Importance of Opinions

This week I used some of my connections (this ladies and gentlemen is called networking, and it gets more people jobs than anything else) and managed to get a couple of people, 7 to be exact, to tell me what they thought of the title, summary, and first three chapters of my book.

This survey-ish thing has not been completed as of yet. But I have gained some valuable information from it, actually.

When each of them sent me a message volunteering, I sent them back this:

Please give me complete honesty, don’t try to spare my feelings. If you think something doesn’t fit, or it could be done better, or you just think it stinks, please tell me. That’s exactly what I need to know.

1.       You’re looking at a shelf of books and you see the title “Beguiled”

Does it catch your interest?

Yes

No

Depend on what the cover arts is (In the words of my friend “Of course I’m going to judge a book by its cover, that’s what covers are for!”)

I’m just looking for anything to read, so I’ll check out the summary

2.       Let’s say that you do pick up the book. You turn to the back/inside flap and read the summary

Erin was willing to give her life for her cause. Aviel was willing to do just about anything to prove to his father that he was worthy of his position. Unfortunately when the two first meet, she’s in a cell for trying to give her life for her cause and he has to learn why to be worthy.

The deeper the two delve into the truth behind true loyalty and honest revenge, though, the more they learn that nothing is like it seems and the only people they can trust are the ones least likely — each other.

And your honest reaction is…? If you could tell me pretty much exactly what you thought when you read it, or what you automatically assume about the book.

3.       Do you read the first chapter/couple of pages?

Yes

No

Still bored and looking for a book, so sure

4.     What if a friend had told you that they liked the book?

Still Yes
I'm bored, s/he said it was a good book, sure I'll read a few pages.
I'm hesitant, but I trust my friend enough to read a few pages
Even with their recommendation, eh.
Still no.

If yes, email me at [vinshire.sisters@gmail.com]

If no, thank you for your help! If you didn’t explain why not when you explained your reaction to the summary, please do.

The summary I came up with in like 15 minutes for the purposes of this. The last time I wrote up my summary was for the first draft before I made some serious changes.

I actually got a lot of good feedback. 

By the time I finished responding to the people who wanted to help (someone just contacted me this morning about it actually) the summary looked more like this:

Erin was willing to give her life for her cause. Aviel was willing to do just about anything to prove to his father that he was worthy to take his late brother's position as heir to the throne. Unfortunately when the two first meet, she's in a prison cell for trying to give her life for her cause and he has to learn why to be worthy.

The normal punishment for spying, the punishment all her predecessors faced, is death. Aviel saves her though, on the chance that she'll be the Rebel that will explain the reasoning behind the past five years of destruction. The explanation is nothing like what he expected — and the truth even worse.

But the deeper the two delve into that truth and the secrets behind true loyalty and revenge, the more they learn that nothing is like it seems and the only people they can trust are the ones least likely: each other.


If they responded that they would be interested enough to look at the first few pages there in the bookstore/library (which most everyone has said they would - one person said that she wouldn't if it was the first summary, but she would with the second) I sent them the first chapter with a new set of questions, the last of which was "Are you still interested". If they responded yes to that one, I sent the them the second with its questions, and then the third. 

So far only one person has made it all the way through Chapter 3, but the majority of my test subjects have responded on the first. 

The results have been very helpful. I feel a lot more confident about some of the choices that I made recently. I told you last week how I decided to add a second character's POV instead of keeping it limited to the main character the whole book. So far the responses to that have been that it fits and it's helpful. Because of the situation I can do a lot more explaining about the world and situation through his perspective than hers. 

But at the same time, at least one person opened my eyes with the comment "I kinda really want to know more background information, but ... I must have patience. " to the fact... that there isn't really much world building to be spoken of. So I realized that I really had to knuckle down and do some of that. (And I actually used one of our own articles, actually written by Margaret: World Building 101 - Margaret is a crazy insane world builder. Think Lord of the Rings world building status)

A lot of people told me that there were a couple of cliches, but for first impressions that's not what I'm totally trying to avoid.

I've also learned that friends have a lot of influence on the type of books we read. Almost every person said that they really take their friends suggestions for books into consideration. Which is probably really good for me.

We've talked on this blog before about the extreme Importance of Writing Buddies (if you don't have one, I beg of you to please find one. They are probably more useful to you in writing than anything else), but we also have to remember that for must of us our audience isn't our writing buddy that's also trying to write and is trained to notice any and all flaws so you and themselves have as few as possible... your audience is (for most us at least that are under 20) your friends. The regular people who are looking for something good to read. Sometimes they're not even looking for something good (though they should be).

