Tag: #amwriting

I Love a Deadline

~ Philip Shepherd ~ Leave a comment

I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.

—Douglas Adams

Deadlines are meant to induce stress. I know none of us wants more stress in our lives (do you?), but most writers I know struggle with two things: discipline and focus. A reasonable deadline helps with both.

A little bit of stress focuses me on completing a task. A definite deadline can keep your bottom in the chair and your fingers on the keys much better than “inspiration,” that fickle muse, ever could.

How do you set valid deadlines, so they don’t just whoosh by as they did for Douglas Adams?

As I have found by completing more of my first draft in a month and a half than the previous year, you fix a penalty for not achieving a word count. I do dislike word counts as they become a target and I am an underwriter, so I usually fall short of any desired word count and add fluff words just to pan things out and use words.

Having put all that into consideration, I would recomend that you set up deadlines and don’t make a self-reminder or self-incrimination act to reprimand yourself for missing it. What you need is someone else to carry out the forfeit. Money is usually the best way to do this. Give someone £100 and have weekly deadlines, say Fridays so that you submit work every Friday and if you miss more than two Fridays they get to keep the £100.

It works fine for myself.

My First Draft Update

~ Philip Shepherd ~ 1 Comment

This update is about my progress to my first draft of my first novel in crime fiction. I am on Day 38 of 100 on a course called Write a Book in 100 Days, by The Write Practice.
Here are my observations:
1. The course is $100 more expensive, but if you complete your weekly deadlines of posting the 4,500 words you wrote during that week for 15 weeks, then you will have the money returned. While you reach a total of 65,000 words after 100 days.
I have to say, this type of deadline pressure does help you find the time and actually to meet the word count. Although, you can miss two deadlines of the course and still receive the $100 refund.
2. There are about 140 students on this course, and we are embedded in groups of 10 people. Each week on Fridays I have to submit my chapter. Before the next Friday, I have to read at least three other people’s submissions and critique their work.
This critique of 2000 to 7000 words is not as easy as it sounds. As it is a first draft then spelling, grammar and punctuation is not an issue. Not even ‘Show, don’t tell’ is an issue you can highlight.
I often write at the top of my submission that all I am interested in is how fast it is progressing and what the voice of the narration sounds like to the reader.
I have to congratulate Joe Bunting in creating such a helpful course.

The Characters within your Story

~ Philip Shepherd ~ Leave a comment

Character Traits

At the end of the day, the characters are the most critical part of your story. They’re the ones with which your readers empathise; they’re the ones your readers will finish the book to follow. Some people have told me to write backstories and investigate every detail of their lifestyle so I can use them in a way that is consistent.

Here’s my simple principle: whatever makes it into the window frame of your story has to either impact your characters somehow or at least impact a role in a way that will grab your reader’s attention.

Build up your new world. Play and have fun. Go crazy with them. Then when it comes to your story, just make sure that the parts are seen through the window frame matter to the characters. It’s not who the characters are at the beginning, it’s what they do within the timeframe of your story. Their actions are what people see of them. A personality whom is merely upset and looks downwards is very different from a character that stands tall and slaps the face of the other actor that said something nasty.

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.

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.”