And it never really gets easier, as we tend to challenge ourselves more with every project.

For me, the worst part is the first draft, which is always somewhat of a slog. I love it and dread it at the same time. It’s like running a marathon when you’ve forgotten how to run. But you haven’t really, you just keep putting one foot in front of the other. Bird by bird.

When I remember this, the writing is not quite so hard. And I am reminded that writing is not all angst and adverbs. Sometimes it’s actually—dare I say it—fun. There are undeniable pleasures, however fleeting or abstruse or just plain unfathomable to Other People (non-writers) they may be. Keeping them in mind can help us enjoy the writing process more, even on those days when we struggle to make our word count.

The next time you sit down to write, notice—and applaud!—when you:

Find just the right word.

There is no better feeling than nailing the right word. And why shouldn’t it feel good: There are more than a million words in the English language, around 170,000 in current use. Most adult native speakers have a vocabulary of 20,000 to 35,000 words. So finding that one-in-a-million perfect word is reason to celebrate.

Find just the right turn of phrase.

This is related to the above—only it’s more complicated. This is one of the glories of prose, the one that’s closest to the glories of poetry. Okay, so it’s not poetry, but when you come up with a witty bit of alliteration or a new twist on an old cliché or line that drums a sweet rhythm, congratulate yourself. That’s creativity in motion.

Solve an intricate plot puzzle.

I write mysteries, which are by definition puzzles. Piecing together a new puzzle every time is part problem, part play. But as Hemingway pointed out, “there is a mystery in all great writing.” No matter what the genre, figuring out the mystery in the story we’re telling is gratifying on every level.

Make yourself cry.

Robert Frost said, “No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader.” When we bring ourselves to tears while writing a particularly moving scene, we have connected with at least one reader. And in so doing we’ve increased our odds on connecting with other readers as well. After all, there’s nothing like a good cry.

Make yourself laugh.

When I was an acquisitions editor, I acquired and developed a lot of humor books. Humor is a tough category, because it’s so subjective. But I figured if the writing made me laugh, it would make some other people laugh, too. Enough to warrant publishing the book—and I was usually right. In fiction, the best—and easiest—way to make the most readers laugh is not through one-liners, but through character-driven humor. Write characters that make you laugh, and readers will laugh with you. Bonus: You’ll benefit from all those endorphins released when you laugh, the feel-good hormones that can fuel your storytelling.

Learn something new.

When I get stuck, I do research. I google arcane topics, I conduct interviews with experts, I visit possible settings for scenes. I’ve spent many enjoyable hours tracking down wild orchids in Vermont, archaeological digs in the Middle East, luxe destination weddings all over the world. And that was just for THE WEDDING PLOT (which debuts next week).

Fall in love with a new character.

As an agent I can tell you that it’s a lot easier to sell stories with compelling characters. (One of the most common complaints I hear from editors is, “I just didn’t fall in love with the protagonist.) Bringing characters to life on the page is one of writing’s greatest satisfactions. In THE WEDDING PLOT, I wrote a scene with a character I’d not planned to be a part of the story, Bodhi St. George just came to me and I wrote him. I loved him, and that love prompted me to rework the story to accommodate his character. He was fun to write—and apparently fun to read. When my wise and wonderful editor Pete Wolverton read the story, he told me that I’d created this great character, a character readers would fall in love with, so we needed more of him in the book, so as not to disappoint them. I went back and wove Bodhi throughout more of the story, which was also fun.

Work something you love into your story.

Write what you know, that’s the old adage. But I tell my writing students: Write what you know, write what you love, write what you’d love to know. One of the great joys of writing is when you’re able to write about the things you love. That’s why there’s nature, Shakespeare, and dogs in all of my novels. And the scenes where these elements appear are always my favorite ones to write.

Work someone you love into your story.

Most of my characters are composites, built of the physical and psychological traits, virtues and vices, and qualities and quirks of many people, real and imagined. But that changed with THE WEDDING PLOT. I had just begun writing the first draft when my father died unexpectedly, and I was too distraught to do much of anything, much less write. But I had a deadline to meet. I ended up writing my dad into the book. This gave me something to do, a means by which I could honor The Colonel. It was as if he were right there on my shoulder, helping me write his story. I like to think that even now, somewhere he’s smiling.

Surprise yourself.

Right after Frost advised, “No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader,” he went on to advise, “No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.” Everyone loves surprises—especially those we create for ourselves. Be open to the unplanned, the unexpected, even the unwanted. And when you surprise yourself, go for it.

