WRITING WITH

MAGGIE STIEFVATER
2020
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NOTEBOOK
 ACT 1
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INTERNAL
 VIDEO 1: Translation

WRITING IS NOT TYPING

What is writing? Writing is more than learning grammar and form. It’s important
to remember that all the skills we throw ourselves at are for one purpose:
encouraging a reader to see our story in their heads the same way we see it our
heads. This is a process of translation more than anything else: from the
nebulous, abstract form in your head into the more limited concrete form that
exists on a page.

It’s important to remember that this process of translation means that writing is
always a compromise. Words are wonderful, but they will never be as free and
huge as thought. Eliminate the idea that there’s a perfect draft: it’s imperfect
the moment it has to become words.

It’s a freeing truth, though, if you can manage to internalize it. Writing is
translation, transcription. You can delete an entire draft and still have the book,
because the book is saved forever in its perfect form on the hard drive of your
brain.

YOUR BRAIN IS AN INDIVIDUAL

Novel-writing is really about developing a custom decoder ring for your mind.
The natural language of your story is thought, and the way your brain processes
thoughts is unique to you. It means solutions that work for me may leave you
cold, and that’s not only ok, it’s to be expected.

Moreover, every writer has different goals. Different genres demand different
approaches. Advice that drives you towards a tightly-paced thriller might be
completely wrong for a sweeping gothic romance. That experimental literary
novel needs a different approach than that voicey first person comic novel.

Be canny. Aspiring writers need to be curious collectors of wisdom: pick up every

bit of knowledge you run across, but be equally free with putting it back down
again if it doesn’t work for you. Beware of absolutes. There are very few writing
rules that always apply.
 THIS SHOULD BE FUN
Writing is a most excellent game, but games are more fun if you understand
what’s going on. The goal throughout this is to end up with a good book . . . but
also to develop a personalized strategy that allows you to generally enjoy the
process along the way.

You can learn to enjoy the process, if the process is right for you.
 VIDEO 2: Mood

NON-FINISHERS UNITE!
Even though I began writing very young, and even though I knew what kinds of
novels I wanted to write, I still spent most of my writing youth plagued by a
problem many writers share: I was a non-finisher. Sometimes I managed to make
it to “the end,” but more often than not, I petered out before finishing the rough
draft. There are all kinds of reasons to give up on a book, after all, right? Boring
idea, lame main character, plot holes, plot tangles, etc. etc. Eh.

Academically, I understood that book problems could be fixed in revision, but

the books never made it that far. And no matter how many words I wrote into
novels, I didn’t seem to get any better at learning myself.

This is because learning how to write is more than simply repetition — remember
that we’re not learning to type. We’re learning to translate abstract-to-
concrete. It’s a different skill than learning to acquire wordcount. You can pour
a million words into various novels and still have the same bad habits on the
other side.

That old “word smarter, not harder” adage is such a cliché, but it really applies. I
had to learn what was actually keeping me from finishing instead of continually
throwing myself into the brink.

THE BOOK I INTEND TO WRITE

My problem was that I started actually putting words into the draft before I was
truly ready. Motivated by the thrill of a new idea, I began writing as quickly as
possible. I felt like the longer I left an idea to sit, the more likely I would lose that
flush of excitement. And since I seemed to flag the moment that excitement
wore off, speed felt imperative.

But the truth was that I actually needed to pause and let my story spend more
time in my head. I needed to learn more about why I was driven to write this
story, and what I hoped it would end up being, before I began writing. I didn’t
need to know the end, but I needed to know the outcome. What did I intend to
write? I developed a rough system of concepts I needed to puzzle out before I
began to set down words.
Otherwise, the manuscript itself became a worksheet of sorts, a tangled
document where I tried to solve all kinds of literary problems on the fly. Would
that work for some brains? Probably! Did it work for mine? No. Eventually I would
make so many logistical decisions to solve concrete problems in the manuscript
that I’d find myself tangled into a corner. Out of passion, out of solutions, and
out of commitment.

WORDLESS DECISION-MAKING
Remember what I said in the introduction about the natural form of story being
thought? The longer you keep a book idea in your head, the more outrageous
and inventive and nimble it is. Imagination is wordless! Boundless! Your book gets
all bound up with feeling and intention when it’s still in your brain; but execution
immediately begins to corrupt it, especially if you’re unsure of yourself and new
to translation. Up in your head, though . . it only has to obey dream logic;
nothing has to join up. This allows you to mentally run through endless
permutations without running aground on that pesky thing we call reality.

A novel is a series of decisions, both active and passive. Active: this is what this
book will be. Passive: ergo, it will not be any of these other books. Active: this is
where this chapter will take place. Passive: it will not take place in any of these
other possibilities. The more decisions you’ve made in advance, the faster you
can write — the faster you can simply execute them.

And if I make those decisions up in my head, without writing them down in

words? The word-making execution goes much faster. And, best of all? I get to
“The end.”

This is how I’ve developed my decision-making flowchart. Perhaps calling it a

flowchart is somewhat misleading, because I do sometimes go back and forth
among the items in it (against the flow? This is beginning to sound more like an
Olympic sport) — but regardless, it’s a pretty predictable shape for my current
writing process.
 MOOD
Mood! Mood! Mood! This is King, Queen, Prince and Princess of novel-writing for
me. It is where I begin each book. I ask myself not “what do I want to write
about” but instead “how do I want to feel for the next several months?”

As readers and viewers, we engage with stories at the level of mood. On movie
night, we ask ourselves first “what kind of movie am I in the mood for?” not
“what sort of character arc do I want to watch tonight?” We begin and end
with it. If a book or a movie gives us the mood we want, we forgive it for all sorts
of plot holes or shoddy writing. It’s taken us someplace.

So that is how I begin and end my books as well: mood. Feeling. Everything else
is then seen through this lens. Bittersweet? Eerie? Lush and gothic? Every idea
gets formed to fit the feeling.

KEEPING TRACK OF MOOD

Mood is my mission statement, my touchstone. After I’ve decided what I want
my next project to feel like, I return to it again and again to make sure I’m
making the project I intended to make. That means I assemble

- Playlists
- Image boards
- Read-alike novels
- Watch-alike movies

And refer back to them throughout the process. It’s easy for a project to “walk”
while you’re wrestling it onto paper. This helps me tug it back into line again and
again.
 VIDEO 3: Ideas

IDEAS ARE DISPOSABLE

When I first began writing this seminar, I tried to imagine what I would most like to
convey to everyone watching. If they could only take away one lesson, what
would it be? And I believe it’s this: durability. Resilience. An acceptance that, as
a creator, they will never create perfection, and so it’s ok to move on, to try
again, to shoot for greatness and always hit just beneath.

A facet of durability is believing that ideas are disposable. It’s easy to feel
precious about one’s ideas, especially if one has been working away at them
for years. Other ideas dry up, and it feels like if you don’t execute the one good
idea you have, that’s it for you. The truth, however, is that humans are story-
makers, we’re questioners, we’re players of the game “what if.” We’re designed
to come up with ideas, even though that pipeline sometimes gets clogged with
years of creative block. Idea-making is a skill and a muscle, and without
practice, it goes quiet.

I encourage those of you who have been working on a single project for more
than a few years to put it down. Not forever. Just long enough to come up with
an entirely new project. It’s difficult to put new skills into practice on an old draft.
Your new draft will showcase them all and give you confidence. Then you can
pick up that old favorite with fresh eyes and reinvent it.

IDEAS AREN’T PRECIOUS

Ideas are the smallest possible building block of a novel. They’re a great start,
but they are just that: the spark! They need ever so much more work put into
them to turn them into novels. And because novels are tinted by your personal
experiences and story-telling preferences, the underlying idea is often far less
visible than you might imagine.

I could give the same idea to everyone taking this seminar and ask for you all to
write me a novel about it and I reckon I’d end up with hundreds of very different
projects.

Think about all the Cinderella retellings. Think about all the apocalyptic novels
that begin with “what if aliens attacked?” As I said in the video, I did a short-
story writing blog with two other authors, and we often used the same prompt to
start us off. Sometimes the prompts were quite complex, like “The Lady of
Shalott.” Regardless, because we were all very different writers and people with
very different story-telling priorities, we’d end up with three very different stories
every single time.

It’s easy to talk yourself out of an idea by saying it’s not unique enough in the
literature landscape, or to get downtrodden because a book comes out that
seems to share an idea with yours. Just throw yourself into your idea and write it
only the way you can write it.

IDEA-MAKING IS A MUSCLE
The more you look for ideas, the more you’ll find them. I find my idea-making
outlet gets jammed up when I feel like I’m snarled in too many projects. If I feel
like I can’t use an idea, they stop showing up. But with the short story blog, I
knew I’d need a new idea each week, even if I was up to my neck in novel-
writing. Getting my brain in that hungry mindset meant that ideas came faster
and faster, and needed to feel less and less “special” for me to see the value in
them.

If you need practice in making ideas, set yourself the assignment of a story each
week. Look for ideas:

- Retell folktales
- Dramatize the lyrics of a favorite song
- Tell the story of someone interviewed in a news piece
- Put yourself in the shoes of someone you’re arguing with
- Reverse a rule you take for granted, like gravity
- Give power to someone who normally has none
- Or take it away from someone who normally does
- Imagine the worst thing you think could happen
- Imagine the best thing you think could happen

IS MY IDEA ANY GOOD?

This is an irrelevant question. There’s exceptions to every rule, of course, but
generally speaking, there’s no such thing as a good idea or a bad idea. There’s
only such thing as a good or bad idea for you.
Ideas that are good for you are:
 - Personal
- Specific
- Exciting
- Exclude Secondary Sources

PERSONAL means that the idea matters to you. AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL means that
it’s about you. The difference between them is distance, either in time or telling.
An autobiographical story with little distance can only be told once. Personal
stories are infinite — even if it is the story of your life, but transformed into
metaphor.

SPECIFIC means that the idea is best told by you. It involves special knowledge
that only you have, or a corner of the world that you’re so interested in you can
dig deep into the nitty-gritties. Readers want to be taken someplace they
haven’t been before.

EXCITING means that it’s something you are passionate about exploring, not an
idea you’re pursuing for more pragmatic reasons. You can pursue an idea
because you feel like there’s a hole in the market, or you think your MFA advisor
will be into it, or you think your mom won’t judge you for it, but it won’t keep you
very warm at night in the cold, cold second act of writing.

EXCLUDES SECONDARY SOURCES means that it’s not just a rewrite of your
favorite media. Novels are like pieces of a conversation. It started before you
entered the room, and if you waltz in and just repeat what someone else just
said — well, that’s bad conversation-making, isn’t it? Better to chime in with
something that is informed by everything you heard before.

LET YOUR FAVES INSPIRE YOU

That’s not to say you can’t be inspired by the media you love. You simply need
to think critically about it. What are the components of the work that you love?
Which one can you pull out to explore individually? If you say “ALL OF THEM, I
CAN’T CHOOSE” — let it be. You don’t yet have the distance to respond to it,
and that’s okay.

If you can pull out one or two, explore them in a way that’s specific to your
experience. Remember that the more elements of the original you combine
with the same priorities as the original . . . the more you’re just writing the original
again.
 IDEAS ARE METAPHORS FOR OTHER IDEAS
One of the things that writing many stories in short order taught me is that ideas
are often metaphors for other ideas.

Story ideas, after all, are being created by a version of you. This current version
of you is influenced by what you’re reading, what you’re anxious or excited
about, your interpersonal relationship status, the state of the world. Your ideas
are your way of processing that. It means that ideas that you have close
together are often thematically the same. Often just their clothing is different.
Let’s say you have . . . an idea about a lawyer losing faith in the value of his
profession and an idea about a dog that realizes barking no longer excites him.
Those are both thematically the same. The protagonist is losing the faith in a very
specific way.

Ask yourself which you prefer. Or combine them. Sometimes you need a whole
bunch of disparate ideas smushed together to make a novel, and sometimes
you just need to cull.

Finally, if you’re haunted by an idea that doesn’t seem to fit into your current
project — one of the so-called ‘plot bunnies’ — try exorcising it by writing it into
a short story or standalone chapter. These little fictional time capsules preserve
the mood and delight of the idea, and you can always come back to it later
and crack it open for a longer work. I did: both Scorpio Races and Shiver began
as short stories that were saved for later.

WRITE WHAT YOU KNOW

Every writer has heard “write what you know” at some point in their journey. It’s
good advice and an excellent way to write a novel only you could write, but it
can be limiting if taken too literally. Remember that “what you know” doesn’t
necessarily mean your zip-code or your exact physical experience. It means
write you know emotionally.

After all, if you only wrote your exact experience, you’d not only have only just
one book in you, but projects like Finding Nemo and Watership Down and Wall-E
wouldn’t exist, as there are very few fish, rabbit, and robot writers on the ground
these days.

CHECK BACK INTO MOOD

Remember that I consider my ideas subservient to mood in that grand flowchart
I was talking about. Every idea gets seen through the lens of the mood I’ve
already chosen, which gets me a good part of the way towards the next step:
premise.
 VIDEO 4: Premise

A PREMISE IS A PROMISE

The idea is the spark; the premise is the flame. The clever reader will note that
idea vs. premise is semantics. Some people use them interchangeably. For me,
however, an idea is any spark that lodges in my writer mind. A premise is
meatier. More complex. For example, consider the Scorpio Races. The idea was
to retell the water horse myth. The premise was formed when I decided people
would race the water horses.

To me, the premise is when an idea gets enough weight to become a promise.
When it actually becomes a good predictor of the novel it will become. And
equally important, all the novels it won’t become. The hallways I no longer have
to explore. The more doors I close, the faster I can move down my route without
sticking my head around corners. In many ways, that’s what premise is to me: a
narrowing of possibilities.

MOOD + IDEA = PREMISE

I described how Shiver came to be. The flowchart I described for it included
idea, mood, theme and setting, but if you’ve read Shiver, you can see how
really, the book was promised after just those first two. Idea plus mood:
bittersweet love story plus werewolves. That’s Shiver. That’s my touchstone.

It’s also, I should point out, when before, I’d be sorely tempted to begin jotting
things down. Exploring the concept on page. I knew myself well enough then,
however, to practice restraint, and learn more about the book.

MOOD + IDEA + IDEA = PREMISE

Sometimes it takes longer than others to come to a workable premise,
something specific enough to actually give me enough to brainstorm the rest of
the flowchart. Particularly for a longer work or a complex work, mood plus idea
doesn’t really get me to the next stage.
For something like the Raven Cycle, I actually stuck multiple ideas together,
ideas I’d been collecting for literally years and sticking into their own individual
projects.

- The non-psychic daughter of a family of psychics

- A boy whose family can take things from dreams
- A privileged young man looking for meaning in a medieval quest
- A forest where all seasons exist at once

It was only when I combined these together that I finally had a premise that I
could hold in my hand and look at. Could I have written each of them on their
own? Yes, for sure. Would they have been very different novels with different
priorities? Absolutely.

It’s important to remember that there’s rarely wrong or right answer at this stage
of the game. One premise or another is not inherently better or worse. Instead,
it’s more important to remember that the right premise is one I’m invested in. The
one that lets me explore everything about the idea and mood in ways that
please me as a story-teller.

EXERCISE
In the video, I invited to you to try this out with an idea I provided, and if you
didn’t pause the video to try it out then, I invite you to try it out now. It’s easier to
play when you feel like the stakes are low, and what’s lower than playing with
an idea someone else handed you?

Again, the exercise is this:

Take the idea — Everyone aged 24 disappears for 24 hours — and run it through
various moods. Do you have enough to develop further? Or do you need more
ideas to stick to it?

Remember the other ideas can be completely disparate. Imagine sticking any
of these onto it to get a fuller picture:

- A spaceship journey goes terribly awry

- Historical shapeshifters!
- A trial attorney trying to prove himself
- A grad school program rife with corruption
- A rare whale
- A long-dreaded wedding
Try to study the workings of your own mind as you do this. What makes a
combination feel more plausible for you? What kind of information do you seem
to need in order to continue brainstorming? What seems to be a surefire way to
shut you down?

PERMISSION TO DAYDREAM
This stage is a wonderful stage to daydream at. To imagine what your book
would look like. I mean really look like. To close your eyes and picture the title
page. The style of the cover. The font the title is printed in. The heft of the book in
your hands. The feeling the reader gets when they read that first paragraph. The
feeling they’re left with when they close the book the book for the last time. And
for further: imagine it’s been adapted into a film. You’re sitting in the best seat.
The title credits are displayed; music is playing. What’s the music? Who are the
audience?

This feels like an indulgent exercise — after all, authors don’t have any say in
their covers usually, and they certainly aren’t picking the music that plays over
their credits. But it’s a useful exercise because each of these choices are made
based upon story genre and audience. When you imagine a thriller’s font for
your book, you’re making a decision. When you imagine a fat book, you’re
making a genre decision. When you imagine readers’ being terrified in the first
paragraph, or weeping over the last: those are decisions that help set in your
mind what you’re intending to write.

Picture it as fully as you can. That’s the book you’re going to write.
 VIDEO 5: Setting

MOOD AND SETTING

Remember how I said the natural form of story was in your head? Words are
wonderful — huge fan, I own all the albums — but ultimately, they’re limiting. This
was particularly true with The Scorpio Races. It began with a mood, like all of my
books, but this mood was encapsulated in an image. If I’d tried to describe it in
words, it wouldn’t have caught all the complexity of the mood. But an image . .
. well, they can contain 1,000 words, someone once said.

That image, of a solitary rider on a blood red horse at the base of chalk white
cliffs, formed the backbone for the novel.

