Rich Hands in a Poor Garden

One of the advantages of writing a series revolving around the same core cast is the growing richness of the portrayals. A large part of writing any novel consists of discovering what the lead characters are like. How fully a mature version emerges can determine how well the book as a whole succeeds. That advanced knowledge of a character can then be transferred to a second book and those after that.

What cannot be carried over is a fresh plot. While you were tinkering around with the characters in that first book, you were also discovering how the story would develop. That organic process may have worked well the first time around, but it likely will not in later iterations. Why is that?

When you have a variety of players, you’re inclined to find things for them to do. A scene may be devised for the sidekick to the hero, for instance, because he’s so peculiar in that wonderful way. Plus, you decide to give him a spouse in order to mine his peculiarity even further. This process is repeated for a number of major characters, giving them scenes in a regular rotation. 

Pretty soon, though, you’ll discover a distressing development. Writing for all of your beloved characters has a centrifugal effect on the novel as a whole. They’re spinning out into their separate orbits. Yes, you may have started with a compelling main plot, but it is proving too thin a reed to support so many wayward events.

The process of tinkering to discover new plot developments needs to be outlined more fully before you start page 1. Each of the major characters—at whatever level of importance you decide—needs to participate in a plot line that progresses each time toward her individual goal. If you want to give a character a spouse, that’s fine, but first determine how that marital combination can produce or finesse obstacles for the character. 

Once your notes show concrete advances that each main character will take, now examine the whole. How can the separate plot lines intersect, and at which points in the novel does that happen? The later the intersection, the more important the plot. What you’ll discover by laying out the skeins separately is which characters truly deserve to lead the next book.

Exercise: If you have already written a follow-up book, draw up a list for each major character. Go through each scene and write down in a sentence or two what plot advance the scene made. When you’re done, look at the list and ask yourself: how much did each scene move the character’s story forward? Most of the time that will tell you how much she should be featured and how many scenes should be cut.

“A man may be so much of everything that he is nothing of anything.” —Samuel Johnson

Copyright @ 2025, John Paine

Walk About

Ever since Archimedes stepped into a bathtub, humankind has been looking for eureka moments. Nowhere is that search as ceaseless as in the world of literature. A book contains so many sentences, and you want them all to sparkle. That’s why a large proportion of the edits an author makes on a draft consists of switching around a phrase, or substituting a fresh vocabulary word, or a dozen other changes to make a sentence more polished.

The creation of a story comes out an agonizing dribble at a time, and it’s easy to become discouraged. Minutes upon minutes can pass while you stare at a page, knowing that brilliance is burgeoning somewhere in the back of your mind—but not a single blessed thought will come out. 

In these cases, it helps to be hyperactive. A person who cannot sit still will do what an author who is stuck requires so badly: they get up. While I’ve never found that pacing about, hand in chin, does much good, I do know that when I stop forcing the issue, metaphorically beating my head against the screen, good ideas come to me.

You can make this a deliberate part of your routine. You get up to stick the half-drunk coffee in the microwave. While the half minute of heating up ticks off, you may find that a snatch of an idea comes to you. If you have been absorbed in what to write next, that unbidden snatch may be what you wanted. This technique works for any sort of roaming activity, be it making lunch, folding clothes, going to the loo, or, well, taking a bath. You have allowed yourself to relax, and your subconscious responds: “Now that you’re not thinking about it . . .”

Little by little, those ambulations around the house can produce hundreds of clear-cut ideas that you can stud into your story. You won’t experience eureka if you’re not looking at all, but you can make it a steady practice. So, the next time you’re feeling really stupid and inadequate, give yourself a break. Literally, go smell the flowers.

Exercise: Once a stray thought comes to you, you then have to write it down. Trust me: with all the thoughts that pass through your mind while roaming about, you can so easily forget it. Make sure you carry your mobile phone with you. If Siri is not at hand, you must act the fool and keep repeating the phrase in your mind, or on your lips, until you return to the keyboard. 

“It is not easy to convey, unless one has experienced it, the dramatic feeling of sudden enlightenment that floods the mind when the right idea finally clicks into place.” —Francis Crick

Copyright @ 2025, John Paine

When Telling Helps Showing

Show, don’t tell is a hoary maxim in storytelling, but how exactly you are supposed to do that? I read both fiction and nonfiction in which numerous interesting incidents are related, but very few scenes or sections bear much relation to their neighbors. Upon talking to the authors, I invariably learn that they had been advised to show, not tell, and that explained the absence of any thematic material binding the pieces together. The book is all knees and elbows without any sinew.

You want to show a person or character involved in an event. That type of writing provides vivid, up-close details that readers can use to imagine themselves in the person’s shoes. That vicarious involvement is one of reading’s greatest pleasures. Telling about that same incident, on the other hand, places a filter between the reader and the experience. The author is relating secondhand news—“as told by.” 

Once you have written out the incident, however, that doesn’t mean your job is finished. Now you need to provide context. Sometimes that can be accomplished by linking two thematically related incidents back to back. But most times you need to provide bridgework that provides the linkage. For example, an argument Cal just had with his wife will not seem connected in the reader’s mind with the argument he had with his mother 200 pages earlier unless you remind the reader. 

Many other times you need to provide framing. Whether through an author’s reflections or a character’s thoughts, you give an overview that explains why what we are about to read or have just read is brought up at all. A doctor fails to saves a patient, for example, and in the next scene she learns a lesson in compassionate healing. How are you supposed to convey that unless she thinks about the lesson she learned? With such a device, you now have given the reader the sense of how this incident fits within your larger picture.

