Writing the Breakout Novel Part 1
2001 was a different time. We’d all collectively agreed that putting your credit card on the Internet was a very bad thing indeed, and I really, really wanted a book my local Chapters didn’t carry. I had already Put My Credit Card On The Internet about a month before to buy a book on writing by Holly Lisle, but Writing the Breakout Novel was supposed to be amazing.
I remember sitting in my tub in our old apartment reading the book while the water got cool around me. Wow, I remembered thinking. This is awesome. I do all this stuff already but isn’t it great that it’s all in order here?
Of course, I did nothing that was contained inside the book, because here’s the thing they don’t tell you about Writing The Breakout Novel: It’s a damn hard thing to do. I’m just throwing that out there for the 25-year anniversary title. I hope it’s going to be out there in another thirteen more years, because it really contains everything a writer needs to have their own breakthrough realization.
Or at least have a baby-writer edition called Writing the Breakthrough Novel that allows people who aren’t professional authors to begin with, because the reason it took me so many years to get it was that first I had to become a professional author. It’s not his fault; it clearly states in the beginning that it is for midlist authors alone, so when I started, I wasn’t his ideal reader.
I knew how to get characters to do things at the time. It’s a lot more than some people know, and a hell of a lot less than most. Before the book spoke to me, I had to learn how to get the story to match what happens in my head every time without fail.
When I read the book I was working on before getting the book, I realized that time after time after time, I’d chosen the most obvious route to get to X and that most of my characters were arriving at the interesting thing place only after the interesting thing had happened and they were just told about it. I catch a lot of baby writers “plotting” like this, and I’m so sensitive to it because I did it as well. Writing interesting things is hard, you guys. Telling people about how awesome it was after the fact is easy, and new writers need easy.
Then I had to realize that while I could match my head-idea perfectly, my head idea was actually pretty boring and I had to concentrate on being able to head-idea on page while only focusing on the exciting bits of the story.
The remake of the 2004 Misbegotten was this. I’d hacked it open and put the exciting bits back in, but what remained was a Frankenstein’s monster mishmash of mixed motivation (omg, natural alliteration! STAMP IT DEAD WITH FIRE!). It was mishmashed, and it had characters wanting different things at different times and I had to reject it from the editor I’d sent it to myself because no matter how good I thought it had been, it couldn’t live in the shape it was in.
So then I could match what was in my head during just the exciting bits of the story, but I still didn’t feel done.
I wrote a lot in this stage as Angela Fiddler, but the reviews were mixed. Some people loved the world and the characters, some people hated that the romance wasn’t a part of the story because I wrote about soul-bonded people who once they connected, they were connected. Both sides were right. If I hadn’t read a crappy Starbucks cup that said, “The worst thing you can do is be financially rewarded and praised for doing the wrong thing”. Sure enough, Angela Fiddler was the wrong thing, and I was getting not insubstantial bits of money from her.
And then, just when I thought that I was a pro writer and aren’t I awesome, I realized, holy crap, you can use your story to tell a story without actually referring to the second story in the story. Mind = Blown.
And the book that finally does everything Writing the Breakout Novel is Misbegotten 3.0. I have never thought an old idea of mine was worth repeating until I failed so miserably at bringing the story behind Misbegotten to life. I’m not sad or sorry no one “failed to recognize it’s genius” because the book in front of them was not good. Don’t be using this story in a “this book was rejected X number of times so buck up and keep sending them out.” This is a “if you get rejected, there may be a reason for it”.
As baby writers who write, we tend to need to believe that out of X XXX,XXX’s of books written each year (I may need to add a couple X’s, that’s just a guess) only XXX of that genre are going to ever get published. So my chances of being published is y= XXX/X XXX XXX. What we don’t realize that if the book you write is a bad book, y=0. Or it’s so close to zero, barring certain factors such as divine intervention. There’s still a decent chance that a good book won’t publish either, but when you’re struggling to come up with a synopsis because nothing exciting ever happens in your story that you need to tell someone about through the synopsis, the problem isn’t your synopsis writing, it’s the book you’re trying to inject interest things happening in after it’s already been written.