For the longest time I conflated mood and setting. In reality, they inform each
other, back and forth, the idea sandwiched in the middle, becoming ever more
specific as you land on a zip code for it.

THE WHY OF A PLACE

I often tell my writing friends that writing is like holding a huge bundle of balloons.
You’re trying so hard to hold on to everything, but there’s so many of them, and
against your will, without you even noticing, sometimes one or two slip through
your fingers. You forget to think hard about setting. You forget that characters
can have siblings. You forget about nuance and color because you’re focused
so hard on just getting the things you have tightly in your hand done well.

It can be easy to fall into a setting, especially if the idea itself doesn’t
immediately come packaged with one.

WRITE WHAT YOU KNOW

Here’s that piece of advice again, coming to haunt us like a rerun. In this case,
what can specificity of experience lend to the setting? What do you know
about a location that you can use? Is there anything you can write about with
intriguing specificity?
When I traveled to cliffs for the Scorpio Races, what was I really looking for?
Accuracy? No. I was looking for truth. I wanted to know what it felt like to live in
such a place.

GENRE AND SETTING

This varies by genre. The Raven Boys takes place in the valley and because so
much of the series is about finding home, I have a lot of room to talk about the
sense of place. That’s not so true in Call Down the Hawk, even though it features
a lot of the same characters. It’s a more briskly paced series, more focused on
plot and mystery, and although the setting must still be specific, it is not the
subject of the painting.

It’s also relevant when you’re getting ready to dive into location research. The
amount and kind of location information you need for a brisk thriller will be very
different from a leisurely literary piece that is very interested in the dynamics of
the community it takes place in.

EXERCISE
The benefit to me keeping this up in my head for as long as possible is that I can
still daydream wildly, without losing anything or committing to anything. I’m not
yet constrained by the reality of prose nor by the pressures of research. Instead, I
can let myself contemplate as far as my imagination will let me. I’m moving
back and forth between mood, idea, premise, and setting, prodding each
option to see which one feels like something I’d like to explore.

In the video, I asked you to do this exercise, and if you didn’t pause it then, I’d
like you to pause now instead. Take that idea that I gave you in the previous
exercise: everyone age 24 vanishes for 24 hours. And using the mood and
premise you attached to it before, now play around mentally with different
settings. Watch how some settings open up a premise — like placing it on a
Mars-based military base. And watch how others make it more intimate — like
setting it entirely in a grocery store.

As creators, we often have default settings. Scenarios, personality types, settings

that we always point our camera at. Try in this exercise to stretch outside of your
comfort zone. Imagine the story happening in:

- a cottage at the edge of an eerie moor

 - Underwater
- 16th century China
- the Olympics
- a mundane corporate office
- the White House
- the future
- New York City
- A farming community

Even imagine it happening in all of those places, because sometimes stories

range and their setting is actually all of those settings combined.

Think about how each setting makes the story feel different and offers different
possibilities. Which ones open up questions for you? Which ones shut them down
immediately?

Then apply it to your own concepts.

 VIDEO 6: Story, Part I

WHAT IS STORY?
Story is all-important. In commercial fiction, anyway.

Story is the tune, the part that makes the song catchy. Not every listener needs a song
to be hummable. There are huge swaths of listeners who listen for the timbre of a song,
the texture and feel of a song. If it fits in their genre, they’ll add it to the playlist. But if
you want to have a hit, it’s got to be catchy.

That’s story.

The funny thing about story is that it’s the thing that often feels the most important to
the reader, but it’s often the thing that is most changeable to the author.

The things I’m interested in looking at in my books — character arcs, theme, mood
— support story, but it’s important for me to remember they aren’t story. They’re noise,
texture, proof.

Story is plot, which is beginning, middle end. In my opinion, story must be at least one of
these three things:

- Conflict
- Exploration
- Change

In commercial fiction, it’s often all of these, but at the bare minimum it is one.
Beginning, middle, end. The reader has to feel like they’ve accomplished something
between those pages.

CHOOSING THE CAMERA, PART I

It’s about this stage in brainstorming that I begin to think about where I will set
down my cameras in this world I’m contemplating. I don’t mean point of view,
although I might have an inkling of who I’m interested in following at this point,
depending on how the idea came to me. I mean that it’s time for me to decide
which facet of the idea I’m interested in focusing on.

Generally, the correct answer here is that the right story is the one that explores
the elements of the premise that fascinate you.
For example, there were many different ways to explore the story in Lament, my
debut. The novel, if you haven’t read it, is about a shy teen whose preternatural
musical talents draw the unwelcome attention of the fairies, including a human
who has been roped into being a fairy assassin long before.

I told the story of the teen just as her talents began to threaten and intrigue the
fairies. But I could have easily told that story from the fairies’ point of view. The
assassin’s. I could have told the story from the point of view of the mother
watching her daughter play a cat and mouse game with the supernatural. I
could have told the story from the best friend’s point of view (And did, in the
sequel). None of them are right or wrong: it was simply the story that allowed me
to look at the elements of the premise that intrigued me at the time.

Jurassic Park from the point of view of the hospital staff treating victims. From the
scientists. From park goers. From the dinosaurs.

Harry Potter from the point of view of students, or teachers, or muggles.

Twilight from the point of view of the guidance counselor.

There’s no right or wrong answer — there’s only the answer that allows you the freedom
to look around the corners you want to look around.

MOOD
I keep checking back into mood as I hold this brainstorming party in my mind.
Shiver could have been a horror with very few changes.

I spend a lot of time listening to those playlists at this point and reminding myself:
what is the book you meant to write? What does that story look like?
 VIDEO 7: Story, Part II
PASSIVE & ACTIVE STORIES
At this point of brainstorming, it’s too early in the game for me to be writing any
plot down or doing truly complex plot thoughts, but I am thinking about how
active my story shapes are.

Planning active storylines from the get-go makes me more frustration-proof later.
A handy rule of thumb for seeing if you’re thinking about a story in an active
way or a passive way is to remember the difference between active voice and
passive voice in grammar.

Active: She bought a house.

Passive: She was given a house.

In an active sentence, and in an active story, the subject is the one driving the
story. She’s acting upon the situation.

In a passive sentence, and in a passive story, the subject is being acted upon.
She is a pawn. She isn’t doing anything; the world around her is. It means that I,
the author, will have to continually think of bigger and badder things to throw at
her throughout the story to drive her through the plot, which ultimately will feel
like a run-on sentence.

Think about this in terms of our imaginary idea: everyone aged 24 disappears for
24 hours. If your plot only involves someone watching this happen to someone
else, that’s passive. If your plot involves an active investigation and solving of the
issue by someone else, that’s active. If the plot is about a 24-year-old
disappearing and watching other people try to figure it out, it’s passive. If it’s
about the 24-year-old disappearing and then changing their life once they get
back, it’s active.

AMNESIA
What is it about aspiring writers and amnesia? We love it. Why do we love it? I’m
not sure why it’s such a common device in new writers’ fiction — how many of
us have met someone with amnesia in real life, after all? — but there’s no
denying it. Characters all over the world are forgetting their pasts every day.
I was no exception. I went through my amnesiac stage. I wrote about wizards
with amnesia. Historical figures with amnesia. Unicorns . . . with amnesia. Possibly
it was a way to avoid learning exposition and back story. After all, if you can’t
remember your past, you don’t have to spend much time on page recounting it
to the reader. But what it actually did was render all those characters quite
passive. Each manuscript spent an enormous amount of time guiding the
hapless character through a series of events where they were acted upon,
learning what the world and their past was really like. It looked like action, but it
was instead just the world’s slowest detective story and withholding of
information. If I had begun those stories with characters who knew who they
were, the bigger plot would have begun immediately and they would have
been forced to change in more interesting ways. Not learning who they used to
be, but learning who they were going to become now after the harrowing
adventure they were on.

A TALE OF TWO TENSIONS

Novels often contain both abstract story and concrete story — do these things
have better names? Possibly. MFA grads, feel free to weigh in. Abstract stories
are continuous, nebulous, and often internal. Concrete stores are just that:
external, visible, obvious. Concrete stories have an obvious end that provides
the reader with an easy to identify goal. Abstract stories will need to have a
concrete end imposed on them in order to acquire a commercial shape.

ABSTRACT CONCRETE
Staying married Falling in love
Protecting a city from aliens Killing the enemy’s queen
Not being anxious Learning to speak to strangers
Staying friends Finding Glendower

Compare the tension between a story that is about a couple struggling to stay
married versus the easier, more obviously commercial romance shape of a
couple falling in love for the first time. How will we know the story of the
struggling couple is over? We’ll need to impose a concrete goal over the top of
their struggle so that when it is accomplished, we know their internal, abstract
plot has resolved.

What about a story about protecting a city from invading innumerable aliens?
This is why so many stories of aliens impose them with a hive mind — that way
the viewer or reader understands that if the queen is killed, the story is satisfyingly
over.
In a quieter, coming of age story, the plot might revolve around a character
learning to be less anxious. But how will we know that she’s succeeded? Like the
story of the squabbling couple, we’ll have to impose a concrete storyline over
the top so that we can see her physically act out a proof of success. For
instance, if she begins the story being dressed down by a bully of a teacher, our
concrete proof of her internal arc can be demonstrated when she absolutely
obliterates him in a debate in front of the entire school.

Often we authors are most interested in the internal, abstract stories, and that’s
all right — but it means you have to accept that you still need a concrete plot
to drive the pacing of the story. To me, the Raven Boys was about staying
friends. But to a reader, it’s about finding Glendower and unlocking
Cabeswater. That’s the concrete story that gives me the freedom to tell my
abstract story.

Commercial fiction doesn’t always get tied up with a neat little bow, but there is
always some kind of bow.

WHERE THE STORY BEGINS

It’s right about now I start asking myself where the story begins. I might not be right. But I
want to be in the ball park. Where in the story we begin, and how long we run through
the scenario, can change everything in a book.

I’ll be the first to warn you that this is like that mirror in Harry Potter, where you look into it
and it shows you what you want? Dumbledore is all, no, bro, don’t keep looking into it,
it’ll drive you round the twist.

I’m not looking for perfect right now. I know that the actual beginning of the timeline
can change in the writing or in the revision. What I’m looking for is a framework I can
operate within.

The ideal starting place is the one that sets you up to tell the story you’re exciting about
telling.

Let’s take a look at the way starting stories in different places can change the shape of
them. We’ll start with our idea: everyone aged 24 disappears for 24 hours.

Here are two obvious starting places:

- When everyone disappears

- When everyone comes back

Break them down: when everyone disappears will set you up for a timeline where much
of the beginning will be taken up with trying to understand the puzzle of it. Putting
together that it was not just one person disappearing. Realizing they’re all tied together
by age. Trying to understand if they’re ever coming back.

When everyone comes back means that you’ll be spending time instead exploring
what the disappeared experienced, what they missed, and how that changes the
world.

Now here are some less obvious options:

- 24 years after the first batch disappeared, maybe when conditions seem to
be the same as the last time 24 years olds went missing. Thinking about it this
way twists the world bigger.
- a few weeks or months before the disappearance, when a main character
runs away or disappears themselves on purpose and gets dragged back to
their life. Twisting it this way makes us look harder at character — giving us a
hint at the character arcs we might explore through this story.

There aren’t wrong or right answers. At this point, the answer is just: what let’s you look
at the things you find exciting.

And remember.

You need to have a place to start writing. You need to have a beginning of the book.

These two things do not have to be the same thing. One gets you into the work. The
other is the work. And a lot of times, you can’t tell the shape of the story until you have
more of it blocked in.
 VIDEO 8: STORY, PART III

THREE-ACT STRUCTURE
We are programmed to accept a three-act structure.

It’s invisible, like a sentence that begins with a noun and heads to a verb. You don’t
have to use this shape, but understand that it costs you something to not. Readers have
a certain amount of brain power to give to you, and they’re willing to do a certain
amount of the heavy lifting themselves, but after a certain point, a book is too much
work and they put it down.

Three act structure costs nothing. It’s the free template. And look, that doesn’t make it
bad! If you have great content, no one wants to see the flashy sidebars or graphics.

Here’s a pretty common shorthand for three act structure:

- ACT 1: Get the character up a tree

- ACT 2: Throw stones at him
- ACT 3: Get him down gracefully.

It’s a shorthand that works to remind us of what the acts generally do:

- ACT 1: Establish normalcy, then break it

- ACT 2: Place character in escalating conflict
- ACT 3: Resolve story with the character changed by the events

And it’s a shape that seems to work well for many stories:

- Hunger Games: the Games are the tree

- The Scorpio Races: the race training is the tree
- Coraline: the mirror world is the tree

But it’s a shorthand that prioritizes conflict. In the last video, I talked about how story was
conflict, exploration or change.

Think about stories like:

- The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe

- The Italian Job
- The Raven Boys

Their middle acts have conflict, yes, but they are equally about exploration. There can
be a temptation to believe that tension must always be negative, but the pull of
discovery can be just as effective. This truth seems to get explored more in younger
categories. Middle grade books can investigate the surprise of a birthday; young adult
books more often send the protagonist off to war on their birthday; adult books muse
there is no joy in birthdays anymore as they gaze back regretfully on a life ill-spent.

Match your balance of change, conflict, and exploration with your desired mood, not
with a fear there won’t be enough tension.

THE AMOUNT OF STORY

Genre and story have a fairly tight relationship. Not only does genre often
predict the content and tone of the story, but it also predicts the amount of
story. Think about the amount of plot events in a movie like Sleepless in Seattle
versus Game of Thrones. In a Marvel movie versus a Pitch Perfect movie. As I’m
brainstorming about my story, I’m thinking about how much of it I’ll need. No
point brainstorming an epic for a comedy, and on the other side of the coin, I’m
going to need a fairly complex story for a trilogy.

WRITE WHAT YOU KNOW

The easiest story shape is true.

If you’ve experienced or witnessed an event, you already are much of the way
toward a story shape. But remember the difference between personal and
autobiographical — without distance from a personal event, you can wander in
the mire forever. If you haven’t solved a problem for yourself, your character
isn’t going to figure it out before you.

But with distance, you can establish what a story means to you and as soon as
you have meaning, the natural progression of beginning, middle, and end fall
into place.
 VIDEO 9: Character, Part I

CHARACTER IS SUBTRACTIVE
Character is art, and art is subtractive. Art removes things from reality in order to
paint a picture, a mood. In an unstudied photograph, everything is in focus and
all colors are equally brilliant. The artist limits the palette to set the mood and
brings elements in and out of focus in order to direct the viewer’s eye.

Readers long for this — we read fiction to feel the authorial hand, to know that
things mean something. To know that a narrative has been crafted. Characters
are no different; they must be artful and stylized to match the genre of the book
they inhabit.

CHARACTER IS SUBSERVIENT
There’s a reason why I think about character after I think about all of the other
items on the flowchart: mood, idea, premise, setting, story. It’s not just that I’ll get
caught up in inventing characters too complex to inhabit any story. It’s because
character has to obey the rules set by my other decisions. A vicious villain looks
different in a light comedy than in a gritty political thriller.

Imagine a Loki character in multiple projects. The god of mischief doesn’t

change his stripes at a basic level, but a Loki in a Marvel movie versus the Loki
character of Tyler Durdin in Fight Club look very different because their genres
are calling the shots first and foremost.

It works the other wayYou can tell the ugliest of stories in a sweet way if you
choose the right camera. You can make the sweetest of stories ugly if you
choose the right camera.

CHARACTER IS COMPLEX
This is when I begin to jot things down. Not into a manuscript — Heaven forbid,
the aliens would definitely still arrive if I started now — but into a notebook. I jot
questions to myself about the characters and the story, doing my work
longhand. There’s something about the act of writing it down by hand that
makes my brain work differently. I read once that we process stuff differently
when we handwrite it versus type it, and that feels true here.

Also, it’s comforting. It feels like a new stage. This is not yet drafting, but it’s
getting close. Exciting!

A MAIN CHARACTER IS A CHOICE

Don’t let yourself just default to a camera. Ask yourself Why these people? Why
no one else? Is it because it is truly the best way to look at your story? Or is it
because it’s the most obvious.

I think we need to take a brief pause to talk about one of the squirmiest aspects
of learning to write: you’re going to write yourself into a book.

You’re going to do it by accident. A lot of people think that accidental self-

insertion is about wish-fulfillment, but the truth is, you’re going to appear in that
book in all kinds of forms. Not just the dashing hero, but the side characters and
the villain and everyone in between.

This is because one of the things we have to learn as a writer is how much of our
experience is exclusive to us.

I’m going to read you a bit from Call Down the Hawk about Ronan figuring out
that his experience isn’t exclusive. We all have that realization to some degree
throughout our life, but as writers, it’s crucial we fast forward and super power
that understanding.

If you don’t know the ways you are different from most of the world, you’ll write
that into your book, without context. Every character will become you in little
telling ways.

Many of you will have read books for other people and will have had the cringy
experience of reading for friends and seeing themselves in their book. When I
first began writing, way too many characters drank tea and way too few drank
coffee or alcohol — just like me. It didn’t occur to me. Everyone was a musician.
I had no idea how to write a character who wasn’t. Every character was wildly
ambitious. I just assumed everyone was. I used to read for a writer whose make
out scenes always ended up with the girl sitting in the boy’s lap. Always. It was
the peak of romance. I’ve sat in laps, sure, but it’s not really my kink. You know
what is? Road trips. Maggie, remember, there are lots of ways for dates to go
down that don’t involve cars.

I hammer on this now because — especially if this is your first or third or fourth
book, early days, you know — you have to be especially vigilant when choosing
the camera for your story. By default, you’re programmed to choose yourself.

