Ways to Make a Good Book Better

Preface

Last week, I met my friend, Jon, at Forza for coffee. For those of you who don't live in Denver or haven't heard of Forza, it's a nice local coffee shop Jon showed me when we first started hanging out about a year ago. They have this great drink called a Ventian Late. Sadly, I have no idea what's in it, but it's really good. I tried their Holy Spumoni once, and it was so sweet I almost wanted ice cream to calm down the flavor. It was good, don't get me wrong, but it was very sweet, so make sure you're in the mood before you try it. It's located on 104th street just west of Federal, if you decide to look it up.

Having said that, we had a great meeting. Jon is a pretty good author and has been writing for a lot longer than me. He's never actually published anything and is pretty shy about letting people read his work, but ever since I started this project, he's been a great motivation. For some reason, the little icon that shows he's following me says "Keoni Keller." Why is that anyway?

Anyway, to get back to the story, he had a lot of ideas on how I could continue to improve on what I'm doing, so I wanted to share them with you here. I didn't take notes, but I think I remembered most of them, so I'll do as best as I can. If I forget something, feel free to leave a comment, Jon.

Before I write the methods of making a good book better, I want to pass on the warning Jon gave me. Don't ever stop writing to edit your book until you're done with the book. He told me not to apply any of these ideas to stuff I've already written. He says that when I finish my entire book, I should then go back and fix it all at once. I am going to start applying these ideas from here forward though.

Watch the Grammar

I personally hate grammar. I never liked diagramming things in school, and I still can't tell you what an indirect object does. I usually try to forget about grammar, and I'd much rather write like I talk than like some sort of school paper. Despite all that, Jon gave me some great reasons having good grammar helps make your book better.

1) Punctuation changes the meaning of a sentence:

Proper punctuation can clear up a lot of confusion. Jon showed me a wikipedia entry about the serial comma versus the Oxford comma: Serial comma entry. The point wasn't the article itself but some of the examples that show how you use a comma can change a sentence completely. The first example right under the "Unresolved Ambiguity" heading was my favorite.  I won't give any examples here for the sake of keeping things simple, but feel free to look at it for yourself.

2)Simplicity:

A sentence makes a lot more sense and is a lot more simple when all of the words are correct and match the sentence. For example, affect versus effect. I still don't know the difference between these. Jon and I spent a while talking about the difference, but he also told me to look on Grammar Girl to clarify when I don't know which one to use. When someone with a good vocabulary read my work, they need to be able to tell exactly what I'm saying.

--Addendum on grammar:

There is a thing called a hanging participle. Apparently I use these all the time. A hanging participle is when you have an "-ing" verb that should be related to a noun but is somewhere else in the sentence.... Now that I read that, I have no idea what I was trying to say. Let me give an example:

        Jim went to the store expecting to find a book.

In this example, the word expecting modifies the noun it's next to. So, the store is expecting to find a book, no Jim. In order for this to be correct, the sentence should read:

      Expecting to find a book, Jim went to the store.

I would never talk like that, but Jon showed me how it can create a lot of confusion if you don't do it correctly. I had never heard of a participle, much less a hanging one (reminds me of a hang nail), but I am going to watch for them from now on.

Keep the narration voice consistent

Jon pointed out several areas that I go from an archaic voice to a more modern voice. In the earlier chapters that I showed Jon before posting them, he pointed out that some characters spoke with "ye" instead of "you," but they didn't stay consistent in the accent otherwise. It's important to make sure you have a single narration voice and all your characters are consistent or the reader will become lost in what is happening. It's easy for the reader to loose focus if you don't maintain something consistent for them to hold on to.

Keep the characters separate from one another

Apparently a lot of people, myself included, tend to speak in their own voice when they write, but when you have a book with multiple characters, especially when you are writing from multiple points of view, it's easy to mix and blend the character voices, but it's important to keep them separate. The more distinct you can keep the character voices, the easier it is for the reader to follow and the more fun it is for them to get involved in. Characters become more real when they are more distinct. Try to imagine going to a movie where every character looked and sounded the same. Would that be fun or confusing?

