Boarders Writing a Novel - Thread V

[Zoë Sumra]

Replying to Myrddin at the end of the last thread:

Dreaming up the complex plots and characters is the fun and easy part. Making the outlines and note make sense in compelling prose is the hard and time consuming part. Polishing that prose into something worth sharing harder still.

Disagree, disagree, disagree! I like writing. No, I love it. I wouldn't do it if I didn't: I'd just tell myself stories. Maybe that'll make me a worse writer, in that I'll go, "oh, it'll do" and just push on instead of concentrating on quality. I suppose that's what editing/polishing is for.

Agree with you about the polishing being hard. And very, very annoying. Not so annoying, though, as having a group of characters... and a setting... and part of a plot... and not the rest of the plot.

When I finish this revision, I'm starting a different series.

Rough Diamond, in its present incarnation, is half of a 201K book I'd already written. I therefore technically have a first draft of the second book, though it'll need redoing in patches and significant editing throughout. I'm not going to attack that unlesss I get representation for RD - I'm going to do something different: either RD's standalone prequel, which I've already started, one of a few different SF books that have been floating around for a while, or an urban fantasy involving Greek gods in modern day London. The latter is one of the projects for which I have all characters, a setting and most of a plot, but not all of a plot, and I'm missing the most important bit: not the most fundamental aspect overall, but the front-line part.

And don't forget the reason why GRRM didn't just write the "7" books in his series. He's still got to eat. ;)

True, but reliant upon publication.

There was a bit of a discussion, or a bit of avoiding a discussion, towards the end of the last thread. Without wanting to start a massive argument, my position is:

There's still prejudice in the trad publishing world against self-publishing fiction, due to the vanity route. Self-published books are still effectively barred from being picked up by publishers due to diminution of rights. The average self-published book has quality issues galore, and the book trade often can't sell them - no ISBNs, no trade discounts, no returns - or won't sell them.

However, in the past six months it's become increasingly possible for self-published authors to begin careers via selling ebooks for cheap on Amazon, just as indie bands can sell music via Amazon and iTunes. As the finances improve, it's possible that the other negative aspects of self-publishing may begin to reduce.

I'm still aiming for publication for a whole raft of reasons, including that pesky desire not to be seen as a narcissist, but if I get past the three hundred rejection point or some other arbitrary stage where I decide enough's enough, I may reconsider. By then, the self-published ebook route's impact will be better understood. And, tbh, I've always been a better candidate for self-publishing than many people - I work in the print department of a private publisher, and my working credits include doing cover graphics (for very boring textbooks. I'd hire my sister-in-law for cover art), typesetting, proof-reading and, at the moment, print buying. The ebook process is the only part I've never dealt with on a daily basis. So it's not something I really want to do, but it's an option I'm putting (a very long way) into the background.

[Ebenstone]

I don't think Stu meant that you can't play with the stories or anything like that. I'm of the same school of thought as he is. I've outlined the next three books in my series. Very bare bones with lots of room for expansion or contraction as I see fit.

My series is called Seasons of Destiny and I have it planned for four books: Winter's Discord, Spring's Tempest, Summer's Strife (tentative,it might change to Summer's Sacrifice, though nothing is for sure) and Autumn's Glory. I think it was Stu that suggested keeping it at four books since it balances with the four seasons. IN my mind Summer is a big book, outlined at 72 chapters IIRC (my plan sheets are buried in the spare bedroom) and since I envision these as YA...that's a bit long. But I'm keeping it as such, especially since there is some interest with Winter as a more traditional fantasy now.

As I said, I wrote the first draft of Spring's Tempest, but it's virtually useless since the rewrites on Winter's Discord. Giant chunks of it have no purpose now, but might be salvageable for the third book maybe.

That being said, the funny thing is one of my writing projects I want to occupy myself with is filling in some of the backstory that is really important to my series. My Robert's Rebellion....my tournament at Harrenhal....my plan has been to sort of outline and do a pretty detailed synopsis of the whole story in order for the events of Seasons to make sense. But I stopped doing that because it's a waste of time for right now.