Artists do this to. The face we know best is ours. We don’t even understand,
when we first begin to draw, what’s unusual about our face. Not everyone’s
eyelids fold like ours do. Not everyone’s lips are as broad or as narrow. So at first,
especially if we draw from memory, we draw ourselves. Look at new artists
online. If you look carefully, you’ll see how inexperience shows: they put the
same face on every person. It’s not bad observation. It’s just incomplete.

It’s a life-long process to learn the skill of winnowing out the exclusive aspects of
your experience.
 VIDEO 10: Character, Part II

CHOOSING A CAMERA, PART II

Generally, the most commercial protagonist choice is also the most active
choice. After all, reader satisfaction generally comes from watching a situation
and a human change — whether that’s from better to worse or evil to good
doesn’t particularly matter. We’re drawn to dynamism. That’s story. That’s the
catchy tune.

Which means these are often good questions to ask yourself when picking a
camera:

- who’s in the thick of it

- who stands the most to gain?
- who stands to lose the most?
- who started it?
- who stopped it?
- who offers an unusual view of a usual picture?
- who offers an mundane view of unusual scenario?
- who lets you look at what you want to look at?

Let’s look at our idea again, everyone 24 disappears for 24 hours.

•who’s in the thick of it

This would be a character who either is the one disappearing, or directly leading
the charge of addressing where they went.

•who stands the most to gain?

This is back to the concept of that character who had originally run away from
their lives — this is their chance to restart, perhaps.

•who stands to lose the most?

What about a character who goes missing on the day of their best friend’s
wedding? Who misses a court case? A final exam, a surgery?

•who started it?

How do I feel about the first person to vanish? The person or entity that
engineered it?

•who stopped it?

How is the problem ultimately solved? How do I feel about telling the story from
the point of view of the person who brings the phenomenon to a close, for good
or for bad?

•who offers an unusual view of a usual picture?

For instance, if we’re telling a novel in a mundane situation that we think we

already know, like a typical office or school, it changes the story if we pick
someone who offers an off-kilter or very intimate view of it. What happens to the
office if you lose your 24-year-old Fed Ex guy who normally comes by every day,
or what happens at the school if you lose a posse of 24-year-old grad students in
a small program?

•who offers a mundane view of unusual scenario?

If we’re talking about space stations, military take-overs, a colony of centaurs

fighting for survival — focusing on someone with a mundane role within it makes
an unusual set up more accessible. What happens when you look at the story
from the point of view of the investigator whose sister was one of the ones who
disappeared?

•but ultimately, who lets you look at what you want to look at

That’s the only rule. You just have to sell it. There’s a book called Station Eleven,
about the end of the world after a virus [insert heavy silence here]. Apocalyptic
books can be vast in scope. After all, everything has been changed from the
norm. Where to point the camera? In Station Eleven, the author points it at a
troupe of traveling actors, which lets her look at what presumable she wanted
to think about: the role of culture in humanity, even in heightened times.

There’s a series I loved in my childhood by Lloyd Alexander called the Chronicles

of Prydain. It’s an epic series based on Welsh myth, really vast stuff, the battle of
good and evil, kings having it out. The main character is not the prince or
princess, not a knight or king, but an assistant pig keeper, which allows the
author to examine a kid coming to grips with his feelings on heroism, ambition,
and nobility.

What do you want to look at?

Remember when we were talking about making a story frustration proof. A large
component of that is making a character who is able to move through the plot
actively.

RIGHT-HAND CHARACTERS
There’s a kind of character that I like to read about but I don’t often write about myself.
I’m sure in proper literary criticism there’s a name for these characters, but in my head, I
just call them right hand characters. It’s not exactly that they’re passive. They’re simply
not the most active choice. They’re the right-hand man, rather than the obvious
protagonist.

Sherlock would be a fine protagonist, but he’s not: Watson, the observer, is. In Ferris
Bueller, Ferris initially seems to be the protagonist, but he’s also not. He’s the situation.
Cameron is the one who changes.

Novel-wise, George Saunder’s Fox 8 is a little novel about the growth of suburbs
and development . . . told from the point of view of a fox.

Room, by Emma Donaghue, is the story of an abducted young woman kept in a

single room by her captor . . . told from the point of view of her child.

And Remains of the Day, by Ishiguro, is about a failed love story, from the point
of view of a butler who gave up everything for his job, rather than the more
active lady in his life.

These characters are not the most active choice. They look at the situation from
the side, in a roundabout way. This can create a cool dynamic of a very fraught
situation diffused through a limited camera.

These are the questions I ask when I’m looking at populating my stories.
 VIDEO 11: CHARACTER, PART 3

KEEPING IT SIMPLE . . . AT FIRST

My writing life changed forever after I read SOMEDAY THIS PAIN WILL BE USEFUL
TO YOU, by Peter Cameron. When I was finished reading this novel, I found
myself bereft. Bereft! Not because the ending was sad, but because I missed the
main character. I had no idea that a book could do such a thing — that a book
character could feel so real. Before that, I’d known the broad strokes of how to
create book characters: they were predictable, specific, interesting, etc. But I
had never thought that I could create actual humans.

Now I was determined to write actual humans.

But I can’t start there. Obviously, great characters, human characters, are
specific, rich, and interesting, but for me, if I invest them with that kind of
specificity and noise in this part of my brainstorming, I quickly lose sight of both
how the character interacts with the story and group dynamics.

Instead, I keep it simple. Ghoulishly simple. I consider my characters mere

paperdolls at this point. Tropes. The serious one. The angry one. The wounded
one.

I do this because I’m not just looking at each character. I’m looking at the
spaces between them, and once they get more complicated, it’s harder to see
those shapes as clearly.

SITCOM STYLE
I don’t think anyone would consider my works to be anything like a sitcom, but
that’s often how I think of my characters when I first begin to shape my cast.
Ultimately I don’t want my characters to be as stylized as a television sitcom
— they’ll have more nuance and edge than a thirty-minute laugh track piece
can support — but studying sitcoms helps me think about the way character
groups are constructed. Sitcom casts are full of larger than life personalities that
create drama just by existing alongside each other. Viewers can predict the
way they will come into conflict with each other and with new situations in a
way that creates predictable and hilarious results each week.
Of course, they are stylized and too stereotyped to work in a Stiefvater novel,
but they remind me to create my casts in ways that have organic tension. The
smart one! The stupid one! The underdog! The jokester!

This kind of dynamic character group building is visible in almost all media that
has a thriving fandom, and it’s worth studying. Think about the Marvel movies.
Would have two Captain America characters in the same group? Two Tony
Starks? No, collect only one of each. And think about how knowing how these
two will predictably spark off one each other adds easy and dynamic tension to
literally any scenario you put them in.

I did this with the friend group in the Raven Cycle. Gansey (the noble one).
Ronan (the angry one). Adam (the studious one). Noah (the doleful one). Blue
(the curious one). And again with the women of Fox Way. Maura (the funny
one). Persephone (the airy-fairy eerie one). Calla (the uncompromising brash
one).

Here’s an exercise: try reducing your friend group to tropes. Your family. Look at
the spaces between them.

LINDA THE LUNCH LADY

How many characters do you need? As few as you can manage and still get
the job done. It’s a lesson I have to learn again and again. Characters who
seem unique and well-defined to you blur in the mind of readers. Two
characters with names that start with G make them frown with confusion in the
first few pages. Two characters who serve the same plot function will just slow
things down.

One of the earliest edits I got for Shiver was the request to delete Linda the
Lunch Lady. She was a cafeteria woman whose only role was to support Grace
in a way similar to Grace’s family and friends already did. Shiver was already a
small-cast affair, and she stuck out like a sore thumb — two Captain Americas. I
deleted her and no one missed her.
 VIDEO 12: Character, Part IV

STEALING & NOISE

Now that I have my tropey character groups roughly inserted into my story idea,
it’s time to give them life. Now what gives a character life? I used to think, as an
aspiring writer, that it was detail. I would fill out charts of my characters’ traits,
making sure they all looked different, but guess what: it didn’t actually make my
characters different. It made them as different as Clark Kent with glasses or
without glasses. It was like dressing a Barbie doll up in different outfits and
thinking that made it a different doll each time. It was like when you put a hat
on, and your dog doesn’t know you.

Because it’s not the details that make a person who they are, even if those
details are very specific. I play the bagpipes, as you’ll recall. If you got a room of
20 bagpipers together, would you expect us to be identical?

No. Details are proof of who someone is.

When you’re adding details to a character, noise to a character, they should

prove the rules of them. Why they do what they do. It’s not aesthetic.

Now how do I accomplish this? I steal. I am always a hungry thief for reality.
Now, I don’t steal a whole person. I don’t need a whole person. Also, it’s
probably unethical.

Instead, what I’m looking for is for are the various ways that my tropes are
proved and worn in the real world. Let’s say I want to write a nerd. Let me play
my mind over various nerds I have known. What makes them feel nerdy? Can I
take any of those attributes? Or perhaps I need someone who is motivated by
duty. What does that look like in the real world? Can I take any of those details?

DRAWING FROM MEMORY

Now, I don’t have to draw every character from real life. But I’m very mindful
that if I don’t, I revert to default types. It’s much like artists. If I asked you guys to
draw a person from memory, you’d probably draw me something that looked
recognizably human, no matter how good of an artist you are. Eyes, nose, the
works. If I handed you a photograph of a person and told you to draw that
person, you’d probably draw a more specific sort of human, no matter your skill
level. You’d give a shot at reproducing what you saw and so it would be just
that little big more unique than the other. Now, if I had you draw lots of people
that way, you’d probably get better and better at finding the little specific
things that made them look identifiable.

And yet if I took away all those photos and said, draw me a human, you’d
revert somewhat. You’d either draw the last person you remembered drawing,
or you’d draw your standard issue person-drawing, or something somewhere in
between.

That’s what I do. I have written many characters from life in my life, so I have a
pretty good buffer, but eventually, I will still just end up writing the same types.

So I keep looking for reality.

THE STORY OF ADAM

 VIDEO 13: Character, Part V

WRITE WHAT YOU KNOW

Exercise time! Write what you know means stealing people you know, stealing yourself,
and looking for the emotional truth in all relationships (so you can steal it). If you’re
writing “the rebel,” look for people you know who are rebels in real life and ask yourself
why they come off as rebellious, and ask yourself how they show emotion/ anger/ love/
etc. Then steal it.

And don’t forget the noise. Ronan and the mice. Adam and the box kicking. People
are prettier and uglier than characters.

WHO ARE YOU?

Unless you know yourself thoroughly, you don’t belong in your book. Personal versus
autobiographical. You can steal from yourself as long as you have enough distance to
be able to pull it off.

Am I Ronan Lynch? No. But I stole a bit of me from when I was 19 to give him a human
heart and pushed him on his way. Here’s a way you can tell if you have written yourself
into a book. Ask yourself: how would I respond to this situation? And if the answer is
always “the same way this character is” you’ve written yourself into the book.

As for me, I don’t lose sleep thinking that Ronan Lynch is too similar to me. You know
how I can tell we aren’t the same? I have loads of friends.

A PUNCH IN THE NIGHT

I don’t know if you’ve read The Raven Boys, the first novel in the Raven Cycle. If you
haven’t, you might want to cover your ears, or fast forward. Is this really a spoiler? It’s a
spoiler, but not a ruiner.
Anyway, I was just going to tell you about a scene that I knew would happen from
nearly the very beginning of the writing process, even though I wasn’t sure when in the
draft it would take place.

It is this: there’s this character named Adam, and his father is a real piece of work,
though we haven’t seen it onscreen really before this point. He’s upset with Adam, and
he hits him, and Adam falls. We’re watching Adam struggle and realize that he’s
damaged something in his hearing, and then someone comes along and punches his
father.

Now, Adam’s father was not the big bad in the novel. And plotwise, him getting wailed
doesn’t change the protagonists’ march through the story. Nonetheless, it was an
important scene and one I couldn’t wait to place.

WHAT IS SATISFACTION?
Have you ever hugged a book?

Have you ever read a novel — we’ve all done this — where you get to a part
that’s just so satisfying that you have to lower the book to your lap and just sigh
into the sky? Have you ever read a chapter that made you think, I don’t care
what else this book does after this, I will like it because of this. There was a
chapter of The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay that did that for me. I don’t
don’t even know if I remember what happened in that book after that but,
chapter 9! Perfect. That’s satisfaction.

Now, back in the intro I talked about how I tried to think about the endgame of the
book, the reader, but only when it was the right time. This is one of those right times.

As I get more into specifics of developing my idea, I want to make sure I look for
moments that I can be satisfying.

Now what is satisfaction? It’s not happiness. Both happy endings and a miserable scene
can be satisfying. It’s not about giving readers what they want. It’s not even about
giving readers what they need.

Satisfaction is giving the readers what you promised.

The most dramatic version of what you have promised.

Satisfaction comes from an exquisite release of tension. It comes from promising a thing
and then stretching it out for as long as possible before SNAP there you go.

Hug the book.

 BUILDING SATISFACTION INTO THE BOOK
The reason why satisfaction is not as easy as a happy ending is because true
satisfaction is intensely specific. It’s tailormade for that moment, that character.
The longer you can successfully delay that satisfaction, the sweeter it will be.

It comes from being on the look out for moments where we can deliver the
thing the reader always desperately hoped would be given to them but never
dreamt to imagine you would grant.

Imagine, for instance, the Harry Potter series. You have Harry set up to be a hero,
and so when And instead imagine what it would be like to make a non-crier cry.
That is a far more tightly stretched rubber band of tension. Taking a character
like Ronan from the Raven Cycle and constructing him so that the reader
expects him to do anything but act vulnerable means that when I do finally
break him, it’s going to be incredibly satisfying, even if it is not positive. Likewise,
if I have a powerful character take on the villain, it will be in-character and solid.
But imagine instead the moment when Neville Longbottom, the underdog,
finally takes on Voldemort. Or when Neville Longbottom finally got hot. THAT is a
release of exquisite tension, and it begins at the planning stages, setting up your
characters for such an emotional situation. I will often have a scene like this in
my head before I know much else about the book. I won’t know exactly how
I’m going to get there or how it fits into the plot or premise, but I will know what
emotional beat I want to hit for maximum satisfaction. There are two scenes in
the Raven Boys that I had before I ever began drafting. If you haven’t read,
close your ears with your finger-parts. The scene where we discover that Noah is
dead is one of them. And the other was when Ronan came back after Adam’s
father hit Adam. I had no idea where in the plot these two scenes would fall, but
I knew emotionally that I wanted them based upon the earliest construction of
the characters and premise.

The Opposite of Satisfaction is not Boredom

The opposite of satisfaction is not boredom but dissatisfaction. You can use
dissatisfaction to pace out your novel, but remember a little bit of reader frustration
goes a long way. Dissatisfaction usually comes from something that keeps your
character from being able to act: illness, grieving, imprisonment.
 VIDEO 14: Point of View

PROS & CONS

I debated whether or not this video — point of view — belonged in ACT I:

Internal, or ACT II: Writing, and I’ve decided to put it here with a note to revisit
because it is indeed something I think about before I write anything down.

But you know those ‘one of these things is not like the others?’ game? Point of
View is that. Because unlike everything else I’ve just talked about, it’s a tool. It’s
for them. The reader. You don’t really need to make point of view decisions if it
all stays up here. You get to flit wherever you like. Point of view is about words.

Because it’s a tool, it is more objective than everything I just talked about too.
There’s not truly right or wrong answers, because there’s very few of those in
writing, but there are definitely more straightforward answers.

The decision we’re looking at first is this one: first person or third person.

THE PEOPLE
I know you guys know the difference between first person and third person but
you know what, in the interest of thoroughness, let’s just revisit first person, third
person, second person, the people.

First person:

When I walked into the room, I couldn’t help but notice how nice Amanda
looked. She looked up at me and waved with an expression I couldn’t interpret.

Third person:

When Polly walked into the room, she couldn’t help but notice how nice
Amanda looked. Amanda looked up at Polly and waved with an expression
Polly couldn’t interpret.

Second person:
When you walked into the room, you couldn’t help but notice how nice
Amanda looked. She looked up at you and waved with an expression you
couldn’t interpret.

Omniscient:

When Polly walked into the room, she couldn’t help but notice how nice
Amanda looked. Amanda looked up at Polly and waved. Amanda couldn’t
help but notice how nice Polly looked, too.

PROS & CONS

When I was a young reader, I used to think that I didn’t like in first person. Not
writing it. Reading it. After all, I didn’t like any book in first person as well as third
person. As such, I wrote in third person for a long time, developing all kinds of
bad habits that one can only pick up in third person.

(Don’t worry if you only write in first person, there’s all kinds of bad habits you
can only pick up there, too).

I only realized as an adult that actually, what was going on back then in my
youth was that I preferred the kinds of stories that were told in third person. It
had nothing to do with the fact of first or third at all.

Because used correctly, first and third person both have very different strengths
and weaknesses.

FIRST PERSON:

- Immediate
- closes the distance between you and character
- shrinks the story
- sets tone and mood
- best for conveying emotional and internal change
- inefficient at covering external events
- biased/ limited by what the narrator can and would observe

THIRD PERSON

- distance
- opens the camera beyond the internal landscape
- expands the story
- best for conveying external or broad change
 - efficient at covering external events
- neutral tone and mood (*close third)

For many stories, that means the obvious choice is right there in front of you. A
quiet coming of age story lends itself to first. A sweeping epic is more likely to
work well in third.

Compare the quiet first person of Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist, which takes
place entirely in one night, versus the vast narratives of either the Game of
Thrones or Lord of the Rings.

