Novels

There are thousands of books out there that purport to show you how to write your great novel. This book is somewhat different in that it endeavours to show you how NOT to write your novel, or novil as was first written here.

The book lists two hundred mistakes to avoid at all costs, and if you are struggling to write a good book, then this list may well save you an awful lot of grief.

It is a well known fact that sex scenes are amongst the hardest to write. Reading some of the bungled attempts featured in this book and I can well believe it. I am not certain whether the “bad writing” featured in this guide is real or simply made up, but of one thing I am certain, some of the bad sex is so toe-curlingly awful, it becomes hugely amusing.

Surely no one could write this bad, you might be forgiven for thinking, yet we all know that bad writing is plastered all over the internet under the guise of  “my latest exciting book”.

As Lynne Truss commented, the lady famous for her Eats Shoots and Leaves punctuation guide, “Heavens, what a joy this book is, extremely funny.”

The guide covers such facets as plot, dialogue, pacing, character essentials, bad guys, beginnings, endings, narrative stance, historical research, sentences and paragraphs, and much more besides.

At the end is a section entitled: How not to sell your novel, which again is incredibly funny, if some of the enclosure letters to publishers repeated here are to be believed.

If you have been struggling to land a publishing deal for years, or have just started out on that rocky road, How Not To Write A Novel could well be the best book you have ever bought.

Hugely amusing and mighty useful, I defy any writer not to look at their own work through different eyes, once they have read this work. It comes highly recommended because it is both a great read, and downright useful.  An essential addition to the bookshelf for anyone determined to find a traditional publisher to take on their work.

Learn How to Start a Novel That Will Be Fun and Easy to Write
By Elizabeth L. Andrews

If you are really interested in writing a novel that will feel satisfying to you and to your readers, it's important to start things off right. Although you may just want to jump into your writing and see where it takes you, if you take some time beforehand to prepare, you'll find the process of writing your novel becomes much easier and more enjoyable to you. Not only that, this crucial step will help ensure that you write the very best novel that you possibly can.

Develop The Blueprint that Will Guide Your Writing

This essential preparation involves exploring and developing your initial novel ideas so you have a clear view of where you want to go with your novel. By making some basic creative decisions about your novel's characters, the world your characters inhabit, and the basic through-line of your plot, you will have an invaluable resource to guide you through the process of writing your novel from the beginning sentence through the final word.

Take Some Time To Get To Know Your Characters

To start, think about who your characters are and what inner changes they might make as they proceed through your novel. Use the following questions to help you begin to turn your initial impressions into rich, multidimensional characters that live in your imagination. You'll know when you've done enough when you begin to feel a real sense of connection to your characters and care about what happens to them over the course of your novel.

• Who are the main characters in your novel? Give each one a full name that feels right to you.
• How do they look physically? i.e age, ethnic background, key physical characteristics
• What is their personality like? i.e. idiosyncrasies, temperament, habits
• Where do they come from? Describe their childhood as well as any other defining past experiences that helped to shape who they are today.
• What are they key things that they love, hate, and fear in their lives?
• How happy or satisfied are they? Have they settled for less than what they really want?
• What do they most want from life? What are the inner and outer obstacles in the way of getting it?

Creating the World of Your Novel

Next, you will want to decide on the world that your characters inhabit through the course of your novel. Starting with your initial ideas, let the details of the locations for your novel unfold until you can clearly see these places in your imagination. To get yourself started, begin by exploring the following questions:

• Where does your novel take place? i.e. country, state, region. Is there more than one general locale?
• What is the time frame for your novel? i.e. When does it take place and over what period of time?
• What are the specific interior and exterior locations like in your novel? i.e. the inherited sailboat, the secluded cabin, the seedy apartment building, the magical castle
• What seasons are experienced over the course of your novel? Describe what they are like in your novel's locations.
• Are there key objects that play an essential part in the storyline of your novel? i.e. an old letter, a magical cape, a diamond ring, a secret code

Developing the Storyline of Your Novel

The third essential step is to develop a solid outline that will guide your writing through each key plot point and result in a dynamic, compelling novel. Now that you have a good sense of what motivates your characters as well as the obstacles they will face, you can use this information to develop the action of your story. Although there are a variety of different novel structure formats that you can follow, at the most basic level, they come down to the following essential questions. You can use these to get started on your novel outline.