Exercise: Pick out an incident in your manuscript. After reading it, do you know how it relates to the rest of the book? Of course you do. Write down that reason, in a sentence or a paragraph, depending how much explanation you think is needed. Try placing that explanation, from the lead character’s point of view, at the end of the incident. Does it fit there? Would it, or part of it, fit better at the beginning? Could you break up the explanation into pieces and fit them in throughout the incident—from inside the mind of the character?

“Don't say the old lady screamed—bring her on and let her scream.” —Mark Twain

Copyright @ John Paine, 2025

Fulfilling Expectations

An author setting out in a new genre like fantasy can be delighted by the riches that it offers. Many authors dream of writing a tale populated by dragons, snarling or friendly. Hero worship, depending on the author being emulated, can be an instructive practice for a beginning writer. My own first (unpublished) novel was a fantasy, and its hero bore perhaps a slavish resemblance to Bilbo Baggins.

I mention that because I also brought an unfortunate ignorance to the writing experience. The Hobbit was the only fantasy I had ever read, since my literary tastes back then ran more toward Heart of Darkness. Devising unexpected surprises for the reader—a boulder that contains a door!—was terrific fun to write. It was not until later, when I began to edit fantasies, that I realized the cardinal error I had made.

The gambits I had employed were too timid for the genre. While I was being quasi-realistic about how such things could possibly happen, a Michael Moorcock was making giant leaps in credulity. The attitude of such a writer is: screw you if you don’t want to go along for the ride. You’re not my audience.

The cautious approach shows its unstubbled chin to the reader right away. That’s because, feeling that throwing up unbelievable stuff in the reader’s face will cause them to put the book down, the author does not introduce standard genre elements early. A hundred pages can pass before there is any whiff of magic. The writer may instead present copious research into the mythology from which the fantasy is drawn, such as ancient Ireland. The thought is: I’ll get the reader primed for the fantastic stuff that’s coming next.

The problem is, readers of the genre are hoping that stuff happens on page 1. If they have to wait too long before any cool stuff happens, that book is going back on the shelf. Why is that book called a fantasy? they wonder. 

That error is compounded by not adding more magic consistently. If you have read the other books in the genre, you’d know that you’d better come up with fresh ideas. Dragons are so passé, even comic ones. The other authors in the genre have produced X and Y and Z; what do you got to top that? 

Exercise: Before you even start, amass pages upon pages of details of what the world you are creating looks like. You should know 100 magic twists and where they’re located. If you’re borrowing a basic concept from someone else, how can you recast it to make it your own? You should already be able to walk through your kingdom—from the inside of the character—before writing the first line.

“All cartoon characters and fables must be exaggeration, caricatures. It is the very nature of fantasy and fable.” —Walt Disney

Copyright @ 2025, John Paine

Second Time Around

An author’s first novel often represents the union of several gleaming factors. The writing shows precision in word choices, because so much time has been spent evaluating each sentence. The characters have true depth, because stops and starts as the book develops winnows out those who are less compelling. Most important of all, the book has a good concept. A subject struck a nerve at the very beginning, and the fleshing out of that topic proves how solid it was.

Where authors can fall short is the selection of the sophomore effort. Part of the problem is fatigue. So much effort was expended on the first book that a writer finds that, like Atlas, supporting one world feels like quite enough. To start from scratch and spend hundreds of new hours is a daunting prospect. At least the first time around, you had no idea how long it would take.

Juxtaposed to the weariness is your knowledge that you are a much better writer. In the latter stages of revision for the first book you likely found that the words you composed flowed out of your head faster. You were using certain techniques, like converting the most interesting word in a sentence into an active verb. So you want to put all that hard-earned training to work.

A first impulse with many writers is to pen a sequel. After all, you know the characters of the first book so well. Yet this is where so many writing journeys fall short. The concept for the second book may come to seem pallid compared to the first. Ten, twenty, maybe fifty pages into the new book, you find yourself losing interest. It just isn’t grabbing you, pulling you onward, the same as the first one.

That’s why, no matter which concept you choose, the first consideration needs to be how excited you are by it. Better writing skills employed on a less compelling central idea is a pointless exercise. You might as well perform black belt moves on a mannequin. 

How do you find good concepts? While some authors are bursting with great ideas—when will I find the time to write them all out?—most of us have to be more patient. You can move the process along by staying mentally sharp when you read news articles. Would that disaster in Dallas fit with the core characters you have in mind? Like many other gifts of the Muse, that ever elusive minx, you may find that by actively seeking, the perfect idea blindsides you unexpectedly.

Exercise: Context can provide the basic shape in which to fit the concept. Draw up a few pages of notes about 3-4 main characters you’d like to explore (whether from past books or not). In particular, what sorts of relationships between them would you like to develop? Now you have laid the tinder that can be sparked.

“Creativity and insight almost always involve an experience of acute pattern recognition: the eureka moment in which we perceive the interconnection between disparate concepts or ideas to reveal something new.  —Jason Silva

Copyright @ 2025, John Paine

Plucking and Choosing

As a person who worked for years with a sharp pencil, I tend to trust my instincts more than word-processing aids, but that is only a personal preference. Tools such as Find can be a godsend for a careful author. I have a mental clicker that keeps track of common mistakes such as overused words and expressions. Yet an author has a harder time seeing these, because the repetitions represent the way you spark the power to generate other words used in those sentences.  In other words, certain ways of phrasing a sentence puts you in your wheelhouse for expressing a new idea. So, an author should use “quite” and “rather” qualifiers if they help you get out a sentence that is provocative and interesting. After you’re done, you just delete the “quite” or “rather”—and everything else still sparkles.

