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If you are thinking about writing a sequel, you must above all escape the clutches of the first book. You can do that by being deliberate about your outlining the second book. Forget about being organic. If you plunge in blindly, thinking the characters will guide you through, you will likely find that your story is noodling right along the same grooves you pursued last time. Set down clear lines you want the new story to follow first.
You first have to devise a way to foment new tension between your established characters. Let’s say that the sexual tension between Lee and Amy built nicely during the first book. Yet once they become a pair by the end, where do you go from there? As the old dictum goes, you either have to build up or tear down a relationship. The one thing it can’t do is remain on a plateau all book long. So you better start creating some problems if you want Lee and Amy to keep entertaining the reader. The reasons that a couple has problems are many: infidelity, undue jealousy, money, and/or divergent interests among them. Which type of problem would lead their plot line in a distinctly different direction from the first book?
You should also consider other sources of friction as well. Perhaps Amy’s father hated Lee, but by the end of the book has come to respect them. What is going to replace that point of tension? Unless you have a new concern for her father, you might want to consider relegating him to a minor character.
When you are outlining the next book, take one important step. Create new major characters right from the start. Write sketches about them, just as you (hopefully) did for your major characters in book one. When you set out a preliminary order of scenes, make sure the new characters are heavily involved with the ones being carried over. That way you’ll avoid any scenes that mainly explicate the past. Once you’ve created a run of 10 or so scenes, you’ll have a good start to a fresh book.
Exercise: Draw up an initial plot chart. I have provided a partial one below, based on a chart for my own YA novel that I have passed along to many authors. You can see right away the advantages of laying out in brief what you’d like to pursue, and with which characters. You’re moving beyond the hazy one-line comments in your outline. You are setting down clear objectives, with named characters. You can see at a glance whether you’re replicating relationships or plot ideas from the past.
“If you write one story, it may be bad; if you write a hundred, you have the odds in your favor.” —Edgar Rice Burroughs
Copyright @ 2025, John Paine 
When choosing a subject for a novel, a number of authors choose to write for a younger market. Children’s books, even those for young adults, are shorter, which means less of a writing mountain looming ahead. You may feel that you have always been a teacher of sorts, so the impulse toward instruction is natural. Once the book is started, however, a difficulty of a most basic sort crops up. What sorts of vocabulary words should be used? How complex should the sentences be?
Authors frequently think in terms of their own desire, neglecting basic principles they would follow in ordinary life. Would you buy the first nail gun you see? Do you even need to buy one at all? You would research the question to find out. The same holds true for this market you have chosen. Don’t shoot in the dark—look up online what books schools recommend for each grade level. Then read a few of them, hopefully your direct competition. If you want to write a historical novel, read the ones they recommend and see what level that writing hits.
One reason I point this out is that children are more sophisticated than you think. Depending on the grade, they may be used to reading complex sentences, for one example. You shouldn’t assume that children don’t know words that are longer than eight letters. When you consider that New York Times arti are written at a ninth-grade reading level, you don’t have to dumb it down so much. Not only that, but teachers at each grade level want books that challenge their students to find new words. If you’re writing at a fourth-grade reading level for the sixth-grade audience you want to reach, remember who are the guardians at the gate.
How do you know what level you should be writing at? That is an easy question to answer. Education is one of the largest sectors in the country. Entire websites are devoted to all sorts of topics for students. Your readers are the ones that can run circles around you online, remember? You can check your reading level by consulting online sources such as Readable and Lexile and Quantile Hub, for two prominent examples.
The willingness to do your homework as an author will prepare you for the most important task at all. You need to communicate, as an adult, to children. You have to be a little kid inside. All of the hundreds of other children’s authors are doing it. See how you can help out with your great ideas.
Exercise: When reading any of your competition, you need to divorce yourself from the material you are reading. If you get caught up in the story—or, if you pooh-pooh how simple it is—what good does that do for your analysis? The best tactic is to stop frequently. Read only a few pages of a chapter. Don’t finish it. Then go back to the start of the chapter and read it again. That way you’ll be able to say: that’s what they are doing so well.
“Make it a rule never to give a child a book you would not read yourself.” ― George Bernard Shaw
Copyright @ 2025 John Paine. All rights reserved.
Journalists rightly feel that they have the most interesting stories. That’s what they spend their lives doing: seeking out the new and unusual. When they are fired, as seems inevitable in the incredibly shrinking world of media, some turn their hand to fiction. After all, stories are what fiction is all about, right?
Up to a point, that reasoning works fine. In fiction you can really burrow into a news article. If there is a heroin epidemic in Chicago, say, since I’m partial to that great Midwestern city, a reporter can expand into a personal tale that covers the decimated newsroom of a modern newspaper, the seamy underpinnings of the Chicago P.D., the black kingpins of the South Side. In such a rendering the protagonist is invariably a maverick, hard drinking, ready to tell a boss to f**k off. All of this material looks promising.
