In Which I Hit A Webinar

So on Thursday of last week, I attended the Writer's Digest Webinar Starting Off Right: How to hook an agent with your first pages (this may not be the exact title. I was dumb and forgot to write it down. It's close though and I'm sure you get the gist)

I heard about this webinar from the lovely Roni over at Fiction Groupie, since it was her agent, Sara Megibow, putting on the webinar. The best part of the webinar? It comes with a critique of the participant's first 3 pages! Awesome, right? Totally worth the money. It's like they knew what bait to hang in front of us to entice us in



see more Lolcats and funny pictures

(also, she stated that, if she likes the first pages, she may ask for more. How awesome is she?)

Anyway, I took notes during the webinar so I could write this blogpost and let you all know what Sara said. I have to say, when the webinar was done, I felt totally confident. She said very little that surprised me and it seems I am on the right track.

She broke it up into a "why" and a "how" section, though most of the seminar was in the "how" section.

WHY (is it important to start off right)

• The agent has to be engaged immediately
• Sara says, for her to offer representation, she must love the manuscript AND think she can sell it
• She also almost always knows within the first three pages if she loves the novel
• She is actively looking for new clients (and she's with the Nelson Literary Agency. Pretty snazzy, IMO)
• She is looking for: YA, MG, Romance, Sci-Fi, Fantasy, Women's Fiction and Literary Fiction with a commercial bent
  

That was pretty much it for the "Why" it's important to start off strong. She then went into the "How" and this was broken down to "Hot" and "Not Hot" sections

HOW (to start off strong)
HOT (what she likes to see)

There needs to be:
1. A clear inciting incident
2. Compelling Characterization
3. Command of the basics

1. the writer needs to be able to explain in 1 or 2 sentences what propels the novel forward. This should also be in your query. She says it is essential for the writer to be able to do this. For her, it is a deal breaker if there is no clear inciting incident

2. Why do we care about the characters? This is clearly important and good characterization needs to be present early on

3. This is broken down into more sections:

• Superior writing. If you do not have a firm understanding of the basics of writing, this is a deal breaker for her. She stated multiple times that a writer needs to master the art of writing before one pursues the business of publication
• Unique concept. Which mean, no vampires, no super powered children discovering they're the key to saving the world, no women opening bead and breakfasts, and in sci-fi and fantasy, no prophecies and cliches. None of these things are deal breakers, but you'd better have an interesting spin on it to make her love it or think she can sell it.
• Effortless world building. She wants to be engaged by the world.
• Realistic character motivation. For example, if your character finds a body, that character better have a damn good reason for investigating the murder instead of doing the actually believable thing of calling the police

NOT HOT (what she does not like to see)

1. Data dump - we all know this is a no-no for the beginning of your novel

2. Ineffective use of dialogue - all the examples she showed were obvious things such as "as you know, David, I'm the king and was crowned thirteen years ago on your birthday".

3. telling vs. showing - again, she stated the necessity to have masted the art of writing before jumping into the business of publication

4. mistakes with POV - a deal breaker for her would be an adult narrator in a YA novel. Or strange narrators like houses or jewelry.

5. prologues or dream sequences - this isn't a deal breaker for her, because they can be cut if needed, but it is a red flag. And if you've got some marks against you in other areas (sloppy grammar, etc) you're probably in for a form rejection.

Then the last few minutes of the seminar were wrapped up in questions. A lot of the questions were unproductive or had already been answered (questions about prologues, or questions regarding queries, which the seminar did not address) but I took a few notes.

• it's good to keep momentum moving in the beginning. Shortening chapters is a way to do this, but isn't necessary
• always keep queries short - like back cover
• if the novel's momentum slows in a scene, it's typically due to too much data
• For genre fiction - opening with action is important (though, for fantasy, it's acceptable to start off slower)
• prose and imagery can function as a hook, however this is harder in genre fiction
• if an agency's submission guidelines don't say it's not OK to submit to more than one agent in the agency, then you're probably OK to query more than one agent
• read other books in your genre - especially what's selling well and has good reviews
• if you're looking for critiques of your work from people "in the biz" she recommends the annual Brenda Novak auction (the link she gave is broken. Usually though there's a lot of buzz for it around the time). Yes it will cost money, but it's for a good cause (though in my experience, it's huge leaps above what I could afford).