Lose yourself.

There are those magical, mystical moments when we find ourselves in the zone, so deeply engaged in the writing of our stories that we lose all track of time. We skip meals, we forget our friends and family, we even tune out texts and emails and phone calls. This is simply writer’s heaven.

Get the job done.

Sometimes the only contentment comes with meeting your word count goal. Soldier on, and then mark that day’s work as DONE. Whether you use checkmarks or gold stars or retail therapy rewards (which I prefer), acknowledge your achievement.

Decorate the house.

Joyce Carol Oates compares revising the first draft to decorating a house. You’ve got the first draft down on paper, you’ve built the house, but it’s not finished until you’ve decorated it. I love decorating, and I love revising. That’s when the real fun begins….

That’s Entertainment!

Ultimately writing a novel means entertaining yourself. If we can’t entertain ourselves, why bother? Granted, it’s a hard-won entertainment—it’s a lot easier to binge Netflix or play video games or read someone else’s book—but nothing beats the pleasure of having written, and holding that book in your hand a year or two year later.

I’m just saying.

That’s why as an agent, author, and writing teacher, I always caution my clients, fellow writers, and students to play it safe when it comes to POV. And yet every once in a while I come across a story whose author threw caution to the wind so splendidly I am tempted to play around with point of view myself. If you find yourself so inclined, read on.

FIRST, THE RULES

As Picasso reminded us, “Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.” Here are the POV rules you need to observe long enough to master them before you break them:

1) No omniscient POV. (It’s considered old-fashioned these days, at least here in the U.S.)

2) When writing first-person, stick to one POV per book.

3) When writing third-person:

a) Stick to third-person close;

b) Use only one POV per scene;

c) Use no more than five POVs per book; and

d) The protagonist’s POV should predominate.

A caveat: The following explores how a few bestselling authors far more skilled than I—and probably you, too—took POV risks that worked big-time. So if this your first rodeo, you’re better off writing by the aforementioned rules. But sooner or later, regardless of your skill level, you’re going to want to break the rules. When you do, remember these examples of stories where the novelists’ POV gambles paid off.

FIRST-PERSON PLURAL POV

In two of my favorite novels of all time, the authors use first-person plural POV (we/us). In The Jane Austen Book Club, Karen Joy Fowler writes the story from the book club’s point of view. The book club members meet every month to discuss a Jane Austen novel, with unpredictable consequences for them all. (This 2004 novel is a must for all Austen fans; the film adaptation’s is fun, too, if not particularly faithful.) Here’s the opening:

Each of us has a private Austen.

Jocelyn’s Austen wrote wonderful novels about love and courtship, but never married. The book club was Jocelyn’s idea, and she handpicked the members…. We suspected a hidden agenda, but who would put Jane Austen to an evil purpose?

Irresistible, and we the readers fall in love with the literary, gossipy voice.

The same is true for Unlikely Animals, Annie Hartnett’s second novel, published just last month. A sort of “Our Town meets Alice Hoffman with a touch of John Irving,” this wonderful novel is written from the point of view of the dead people in the cemetery of the small New Hampshire town where the story is set. Which may sound morbid, but is not, as you can see from the opening lines:

Maple Street Cemetery

Everton, NH

43.3623° N, 72.1662° W

Years later, when people in Everton would tell this story, they would say it was Clive Starling who called the reporter, the way that man loved attention.

But we remember the way it happened….

Again, irresistible. We want to hear the real story, as told by the dearly departed, who know this town—past and present—better than anyone.

SECOND-PERSON POV

This POV (you/you) is rare, at least from my point of view. Only one immediately came to mind—Bright Lights, Big City, by Jay McInerney. This 1984 novel grabs readers from the very beginning, promising a ride as wild as the Eighties:

You are not the kind of guy who would be at a place like this at this hour of the morning. But here you are, and you cannot say that the terrain is entirely unfamiliar, although the details are fuzzy. You are at a nightclub talking to a girl with a shaved head.

And we’re off on the journey with McInerney, because we’re not that kind of guy either….and yet.

OMNISCIENT POV

Omniscient point of view is “Author as God.” Think 19^th century novels, and fairy tales: Once upon a time there was a girl…. “Author as God” has fallen out of fashion in the 21^st century, most notably in the United States. You still see it sometimes, especially in science fiction, fantasy, historical fiction, and literary fiction.