The difficulty comes when there is you’re somewhere in between. A character

driven thriller could go either way. When faced with a decision, ask yourself
some questions:

- Is it a story about the character or is a story about the world?

- Is it a story about a single person or is it a story about the shapes between
people?
- Is it more interested in the external plot or the movement of the internal
landscape?

Lament, my story about the talented musical teen facing up against homicidal
faeries, is told in first person, because it’s about Deirdre’s individual and
emotional journey as she comes of age. The mood is set by the way Dee tells
the story in her own words.

There is an old version of Lament that’s in third, and it is slow-moving and staid; it
holds you at a distance.

The Shiver Trilogy is an intimate, slow moving story of relationships, immediate

and journalistic. It’s told in two rotating first person narratives in the first book and
four for the other two.

The Raven Cycle is the story of a friend group, and third person pulls the camera
out so that I can look at all of them. The mood is set by the third person narrator
in order to keep the story feeling sweeping and large-scale, and to keep the
mood set by the prose, rather than by Gansey or Ronan or Blue’s internal voice.

There’s an old version of Blue’s story in first person, and it is odd for me to look at
now. It feels young, modern, and immediate — just like Blue — and is nothing like
the mood of the finished series.
 MULTI-POV CHALLENGES
Generally speaking, the correct number of point of view characters is the fewest
that gets the job done. It can be tempting, especially when writing a story with a
complicated plot, to reach for a new camera every time a new plot point
comes into play.

And depending on the genre, you can. In an epic fantasy or a gritty thriller, the
genre conventions allow you to grab a different camera. Readers familiar with
the genre won’t be surprised to see another face. But if you’re grabbing multiple
cameras in a romance or coming of age story or in a story you’ve to that point
told in an entirely different point of view, they’re going to suffer culture shock.

The important thing to remember with adding point of view is that you divide
emotional investment every time you do. The most invested a reader will ever be
is with a single point of view, one person to care about. Every time you swap,
they have to start from scratch. Eventually, they might give up on you.

Some narratives, however, are defined by their multiple point of view changes.
World War Z, for instance, is a zombie novel that is told through multiple
interviews with survivors. It means the point of view changes many, many times.
It works because the story isn’t asking you to be invested in any one of those
people. It’s expecting you to be invested in the world instead. The multiple
POVS, although in first person, give you distance and scope because there are
so many of them.

VILLAIN CAM
Readers don’t have to love every point of view you put them through. They
have to need them. Villain cam is a tried and true device to offer readers a
window on plot elements they might otherwise not see.

When planning out villain cam, ask yourself if it improves or decreases tension to
be able to see what the antagonist is up to. Sometimes it helps the reader
ground themselves to know that foul things are afoot while everything looks fine
for the protagonist, but other times it ruins the suspense to know what they’re up
to.

I say villain cam but really this goes for any Rando Cam. You’re allowed extra
cameras held by people who aren’t quite protagonists, but remember that they
are more about the dissemination of information than character.
These sorts of cameras are more allowed in prologues, but prologues are also
infamous for being skippable. You don’t need the reader to love every point of
view section. But they should require it for knowing what’s going on. If you can
skip it and you don’t lose much, ask yourself if you really need that camera, or if
it’s a crutch.

MOOD
And ultimately, check back into mood. What is the story you’re telling?

Exercise time: write a page from any part of your story in the voice of your
chosen character — or characters’. Try first. Try third. Which one looks like the
book you imagined?

That’s where you start.

 ACT 2
__________________
WRITING
 VIDEO 15: The Draft

A ROUGH DRAFT IS FOR YOU

Take this idea and let it build a nest in your mind:

You will always have to write rough drafts.

Getting better at writing does not mean eventually skipping steps. It means you
make better writing at each step.

I have been writing novels since I was as tall as a paper clip. I have published
over a dozen. Millions of words. Hundreds of chapters. Dozens of short stories.

I still brainstorm, problem solve, and then write multiple drafts of each novel.

I have come no closer to closing the distance between a first draft and a final
draft.

I’m going to say that again: my first draft will never be my final draft. YOUR first
draft will never be your final draft.

Perfection is the number one predator of aspiring writers. You won’t achieve it at
any stage, but definitely not in the first pass of throwing words into a document.

I might accomplish a short story with very little editing. I might even accomplish
a chapter or two that is pretty close to final. But there’s simply no way I can hold
the complexity of a novel in my head like that.

You might already be nodding your head and saying, yes, fine, I know that,
writing is revision, blah blah blah, accept that my first draft will be bad.

But I don’t want you to accept that your first draft will be bad. I want you to
instead embrace this truth:

THE FIRST DRAFT IS FOR YOU

The first draft is an elaborate scratch paper. It’s the little figures you work on the
corner of your napkin to figure out math. It’s the feathery sketches you do
before you do the full pose in oil paints. You’re dry-fitting your exhaust, you’re
setting all the pieces out of the IKEA box to make sure you have everything
there. It’s shorthand. Pick your metaphor. It’s a worksheet.

Yes, your first draft will not be good, but that’s not the same as bad, and
moreover, the not goodness is a byproduct. Instead of telling yourself that you
need to chuck words into a document because you have to start somewhere
and so the words might as well be bad, ask yourself what you need to know
before you can go to the next step.

If you embrace that this is a step, you can start to make your first drafts full of the
things you personally need rather than just thinking of it as an amorphous bad
version of the final.

WRITING FROM THE TOP DOWN

Theoretically a final book works on all these levels:

Book level
Sequence Level
Chapter level
Paragraph level

When you fall prey to perfection, you write to those final levels: paragraph and
sentence level. It’s easy to get stuck on the right phrasing for your opening or to
get flummoxed by the pacing of a single chapter.

And why not? We type word-by-word. Easy to get fixated on a good sentence
flow. But you’d be building your house with Lego bricks. It takes a long time to
do it that way, and when you’re looking at a project THIS close, it’s very easy to
lose sense of the bigger picture.

A good rough draft — a good working document — doesn’t have to have a

beautiful turn of the phrase. A good rough draft works as much as possible from
the top down.
 VIDEO 16: STRUCTURE

YOU NEED A PLAN

A question published writers often get asked on panels is this: are you a plotter or
a pantser? Either/ or. Someone who plans everything or someone who just wings
it? I have known people who are indeed total plotters, writing detailed 30-50
page outlines. And I’ve known people who are complete pantsers, who take an
idea and write it until the end.

But most people I know fall in between.

How much structure do you need in the rest of your life? The reason why I shared
my art-making is because it represents the amount of structure I need in my life. I
need a skeletal big picture plan. I need quite a bit of certainty about how I’m
going about my beginning. And then I continually update my map along the
way so that I always have it drawn further than my flashlight reaches.

It doesn’t have to be an outline, but you need to figure out a structure.

Here are some scaffolding options that have helped me in the past.

Scaffolding Options

- Summary
- Synopsis
- Plot Point Chart
- Limited Outline
- Full Outline
 SUMMARIES
This is like the back of a book. Does it have to be accurate? No. But it gets me
into the mindset of structure with low stakes. They also are easier than the next
most detailed plan, because they often waffle on an ending.
And Scorpio Races:
 SYNOPSES
A synopsis can be a few pages long or it can be ten pages long — but it tells the
whole story. Beginning, middle, end. If you pull off clever synopsis writing, it will
serve you well, because you’ll need them again in the querying stage.

In the brainstorming stage, it asks you to solve tough connective questions.

I used to do this in a pretty regimented way, as you can see for this one for
Ballad. I don’t do it anymore because . . . I lie. Yeah. I totally lie. I never think I
am when I’m writing them, I think I’m coming up with good strategies for getting
through the plot, but . . . yeah, they’re lies and I never follow them.
But now I’m more likely to fudge as I know what I need. Here’s the one for
All the Crooked Saints. Notice how this is just for me, not for an editor or
even a critique partner. It’s me babbling my way along until I imagine a
full story.
 PLOT POINT CHART
This is not truly an endpoint but rather a sort of worksheet I will do as I head
to the next stage. I plug in these chapters with my best guesses for what
they will look like in the finished book. This requires a lot of brainstorming as
I play out possibilities for the book’s shape over and over again until I find
one I mentally like. Remember, as long as I keep it in my head, it can stay
inventive and uncompromised.

This is the time to bust out all those great playlists I came up with in the
beginning of the process to remind myself of the novel I want to write.
What are the cool scenes I’ve been imagining along the way? How did I
plan on incorporating satisfaction into the draft? Time to find a way to
manifest them here.
 LIMITED OUTLINE
As the name suggests, it guides me just on my way, as you can see for this
one for FOREVER. I use this kind of outline more than any other. I begin
with anchoring my plot points so that I understand the shape of the entire
book, and then I write a limited outline for the first act, amending it as I get
further along in the book to make sure I always have some scaffolding to
climb on.
 DETAILED OUTLINE
And sometimes a project will require a full outline, as my retelling of
Swamp Thing shows. I’ll confess: I write beautifully with a full outline, but I
hate it. It makes me do all the work upfront, which takes me forever, and
robs me of all my organic exploration.

So does it work for me? Yes. But just because it works doesn’t mean that
it’s the only thing that works. The correct method is the one that not only
works but lets you play, because then you’re more likely to return to your
work again and again.
 VIDEO 17: 3-ACT STRUCTURE
A BREAKDOWN OF ACTS
Let’s look back at three-act structure. It gives a spine to an otherwise
amorphous pile of goo. And who doesn’t love vertebrates?

ACT 1:
In act one, we establish normal, and then we break it. We swipe the 24-year-olds
away. This begins to set in motion a change within our main character, although
their reaction to it is stunted in some way — juvenile, unevolved, jaded,
frightened. They act, but because they have to, or in a rash way. This is when
Puck makes her rash decision to join the Scorpio Races: quest time

ACT II:
In act two, the narrator will face a series of escalating challenges. Each one is
pushing the character and the situation into bigger and more interesting places.
About halfway through this act, the midpoint arrives and with it comes new
information: the quest will be harder than we imagined, or the bad guys have
hidden skills, or the best friend turns out to be a monster. Or your roommate turns
out to be a skeleton in the woods. This pushes our action into somewhat more
urgent pacing.

It often looks as if the characters are getting closer and closer to achieving their
goals but at the end of act two, everything goes to pot. Friends betray or allies
die or everything that we feared comes to play. It knocks our protagonist right
on their ass.

But using all of the stuff they’ve learned over the course of the story, they come
up with a solution that launches them into the climax.

Some folks break act 2, traditionally the longest of the acts, into two acts and
call it four act structure — I still think it functions just as three act structure, it
simply makes the importance of the midpoint more obvious.

ACT III:
And in this climax we will see the protagonist come face to face with the thing
they were crummy at or afraid of in the first act. But this time, instead of making
the rash decision they made at the end of act I that launched them into the
quest, they make a mature and evolved one that’s a product of what they’ve
learned. And then we play out the action to execute the results of that moment.

The internal, or passive arc that we talked about many videos ago concludes
with this internal conquest, and the external arc, motivated by that success, can
finish off with a solid plot win not possible without that internal change.

Formulaic? I don’t think so. Because really what we’re looking at here is the
natural breathing patterns of beginning, middle, end. Something happens, we
rise to meet it, it changes us.

GENRE DEPENDENT
How much you’ll see the structure and feel the urgency of three act structure is
both genre and tone dependent.

Generally, the more you see the bones, the faster the story will feel. Think of that
instruction for a good presentation: “I’m going to tell you about A. B. C.”

Structure creates expectations. Expectations snowball into promises as the

rubber band gets drawn out. The exquisite release of that tension creates
satisfaction. And resolution.
 VIDEO 18: Odds & Ends/
Beginning

BOOK STRUCTURE VS. TV/FILM STRUCTURE

Nowadays, we’re all products of all the various forms of media we take on. Film,
tv, books, manga, graphic novels, webcomics all influence the way we think of
story structure. This can be both good and bad.

It’s important to remember that there are things that TV can do that we as novel
writers can’t, and vice versa. TV/ Film are creating narrative in a briefer visual
form, after all, and we are writing prose creations that require the readers’ minds
to turn them back into images over a course of hours or days.

FILM STRENGTHS

- Begin in media res

- Head hop
- Spend a scene watching someone simply walk or talk

BOOK STRENGTHS

- Set a tone with prose

- Cover massive amounts of complicated backstory in very little space
- Offer a precise view of a character’s internal workings

START WITH A BANG

Films often begin with a bang, and novel writers are often advised to attempt
the same. I disagree entirely! Open up ten of your favorite novels and take a
look at how they begin. How many of them rely on an action scene to pull you
in? How many instead rely on an interesting story-telling style, on painting an
image of an intriguing location, of posing a question of some kind?

Yes, start with a band . . . and bag of interestingness. Of specificity.

Readers don’t need explosions, they need questions. They need you to open
the door to the wardrobe and show them there is something unexpected on the
other side of the coats. They need curiosity.

CONTEXTUALIZING SPECIFITY
Specificity is a marvelous way to open a novel — readers love feeling like
they’re seeing something new in an interesting way — but your job isn’t to
lecture the reader. If you’re writing about something you know well, either
through experience or through research, remember to contextualize it for the
reader. Imagine how it looks from the outside. Remember the thing that is
fascinating to you because you grew up with it will need more support for
someone who is just coming to it for the first time.

And remember that something that is very emotional to you might not be
emotional to the reader. You may need to attach it to something more
recognizable to the average person in order to make it comprehensible.

Think of the difference between pop writing on science and science papers.
The average reader reads the first for fun; the second is for peers.

Explain, ground, and take care of your reader when writing about things you
feel deeply about. You can make absolutely anything interesting, but you have
to sell it.

DO WE NEED TO BE SYMPATHETIC?
Character moments are great ways to begin novels. People love people!

One can easily get stymied trying to imagine how to make your character
likable in short order, but the truth is that your character doesn’t need to be
immediately sympathetic: they need to be immediately interesting, which is a
different thing entirely.

Characters are interesting when they

- Are competent at a specialized skill

- Have an unusual drive or ambition or quest
- Are haunted by a tantalizing mystery
- Are funny
Likeable is a different thing entirely. Sympathetic is a different thing entirely. It
can be tempting to try to make a character sympathetic by making them too
good. Fake ways of generating sympathy involve making a character who love
kids and dogs, who thinks of the underdog, who always acts in an evolved and
thoughtful way, etc. etc. But that’s not sympathetic. That’s just boring. That is, in
fact, the way to create the dreaded Mary Sue.

MARY SUES
A Mary Sue is what readers call a character who is perfect, or a character who
is imperfect with such forgivable or easily overcome complications that they still
round up to perfect. The truth is that a Mary Sue is very situational. Do they feel
like they experience consequences like the other characters in the story? Do
they feel like they experience consequences like a human?

Mary Sues often are beautiful but don’t realize how beautiful they are; they
have not noticed themselves reaping the benefit of going through the world
with a comely face.

Mary Sues can also be men, of course. Men without skills recruited into
government agencies for suddenly secret missions? Can be Mary Sues.

It’s important to note that perfect characters are no necessarily Mary Sues. True
perfection is often played for laughs: Gilderoy Lockhart or Mary Poppins’
practically perfect dispositions are pointed at for mirth, not for us to sympathize
with them.

AVOIDING THE GARY STU

It’s easier to avoid the Gary Stu than you’d think — just pursue the logical
consequences of whatever great trait they have. Sean Kendrick, of the Scorpio
Races, is widely considered the best person to handle the water horses on the
island, although he’s only nineteen. Why isn’t he a Gary Stu?

Because I’ve explored how he became that good. I not only explored how he
became that good but also why he became that good. Real human
consequences: turns out being the best with the horses comes from being not
very good with people.

The Pet Possum Paradox

One way to make characters sympathetic to the reader is by making them
beloved by other characters. Even if they are terrible, we’ll feel empathy for the
people who love them. Imagine it this way: you’re driving along the road and
see an animal hit. DON’T BE A CAT OR DOG, you say. It’s a possum. WHEW, you
say. Why?

Because the cat or the dog is a pet — they’re loved.

Imagine that same scenario, only when you drive by, the possum has a collar
with a tag that says “Polly.” This time, it doesn’t matter if it’s a cat or a dog . . .
you’re still sad. Someone, you think, loved that possum, and that makes you sad.

Using this principle with imperfect and difficult characters will buy you time to
slowly reveal their good side.
 VIDEO 19: Prose

PROSE IS FOR OTHER PEOPLE

The how you tell a story is just as important as the story itself, and prose is the
most public-facing part of that.

Imagine your favorite author has just come out with a new book. Think about
that moment when you open the cover and see the first page. You sigh . . .
ahhh. Yes. Just as you remembered. It’s like coming home.

That’s prose. Prose is tricky, prose is clever. Prose are the words we use to sneakily
climb inside readers’ heads and move around the furniture without them
noticing. (Please note that at the end of the pdf is a piece on figurative
language and moving emotional furniture around).

PROSE IS DICTATED BY GENRE

Prose tells us what kind of book to expect. Clean, invisible prose signals a
speedy, plot-driven book. Lush, figurative prose promises a slower, moodier
read. Let’s look closer.

INVISIBLE PROSE
This is workmanlike prose. It gets in, it gets out. What are you showcasing? The
plot? The world? Invisible prose does the work without calling attention to itself.
It’s clear, generally skipping figurative language in favor of the direct route. The
more you invite a reader to enjoy or ponder your words, the slower it moves
them through your story. So what is your main goal?

Take a look at these two first pages of invisible, brisk prose, from Dan Brown’s THE
DAVINCI CODE and Suzanne Collins’ HUNGER GAMES, in third and first person
respectively.
 VOICEY PROSE
Are you showcasing character or mood? Voicey prose is for you. It also controls
the length of time the reader spends in the moment. Figurative language or
unusual voice encourages them to pause. Consider. Live in the story. What’s
your goal?