Even if your book is a literary masterpiece, it's got to appeal to the audience. Maybe you're looking at the wrong audience and you need to adjust thusly. But they're the ones that will or will not be buying your book. And it your goal for them TO buy the book. So it's important to know what they're actually thinking.

We have an advantage in this over the rest of the writers appealing to our audience, because most of us actually are a part of the audience. We go to school with our audience. We know what they're actually reading, know what their actual opinions are. 

Of course that's not always true. Margaret's home schooled, she doesn't spend 6 hours at a High School with 2,000 teenagers. But for most of us, that's a big advantage. We're reading the books aimed at our audience and we know what there's too much of and too little of.

I now know from experience that it's actually a really valuable experience.

You might have a different experience than I do with this obviously. I contacted most of these people online. You might be able to do the same, if you are home schooled or don't interact with a lot of people the same age as your audience. I just posted a little ad in the other story that I write that I needed people to help me with a project I was working on, all you needed to give me was your time and your opinion.

If you do go to school, you could also very easily just print out copies of your first chapter and a summary and hand them out to people at school, asking them for their opinions (come school time, at least).

If you don't know anyone in your audience (I do realize that throughout this post I just kind of assumed that everyone here is writing for a teenager/young adult audience, but hey, maybe I'm wrong) I would definitely suggest working on that, because knowing those people and getting those people to like your writing is called a platform, and it's very important.

Editing Is Like Raising Children...

GUYS I FEEL SO ACCOMPLISHED. I'VE ACTUALLY BEEN WORKING ON MY BOOK. YAY!!! I've probably spent 20 hours, give or take, since last Friday working on editing or on my characters or world building. I feel very accomplished. But nothing like what it will feel like when I actually finish my edits, I'm sure ;)

One of the things I've had to do this week as I've edited is make a few sacrifices. Which is sometimes hard, but you've got to do it.

In Gail Carson Lavine's (the author of one of my absolute favorite children's books Ella Enchanted - seriously, you are never too old for that book. It is just so good.) book Writing Magic (that was a pretty great Christmas gift, Thank You Grandma!), she makes this comment about the difficulties of having to cut something you love, which I happen to love (her comment about it, not the cutting something you love.)

"You will sometimes write paragraph of staggering loveliness, You will! Probably you already have. You’ll want to have those paragraphs tattooed on your forehead where everyone will see them.

Then you’ll discover that they don’t help tell your story. Do not do not DO NOT DO NOT DO NOT bend your story to accommodate your brilliant words.

Revising and cutting take courage and self-confidence. You have to believe that you will write equally brilliant prose again. And you will. There’s no doubt about it. And some of your new brilliant prose will have to be revised or cut. But some will actually fit your story. Hallelujah!"

In this particular case it's not brilliant prose that I had to give up, but when I wrote the book I was very determined that I was going to write in 3rd person limited from the perspective of my main character. And I had every intention of sticking to that.

On Thursday I decided that I was pretty much going to have to add the perspective of the second main character and alternate chapters by POV.

I was really dead set against that when I started writing it, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized that I really kind of needed to add it. Because of my main character's position for most of the book, she can't be involved in a lot of the most important stuff going on, she has to be told or figure everything out second hand. Which isn't that bad. I knew that and still was determined to write it with only my main character's POV.

Then I also realized that it was sagging/boring in the beginning and at the end because she wasn't involved in anything. And I couldn't get her involved in anything without sacrificing some important plot points.

Also, the change in one character at the beginning seemed way to out of the blue without that perspective change... Writing from only the perspective of one character has its downsides.

Downsides which I have discovered in the past few weeks trying to edit this thing that I'm trying to turn into a readable book.

Maybe it's going to be the complete opposite for you; you want to have multiple character's perspectives but discover what's best for your book is to only have one.

Really I feel like that's what editing's all about. It's about doing what's best for the book, regardless of what you might want to do. You created this thing when you wrote your first draft. You gave birth to your child. Now you have to raise it into its own person. And you know most of the ideas about what will be good for this child. Go to school, don't eat glue, don't play with knives, don't shove beads up your nose, eat vegetables.

But at the same time the child (in this case your book... and I guess since we're all under 20 kind of sort of us...) needs to grow up into its own person. So don't be afraid to see it growing into something you weren't quite expecting, or doing something differently than you thought it would. As long as it's not on drugs and spending time in jail, you're good!

... well that metaphor came out of no where.

In addition to deciding to add another perspective despite my reluctance, I also figured out a lot more about my antagonist's past and reasoning, which really really needed to happen. An hour sitting outside in the shade with a pad of paper, a pencil, and my thoughts. Did wonders.