No one does it better than Alice Hoffman, who writes modern-day fairy tales, a kind of “Yankee magic realism,” a literary legacy she has attributed to Nathaniel Hawthorne. You can see why in the opening to Practical Magic, the 1995 novel I reread whenever I’m feeling blue:

For more than two hundred years, the Owens women have been blamed for everything that has gone wrong in town. If a damp spring arrived, if cows in the pasture gave milk that was runny with blood, if a colt died of colic or a baby was born with a red birthmark stamped onto his cheek, everyone believed that fate must have been twisted, at least a little, by those women over on Magnolia Street.

Hoffman has us at “the Owens women.” The scope and timelessness of the novel are part of its attraction, and the omniscient POV helps her establish both.

MULTIPLE FIRST-PERSON POV

Conventional wisdom has it that if you’re writing first-person point of view, you should stay with that one POV for the entire novel, if only so readers know whose head they’re in the whole time. Mixing it with third-person is tricky enough, but using more than one first-person point of view can be very confusing for readers if it’s not done with finesse.

But when Gillian Flynn used his-and-her first-person points of view in her blockbuster thriller Gone Girl, writers took note—and we’ve been flooded with multiple first-person novels ever since. As an agent, I see a lot of them, and mostly it doesn’t work. Gillian Flynn made it work, by making the voices of the husband and wife characters very different—and by first introducing the wife’s POV through diary entries. The diary entries not only help the reader remember who’s who, but in Flynn’s capable hands, they also serve as a clever plot device.

Speaking of devices, Maria Semple’s Where’d You Go, Bernadette is a master class in these tools. This book club favorite, technically told from the first-person point of view of an eighth grader named Bee, opens with Bee’s report card, just one of the dozens of devices Semple uses over the course of the story that become, in effect, other POVs. (For more, see the full list in my book on story openings, The Writer’s Guide to Beginnings.

MULTIPLE THIRD-PERSON CLOSE POV

Nobody breaks the rules as beautifully as George R. R. Martin. When to my chagrin one of my clients changed points of view half a dozen times in the opening of her novel and cited A Game of Thrones as her model, I went right to my copy of the epic fantasy. And yes, in the first fifty pages alone, Martin changes points of view at least five times (the conservative limit for an entire book). But it’s neither choppy nor confusing—it’s brilliant.

Martin keeps the reader reading, through the skilled use of compelling action, likable POV characters, and clear links from one chapter to the next. I was so thrilled by his masterful handling of POV that I sat down and wrote a detailed analysis of his opening for my client (which you’ll also find in The Writer’s Guide to Beginnings). So it can be done, and done effectively, but most easily if you’re George R. R. Martin. I’m just saying.

GO FOR IT

For the record, I still say it’s risky to break the POV rules, especially if you’re writing your debut. But ultimately, all writing is risky. And the more we write, the more challenges we like to present ourselves. Point of view may be one of the challenges you take on in your next work. I have the terrible feeling it may be in mine. But as we’ve seen, other writers have met that challenge with grace and grit. 

I recently led a workshop at the New York Write to Pitch Conference, an event dedicated to helping writers perfect their pitches as well as discover what factors in their novels might prevent their work from becoming published in an increasingly unforgiving marketplace. Often it’s the fact that there’s nothing unique enough about the novel itself to persuade agents and editors and ultimately publishers to take a chance and champion the work.

In a publishing landscape that’s more difficult than ever, thanks to the pandemic and other factors affecting retail businesses right now, it’s more important than ever that you are able to differentiate your story, positioning it against all of the bestselling titles by brand-name writers. While it’s true that book sales are up, they are up for backlist, that is, books that have already been published, mostly by authors who have already found an audience. For new titles, especially those being published by debut authors and midlist authors trying to build a readership, breaking out is tougher than ever.

That’s why it’s imperative that you be able to differentiate yours from all those other bestselling books out there. We talked a lot about this at the conference and we’ve talked a lot here at Career Authors but the confusion about how to differentiate your work remains.

Are you being told that your story is “too quiet“ or “not compelling enough” to compete successfully in your category? Or that the editor or agent didn’t “fall in love with your protagonist” or “feel strongly enough” about your project to take it on? Or that they’re looking for more “high-concept” stories—and yours doesn’t hit that bar?

Here are six ways to make sure your story stands out—in a good way. Ways that can help get you past the gatekeepers and into the bookstores.