I run the Find function when my intuition tells me that too much repetition is at play, and I sometimes have been shocked by the results. I knew characters were doing a certain amount of staring at each other, but 148 times? A person could get eye strain from that. That’s where another computer aid comes in. 

I use a dashboard thesaurus often, flicking the screen over to study possible alternatives. After all, I’m in the business of keeping the vocabulary in a manuscript fresh. On occasion I find that none of the synonyms really will work, but nine times out of ten I spy another word at the same level of diction that I know very well—and will work perfectly. You use Find, flick to the dashboard (or however you like to set up your thesaurus), and presto: nice word substitution. 

You can also run a global search on trickier items of redundancy. One phrase I look for often is “as if” or “as though.” This sort of sentence construction has valuable uses, but when I see it repeatedly, I usually feel that the prose in general is getting snarled in complex sentences. Again, writing depends on how an author thinks. If you naturally compose complex sentences, using “as though” is a natural extension of unspooling a thought. Many readers, especially nowadays, don’t think that way, however. What I tend to do is delete the connector, and separate the sentence in two. Most of the time, removing the connecting clause does not require any further editing. But you have removed a tangle.

What I really wish for—if Santa would like to join the world of computer editing—is a search function that would identify how many participial phrases are used in a manuscript. Again, I am not an enemy of them, but I do know that many such phrases are stronger when they become an independent sentence. But if you try to look up “ing,” you will be frustrated. The suffix is used too often for other purposes. If robots can clean my house, how come they can’t look for a comma followed by a participle?

Exercise: If while reviewing your manuscript, you feel a tic that you’ve seen that usage before, stop. You have, almost for sure. Type the word or phrase into your Find window and see how many times it is used throughout the manuscript. You’ll likely gulp at the number. Then spend a few minutes looking up synonyms, not only for that word, but for similar words. Start jumping through the search and adding fresh vocabulary.

“I have written—often several times—every word I have ever published.”
—Vladimir Nabokov

Copyright @ 2025, John Paine

The Early Morning Ghost

Writers are lucky that the human species does not wake up instantly. Instead, we lounge in bed, even after the alarm goes off. In those minutes before fully awakening, thoughts about your story can come to you. Like a cyclone, a ball of thoughts about a scene can spin out of the nether regions. Soon enough, you find yourself trying to lock down the ineffable so that you can include it in the book.

What ends up happening, unless you possess a preternatural ability to access your subconscious, is that you concretize only a small portion, maybe a paragraph. Lying in bed, you keep repeating the words, over and over, until you remember them well enough that you can jump up, rush to your desk, and record them. Repeating also helps you to judge whether you really have discovered a bon mot. Many times the thoughts tumbling inside your head can glow because the general direction seems so promising. When you actually pull one of the lumps out into plain view, you may find that it is really dross. That realization may occur while you’re still in bed, when you write it down, or when you review it later, thinking you were so damned smart and . . .  wazzz this thing?

Once you have written down your eureka thought, don’t set it aside and go off for breakfast. Dwell with it awhile longer. You may not be able to recapture the glowing whorl, but you may be able to tack on thoughts to what you have. What are the possible consequences of that sentence or two you wrote down? 

Let’s say the line is: “She didn’t mind that he wasn’t smooth, that his chin scratched her. She was pleased he had tried at all.” What do you know about that woman character? Does this new thought turn up a new trait of hers you hadn’t considered? Bear in mind that you don’t have to write follow-on text. You could simply make a note about her in her character-notes file: I want her also to be like “that.”

When you dwell in the pursuit of what pulled you out of bed, you may find, while drinking a cup of coffee to keep waking up, that you are tingling with the promise of a good writing session to come. Maybe the page you write that morning is more pedestrian than your eureka sentence, but it still a page of writing you put down on paper. Especially if you had been building up to a new breakthrough over the past few days, the one thought bursts open a dam of other thoughts. Brilliance doesn’t only come in spurts. Once you have material down where you can work with it, you can rewrite until that entire page shines as well.

“The only thing worth writing about is the human heart in conflict with itself.”          ― William Faulkner

Copyright @ 2025 John Paine. All rights reserved.

Keeping Pace

Writing is an endeavor prone to mood swings. This is hardly surprising when you consider that you’re engaged in tapping into your subconscious. One morning you wake up and your head feels clear, like you could see for miles. Another day you wake up and feel fog crowding in around your eyes.

These up-and-down swings occur on a longer cycle as well. You may miss an entire weekend because you’re away, and all that next week you remain AWOL. You’re just not feeling the usual urge. Or, the evening you plan to get back into the story, your brother calls about Thanksgiving plans. By the time you hang up, you have barely a half hour left before going to bed.

A more pernicious effect on writing can occur from external forces. Your job goes through a demanding phase. You wake up early to get an early train to get to work early, because you know a pile is waiting on your desk. Depending on how long the rush period at work is, you can find you haven’t written all week, maybe even more. If you had been in a groove, settling down every day or so with the story, you’re left facing the ruins of that happy stretch.

These lulls separate those for whom writing is an avocation from those for whom it is a vocation. But that’s okay. You don’t want to give up your day job to chase a unicorn. What you can do is make a promise to yourself that you will take advantage of the good swings.

