Meet PPW Member Patrick Hester

Today we take a quick peek into Patrick Hester’s busy universe. He is not only a writer, but an avid reader, and a teacher as well.

KATHIE SCRIMGEOUR:  What is a book that you read that you couldn’t put down, and why? What is a book that you will reread more than once?

PATRICK HESTER: Most recently, any of the Miles Vorkosigan books from Lois McMaster Bujold. Once I got into them, I fell hard and couldn’t stop until I’d read them all. Bujold is a master of storytelling and great characters and worldbuilding.

The Lord of the Rings or Robert Jordan’s Eye of the World are books I have read and reread multiple times. Both are cherished by me and for very different reasons. Tolkein is who most fantasy authors look to as foundational and a deep influence, kinda like how bands in the 70’s would say The Beatles inspired and influenced them. I was introduced to Tolkein at a young age and was blown away by the world and characters he created.

Jordan did the same, but on such a scale! His Wheel of Time series is massive and dense, full of mythology and worldbuilding, and characters! Oh, I love the characters. When a new book was coming out, I would reread the entire series (think about that for a second, cuz there are 14 of them plus a prequel!) Now that it’s finished, I reread just the first book – Eye of the World – when I can, or when I need a reminder of the kind of author I aspire to be.

KATHIE SCRIMGEOUR: What author inspired you to write?

PATRICK HESTER: As mentioned above, Jordan and Tolkein were both huge influences on me. I’ll add to that all of the Star Trek novels published in the 70’s and 80’s by great authors like Diane Duane, D.C. Fontana, Peter David and Vonda McIntyre.

More recently, I’ve been inspired by Jim Butcher, Gail Carriger, Lois McMaster Bujold, Brandon Sanderson and James SA Corey, all of whom approach writing and storytelling in different ways.

KATHIE SCRIMGEOUR:  You teach workshops on Scrivener, and many writers are unfamiliar with this powerful program. If it is possible, can you tell us why this is a “must use” program for writers? How will it help them be better writers?

PATRICK HESTER: The first thing I always tell people is this: Scrivener is not Word. Word is a word processing software that has been enhanced by its developers to offer bells and whistles specifically for people working in offices. Need to send a fax? You can do that from Word. Want a simple brochure? Word has one. So on and etc.

Scrivener is project management for writers that includes, as part of a powerful suite of tools, a word processor.

If you want to write out of order as ideas come to you for chapter 36, Scrivener makes it easy to do that. Word, you basically need separate docs for each chapter to do that. Want to outline your novel and have that outline visible as you work on each chapter? In Word, you have to have multiple docs open, totally doable. In Scrivener, you split your screen and have your outline on the right, manuscript on the left. You can also have all your research, character descriptions, notes, etc.

Scrivener is designed to make it easier for you to draft your manuscript quickly and in the way that makes the most sense to you and how you write.

KATHIE SCRIMGEOUR:  How can people find out about your upcoming classes?

PATRICK HESTER: Usually my website, www.atfmb.com but I can clue your readers in right now to my next class – it’ll be at the 2017 Pikes Peak Writers Conference as part of the Thursday Prequel on April 27th. You can actually take only the Thursday Prequel if you like, and pair my half-day afternoon workshop with one of our awesome morning classes. For information about cost, visit PikesPeakWriters.com.

KATHIE SCRIMGEOUR: What are you are working on right now? Tell us a little about it.

PATRICK HESTER: I’ve had a space opera percolating for a couple years now – I’ve described it as the hunt for Red October in space. I’ve written, rewritten and shredded it a few times. The most recent draft takes it down from five point of view characters to two. This has allowed me to focus much more on those two characters and the world I’m building, which takes place just a couple hundred years in the future. Humans have discovered space travel and have taken the first steps out into the galaxy only to find they’re still alone. They’ve colonized worlds and gotten into a routine of exploration and exploitation of resources. The same petty political issues we see now still exist, just on a broader scale between not only countries, but country-sized corporations and independent colony planets. When a new technology is discovered and deployed by one country, it threatens to incite a war like we have never seen before – a space based war. Everything is riding on a naval intelligence officer, and a gateship captain, neither of whom are aware of just how much is riding on them or what will happen if they fail.