1) Get Crazy With Your Story Idea

The idea of the story/series itself needs to be different from the competition. And you need to be able to articulate that difference. As in Jaws, Jurassic Park, Wicked, Moneyball, The Martian, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, even Snakes on a Plane. Or these two recent New York Times bestsellers:

The Maid, by Nita Prose

A maid with autism and a love of Columbo finds herself involved in a murder at the luxury London hotel where she works.

Razorblade Tears, by S. A. Cosby

A Black father and a white father team up to avenge the murder of their gay married sons—sons neither fully accepted while they were alive.

Just from these short elevator pitches, you can see why these stories are finding an audience.

2) Get Crazy With Plot Points

It’s not enough that the story idea is big. Your plot points have to be big, too. Make sure that each of your plot points—the big scenes of your novel, from inciting incident to climax—are worthy of the name. Milk the drama, the conflict, the setting at every significant step on your protagonist’s journey.

3) Beef Up the Sex Appeal.

And I’m not talking sex scenes here. I’m talking the sexy, publicity-worthy stuff of your story. Can you weave in:

• Dramatic settings—ask yourself if a location scout would get paid to find the locales where your scenes are set
• Real-life people—as Jess Walter did with Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton in Beautiful Ruins
• Over-the-top plot elements ripped from the headlines—think Jodi Picoult

4) Name Your Protagonist’s Superpower.

The best protagonists have superpowers, that is, something that sets them apart from your run-of-the-mill characters. They don’t have to fly faster than a speeding bullet, but they should have some quality, ability, or talent that makes them smarter, braver, wiser, something more than the rest of us.

In my Mercy Carr series, Mercy has the ability to see what others miss. But she’s not alone; even the dogs have superpowers in my books. Bomb-sniffing Malinois Elvis has a great nose but it’s his fierceness that sets him apart, while Newfoundland/retriever mix Susie Bear pairs her superior scent work with a congeniality that helps her draw out the lost and frightened children and elderly folks she finds hiding in the woods.

5) Emote! Emote! Emote!

Readers read to feel something. So start evoking emotion right there on the first page, and keep the drama going. I got the best reviews of my career in The Hiding Place, thanks to the fact that it was my most emotional story so far in the series. Think of the last story that made you laugh out loud, cry ugly tears, sleep with the lights on. Do that.

6) Go for Broke.

As an agent, I find the hardest thing to sell is a story that’s a little of this and a little of that. If you’re writing a thriller, make it the mother of all thrillers. If you’re writing fantasy, give us a world we’ve never seen before and a hero who must find his way through that world with his heart, mind, body, and soul somehow intact. If you’re writing romance, make us fall in love right along your heroine, break our hearts and piece them back together and break them all over again before that happy ending. If you’re writing literary fiction, make your prose sing and your characters suffer and your plot soar.

Whatever your genre, embrace it entirely—and get crazy!

That said, learning to take the good feedback, leave the bad, and get on with the hard work of revision is crucial to becoming a career author. Whether you’re reading your story aloud at Bread Loaf or exchanging notes with your best writing buddy, you need to develop a skin thick enough to deflect the slings and arrows of harsh assessment and permeable enough to absorb the wisdom of relevant observation.

Developing this thick skin is so important, according to my pal Michael Neff, poet, author, and founder of the esteemed Del Sol Review, that he prepares the writers who attend his acclaimed  New York Write to Pitch Conference by giving them what he calls THE THIN SKIN TEST (see below).

Note: I often serve as a workshop leader at this quarterly conference, so I’ve seen firsthand the direct feedback from agents and editors that participants receive. It’s invaluable, but it’s also intense. I can see why Michael created this. And I asked him if we could reproduce it here, as I believe it could benefit any and all of us as we take in criticism from teachers, editors, agents reviewers, readers, and our fellow writers.

Fair warning: Michael’s approach is not for the faint of heart. But then neither is a career as a writer.

- Paula Munier

_____________________________

THE THIN SKIN TEST

By Michael Neff

In case you’re not sure if your skin qualifies, we’ve developed a few skin test questions below. Feel free to respond to yourself as you read each one. We desire to work exclusively with writers able to take fair and direct critique from the professionals, and we also wish to avoid time-wasting instances of Offended Writer Syndrome (OWS) which often take place in writer workshops all across America.

