I don’t mean go all George R R Martin and kill them outright. I mean that you should make an effort to put your characters into situations that seem impossible to escape from – and then watch how they ingeniously do escape.

We are all so used to fiction now, and the standard of good triumphing over evil, that it takes some doing for a fiction writer to actually make us feel like the character is in genuine danger. Even when the hero is suspended over a pit of snakes, we still know they will get out – the interest comes in finding out how.

Ideally, you’ll make people really genuinely feel there is no escape for your character, whether it be a pit of snakes, an overbearing spouse or a mental illness. You should think long and hard about what sort of situations you can put your character into which will have them stuck and stumped.

I think it’s best that you personally don’t know the answer when you first come up with these situations – that will make them feel more genuine.

Take five minutes to try to come up with five situations that appear to be impossible to escape. Here are a few to get you started:

• Jemima has been captured by her arch nemesis and trapped in a coffin (nailed shut, naturally), which is wrapped in iron chains and is on a conveyor belt heading towards a cremation furnace.
• Victor is trapped in a dead end job. He has huge debts to pay off, no qualifications and estranged from his family.
• Francis has been wrongly accused of child abuse. All her friends have turned against her and the authorities won’t listen to anything she says. She’s been fired from her job and her husband has left her and taken her children.

Once you’ve got a handful of those sorted, spend a little more time coming up with the solutions. Try not to make too much use of outside help – the character needs to solve the issue under their own steam.

Or, if you are too lazy to come up with your own, try to come up with solutions for the scenarios detailed above. Make sure you do yours before reading mine, below.

Here are my ideas:

• The coffin is wood, so as it nears the fire, the wood begins to warp and burn. She squeezes herself against the far end as far as possible, and when enough of the coffin is burning, she kicks through and escapes.
• Victor’s dead end job is selling holidays. One day a man comes in just his age but clearly much happier and more successful, who explains he has no money, but he just roams the world. Victor packs everything in and buys his own holiday with his last paycheck and sets off with just a suitcase of things. While in Thailand he discovers an aromatic incense that induces deep calm. He brings some back home with him and starts his own business selling it, which is a great success.
• Francis scours through the testimony of the child and manages to find some details which prove that they are making it up. She also researches child psychology and finds evidence that parents plant and enhance the concepts tentatively suggested by children. At the final court hearing the child who accused her breaks down in tears saying it was only meant to be a joke and he is really sorry. The judge rules in her favour.

Please do enter your ideas below!

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There’s nothing quite so gutting about wasting weeks, months and even years writing your novel only to find out that it has major plot issues.

Below are the five elements I’ve found most critical when it comes to creating a stonking plot that gives your readers the excitement and satisfaction they crave.

Start with a good premise

Premise, logline, backbone, kernel, elevator pitch… Whatever you want to call it, this is a single line which sums up the absolute core question and thrust of your novel. It should include five elements: character, situation, objective, opponent and disaster.

It should set out who the protagonist is, what they want, what’s stopping them and what disaster they need to avoid. It also helps to offer some sense of setting.

This premise is your anchor, to ensure your novel is coherent and starts on a solid footing.

Define your character’s flaw

The most popular stories follow a flawed character who redeems themselves.

They should be able to take the right action in the final scene that they would not have been capable of in the first scene. Allen Palmer of Cracking Yarns suggests that the two character flaws that offer the most reader satisfaction when overcome, are a lack of courage and a lack of compassion. I’m not saying you have to use one of those, I’m just mentioning it.

By the way, if you haven’t read Allen Palmer’s entire website, you should. http://www.crackingyarns.com.au/

Follow the timeless mythology stages

It has been shown fairly comprehensively that the vast majority of popular stories follow some or all of a series of stages. You certainly don’t have to follow these steps to the letter, but if you’re struggling to understand why your plot isn’t working, it may be worth seeing if adding in some of these stages might help:

• · Meet the protagonist in their natural state (don’t forget to demonstrate their flaw!)
• · The protagonist’s world is disrupted by a threat or opportunity
• · The protagonist expresses reluctance to respond to the threat or opportunity (or some other character voices the dangers)
• · The protagonist takes decisive action with regard to the threat or opportunity (preferably burning some bridges so they can’t turn back)
• · The protagonist is tested, either physically, emotionally or mentally
• · The protagonist learns from others – though the others don’t necessarily need to be intentionally helpful or positive
• · The protagonist should hit rock bottom, where they suffer terrible setbacks and lose something they hold dear
• · The protagonist bounces back with renewed vigour to face the final conflict
• · The protagonist returns home triumphant

Give your protagonist an impossible choice

It’s no good to just have a sword or word fight at the end of the novel and the strongest / smartest one wins, even if the protagonist was a weakling / shy guy to begin with.