The problems start to arise after about the first hundred pages. Once the all-too-real scenario is laid out, in all of the spheres the book will explore, then what Aristotle would call Act II begins. The lead reporter does his job, reporting the incident, albeit in greater detail that a newspaper would allow. The interactions are nasty and gritty. The newsroom scenes have the requisite gloomy banter. Yet, reading it over, the journalist may feel twinges of dissatisfaction. Something about the whole enterprise seems pallid, despite the gripping events.
That’s because the reporter, just as in real life, is only incidental to the drama. That’s why so many of these types of stories are mysteries: because the job of reporting is a type of investigation. Even if there is a love interest, the object of desire may be just another subject from an interesting article. The reporter doesn’t really fall in love, because she’s too much of a free spirit to be tied down.
The journalist is hiding behind his typewriter. He’s an observer when he needs to be intimately involved. The events portrayed need to rock his world, making him a different person. Instead, he is bound to the realistic framing he has devised. As a fiction reader I remain as aloof as the reporter. Nice story, and now? I turn the page to the next story, right?
Exercise: Start with a single #2 character. Make up a relationship that has nothing to do with real-life incidents. The only reason for that character is so the reporter can reveal how she is feeling inside as the story unfolds. That foil, if you will, is the reader’s way into your lead character’s heart.
“Every man is surrounded by a neighborhood of voluntary spies.” —Jane Austen
Copyright @ 2025, John Paine
Satire can make for a wonderful read when placed in capable hands. So many social conventions as well as belief systems are absurd. Yet what starts as a barrel of laughs can be doomed in the long run if an author does not employ a variety of tools to keep the novel’s turns fresh.
The first is to keep one primary plot aim true. While it’s fun to read about characters taking constant swipes, the story can devolve into a puppet show of tricksters and fools if someone is not staying on the beam. That character may well be the most slashing maverick of them all as long as her cause is meaningful, such as curing malaria. The reader then can keep rooting for justice to be served through all the mayhem.
Second, provide enough plotting so that the novel does not remain on the same starting premise. An arrogant bully can lose swagger if he keeps dissing the same characters about the same topic. A satire about the development of a miracle drug, say, had better move beyond the laboratory and the boardroom, or you’re done in 80 pages. A further stage in this scenario might be a hypochondriac in a trial phase, the head of the FDA review board, a member of Congress agog about the benefits of a side effect, etc.
A third asset is a large cast of characters. What seems extremely funny when one character takes a beating can start to look like meanness after repeated blows. A hedge fund raider, for instance, can beat up on a hapless CEO only so much before we start wishing the CEO had some redeeming quality. That’s not to mention the repetition factor. Even a running gag needs new circumstances to remain vibrant. If you advance the plot steadily, that will entail adding new characters. You can not only use the new settings. You can also insert new players into the matrix of old slings and arrows as a way add new variety to what seemed tired.
You might also consider starting with a subplot from the beginning, headed by an absurd character. In the running example being used, this might be a mad scientist working for a second biogenetics company who comes at the malaria issue with a patently quack solution. This personage also provides a break from the main plot, and that is helpful because switching back and forth by itself helps to keep plot lines fresh. That, in essence, is the entire ballgame: keep showing us new tricks.
Exercise: An outline can be valuable before starting a satire. You can lay out the characters in opposition at each stage. Not only that, you can sense from afar when a plot thrust is losing gas. That’s when a new plot line/character needs to be introduced. You can also sketch out how old and new characters can intertwine for new twists on old gags.
“Analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog. Few people are interested and the frog dies of it.” —E. B. White
Copyright @ 2025 John Paine. All rights reserved.
A good novel is encyclopedic in its coverage of so many different realms. Chief among them are the attitudes of the lead characters toward each other. When you’re writing truly from one point of view, an entire history of a relationship can be revealed in what a character assumes about another—without the author having to expressly comment on what either of them is like.
Where does this history come from? From the nether regions of your brain. Even if you are basing a fictional relationship on a real one, you still have to cull from the complexity of those years certain ways of interacting that can form a cohesive bond within the confines of your book. That’s where your reliance on knowing how you and your best friend, say, work(ed) together can lead you astray.
That’s because your characters are going to be more extreme than the real-life models. That means their past history will have correspondingly sharp highlights. As you’re writing, this altered past comes into play. Let’s assume you have made real-life teenage drinking and drug escapades more serious. You know you want the friend to be more hardened, maybe having served time in prison or in a dry-out clinic. Yet how, if the two were supposed to be buddies, can you keep your protagonist savory enough that a reader isn’t turned off by their evil?
Unless you sketch out this grimmer past, you won’t know. You’ll have a vague notion of how a plot turn might go, but because your made-up version of the past still is swimming in the ether of the real past, you’ll end up continuing to put off having to decide. Chapters may be written down, in which the two have solid dialogue, attitudes about plot events that ring like a bell, etc., but underneath—where you have the opportunity to really make them distinctive—you’re still undecided about their roles.
You have to stop working on the story. Forget about making headway. Figure out what the two did in your fictional past. Start with character notes: what are the buddy’s family and environmental impacts that made them the bad influence on the protagonist? What was the first bad thing the two did together? How, as they got older, did they start to drift apart? How did the hero escape going to prison, as a for-instance?