I'm confident (cocky?) enough that I believe that I'm talented enough to get published someday, so I guess on some level I feel I have to do this. But, I'm spinning a lot of plates right now and my time is too valuable to waste time on something like that. I'd rather put my efforts into a new project for the time being.

SO, after that self-indulgent rant, let's do a hook roll call. Tell me about your project using no more than 2 sentences:

My shopped piece: WINTER'S DISCORD: Ben Grange is the third son of a powerful duke, spending his days carousing and avoiding responsibility, but dreaming of something greater. When an attempt is made on his life, a strange and powerful magic awakens within him, reflecting the dark omens plaguing the Kingdom of Galidan, throwing Ben and his friends headlong into a conflict that they don’t entirely understand, leaving them alone to deal with issues of loyalty, friendship and responsibility.

My WIP: JAIMAN ZARACHEK AND THE SISTERS OF KHODA: Weaponmaster Initiate Jaiman Zarachek can’t stop thinking about Ziba Bakhar, who can barely stomach him and his friends, regarding them as undisciplined and extremely overrated as men of war. But when Jaiman and Ziba are separated from their masters while escorting an ambassador’s daughter, they discover things about one another that have repercussions that will change both of their lives. (This is very rough.)

How about you?

[Starkess]

Those are some hefty sentences!

Okay, let me try...

EYE OF THE BEHOLDER: Kerah sa Maneiwon considers herself a failed Keeper and is surprised when the Master Keeper does not agree--in fact, Donlei is sending Kerah on a mission to save Ildor. With the help of only secretive runaway Shrenik, she must discover why the collective knowledge of the Keeper's felines is fading away.

Dunno, not great, but it's off the top of my head. :)

[Ebenstone]

Yeah, I kind of cheat with the super long sentences. I'm the guy that people complain about when I enter hook contests!

[manmiles]

Thought I might as well use this point to jump on the bandwagon of this thread. Admittidly, the story angle was me looking at the original Star Wars movie and thinking 'What if Obi-Wan Kenobi had been the hero of the story, the Old Man with more days behind him than ahead of him and Luke Skywalker the impressionable sidekick?'

'The Silver Blade'

Kira Valor was once one of the world's greatest heroes, but he walked away from it in disgust as he realised that what he had fought for was no better than what he fought against. Twenty years later and Kira is now an old, forgetten farmer in the middle of no-where, but when an old friend finds him, bringing along the daughter of a man Kira once murdered. Kira now finds himself having to return to the fight, not only to train the daughter to unleash her power and potential, but also to fight against the very tyrants and warlords he helped put in power in the first place.

[Arthmail]

Been awhile since i've posted in here with you folks. Since i've taken a breather from my overly long and possibly initially unsellable series (first book is 225k after cutting off 50k and slicing the book in half), i've started a new one and its going pretty well.

So i'll take up Ebenstone's challange, as hard as it actually is.

The Scar: Ishtaran Kandalos, genius and crippled former officer of the famed mercenary company the Iron Swords, travels deep into the magic ravaged waste called the Scar, seeking a source of knowledge lost for 2 ages of the world, but his obsession will lead him and the men with him to a revelation that few of them will survive. In Vassasur, the capital of the merchant state of Rophen, the aging slave Ififos Oboon Ananajii is commanded by the Royal Inquisition to find out who has been murdereing powerful senators, and though aided by the violent Salmalus oc Khonyan, he will find himself thrown into a mystery that even his feared intellect could never concieve.

[Zoë Sumra]

manmiles, welcome to the threads, and I like your premise.

Arthmail, that sounds awfully like two books. :s Probably just sounds like it rather than is, but you could have the same issue Myrddin once had - lack of distillation upon presentation.