• Where are your characters starting from at the beginning of the novel? What are their life circumstances and how is their life less than perfect?
• What specific problems do they have?
• What obstacles are in the way of them getting what they truly want?
• What strategies will your characters use to try and overcome these obstacles? What will they need to do to get what they really want in their lives?

Basic Novel Structure

In terms of the basic structure of your novel, here is a simple guideline that many writers find useful: To begin, you will establish your character's current world, illustrating the ways they are out of balance. About one third of they way through your novel, your main character is forced to make some change in their life that actually helps them move closer to what they really want, even if they don't realize it at first. At the half way point, complications are introduced that make the character question whether this is what they really want. About two thirds of the way through, your character will reverse the positive change they made initially and try to go back to where they were at the beginning. From this low point, they will find the strength within to renew their commitment to their goal. This leads up to the final confrontation with the main obstacle and ultimate success.

It Is Really Worth It To Start Your Novel With This Guiding Blueprint

I encourage you to take the time to go through this creative preparation phase before you start writing your novel in earnest. If you do, you will be rewarded with an inspiring step-by-step map that will guide you across the vast expanse of your novel. By vividly imagining the details of character, setting, and plot beforehand, you will find that the writing process flows with much more ease and certainty. Rather than just staring at that blank page each morning and wondering what to write about, you can simply look at your blueprint and clearly see what's next. Because you will know your novel's essential details so well, you will feel inspired and enthusiastic about writing each day and the resulting novel will be one that is rich in detail and compelling to your readers.

If you would like some additional guidance to help you develop your novel blueprint, there are a several good novel writing software programs that walk you through the whole process step-by-step. You can read a review that compares three of the best novel writing software programs at http://writerssolutions.com/compare-top-novel-writing-software-newnovelist-the-marshall-plan-software-and-dramatica-pro-reviews/. Each of the writing software programs reviewed there will help you develop rich, multi-dimensional characters, create vivid settings, and put together a solid, compelling plot that both publishers and readers will appreciate.

Elizabeth L. Andrews writes for http://WritersSolutions.com, a website designed to provide writers with supportive, helpful ideas and resources to help them unleash their innate creativity and make the process of writing easy and satisfying.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Elizabeth_L._Andrews
http://EzineArticles.com/?Learn-How-to-Start-a-Novel-That-Will-Be-Fun-and-Easy-to-Write&id=2596201

How to Start Marketing Yourself While You Write Your First Novel
By J Hugh Thomas

We all have those dreams of great accomplishments from time to time. Of climbing Mount Everest, skydiving, or writing the great American novel. Maybe that is you, the writer who is ready to break out. Or maybe you just want to give it a shot. Regardless of the setup, you are reading this article because you are either writing a novel or you want to write a novel. I understand you because I am you. I am on the journey of writing my first novel and hope to finish my first draft soon. However, the pages I have written in my novel only account for a portion of my writing over the last year.

It is just as important to study the current methods, techniques, and technology of marketing novels as it is to write your novel. Why? Because once you are published (think positive), your publisher is not the primary push behind marketing your novel or you as an author. You will be the primary marketing department for all of your creative work. This is a shock to many writers once they become published authors, and probably results in many one time novelists who sell five hundred copies and fade away.

But knowledge is power, and now you know.

So what do you do about it? Read and learn. There are literally hundreds of free online information sources dedicated to online marketing and the more narrow discipline of marketing fiction, both online and through other mediums. I will just lay out a few of the things I did for starters as a baseline.

1) Choose your author name I know, sounds silly. But if you try Googling your name, you may quickly find that it is very serious. Most people have at least three names, first, middle, and last. You want to find the combination of those names and/or initials least represented in a web search. This will allow people to find articles and websites about you with much less competition from others. For example, I searched for Hugh Thomas and found a well known historical writer by that name listed for pages on end. Then I searched for "J Hugh Thomas" and found no writing competition. Therefore, as a writer I am always J Hugh Thomas.

