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


 

Entangled in Text

The world of fantasy is a prolix one. The books in the genre tend to run long, entwining folklore and history with the author’s own imagination. Because plot points often turn on magic, involving a talisman or a chant, the freedom to roam is given a wide latitude indeed. After all, if a character can be a half-dead elf, who knows what properties they may possess?

This very freedom can lure the neophyte author into various traps. These snares are similar to those in historical fiction, with one large exception. The readers of this genre expect a filled-out world to inhabit. The hoariest example of this comes from the founder of the genre, Middle Earth of J.R.R. Tolkien. Everyone who has followed him has had the duty to create a magical world, populated largely with non-human species.

Devising such a storied place requires a tremendous amount of work. The less original writers tend to follow a single country’s mythology, for instance, the Ulster Cycle featuring Cuchulain. Because the research into the topic provides so many rich possibilities, an author can become lost in their embarrassment of riches. Even worse, in working out particular instances, such as being opposed by a malignant spirit while trying to cross a ford (common in Irish mythology), an author can spend pages upon pages updating the ancient lore in their own words.

The author controls how many elaborations will fill out this world. A fantasy that does not have a new exotic population waiting in the next forest can feel limited to a reader. Not only that, but the characters must have entire belief systems that govern their spheres. So besides creating the denizens in all their bizarre variations, an author must work out the ramifications of mythical (or, mystical) beliefs.

What can be lost in all of these laborious proceedings are two elements vital to any story: character and plot. An author may be so eager to explicate why, for instance, dark knights ride winged steeds that the characters teaching and learning the lore become stick figures. The lore also tends to act like sucking muck in terms of advancing the plot. The reader is reduced to enduring lectures on the author’s proficiency in spinning out original material.

Here’s the rub: all of the great research and spinning out ideas is merely stage setting. As an author you must proceed in two stages. Once the research is completed, you still have a novel to write. You still need great characters involved in a series of stirring feats.

Exercise: Use that favorite device of fantasies, a map, to guide your research efforts. Allot your various research topics to a region along the quest. Then look at your band of core characters. How can you make each region bring out a quality in a chosen character? In other words, put the research in the character’s hand, to manipulate as they will.

“Highly organized research is guaranteed to produce nothing new.”
― Frank Herbert

Copyright @ 2025, John Paine

Fighting Yourself

I recently came across an intriguing observation: “The curse is not that you are given a destiny, it's that you make your own destiny.” It made me think of a number of novels written by fledgling writers in which the lead character proceeds on a single track all book long, almost like a wooden toy train. He has been imagined as a certain type, and he does not deviate from type.

Life is full of contradictions, though. Consider that in a literary novel, the main question is how the lead character can overcome herself. Her obstacles are largely of her own making. We all know that a character-driven book is more literary than a plot-driven one. So, how come those protagonists spend so much time wrestling with their own demons?

Unless you have formal training in being a writer, you’re probably better off starting with a plot-driven book. You decide on a certain core of defining characteristics for your hero: he’s hard-bitten, abs-packing, gunshy with women, or whatever. That’s the way he acts most of the time. Yet if he never leaves the track you put him on, he will remain a monolith—guarded from the reader by the traits you insist on maintaining.

We all have weaknesses: drink, net surfing, knee-popping exercise, etc. We are tempted to do wrong, and we often fall, for reasons we don’t understand. The deficits run the gamet from the petty—filching Halloween candy from the bowl—to book-long dilemmas, such as fighting off the powerful attraction of a former lover while staying true to the new one.

You cannot be satisfied merely with a situation. That is a one-time event, soon forgotten by the reader amid the tumult of plotting. When we make a mistake, we can be exposed for it. A single word said the wrong way can have repercussions that continue to spiral downward. The fight to stay on track enriches a portrait while the plot is delivering the excitement.

Exercise: Pick a guilty secret the protagonist has. Now sketch out several strings of scenes. If the secret is discovered by a spouse, how can the heroine recover her standing? If the secret is found out by a friend, how does that affect their relationship? If an enemy, how can it be used to blackmail the heroine? Don’t commit yourself to any of them until you explore all the delicious possibilities.