Summer Planning

I haven't made a post since school ended for me because I have been super busy. Last week if I wasn't studying for my finals, I was getting ready for Girls Camp, which I've been at all week. So there hasn't been much time to fit in writing a blog post.

But the good news is that it's now summer.

Other than something going on mid-July and summer homework, I'm pretty much free.

I understand if you are not quite as free as I may be. Margaret is not free at all. She's doing two Summer Camps, two summer classes, and get a job, literary goals aside. She's also attempting to figure out some serious plot problems and write her first book, and she's determined to write some blog posts over the summer. This is technically her blog as well. We share it. Even though only 9% of the posts on here were written by her. But out post popular post was written by her, so I'll give her the 10%.

:D

I'm a true best friend.

But even if you are busy, summer is a great time to try to write/edit/work on your novel. I finished my novel not last summer but the summer before that. Planned it, wrote it all, finished I think two days before school started again. It's 6 hours of your day that's now free, more depending on how much homework you have every day.

The biggest problem with depending on summer to get serious work on your novel done is accountability. There's two to three months depending on your school schedule, which is more time than you get for NaNoWriMo. It's easy to slack off, especially during summer which is THE time for slacking off. The summer that I wrote my novel I decided that I was going to get up at 8:00 and work on my novel until 3:00 when I could do whatever I wanted to. The idea was that I was replacing school with novel writing time.

... yeah that last for like a week or two.

I'm not quite sure how I managed to write that whole thing.

The trick is, like most things, to figure out what works for you. The best advice I've found is to write in a different place than you do your internet searching. I probably wrote more in one day at the library than I did in a week at home just because I was in a different environment where I could focus completely on my task and not get distracted by family or "Oh, I should check that."

Another tip I've found very useful, is to write without music playing. I know I've done at least two posts about writing music and it setting the mood for what you're writing, but it's really easier to focus on what you're writing without it. 

If you are going to have it playing, because there are some scene you really do need music to write to, get it on a playlist or some sort of radio channel. iTunes or a Youtube playlist or Spotify or Pandora. Do NOT listen to songs individually on Youtube. That means that every 3 minutes or so you have to go back to your browser to replay or find a new song, which means that every 3 minutes you have contact with one of the biggest distractions there is.

DON'T DO IT.

It's not worth it, I promise.

And of course there is the average tips. Keep the area around where you're typing/writing free of distractions. I've spent a good 3-4 minutes in the middle of this post shinning my nails because the little block thingy was next to me. 

I find it's better to have full meals rather than just snack because then you're stopping to eat your chips or carrots, depending on how healthy you are.

The best tip of all though is that you really need to just get into a habit. Humans are naturally creatures of habit. It takes about a month to create or break a habit, so try to find what works the best for you and STICK TO IT (See my post on consistency). 

I would also like to take the time to point out that this is really where we as young writers have an advantage over most adult writers. Only adults employed by school systems really have any summer breaks, and even then a lot of them live off teacher salaries and have to work during the summer to survive. But most of us are probably still being provided for by our parents and are more or less free during the summer time. We're practically given two to three months of time that we could spend writing. 

Take advantage of it! 

This is my last real summer of high school, so your can bet I'm going to. My goal for this summer is to try to edit my book, naturally. My goal is to be able to start sending my manuscript off during Senior year. The two biggest things I need to accomplish with my novel over the summer is figure out a sub plot and what I'm doing with my bad guy.

Have a great summer guys!

Words Are the Best

When we finished the AP US History test, my teacher decided that he didn't want to spend the entire next few weeks doing nothing, so he assigned us a project. Of course the main purpose of the class is over, so instead of making the project history related, what we had to do instead was come up with a presentation on what is "The Best".

It could be the best food, the best sport, the best athlete, the best movie. A lot of people did the best club/elective on campus. Best past time, best over all.

This project was also the first time in my entire academic career that signing up last landed me with the last day. That last day was today.

I had no idea what to do for the project for a while, but I eventually decided that I was going to do my presentation on how "Words are the best form of communication." If you remember my post about the Worth of 1000 Words, I really hate the phrase "A  picture's worth 1000 words" because it degrades the worth of words. This presentation ended up being more of an excuse for me to try to dismiss that phrase.

You've got to understand, as someone who works primarily with words, it comes off almost as an insult to me. Which I'm fully aware is irrational, but whenever they say that it makes me feel like in a way they're belittling me and what I'm try to create. So this presentation turned out a little (read: highly) passionate.

I asked someone to record my entire presentation, but it ended up being 17 minutes long, so the file was far too huge to send to myself. So I can't show you that, but I can link you to the Power Point.