Patrick Hester is an author, blogger and two-time Hugo Award Winner. He lives in Colorado, writes science fiction and fantasy, and can usually be found hanging out on his Twitter feed - @atfmb. His novel, SAMANTHA KANE: INTO THE FIRE is available at all major retailers. His short fiction can be found in the anthologies Space Battles: Full-Throttle Space Tales #6 and An Uncommon Collection, as well as the eBooks Conversations with my Cat, Witchcraft & Satyrs, Consumption, Cahill's Homecoming and Cahill's Unfinished Business. His Functional Nerds and SF Signal weekly podcasts have both been nominated for Parsec awards, and the SF Signal podcast was nominated for a 2012, 2013, and 2014 Hugo Award. His Scrivener Quick Tips articles exploded on social media and the web in 2012, and he’s been teaching writers how to use the software ever since.

I'd Like a Website -- Now What (Part Two)

Editor's Note: This is a continuation of Patrick Hester's column on websites from Monday, March 20. 


By Patrick Hester

Registering a Domain  

There are a lot of places where you can register your domain name that can be independent of where you host your website – remember how I said the two are different? These places are called ‘Registrars’.

Here are some examples of where you can search for and register your domain and the cost as of this writing (presented in no particular order of preference):

·       Go Daddy: https://www.godaddy.com/

o   $2.99 – $11.99 per year depending on what you want

·       BlueHost https://www.bluehost.com/

o   FREE domain registration when you sign up for webhosting

§  BlueHost says in the fine print you retain ownership of your domain name until/unless it expires and you choose not to renew it

·       Register.com https://www.register.com//

o   $5 per year or more based on the services you choose

·       Google Domains https://domains.google

o   $12 per year or more based on the services you choose

This is a simple cross section of some of the options out there. There are A LOT more. Many of these companies offer to bundle your domain registration with the hosting of your website, enticing you with discounts and deals if you do so. Before you sign up for one of these, consider how you are going to build your website and the software you’re going to use. More on that in a moment.

Your domain registration is usually good for one year, but you can purchase more than one year at a time in order to enjoy various discounts being offered. PPW’s fearless leader, JT Evans, went ahead and registered his domain for 10 years!

It’s important to note that you will have to renew your domain name eventually or your website will vanish from the Internet (even though your hosting with all your pages, posts, etc. is still there). There’s a grace period offered by most registrars that allows you to renew your domain name and turn everything back on should it expire. At the end of that grace period, your domain name will come up for grabs and anyone can purchase it.

NOTE: At this point, it can become very difficult and costly to you to get your domain name back. Make a point to remind yourself of when your domain name expires – put it on your electronic calendar, write it on a post-it, whatever works best for you. The registrar will also email you months in advance of the expiration date, so make sure email from them doesn’t go directly into your spam or junk folders.

ANOTHER NOTE: When it comes to registering domains, the registrar will require personal information about you like your real name, address, phone number, etc. There are some international laws (ICANN) governing how domain names work that require them to gather this information. Unfortunately, that information also goes into a public record archive about domain names. If you don’t want any Joe or Jane to be able to find that information about you, you can do an add-on to your registration to add a privacy layer. This will hide your information from public view, but keep it associated with your domain per the international laws to allow rapid resolution of technical problems and to permit enforcement of consumer protection, trademark, and other laws.

Web Hosting

Once you have your domain name registered, you need web hosting for everything that makes up the site itself. Companies charge a monthly fee for this and usually will give deep discounts if you pay in advance quarterly or yearly. I’ve seen hosting for as little as $2.99 a month, and as much as $300 a month, depending on what you want.