2) Buy your domain name It is cheap and in today's world, it is pretty much expected. This also factors into your decision on your author name, because ideally you want to choose that name as your domain, in my case jhughthomas. It is best to get the .com domain, but if it is not available you can always go with something like .net or .info instead. Buy the domain from a company that will allow you to put up a simple website without a hosting fee. This means that for less than $10 per year, you can have a searchable presence on the web with some basic information about you and your novel.

3) Start a blog In the past you could write a great novel and either academics or media figures would fall in love with it causing old style viral marketing. Today, users are coming to expect a new level of access and interaction with the producers of fiction. This combined with the fact that blogs are probably the single best way to develop a web presence makes your blog critical. My recommendation is to blog about writing your novel, or blog about parts of your novel. The reason is to keep you from being overwhelmed going in too many directions at once. Just write about what you are learning and doing. And post regularly. The best way to lose followers is to post sporadically. Once a week is usually a good schedule. Many free blogging sites exist but I use blogger.com.

4) Feedburn your blog Now we are getting into some real marketing. By using feedburner.com, you are optimizing your blog to be delivered through RSS feeds to whatever platform the user chooses. In addition, you can give users the option of subscribing to your blog by email. You can setup feedburner to ping Google every time you post a new entry causing it to be instantly indexed for search. There are more features than I can cover here, but I think you can see that this step will go a long way to making you very searchable on the internet. Remember, every skill you learn now will be applied in new ways once your novel is complete. This is a time of education with some side benefits.

5) Blog or podcast some free fiction I have not reached this stage yet, but I think it is the next logical step. When you are trying to sell a $10-$15 soft cover or a $25-$30 hard cover book, why will a reader choose your novel? Once you are established you have your brand name, like Stephen King or James Patterson, and the brand is what attracts the buyer. The reader does not see a Stephen King book as being a big risk. You do not have that luxury. If you are willing to write some great fiction and give it away, you have a bigger chance of developing readers who will buy your books. The key here is "great fiction," not just your leftover ideas. Spend as much time, if not more, writing multiple drafts and editing your free fiction as you do with your novel. This is your first impression so dazzle your readers so they will come back for more.

This only scratches the surface of all the ways you can market yourself while writing your novel. I hope that these ideas will help you as you complete your novel, get published, and market like crazy to drive up sales.

J Hugh Thomas is a database developer and a programmer who is writing his first novel. Read his blog http://onwritingmyfirstnovel.blogspot.com to see all of his writer's resources and free advice.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=J_Hugh_Thomas
http://EzineArticles.com/?How-to-Start-Marketing-Yourself-While-You-Write-Your-First-Novel&id=2049247

Ten Tips to Help You Finish Writing Your Novel By Ann Roscopf Allen

1. Set aside a time to write and keep it sacred.

Make this a time when you know you are at your best and feel most creative -- Saturday mornings, late at night, whatever works for you. Make writing a priority and arrange other parts of your schedule around it.

2. Remove all distractions while you write.

Turn off the television. Don't answer the phone. You may need to set your writing time at a time when no one else is around to help you avoid being distracted.

3. Outline your plot.

Know generally where you want your story to go. Sometimes stories and characters develop in unexpected ways, and you need to allow for that. But keep your guiding plan in mind.

4. Avoid the intimidation of a blank computer screen.

Just start writing. Try freewriting about the plot of the story or a character to get "the flow" started. Begin a dialogue between two characters and see where your flow takes you. Sometimes that ends up in an embarrassingly bad scene, but that bad scene may just have the seeds of something a lot better in it. Once you've got something written, you can always improve it, but you have to get something, anything, written first.

5. Keep a draft mentality.

Nothing you write has to be permanent. Everything can change. If you get into a good flow and there's a word that you just can't think of, don't interrupt the flow by pondering over the word or going to the thesaurus. Leave a blank space and keep writing. There will always be time to go back and look up that word. At this stage, spelling and grammar don't matter; just write and create.