Then write out several scenes that you know probably won’t make it into the novel. How did the two interact when the evil was committed? Was one intent on malice while the other was talked into it? After it happens, what are the two divergent reactions? How does that impact the way they approach another act of evil a month/year later? Write out that next scene. What you’ll find is that you will learn the answers. Once you know, then you can write implicitly about their interactions in the present day.
“My father had a profound influence on me. He was a lunatic.” —Spike Milligan
Copyright @ 2025 John Paine. All rights reserved.
Amid the ebullience of finishing a novel, after a seemingly endless number of drafts, an author can become caught up in the idea of writing a sequel. They may have been told that the key ingredient is carrying the central core of cast members over to the new book. High among them, maybe the #2 character, is the villain. Wouldn’t it be nice . . . ? thinks the author.
The factors arguing for a resumed battle between protagonist and antagonist are pretty clear. You have built up the villain into a memorable character, allotting almost as much space as to the hero. In addition, in order to drive the book’s suspense, the two characters may have operated in separate spheres, as heroes often spend the entire book trying to identify and then locate the villain. So now that the villain is a known quantity, they could spend the entire book feinting and counter-feinting, just a barrel full of monkeys to spring on the reader. Best of all, you know both of them so well, the second book will nearly write itself.
While there are certainly series in which an overarching villain is continued from book to book, they usually are not the heavies in any one of those books. Instead, it is the kingpen’s henchman who gets down in the trenches and dukes it out with the hero. That arrangement seems to indicate that the reader is getting gypped, but that’s not true.
The reason why is: coverage. The person who keeps showing up is the one whom the reader will learn to hate. That is one of the governing principles of story logic. You control which characters will induce emotion from the reader. Aunt Millie might be a terrifying ax murderer, but if she rarely appears in the book’s pages, we’re not going to pay her much attention.
Now let’s consider the question in terms of math. Say you have allotted, out of a 400-page manuscript, 200 pages to the hero’s scenes and 125 pages to the villain’s. By a simple number count, you can see that more than three-quarters of the book has been devoted to one or the other. If the hero is to match up with a titanic foe—needed for a thrilling climax—are you going to feature some also-ran from the other 75 pages? No. The bigger they are, the harder they fall. Ergo, you can’t save the primary villain for the next book, because that is the only struggle that will satisfy readers of the first book.
Exercise: Series writers commonly use the same types over and over. Examine the scenes in which your villain appears. Write down notes pertaining to physical descriptions, type of personality, and background. Now imagine that same person in your sequel, only strip out the descriptions and background. Replace those elements with new ones. You have a new villain.
“The more successful the villain, the more successful the picture.” —Alfred Hitchcock
Copyright @ 2025, John Paine
The search for variety in prose leads us down alleyways that tend to follow the way we think. I will start by offering up myself as an example of a writer that trends toward complexity in sentence structure. I see this same quality in many authors untrammeled by any literary principles but the ones they have devised for themselves. In other words, writing intricate sentences is not necessarily a contrivance. It just may be the way the thread spools out.
In past posts I have stressed the need to simplify when the occasion warrants, such as an action sequence. The opposite problem, however, can afflict an author more sparing with his prose. Hemingway is emulated often without realizing how hard he worked at crafting simple prose. What I tend to see are sentences that feature a bunch of action all attached by commas. The most pedestrian variety runs like this: “He came to his car, opened the door, got in, took out his key and inserted it.” You may laugh at how mundane this is, how superfluous all those pieces are. The entire sentence isn’t needed.
I see this pattern elaborated upon, however, by more intelligent authors. A sentence commonly starts with a participial phrase (“-ing), then a main sentence stem made exact by adjectives, along with a prepositional phrase that leads another clause. Such as: “Without knowing what to do next, she decided that she should not do a thing, with the thought that perhaps the wrinkle would be ironed out with time.” Grammatically, it hangs together. Idiomatically, it has a nice feel. But is the expenditure of 27 words worth the contents of the sentence? The upshot is, she decided to hang tight. No plot movement was created. Nor any character furthered, unless the point is that the character is wishy-washy. I personally feel my attention dimming over the course of the sentence, because all that ado about nothing makes the sentence sag.
How you write doesn’t matter. What you load into a sentence does. The trap for a writer talented enough to write from inside a character’s head is that stringing together a fine web of words does not substitute for depth of penetration. If the passage consists of nothing but mental nattering, the reader’s involvement with the narrative recedes—because the substance doesn’t merit closer attention.
I would rather read a series of short, precise sentences that firmly carry the story forward, whether in action or in thought. That way is harder, because now every phrase has to count. So before you spin out your next flowing sentence, feeling your way forward for the right nuances, you might want to ask yourself: what is the sentence accomplishing for the reader?
Exercise: A good way to tell whether the constituent pieces of a sentence have any value is to break up the sentence. Imagine each phrase is a separate sentence. If you have three clauses, as in the example given above, you’ll see more easily how little is getting done if you have to read it through in three separate sentences. Start by giving each clause more impact and then put them back together.