• Has any writer ever prefaced their critique of your work by first saying to you, “Don’t hate me, please?
• Do you sense that writers who unfavorably critique your work are “loading the gun” and taking aim?
• Do you rush to defend your work when a reader gives you criticism rather than absorb and weigh it carefully?
• Do you feel a need to say unkind things about a writer’s work if you perceive she or he was unkind to you first?
• Have you ever chastised any writer for what you consider to be improper or incorrect critique of your work?
• Have you ever been in writer workshops and reacted to criticism of your writing or story by demanding the other writer defend their decision in such detail that it served your purpose of making certain they never gave you unfavorable critique again?
• Do you receive critique you oppose in good humor, but routinely seek the negation of it from those you know will agree with your version of reality?
• Do you feel a bout of OWS coming on after reading the above questions?
• If you answered yes to two or more of the above questions, the New York Write to Pitch Conference is definitely not for you.

#1

My villain is so bad he kills the dog.

It’s almost impossible to sell a book in which a dog (cat, horse, etc.) is killed. I’m just saying.

#2a

My hero dies in the end.

Readers want your hero to survive his trials and tribulations, overcome the obstacles you put in his way, and become a better version of himself.

#2b

My heroine dies in the end. It’s a series.

No, someone else can’t take her place in Book 2. If you’ve done your job right, readers have fallen in love with your heroine. They want her back in Book 2.

#3  

I can’t find any comparable titles.

You need comps to prove there’s an audience for your book. And these should be recent comps by up-and-coming writers—not blockbusters by bestselling authors.

#4

I know you don’t represent picture books, but you’ll want to represent mine.

No, I won’t. And you don’t want an agent who doesn’t know the category anyway.

#5

There are no murders in my mystery.

Murder mysteries need murder. The sooner you drop the first body, the better.

#6

I’m saving that for the second book.

If you don’t sell the first book, there is no second book. Go for broke in your first book. Don’t “save” anything for the next book.

#7

I know you told me last year that I should rethink using a dozen points of view, but I still think it works.

I won’t represent any debut novels with more than five POVs, and I’m not the only agent who feels this way.

#8

The bad guy accidentally dies in the end.

Accidentally? The antagonist must get his just desserts—and if he dies, it can’t be an accident. His death must come as a result of his own villainy, even better if it’s at the hands of your hero.

#9a

I don’t write in Microsoft Word.

Microsoft Word is industry standard for submissions. No Scrivener, no Pages, no PDFs.

#9b

I could convert my document to Microsoft Word for you but the formatting will be off.

It’s your job to submit your work in a professional manner. Anything less marks you as an amateur.

#10

It’s 1000 pages. I don’t know the number of words.

Word count is what matters. For most genres, aim for 90,000 words. Too short or too long and odds are you won’t sell it. If you don’t tell us the word count, we’ll ask.

And readers are a people in search of a heroine, always. One of the biggest problems I see in manuscripts—confirmed by editors when they pass on projects—is the protagonist. Your protagonist should be compelling and courageous. Heroes are, by definition, heroic. Your heroine should push herself to be braver than she thinks she can be, braver than readers think she can be, braver than you think she can be.

There are all kinds of courage. Here are some thoughts on heroes, heroines, and the nature of heroism from authors who’ve given us some of the most memorable protagonists….

_______________________________________________________

“Great heroes need great sorrows and burdens, or half their greatness goes unnoticed. It is all part of the fairy tale.”

―Peter S. Beagle 

“Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear – not absence of fear.”

—Mark Twain

“Over time, it’s occurred to me that my protagonists all originate in some aspect of myself that I find myself questioning or feeling uncomfortable about.”

—Julia Glass

“Bravery never goes out of fashion.”

—William Makepeace Thackeray

 “You have to go out of your way as a suspense novelist to find situations where the protagonists are somewhat helpless and in real danger.

—Nelson DeMille

“I wanted to be my own heroine.”

—Jesmyn Ward

“Without heroes, we are all plain people, and don’t know how far we can go.”

—Bernard Malamud

“Alpha heroes, even uberalpha heroes, still win readers’ hearts. I like a masterful hero myself, but I also enjoy the idea that sometimes the heroine can be in charge.”

—Emma Holly

“Self-trust is the essence of heroism.”

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Characters stretching their legs in some calm haven generally don’t make for interesting protagonists.”

—Darin Strauss

“Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.”

—Anais Nin

“I’m not at all interested in the brave who fight against the odds and win. I am interested in those who accept their lot, as that is what many people in the world are doing. They do their best in ghastly conditions.”