In first person, voicey prose sounds like the character. In third person, voicey
prose is the voice of the narrator. Here’s two examples of that: one from Nick
and Nora’s Infinite Playlist, by David Levithan, and one from Call Down the
Hawk.
 YOUR VOICE
Remember how I said you would insert your character into the book if you
weren’t thinking? I’m afraid to say it’ll happens here too. The exclusivity of your
experience also applies to how you use language.

Examples? I say air-co, because my mother does. Does anyone else? Dubious. If
I don’t realize that this is an expression that is unique to me, I’ll end up writing it
into multiple character’s dialog — and that will stick out like a sore thumb. It’s
important to listen to other people and to yourself to understand what you say
that no one else does.

Likewise, it’s important to think about slang and what you reckon will be around
for awhile. It’s easy to accidentally date your book by giving your characters
slang that only lasts for five years in this new high-speed internet world.

GETTING THE WORDS OUT

It can be daunting to get started. To put down words by that blinking cursor. Try

- Reading out loud

- Blocking in the shapes of each paragraph
- Writing exactly what happens in the chapter without any style at all
- Commas? Millions of commas?

EXERCISE
When was a full time artist, I used to work on my craft by copying famous artists
— a very old-fashioned and well-worn practice. Learning by copying is a way of
trying out other people’s skills and seeing what parts of them work for you. No
point reinventing the wheel after all.

You can try this with writing as well. Try finding your voice by writing the first
chapter of your book like several other author’s you admire. Remember that
although you might sound like these authors, true authorial voice isn’t about just
word choice. It’s the way you look at a story, and the places you set your
camera. It’s about your narrative priorities.
 VIDEO 20: Pages & Physical
Setting

PLACING PROSE

You can often tell an unprofessional manuscript from a published one simple by
the shape of the paragraphs on the page. That’s why Brenna’s technique of
placing commas works, after all. There is a natural shape to chapters that is
visible.

Pages are like a good mix tape. They are formed of a combination of long and
short paragraphs, all doing different but complementary jobs. When put
together they create an organic rhythm. Paragraphs are to chapters as
sentences are to paragraphs. They give you natural pauses that guide our
pacing through the chapter. Too many run-on sentences make us feel
breathless and rather than giving us a sense of urgency and tension, has the
opposite effect.

Mix tape, right? You want them to match, but if they’re too samey, it all runs
together.
I can often look at a new writer’s manuscript and see their crutches just in
paragraph shape. Pages and pages of dialog, or huge blocks of description
without pausing for breath.

This is the part of writing where we start to think about taking care of the reader.
Readers need us to tell them how fast to go through a page.

Long stretches of text are going to slow the reader down. Brief paragraphs are
going to speed them up.

SPEED IS NOT ALWAYS THE GOAL

Readers need to slow down to feel things. Sit with your feelings, as the internet
would say. After you’ve pushed them through a breathless action scene where
they’ve uncovered a huge revelation, let them sit and think.

I think the easiest way to look at the way prose gets thrown on a page is to
break down the kinds of paragraphs. Here’s a rough list of categories (collect
them all!)

- Physical setting
- Personal description
- Dialog
- Physical action
- Internal action/ thought
- Backstory/ Remembered Action
- Miscellaneous Exposition
- Punctuation

Later, we’re going to spend a very long time going through a scene paragraph
by paragraph, but first, I’m going to use these as an excuse to talk about
inserting each of these things into our writing in general.
 PHYSICAL SETTING
When I devote words to physical setting, I’m not trying to give the reader an
accurate picture of where they are. It’s nice if they get an accurate picture. But
really, my priorities when I describe a place are fourfold.

- Tell the reader how to feel about where the scene takes place
- Ground the action of the chapter in space
- Use the length of the description to control how fast the reader is moving
through the scene
- Use the description of the setting to tell us something about the people in
it
- Tell them how it feels to be in that scene

What do I actually need them to look at? I describe objects within a scene if I
know the characters need to interact with them later, or if they lend emotional
weight to the scene.

Things I don’t need to do? I don’t need to tell the reader “she sat down on the
chair.” “She opened the door.” “She walked to the counter.” Unless I need those
sentences for pacing or to ground the reader in the moment. You don’t need to
direct.

CHOOSING THE SCENE SETTING

Remember that the setting in a chapter is a tool.

Can you make the scene more exciting by having it happen in an unexpected
place? A mundane moment against a fantastic scene, like the parade in Ferris
Bueller? Or a fantastic moment against a mundane scene, like . . . well, basically
all of Gross Pointe Blank?

In revision, I’ve often revolutionized a scene simply by changing where it

happens. Sometimes a scene shift will be all that’s needed to shake a new and
surprising side of a character free, or enough to elevate a boring conversation
to a big set piece.

I host the hit man in a cozy Bed & Breakfast. I place the art forger at a suburban
party. I put a quiet conversation in a hidey hole in the basement of a school. The
only rule I have is to not be matchy-matchy. If it makes perfect sense for a scene
to take place in a certain location, do I really want it to take place there?

Have fun. Be specific. Remember that you’re taking the reader on a journey.
What can you show them?
 HIT THE LIGHTS
Long ago, I read a piece of setting advice somewhere — I can’t remember
where. It wasn’t about novels; it was about tv or film. The writer advised against
setting two different scenes in the same location, and if one had to, try to make
sure that you returned there at a different time of day.

I actually don’t know if this is good television advice. But it’s pretty spiffy novel
advice. It challenges me to show something different each time I return to a
place, if not about the place, about how the character feels about it.

YOU’RE ALWAYS TALKING ABOUT TWO THINGS

Ok, you don’t always have to be talking about two things at the same time. Not
every sentence have to be a wonder of multiple meanings.

But if I have a block of text, a paragraph, in order for it to earn its keep, I need to
be doing two or more things in it. Here’s a physical description that tells us about
the fairground where Ronan is meeting Kavinsky, but it’s telling us just as much
about Ronan and the mood of the scene as well.

Could the reader draw this fairground? Do we know how many buildings are
there? No. Those aren’t the details I care about, that matter to my story.
 VIDEO 21: Personal Description
WHAT DO HUMANS LOOK LIKE?
Personal description is genre-specific. A thriller is more likely to tell me a
character’s height, build, etcetera. A romance is more likely to tell me what’s
appealing about a person’s appearance. A literary novel is more likely to tell me
about what it feels like to see the person.

Personally, as a reader, I don’t care to read a list of physical stats on characters.

This is partially because — well, perhaps entirely because — I’m pretty bad at
recreating a specific picture of what a person looks like from a text description. I
also simply don’t remember it. You can tell me all you like that your main has
dreamy hazel eyes and unless they’re attached to some emotional or plot
moment, I’m never going to remember.

Confession: I’m not going to remember my own characters’ eye colors. Not
unless it is attached to some other plot point.

However, that isn’t to say that this means that writing detailed character
descriptions is wrong. Other readers feel very differently. And other genres feel
very differently. Find a balance between what you prefer as a reader and what
your favorite books in your genre seem to do.

Personally, I would rather describe characters in the same way that I describe
setting. Emotional truth first, the way it feels to experience them, and then put in
the concrete details.

And of course the way we see these people depends on whether or not we’re
looking at them in first person or third.
 FIRST PERSON BIAS
If you’re in first person, remember that the description of other characters is
going to come through the voice and eyes of your narrator. What are they likely
to see? What are they likely to admit to seeing?

This description is telling us what Sean looks like, yes, but you’re not going to be
able to draw a portrait from the description.

It’s also telling us just as much about the space between Puck and Sean and
Sean and the islanders as it is telling us about his appearance.

Look how she contrasts him with Thomas Gratton’s friendly, ruddy self, and
Sean’s utter unapproachability. Does Gratton really look like flour and potatoes?
No, although that sounds delicious — it’s an emotional description that evokes
comfort. And no one is hugging Sean with his body made of stone and
driftwood and anemones.
Here’s another description. This one is about Gabe, Puck’s brother, but notice
that it’s not really just about what he looks like. It’s also about the space
between Puck and Gabe.
 THIRD PERSON BIAS
Here’s a description from a short story about Opal, a little supernatural hooved
character who was pulled out of a dream to live in the real world. Notice how it
is filtered by her experience. She doesn’t understand what a romance novel is.
Also notice how it is an emotional description rather than a factual one. What is
cloud-shaped? What is cloud-colored? We understand it in our heart first, head
second. The reader fills in the lady’s image with a type of person they think she
is.

DESCRIPTIONS ARE ABOUT THE OBSERVER’S RELATIONSHIP TO

THE DESCRIBEE

Even in third person, I keep this mind. Even omniscient is biased – the unnamed
narrator is filtering the look for us. The bias is often more tone than content, but
really, can you separate those things?

The rest of CALL DOWN THE HAWK is in close third person, but the opening is in
omniscient. Here’s a description of Ronan Lynch from it:
This is from the omniscient prologue of the book. Notice that it may not have
overt narrator bias, because it’s in omniscient, but it obeys the mood and tone
of the book. It’s telling you more than what he just looks like. It’s telling you what
kind of story to expect from both the book and this character.

WHEN TO DESCRIBE

Description happens in two places:

- when we see the new character

- when we have room for it

These two things don’t always congeal in the most agreeable of ways, so
sometimes you have to be inventive. Imagine an action scene, for instance,
where we are rushing through a scene. We don’t have time for the chunk of
description we just saw above.

But we can’t just run by and then later say “oh by the way, a little while ago I
saw a stranger. I just remembered this second that he was handsome and had
a triangle shaped scar on his forehead.”

Instead we have to find a way to jam it into the moment.

Here’s a pretty quick description from a pretty quick moment. The elevator door
opens and, in the moment before it closes again, Ronan sees a woman who
looks a lot like his dead mother.

A couple things: short sentences. See the description of her blue eyes? I’m
asking the reader to remember that luxurious description of Ronan when I had
time.

I’m also using the briefest description possible with very specific wording, so that
if I refer to her later, I can use one of those descriptive words and readers will
instantly remember this moment.

WHAT TO DESCRIBE
The most important part of that description of the woman who looks like Ronan’s
mother is her eyes and her jacket — because it will give me a handle I can refer
back to later — and her hair — because it reminds us how she looks both like
Ronan’s golden-haired mother and his golden-haired younger brother.

Nowadays, I try to be mindful that unless I specifically describe a character’s

skintone, many readers will default to white. So I try to describe both my white
and non-white characters’ skin with equal weight now.

WHAT THE READER WANTS/ WHAT THE READER NEEDS

Generally, what readers want from a description is a specific physical list of traits.
What the reader needs, however, is to know what the character’s physical
appearance means to the narrator and the story. If their brown hair means
nothing, it’s not truly important.

So the goal is to balance what they want and what they need, keeping in mind
that you use real estate for both.
 VIDEO 22: Dialog
HOW PEOPLE SOUND
Dialog is not meant to be a snapshot. Let’s head way back in memory land to
that comparison of cell phone photo to painting. Do you remember that? How I
asked you to think about the difference between art and reality? Reality is that
unfiltered cell phone pick pointed at random. Art is prioritized, interpreted. It’s
telling you how to feel about what you’re experiencing, and it’s telling you
what’s important to focus on.

That’s how I write dialog.

I don’t need it to be how people sound, I need it to be how readers remember

people sounding. That means it is shorter, punchier, and considerably more
flavored with personality than an overheard conversation.

That doesn’t mean I’m not always listening for little bits of specificity to pick up. I
interviewed a car guy in England last year and he said ‘crumbs’ instead of a
swear whenever he was upset. I loved it and stole it at once.

DIALOG ADDS SPEED BUT…

It doesn’t generally add as much meaning or weight as other kinds of writing.
It’s inefficient. Readers will clip through fast dialog lines at a great speed, but if
you’re only giving them dialog, you’re often just giving them cream puffs to eat.

Obviously there are notable exceptions. You can tell an entire novel in dialog.
But the dialog then will have to serve the purpose all the other paragraphs
would normally carry. It needs to set the tone, scene, time frame, etc., all within
the voice of the character speaking. A doable gimmick.

DIALOG IS GENRE-DEPENDENT
The amount of dialog signals to the reader what kind of story they’re in. Up
above, I just mentioned that you could tell an entire story with dialog. You can,
but it’s a certain kind of story. What if you’re writing that epic Game of Thrones
fantasy? Could you do that entirely in dialog? Yes, but it would make it feel
different. It would sound more like World War Z, that zombie novel told entirely in
interview form. Is that the book you intend to write? Or does it just feel easier to
write it in dialog because then you don’t have to think about exposition and
setting?

You can see how genre-dependent dialog is with a cursory glance at your
favorites. Remember those pages I showed at the beginning of this section? The
grayed out ones? When you’re placing your dialog on a page, compare your
page shapes with other page shapes of books in your genre. Are they using the
same amount of dialog as you? How does it look different? What does kind of
story does it promise?

When I was writing the Scorpio Races, I had a challenge with myself to use as
little dialog as possible. I wanted the book to feel old-fashioned, unearthed, a
novel that had been found underneath a bed moldering for decades. And
because a lot of dialog tends to feel quite modern, I decided I’d keep the
quotes to a minimum.

It’s interesting because I don’t think you could tell that from reading the final
manuscript. There’s dialog in nearly every chapter. But it did encourage me to
be efficient. There is no banter in the Scorpio Races, which keeps the mood
weighty.

CONVERSATION WITHOUT DIALOG

Speaking of dialog-free zones.

Dialog doesn’t always need to be in quotes. Never underestimate the value of a

phrase like “they murmured quietly in the backseat.” Remember that every time
you put words on a page, you’re giving them weight. Does everything they say
need to have weight? No, sometimes it’s just prattle and we don’t need it.

Other times, it’s difficult to find a way to convey a conversation without ruining
pacing and ruining character.

There was a scene in Blue Lily, Lily Blue that set me back on my heels. One of the
character, Jesse Dittley, was an enormous man and for the funzies of it, I put all
his dialog in all caps. Fun, right? Yeah. Until I needed him to describe a
complicated curse on his family to Blue, one of the other characters. I ended up
with pages and pages of ALL CAPS. It looked awful. Neither character sounded
like themselves. The dialog was boring as hell.

Many days and many attempts later, I hit upon a solution: take it out of quotes.
See the solution below.
If it isn’t important to hear the exact words, ditch it.

DIALOG TAGS
He said. She commented. They remarked.

There are a lot of rules out there about dialog tags but I generally think of them
as pirate guidelines.

There are essentially four rules I pay attention to:

- Who is speaking should be clear

- ‘said’ is invisible
- ‘chuckled’ and ‘laughed’ are not dialog tags
- An action item is often better

I try to avoid long stretches of untagged dialog where the reader has to guess
who’s talking — I limit it to just a few lines where it’s obvious who’s speaking, like
below:
I never feel bad about using ‘said’ instead of a more exciting tag. It’s invisible.
The default. I only replace it if I need to. And I never use words like ‘chuckled’ or
‘laughed’ as dialog tags. You can speak through a laugh, but you aren’t
speaking by laughing. It’s distracting. Also chuckled is a stupid word.

And then finally I try to use action lines instead of dialog tags when I can. It saves
me some space and as an inefficient, long-winded writer, I always want more
space on a page.

Notice here how the Zed does not have a dialog tag but it’s obvious that the
Zed is the one speaking.

The only rules for dialog format and structure is clarity and usefulness.
 VIDEO 23: ACTION
PHYSICAL ACTION
I hate writing action scenes. I hate reading action scenes. They don’t feel like
they matter to me, is the thing. I long to just skim to the end of them as a reader.
Tell me the upshot. Do they get away? I don’t care if they’re jumping off
buildings. It’s hard for me to picture it.

But . . .

Ok, I actually don’t hate action scenes. But I need them to work. I need them to
really, really work. I need to know what they mean. I need the active moments
to be so tightly knotted into character and setting and story that I can’t skip. I
want to read to find out what each of these actions means to the characters.

That said, it still takes me three times as long to write an action scene as any
other kind of scene. First I write out what happens in the scene, paragraph by
paragraph, so I can orient myself in the action. Then I remind myself that I don’t
need to direct the character — I don’t need to account for every motion, just
the ones that paint the scene effectively.

And finally, I pair it with something I care about. Every paragraph doing double
duty. Here’s an action scene from The Raven Boys. Check out how a fistfight is
really an excuse for an absolute pile of backstory.
 BREAKING THE RULES
Of prose. In this marvelous game of writing, anything goes, and nowhere is that
more true, in my opinion, than in action writing. Action is a very strange thing to
convey in print. We’re trying to move the reader through a physical space at
the same breakneck pace as a character, while fully painting the setting and
emotional stakes and keeping it from feeling like a run on sentence of punches
and chase scenes? Dear God.

Pull out all the stops. Do what it takes to keep the pacing moving, to keep it
clear. To establish the tone. Break the rules. Anything goes, prose-wise, as long
as you sell it with confidence.

Here’s an example of rule breaking from an old short story of mine.

The only rule for action is this: keep it exciting, and keep it meaningful.
 VIDEO 24: INTERNAL ACTION,
FLASHBACKS, ETC.
INTERNAL ACTION
I said earlier the how you tell a story is just as important as the story itself.

Now I’m here to say the why of a story is just as important as the how. What is
your character feeling? How is it changing them to live this narrative? Internal
action paragraphs tell us directly. This functions differently depending on
whether or not your book is in first or third person, of course.

In 1st person, there is no gap between external observation and internal thought
— it’s all internal thought. They can just ruminate on how they feel.