“A healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people's patience.” —John Updike
Copyright @ 2025, John Paine
Have you ever had the feeling, while reading a long exchange of dialogue, that you are skating on the surface of the story? You realize that so-and-so might say such a thing, and that the response to that statement is also true to the ear—but the material seems so slight that you’re dissatisfied. You wish everybody would just stop yakking for a minute. Come up with something exceptional.
For many writers, dialogue is the first narrative form that they master. As they are typing, the words that their characters will say come easily. After all, how many conversations have we had in our lives? Yet within this facility lies a trap. While we can “hear” how a character of our own devising says a delicious bon mot, the reader does not necessarily have the same experience. Spoken words on a page are flat, to a very large extent, and need to be framed by context.
Deft alternating between the immediacy of dialogue and the grounding that prose narrative provides is one of the tricks of good storytelling. I have a loose rule of thumb that for every three lines of dialogue, a character’s thought or some piece of physical business—a wry look, coughing nervously, etc.—should be inserted. Such work need not be deep. The character may merely think, for instance, that what this boor just said to him was insulting. Adding to “she said,” the one word “sneering” tells us quite a bit about how that line of dialogue is being spoken. These asides provide context, in other words. They add complexity not only to the character but also to the story itself, particularly when what the character thinks is at odds with what she says.
Exercise: Throughout a review of a draft, look for stretches of dialogue. If any one of them goes on for more than a quarter page, look for places where you can insert a narrative aside. If you can do so roughly every third line, you will find that you are adding depth to the scene. What’s being said is only one level of a multi-layered, textured passage.
“People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.” — Soren Kierkegaard Copyright @ 2025, John Paine
Once you have finished writing a novel, the notion of writing a sequel can be mighty tempting. Many commercial books are part of a series, featuring the same hero, such as Harry Bosch or Kay Scarpetta, and writing that way increases brand recognition. Plus, you already have gone through the process of discovering your characters, so you know them well. What isn’t as apparent at first is how much of a burden a previous book can place on your new book.
What you have already written exerts a pull on you because you realize that so much of it works. You may resurrect some of the burning issues of the first, because they still inflame you. Let’s take a for-instance. The heroine is a pubescent girl abused by a stepfather, and she hates her mother for turning a blind eye. If the stepfather is killed at the end of the first book, though, how much good is that hatred going to do in the second book? The punishment has already been served. Even worse, the stepfather is no longer around to actively perpetrate his evil.
The problem is, you derive none of the benefits from the first book—the growing tension between the characters—and all of the liabilities. Anyone who hasn’t read the first book isn’t going to understand the urgency that you so carefully built. It’s all in the past. That means the past operates as a dead weight lugged around by the present-day story.
Any sequel needs to develop its own plot lines. What you want is to carry forward a core cast of characters from the first book and employ them in fresh pursuits in the second book. The lesser characters who belonged to the plot of the first book must be jettisoned as active characters in the sequel. For instance, if the mother of the abused girl is not given a new plot pursuit, she’s not worth more than a cameo appearance—a piece of background info.
You are still writing from strength. You still know intimately the small group of characters that are leading book two. But when you are sketching out the plot lines for the book, make sure that they are not hovering like carrion birds over what is now a carcass.
Exercise: A common piece of writing workshop advice is to write pages and pages to get to know a character. If you have already written an entire book featuring your main characters, though, you have already done that. You have that rich lode to draw upon. You can create back stories that summarize what they did in the first book, just as you would insert background pieces for any character. But keep it at that: pieces a half page or a page long that are inserted into a new story.
“The only reason I would write a sequel is if I were struck by an idea that I felt to be equal to the original.” —Dean Koontz
Copyright @ 2025, John Paine
Your characters suffer from a universal limitation. They all spring from inside you. They tend to sound alike, because you’re the one who is thinking up all the things they are saying. This muddle is exacerbated by the fact that dialogue, while easy to write, is usually the least distinctive element of your narrative. Why is that? In dialogue you need to capture the cadence of the way people speak. Otherwise, conversations can sound artificial, labored. What people say, on paper, usually sounds like what a lot of people might say.
So, how do you make your characters speak in unique ways? As with other elements of building a compelling character, your difficulty probably stems from the fact that you are writing about them from the outside. They’re all sound like you because you are dictating—the puppet master—how they should talk.
Dialogue needs to be spoken from the inside. Once you grasp that simple principle, separating out voices becomes one more function of creating vivid personalities. Let’s take the example of a boy and girl that have fallen in love in New York City. What are the most outstanding characteristics of the boyfriend? First, let’s say he hails from Ohio. As any Easterner can tell you, people from the Midwest are so nice. He’s lived in New York for three years. Now ask yourself: what are the sorts of things would you talk about when you’ve lived there for (only) three years?
Now let’s consider the girlfriend. She’s from Brighton Beach in Brooklyn, streetwise but shy. What is her frame of reference? She’s lived in New York all her life, so she’s going to complain about all its irritations. That’s how being cooped up in a city feels. Maybe add in that her conversations are sprinkled with scientific references, because that’s what she studied in school. Maybe she can’t wait for the Science newsletter in the Times to come out on Tuesday.