A book is like a huge boulder you are rolling. The more your shoulder stays in contact with it, the harder you push when you are rolling it, the more progress you will make. You have to think ahead, deciding to dedicate the next block of time you will have free to writing. If that means both mornings of the next weekend, put it down on your calendar on Wednesday night. Two long blocks of red—9:00 to 12:00 (red for passion, your passion). Intent counts. That’s what keeps those gaps in the range of days, not weeks.

Exercise: Don’t make promises you won’t keep, though. If you put down Sat-Sun 9:00-12:00 for every weekend on a repeat cycle, guess what’s going to happen? You’re going to miss some of those dates. You’ll start clicking off that block before you even reach the weekend, and that will become a habit. Focus on this week, not on months of vague promises.

“Exercise the writing muscle every day, even if it is only a letter, notes, a title list, a character sketch, a journal entry. Writers are like dancers, like athletes. Without that exercise, the muscles seize up.” —Jane Yolen

Copyright @ 2025, John Paine

 

Reaction Fits the Action

Amid the sins an author fears—bland characters, bungled story lines, bad writing—the worst is: boredom. At the base of the worry is the knowledge that many writers’ lives are dull. You merely need to think how much time they spend in silence in front of a screen, and the reason for the gnawing anxiety is self-evident.

The response takes a variety of forms, and one of them is amping up what isn’t that exciting to begin with. This sin seems to stem from a conflict between an author trying to be realistic and their trying to be entertaining. In this version, a modern-day Thor does not shoot lightning bolts but blows out a house’s electric box. The inhabitants still have a right to be  startled. But if they are running around screaming in the dark for a protracted length of time, the reader is left wondering: why doesn’t someone go down and flip the circuit breakers back on?

That right there—the reader’s response—needs to be an author’s guide. Determining how they will respond is not difficult. Any writer knows that if they let a part of the manuscript to sit for a while, possibly months, they will feel more neutral when they review it. If you sense that the reaction is out of bounds, you very likely are not alone.

The chief offenders in this regard are a character’s thoughts. While you can take some license—the character may be more unstable than normal individuals—you have to remember that the reader wants to participate vicariously in the story, and a character’s thoughts are one of the main avenues to do that. If the reader feels that the character is making much ado out of nothing, the bond between reader and character is frayed. When it happens enough times, the reader gives up on the character—and most likely the book.

That’s why you should try to keep the thoughts restricted to the gravity of the plot advance. If your character’s father has a history of yelling at the main character, she most likely is inured to it. Bye, Dad, I can’t talk to you right now. You would have to devise a novel circumstance, such as Mom lying in a heap on the kitchen floor, with Dad standing shell-shocked nearby, to engender true rage. In other words, change the plotting, not the reaction. Make the story more exciting, and the chorus will amplify the clamor.

Exercise: Comb through the manuscript, focusing only on characters’ reactions to events. Judge how well the dramatic weight of the one corresponds to the other. Earlier in a book, you want less dramatic material, so you can build to the better stuff later. In that case, modulate exuberant reactions. Later on, though, you may have to do the opposite: ramp up the action.

“To every action there is always opposed an equal reaction.” —Isaac Newton

Copyright @ 2025, John Paine

Tricks to Bind Narrative to a Character

Authors writing a plot-driven book will rightfully claim that they do not have time for lengthy character explorations. Such work slows down the book’s pacing. Yet this approach also runs the risk of creating characters so ill-defined, they’re cartoon cutouts. The question for this author is: how do I create memorable characters in quick strokes? Here are a few tips:

First of all, your character has a memory. Let’s use a running example of an Ebola-like outbreak in a war-torn country in Africa. Let’s further posit that the protagonist is an American doctor trying to save patients. She arrives at a stricken village, and you provide a paragraph of description that fills in the harrowing details. All of this writing is exterior: that is, it could be described by anyone. So how do you make it an individual experience?

One way is to compare it to other outbreaks she has experienced. A doctor involved in infectious diseases usually is familiar with numerous types of these diseases. If she has served in other humanitarian crises, she would assess this one in terms of the previous ones. In other words, you’re using her memory to bind all of the sensory material in that descriptive paragraph to her.

Another trick is to put yourself in the character’s shoes at the moment she is experiencing action. Let’s say our doctor (we’ll switch to a man) steps out of his Jeep and approaches the door to what appears to be the village clinic. Again, you have a paragraph of description of approaching the closed door. Again, the writing is all exterior. How do you make it personal?

Ask the questions your character would ask. Start with: What does he fear is waiting on the other side of the closed door? That’s why you wrote all that descriptive stuff, isn’t it? You want to induce trepidation in the reader. So stick it inside the mind of the protagonist. Monkey see (the character), monkey do (the reader).

A third trick is to use description itself, only calibrated to the character. Let’s say the protagonist thinks she recognizes another doctor from back home, only he’s lying on one of the fetid clinic beds. You describe her first impressions, from a distance. Then, as she gets closer, she provides more pinpoint descriptions that she recognizes. All descriptions, but your character controls the focus.

Exercise: Here’s one more trick. If you have any emotional material at all, judge how impersonal it is. For example, when the woman doctor recognizes her friend:  “She experienced a rush of anxiety.” Do you mean: “She was terribly worried about him”? Try to use warmth in the emotional descriptions rather than accurately cataloging the state. You’re not using more words; you’re choosing the right words.

“Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Copyright @ 2025, John Paine

A Day at the Zoo

Monsters in fiction are as old as the first campfire around which stories were told. Human beings may no longer be puny creatures who venerate oak trees, but the terror of being so small in a world—and now universe—so vast has never left us. The same readers who regard goblins and pookies as whimsical relics of a credulous past still want to buy the next horror novel. Awe is as instinctive to us as eating.

The introduction of monsters into a novel, however, lays traps for the unwary. The difficulty stems from the core thrust of fiction, to tell a story about people. As readers get to know a character’s qualities, we can find a place in the story to occupy. We can root for the hero, or find their thoughts intriguing. The fictional concept may be amazing. But before obstacles can be strewn in the path, first we must have a character worthy of following.

This central tenet is why novels that are filled with hordes, no matter how terrifying their appearance, or how distressing the results of their gnashing teeth, can become numbing after the first blush. Creatures do not have personalities. They merely snarl and lurch. I am scared by a menacing watch dog, but I also find its relentless hostility tiresome. Come on, what did I do to you? The dog can’t tell me, and neither can a fiendish mob.

Such books rely on the reactions of characters who are trying to avoid being overwhelmed. Such a plot driver is familiar to readers of military thrillers, in which heroes struggle against a mainly faceless enemy. We care about the one character, or core cast of characters, whose qualities are known to us. The urgency of the threat is communicated by how dire that one character’s circumstances are. Or, we realize the gravity by how the pressure of the situation is changing the character’s personality.

When an author adds what I call the “buddy element,” the possibilities multiply. If two friends start off the book as a wisecracking duo, smart and funny in a typically American adolescent way, the story has a gauge by which to measure the growing threat. If one of the friends changes the relationship, such as panicking or abandoning the partner, that is the change that affects readers emotionally, more than all the warts in the world.

Exercise: Review the manuscript with a focus solely on the main characters that started the book. If you have a strong relationship, chart scene by scene how that is progressing. Are you, for instance, isolating them later on, due to the exigencies of the plot? As a result you are robbing the book of one of its early sources of power. Can you find a way that they can rejoin, at least for the climax sequence?

“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.” — Friedrich Nietzsche

Copyright 2025 John Paine. All right reserved.

Persistence Pays Off

Writing is like music in the composer’s ability to use motifs to gain a cumulative effect. The same structure employed in a symphony—introducing an idea and then running through variations—can be employed by novelists. That is an important lesson to learn because writing is episodic by nature. A chunk of work gets done in a day, and an author moves on to the next chunk.

The way to use this tool is straightforward if you know what you are looking for. You can start by examining what your protagonist does over the course of the book. What are the major themes? Let’s say, for a running example, that a young man falls in love with a young woman. While his troth is true, he has competing traits that many of us have, among them inability to commit, alcohol or drug abuse, or a consuming desire to get ahead.

A character’s failure to get out of their own way is found in many novels. Yet you don’t have to be an exceptionally insightful writer in order to keep turning that prism in the light and finding new instances to mark the failure. You merely need to have the character reflect, as the novel’s events unfold, how the failure is playing out during the different stages.

Returning to our swain, let’s assume that a breakup in the relationship was caused by one night of excessive drinking. The hero now will spend the rest of the novel working his way back to his true love. Perhaps during one stage he swears off drinking, even if he falls off the wagon a time or two. He retains the reader’s sympathy because he’s at least trying. All the time he keeps thinking of getting her back. Yet when he returns to her house—knowing she won’t talk to him but he just wants to see her—she steps out of a car with another guy, maybe even his best friend. That sends him on a downward spiral. You record his feelings about her during that stage. Maybe he becomes so morose, he loses his job. Now his love for her has become poisoned by having too much time to think about her. He might go off on a bender and end up killing himself or nearly so. How is that young romance looking now?

You don’t have to plumb a character’s innermost soul if you’re halfway proficient at plotting. You just have to stay on task. In the swain’s case, his true love wasn’t a one-time deal back in the early pages of the book. Through progression, she becomes an embodiment of why he’s a failure.

Exercise: If you have already completed a draft, review it with an eye only for your protagonist’s top points. What are you stressing consistently? Once you see certain patterns, review the plot events. Could you line them up so that they tell a story in stages?

“If there were only one truth, you couldn't paint a hundred canvases on the same theme.” —Pablo Picasso

Copyright @ 2025 John Paine. All rights reserved.

Ideas from Your Notebook

If you can’t get started during a writing session, you might turn to a source of inspiration that can take you in unexpected directions. I’m assuming that you keep a pocket notebook, or the electronic equivalent, around you at all times. Writing is the art of observation, to a very large extent. William Burroughs once wrote: “Nothing exists until or unless it is observed. An artist is making something exist by observing it.”

As the day passes, listen to what your office mates are saying. Listen to the oddball everyday stories or incidents that someone inevitably comes up with. Go out at lunchtime and observe how the light strikes a building’s window or how the flounce of a hem reveals a bony knee. I have an old notebook filled with pages of observations of the Boston Common at different times of the year. The material that can fill your novel is all around you, at all times; you just have to pay attention.

Most important, keep a notebook on your night table. You are probably already aware that some of your most powerful thoughts come to you at the twilight margins of either waking or falling asleep. If your story is revolving in your head, never far from the front of your mind, you will find that these are crucial moments in which some of the best sentences in your novel come to you.

Because these notes are so random, they most likely do not pertain to the passage you want to write in today’s session. Yet if you’re really stuck, trying to write in sequence may be beyond your powers anyway. Go grab a notebook that you know has several pages of observations. Read through them and see if any would fit in any part of your novel. If one or more does, go to the place in the manuscript and see if you can insert it. You’ll find, if your writing is tight enough, that you have to rework the material around the insertion. You may have to fashion an entire descriptive paragraph to include it.