—Kazuo Ishiguro

“I’ve found in the past that the more closely I identify with the heroine, the less completely she emerges as a person. So from the first novel, I’ve been learning techniques to distance myself from the characters so that they are not me and I don’t try to protect them in ways that aren’t good for the story.”

—Beth Gutcheon

“Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point.”

—C. S. Lewis

“I’m not nearly as outrageously brave as many of my rascals that I write. But I think the rascal spirit must reside in me somewhere.”

—Christopher Moore

“[A] hero is someone who has given his or her life to something bigger than oneself.”

—Joseph Campbell

“My own heroes are the dreamers, those men and women who tried to make the world a better place than when they found it, whether in small ways or great ones. Some succeeded; some failed; most had mixed results … but it is the effort that’s heroic, as I see it. Win or lose, I admire those who fight the good fight.”
―George R.R. Martin

“My childhood was spent embracing one literary heroine after another. I identified passionately with each one and would slavishly imitate them.”

―Sophie Kinsella

“See, heroes never die. John Wayne isn’t dead, Elvis isn’t dead. Otherwise you don’t have a hero. You can’t kill a hero. That’s why I never let him get older.”

―Mickey Spillane

“There is perhaps no more rewarding romance heroine than she who is not expected to find love. The archetype comes in many disguises—the wallflower, the spinster, the governess, the single mom—but always with one sad claim: Love is not in her cards.”

—Sarah MacLean

“The life of the hero of the tale is, at the outset, overshadowed by bitter and hopeless struggles; one doubts that the little swineherd will ever be able to vanquish the awful Dragon with the twelve heads. And yet … truth and courage prevail, and the youngest and most neglected son of the family, of the nation, of mankind, chops off all twelve heads of the Dragon, to the delight of our anxious hearts. This exultant victory, towards which the hero of the tale always strives, is the hope and trust of the peasantry and of all oppressed peoples. This hope helps them bear the burden of their destiny.”

―Gyula Illyés

“My favorite literary heroine is Jo March. It is hard to overstate what she meant to a small, plain girl called Jo, who had a hot temper and a burning ambition to be a writer.”

—J.K. Rowling

“Heroine: a woman of heroic spirit; the principal female person who figures in a remarkable action.”

—Mindy McGinnis

“Show me a hero, and I’ll write you a tragedy.”

—F. Scott Fitzgerald

“A good novel tells us the truth about its hero, but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.”

—G.K. Chesterton

Movie Night

This is a fun one. Watch three films based on bestselling novels in your genre. While you watch, write down what happens in every scene. That is, the beats of the story. As in Jaws: Young people having fun on the beach; young woman runs into the ocean;  young woman is caught and dragged to her death screaming, etc.

Do this three times for three movies, and you should soon be swimming in plot ideas….

Card Game

Let your fingers do the plotting…. Get yourself a deck of tarot cards or storytelling cards. (There are many decks, apart from the classic Rider-Waite Tarot. Note: I have many decks; my new faves are the Hero’s Journey Dream Oracle, the Wise Dog Tarot, and the Literary Witches Oracle.

Pull a card and ask yourself how you could weave that element into your plot. Ask yourself what plot ideas come to mind when you pull the Death card, the Star card, the Quest card, etc.

Play cards—and plot away!

The Worst Possible Thing

Playwright George Abbott used this formula for the three-act structure: “In the first act, get your hero up a tree; in the second act, throw stones at him, and in the third act, get him down safely.”

The rocks should get bigger as the story progresses. The way to bigger rocks? Ask yourself after every story beat: What’s the worst that could happen? And make that happen. Go silly, go dramatic, go over-the-top with your worst possible things. There’s plot gold in there.

Hallmark Bingo

Believe it or not, the tropes for Hallmark movies are so entrenched by now that viewers get together and play Hallmark Bingo. They download one of the many Hallmark Bingo cards available on the internet, and as they watch a movie they look out for certain elements to appear that are marked on their cards. As in: Christmas party, baked goods, handsome veterinarian, etc.

What are the tropes in your genre? Make up own your bingo card with those tropes. Now, how can you reinvent those tropes, and breathe fresh life into them? That’s plotting….

Plot On!

With these story tools, plotting is just a hack away. Have fun with it, and happy plotting!

by Paula Munier

Plot matters. The days when you could sell a slice-of-life novel in which very little actually happens are over, for the most part. As an agent, former acquisitions editor, and mystery author, I’ve learned this the hard way, in the trenches, so to speak. No matter what genre you’re writing in, something needs to happen.