Think of hosting as the space where everything that makes your website up will live. Most of the discount hosting out there is what we call ‘shared hosting’. The host has a giant space and has cut it up into sections and rents out those sections to each person who wants a website. The sections have walls between them so you can’t see their stuff and they can’t see yours. But if someone else gets a sudden influx of traffic to their area, yours can suffer and your website might become slow or even not show up when people come to it. This is rare, but it can happen and is worth mentioning.

Dedicated hosting is expensive, and most everyone ends up using the shared hosting until or unless they become famous and have a lot of traffic coming to their website.

Some examples of web hosting companies and the cost as of this writing (presented in no particular order of preference):

·       BlueHost - https://www.bluehost.com/shared

o   Starting around $3.95 a month with discounts for pre-purchasing for set terms

·       HostGator - http://www.hostgator.com/web-hosting

o   Starting around $3.95 a month with discounts for pre-purchasing for set terms

·       GoDaddy - https://www.godaddy.com/hosting/web-hosting

o   Starting around $3.99 a month with discounts for pre-purchasing for set terms

Your webhost will give you a set of numbers and/or letters, sometimes more than one – these are called ‘named servers’. You take them to the site where you registered your domain, login to your account, and type that into a specific spot. Boom. Your website and domain name are connected, and your site will appear when you go to your domain name in a web browser.

Usually, your webhost also has an area where you can setup email addresses and then access that email through your phone, desktop client and web interface.

CMS – Content Management Software

Every web hosting company worth their snuff will include access to software you can use to build your website and/or blog. Some, like Blue Host listed above, specialize and offer support and services dedicated to specific CMS. For Blue Host, it’s Wordpress. Now, I talked about Wordpress.com above, but in this case, I’m talking about Wordpress.org.

When looking at CMS software, the leader comes from Wordpress.org. Wordpress is split into two projects - .com and .org. The .com is the paid side where you can setup a blog using their domain and pay for extras as I described above. The .org is where you can download Wordpress – the blogging software – for free and install it on your webhost. You then have access to everything that is out there and being developed for Wordpress, including tens of thousands (if not millions) of design templates, plugins and widgets. These come in free and paid versions, and are designed to make it easy for you to setup your site quickly and easily.

Blue Host features a ‘one click’ install of Wordpress, taking away all of the heavy lifting. Other webhosts have adopted this approach and usually have some sort of quick and easy installation of Wordpress that doesn’t require you to do much more than click a link – which is great.

I’m an unabashed fan of Wordpress, which you’ve probably figured out by now. I think it’s easy to install, easy to use and maintain. It comes very search engine friendly out of the box, and with a plugin like the free version of Yoast, you can amp of how easily your site works with the search engines by answering some questions and filling in the blanks.

That doesn’t mean Wordpress is the only horse in town. There are plenty of others. Some are more complicated than others.

Here’s a quick list of some of the options out there you can install and use for free:

·       Wordpress.org - https://wordpress.org/

·       Drupal - https://www.drupal.org/

·       Joomla - https://www.joomla.org/

If you have published works out there, you need a website. When someone reads your stuff, more likely than not they’re going to want to look you up online and see what else of yours is out there. Not finding you is bad, and can turn readers – especially young readers – off and make them look elsewhere.

Having a website is much easier today than ever before. If you’re at the point where you think you need a website but aren’t sure – maybe you don’t have anything published yet – sit down and figure out why you think you’re ready and what you think you need from a website. Make a list. Then take a look at what it’ll cost you not only in money, but time and effort. If the benefits outweigh the costs, then it’s time to take the plunge.