I remember sitting in my tub in our old apartment reading the book while the water got cool around me. Wow, I remembered thinking. This is awesome. I do all this stuff already but isn’t it great that it’s all in order here?
Of course, I did nothing that was contained inside the book, because here’s the thing they don’t tell you about Writing The Breakout Novel: It’s a damn hard thing to do. I’m just throwing that out there for the 25-year anniversary title. I hope it’s going to be out there in another thirteen more years, because it really contains everything a writer needs to have their own breakthrough realization.
Or at least have a baby-writer edition called Writing the Breakthrough Novel that allows people who aren’t professional authors to begin with, because the reason it took me so many years to get it was that first I had to become a professional author. It’s not his fault; it clearly states in the beginning that it is for midlist authors alone, so when I started, I wasn’t his ideal reader.
I knew how to get characters to do things at the time. It’s a lot more than some people know, and a hell of a lot less than most. Before the book spoke to me, I had to learn how to get the story to match what happens in my head every time without fail.
When I read the book I was working on before getting the book, I realized that time after time after time, I’d chosen the most obvious route to get to X and that most of my characters were arriving at the interesting thing place only after the interesting thing had happened and they were just told about it. I catch a lot of baby writers “plotting” like this, and I’m so sensitive to it because I did it as well. Writing interesting things is hard, you guys. Telling people about how awesome it was after the fact is easy, and new writers need easy.
Then I had to realize that while I could match my head-idea perfectly, my head idea was actually pretty boring and I had to concentrate on being able to head-idea on page while only focusing on the exciting bits of the story.
The remake of the 2004 Misbegotten was this. I’d hacked it open and put the exciting bits back in, but what remained was a Frankenstein’s monster mishmash of mixed motivation (omg, natural alliteration! STAMP IT DEAD WITH FIRE!). It was mishmashed, and it had characters wanting different things at different times and I had to reject it from the editor I’d sent it to myself because no matter how good I thought it had been, it couldn’t live in the shape it was in.
So then I could match what was in my head during just the exciting bits of the story, but I still didn’t feel done.
I wrote a lot in this stage as Angela Fiddler, but the reviews were mixed. Some people loved the world and the characters, some people hated that the romance wasn’t a part of the story because I wrote about soul-bonded people who once they connected, they were connected. Both sides were right. If I hadn’t read a crappy Starbucks cup that said, “The worst thing you can do is be financially rewarded and praised for doing the wrong thing”. Sure enough, Angela Fiddler was the wrong thing, and I was getting not insubstantial bits of money from her.
And then, just when I thought that I was a pro writer and aren’t I awesome, I realized, holy crap, you can use your story to tell a story without actually referring to the second story in the story. Mind = Blown.
And the book that finally does everything Writing the Breakout Novel is Misbegotten 3.0. I have never thought an old idea of mine was worth repeating until I failed so miserably at bringing the story behind Misbegotten to life. I’m not sad or sorry no one “failed to recognize it’s genius” because the book in front of them was not good. Don’t be using this story in a “this book was rejected X number of times so buck up and keep sending them out.” This is a “if you get rejected, there may be a reason for it”.
As baby writers who write, we tend to need to believe that out of X XXX,XXX’s of books written each year (I may need to add a couple X’s, that’s just a guess) only XXX of that genre are going to ever get published. So my chances of being published is y= XXX/X XXX XXX. What we don’t realize that if the book you write is a bad book, y=0. Or it’s so close to zero, barring certain factors such as divine intervention. There’s still a decent chance that a good book won’t publish either, but when you’re struggling to come up with a synopsis because nothing exciting ever happens in your story that you need to tell someone about through the synopsis, the problem isn’t your synopsis writing, it’s the book you’re trying to inject interest things happening in after it’s already been written.