In short: You need a plot. Which is why when Writers Digest asked me to write a book on plot, I wrote PLOT PERFECT: How to Build Unforgettable Stories Scene by Scene. Because I knew that selling a novel without a strong plot was infinitely harder than selling a novel with a strongly plotted one.

No surprise, then, that I’m a plotter, not a pantser. When plotting my own Mercy Carr mysteries, I’ve followed my own advice, straight out of my own (bestselling) how-to-plot book. So imagine my delight/dismay when my latest mystery, THE NIGHT WOODS, received a (wonderful) review in bookreporter.com by the fab (oh-so-astute) Pamela Kramer in which she writes:

…The crimes seem unconnected. What could a billionaire and a visitor to a hermit have in common? But as fans of Munier know, she is supremely capable of throwing spaghetti at the ceiling and not only having some stick up there, but braiding it en route. The more messy facts and mysterious matters there are, the more Munier will confound us with myriad suspects and many possible motives….

Spaghetti? Really? Is that what I’m doing? I didn’t think that was what I was doing, but having given it some thought, I realize I was wrong. Yes, I plot out my novels, first by nailing the usual plot points—inciting incident, plot point #1, midpoint, plot point #2, climax, denouement—and then by sorting out the scenes in between that take the reader from plot point to plot point. Once I finish the first draft, I sit down with a Sharpie and a giant Post-It and write out a scene-by-scene outline of the entire book so I can see the whole story at a glance. (I know, I know, very analog. But what can I say, it works for me.)

For the early books, I followed this aforementioned process to the letter. I would have been lost in the story woods forever without a pathway out. But it’s different now, I’m not such a stickler for plotting every beat of the story.

I find that this is partly a matter of time; my day job as an agent (which I love) takes up most of my waking hours, so pounding out a book a year means writing whenever I can steal the time. More time spent putting words on paper, less time spent plotting. That is, more time spent throwing spaghetti at the ceiling.

Which begs the question: Where does the spaghetti come from? It comes from that mysterious gold mine inside our writer’s mind: the sub-conscious. The longer I’m in this writing game, the more I have learned to trust my sub-conscious—the pump that fuels the creative process. I will think of something, or more accurately, my sub-conscious will think of something.

All I have to do is pay attention when my sub-conscious whispers to me—and keep it happy and productive. Is my pump running dry? Do I need to prime the pump of my creative process? That’s when I turn to 1) research and 2) my husband. Let’s start with research, since that’s easier.

I love research. I started as a reporter, so I’m good at research. Good at getting people—cops, game wardens, dog handlers, first responders, wildlife biologists, to name a few—to talk to me, good at tracking down leads, good at doing deep dives on search engines, in libraries, through organizations. Good at reading around the subject. All grist for the mill, fuel for the fire, the wind beneath your wings… choose your own metaphor.

As long as I keep priming the pump—and don’t think too hard—my sub-conscious keeps on noodling and I keep on throwing spaghetti. I weave those noodles into my story, with the faith that somehow, someway, they’ll stick. And most of the time, they do stick. All good.

Sometimes, however, the spaghetti slips—and I struggle to, as Pamela Kramer put it so vividly, braid it en route. That’s where my husband comes in. Now, my husband is not a writer. (No worries, he is a reader.) He’s not much of a talker either, but he’s a good listener and he can fix practically anything. I go to him whenever I’m faced with a Gordian knot of a plot problem.

Explaining the issue to him forces me to identify and articulate exactly what’s not working—and that process alone usually prompts a remedy to come to my mind. If it doesn’t, we keep on talking about it, and he comes up with his own answers. Sometimes I use them, and sometimes I don’t, but either way I almost always have at least a hint of a real solution by the time our little talk is over.

As I write book #7 of the series, I find myself at the halfway mark—around 200 pages, 45,000 words—the point at which I typically throw a lot of spaghetti. Anything to get through that endless second act. You know the feeling.

The next time you find yourself muddling through the middle, try tossing some noodles up into the air. See what sticks. Keep priming your pump. And if you get stuck, talk it through with a good listener. Preferably someone who’s not a writer.

And then keep on plotting to The End.

WHAT ARE YOUR SELLING POINTS?

Here are some of the selling points that might/should apply to your story.

USP

USP stands for Unique Selling Proposition. That is, what makes your story unique.