Here goes with mine:

ROUGH DIAMOND: Gaia Cardwain, a teenage tearaway, blunders her way to folk-hero status when she attacks an interstellar paramilitary force while on a test flight. Her outright assault on the paramilitaries is confounded by the participants in an interstellar mafia conflict, a mystery space magician and her overbearing mother, teaching her that stopping wars is far more difficult than starting them.

[ErikConrad]

Good idea, esp early in the new thread!

In hushed voices, Southron Lords are plotting to overthrow the king and his weak son, and take back control over the northern lands. The conflict spirals out of their control in THE BROKEN ORDER as James and Daclan, northern lords who grew up like brothers, are coaxed into a course to settle their differences - but they don't go about it as expected.

[Arthmail]

manmiles, welcome to the threads, and I like your premise.

Arthmail, that sounds awfully like two books. :s Probably just sounds like it rather than is, but you could have the same issue Myrddin once had - lack of distillation upon presentation.

Here goes with mine:

ROUGH DIAMOND: Gaia Cardwain, a teenage tearaway, blunders her way to folk-hero status when she attacks an interstellar paramilitary force while on a test flight. Her outright assault on the paramilitaries is confounded by the participants in an interstellar mafia conflict, a mystery space magician and her overbearing mother, teaching her that stopping wars is far more difficult than starting them.

Well, they are both actually pretty heavily connected. I'll explain some of the back story...because sometimes i just want to talk about the damned thing.

So Ififos is actually Ishtaran's slave. They met prior to Ishtaran's crippling leg wound, when as a member of the mercenary Iron Swords, Ishtaran fought against Ififos's father. Ififos at the time was the Exalt-Prince of Zalthajir, but his uncle hired the famed Iron Swords and started a war to usurp the throne. At a random encounter Ishtaran, unknowing of who Ififos is, save's his life. After the Battle of Sanvashi Wells, where Ishtaran is betrayed by elements of his command (led by the son of a senator that has long been enemies of his house), he is captured by Ififos's men. Ififos prevents Ishtaran's execution, but is unable to prevent him getting sent to Rastafik, the darkest prison this side of hell. The Iron Swords win the war for Ififos's uncle, and Ififos is sold into slavery. Two years after that, and totalling five in all, Ishtaran is released from Rastafik with the aid of his optican (sgt.), Salmalus. Returning to Rophen, he finds Ififos has been sold as a slave and buys him. Ownership laws in a merchant run society being what they are, Ishtaran cannot just make Ififos a free man, and with no country to return to (and never having been a good war leader), Ififos elects to stay in Rophen and help Ishtaran rebuild his families fortunes (and their bank). Ten years pass between the occurance of those events and where the story picks up.

Now through his studies, and a rare gift to understand and see Runes even though he is not a Wizard, Ishtaran rebuilds the fortunes of his house, mostly through inventions of Rune crafted items that takes other Wizards years to create. Now, part of that ties in to his learning, and his abilities. But previous to the war in Zalthajir, Ishtaran had found documents detailing the creation of something called Glassteel (tentative name-not really pleased with it, but nothing else has produced itself). What he creates at first is simple, but after his return he smashes two older surviving relics to create Glassteel that has colors within it. But being the obsessive that he is, and knowing that the true power of the Glassteel lies in finding a way to include the colors, he researches as best he can whatever ancient texts he finds his hands on to find a means of creating the colors. Only, it turns out, the last information where it might lay is in the Scar. So he goes.

But with him gone, the Inquisition, fearing traitors within their ranks, is forced to turn to Ififos - they know that if the most creative thinker in the city left his slave in charge of his bank while he was gone, he might have the goods to discover why powerful senators are being killed.

Both plot lines tie in to the larger picture that i began to create with my first, far too long book (which be but one book of a five part series). So they are at the cusp of a coming war, both of them, both inexplicably tied to the same events.

So not two books, but one. Hopefully.