“From separation and loss, I have learned a lot. I have become strong and resilient, as is the case of almost every human being exposed to life and to the world. We don't even know how strong we are until we are forced to bring that hidden strength forward.” —Isabel Allende

Copyright @ 2025, John Paine


 

Too Far Afield

If you are writing a novel that spends a significant amount of time overseas, you should be aware of the xenophobia factor. That is an American reader’s preference to read about American characters and/or locales. This may stem from living in an insular country where people disdain learning other languages and preach to other countries about our values.

Of course, the best-seller list is dotted with exceptions. One that jumps out is Anthony’s Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See. That stems from the fact that most readers are looking for two elements in a novel. One is the lure of the exotic: am I being taken to a place I’ve never experienced? Yet the other is identification: can I imagine myself inside the head of the protagonist during the exotic journey?

How well an author stimulates the reader to participate vicariously determines whether she wishes to read the book all the way through. That identification explains our affinity for British characters and settings, since inhabitants of that insular nation also bristle at any notion of restricted elbows. In general, American readers also understand the motivations and moral leanings of our European forebears. For one example, why did the Soviet Union become the Evil Empire whereas today’s China, equally repressive and powerful, garners little more than puzzled shrugs? I believe it’s because we understood why Moscow was so Machiavellian.

That’s why you need to be cautious about your choice of exotica. If your novel features an Afghani professor who gets caught up in trafficking in the Golden Triangle, the average reader may think that is too weird. You can imagine the thoughts running through her head. A professor? Do they even have colleges in Afghanistan? Isn’t that the awful country we finally got our soldiers out of? And what’s with the Golden Triangle? Oh, that’s heroin (ugh) . . .

Afghanistan is a perfectly fine exotic locale. It was the setting for runaway best-seller The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseni. But you know what? I had to google the spelling of the author’s name, and I’m more willing than most to plunge into a new jungle. Despite this, the reason the book became so popular was the personal relationships at its core.

If you can make a central partnership, such as a building romance, involve the reader intensely, it doesn’t matter if the couple is being kidnapped by the Berbers of Algeria or confronting an epidemic in Myanmar. We can root for or against your chosen individuals. So, don’t be afraid to venture abroad, but be aware that the American reader needs some reason to want to come along for the ride.

“It is often safer to be in chains than to be free.” —Franz Kafka

Copyright @ 2025, John Paine

The Problem with Politics

To your possible disappointment, but more likely relief, this post does not concern which pigs should apportion the slop. Rather, it addresses the earnest writing outcomes about this national pastime. Any author who believes that the emotions engendered by yelling at a TV reporter can propel a novel in the same fashion is sadly deluded. As Tom Clancy observed, “Fiction has to make sense,” whereas politics doesn’t, at least to one half of the population at any given time.

Journalists who turn to fiction are the most common practitioners of the political novel. Many times they have covered the Beltway and are privy to the dealings of its insiders. Since they don’t know how to write a novel, they tend to fall back on what they know: inside dope that makes headlines. How is it, though, that the unending conflicts between, say, the House Speaker and the President—so entertaining in real life—seem oddly mawkish in a story?

The lack of morality can’t be the reason. In real life, voters are outraged because their moral principles are so often flouted by elected officials. As for fiction, morality is one of the guiding principles of drama. So where is the disconnect?

A novel forms its own universe. An author picks certain characters to embody certain qualities, and then designs a plot that, through the author’s chosen conflicts, reveals the right and wrong ways to live. Yet depending on the author’s lodestones, those ways can be wildly divergent. What matters is the moral compass of the lead character(s). That is the logic that determines what is right or wrong.

It is also true that received wisdom is not nearly as compelling as hard-won wisdom—that is, what the character endures during the course of the book. While their milieu may be instructive in some minor fashion, the wisdom far more often comes through the conflicts with other characters. To survive, politicians must manipulate the vote count—but where is the drama in the conflict with faceless masses?