In third person, however, direct thought gets put in italics. It’s very easily
overused as the sheer look of it can pull us out of the moment — like the all caps
block of the Dittley dialog I talked about before, a block of italics makes us
consciously aware we’re pausing the story to talk about feelings.

The only reason why I use it is when I can’t convey a character’s feelings with
their actions. For instance, in the scene below, Declan is otherwise very in
control, and there’s nothing to indicate his uncertainty at diving in if you’re
looking at him from the outside.

So we get a glimpse inside his head.

 UNRELIABLE NARRATORS
Characters lie. Especially in first person. There’s a phrase for when characters lie
on purpose to the reader — unreliable narrator — but the truth is that even
characters who are not lying on purpose are sometimes untruthful. This is
because we lie to ourselves; we don’t always understand what we’re feeling
and why we feel it. So a character might say in their head: I don’t care, this is
stupid, when really they do care and it definitely isn’t stupid.

Our job as a writer is to make sure that when there’s a mismatch between what
the character is feeling and what they say they’re feeling to clearly signal that
this is what is going on. It doesn’t need to be obvious in the moment, but in
retrospect, the reader should be able to look back and see that yes, this was not
inconsistent writing, this was a character grappling with the truth.

OH GOD THE FEELS

I often add a lot of this feely stuff in the line edit, which I reckon probably sounds
insane if you’ve read many of my angst-soaked books. But if I don’t write spare
manuscripts, devoid of excess emotion, they quickly grow overwrought and
soapy. I know I can always dial up the feelings. It is harder for me to figure out
how to prune it.

Because of this, I often find that my first drafts are full of unearned emotional
moments — big emotional reveals that aren’t promised and built up to. This used
to make me feel like a cringey hack. Now I know it’s just another step in revision.
 BACKSTORY/ REMEMBERED ACTION
(ALSO DREAMS)
Flashback time!

Writers are told all the time not to use flashbacks and dream sequences, and for
the longest time, I adhered strictly to this rule. Rule! Rules! Now I eat rules for
breakfast.

Here’s the real rule: flashbacks and dreams can happen, but they have to
affect present day action.

The reason why these two kinds of scenes are so often discouraged is because
they’re dead air, story-wise. They’re a pause. They don’t mean anything, they
don’t push anything. They’re all internal. But if your flashback is actively
informing present action — well, the rule doesn’t apply then. You’re keeping the
story moving.

Dreams function under the same rules as flashbacks. People generally advise
against dream sequences for very good reasons. They have no consequences
and they don’t follow logic. The reader is a captive in this imaginary paused
timeline until you wake them up. It doesn’t matter how deep and meaningful
the dream is, we don’t care that it’s giving us subconscious clues . . . we just
want to get back to the real story.

I avoided dreams in the Raven Cycle for as long as humanly possible because I
heard that warning voice whispering in my ear.

But then I remembered it didn’t count. Not in the Raven Cycle, anyway. Ronan
Lynch could take things out of dreams so therefore his dreams counted as
action sequences. They were present story, not internal action.

INLINE FLASHBACK
This is how I think a flashback works best. Not as a standalone chapter, but
rather as agreeable chunks of relevant story inserted into present day action,
both informing the reader of the past while making the present ever so much
more meaningful.

Here’s an example from Shiver.

 PACING FLASHBACK

You don’t have to jam your flashbacks into action scenes (although obviously
you can tell I’m a fan). You can luxuriate in them as long as you actually need
them. Below is an example of a flashback that I used in Call Down the Hawk
when I needed to slow the reader down. I had just gone through a bunch of
dense, high impact chapters and I needed the reader to pause, breathe, and
think about what had just happened.

It’s worth noting, for drafting purposes, that when I wrote this section, for the
longest time, I just had a note that I needed some kind of flashback or reverie
right there. It was my version of Brenna’s commas, I suppose. I could just feel that
I was going to want a break there, even though I didn’t know yet what I needed
it to be.
 YOU HAD TWO JOBS
Remember that every paragraph is doing two jobs in an ideal world. Setting and
character. Or character and plot. Exposition and setting. Etc. etc. A flashback is
acceptable but it has to follow those rules. It can’t just be giving you old info.
 MISCELLANEOUS EXPOSITION
(TIMEFRAME SETTING)

I used to write all of my novels happening in a blur of days. Not because it was
easier, or because I wanted all of their character development crammed into a
week, but because I’d never been taught how to write these little words “Two
weeks later.”

Man, it sounds so simple now. Why wouldn’t I just say “after a few hours” or “over
the next month…”? I have no idea. It felt like a miracle when I realized I could
do it.

You can’t skip over any big plot moments, of course, or the reader will be
annoyed that you’ve hit fast forward, but if you don’t have anything to say and
you need them to have invested some time in it, it’s montage time. Seriously.
Give us a chapter of just beautifully told and stylized fast forward and we’ll be
delighted to have skipped the boring bits.
 BEGINNINGS & ENDINGS
(EDGES)
When I was an artist, I got a piece of advice: pay attention to your edges.

The theory was that how you finished your edges — of your canvas, of your
forms — affected how people thought of your work subconsciously. I think it’s
supposed to be a little like vacuuming. No one notices if your house is
vacuumed, but the sure as snot notice if it’s not.

Edges in books feel the same way to me. The beginning and ends of chapters
are important. The way you frame a chapter can change the events inside it
entirely, because you’re telling the reader how to feel about what they’re
reading about.

Imagine you’re writing a scene about something neutral: a snow shower. The
way you introduce it and the way you conclude it tells the reader if it was a
good thing or a bad thing. Ominous snow shower? Or joyful surprise. Edges. This
works even on more complex chapters.

Here’s an example from Call Down the Hawk. This opening tells us exactly how
to view all of the events that happen in the chapter. Look at me, the opening
says, through the lens of Jordan longing to live on her own.
 PUNCTUATION
Some sentences are for the lulz. They’re for the tone. The pacing. For the humor,
the drama. Remember that authors invent words, invent grammar, break the
rules. I’ll never forget the moment when I found out, as a kid, that an author
invented the name Vanessa. You can do that? I thought. Yeah! Of course!
We’re story makers and word changers! This is a battle ground, baby! We do
what we have to do to stay alive in between the pages!

If you think you need an itemized list or a random split sentence or a random
italicized swear word in the middle of a page for just the lulz, for the tone,
whatever, try it. See how you like the shape of it. See who tries to stop you.

My shortest chapter is just one sentence long.

I still get fanmail about it.

What to call these paragraphs? These sentences? Punctuation? Extras? Flavor?

What are they for? Pacing. Tone. The lulz. Sometimes their use is obvious;
sometimes they are more stylistic.

Here’s an example from the Raven Boys. In it, Adam is bouncing a rubber
Spongebob ball. Does the ball add anything to the plot? No. Is it important that
he has it for later? No. Does it ground us in time? Well — sort of. The characters
had just gone through a very adult and serious altercation and it felt important
to remind the readers that after all, they were just teens. The rubber ball and the
reaction to it felt like it did the trick without calling attention to itself.
 VIDEO 25: Dissecting a Chapter

ESCALATING SNOWMEN

A novel is eighty-thousand words. Give or take. YA generally runs from 75,000

words to 125,000 words, depending on taste. When I began, they tended
towards the shorter, now, they tend toward the chonkier. I’m sure tastes will
change again, but for now, let’s say a YA novel is 80,000 words. It’s a nice round
number, good for math.

It’s a huge number. 80,000 words. WORDS. Words. Words. Words. More words.

If I think about writing a book in these terms, I’ll get bogged down in a second.
I’ll immediately get dragged into the idea of building a house with Lego bricks. I
focus on how many words I wrote that day. I’ll focus on how long each
sentence is. I’ll anxiously look at how I’ve spent three months on a draft and stil
have only 20,000 words. Is that good? Is that bad? Probably bad. 80,000 words!
That’s so many!

Instead, I try to think about writing a rough draft from the top down. Even
though I’m using words to construct it, I need to think about it in book level,
chapter level, paragraph level, sentence level.

So instead of imagining a book as 80,000 words, instead, I’ll think about it in

terms of 2,000 word chapters. Give or take. Sometimes I’ll write a 1200 word
chapter, sometimes a 5000. But if I think of them in 2,000 word chunks, I won’t be
too far off. And now, instead of an 80k word chunk, it’s 40 chapters. 40 building
blocks to tell a story. 40 connected mini-stories that bring us to a conclusion.

And I can break it down even more.

Remember this fun guy?

Each of these blocks are chapters, give or take. That means that even if I’ve
done the bare minimum of plotting and have only answered what each of
those filled in plot points will be, I have thirteen out of forty as anchor points. That
ain’t bad.

Considering that each of the acts also have predictable goals (1. Establish
normal, then break it, 2. Escalating fun and games and solidification of the real
goal, 3. Tackle the real goal) and I really just have three big chunks. 80k, 40, 3. I
can hold that in my head.

I just need to stack the acts right. Escalating in tension and speed. An escalating
snowman.

DISSECT A CHAPTER
In this video, I dissect the first chapter Jordan Hennessy appears in in CALL
DOWN THE HAWK.

In my opinion, as a writer, I think this chapter’s job is:

- Introduce Jordan Hennessy

- Start off her subplot
- Indicate her individual character arc
But what I think the chapter about and what the reader will perceive it as are
different — I’m thinking about the internal role of the chapter. It needs to be
showcased in an external way. To the reader, this chapter is about Jordan trying
to earn her way into the Fairy Market.
Notice when reading it how it obeys the general rise and fall of a three act
structure, even within a chapter. This isn’t because I feel like chapters need to
obey the same rules as a novel — this is because three-act structure naturally
mimics the shape of a story. Beginning, middle end.

Special things to note in the chapter:

1. “ACT I”: introducing normal, showing what Jordan’s life is currently like,
how she believes she’s in control of the situation, etc. Ending with the ring
of the doorbell as the conflict arrives in the form of Bernadette Feinman.
2. “ACT II”: the glorious Bernadette Feinman instills the second act with
tension by introducing the challenge: can Jordan impress her enough to
get access to the Fairy Market?
3. “ACT III”: Jordan throws down in the “climax” by presenting her
impeccable forgeries, but ultimately the chapter ends with her not getting
what she wants (which, the watching author will note, gives her something
she has to fight harder for later).

Consider another few things as well:

SETTING: a suburban party

TIMEFRAME: the chapter begins after Jordan is already there, not when she
arrives, and ends when she loses her chance, not when she leaves
CHARACTERS: there are many people there, but few characters
 VIDEO 26: Magic & Myth

MYTH, METAPHOR, & UNIVERSALITY

The power of myth is in its truth. Myth is reality, but heightened. Mythology is the
fanfiction of history: it begins with truth and then exaggerates, stylizes, twists,
turns, storifies it. It scrubs the details but keeps the emotions.

Mythology allows a story to be emotionally true to someone hundreds of years

later. Men who are larger than life become literal giants. Monstrous people
become actual monsters. Myth.

Myth and magic are not the same thing, however.

Myth is a form of story. Magic is the rules.

When you write magic based on reality, then it becomes myth. It stands for
something else. When magic is a metaphor for something meaningful to you,
readers will translate it back from magic and myth into something meaningful to
them.

Myth makes stories universal.

MAGIC SHOULD BE REAL

How do you heighten something? Imagine a real event that happened to you,
and see how you can push and pull at the important features. Can you
heighten the stakes to make it a more exaggerated story? Can you map it onto
an existing folklore or a new folklore to make it more universal? Climate change
angst becomes a mermaid story; the dangerous and beloved horse of your
youth becomes The Scorpio Races’ deadly water horses; your childhood anxiety
over death becomes a physically impossible snow monster.

Of course, your magic doesn’t have to be real. It can be flippant. Aesthetic. But
to me that feels hollow, lighter. I use magic to talk about the truth.
 LIGHTNING STRIKE RULE
In order for magic to carry real emotional stakes for readers, you have to
remember to teach them the rules. I call this the lightning strike rule.

If a character is struck by lightning in a book or movie, the reader or viewer

immediately understands this is a bad thing. They not only understand that it’s
bad thing, they understand why it’s a bad thing, even though the mechanics of
a lightning strike are actually quite complicated. This is because we’ve been
taught ever since young what happens to a person struck by lightning.

This knowledge means that a writer can use a lightning strike and immediately
invoke an emotional response.

With magic, however, readers can often be left scratching their head. It’s your
job to explain and teach the magic before you need the emotional reaction to
it. Lightning strike rule.

GIMME POINTS
I heard about this concept of “gimme points” from an author named Carrie
Ryan. She explained to me that she felt that all writers started out with a certain
number of gimme points that they were free to spend on anything, but once
those points were spent, the reader put the book down. Gimme points were
used with

- Unpopular story choices, like killing the love interest or a cat

- Difficult to pronounce character names
- Complicated worldbuilding
- Breaking some of the rules of reality
- Unusual story structure

Etcetera, etcetera. She said she felt like a writer could choose to spend them
(and she did — I think I remember a scene in one of her novels that involves a
zombie baby getting thrown out a window, which seems like a thing that uses
up some points) however they like, just with their eyes wide open.

I’ve never forgotten this concept, especially as I wallow about in the dense
Celtic mythology and music that I grew up with. To me, it makes sense. To
someone else who didn’t grow up with it, it’s just unpronounceable words. Do I
want to name that character Eoin, knowing they’ll struggle to pronounce it? Or
will I go with the easier Sean — a compromise, but fewer points? Do I need
those points elsewhere?
I don’t begrudge having to teach my readers something, but I try to be mindful
that teaching and entertaining use different parts of the brain. I don’t mind
doing it in tiny pieces. This is often what it means to be commercial.
 ACT 3
__________________
STORY-TELLING
 VIDEO 27: Revision
THIS ONE’S FOR THE FOLKS AT HOME

It’s not as exciting to talk about revision. The image of the lonesome author
toiling away in their tower is not one of an author editing with precision but
rather the author pulling words out of thin air for a draft. I guess it’s not as sexy to
show the lonesome author adjusting pacing by candle light.

But for me, this is where the game gets good. My novels get started in the rough
draft stage, but they get made in editing.

It’s important to remember that this part of the game is for the folks at home. This
is where you close that distance between the manuscript in your head and the
one they experience.

The goal is not to create a book everyone will love, but rather to get as close to
your mental picture as possible. There is no such thing as a book for everyone, so
you might as well just work on doing what you intended.

A PERSON IN POSSESSION OF A NOVEL

My debut novel was bought on partial, which is fairly unusual for a debut
— normally first novels (and often even subsequent ones!) are sold with
complete manuscripts in hand.

But this novel, Lament, had an interesting path to publication. It was originally a
90,000 word behemoth, dense and wandering. I submitted it to Andrew Karre,
who would later be my first editor, and he asked if I’d edit it so he could try to
convince the publishing house to take it. I did, and he did, but the house
passed. Andrew asked me to send in my next novel, though, for him to look at.

I took a year and wrote another book and sent it to him, upon which he said
that he was still thinking about that first book I’d sent him. What did I think about
trying to edit it again, only this time really doing it?

Fair point.

I just hadn’t known how to edit well when I first gave it a crack.
I edited it again.
This time, I really threw myself into it. Moreover, I did it blind — instead of working
right in the draft, fixing it line by line, I wrote a new draft based upon what I
remembered happening in the first one, without peeking. I knew I’d learned so
much from writing another draft in between (remember that principle of “A
Painting a Day,” where you learn more from repeating the entire process than
working on one thing again and again) that in order to incorporate everything
I’d learned about structure, I had to use all different words.

And Andrew bought it based upon just three revised chapters. I couldn’t believe
that he trusted me enough to buy a book based just on that. What if I
completely ran off the rails later?

I recently sat down and had a conversation with him (it also can be found at
the end of this document in its entirety) and this is what Andrew said about
acquiring that manuscript of mine a decade ago:

The thing I most look for in a new project is a combination of a

novel’s (or, ideally, several novels’) worth of author and material. The
actual manuscript present at the moment we decide to make a book
together is not actually all that important to me—certainly not as
important as whether the author gives me the unmistakable sense of
being a person in possession of a novel. I want to spend time with
authors who are not only willing to write their way in to their novels,
but who are enthusiastic about doing so.

Read that, and then read it again.

I love this phrase:

“A person in possession of a novel.”

I want you all to imagine yourself as people in possession of novels. It’s

somewhere in you; you just need to get it out.
 THREE THINGS FOR REVISION
In order to revise effectively, you need three things.

1) A good mindset
2) Objectivity
3) Priorities

1 GOOD MINDSET

You are not your book.

You aren’t; you simply aren’t.

I don’t care if you’ve poured everything you’ve gotten into this manuscript, if
you’ve invested it with as much of your person as possible, it is still a thing that is
separate from you. Even if it was the truest physical expression that you could
manage, it would still, after all be a compromise: the original, the perfect
version, the truth is still stored in its true form in your head.

This is a translation of just one of your ideas. This is a version of a translation of just
one of your ideas.

A critique of it is not a critique of you.

I hammer on this because it’s absolutely essential to acquire this division of self
and project as much as possible in order to edit well.

You’ll need your instincts for the next part of revision, and that means your
instincts have to be divorced from hurt feelings.

Remember, editing and critique is about making the book for them, not for you.
It’s not about changing your vision to make it more what they want, it’s about
finding a way to show them how cool your vision is. It’s not about being
malleable; it’s about being nimble.

It is about being willing to do whatever is required to translate your vision to an

audience. Are you game? Please say yes.