As in these X Meets Y loglines:

• Castaway on Mars = USP for Andy Weir’s The Martian
• Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine meets Columbo = USP for Nita Prose’s The Maid
• RED meets Assisted Living = USP for Richard Osman’s The Thursday Murder Club

What sets your story apart from the others of its ilk? What are your comparable titles? How can you articulate your USP in your pitch? What’s your X Meets Y? How soon in your story do you make the USP clear in your story? These are questions to which you should have good answers if you want your work to break out in today’s tough marketplace.

CHARACTER

Who is the hero of your story? What is their superpower? Why will readers relate to this character? In The Maid, the neurodivergent clean-obsessive heroine Molly Gray is the story’s biggest selling point. She sees what others fail to see—and everyone around her underestimates her, just like her hero Columbo. We fall in love with Molly right away—and happily follow her through her trials and tribulations until The End.

SETTING

In the best stories, the setting is a critically important character. There are a million stories set in New York City, for example, but in the best stories we see a different NYC: Tom Wolfe’s NYC in The Bonfire of the Vanities, Candace Bushnell’s NYC in Sex and the City, Katy Hays’ NYC in The Cloisters. How do you make your setting your own? In The Martian, Andy Weir shows us Mars up close and personal—and it’s riveting.

PLOT

High-concept plots sell: Big Shark terrorizes small town (Jaws). Serial killer who only kills other serial killers (Darkly Dreaming Dexter). A white  father and a black father set out to avenge the murder of their married gay sons, from whom they were estranged (Razorblade Tears).

Give me a high-concept plot we haven’t seen before, and I’m one happy agent. Because that’s a selling point few editors, publishers, reviewers, readers can resist. Is your plot a selling point?

VOICE

Voice is half the battle. Give us a voice we haven’t heard before—Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye, Esch Baitiste in Salvage the Bones, Ava in Swamplandia!—and we’ll follow that voice anywhere. Think of Remarkably Bright Creatures, in which Shelby Van Pelt stunningly pulls off writing from the point of view of an octopus named Marcellus. If people tell you that you have a strong voice, you’re on your way—just make sure you have a plot to go with it.

BIO

If your personal or professional life informs your story in a meaningful way, that can be a selling point. Maybe you’re a retired homicide detective writing a police procedural, or a high school teacher writing a contemporary YA novel, or an immigrant writing a family saga about an immigrant family. If your life feeds and fuels your work, that could be a selling point.

WHAT ARE YOUR SALES OBSTACLES?

As an agent, I have a front-row seat to rejection. Here are the most common complaints editors make when passing on a project:

“We’ve seen this a million times before.”

Drugs, sex trafficking, alcoholic cops, opening with your heroine waking up, office meetings, dreams, yadda yadda yadda. Anything we’ve seen a million times before is an obstacle to selling your work. Find a way to make it new.

“I just didn’t fall in love with the protagonist.”

Unlikable protagonists are harder to sell than likable protagonists. If your hero isn’t likable, at least make him admirable in some way. Give readers a reason to read about him.

Also: Your protagonist needs to be pro-active. Your heroine should drive the action from beginning to end. We need to see her overcome the challenges and obstacles she faces to become a stronger, smarter, wiser version of herself. Give her a compelling character arc.

“The pacing is off.”

Pacing is one of the biggest reasons good writers fail to sell their work. Often pacing problems come down to:

• The beginning is too slow.
• The middle is too muddled.
• The ending is too rushed/cliff-hanging/ambiguous.

Check your pacing for the above—and pick it up!

“I don’t know how to sell this.”

If your story does not fall neatly into a genre or sub-genre, agents, editors, publishers will not know how to sell it and readers will not know where to find it. No one will know what to do with it. Unless you’re the next Gregory Maguire or  the next Diana Gabaldon, who created their own genres. But odds are what you’ve done is a mishmash of genres, not a new genre. And it’s hard to sell a mishmash.

The aforementioned complaints are, in effect, obstacles to the sale. Ask yourself if any apply to your work—and eliminate them before you try to shop it.

SELL, SELL, SELL

When I talk to clients about their work, I talk in terms of selling points and sales obstacles. (This very post was inspired by two recent conversations with writers about their stories.) Once you’ve identified the selling points in your story, you can capitalize on them. The same goes for the obstacles to selling your story: Identify them, and then eliminate them.

Armed with strong selling points and unburdened by obstacles, you’ll be ready to query agents and editors—and be this much closer to a publishing deal.