You can see what I’m driving at. That jotted-down note is firing up your creativity. You’re devising solutions, just as you do all the time as you write. Granted, the material isn’t making your novel move forward. But when you’re done with the draft, you’re still going to have that terrific sentence or paragraph in it. You may well decide that your writing session was worth the pain just because that one piece is so compelling.

Exercise: If none of the above options work, you should turn to your diary for inspiration. Reading through it can be a slog—did I really need to revisit that conversation I’ve had a thousand times with my mother?—but you may well find material that would work well in the novel. In other words, it is a slower means of finding applicable details.

“Words are often seen hunting for an idea, but ideas are never seen hunting for words.” —Josh Billings

Copyright @ 2025, John Paine

Error Free

As a freelance editor, I see manuscripts in all stages of undress. That’s because I can enter the writing process even before an author has completed the outline, depending on what sort of help is requested. I will notice misspellings or the like and ignore them. The book is still in a preliminary phase. My tolerance during a full manuscript edit, however, is different.

Typos and basic mistakes of grammar indicate a lack of seriousness toward the craft. Characterization can be gifted, the plot can be exciting, but raw talent isn’t enough. Having vague notions of becoming a great American novelist is a common sentiment during all of those hours spent alone. Yet it’s also like being a Little Leaguer who believes they will grow up to be the next Babe Ruth.

I see manuscripts that are littered with dozens of mistakes, sometimes on a single page, and I always wonder, “Does the author not realize these are mistakes?” Perhaps they think the editor, or someone at the publishing house that buys the book, will clean up after them, like Mom used to. Getting out the protean emotions, that’s what’s important.

The fourth hexagram in the I Ching, the classic Chinese book of oracles, is “Youthful Folly.” Back when I was a young writer, given to mysticism, I used to roll that hexagram all the time. The Chinese sage that wrote that book knew me better than I knew myself.

The reason I bring that up is because literary agents and editors are, by and large, mature readers. They see manuscripts all the time in which the writing not only shines, but no typos can be found for pages at a stretch. That’s when I, personally, know the writer is committed to their craft. I know in addition that I, the reader, am the beneficiary of all that hard work, and I like the author better for that reason too.

An author breaks down sweeping ideas into granular text all the time. The process of learning correct grammar and spelling follows much the same path. At the ground-eye level, a dictionary is always in your dock. The Chicago Manual of Style, or the equivalent, is always on a nearby shelf. When you develop the habit of constantly looking up prose, even when you’re pretty sure you’re right, you are immersing yourself in all the possible means of expression. Whether a root stem ends in –ing or –tion starts to really matter to you. You’re getting in up to your elbows in words.

Exercise: What you don’t know about grammar and spelling can seem so sprawling, you may be daunted. That’s why many writers start with Strunk and White’s Elements of Style. It’s a thin book, and its pages are filled with so many common topics, you’ll feel immediately comfortable. You can’t lose by following the precepts of one of the greatest New Yorker editors of all time.

“It is a damn poor mind that can think of only one way to spell a word.”               ― Andrew Jackson

Copyright @ 2025, John Paine

 

Trolling for Ideas

One of the most fertile sources of ideas is, not surprisingly, other books. That’s because the acuity of a good writer often reminds you of thoughts you yourself have had before. I should pause to clarify terms. I hate plagiarism, as does anyone engaged in the book industry and knows how hard writers struggle. The mining of ideas I am suggesting operates at a plane once removed.

Rather than copying anything, you can jot down the concept that struck you. For example, let’s say you’re reading about a young man who, being awkward at parties himself, becomes jealous of his girlfriend for spending too much time enjoying the company of another man at a party. You realize that for your book, such an incident would be perfect for demonstrating the character’s overall decline into paranoia. What’s more, you are struck by how well the author captures not only the initial poisonous simmering at the party, but how the character thinks about it afterward. At a conceptual level, you see the technique employed, and that becomes a springboard for your original train of narration.

At a lower level, reading other books can remind you of details that you want to add to scenes. Again, don’t steal what is original, but use the book as you would any other source you research. If the author is writing about a dog with a red collar, you can act upon associated ideas about when you owned a dog. You can remember items such as dirt smearing a dog’s collar or dried hanks of fur after the dog has wallowed in mud. Just as valuable, you may read something that sparks off in your mind a memory of how you felt about your dog at a certain time, perhaps the way you felt about the white hair that slowly ringed its muzzle as it aged.

Remember the reason you’re looking for ideas: to feed more fresh material into your book. By the same token, I have deliberately rented movies merely to pick off details that relate to a setting, often in the past, that reside in the back of my mind and will not come to the forefront on its own. You are a hunter, so go gather for your book.

Exercise: Keep a pocket notebook or iPad at your side when you read your next novel. When you see a striking idea, stop and write, in your own words, how that notion could be converted into what you have in your story. It may well be that what you write down has nothing to do with the book you’re reading—but rather it sparked off a wholly new idea because your subconscious reacts to your intentions for your book.

“The way you define yourself as a writer is that you write every time you have a free minute. If you didn't behave that way you would never do anything.”              —John Irving

Copyright @ 2025, John Paine

Put It Down on the Page

One of the most fruitful activities while writing a story is talking out character and/or plot problems with someone else. During the first draft this person is likely your long-suffering partner, and then the sounding board can expand as you explain the book to others. Whatever the audience, the feedback most of the time is not as important as your testing out new ideas.