6. Don't feel compelled to begin at the beginning.

You don't have to write your story in chronological order during the drafting phase, especially if you know the main events you want your novel to cover. Work on the chapter you feel like working on. The first sentence and the first chapter will probably require the most work, so don't get frustrated by trying to get them perfect before you write anything else.

7. Organize your files, especially if you are not going to write in order.

Create a different file for each chapter you write. That way you can dip in and fool around with a few words or draft a scene and then save it, close it up, and move on to a different section of the story. When you can easily work on what you want, you are also preventing writer's block.

8. Revise, revise, revise.

Someone once said, "Writing is revising." Change and polish and delete and rearrange and change some more until you like the sound of the words. Often the best way to revise a sentence is to delete it.

9. Don't be afraid of putting yourself out there.

Make a list of writers who have written mediocre books (the incentive: "If HE can do it, so can I.") Be emboldened by writers whose works don't impress you much. The only thing they have over you is their persistence. There will always be critics, but you have to separate the wheat from the chaff: some people's criticism means something; most people's criticism is just so much noise. People keep writing novels despite the criticism. You might as well be one of them.

10. Only you can determine when you are finished.

Show your writing to a trusted friend, preferably one who knows about writing. Friends are likely to tell you how wonderful your novel is, as friends will do, and this of course is not helpful at all. Read between the lines of their compliments. Ultimately, you have to be the judge of your own writing.

Make up your mind to finish your novel, and you can do it. The only thing standing in the way is you.

About The Author

Ann Roscopf Allen is a college writing instructor and the author of the historical novel A Serpent Cherished, based on the true story of an 1891 Memphis murder. Visit her website - http://www.aserpentcherished.com/pages/1/index.htm

info@aserpentcherished.com

How to Write a Novel - Crafting Your Premise
By Joe Nassise

Writing a novel is easy. All you have to do is sit down at the computer and write.

Writing a good novel? Well, that's a bit harder. I've been writing professionally for seven years and I've sold nine novels in five different countries. My work has appeared on the bestseller list in Germany and has generated enough income for me to do it full-time to support my family. Since other writers helped me as I started out, I'm going to do the same thing here for anyone inclined to listen.

A good novel starts with a good idea. What we call a premise. A premise is the basic, underlying story. In essence, it is what the book is about. It is the central idea that makes people want to read the book.

The premise for my Templar Chronicles series (Heretic, A Scream of Angels, and A Tear in the Sky) is that modern Templar Knights are acting as a secret combat squad for the Vatican and protecting mankind from the supernatural threats and enemies that surround us. The premise for my forthcoming novel, The Book of Coming Sorrows, started with a simple question - what if? What if the apostle John wrote another book after he wrote the book of Revelation? What if that book brought about the cataclysmic events in Revelation when it was read aloud? What if that long, lost manuscript was discovered suddenly in New York City and someone began reading it?

You should be able to define the premise of your book in a single sentence.

Yes, I said one.

One sentence only.

If you can't, you really don't know what your book is about. (Some people will argue with that statement, believing that a novel is too complex to be reduce to a single sentence, but I've always felt that it needed to be broken down to its smallest denominator.)

So, step one in writing a novel - come up with a premise. Make it interesting. Make it exciting. And make it a single sentence.

Some hints:

* Shorter is definitely better. Try for under twenty words.

* No character names. Be generic. Say "Templar Commander" rather than "KNight Commander Cade Williams," for instance.

* Reads book summaries from places like the New York Times bestseller list for examples.

* Figure out what character has the most to lose in the story - and then tell what he or she wants to gain.

Start with a strong premise and your book will find the legs it needs to stand on its own.

Joe is the internationally bestselling author of the Templar Chronicles trilogy and a trained writing/creativity coach. Take your fiction to the next level with him at rockyourwritingcareer.com.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Joe_Nassise
http://EzineArticles.com/?How-to-Write-a-Novel---Crafting-Your-Premise&id=2060883