Are these two characters going to talk differently? They will if you keep in mind, as you begin every conversation between them, where they’re coming from. Once you get a feel for operating from inside their head, your characters are going to talk to you first—in their own voice. Then just write down what they say.
Exercise: The most straightforward difference between two characters is: one’s an extrovert and the other’s an introvert. How do extroverts talk? You can start with the premise that they do their thinking out loud. They’ll do a lot of announcing. An introvert will tend to stumble more aloud. They will blurt out something, then have to correct themselves halfway through, or want to correct themselves because they are thoughtful enough to desire the right nuance. Try it: listen to people talk, and you’ll see the difference right away.
“Your manuscript is both good and original, but the part that is good is not original and the part that is original is not good.” —Samuel Johnson
Copyright @2025, John Paine
Losing at love is a common topic for a romantic plot line. That’s because the fall from a state of bliss creates anguish, which is an ideal way to foment ongoing tension in a character. Remembering the good times makes use of time shifts, a narrative technique that readers enjoy. In many cases, the unhappiness is succeeded by a new attempt at love, and the mistrust engendered by the past partner creates trust issues with the new one. As a plot premise, a broken heart has to be rated as A+.
What works well as a book opens, however, can become depressing, even annoying, as the story ventures forward. Part of the reason is that despair is bleak, and there is only so much of it a reader can take. We already know life sucks; why do you think we’re escaping into a book? Hand in hand with this feeling, a novel usually holds out a reason to hope. There is a way to higher ground, if only the character can find it.
Another reason is stagnation. Once the initial circumstances of the past love affair—the winning ways of the partner, the relief from prior loneliness, the fun escapades shared—are laid out, often over a lengthy course, maybe a few hundred pages, a character can be increasingly seen as running in place. Get over it already. Don’t you see that new guy likes you? Are you blind?
This growing perception is driven by the forward momentum of other characters in the novel. They are getting somewhere in their quests, and thereby they draw a reader’s interest. By contrast, a character still moping becomes a less desirable plot line to follow. With that character, the second verse is the same as the first. And the third. And the fourth . . .
An author often responds to this urgency by cutting down on background scenes, limiting the past thoughts to a paragraph or two before pushing forward into the present. In some ways, this transition period is worse—because that sort of work is distant storytelling. We’re not even getting a fully realized scene anymore. Even if it occurred in the past, at least the reader can immerse themself in it.
A better tack may be to transfer the bitterness caused by the old lover onto the new one. The sourness becomes a distorted prism through which the present is viewed, one that is broken by the growing realization that love rules all, even a new, not as amazing, love. However tempered, it does represent forward progress.
Exercise: Once the original scope of the past love is laid out, over the course of a few scenes, mix in the new love interest. Give the reader some hope, even if the light is all the way at the other end of the tunnel. By halfway through, the past can be intermixed with the present—by the new partner demanding to be taken seriously.
“I think about you. But I don't say it anymore.” —Marguerite Duras
Copyright @ 2025, John Paine
When you are fully engaged in the art of writing, you never really have any time off. When you are not actively creating, you are researching, observing, or jotting down stray ideas that might help your story. If you have a full-time job, the hours spent there can seem like interruptions—time spent relaxing, by comparison—to the hard work you really want to be doing. All thoughts are possible figments that can be collected when you sit down to write.
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 am a staunch enemy of plagiarism, as is 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 the written words, or the original juxtaposition of phrases, you need to 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, maybe the next morning, the next evening, and a week later, when they attend another party. Does he in fact say anything to his girlfriend, or is he too ashamed of what he was projecting on her? That alone would indicate the depth of paranoia. 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 dogs, you can seize upon appurtenances that help fill out your possibly vague memory of when you owned a dog. Items such as dirt smearing the dog’s red collar or dried hanks of fur where the dog has wallowed in mud could, if you choose your own wording, describe dogs in dozens of other novels, stories, articles, etc. Just as valuable, you may read a detail that sparks off in your mind a memory of an entirely different detail about your dog, perhaps the way white hair slowly ringed its muzzle as it aged and the way you felt about that.
Remember the reason you’re looking for ideas: to feed more ideas into your book. When you jot down ideas, you’re not leapfrogging off someone else. You know what is in your book, and the idea can relate directly to a scene that you’ve already written. 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 (if you can resist the author’s narrative pull) and write, in your own words, what that idea sets off in your mind. If you have a scene set in the desert, for instance, it’s useful to have a description of how it feels when a granule of sand gets in your eye. You may not use all of the entries on your list when you are finished, but even if you use a couple, your book is that much richer.
“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
Our minds can be stuck in certain ruts, and we end up using the same words over and over again. I frequently consult a thesaurus because a manuscript I’m editing keeps employing certain common words. While freshness of story concept is an overarching attraction for a reader, freshness of vocabulary can be a subtler but ongoing source of satisfaction.