[Ebenstone]

Those are all AWESOME! Exciting sounding projects that humble me! Making me wish I had time for beta reading. I'm going to smugly post some comments/suggestions because I am an obnoxious nit.

Arth- Your backstory clarifies the confusion, but the hook still comes across as two very different books. Now, Eloisa commented on Stu (Myrddin). I read the first section of his book and can tell you that it is ONE self contained story. A very, very good story. I really couldn't make any suggestions to him the way he did to mine. Just keep that in mind. And it's too long. (I'm the frying pan calling the kettle black here. My two hooks are actually entirely too long and bad examples!)

Erik- I'm completely interested in yours. It feels right up my alley!

Nora-LOVE the concept. Too many names. Focus on one character! That was my biggest mistake in query/hook. I've got 5 POV characters. Once I focused on the "main" character, my query and hook sounded a lot better.

Manmiles-Love it. We spend so much time on the farmboy and not the mysterious mentor.

Eloisa- The term tearaway has me interested all by itself. You've got a nice mix of stuff going on in there.

[Starkess]

Nora-LOVE the concept. Too many names. Focus on one character! That was my biggest mistake in query/hook. I've got 5 POV characters. Once I focused on the "main" character, my query and hook sounded a lot better.

Thanks for the tip. I need to try and wrestle my query letter into submission again...sigh.

[emberling]

I'll give it a shot...

The Fist of Tyr - zealous paladins that leave no perceived injustice unpunished - are descending on the remote town of Witherby, following reports of a heretical sorceror raising an army of raiders on the nearby frontier. The new lord of Witherby, however, is insistent in ordering continued research into sorcery right under the Fist's noses, and the scribe Lia, whose mother was killed by the Fist years ago, must find some way to protect herself and her home from their wrath.

I don't know, two sentences is hard. It feels like I'm leaving out so much important detail... which I guess is the point, just cutting it down to the barest possible.

But it's like I can't get to the good parts and it just sounds like Yet Another Fantasy Cliche. Except when I try to think of what the good parts are, they're all spoilers, so I'm probably stuck with it.

[Zoë Sumra]

I don't know, two sentences is hard. It feels like I'm leaving out so much important detail... which I guess is the point, just cutting it down to the barest possible.

The first time I tried to write a synopsis, I found it impossible until I cut down to the barest bones - one sentence, then two, then a paragraph. Cutting down to bare bones is an important skill, IMO, because like Ebenstone said, it focuses your presentation in querying.

Which is my beef with the two-sentence description Arthmail wrote! I've no doubt that, like Ebenstone (again!!) mentions in light of Myrddin's work, it's one very deeply connected book. Just, your two-sentence pitch doesn't feel like it. I immediately want to ask how the bits are connected (because you don't connect them overtly in the two sentences). And you told me, and the explanation worked, and was very interesting (and talking about books is fun!). But an agent might not give you that long to explain it.

To give an example - in the overarching context of the story arc of which Rough Diamond is a part, the second most important plot aspect of RD, after Gaia's tempestuousness leading her to become Space-Batwoman, is the "mystery space magician" whose existence I throw away here in less than half a sentence. He's a subplot character in this book (or looks like it), and there isn't any real way to link him in two sentences to the Gaia-driven main plot. So out the explanation goes.

(The third most important plot aspect of RD doesn't even get a mention here. Too weird, and presented in-book as too peripheral.)

It's a matter of balancing what you see as really important against what someone else would understand when given a tiny snapshot. When you have the time to give people a bigger snapshot, the canvas becomes much more expansive. :)

[Ebenstone]

Kurokaze-it's supposed to be hard.

My book is 130k. I had to condense that down to under 400 words in query. Reading how big some of your projects are (225k plus), it's going to be very, very difficult. And for a hook I had to condense it down even more. It's a difficult skill to master. I'm still not there yet. Look at how much I cheated in my hooks. They are long sentences. I actually have a better, shorter hook that's been effective at winning a couple of hook contests, which is how I got my first agent way back when.