Now, don’t get me wrong. You’re allowed to feel daunted by the editorial
process. I know published authors who get their massive edit letters and have to
take a few days to come to grips with it. I know authors who need other authors
to open their edit letters for them to let them know how bad it’s gonna be.
Take a minute, yes. But then dive in.

2 Objectivity
Recently, a writer friend of mine with an absurd amount of schooling in narrative
criticism old me that no one had ever told her that editing meant analyzing her
own manuscript like it was someone else’s published work. She had no problem
with analyzing a novel she was reading and thinking of how it could be better.
Why not her own?

Because we lack objectivity.

We’ve worked on our project for ages. We skip over narrative gaps. We impose
sympathy where there is none. We see the story in our head whether or not
we’ve managed to get it on the page. This is a problem: we need to be able to
see our project like an outsider.

We have two tools in our drawer for regaining objectivity.

The first is time. If you’ve ever been embarrassed by your early work when you
look back at it, you’ve already used this tool. The cringe is how you know it’s
working! All of the subconscious favors you did to your writing just after creating
it disappear the further you are away from it. One week? Hey, this is fun! One
month: oh man. One year: oh no. One decade: oh GOD.

For me, two weeks is the bare minimum I’d like to have before getting back into
editing. If I can swap to another project or read other novels in the interim? Even
better.

The second tool is a critique partner. Or a beta reader. The only difference
between them is that you swap projects with a critique partner, and a beta is
just a reader. Regardless, these first readers are your consequence-free to see
how your words land in someone else’s brain. This is free feedback, falling
without consequence. Is that what your hair looks like from the back?

But not just any reader will do. You need someone who reads books on the
regular — not just a willing friend or family member. And you need someone
who reads the kinds of books you’re trying to write. A thriller reader will give you
advice through a thriller lens. A romance reader will prefer romance
conventions. So on and so forth. The closer your first reader is to your eventual
readership, the better the advice will be.
And remember how I said you’re going to need to put away ego? It’s for this
part. You’re going to need to be able to rely on your instincts to know when
you’re pushing back on a piece of advice because it’s not right for your story
and when you’re pushing back because your feelings are wounded.

Remember: your vision is worthless as a story unless most people see it the way
you intend it to be seen. Revision is when you close the gap between what’s up
in your head and what’s down on the page, and you’ll need all the objectivity
you can get to pull that off.

3 Priorities

You can’t edit forever. You shouldn’t edit forever. Eventually, the little bird must
test its wings and go off.

I find editing writers fall into two camps. The first can’t wait to be done with
editing. The second lives in dread of the moment the draft will be pried from
their hands. The cure for both is the same — having clear priorities for the
revision. It feels more manageable to jump into editing with a plan, and having
a plan means that when the plan is done, you can feel okay about releasing
the draft into the wild.

It’s important to remember the following:

- No draft is perfect. No book is perfect. There is no such thing as a project

that has everything fixed on it that could be fixed. It’s important to be
able to know what to let go.
- Revision is for other people. Don’t do work other people don’t care about.
You don’t need to twiddle around making sure every time the word
TELEVISION appears on a page, the word BLUE also does, unless that
matters to the reader. Don’t make trouble.
- Work from the top down. Book level, chapter level, paragraph level,
sentence level, word level. Don’t jump straight to copy edits — there’s no
point perfecting a sentence when you may still just hack out that chapter.
- Keep in mind that the original form of your book is in your head. You’re just
moving stuff around until this physical version gets closer. You’re not going
to ruin it; you still have that perfect one between your ears.
- Learn yourself. I know I tend to write the same sorts of drafts all the time
now. For instance, I prefer to add the emotional connective tissue in
revision, so I know that’ll always be a priority.
Professional authors generally get edits done in a pretty standardized process:
first, a big edit letter or call that addresses big picture items that need big
moves. Second, line edits, or things that can be fixed by simply moving around
sentences and paragraphs, without cutting chapters or completely revising
characters. And finally, copy-edits, which fix grammar errors, timeline errors, and
continuity errors.

It’s top down. Book level, chapter level, paragraph level, sentence level. Good
practices.

THINGS TO LOOK FOR IN REVISION

A few notes about before I offer a partial list of revision possibilities.

1. Knowing what’s wrong isn’t the same as knowing how to fix it; when your
reader says there is a problem, believe that, but take any solution they
propose for it with a grain of salt.
2. Every problem has multiple solutions, often equally compelling.
3. You will tend to have the same weaknesses across drafts; plan for them.
4. When your reader begins to nitpick, the details they pick at often aren’t
the problem. It is often that they’ve slowed down enough to notice them.
5. If you can’t figure out how to fix a problem, back up. Many problems
actually begin long before they are noticeable in the draft.
6. Have two critique partners, when possible, so that if they both notice a
problem, you know it’s true.
7. Don’t get attached to things that readers like in early drafts; sometimes
readers just get attached to the most developed part of a manuscript,
which doesn’t mean that it’s still useful after everything else has been
brought up to snuff.

BOOK LEVEL

Purpose/ propulsion/tension. Does it build through the acts? Does the

second act need to be re-ordered or massaged to make sure the tension
escalates throughout it? Is there a lag in the middle? Do we need to be
reminded of the stakes?

Character arc. Are they consistent? Are they interesting? Do they have a
goal? Are they too perfect? Are they too imperfect? Do they interact in
interesting and surprising ways with the other characters? Does their arc
unnecessarily echo another character’s?
Setting. Is it working as hard as it can? Is it interesting to look at? Have you
used it multiple times without exploring it more? Is it difficult to picture?

Reveals: Do they appear in logical places? Can they be moved for

greater satisfaction? Do they land at the ends of acts or at a midpoint?

Plot: Do we care enough about where we’re going? How long do we

have to read before we understand what the goal of the book will be?
Do we clearly prioritize the main plot and do we keep track of the
subplots?

Antagonists. Are my villains landing right? Do I have villains? Do I need

villains? What is the thing stopping my character, and have I articulated
that?

Mood/ tone. Does my book feel like what I want it to feel like? What’s
preventing it?

CHAPTER LEVEL

Pacing. Do I need these chapters? Are they doing multiple jobs? Are they
in the correct order? Do I have a bunch of action scenes or ruminative
scenes strung together inappropriately?

Point of view. Do I switch between point of views too often? Not enough?
Is this point of view the most interesting for this scene? Is this point of view
able to carry the main plot or subplot or should I cut or adjust?

Framing. Is it possible this internal moment is framed with the wrong

external moment? Do I need to have them doing a different activity in this
chapter to better showcase this conversation?

Character. Does every character have a job in every scene? If not, get rid
of them.

PARAGRAPH LEVEL

Edges. Do I set up the reader’s expectations for the chapter and then tell
them how they should feel about it at the end? Do I need to adjust the
pacing with a longer or shorter introduction to the chapter, like a
flashback?
Dialog. Do I need it? Does it sound like the characters? Does it do two
jobs?

Description. Are my scenes grounded in reality? Are there huge blocks of

text my reader has to sort through? Am I looking at things through my
characters’ eyes appropriately?

Repetition. Do I say the same thing twice or have paragraphs doing

basically the same job twice? Do I have characters doing the same job in
the story more than once?

Relevance. Is every paragraph doing a job? Two jobs? If not, cut it.

Specificity. Have I remembered to focus on the tiny details that make

things real? Have I remembered where the dog is in the chapter? Did I
remember grandparents? Weather? Wisdom teeth and common colds?
Have I been thinking about gesture?

SENTENCE LEVEL

Pacing. Is a scene running long? Sometimes just cutting unnecessary

words can make it earn its keep. Running short? Do I need description,
backstory, more grounding?

Voice. Am I consistent? In first, does my character always sound

predictable? In third, does the narration sound like me?

Word choice. Do I use slang or words specific to just me too often? Have I
been as specific and playful with my prose as I can?

Figurative language. Do my metaphors and fancy language work to

move the readers’ emotions without them noticing, or do they distract?
Do I use more than one metaphor do describe the same thing?
 VIDEO 28: Durability
YOU ARE A STORYTELLER
Because you are human. Humans love story. We see the world in stories. I fully
believe that you have cool stories in your head and that you can find a
translation method that gets them out of there for other people to enjoy.

There are ever so many things in the world that would stand in your way, if you
let them: jobs, kids, illness, school. There are so many reasons to put it down.
But you’ve already spoken your intention — I know, because you’re reading this.
You’ve thrown your hat in the ring. You’re thinking of trying, if you haven’t
already begun.

Try.

Give it a shot. Do it at least once. Get the story out of your head. Fix it up. At the
very least, you did what you meant to do. You tried.

(and then you can do it again and again and again).

I believe in you, story-teller.

SUPPLEMENTAL READING

1. Figurative Language: “Red = Rage”

2.Pacing: “The Art of Invisible Movement”
3.An Interview with Andrew Karre
4.Publishing Doesn’t Want to Eat Your Heart
Red = Rage. Ocean = Longing. Literary
=
Every so often I have this conversation at a school visit.

THE CAST:
STUDENT
ENGLISH TEACHER
ME

THE SCENE:
After my presentation, a student drags a beleaguered English teacher to my side.
THE CONVERSATION:
STUDENT (always with a rather mocking tone): So, Maggie, when you put red curtains in a scene,
does that mean that the characters are angry and stuff?
ENGLISH TEACHER: That’s not quite—
STUDENT: —Because we are supposed to analyze all of these books and I don’t think any of the
writers actually put in an ocean in the scene just so that two hundred years later we could read it and
think the ocean stands for longing.
ENGLISH TEACHER: Sometimes a literary device—
STUDENT: I think we’re just looking for stuff that isn’t there. The writer just put in an ocean because
the book TAKES PLACE BY THE BEACH. And the rest was invented by evil English teachers.
ENGLISH TEACHER: If I were evil, I’d—
STUDENT: —So, you’re the writer: do red curtains mean anger?
ME: Curtains do make me angry.
And then I was at LeakyCon, sitting in on a panel called “Is YA Literature?” to find out if I was
writing literature, and this (summarized) conversation happened:

THE CAST:
A SMART YA WRITER
A SMART ADULT WRITER
ANOTHER SMART YA WRITER
THE SCENE:
The panelists have just been asked to define what is meant by literary fiction.
THE CONVERSATION:
SMART ADULT WRITER: All I know is, I know literary fiction when I see it.
SMART YA WRITER: I got a look at the guidelines for assigned school reading and they suggested it
be a book with enough content to be analyzed. Enough depth to support multiple interpretations.
ANOTHER SMART YA WRITER: I think literary is a ridiculous term and value is assigned by our
readers, right here, right now: do they like it or not? There’s no such thing as a good book or a bad
book. There’s a book that matters to a reader.

I think you can talk in endless circles about what constitutes “literary” fiction and whether it’s good
or bad or has no value or can be traded for a gallon of milk. And I also think you can talk in endless
circles about whether or not there are “good” books and “bad” books and who gets to decide which is
which. And if you do ever find an end to these circles, you can finish up with a indefatigable dessert
course of the literary writing versus commercial writing debate.

So I’m instead going to talk about the one thing that interests me about fiction: getting into your
head and moving stuff around. I am in the business of changing people’s moods and making them
see scenes the way that I see them and feel things the way I want them to be felt. You may consider
me Very Interested in learning everything I can about doing all that more effectively.
Sometimes, dear reader, this is going to mean making the curtains red.

Please know that I’m not much for literary writing for the sake of literary writing. I enjoy a nice turn
of the phrase, sure. I do enjoy picking apart novels to see what makes them tick. But my academic
pleasure runs out very quickly (now there is the least sexy sentence I’ve ever written). As a writer, I
am delighted to be given literary prizes, but they aren’t on my list of goals. I’m chiefly interested
literary devices insofar as they allow me to more effectively get inside your head and move around
the furniture.

And they do. Allow me to demonstrate. Here are two paragraphs from one of my favorite sequences
from The Dream Thieves*:
*these are not spoilery, although they are from the middle of the book, so if you want to be totally
uninformed on the action of Book 2, I suggest you wander to another corner of the Internet.

Oh, I had such plans for this party scene. I wanted the reader to see it just like I did. The all-
encompassing luxury, warm and old and unquestioned. The complexity of the political world, the
beauty of wealth, and the stagnation and corruption of old, unchallenged value systems. Adam, as my
point-of-view character, is feeling and thinking about all of these things, and I wanted the reader to
experience it with him.
I could have told the reader all of those things. Point blank. I could have gone with a barebones
description of the driveway:

The circular driveway was packed with so many elegant vehicles that the valets had to turn cars
away.
And then just had Adam muse in italics about his feelings on being there. But then you would
only know it. You wouldn’t have experienced it. I wouldn’t really be getting into your head and
moving things around unannounced. I’d be walking in, hanging up a mirror, then pointing and
saying “there’s a mirror. It’s yours now.”
Here’s another snippet from later:

Okay, the curtains aren’t red. But the runner is purple. How noble!

Man, I was working hard in this little section. In reality, the hallway of the house is lush and content
and established. But inside our two protagonists, trouble brews — you can see it in the mirror. The
side table, on the outside of the glass, is docile. But the mirror-image of the tidy hallway
is crazed and twisted and rakish.

Again, I could’ve just told you: on the outside, the boys look foxy and orderly in suits, but on the
inside, they are hot messes.

But I don’t want you to know. I want you to feel. And our old friends, those countless literary devices
of simile, metaphor, allusion, figurative language . . . that’s the way in. It’s not about fancy literary
prizes. It’s not about seeming impenetrable or smart or high fallutin. I’m not trying to impress
anyone. I am trying to make you feel a story, that’s all.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that I don’t believe in the literary/ commercial divide. And I don’t
believe that literary is good or bad. I believe that good novel makes readers feel, and the more
readers I can make feel, the more successful I will consider that book.

I also believe that sometimes that means making the curtains red.
 The Art of Invisible Movement
Several weeks ago, an aspiring writer asked me what my opinion was on “in-between” scenes —
scenes where “nothing happened.” She noted that her favorite scenes in books were often ones where
characters were only talking about their lives. How did I recommend including these while
maintaining pacing?

I have three thoughts on Nothing scenes.

1. Always Be Mindful of Invisible Movement

I don’t believe in Nothing scenes. I believe in scenes that appear as Nothing scenes to the reader, but
are actually full of invisible movement. I have a rule for myself — insofar as I do rules — that every
scene should be doing at least two things, preferably three or more, no matter how much it appears
to be about merely one.
Here are examples of things scenes can do:

• give backstory

• demonstrate character change

• create a sense of place

• satisfy logistics; i.e. move a character from place A to place B

• establish character

• explain world-building

• move through action sequence

• move external plot forward

• establish dynamic between two characters through conversation or action

It can be tempting to grab just one of those and say DONE. SCENE. GOOD. But efficient storytelling,
powerful storytelling, involves doing many of these at one time. A scene may appear to be merely
about a character crashing his best friend’s car. But it must also be about his character journey and
about his dynamic with another character, all the while pushing the external plot forward. Complexly
written, but simple to read: ah yes, these scene where Ronan takes the car.

A Nothing scene might overwhelmingly appear to be merely a conversation, but it needs to be doing
heavy lifting in the places between words. Work in place, backstory, character motivation. Let the
unspoken seethe in between the spoken. Subtly tie the conversation to the external plot. Why is the
conversation happening now? Make sure it references the steps that came before it to make it seem
inevitable instead of like an element that can merely lift out and be placed elsewhere without
consequence.

What you’re attempting to do is maintain invisible movement. Remind the reader of what is still
lurking during this quiet moment. Or remind them that this is the stake: that this quiet moment is
what the characters are fighting for. Or situate the quiet moment within a larger, external plot
machination, and end the conversation by wrenching them externally according to the plot.

But don’t just let them talk. You can at first. Draft it that way. Be delighted by the quiet conversation
you’ve written. But then get back to work. You ain’t done. Push things forward invisibly by having the
scene do something else in the background.

2. Earn It
You’ve got to earn all frothy conversations or quiet moments in two ways. First is the rhythm of the
thing. It’s like a mix tape. Don’t group all the quiet stuff together, dude! Tense action scenes seem
more speedy when interspersed with quiet moments, and vice versa. Earn your quiet moment by
putting us through our paces for a bit first.

Second: you’ve got to emotionally earn your quiet moments, your Nothing conversations. You may
have been daydreaming of the moment your two characters finally open up and reveal their deepest
truths through memes, but if you do it too soon, the scene will feel empty . . . and slow. Like just a
Nothing scene.

An emotional conversation should be a reveal, a satisfying culmination of something half-seen until

that moment. Timed correctly, far enough along in the emotional journeys, these conversations will
feel like a resting place or a reward instead of a lull.

3. You Can’t Live on Ice Cream Cake, or You Ruin Ice Cream Cake
There’s a reason why a lot of readers think they love Nothing scenes — they mean the scenes
mentioned above, quietly emotional scenes placed well within the narrative. They feel amazing! But
the chemical make up of these scenes mean that they only work when used sparingly. It’s not the
quietness of them that makes them incredible. It’s what had to happen to make the quietness
possible. Ice cream cake is special because it’s a rarity, brought out only for special occasions. The
same goes for all pleasurable excesses in novel-making: banter, kissing, action sequences, emotional
porn. They all need to be used sparingly, and to be placed as a result of story, not instead of it, or
you’ll find yourself with a Nothing novel, because ice cream cake for every meal makes it lose its
meaning.
The thing to remember about novel writing is that the key to pacing is tension, and tension doesn’t
always come from negative consequences. Positive consequences can work just as well (think of it:
love stories, exploration narratives, training sequences). Make sure your Nothing scenes maintain
invisible movement by continuing to promise some kind of tension, and you’re golden.