Part of the reason these sessions are so helpful is because you’re staying involved in the writing process. The issues are churning in your mind, and at some point a solution will emerge from your subconscious. Even on a day when you are frustrated while writing, talking afterward about what you are trying to do is an attempt to right the ship for the next writing session.

The main reason for its value, though, is that in formulating thoughts about what you’re trying to accomplish, you can have eureka moments. The neural pathways in the brain are mysterious, and the art of communication in particular seems to operate through separate channels. For some reason a matter you have spent hours wrestling with in your study may trip off your tongue effortlessly. “Oh, of course, that’s the answer” is a comment I’ve made more than once when a surprise pops out of my mouth.

You run a risk, however, if you don’t behave as an author and get that idea down in writing. This applies especially when someone raises an objection about your story. The natural impulse is to explain why you did such-and-such. The explanation seems so right as you are speaking. Yet as an editor, I have one significant problem with this method. If the reason you’re giving is not down on the page, where I can read it, what good does it do me?

Joining the twin streams of written prose and spoken explanations serves to deepen your narrative point of view. What you’re telling another person is only a variant of telling the same thing to your reader. So get down that spoken idea first, plain, unvarnished. You can always improve upon simple vernacular, being more succinct or expressive as you edit the prose. But if you wish to be a complete writer, those bull sessions of throwing out ideas are only one more facet of someone who is immersed in a life of writing.

Exercise: If you’re explaining a part of the story, and you vocalize a really good idea, rush out of the room and write it down. Sure, it’s weird, it’s antisocial, but that’s what writers are. Think of it this way. The person you’re speaking with will regard the hiatus as strange but charming, not mind-poundingly normal. He may well decide: she’s a more interesting person than I thought.

“The author must keep his mouth shut when his work starts to speak.”
—Friederich Nietzsche

Copyright @ 2025, John Paine

Causes Interrupted

Writing a novel takes a long time, and sometimes authors decide they need to take a break. Getting sick of your own words happens to every writer, so this is not surprising. The pause that is taken varies from a few days or weeks to months. The latter occurs more frequently to authors who have a full-time job and write in their spare time. Life gets away from all of us.

During a long hiatus, a writer can lose their place in the story. When they finally return, they can be inspired to begin anew because a new idea comes to mind—just the sort of element that will inject new life into the beast that had grown so tiresome. The author skims what has already been written and plunges in.

Although it can be tedious to read what you’ve already done, it is imperative for story continuity. When you stop writing for a while, you have to make sure you read carefully which plot threads you have been pursuing before. Otherwise, the new outburst of words may pull the reader in an unexpected, and possibly unwelcome, direction.

If I as a reader have been pursuing a romance for 100 pages, I’m not inclined to head off in a totally new direction, such what happens when the hero’s brother murders someone. It doesn’t matter if the romance is not at an exciting point when the break occurs. Any plot line has segments that alternate between strongly pushing forward and then laying back for a while.

Everything is relative, and proportion counts in a novel. If the new outburst runs for five pages, I will welcome it as a tangential subplot that is meant to interrupt the tide of the romance. If it is 20 pages, I will start to feel adrift. I may not really know the brother. I may not know the victim at all. So I’m supposed to drop everything and head off to who knows where?

Besides the confusion engendered, a second drawback is the way that new outburst undercuts the tension of what you already have been building. Any plot line that lies fallow for 20 pages is going to lose its tension. With each page it is being relegated ever further into the past. When we return, it feels like stale news. Oh, right, the romance—along with the niggling question: why does the author think it’s so uninteresting that it can be neglected for so long?

Exercise: Any plot line can be chopped into pieces as long as you like. When you realize that a segment has been going on too long, see if you can find a breaking point in the middle. After all, a novel switches between plot lines frequently. Maybe what you wrote in one burst could be broken apart into more manageable parcels—and the original plot line can retain its momentum.

“I lost the plot for a while then. And I lost the subplot, the script, the soundtrack, the intermission, my popcorn, the credits, and the exit sign.” —Nick Hornby

Copyright @ 2025, John Paine

 

Writing about What Matters

How much a book impacts its readers depends on its aims. A literary novel such as Yasunari Kawabata’s Snow Country, a favorite of mine, is so delicately written that the plot events hardly matter. Most fledgling writers, however, do not write with such precision, and they must adjust accordingly. Depending on how many plot events fill the novel, they may go to the opposite extreme, fulfilling a thriller’s demand for a looming global catastrophe. 

The vast spectrum of choices between these two poles leads to great confusion. How many plot events, would you say, indicate an action-oriented book? How can you tell if the prose style is distinctive enough to obviate plot imperatives? If you fall short either way, you end up with the dreaded midlist book: sorta but not really worth the time spent reading it. 

Narrative voice is highly linked to a lead character’s bent for introspection, and that provides a first useful guideline. How many times does your protagonist natter on about a thought skein that lasts at least a paragraph? I’ll exclude from this list any thought related to the immediate action around it. How often do you go for a deep dive into observations the character has? If they occur more than a dozen times, you should head in the literary direction. You obviously have a facility for that type of writing.

For most authors, though, what happens to the characters far outweighs the meaningful comments the protagonist makes. This holds true even if the narration is skillfully wrought. Say, you tell anecdotes that various cabbies in the LaGuardia Airport taxi pool relate, replete with patois. Yet without supplying any underlying meaning, they are merely entertaining bits. A smattering of low-level plot events, in other words. Your approach is working against what lifts a plot-driven book to its heights: strong organization of events around major characters. 