And that was pretty much everything she talked about!

I would definitely recommend this type of webinar in the future for anyone who's interested.

I hope this helped, and now I'm off to work on my first three pages to submit for her critique.

In Which We Discuss Chapter Breaks

I think I've mentioned before that I don't naturally write with chapters in mind. I write in scenes, and the scenes are written chronologically, and clearly a few of them would be good as chapter endings based on the last line of the scene, but overall I don't put chapter breaks in while I'm writing.

Which means, of course, I have to do that later.

I think I finally got the scenes moved around and separated into viable chapters for Foxfire.

If you remember, here's what my scene blocking looked like before...

And here's what it looks like now, firmly separated into chapters.

As you can see there's no longer one giant chapter on the right hand side and the colors are spread out more evenly. I also added a few more scenes (one pink, one blue), reworked one (I took the prologue and moved it into chapter 3 or 4, can't quite remember which) and split a lengthy Quill scene into two.

Oh, since I forgot to mention this last time we discuss scene-blocking and there seems to have been quite a bit of interest in this technique I'll tell you what I put on each card.

In the upper right hand corner I wrote the scene #, in case I moved some scenes around, but then wanted to put them back in their original order. On the left hand corner I wrote the number of pages in the scene. On the blue cards, because they're from minor character POVs I put the name of the character the scene's POV was in. I didn't have to do this on the green or pink ones because green scenes = Fox, my male MC and pink = Quill, my female MC.

In the body of the cards I wrote both the first and last line of the scene. That way I could see if I was reusing any opening or closing sentences (and I was) and I could remember that I need to make each of these sentences as best as they can be and full of hooks and conflict.

Then below that I wrote a one sentence summary of the scene, just in case I couldn't tell what the scene was about from the first and last sentences. Something like "Quill is ousted from her village".

Of course, you can write whatever you want on the cards. That was just the information I found most helpful for me when scene-blocking.

Anyway, back to the chapter discussion.

I have a question for all of you who either write in chapters, or for anyone who has broken a novel out into chapters (which, I assume, would be anyone that has finished a novel)

How long do you make your chapters?

From a scene POV, you can see that all my chapters are about the same - 3 or 4 scenes, one of about each color. I purposely aimed for that because I like the symmetry of it.

But, a few of those scenes are only a few pages long (I do plan on fluffing some of them up a bit...) which means I have chapters (especially in the beginning) that are 30 pages long, and then chapters in the end that are only 9 pages long.

Do you think this is an issue? Would this bother you as a reader? As a writer? Would you even notice?

I'm just not sure if I should combine a few of the chapters just to give them a longer a chapter page count, even though it will mean giving those chapters a longer scene count. If that makes sense.

Thoughts?

How do you arrange your chapters?

P.S. - Don't forget to enter my 100 followers writing contest for a chance to win prizes. The deadline is 5PM CST Friday 3/26

In Which Prologues Are No Longer Welcome

I love prologues. I love to write them and I don't mind reading them.
Recently, though, I came upon the discovery that many many people skip reading prologues all together. Prologues are kind of the "red headed stepchild" of the writing world and are looked down upon by many people.

Though, to be fair, I guess they've got a point when they state that almost all prologues (unless you're doing a frame story) is backstory. And since you never want to start your novel with backstory, you should cut that prologue and cut it quick.

And even though I know this, I still love to write prologues. My prologues almost always revolve around an incident with one of the characters that happened years earlier. It's almost always an inciting incident of some sort (for Foxfire, it revolves around how Fox, the Male MC is abandoned as a child), but not really of the novel itself.

So even though I love it, and I don't think it's really all that much backstory (even though this is just an excuse I tell myself) I know the prologue has to go.

Sadface.

The tough part, though, is to now take all of the necessary info in the prologue (and there is quite a bit of it regarding how the world works, etc) and inject it later into the story. The difficulty about this is I always want to stick it in too early and that is, of course, a bad idea because then I'd just be starting the novel with backstory again.

Hopefully once I draw out scene cards, I'll better be able to see where to stick the prologue bits.


So does anyone else write prologues? And do you keep them, or kill them?

Tomorrow, a bit more on where to start your story.

Also, two weeks ago I received the blogger purrfection award from the lovely Piedmont Writer(check her out if you're not already. I really enjoy her blog)