Litteris

Stakes are part of the holy trinity of writing (goals-conflicts-stakes), and because if that, a lot of the advice given is on raising them as high as possible. Don't get me wrong, this is good advice, but it dawned on me recently that quieter stakes might actually be easier to write.

The first pages of your story create an instant impression of its quality and value. Agents, acquisition editors, reviewers and potential buyers standing in a store or scanning the First Pages feature on Amazon – are all going to keep reading or skip to the next candidate, depending on how they respond to your opening.

As a developmental editor, I often work with authors to reconstruct, revise, and create completely new openings. It’s a challenge editors face often, and it’s one of the most essential. Here are some of the main issues and how to solve them.

The outside world is full of triggers. If I don’t warn you of one it’s not out of malice Continue reading...

A story with high stakes and deadly dangers can still bore you to tears. Equally, a character folding laundry while contemplating life’s absurdities can be deeply moving and affecting. 

While there’s probably more to work with if your story is about an exploding volcano than creased shirts and an ironing board, the fact that neither subject-matter guarantees how the story will be received demonstrates that whatever it is that draws readers into a tale, it isn’t just a matter of sticking a character in a perilous situation and seeing how they cope. 

So what is it that grabs a reader and keeps them engaged through many hundreds of pages?

There are some good reasons to keep secondary characters (both friend and foe) fixed in how you represent them in a story. 

A lot of these kinds of characters  aren’t going to be in the story all that much and they have specific roles to play. Whether it’s to move the plot along or reveal aspects of the main character, playing a supporting role doesn’t always benefit from too much fiddling. 

You also don’t want to confuse the reader with a constantly changing cast that makes it hard to remember who’s who. Nor do you want to steal focus from the main players by going off on a tangent. But then, you also don’t want to create a roster of one-dimensional automatons who walk on to the page to deliver the same old shtick every time, like a bad sitcom. 

So how do you balance the two? And do you need to?

Here’s what most writers do, and why they fail: They come up with an interesting character and an interesting situation, and then they start writing to see where it’ll go. They figure that both the story and the character will come clear to them as they write. What they end up with is a narrative that’s basically just a bunch of things that happen.