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1zN0QgEv5nSq1_LIqoeGNFoMOVU-7kWXp7PJY_-eigSk/edit#slide=id.p13

It won't be as good as the actually presentation because I can't share with you all of my intonations and comments, but I did my best to add those into the presentation so it'd make a little more sense. 

Enjoy though!

Fan Fiction: An Argument for It

Both of us have mentioned it at one time or another, but that’s because it’s meant a lot to both of us.

Fan Fiction.

Most of you have probably heard of it, if you don’t write it yourself. Let’s be honest here, online blog for teenage writers? Most of us probably know about it. This fall I have been writing fan fiction for five years. Margaret started writing it a few months before I did. It’s how we met. We were both writing fan fiction for a website called Artemis Fowl Confidential.

You can see why I consider fan fiction one of the best things that’s ever happened to me. That being said, I am not ignorant to the ugly side of it. There is a lot of ugliness.

A lot.

Just in case you don’t know, fan fiction is a story that is written by a fan of a book/movie/show ect. These fans come up with stories or ideas about the characters or the world and write them. If you want a new ending, you can write it. If you think of something that was mentioned in the book that was never realized, you can write it or find it.

That of course opens the door to quite a bit of ugly. When it comes to couples in the fandom (a mix of the word fan and kingdom, it’s the collection of fans of a certain book/movie/show ect. and everything that they do to show their love for it) things get really ugly. There are crazy shippers (people who support certain people in a relation’ship’) who will attempt to murder you if you try to tell them that their ship is wrong or not going to happen.

Not only that, but you’re sticking a bunch of (usually) inexperienced writers in a situation where they can go crazy and write anything they want. That leads to a LOT of bad writing. Probably only about half of the fics (the term applied to a fan fiction story) you find on FanFiction.net (the main website for fan fiction) are legible, despite the fact that they’re all typed. Bad grammar, poor sentence structure, horrible characterization, cliché ideas, cliché characters that are basically their attempts to stick themselves in the story… We’ve mentioned it before in the Non Cliché Protagonists Post. Mary Sues are the hated Queens of Fan Fiction-dom.

And that’s not even going into the PWP (porn without plot)/M (Mature rated) fics, or how it’s a gateway into the worst parts of fandom.

All this being said, it’s probably done more for my writing than anything else I’ve done.

First, most obviously, it’s practice. I mentioned in the last post about consistency ( Consistency is the Goal to Meet Your Goal) that I’ve written 2000+ words of a story pretty consistently every week for the past three years. That’s a fan fic. If you start at the first chapter and make your way all the way through to where I’m writing now, you can tell that there’s been growth in my writing.

Just the simple act of writing constantly improves your writing. And if you’re a dedicated fan of whatever it is you’re writing, you will probably be writing pretty consistently (sometimes too consistently when it interferes with writing your actual material).

Not only is it practice, but if you’re in the right fandom/website, a lot of time there are other writers who are willing to give you advice or tell you what you did right or did wrong. Especially when you’re trying out a new style it’s a great place to try to out because you can tell from the reviews whether the readers think that you pulled it off or not.

Which brings me to another valuable skill I’ve learned from my years of writing fan fiction. Learning how to take constructive criticism. Not everyone is going to be nice. In fact, depending on your skill level they often will not be. But there is a difference between someone just being plain rude/mean (flamers) and people who are offering constructive criticism which is a fine line that you learn after enough reviews. Being able to tell the difference and bending your pride enough to at least take someone’s advice is an incredible useful skill.

In fact, it’s a skill that’s not only useful in writing, when you’re getting rejections from agents or editors or either one is giving you suggestions for what to do with your manuscript, but it’s just useful in life.

You learn how to develop characters. The mistake almost every new fan fiction writer makes is trying to write an OC (original character) that turns into a Mary Sue or warps one of the characters so that they’re completely OOC (off original character). I did it. My first major fan fiction involved my OC, Amanda, making the main character, a character who is not interested in romantic involvement at all, fall in love with her. She also spoke eight languages, had over 200 IQ points, came from a poor family, was beautiful… It didn’t help that the title of the story was “Amanda’s First Adventure”.

You learn to not make those mistakes. Making a mistake like that will (hopefully) keep you from getting a book picked up by any agent or editor.

It’s also an introduction to all different sorts of formats and styles. You can do drabbles, one shots, three shots, full length stories. You can write stream of consciousness, traditional, interrupted, scene skipping, flashbacks. Decide whether you like first person or third person. Try present tense. Figure out how to pace a scene so that it’s not going too fast or dragging on. Learn that you really do need to plan out what’s going to happen in a story or face epic writers block (See Margaret’s post on the Brick Wall from Hell).

Maybe even make a best friend.