Like Eloisa, there is more to my novel than just what I said, but I had to choose the central storyline and try to sell that. Sure I left out tons in my hook and even my query, but I talked about the MAIN story and the "MAIN" character.

I'm not trying to discourage or act like I'm some kind of guru, I'm just a veteran of the query wars sharing what little I know. Wait until I get published. You're all going to HATE me then. I'm going to become like Ronald Chevalier from the Gentleman Broncos.

[Starkess]

Finally pulled out my notes and got back to Eyes-draft-2 which will hopefully soon be Eyes-draft-3-ready-to-be-queried. I both like it more than I expected and hate it too. Sigh. Some of my notes are easily fixed (ie standardized capitalization) and some are...not (ie "Last scene needs work.").

Yay for editing!

[Arthmail]

Arth- Your backstory clarifies the confusion, but the hook still comes across as two very different books. Now, Eloisa commented on Stu (Myrddin). I read the first section of his book and can tell you that it is ONE self contained story. A very, very good story. I really couldn't make any suggestions to him the way he did to mine. Just keep that in mind. And it's too long. (I'm the frying pan calling the kettle black here. My two hooks are actually entirely too long and bad examples!)

Little different than many different books out there. Kearney's Monarchies of God has widely divergent story lines. I mean, for a goodly amount of time in the first book of PoN, different characters.

My characters can communicate over a distance, so...it is what it is.

[Ebenstone]

Little different than many different books out there. Kearney's Monarchies of God has widely divergent story lines. I mean, for a goodly amount of time in the first book of PoN, different characters.

My characters can communicate over a distance, so...it is what it is.

I'm only vaguely familiar with Kearney's work and I've never been able to get into PoN. Kearney was established. But using Bakker as an example, here's a chunk from the Amazon description:

It's a world scarred by an acopalyptic past, evoking a time both two thousand years past and two thousand years into the future, as untold thousands gather for a crusade. Travelling among them, two men and two women are ensnared by a mysterious traveler, Anasurimbor Kellhus—part warrior, part philosopher, part sorcerous, charismatic presence—from lands long thought dead. The Darkness that Comes Before is a history of this great holy war, and like all histories, the survivors write its conclusion.

Now if I had to guess, I'd wager that he focused on Kellhus in the hook.

Again, you've got TWO good story ideas, you've just got to figure out a better way to describe them as part of ONE story.

[Bronn is God]

I am enjoying reading what everyone WIP is, great idea!

Maybe you could also add what you think makes your work special. Its hard to determine that from just the outline of the plot alone.

Keep up the good work all :thumbsup: :thumbsup:

[ErikConrad]

Starkess - Shouldn't you incorporate the animal familiars in the 2sentence hook?

Kurokaze - Maybe it helps to focus more on the characters? It's not clear who the main protagonist is. Also, personally I'd be careful with a name like 'Tyr' - it's quite overused

Ebenstone - Thanks! Your (and other experienced boarders') guru-ing is much appreciated

[Ebenstone]

Finally pulled out my notes and got back to Eyes-draft-2 which will hopefully soon be Eyes-draft-3-ready-to-be-queried. I both like it more than I expected and hate it too. Sigh. Some of my notes are easily fixed (ie standardized capitalization) and some are...not (ie "Last scene needs work.").

Yay for editing!

Go team Nora!

In all seriousness, I'm on draft 6 of Winter's Discord. And I know I'm looking at one more for sure (one agent has already told me he has notes) up to 3-4 more drafts before it'll see the light of day. Do you have betas? Betas are important. Mine MADE my book what it is!

Bronn- That's a great request. That's what the querying process is all about. The fact that I can't think of a something to say here on a dime could be part of my problem.

I suppose that my work is intended to be a teen A Song of Ice and Fire, something I don't see on the shelves. I also am targeting a male audience with lots of sports allusions in a medieval context.