That is why politics is an unsatisfactory source of drama. Once the moral imperative is directed at a crowd, it is diffused by its lack of a true target. To succeed, a president needs to develop a relationship with chosen targets in order to engender any more than skin-deep interest. It is true I dislike how my tax dollars are wasted, but reading about it in a story puts me instantly to sleep.

Exercise: At the start of writing a political novel, first pick out the characters, not the situation. How can you build core relationships between a few chosen cast members that will tap into the emotions that we all feel toward people that we grow close to? When one character violates the moral pact that he shares with one other character, now you have moral failing that counts.

“Suppose you were an idiot, and suppose you were a member of Congress; but I repeat myself.” —Mark Twain

Copyright @ 2025, John Paine
 

The Problem with Safe

Carl Jung once said, “A man who has not passed through the inferno of his passions has never overcome them,” and in no endeavor does that apply more than in writing. As an independent editor, I review many manuscripts by first-timers. I have different categories for them—limited writing, sloppy writing, formulaic writing—but the most disheartening is safe writing. Lest anyone think I’m being judgmental, I’ll relate a comment my best friend once told me about my own writing: “You’ll never be good until you let yourself go.” A few years after that, I gave up writing and became an editor.

I have long thought the three main ingredients of writing are talent, heart, and stamina. The first is vitally important, for two people can write about the same subject with wildly different impacts. I have been blessed to witness so many elegant turns of phrase, even in books that were mainly pedestrian. Yet clarity and/or deftness is more akin to sleight of hand than penetration. A financed education alone can yield pearls from swine.

Heart is a more elusive driver of prose. Childhood poverty, whether caused by want or mayhem, and frequently both, has often proven the dictim about a rich man and the needle’s eye to heaven. The bereft among us have a stronger desire to shake off their demons. Yet unbridled passion is no predictor of writing greatness, since it is more likely evinced in motorcycle revs than art. Nor does letting go necessarily confer an entwined wreath, or heroin would be a writing elixir.

Neither of the two qualities above means much without persevering through the many hours spent alone with words. No one is chaining you to your desk, and if you don’t write for a week, no one will notice. Self-discipline is a great quality to have, but over the long run I believe the compulsion to write is fed by the heart. If you don’t have a need to communicate to others through writing, you may write one book and then find the second one just won’t come.

How willing are you to face dark swings of your heart that may alienate your lover, your family, your co-workers? Can you honestly say you have so much writing talent that taking the plunge is worth it? And consider this: most writers ride on tides of greatness. They may produce only one book that stirs the hearts of readers and critics. Yet if you turn away from chaos, even that one book is out of reach.

Exercise: For this post, I will label this as: Advice. If you want to make a go, give it five years. That happens most commonly with people who have just graduated from college. Only after such a long stretch of time, while watching everyone you know start making progress with their careers, will you be able to make an honest assessment. Are you linking up with your soul or your ego?

“Cheat your landlord if you can and must, but do not try to shortchange the Muse. It cannot be done. You can’t fake quality any more than you can fake a good meal.”  —William S. Burroughs

Copyright @ 2025 John Paine. All rights reserved.

How Much Should Be Carried Over?

Most authors writing a series are aware that each of the books must stand on their own. That means a new plot and new characters, since the one usually requires the other. Yet a series does feature the same protagonist and often a core cast of characters. They all have rich backgrounds once the first book is written. So what is the dividing line between starting a new book from scratch and borrowing too much from a past book?

A first guideline is: use narrative summaries. You shouldn’t be borrowing parts of scenes from a previous book. Anyone who read that book will experience deja vu—didn’t I already read this stuff? No one likes to read repeated material, even if they haven’t read a book in a while.

When you use narrative summaries, you can then follow a second guideline. Write out any background information from a previous book in the same way you would write background info for a new character. You write a paragraph or two, maintaining a narrative distance because you’re trying to get through the material quickly. If you have backgrounds for multiple characters in a core cast, you can drop in the compressed back stories at opportune times for each (that is, not all stuffed in one place). That’s the way you would do it if you were starting off fresh.

There is an additional consideration. What if the first book is not picked up by an agent or doesn’t sell to a publisher? You may need to be flexible. The second book you write may end up being the one that sells first. All that time you lavished on background material for the second book now has to be tossed. You have to write new material to insert in what you thought was the first book. How much time do you want to spend on stuff that is not moving the story forward?