If you really want to have the audience on the edge of their seats, you need to offer them a nail biting moment where the protagonist is offered a choice that will define their character and prove that they have grown as a person.

The choice should have these two sides:

a) They get what they ‘want’ (the boy, the job, the treasure) but other people, probably those they love will be forced to suffer
b) They can help the other people (again probably those they love), but they will lose what it is they want and probably much more

Because this is fiction and not real life, how they act will result in righteous consequences…

Don’t give your protagonist what they wanted – give them what they needed

If your protagonist chooses to do the ‘right’ thing, in other words they abandon their personal selfish desires in order to serve the greater good, then something else must happen which swings the situation in their favour and results in them getting something else which is much better than what they thought they wanted – and is actually what they need.

For example, a boy might really fancy the top cheerleader, but at the end of the story he makes a good moral choice and instead ends up with the geeky girl, who is his true soulmate and brings him much greater happiness.

Or, an archaeologist might be chasing a special artefact, but after her moral decision to give it to its rightful owners instead of having it to study herself, she is inducted into the secretive tribe to study their lives.

Of course, your protagonist doesn’t have to make the moral choice – thought of course that’s what happens 99% of the time. If you want them to make the ‘wrong’ choice, that’s fine, but then you must follow through the consequences.

As soon as they have their prize in their greedy little hands it should turn to dust, and their selfish behaviour means they are all alone.

So, on that cheerful note – what are your top secrets that help you ensure your plot holds all the keys?

Often new writers choose to write short stories as a sort of ‘warm up’ before they start writing novels, as the short story seems a lot more achievable. 

If you do this, you’ll soon get told off, and informed that the short story is a completely different animal to the novel, and one is not simply a longer or shorter version of the other.

However. I happen to think that cutting your teeth on short stories is a great way get started with writing, as it gives you something manageable and most importantly, something that you’re more likely to finish. Finishing a story is the hardest part for a new writer (after starting!).

There is a lot of advice and guidance out there for how to structure and plot a novel, and lots of tried and tested techniques, but there is less so for short stories – partially because there is a lot more opportunity to be creative and experiment with whatever you want. Readers can put up with a lot more deviation from conventions over a short term, where it might become tedious over the course of a whole novel.

Here are some ideas that you may wish to use in your short stories:

Breakdown by time

This technique is used in the TV series 24 and book series Bridget Jones’s Diary, where each section is split to represent one hour or one day. You can use subtitles to make this explicit, and it gives you a lot of leeway for skipping chunks of time and keeping a tight focus on the exciting bits.

 

Formats

Similarly to the diary example in the breakdown by time, you can use unconventional formats to make your story more unique and original. For example you could write it as an exchange of emails, a series of newspaper reports, a collection of adverts in a local parish newsletter, or conversations between passing dog walkers. Each format will have a different impact on the story and how it plays out.

Repetition of words, sentences or themes

By hanging the story on a particular hook, you can explore several ideas and still have a satisfying, whole feeling narrative. For example, you could take a sentence, such as ‘Never again’ and use it to start three different paragraphs. Each paragraph could be from a different person’s viewpoint, or the same person at three different ages. This way we can explore the nuances of the human experience.  Or you could have an item which appears over and over again – either the exact same item, or variations of the same type of item, such as different pairs of shoes.

Full Circle

It’s normal for short stories to have a twist, but if you’re really clever, you need to make sure the twist links very closely with the setup. A nice idea can be to follow through an ironic chain of events so that an action taken right at the beginning directly results in a failure to achieve the aim of that action. For example, an actor might decide to flirt with a director in order to secure the part, for which they are already a favourite. But that upsets the actor’s partner, who then wrangles it to inform the director’s spouse of some dark secret. The spouse then ensures the actor is refused the part.

If you enjoyed this article, you might want to check out our novel writing software. Designed by writers for writers.  