About the Author: Patrick Hester is an author, blogger and two-time Hugo Award Winner. He lives in Colorado, writes science fiction and fantasy, and can usually be found hanging out on his Twitter feed - @atfmb. His novel, SAMANTHA KANE: INTO THE FIRE is available at all major retailers. His short fiction can be found in the anthologies Space Battles: Full-Throttle Space Tales #6 and An Uncommon Collection, as well as the eBooks Conversations with my Cat, Witchcraft & Satyrs, Consumption, Cahill's Homecoming and Cahill's Unfinished Business. His Functional Nerds and SF Signal weekly podcasts have both been nominated for Parsec awards, and the SF Signal podcast was nominated for a 2012, 2013, and 2014 Hugo Award. His Scrivener Quick Tips articles exploded on social media and the web in 2012, and he’s been teaching writers how to use the software ever since.

I'd Like a Website -- Now What? (Part One)

Editor's Note: I received a question from a new author who was confused about websites. Rather than answer from my limited scope, I consulted one of Pikes Peak Writers' resident experts and asked him for advice on the topic. Am I glad I did. This article is part one of a two-part series. Because it's lengthy and chock-full of information, we've broken it in two. Part two will run on Wed. March 22. 

By: Patrick Hester

When it comes to websites, most writers agree – it can be a confusing mess. I hope to cut through that today and make it as simple as possible for you.

Having a website is important for every writer. Nearly 60 percent of searches are now from mobile devices – and when someone is in a bookstore and searches for you, or your stories, or something similar to you and your stories, you want them to find you. And you want them to find the right you with plenty of mentions of what you write and anything you’ve had published and where they can buy or read those stories.

How to make this happen? A website.

What is a website?  

This may sound very basic, but I wanted to talk for a second about what a website is. For our purposes today, a website is a domain name you have registered, and some sort of coded file structure hosted somewhere that resolves into a visually pleasing display people can interact with. The two are very different and I want you to understand that right off the bat.

A lot of places will offer you a website for $X a month and ‘take care of all the heavy lifting’. Not all of these sites are altruistic, and I’m going to caution you against them. I’ve encountered plenty of businesses who make this offer and in the fine print say that they own the domain name, website and all of its content. This means if you decide they’re charging you too much, or if you just have issues with them, they’ll hold onto the website name – like www.YourName.com – unless you pay some fee to break it away from them.

Domain Names  

The domain name is what people type into the web browser to go directly to your site, or what pops up when they do a search. It could be your name, the name of your book if you’re creating a promotional website, or the name of your series or world. It could also be what we call a subdomain, which I’ll get into a little further down this post.

There are two kinds of websites you could have as an author, and each has pros and cons associated with them.

Blogs  

Blogs are great for authors who like to write a lot, update their fans and readers on what’s going on, any events where they’re going to be making an appearance, news, etc. They’re also great for keeping your name out there in the search engines when people search for things. Search engines love blogs because they tend to be updated a lot and offer useful information. A search engine will ‘crawl’ every website on the Internet in order to provide results for people who are searching for things. The more often your website has new information on it, the more often those search engines will come back to look at your site again. This is called ‘indexing’.

With a blog, you can have ongoing and updated content with your Posts, and static content with Pages. You can tie posts together using Categories and offer up a pretty user friendly experience for anyone visiting your website.

That’s the pro of a blog. The cons are in writing new content for it. If you’re in the right mindset, spending an hour a week or more writing out blog content and scheduling it might be perfect for you and not a burden. It’s when you’re not that kind of writer that things can become more difficult. Maintaining a blog means writing posts often enough to keep people and the search engines coming back.

I always advise writers to start off slow when it comes to blogging. If you write a post a day, every day, for three months straight, you are creating a ton of content which is great. But you’re also setting an expectation with your readers that you’ll always give them a post a day. If that becomes burdensome, you can turn off some readers who come to the site only to find you haven’t posted anything in a week or two.

Start slow and find a good balance, then maintain it.

Static Website

Static websites are what I would call ‘old school’. These are pages created by programming code – either by hand or using some sort of Content Management System which is a fancy way of saying ‘website software’. The pages don’t change often, which means search engines don’t come by very often to see if anything has changed. The direct effect of this is that your website can appear to be ‘stale’ in the eyes of Google or Yahoo, or the other search engines out there. A well put together static website can look great and be a resource the search engines use, but not come back to for another six months or even a year. Any changes you make in that time won’t show up anywhere. You can tell the search engines you’ve made a change, but it’s an extra step you have to take, and for every search engine out there – which means research and time.