I have to admit, I love reviewing an entire horde of possible substitutes for a word. Each has its own shade of meaning. Among the greatest assets of the American Heritage Dictionary are its boxes that parse out, in a sentence apiece, how a list of similar words should be employed. For instance, “bombast” and “claptrap” seem to be roughly equivalent, but the dictionary points out the difference. “Bombast stresses inflation of style but does not always imply insubstantiality of thought,” whereas “Claptrap is insincere, empty speech or writing.” I think most good writers want to make sure that they are using the right shade of meaning.
You need to be careful. though. Often I encounter a word that is approximately correct, but stands out like a sore thumb because it is elevated so far beyond the writer’s usual level of diction. A look at one of Merriam-Webster’s Words of the Day on my homepage shows the wide divergence of common versus fancy. The word was “nimiety,” one that, despite my fair knowledge of vocabulary, had me stumped. It turned out to mean “excess, redundancy.” Synonyms supplied included “overkill,” “plethora,” “superfluity,” “surfeit,” “surplus,” and “preponderance.” If you are writing a thriller in which you have tough guys and molls, the words that will fit your level of diction are going to be “overkill” and “surplus.” A reader of the genre immediately grasps the meaning and moves on. If you are careful, you will find another word at the same level of diction—that will work perfectly.
The other words would be good choices in a more literary work, although I’m still not sure about “nimiety,” unless you like to use three-dollar words that send readers scrambling for the dictionary. (I will note that, oddly enough, in the days when I used to write down every word I didn’t know, I found Henry Miller had the widest range of vocabulary words. Read Black Spring at your peril.)
Being a wordsmith means knowing your tools. If you are as boundlessly creative as the authors you admire, the bon mot will pop into your fertile brain. Yet if you find yourself annoyed that you’ve picked the same word once again, a thesaurus provides a means by which to free yourself from the rut you’re in. Just think: an entire paragraph of similar words, and maybe even several paragraphs. That can only be described as a pleasure to behold.
Exercise: One reason you are frustrated enough to consult a thesaurus may be that you’re trying too hard. You’re trying to jam that overused word into a sentence. Instead, review the possible synonyms with an open mind. You may discover that an alternate word that you like won’t fit into your existing sentence—but it would if you reconstructed the sentence around the synonym.
“The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.” —Mark Twain Copyright @2025, John Paine
What Matters
In this poisonous season of American politics, the temptation for a novelist is to capture that lightning in a bottle. Yet when I try to remember any political novel that succeeded, only a stray few, such as All the King’s Men, come to mind. Given all the hatred flying everywhere, how can that possibly be?
The first, gigantic obstacle facing a writer is freshness. In our 24-hour news cycle, any American who would read a book already knows the issues. Nor do new wrinkles in these long-standing causes tend to develop. When characters spout off the arguments of the religious right, say, a novel reader’s interest immediately dims. Oh, right, that stuff. Aren’t I reading a novel to get away from that stuff?
The second is politics’ inherent immorality. If a novel has to make sense of our world, how can that be reconciled with a group of individuals whose worth is measured by the opinions of others? Good luck creating a character whose moral fiber waxes and wanes with the circumstances. How much do you think the reader is going to care about that character?
The third is the problem that fiction in general has in aping real life. The right to an abortion, for example, really matters to women. The course of their life may depend on it. Yet when that issue is raised in a novel, the plot inevitably depends on the personal nature of the decision. That’s because fiction is terrific at laying bare what is in our hearts. What a pregnant character tells her mother will impact me more deeply than what she argues, for all women, on a soapbox.
In that observation lies the crux of the matter. Why does Robert Penn Warren’s novel succeed? One reason is the venality of Huey Long, to be sure. Far more energy is directed, however, in uncovering what makes him venal. That suggests that politics succeeds in novels only when it is made personal. My advice? Turn on the TV and shout to your heart’s content. But when you sit down to write, enter your own sphere.
Exercise: The core of a good political novel, as with any novel, is formed of a small cast of characters whose actions impinge on each other personally. If the president and his wife have a long-running battle that is featured every fifth scene, the reader will be moved because of the personal acrimony. When laying out a plot, start there: what can two characters fight about?
“If voting changed anything, they'd make it illegal.” —Emma Goldman
Copyright @ 2025 John Paine. All rights reserved.
Editing comprises a number of skills, but these can be broken down to two basic levels: grammar and intuition. When I say grammar, I’m not talking about strict rules but commonsense principles, along the guidelines of Strunk and White. The same flexibility is even more marked in the second level of editing, as any writer knows. You use intuition to spark a fresher take on the idea written down, or to decide if a sentence is clear to someone else, like your reader.
One type of usage that is instantly recognizable is the cliché. We use them all the time when we’re speaking. They are a form of shorthand for an idea that might need to be explained. Anyone knows what “the ball is in your court” means, even if they don’t play tennis. Clichés can also be used as humor, since the idea that a cliché conveys can be used as a clever association or an ironic counterpart. In other words, the reason that clichés persist, despite our common scorn, is because they are useful.
