over
– Adult Fiction (commercial and literary): 80,000 – 100,000 words
– Science and Fantasy Fiction: 90,000 – 150,000 words
– Romance: 50,000 – 100,000 words
– Historical Fiction: 70,000 – 100,000 words
– Crime/Mystery/Thriller/Horror Fiction: 70,000 – 90,000 words
– Young Adult Fiction: 50,000 – 80,000
– Non-Fiction: is different.

POV
The Point Of View or POV is the view that your story comes from, and how you tell it. There are four main POV’s:
* First Person POV – This is a narration of one character’s view. Within the story, the text is not allowed to show anyone else’s thoughts or anything the narrator cannot see, hear, feel or smell. The narrator is always in every scene as they are telling the story. Things should always be told in the past tense.
* Second Person POV – This is instructions like; You say, “Blah, blah.” You have an idea of what the event is as you use your imagination by taking the instructions and feeling what it would be like if you, the reader were to do those things. It’s not good for long novels but is more suited to short stories.
* Third Person POV, limited – Third person limited point of view is a method of storytelling in which the storyteller or narrator knows only the thoughts, feelings and scenes of a single character, while other characters are presented externally. Third person limited presents a writer more independence than the first person, but less knowledge than third person omniscient.
* Third Person POV, omniscient – The third person omniscient point of view is a way of storytelling where the narrator knows the thoughts, feelings and senses of all of the characters in the story. This third person is not the same as the third-person limited, a point of voice that adheres strictly to one character’s perspective, it’s usually the protagonist.

What is your Story About?

~ Philip Shepherd ~ Leave a comment

Well, what is your story really about?
This is a question you need to ask yourself all the time when you type one word with another on its way to the last one. I’m not discussing the unique notion idea you pitch at parties where you say your novel is about a woman, from wherever, who does this, and that occurs when she’s not entirely paying attention. It’s about what your story is about on a theme level. What does it mean to you personally? What are you telling about the world with your fiction? What in the hell is it really about?
It’s that secret hard-drive, concealed deep in the sub-conscious that urges you to get up too early and stay up late hammering out the words at the laptop or computer. Some of us write due to anger, and some of us write because of our sadness.

The only way to establish what it is you are writing is to sit in that oh so familiar position of a pen in hand and write down a list:
Ten things that make you upset,
Ten things that make you sad…

Endings that Kick you in the Face

~ Philip Shepherd ~ Leave a comment

A great ending is just as important as a hook and exceptional opening chapter. The reader has been kind enough to buy your novel and read it to the final critical pages. It’s advisable to give them an ending that will kick them in their backside, and send them out to get the next novel in a series or just another stand-alone story of yours.
Excellent conclusions to the story give the reader what they want but not in the way they anticipated. It reads smoothly, but it’s not. Keep in mind of the ending of your novel’s three-act structure with twists and climaxes, reversals, impediments and new plans. When you’re novel is over, end it. That protagonist in the first act who had the excellent car and has said a few iambic pentameter memorable lines of dialogue; to the hell with them — we don’t care where he ended up.

As the ‘B’-movie master; Roger Corman once said, “When the monster is dead, the movie is over.”

It’s More Interesting to have a Murder in a Novel

~ Philip Shepherd ~ Leave a comment

If you’re writing a crime novel, then dark and awful things, sourced from the madness of your soul, need to happen. A crime novel without an offence isn’t a crime novel, and a straight-up murder isn’t going to cut it anymore. Give your culprits unique and differing reasons to be offenders. The crooked character in a story never knows they’re the antagonist. In their story, they’re the right guy. The protagonist is as active as the forces of antagonism they are opposing. Give them something to go up against, so they have a juicy match. As I said, ‘A murder or nine, is more interesting.’

*Note: Killers never kills someone because they’re mad, there is always an extra reason to pull the character out of complacency and into murder.

An exercise in this model would be to take the ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ story and re-write it in the first person POV from the wolf’s perspective. While in that mode I’m sure you will see that the wolf can think and do many things that are fine with him.