No one should be blamed for trying to infuse meaning into a novel. An author spends so much time alone, wrestling with matters that are so much more stirring than the morning traffic report. Yet if what moves you inside is not being transmitted by pen to paper, you cannot make the mistake of assuming the reader knows you are filled with such lofty thoughts. If Cam is hunting down the crew that mowed down the rebels, that is the realm of can-do. Write about the interesting ways in which revenge can be exacted.

Exercise: Review the manuscript for lulls between the action. These often occur at the beginning of a chapter. If you want to add meaning, think not about what just happened at the end of the last chapter. Retrace a course back through the endings of multiple chapters involving that character, maybe 5-6. What long-range observations can you make about them as a group?

“Cosmic time is the same for everyone, but human time differs with each person. Time flows in the same way for all human beings; every human being flows through time in a different way.” —Yasunari Kawabata

Copyright @ 2025, John Paine

Unexpected Allies

Authors given to writing plot-driven books can face the problem of inadequate characterization. Sure, the murders and explosions keep on coming, but who is the hero so successfully leaping all the hurdles? The personal interactions in such books are purposeful: either action is being planned or executed. While hints of personality emerge in such strongly paced scenes—the luck o’ the Irish detective or no-bullshit woman cop—the human dynamos may feel mainly like industrious cogs in a machine.

How can an action-oriented protagonist stand out from the teeming crowd of villain slayers? A hint can be taken from a common motive in such books: the need to revenge the murder of someone near and dear. “You killed my brother!” is personal. Readers like that hero more because they can imagine how they would feel. Yet unless the novel spends all its time looping back through the halcyon days with that brother, the sympathy dies out after a while. There is only so much juice that can be squeezed from someone who is six feet under on page 3.

You can give a hero a personal edge by providing a sidekick of sorts that accompanies the hero throughout the book. The most likely candidate is an intimate other (or who becomes intimate) or a child. The idea is that, even though the hero has to get coffee on the go, they will display personal facets in the exchange of coffee.

Yet another prime source can be overlooked: a lifelong friendship. If our Irish Mick knew Joshua in the FBI from childhood, all of the interactions between them as they pursue righting the wrong are infused with their buddy-hood. Early on, you write out a few background passages, with maybe a flashback to a telling past episode between them, and now a relationship is established that the reader cares about—even as they slosh their coffee when their target suddenly takes off.

You can also use ethnic bonds. You can span continents in an international thriller, for example. If you have a Jewish FBI agent who spent youthful years traveling to Israel, she could very well be old friends with a Mossad agent. In this age when youths travel frequently overseas, you can set up all sorts of linkages that tie a book together.

The same ease with a familiar figure helps to fill out a character. A shy person shows their true warmth when they greet an old friend. A hard-charging avenger shows a comic side when their friend pokes fun at their charging. Plus, if they are united in the quest, the book doesn’t have to slow down for touchy-feely sessions.

Exercise: A real-life model can serve you in good stead with such a character. You can write fluidly about exchanges with a person you know inside-out. You don’t have to explain when you instantly know how that person will react. You use your built-in knowledge to write characters with built-in traits.

“There’s not a word yet for old friends who’ve just met.” —Jim Henson

Copyright @ 2025 John Paine. All rights reserved.

Mind Maundering

An author who wants to write more from inside a character’s head needs to take into account the difference between plot events and personal thoughts. The distinction can be fuzzy, because so much of what we think is predicated on reacting to what happens to us. Not only that, but many times in fiction the reader wants to know the character’s reaction to a plot event.

For that purpose, the interior approach is fine. A character’s response does shape the reader’s impression of the event. Yet the dictum to tell a story from inside a character’s head can lead to a distantly told narrative. Plot events happen out of the reader’s purview, or they become background stories that are told through the filter of the character’s thinking about them. That robs the events of any immediacy.

This is a difficult matter to define, because the greatest novel writing is highly subjective. If the authors I admire can do it, you may ask, why not me? The balance turns on what is being written about. If you are recalling a company picnic in a journalistic fashion, then you’re better off aiming for the brightness of dialogue, others’ appearances, gossip about their spouses, etc. How much depth can you draw from the hi-how-are-yous at a picnic, anyway?

If the whole point of the picnic, on the other hand, is so the author can convey one further example of the protagonist’s ongoing depression or growing desperation, then you are writing about a way station in a private journey. What happens there is only crowd noise compared to the exploration of character. What dress a person is wearing doesn’t matter as much as how it affects the character’s mood.

The true goal of internally based writing is to capture the character’s thought patterns, which usually are about personal matters that extend far beyond plot events. If you’re constantly relating external matters, you cannot achieve that depth. Events constitute plot, and you are bound to follow your plotting. In that case, put the reader directly into the scene—because that’s what you’re writing about.

Exercise: One guideline for interior monologue is length. A character’s reaction to a plot event tends to be short. Say, Eloise is offended by a slight at the company picnic, and she tells the reader what she thinks of that s.o.b. How long can that rant go on, really? A few sentences? If it goes on at any length, the interior monologue of necessity would need to probe into the character’s psyche. Why does she find the slight so provoking? Do the two have a past history? Is she sensitive to such remarks because of an unhealed wound in her past? Notice that both options will move the narrative well past the remark at the picnic.

“Thinking is the hardest work there is, which is the probable reason so few engage in it.” —Henry Ford

Copyright @ 2025, John Paine