Unfortunately, they can also be a lazy form of writing. I see them often employed in manuscripts that are written in haste. You are writing, trying to get ideas out, and a cliché springs to mind. They are easy to grab, mentally, and they may very well convey what you mean. Depending on the writer, they may actually be more succinctly phrased than the surrounding material. Their kernel-like clarity is why they were retained in common speech originally.
Yet a cliché is also a borrowed piece of text. To me, that is the greatest sin. If you look at the quotation that ends this post, you’ll see exactly what I mean. You are trying to express yourself. You and no one else. You know about all those other books on all those shelves, and you are carving out a new legacy. So why would you want to clutter up your prose with the ideas of someone else?
One other factor to consider is the fatigue a reader experiences. The weariness felt from encountering the familiar enervates your prose. The reader experiences a subtle reaction: oh, a cliché. That’s sort of boring. You add up enough of them, and the reader comes to feel that your book isn’t special or original at all. You’re always taking shortcuts.
Before this becomes a blanket condemnation, the way you expected an editor would go, we should return to the idea of idioms used in speech. You do want your dialogue to be natural, and people do use clichés a lot. If you were to turn a common phrase into some tortured construction just to avoid using a cliché, it would sound artificial. If you are selective enough, a cliché will subside in usage to its proper place: a minor, idiomatic tool in your arsenal.
Exercise: Comb your latest draft for clichés. Where are they being used? Unless the point of view voice is so chatty that the narrative seems but an extension of dialogue, you might want to limit them to dialogue. Even then, could one character be more given to using them? How about someone very smart but so unoriginal that their intelligence only extends to spouting a wider variety of clichés?
“Originality does not consist in saying what no one has ever said before, but in saying exactly what you think yourself.” —James F. Stephan
Copyright @ 2025, John Paine
Readers pick up a novel expecting to go on a journey. Some authors explore the fringes of civilization, like Annie Proulx, while others burrow into the fringes of the city, like Jonathan Lethem. The exotic is examined in order to uncover the universal. This principle holds true across the entire spectrum of fiction, from commercial to literary.
When you are plotting out who will be taking this journey where, you should consider certain poles: bizarre vs. normal. If everyone wears magenta and cyan dashes in their hair, the reader is inhabiting the equivalent of a Star Wars bar. If everyone says weird stuff that sprays out from their fragmented personality, the reader may feel barred from entry; they're too ordinary to understand. Someone in the proceedings has to ground the narrative so that the reader can participate.
That leads to the first choice. Is your protagonist a swashbuckler or a victim? The world that is explored can seem new because of the way it is viewed. The narrative voice displays idiosyncrasies that turn the quotidian into an object that deserves a fresh look. If the hero is pushing the envelope, unexpected secrets are revealed because she forces them open. She wants to embrace the unknown, in other words. As she actively breaks down walls, the other characters around her serve the function of the reader: oh no, don’t do that.
If your lead is a victim, he is swept into a world beyond his ken. Usually, another major character wields the sledgehammer against the walls while the hero cringes at the thundering crashes. He blunders into discoveries and is displeased by what he finds. In this case, the reader understands him perfectly: I shy away from loud noises too. Even so, that character can’t be everyman. He must have some screw loose to want to keep staggering forward beside that sledgehammer guy.
Now let’s return to the person holding the pen. What intrigues you? What type of character can you write about? How do you envision the protagonist changing during the course of the book?
What you decide helps to determine the unfamiliar places and customs of the novelistic journey. If you want to explore the intersection of solar panels and the Navajo, that’s fine, but how can you make that matter to the reader? Who embodies tradition and who wants to despoil the desert for the better good? If you figure that out before you start, you’ll have a lot easier time demarcating the route you’ll take.
Exercise: When you are laying out a list of character traits, remember that everything is relative. A person who has fixed habits can also long to wander free at some unknown time in the future. A person who finds shaving dull still doesn’t want to stink on the subway. When you mix and match, you find the ways that characters can push and pull each other.
“An exotic birthplace on its own is not informative of anything.” —Italo Calvino
Copyright @ 2025, John Paine
Criminal law is a good background if you want to become a novelist. These lawyers work in a field that probes crimes, especially murder, a rich source of storytelling tension. They deal with the seamy underbelly of society, both criminals and cops, which provide antisocial models for characters. They have to do a lot of reading and writing in their profession, and skill in writing is gained through the practice of writing. So why isn’t the world flooded with lawyer novelists?
I believe the answer, ironically, is judgment. Not so much in the usual equation of an author’s ego vs. talent, although lawyers as a rule have a mighty good opinion of themselves. I mean more in terms of sitting in judgment. After all, many lawyers aspire to be judges, to perch high on the bench and pronounce on the unfortunates that flow in and out of the courtroom.
That lofty distance can be married with a lawyer’s hard-bitten view of humanity. That produces a narrative that is sardonic in tone: can you believe someone would be so . . . ? This viewpoint can be humorous, often of the slight-smile category, and the story can ring with authenticity. So what is the drawback?