You may think that you can’t affect the speed at which people read – fast readers will read fast, slow readers will read slowly. But in fact, our writing choices can have a huge impoact on the ‘pace’ of the writing, and how fast it feels to the reader.

If you want to write a gripping novel, you need to make sure you’ve got a steady foot on the accelerator, and know when and how to put the pedal to the metal and equally when and how to ease it off and cruise for a while.

This article explores fast pacing. For the sister article, which deals with slow pacing, click here.

What a snappy pace adds to your writing

Exciting action

Action is full of movement, and as the many fight scenes and car chases of Hollywood should tell you – fast often means exciting. In my view, you need to have a few other things tied in as well, such as emotional investment and goals, but if you want people to be gripped and whizzing through the pages, you should have a bit of fast paced action.

Building and release of tension

A highly charged scene will start slowly and build up in pace so the reader is swept along. If the pace remains slow, then the action will just fizzle out and won’t feel satisfactory and may even get tedious.

Emotionally charged conflict

Arguments should be fast paced to feel charged with energy and anger. When people are angry they react quickly and aggressively, they don’t ponder things through and consider the other people’s thoughts and the impact of their words. They may act or speak so fast they disregard the consequences, giving you the opportunity to land your characters in more delicious deep trouble.

How to increase the pace of a novel

Dialogue

The format of dialogue requires each new person speaking to begin on a new line, so unless your characters are droning on in monologues, conversations should keep the pace up. Also, dialogue tends to be more sparse than prose, as people don’t tend to describe their surroundings in great detail, they just say what they’re thinking.

Fragments

Think short. Shorter paragraphs, shorter sentences. Fragments are simply the extreme of this – as fragments are just very short sentences – ones which only contain a single clause. Using shorter structures allow readers to speed through. Readers will typically hold each ‘sentence’ idea in their head before moving to the next one. This means that if you have one sentence with several clause, they have to pause to juggle the ideas around and make sure they have them straight. However, if each sentence is a single, simple idea, they can read it and move on right away.

Focus on actions

Increasing the pace doesn’t necessarily mean rushing through the things that happen. Quite the opposite. In an exciting action scene, you may wish to focus right in on each tiny little movement. The key here is to focus on the actions – don’t waste any words describing the scenery or anything that isn’t action.

Did you know that the author of these articles has written an entire Roadmap guide to writing a novel? It takes you through step by step, from premise to final draft, offering useful tips at just the point when you need them. This Roadmap is part of The Novel Factory, which is available to try completely free for 30 days. Why not give it a go? 

This is a sister article to: Slowing down the pace in your novel.

Nanowrimo will be here soon, so I thought I’d write an article about nanoplamo, or national novel planning month. This goes hand in hand with nanowrimo, and in my mind is the absolute key to successfully completing the challenge.

If you are completely baffled by all these nano words, then you might want to check out this article about what nanowrimo is and why it’s useful and / or this article about nanowrimo success.

A step by step nanoplamo!

Step one – get your tools in order

By tools I would include:

A place to work – preferably somewhere to call your own, where you can leave your stuff permanently, but if this isn’t an option, then at least a get a box where you can pack up all your nanoplamo / nanowrimo related things and keep them together.

Computer / software – unless you write on paper (in which case you must be insane), you’ll need a decent, reliable computer and somewhere to back up your work. All you really need for the writing itself is Word and a folder system for putting notes on various things in – but if you’re like me and hate spending time on admin when you could be writing, you might want to consider some dedicated novel writing software – and as you might imagine (because we built it) we would recommend The Novel Factory.

A moleskin notebook / app – while you’re immersed in your novel planning (and writing), lots of things you see in the rest of your life will give you ideas, and unless you have a photographic memory, you’ll need somewhere to note them down. A pocket sized notebook or an app on your phone is perfect (I use iA Writer on the iPhone).

Research materials – if you are setting your novel in a particular time or place, then borrow some books from the library on the period (or buy them from if you prefer – try Green Metropolis for ethical and cheap) and have them in lovely inspiring piles around your workplace for dipping into.

Step two – make a plan

You should have a plan of action for what you need to have achieved by whatever day of the month. It may look something like this:

Day one – write your premise

Day two – sketch out the rough overall plot

Day three – outline main characters

If you don’t want to work all of the steps out from first principles, then The Novel Factory includes exactly this step by step guide, or as we like to call it - Roadmap. You can read more about the Novel Factory Roadmap without having to download the software (which is free to try anyway) here.