Oh yeah, and most important? Don’t beat yourself up if you can’t pull it off in a first draft of a scene.
Just because you have to end up with a hard-working scene doesn’t mean you have to be able to
juggle all those layers at once. Writing is revision, revision is writing, etc. etc. etc.
 A Decade of Publishing:
an introspective with Andrew Karre

As of this fall, I’ve been an author for a decade, and to commemorate the
occasion, I sat down with my first editor, Andrew Karre, now at Dutton
Books for Young Readers, to talk publishing. He worked on my first
published novel, Lament, and its sequel, Ballad, as well as editing my two
short story group anthologies; ten years is a long time and we’re both
different people.

Maggie: Ok. Man. A decade. Ten years. It has a certain gravitas to it, doesn’t it? Permanence. Like I
should have a white hair somewhere (I do. It’s in my left eyebrow). It’s strange to think of how much
has changed in both my authorial life and the writing world since then. The world in general, I
suppose — I reckon those two things are inextricably linked when you’re in a profession that relies on
processing real-life events into fiction. Our editor-author relationship was hatched about a decade
ago, but your professional life was in flux (that’s a pun, I love myself) just a little bit before that,
right?

Andrew: Indeed. I think I had just entered Flux (no sin in self-love) when I first read your query in
my email. This would have been October of 2005. If I remember correctly, I was actually reading an
email addressed to my predecessor, Megan Atwood (she was the force behind convincing Llewellyn
to start Flux, the much-punned-against YA imprint that published Lament in September of 2008).
My title at that time was acquiring editor and my mandate was to acquire YA fiction. I had no
significant experience of either trade book acquisition or of YA fiction. I’d been working in publishing
since graduating from college in 2002, but the majority of my work had actually been on a variety of
adult nonfiction (Google “andrew karre staircases” or “andrew karre wiring” or “andrew karre
handfasting” for a good time [also, that’s my hand on the cover of the last one]). My goal was to find
my place in the book world. I didn’t know what it would be, but I hoped I’d know when I found it.

Looking back, it’s tempting to say we were both on the edge of finding a place, but the borderlands of
that place…well, they were no necessarily intuitive.

Maggie: Looking back with the benefit of a decade, one of the things I feel like we were both
learning was what revision and editing truly meant. I don’t know if you remember the first edits/
suggestions you gave me back then (I don’t), but I do remember I made a dog’s breakfast of
implementing them. I remember that I sent you an optimistic query for what eventually
became Lament, and I remember that at that point the manuscript was a massive, winding, third
person tome that at some point featured a pick-up truck charging through an underworld river of
blood. I’m pretty sure I handed you back something that was still a massive, winding, third person
tome that possibly no longer had a river of blood. I edited only on the most surface level, although at
the time I remember thinking I was doing real work.
One of the things I think I’m proudest of in this decade is learning how different a manuscript can be
while still being the same novel. I’m ever so much faster at going through permutations now without
worrying about whether or not I’ve broken the inherent concept. Did you experience anything like
this on the other side of the desk?
[note for context: I submitted the manuscript to him, he asked for an edit before taking it to
acquistions, I edited it, got turned down, went away and wrote another novel for a year, submitted
the new one to him a year later, and he said “actually, I’m still thinking about that first one, how
about we try again?”]

Andrew: God, I remember that pick-up truck.

“One of the things I think I’m proudest of in this decade is learning how different a manuscript can
be while still being the same novel.”
This is deeply true, and it has been probably the single most important thing I’ve learned on my side
of the desk. The thing I most look for in a new project is a combination of a novel’s (or, ideally,
several novels’) worth of author and material. The actual manuscript present at the moment we
decide to make a book together is not actually all that important to me—certainly not as important as
whether the author gives me the unmistakable sense of being a person in possession of a novel. I
want to spend time with authors who are not only willing to write their way in to their novels, but
who are enthusiastic about doing so. Like you, I think I’ve learned how to get through the
permutations without getting bogged in stuff that doesn’t matter in the earlier phases (and I’m sure I
was very bogged in my initial notes on Lament. Decent chance you’d find questions about whether
the truck was a stick or an automatic). The metaphor I often find myself leaning on is creating a
master tape before a final mix. I want to hear each instrument in the piece before we commit to how
prominent any one voice will be. I think I’ve also gotten better at keeping in mind—and bringing up
when necessary—the first flashes of the final brilliance and using those as a benchmarks throughout.
I think that’s an important editorial function during revision: to remind the author whenever
necessary of the high level they’ve already attained and can attain again.

Maggie: This is wonderful: “a person in possession of a novel.” Have you ever been wrong? Is this
asking you to perjure yourself? Have you ever suspected someone had a novel in them to have them
let you down? You were very bull-ish once I turned in a new draft of Lament — I think I revised three
chapters for you the second time and you said THIS IS ENOUGH STOP THERE I’M GOING TO
ACQUISITIONS. And assumed I was off to the races.
I’ve found I have terrible eye for this. Over this decade, I’ve been through a fair number of critique
partners and met many hundreds of aspiring writers — I taught four huge workshops last year and
learned a lot about humility — and I’ve learned in sometimes poignant and agonizing ways that
beautiful prose or hooky story or compelling characters do not always coalesce in a person’s mind
into a novel. I used to think one would follow: if I read a manuscript with a great voice, I could
swagger in and guide the rest into existence. If they had a great pitch for a plot, I could make them
stylish. I was quite cocky at the beginning of the decade as far as thinking I could be a lamp in the
darkness and now I find I have no confidence that I can shape anyone else into anything. I’m not at
all sure that the way I approach storytelling is remotely transferrable. I know I say all this, and this is
your job, to shepherd. When I put it that way it does sound ridiculous, that I would think I could
sashay in and do an editor’s job simply because I wrote myself, as if they are the one and the same
task.

Andrew: It’s weird, isn’t it? I don’t think I could write a remotely good novel, but I think I can say
with some humility that I can edit them—shepherd them—with a high degree of consistency from
fairly embryonic states. They’re adjacent skills, but only occasionally coincident (and of those people
I am jealous).
I don’t think I’ve ever been totally wrong about the bare fact of a novel existing, but I’ve definitely
misjudged the nature of the novel that person had in them or the work required to help get it out of
them. But I can’t really think of someone truly letting me down with regard to being in possession of
a novel.

The metaphors matter here, I think. When I’m talking to myself (And I’m often talking to myself up
here in my attic) I try to stay away from “I shape” and to say instead, “I create and maintain an
environment conducive to shaping work.” I think that’s a thing I had to learn quickly all those years
ago: the work of editing isn’t really the marginal notes or an editorial letter. Editing is creating a
place and time where a manuscript is flexible and transparent and maximally susceptible to revision.
The work of editing is the collaborative work—including notes and letters, of course—of keeping that
space open. This is a very abstract and highly personal metaphor, but it’s been persistent for me for a
long time — and I do associate its earliest forms with you, because in my experience you remain one
of the most receptive to staying in that space of anyone I’ve ever worked with.

Maggie: Oh, you. I’m up to my neck working on drawing a new deck for Llewellyn (Flux, where we
first began working together, was an imprint of Llewellyn, and tarot cards are far more what
Llewellyn is known for; I wouldn’t have predicted I’d be working with them in this way a decade ago,
though) and so I have tarot cards on the brain. What you’re talking about reminds me of two cards,
the Ace of Wands and the Page of Wands. The first card represents a new project, but the second
represents a person who starts new projects. It’s a subtle difference but I think it’s one that a lot of
creators struggle with: you are not your book, you are a person who makes books. You’re saying: I
don’t sign up books, I sign up people who make books. Revision feels like a natural extension of this
to me. You can delete every word of a project and not delete the project, because the hard copy will
always be stored in your head. “WHAT ABOUT THE WORDS!” cry the disbelieving writers when I
say this. The words are the part that are the least likely to be true. The story is itself, it’s thought, it’s
abstract. The moment you put words to it, you’re translating, and every translation is imprecise and
subject to errors.
Let’s talk what’s happened to YA in the last ten years. Back in the day, you asked me to
make Lament shorter, hipper, younger. Under 80k and in first person. That was very much what YA
was right then. Would you ask the same of me now? How do you see YA as shifting, and how much
do you feel you have to shift to meet it?

Andrew: First, is it OK if I have this embroidered on throw pillows and send them with all future
book contracts?
“You can delete every word of a project and not delete the project.”—Maggie Stiefvater

Regarding YA today versus a decade ago, I think I’ve changed at least as much as it has. This
probably bears some explaining. The YA marketplace has changed a lot, of course. We’ve seen waves
of certain kinds of books have huge success, and we’ve seen waves of certain kinds of readers driving
that success. We’ve seen those waves grow on all sorts of scales. And publishers definitely shift in
pursuit of those waves. But I have a sense that the editors I admire and would aspire to be like one
day don’t leave anything behind when they go after one of those new waves. I imagine the best of us
are miraculous machines for accumulating storytelling.
Ten years ago, I could manage a glimpse at Lament (the untranslated project, not the words in
whatever particular draft) and imagine that it might translate well to a storytelling style that was
more immediate and more centered within a character. My ability to make that imaginative leap was
probably governed by what I’d seen and the relatively little actual YA editing I’d done at that point.
In other words, I grabbed one of the very few tools I’d accumulated, and it was suitable, fortunately.
Very fortunately.
Today, I suspect you and I might arrive at much the same place with Lament, but I don’t think that
would be because either of us is short on other solutions. We’ve both been busy accumulating for
over a decade.
When I’m at my most optimistic about YA as a form of storytelling in 2018, it’s because I see on the
shelves (if not necessarily the tops of the bestseller lists) a similar abundance of solutions. And it’s
not just the shelves: my conception of what it means to be a human teenager is vastly expanded. In
that context, my hope as an editor is not to shift, but to expand with YA and with teenagers.

Lament came out in September of 2008. It was a book that offered a glimpse into the range of what
you knew as a human and what you could do as a storyteller at that moment, and it was thrillingly
and challengingly a YA novel unlike any I’d done. Coincidentally, in September of 2018, I
published Dream Country, a novel by Shannon Gibney, which contains at least five seemingly
distinct points of view, a few of whom are not even teenagers. It too is thrillingly and challengingly a
YA novel unlike any I’ve done before. I like that. I hope I can still be saying that to you in another ten
years.

Maggie: Oh, man, that’s so true, re: the market changing versus us changing. I am a very different
human than I was ten years ago and so my stories are accordingly different. I see humans more
complexly, which makes story making both better and harder. Characters, after all, are simple — like
real life, they get stylized in order to become story-shaped. When I was younger, I saw people simply
and then transformed them into characters. One to one, or just about, in comparison to present day.
Now that I see more facets to each person I meet, I have to make the choice how to simplify them
into character form. It means my characters are ever more human — the Scorpio Races characters
are more human than Shiver, the The Raven Cycle characters are more human than Scorpio, etc.
etc.— but also that it takes increasingly more thought to stylize them.
I’m also mindful of not repeating myself. Ten years in, fourteen novels in, now there’s a real danger
of repeating myself. My critique partners say that it’s a phobia of mine, but I don’t know about that —
isn’t that a path we see lots of established authors take? I’ll continue to be wary of it, thank you very
much, as I head into the next ten years.

I think it’s interesting to mull over the differences in our respective futures, on opposite side of the
desk. So much of our jobs cross over, but you have spent ten years making relationships with real
people (how many of your authors have you retained from your Flux days! How many authors will
pick up the phone to try to snag you for a lunch date when they’re in town?) and I have spent a
decade making relationships with people on a page. You work hard to learn how to understand and
communicate with other people, externally, and I work hard to learn how to understand and
communicate with my own mind, internally. When I put it that way it seems obvious which one of us
is more likely to go mad and be locked in an attic one day.

Do you have any last thoughts or questions? I feel like we’ve written so many words and yet not
covered the half of it. I guess that’s what comes of ten years. It has ever so many days inside it.
Andrew: Let the record reflect, I am standing in an attic as I write this. So…
I definitely feel anxiety about not repeating myself, though I imagine it’s a little different and
probably less urgent than it is for you. I think for me it boils down to being anxious that by doing too
much of the same work, I’ll fall into habits that will leave me unable to appreciate things that are
truly unique or, worse still, I’ll become inflexible and unable to offer a vision for the manuscripts I
didn’t anticipate. This is where the communication part you mentioned really hits hard for me. If I
become rigid in who and what I’m curious about, then I’m pretty sure I’ll soon stop being able to
communicate effectively with the authors—new and familiar authors—who are doing fresh and
interesting work. That prospect is terrifying.

I think maybe we’re trying to hold on to the best parts of the early days when, as you once said,
“everyone could be as batshit as they liked, because no one was watching us anyway” while also
reaping the benefits of our experience with a constantly changing world. If nothing else, the effort
will keep us youthful and spry for another decade, right?
 Publishing Does Not Want to Eat Your
Heart
“I’ve been trying to query for one of my novels for the past few months now, and already I’m
racking up on my 17th rejection. However, three of those rejections the agents took some time
away from their cookie-cutter mold to say that my story was ‘very interesting’ but ‘They would
have to pass…’

I’m really confused by this statement because it means my work caught their attention, but it is
baffling me as to why they rejected it. Do you have any helpful hints in this department? Or even
any hints on how to compose a knock out first chapter that could make agents stop say ‘interesting,
but no…’ to ‘interesting and yes!’”

Here is the thing you need to know about traditional publishing: it does not want to eat your heart. It
doesn’t even want to wither your soul to nothing.

It just doesn’t care that you exist.

I’ve always been fine with that. I don’t need Publishing to be my friend. I don’t even need Publishing
to like me. As a writer, I’ve just wanted Publishing to give me a career. And as a reader, I’ve just
wanted Publishing to give me books I want to read.

That last sentence is going to be my thesis statement for this entire blog post, so maybe I should put
it in bold.

Publishing tries to give people books they want to read.

Oh, no, I have one other thesis statement. It’s two pronged. Let’s put that one in bold, too.

Publishing is run by readers.

If you remember both these things as an aspiring writer, I reckon you’ll be okay.

Let’s go back to the response from the agents. “Very interesting” and “have to pass” are not
opposites, though it might feel that way when you’re staring at a rejection letter.

Here is a list of things an agent must do if she agrees to represent a book:

-love it
-keep loving it after multiple reads while editing it for the new author
-love it enough to pitch it enthusiastically to very busy editors
-love it when it doesn’t sell right away and sits around for six months
-love it enough to argue with editors over bad cover choices/ contracts/ publicity
-love it enough to pitch it to foreign publishers months after signing the author
-love it enough to passionately advocate for a marketing plan for it
-love it enough that 5 years later they can still nod enthusiastically when people say “you agent that
author?”
(an editor’s list looks a lot like this, only with even more passionate fist-pounding at editorial
meetings)

An agent must love your book enough to be willing to spend hundreds of hours on it.
Imagine when you read a novel. I imagine you’re like me: you have novels you like, novels you love
for a week and then forget, and novels that you hug to your chest for months afterward. For an agent
to not despise her/ his job, she needs the last one: fiery passion that means she’ll still love your
manuscript in a year. Moreover, she has be pretty sure that she’ll love your next unwritten project as
well. Because when an agent signs a client, she doesn’t sign just one book. She signs an author.

How many books do you read in a year that you love so much that you’ll absolutely pick up the
author’s next work? For me, it’s less than five. How many books on your shelf would you advocate
tirelessly for? For me, it’s a handful.

I know what you’re thinking. “But if the projects sell, surely that is the point of all this!”

I would never go with an agent who signed me only because she thought I would sell. I want an agent
who loves what I write, so she can tell me if I’m hitting the mark with my new projects. An agent who
is going to pitch my novels to editors like there’s no tomorrow. An agent who advocates my case
because she believes in my work, not because she’s supposed to. Contractual obligation gets the job
done, I guess, but love burns hotter and longer.*

*sexy!

Moreover, Publishing, against all reason, is run on passion. Because it’s run by
readers. Although the bottom line is still putting out books that will sell to as many people as
possible, generally those books end up on the list because somewhere, someone in the industry was
willing to stand on a chair and shout for them. And that love needs to start at the ground level. Me.
Then my agent. Then my editor. Then my readers.
Back to this thing: “Very interesting” and “have to pass.” What this agent is doing is giving you a
compliment. Instead of just giving you a form rejection, she or he is merely letting you know that
you’re writing something promising. If I were to parse it, I reckon it means that the concept is
appealing, but maybe the writing isn’t there just yet. I wouldn’t sweat it. I’d take it for the affirmation
it is and move on. Oh — I’d probably add that agent’s name to my list to query for my next
manuscript. But really, otherwise, I’d be pleased with the little head nod and I’d move on.

So how to move to “interesting and yes!”? I don’t think rejections will give you insight here. I guess
sometimes a pile of rejections will give you a hint — if you get four rejections that say they couldn’t
connect with your main character, fix your main character. But usually they’re just too vague. Which
means it is back to the old fashioned way: critique partners.

And the answer to how to write a compelling first chapter is sitting on your own shelf already. Good
writers are analytical readers. Get your favorite novels off the shelf and dissect those first chapters.
What pulled you in as a reader? What do they all have in common? Can you apply the broad
techniques to your own manuscript?

I promise you that Publishing is actually pretty fair. A little mercenary in that it prefers novels that
appeal to a wide group of readers rather than novels that appeal to only a few. But in my experience,
it’s very rare that a great, commercial novel goes unnoticed during querying. As soon as I wrote
something worth reading, I got published. Not a moment before (a fact for which I’m grateful, as my
name would be on that first effort forever), not for lack of trying.

Publishing really doesn’t want to eat your heart. Publishing is run by readers. All they want is a
good read. It’s your job to give it to them.