The culprit is the ironic distance. Such a perspective is to be expected from someone who long ago adopted a shell to protect themselves from the violence and indignities of the criminal life. Yet because a character is only as deep as the emotions the author inserts, that distance is a form of self-protection. Like a criminal client, a character remains “out there,” to be remarked upon. The author can hide their own passions from the reader.
You cannot become the next Michael Connelly without realizing that he creates terrific characters. The sardonic tone is voiced from within those characters. Passion is a better first stage for a writer. Devise a character willing to jump into the fray beyond all decorum or even decency you’ve ever seen in a courthouse. The polished veneer can be added after connecting with the animal inside. What an aspiring writer might find is they will penetrate that long-adopted shell to find their younger, passionate self.
Exercise: When first scheming a plot, set all of your old experiences aside. That stuff can be realistic filler you insert later. Think of outrageous crimes, with braided leads that lead to a number of characters. Some are obvious early on to the reader, and some are deeply hidden. If you want to use your own past cases, you probably will need to turn the amp on them up to 10 and then keep shrieking.
“A lawyer is a person who writes a 10,000-word document and calls it a ‘brief.’” —Franz Kafka
Copyright @ 2025 John Paine. All rights reserved.
In adult fiction, the appearance of any character under the age of 12 ushers in a special set of problems. To start, it is hard for them to control a point of view because a kid’s perception of the world is confined to the limited amount they know. Such immaturity can be charming—and even compelling in the hands of an excellent writer—but it is hard to take cute affirmations seriously. I too once wanted to play baseball in the major leagues, and look where that road went—perverted by the world of books!
Their lack of what adults would consider common sense curtails their ability to impact a plot. In the crudest terms, it is hard to believe a child would cynically mow down a villain, or even conceive of why that would be a good idea. A child is a poor choice for any romantic involvement. Most adults in a room will not take the advice of a child about what to do next. The old adage about being seen but not heard applies here, but in this case it’s impacting where your story can go.
A third limitation extends beyond the mind into the practical world of getting things done. A child cannot drive a car, arrange for a business lunch, or make an assignation. They cannot slip payoffs, organize sophisticated conspiracies, or any other of a dozen interesting plot turns. You might derive tension from the fear that a child will bungle the job, but that begs the question of: why did the adult think it was a good idea in the first place?
That’s why the best use for a child is often as a victim. The same helplessness that hinders their ability to direct a plot works in their favor when it comes to sympathy. Readers understand that children are at the mercy of an evil adult, since that happens all too often in real life. “Go to your room!” is only a benign expression of this total power. Thoughts of a child lost in the woods, or stowed away in an attic, are among the primal fears that a parent has.
A child alone as a protagonist is a bad idea, but pairing up an older child with an adult, on the other hand, can provide some real zest to a novel. If you imagine a wisecracking pubescent from Southern California, you can immediately see the sort of flavor that could be added. The adult is still on hand to drive the plot forward. Exercise: Review your manuscript for any action involving a child. Is the kid causing the action, or is the event acting on them? If it is the former, make sure the child can really carry that dramatic weight. If the premise seems phony, see if you can either make the child’s success an accident, or add an adult to the proceedings.
“Adults are just outdated children.” —Dr. Seuss
Copyright @ 2025, John Paine
The novelty of writing a novel places a beginner at one end of an uncertain bridge. The act of imagining you’re someone else means that you cross an unseen divide in an unknown direction. In the end you are supposed to achieve the merger of author and character.
How well this is accomplished is affected by a primary quality that all authors need to possess: a big ego. You wouldn’t be writing if you didn’t think, on some level, you have a fantastic gift to offer. Yet a big ego entails being full of yourself, and that may not fill up your characters as much as allow you to do what you’d do normally—proclaim your beliefs. In this case, not at a cocktail party but to a reading audience.
The intrusion of an author into the narrative occurs most often when a character provides their opinion on what’s going on. It’s supposed to be a deeper dive, into the mind of the character. What I see with regularity, however, is this type of thinking: The character is really me; I can spout off about anything I want. So some pet insight about race relations, or what have you, goes in the book. Not only that, but in order to limn in all of the nuances of your complex position, the harangue can go on for a page or more. The book stops short. The reader starts to nod off. Worst of all, the “speech” may not align with the character’s actions in other parts of the book.
Giving political opinions is the lowest dive, in this humble editor’s opinion. I won’t go into how tired I am of elections that help the army protect the rich. Instead I’ll merely point out that no nonfiction opinion breaks your fictional spell faster than a rant about politics. Plus, a reader may not read the book until several years after it is written. Will anyone care less about your Trump/Biden impersonator then?
When you inject your personal opinions into a novel, you’re showing how far across that bridge to your character you still have to go. The character can’t be you, or the book would be boring. It’s hard work to create someone that captivates a reader. So, get over yourself. Make sure that what the character thinks is really clever and unique.
Exercise: Review the manuscript solely for a selected character’s thoughts. When you locate each one, stop and consider: What have I written about them so far? Does all of that line up with the thought here? Even better, ask yourself: how could I make this thought add to what I’ve already portrayed about them?
“Too often we enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.”
—John F. Kennedy
Copyright @ 2025, John Paine
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
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