Step three – follow the plan!

If you’ve followed steps one and two, then you’re in a good position to get started, and all you have to do now is have the willpower and determination to follow it through. And if your plan is in good shape before the 1^st of November, then you’ll be in much better shape to get that first draft knocked out in one month.  

Good luck!

As an author, you ought to know exactly what time it is, and also what the weather is like, at any given moment in your story. Having this information will help consistency and clarity – which translates to your world feeling more real.

Time

Ideally, you should know the year, month, day, time of day and even exact time of day – even if you never mention it specifically. Then, as the real time scene unfolds, make sure time passes accordingly; otherwise your characters may find themselves in a perpetual midday or early evening.

Thinking about what time of day it is can also add realism to your scene, if you weave in the world

around your characters. Is the scene happening around 8am or 5.30pm? Then aren’t the streets filled with harried commuters? Or is it the middle of the afternoon? So the only people in sight are mothers with children, and retirees.

When going over longer time periods, you can still refer to specific months and seasons, or even years, to give a sense of weight to the passing of time. Saying that June turned into August anchors readers in your world a lot more than saying eight weeks passed.

Weather

As an author, the possibilities of building atmosphere and mood with the weather has probably occurred to you long before now.

Try to go beyond the basic weather options: stormy for an angry scene, rainy for a depressed scene, sunny for a happy scene, ray of sunshine through the clouds for a good realisation.

There are many different types of each of the weather conditions above, a storm can be a howling wind with needles of rain, or it could be thunderous and rolling. Rain can be coming down in violent blankets, a miserable grey drizzle, or it could even be huge dollops of life giving nourishment.

In that way, rain could represent new life and happiness, a storm could be excitement and joyful exhilaration, the sun could be oppressive and draining.

The key is to be as specific as possible, and to try to not always stick to the clichés. Breaking them can be refreshing.

As with time, consistency and awareness are important. Make sure you know what the weather is like, so you don’t accidentally have it gloomy one minute and clear blue the next.

Read more about time and weather and how they relate to theme and variations in your novel here.

The Novel Factory Roadmap

When I first learned about The Question, I felt like I'd just been given the keys to the City.

After the Hero's Journey, The Question is probably the most useful tool in the fiction writer's repertoire, and is especially useful for beginning writers, who need a bit more of a formula or roadmap to get them going. Obviously, once you have a firm grasp on how to write a good plot arc, you can deviate more and more from the standard structures and interpret the 'rules' in new and imaginative ways.

But having a starting point, a few rules of thumb to get you going, are invaluable. If you don't know what the Hero's Journey is, then find out, right now. If you do, then it's time to meet The Question.

This article is a short summary of The Question. For the full article, with examples, go here.

What is The Question?

The Question is a moral dilemma that you put to your protagonist somewhere towards the end of the story. By forcing them to make a difficult decision, you put your readers on a knife-edge of 'Will she? Won't she?', as they wonder if the character they've come to know and love (or hate) is made of strong enough stuff.

Can it be any question?

Not really, no. The Question should have two options. If they choose one option (often presented by the villain), then they will have everything they ever dreamed of - riches, love, power, etc. But if they choose the alternative option, they will lose everything and probably be killed or at least thoroughly maimed and shamed.

So, what's the problem? Just choose the good option, right?

Well, to make the ending more thrilling, your job as a writer is to set up the question so that the only way the protagonist can choose option one is betray their principles, probably of honesty or loyalty or something similar. Whereas, if they want to 'do the right thing' that means choosing option two.

So, will you focal character prove their mettle and rightousness even though it means losing everything they've worked for? Or will they give in to the temptation of desire and fold, allowing the baddie to triumph?

The consequences

You can have your protagonist choose either option - there's no law saying they have to do the right thing - though in the majority of modern fiction, this is what happens. However, if you want the story to be satisfying, then you have to make sure the consequences match the choice. This is fiction remember, not real life, and we like good to be rewarded and bad to be punished.

So, whatever decision your hero makes, something unexpected must happen to make sure everything is turned upside down. So if they made the right decision, they triumph, and if they made the wrong decision they get their just desserts.

Click here to read the full article about The Question, including examples, and find out why the reward does not have to be what the protagonist thought it was.