That leads to a third guideline: write the narrative summaries as though they would fit for any book in the series. That means in particular that you shy away from referring to specific events in a previous book. If you feel that the character’s history must contain them, leave a few sentences in that paragraph(s) blank. That way you can fill in the events once you know in which order the books will appear in the store.

That last point touches upon a very common problem with writing sequels. You can be trapped by what happened in a previous book, to the point that you get stuck and can’t devise new plot events for the new book. Forget what happened. Just remember how the characters related to each other. That’s all the series reader will remember, anyway.

“The first man to compare the cheeks of a young woman to a rose was obviously a poet; the first to repeat it was possibly an idiot.”
—Salvador Dali

Copyright @ 2024 John Paine. All rights reserved.

Interested in Good

It is a curious phenomenon, considering that most authors are decent, law-abiding citizens, that so many imbue their evil characters with more brio than their good ones. I’ll be reading through a string of decent scenes about the good guys interacting when pow! I reach this scene filled with psychopathic swagger. The writing is so intense, so alluring that I’m left thinking, “Boy, the author really loves writing about the villain.”

The question then becomes: why can’t this be done for the hero? I understand the basic stumbling block. Good isn’t as interesting as evil. Yet if the one is to triumph over the other in the end, the shining knight must be able to hold the reader’s attention somehow.

Luckily, good and evil are not absolute categories. A person may perform a minor act of evil, such as not stopping his car to let pedestrians use the crosswalk, merely by being too lazy. He may witness a black person at work being insulted but not say anything, taking the easy route of fitting in. Eating chocolate cake while on a diet can be regarded evil.

This ambivalence allows an author more freedom of scope. While the protagonist is aimed in a good direction, she can be given vexing personal issues in which good and evil are relative. I’ll use a common example and run with it, to show its possible complexity (i.e., ability to grip the reader). Let’s take an alcoholic partner. What do you do to stop a loved one from drinking to excess? You have to get along with the person, so you can’t hound him every night. If you do, you’ll get blasted, and to some degree, he’s got a right to fire off. Who likes to be nagged all the time? If you dislike it so much, why don’t you walk out the door?

That opens the avenue to background stories in which you can show how the heroine fell in love with the partner. In the future direction, it provides a way for the plot line to build, because of course you want to show greater and greater excess. Maybe the end isn’t a seven-car pile-up, but the ongoing clash is going to produce some bang-up result.

The protagonist isn’t evil, but fighting evil contains its own complications. If one method doesn’t work, you try another. The more things don’t work, the more force is applied. And then . . . where is the line between good and evil?

Exercise: We all have riveting experiences about which we can write with passion. Choose one in your personal life that has been echoing in your mind for years. Identify the issue and then think how it could be reshaped to fit your hero. Work out a skein of 7-8 subplot scenes in which the problem escalates step by step. Is it ever resolved at all?

“It is not true that good can only follow from good and evil only from evil, but that often the opposite is true.”
—Max Weber

Copyright @ 2025, John Paine

Switching Up

The narrative approach to writing a novel varies according to how much a character influences the interpretation of events. On one end of the specrum lies the action-oriented tale, in which too much introspection gets in the way of the unfolding plot. On the other is the character-driven book, in which action is the occasional byproduct of thoughts. (I’ll leave aside experimental approaches in this discussion.)

A spectrum means that a book can lie anywhere along the arc from one pole to the other. That means no one except the most steely-eyed critic can tell what proportion of each a book contains. A number of critics pooh-pooh commercial novels, but the good ones have extremely well-drawn characters leading the charge. Just read any novel by Stephen King, among many others, and tell me characters don’t matter to them.

Because narrative approach is so variable, less experienced writers can be forgiven for not knowing what side of the line they’re on. Does this scene feature  more action or character interpretation of the action? Many scenes seem to have both. So that leads to other thorny questions like: should I have dialogue in an introspective scene? When is a past memory so filtered by a character’s view of it that the narrative no longer shows the event but tells about it?