Look at things from the character's point of view when writing

Here's one that I've realized going back over my book, when I write, I see the falls in the Netherworld and hear the sound of the river rushing by. I feel Natalie's adrenaline when the armies of the Korgar come by and Kaelon's pain as he's beaten to the ground. As the reader, you only feel what I describe to you. You only see the vistas I explain. When I write, I should have been writing with more description, seeing these things as the character sees them.

I should also describe them like the character would describe them, and not like I would describe them. The characters should all see the same thing in slightly different ways, and it should be described differently. This will give the reader a better sense of reality. I really want to go back and describe some areas more, but Jon encouraged me to keep writing until I was done, no matter what.

Don't rush the story

It's not about getting to the end of the book and being able to say, "I wrote a book." It's about telling a story and a journey. I've really been trying to get through the book because I want to be able to tell people about my book. I want to know what happens myself. When I play games, I rush through the main story and forget the side ones because I'm so interested on what's going to happen.

In real life, there are a lot of side stories that contribute to the main story. When we think about the Battle at Thermopylae, most of us think about the main story, the 300 Spartans who fought an army, but few of us think about what got them to that point or why those men were fighting or why they held off and fought until the last man was dead. If you think about it though, a story about just the battle would be short and fairly dull. It's the lives of the people who contributed that makes things interesting. Think of the movie "300." The battle that the movie was based on takes several minutes out of a couple-hour film. Don't rush the story. Stop to see the world sometimes.

Always have Jedi ^_^

 This one is actually a joke. Jon and I have been playing SWTOR together a lot recently, so he said "no task is impossible when you have a Jedi around."

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Making Your Story More Interesting

A Continuation of Things I Learned from Reading Dracula

This blog is the rest of the article started at Ideas for Narrating Your Novel.

3) Have enemies who are terrifying and enemies who you feel empathy/sympathy toward. 

Dracula was a scary opponent. When Jonathan Harker met the vampire women and realized Dracula was something other than human, it was creepy. Some parts of the story that related to Dracula bordered on scary. He made a really good enemy, although I thought they defeated him too easily. (I guess if he hadn’t been asleep, there was no way they could have won.)

As scary as Dracula was, though, he wasn’t my favorite villain. I guess Renfield might not be considered a villain, but he basically was because he helped Dracula and had a habit of eating living things. All he needed was black clothes and he’d be a pretty standard Batman villain. Even his psychosis fit!

The thing I really like about Renfield, though, was that he wasn’t purely evil. He showed a full range of emotions. While Van Helsing was the epitome of good and Dracula was the epitome of evil, Renfield was the confused guy who gets used by the main villain. I could almost understand where Renfield came from, and I even admired him when he attacked Dracula. How often can you say you admired a villain?!

When you write, most characters should be a mixture of good and evil. While it may make sense for a few characters to be pretty much pure evil or pure good, the majority of characters should be able to be tempted by ease, money, a relationship, power, or something else. I think it makes for a much more interesting character when you come to the end of the novel and realize, “I don’t know if he was a good character or a bad one!”

One of my favorite historical characters is Rommel. He is one of history’s greatest military generals, but he lived when Hitler started WW2. I don’t know how true the following story is, but I remember it from high school. Apparently Rommel said that he didn’t like or agree with Hitler, but he would live and die for his country. Because of this philosophy, he did more damage to the Allied forces than almost anyone else in Germany, but he also defied the leader of his country and died for it. He is a great example of what a character in a novel should be.

4) Don’t be afraid to impair and/or kill some key characters

Early in the novel, Mina’s friend, Lucy becomes a vampire. Later in the novel, Mina becomes the victim of Dracula and begins to suffer from eating his blood. She is scarred by the wafer and eventually has to be trapped by Van Helsing so she won’t escape to join the vampire women. Quincy also falls prey to the fight against Dracula. He dies in a heroic mission to kill Dracula.

I wonder if Bram Stoker ever sat in front of his paper and shook his head because Quincy was about to die, but he knew that it was the only way to kill Dracula. I wonder if he winced when Mina drank the blood from Dracula’s chest, but he knew that it was the next move Dracula would make, so he had to write about it. 

When you are writing your novel, it’s important to stay true to the characters you’ve created. Bringing characters back from the dead or saving them from a desperate situation can be awesome, but it can also be extremely cheesy. Be careful when you do something that wouldn’t normally happen!