When faced with such imponderable subjects, the author’s approach may vary according to mood and circumstance. If the scene contains an act of violence, and you become angry while writing it—damn right there’s a pool of blood!—the tone may be more action-oriented than the preceding quiet scene. It may be that the approach varies because writing a novel takes most people such a long time. How you were writing about the characters six months ago may not be how you’re writing about them now.

When you review the draft after completing it, you may despair about the swings in the narrative. How do the good writers achieve such consistency in tone? One guideline that may prove helpful is asking yourself: what is the tide in my book building toward? If you want the book to remain fairly flat, the choice is easy. That points toward a character-driven novel. If you want, however, a dramatic turning point that changes the protagonist’s life forever, that poses a tougher question. The gauge then becomes: how much do external forces create the change?

If those forces involve murder or the like, and you write a number of action scenes that portray it, that’s not a character-driven novel. If the murder occurs amid a fugue of internal thoughts, the thoughts are getting in the way of the action. You just need to remain true to the tone you set earlier.

Exercise: Review the book scene by scene. At the end of each one, make a rough decision: internally told or externally focused. By the time you get to the halfway point in the book, you’ll be able to determine how you want to pursue the second half.

“I'd buy myself a cabin on the beach, I'd put some glue in my navel, and I'd stick a flag in there. Then I'd wait to see which way the wind was blowing.”
—Albert Camus

Copyright @ 2024, John Paine

Swallowing a Loss

From the grand mishmash of story threads that weave through a writer’s mind while writing a novel emerges a structure that channels these different impulses. While not every piece needs to correspond to the whole, the author needs to be wary of any tangent of significant length. That happens for various reasons, and a common one is: what is left over from a previous draft.

For the purpose of illustration, perhaps the thread metaphor should be colorized. I do that with plot charts during editing. Each major character is assigned a color so that, at a glance, I can tell when one of them has been neglected for a long time. You can also assign a color to certain character pairings: the protagonist-antagonist, protagonist-friend 1, protagonist-friend 2, etc. That way you can track how relationships build.

With such a tool in hand, you can better judge how pieces from an old draft have survived. Seeing the forest for the trees is important in this regard. If you decided after reading over a draft that you needed to add more scenes with a bereaved widow, you need to judge how episodic the new additions are. If she appears only after 40-, 60-, or 80-page gaps at a time, you know the reader isn’t going to care much about her grief. It hardly ever shows up in the book. That raises a knock-on question: what scenes are still those blocks of text in between her appearances?

The reason I am pointing this out is that, in my experience, authors are more willing to add new material than they are to cut existing stuff. Both are required if you’re trying to make a shift in a plot or character direction. Let’s say that the original judgment was: the story spends too much time on the widow’s life before her husband’s death. The scenes set in the past are too much of a drag on the present-day story.

The new scenes of grief are written to push the book forward into the future. Yet if you make only faint-hearted attempts to pare down those past-marriage scenes, that remaining growth is choking out your new shoots. You have to clear more of the ground.

If you assign colors, you will see that very clearly. If the scenes with both wife and husband are red, how many of them still appear in your chart? The new scenes might be purple: the wife post-death with her daughter, say. Let’s add another decision you made: what happens between them will determine whether the wife kills herself in the ending. How well have you, the author, moved on?

Exercise: Vividness in storytelling counts. A full scene in the present contains dialogue, thoughts in the moment, etc. You can truncate those scenes you want to cut down by eliminating almost all dialogue and thoughts. Summarize them instead. Your scenes will be shorter, and they will have a more distant narrative tone.

“Put down everything that comes into your head and then you're a writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff's worth, without pity, and destroy most of it.” —Colette

Copyright @ 2024 John Paine. All rights reserved.








 

All in the Series

One way to get published is to write a series featuring the same core cast of characters. The principle works the same as in a TV series. A reader is entranced by certain characters and enjoys watching the different permutations you put them through in successive books. As an author, a series offers some distinct advantages. You do not have to invent a new protagonist, the most difficult task in fiction writing. You also will have a pretty good handle on a handful of characters. Such in-depth knowledge of an ensemble helps make them stand out as individuals.