I read about a comic (which I can’t remember of the name right now….) where the hero was trapped in a steel box, flying through space at the end of one episode. Apparently everyone who read it couldn’t figure out how he was going to get out, and they were really excited to see what happened. In the next episode, he showed up in New York to save the day without any explanation whatsoever. 

Don’t do that to your reader! When you write your novel, think about what you are going to do; make sure it can happen within the rules that exist for your universe. Some characters will die heroically; others will die for something stupid. Some characters, who you might not like, will live. It’s okay. Let you characters get hurt if that’s something that should happen.

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Ideas for Narrating Your Novel

Taking a Break from Character Creation

The process of creating characters for The Netherworld and trying to decide the basic plot has been harder than I would have imagined. I’ve had to think a lot about each person’s goals and desires and pasts and futures. I see why Ingermason says to take an hour for each character. It’s also difficult to decide which characters are going to be main characters and which will be secondary. 

I’m sure I will create more as the story progresses, but this blog is about the experience of writing a book. I think a lot about the storyline as I do stuff during my day. I have some awesome ideas for how I want things to look, but it’s hard to write them down so that someone else will see them like I do. I really wish I could draw, but oh well.

 I’m glad for all the comments you have left so far. I welcome any thoughts, criticisms, or suggestions!

What I learned from Reading Dracula

William Faulkner said, “"Read, read, read. Read everything -- trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it. Then write. If it is good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out the window." I’m starting to agree. The more I read the more I learn about how to write.

I’ve continued reading to get inspiration for my story. I’m not a very fast reader, so it has taken a long time to finish Dracula. I guess it’s only been about a month, which is faster than I have read most books, but I’ve also had a lot of free time since it’s winter. 

I’ve picked up quite a few ideas about writing from reading Dracula that I’d like to share with you. These ideas focus on how to tell the story. So far, I’ve posted a few blogs about creating characters and getting your novel started. This one is about narrating a novel, or telling a story.

1) Use multiple points of view in order to create picture!

Bram Stoker switched between multiple points of view throughout Dracula. Each of the main characters gets time in the limelight. As the reader, I got to see things from each character’s perspectives. I mentioned this technique when I started reading Dracula, but now that I’m done, I’m more convinced than ever that it’s a great way to write a book. 

If the story had been written from only Jonathan’s perspective, I wouldn’t have known each of the characters as well as I did. By the end of the story, I felt like Van Helsing was an old friend of mine, even though I probably would never be good friends with a professor in real life. It was exciting to see how each character felt about what was happening. It made me sad to read from Mina’s perspective a lot, though, since she had to deal with so much.

As I’ve been writing my novel, I’ve been switching between perspectives a little, but I think I want to do it a little more and make sure that everything in a specific section is seen from just one character’s perspective. I may need to go back and update the first two chapters, but I’m not sure yet. 

Instead of changing the novel from one person to another at the end of each chapter, I’m going to do it within chapters as well. I’m going to use chapters to show that I’m changing from one group of people to another, but within that group, I’m going to use just a line break to show the change in perspectives. What do you all think about this method?

2) Give each character a purpose in the story. Don’t let one hog the show.

In Dracula, each character had a specific purpose and something helpful to contribute to the group. Jonathan Harker was resourceful, but not knowledgeable. Van Helsing was courageous and knowledgeable, but he wasn’t young and agile. Quincy had strength to contribute, and Mina added an interesting twist to a number of places in the novel.

As I think about my novel, it’s easy to think a lot about Natalie and Kælon while leaving the others out. Dracula was more interesting because the characters needed each other and often had to split up which caused interesting problems, but it also allowed them to succeed in the end. Dracula was only one person. Maybe this says something about teamwork versus doing things on your own:p

When writing your novel, keep in mind that fiction shouldn’t be too much different than reality, even in a fantasy world like mine. I think we’ve all heard the saying, “No man is an island” (I just looked it up. It’s a poem by John Donne). Writing a story about one character who can do everything alone is a lot more boring because no one can relate to it. Even James Bond had Q and M to help him out, and he was really good at working alone!

Sadly, I ran out of time to finish this tonight, so I will post this blog in 2 parts. 

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