Yet several pitfalls await the uncritical author. The most serious lies in your assuming, because you know the characters from the last book so well, that the reader does too. Most series are not numbered, so the person picking up the book may know nothing about the earlier books. Even if a reader has read the previous book, that may have occurred awhile ago. They may remember vaguely how much they liked a certain hero, but you have to go through the same introductory steps to remind them of the essential characteristics that make the character stand out. The protagonist still has to dazzle early on to pull the reader into the book.

As for the supporting cast, laying out the basic lines of relationships is even more important. You don’t have to be as exhaustive as the first time around, but you better not plunge us into the middle of an exciting scene and assume that we know how everyone is going to react.  

The second major danger falls under the “cast of thousands” listing. When you are getting started with a new book, still not sure of the direction it is going to take, you can find yourself meandering about, checking in with delightful characters who appeared in previous books rather than focusing only on those characters who will be lead players in the present book.

The imperative to push a novel forward in the early going applies to every book you write. The only way that can happen is if you choose one clear plot line that pushes the story forward. Gabbing with a bunch of past inmates in your asylum isn’t doing that. What matters is this book. You have a responsibility to the (possibly new) reader who paid the sticker price for this book.

Exercise: Be ruthlessly honest with yourself in this regard. Review the first 5-10 chapters, looking merely at the way you are setting up the characters. Did you provide enough of an initial description of the main character for a fresh reader to be captivated? Draw up a chart that lists a one-line synopsis for each scene. Do you find that the hero is merely sitting around chatting with past friends rather than plunging into a fresh crisis? Screw the friends, or drop them into the book later. You have a new readership to entertain. Get to work.

“If you would understand anything, observe its beginning and its development.” ―Aristotle

Copyright @ 2024, John Paine

The Best Blinders

We live on a planet inhabited by billions of people, but we block out almost all of them out as we proceed through our daily lives. So why don’t authors assume their characters do the same thing inside their imaginary worlds? Perhaps the reason is that authors are also creators of the worlds; they have a responsibility to care for all elements of their big garden (of anti-Eden, hopefully). In our real lives, we know the world is composed of massive agglomerations of past human mistakes, and we sensibly ignore as much of the mess as possible.

The reason for taking this skewed perspective on fiction is to spur a more blindered approach in crafting good characters. An entire world cataclysm may be happening around your chosen lead character, but what is she pursuing? Unless she is Wonder Woman, she is tending to the care of those immediately around her.

Let’s take as an example the terrible hurricanes that have become so frequent. Are you, as the author, rushing from here to there to capture snippets of all the awful things that high wind and rain can wreak? Or are you focusing on one grandmother’s cottage in your hero’s backyard flattened by a palm tree?

Put like that, the answer seems obvious. So why is it that so many novels spend so much time metaphorically rushing from here to there? Everyone knows the warning, “Don’t spread yourself too thin,” but that applies to characters as well. All of the characters are thin because they are only inhabitants of a large construct. As opposed to: they are the only reason for creating the construct.

One person, looking outward at a world that seems determined to mess up her day. That is a useful place to start a novel. In the case of a hurricane, to extend that example, what does the character know about hurricanes before it strikes? Some old tale from the fall of ’39, no doubt, told by her grandmother. Write that scene. Maybe more current news of storms during the age of global warming, related by her husband, who knows incidental facts about everything. How does she react to that, given she realizes her husband is a know-it-all? Of course, anyone who has ever experienced a hurricane knows that it creates havoc beyond your worst imaginings. What pieces of it does she see? How does she deal with those she loves that have been ruined in the aftermath? Now, as a reader, I’m riveted by what’s happening in that little corner of the world.

Exercise: If you find your novel has sprawled outward to cover too many characters and events, stop and count to five. You will allow yourself to cover only five points of view of the events. Now, choose who you like the best. Double the number of his scenes. Pretty soon you’ll be narrating true human drama.

“I'll tell you what hermits realize. If you go off into a far, far forest and get very quiet, you'll come to understand that you're connected with everything.”  —Alan Watts

Copyright @ 2024, John Paine