A good use for a static website is as a landing page or site. As an example, you could build one to promote your new book and leave it there forever (or as forever as you can get on the Internet). The page would only contain information about your book, images of the cover, and links where to buy. You can also do this on a blog as a static page. If you run ads on Facebook, you could direct all the traffic to this page/site to determine how well the ad did.  

Sub-Domains

I feel the need to add that there is a third option. But really more of a sub-option of the first – Blogs. I mentioned above something called Sub-Domains. Probably the fastest way to have a website RIGHT NOW is to sign up with a blog platform like Wordpress.com, Blogger.com, or LiveJournal.com, to name just a few.

Why?

These sites offer quick blogs, a lot of times for free, but with some limited functionality. It can get you up and running in a matter of minutes, but your domain name – the name of your website – would be what we call a sub-domain of their website name.

Using Wordpress.com as an example, you could sign up with them and have a domain name of yourname.wordpress.com. You could use a limited version of the wordpress software to build and maintain your site, but they would take care of things like hosting and you wouldn’t really have a fee to renew. They offer more bells and whistles if you pay for them, but you could totally have a ‘free’ website up and running right the heck now.

Having said that, I don’t recommend doing this.

If you’re a writer (or business) and you want to project a professional appearance, having a dedicated domain name like www.YourName.com is a must have. You can put it on your business cards or bookmarks or whatever else you hand out at conventions, book signings, etc. Adding to that an email address like firstname@yourname.com is even better. It’s absolutely a perception thing, but one most people expect of a professional. You went that extra step. With a sub-domain you can’t really do that.

Many of the sites I mentioned above will offer a custom domain name as part of their services, which means you can register a domain and use it with their software. That’s a way to go if you’re interested and it does work. There are usually fees associated with doing it this way, and you should always check the fine print to make sure you’re not signing anything away by setting something like that up with them.

Another way to go would be to register your domain name, then setup hosting and email somewhere and install CMS software to manage it all, which is what I want to talk about on Wednesday.  Stay tuned. 

About the Author: Patrick Hester is an author, blogger and two-time Hugo Award Winner. He lives in Colorado, writes science fiction and fantasy, and can usually be found hanging out on his Twitter feed - @atfmb. His novel, SAMANTHA KANE: INTO THE FIRE is available at all major retailers. His short fiction can be found in the anthologies Space Battles: Full-Throttle Space Tales #6 and An Uncommon Collection, as well as the eBooks Conversations with my Cat, Witchcraft & Satyrs, Consumption, Cahill's Homecoming and Cahill's Unfinished Business. His Functional Nerds and SF Signal weekly podcasts have both been nominated for Parsec awards, and the SF Signal podcast was nominated for a 2012, 2013, and 2014 Hugo Award. His Scrivener Quick Tips articles exploded on social media and the web in 2012, and he’s been teaching writers how to use the software ever since.

Quote of the Week and the Week to Come

“Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self.” ~ Cyril Connolly

Cyril Connelly Source: Wikipedia

Cyril Vernon Connolly (10 September 1903 – 26 November 1974) was an English literary critic and writer. He was the editor of the influential literary magazine Horizon (1940–49) and wrote Enemies of Promise (1938), which combined literary criticism with an autobiographical exploration of why he failed to become the successful author of fiction that he had aspired to be in his youth.

This Week on Writing from the Peak:

March 20      I’d Like a Website – Now What? Pt. 1 by Patrick Hester

March 22      I’d Like a Website – Now What? Pt. 2 by Patrick Hester

March 24      Sweet Success Celebrates Cynthia Kuhn

Quote of the Week and the Week to Come

“I went for years not finishing anything. Because, of course, when you finish something you can be judged.”   ~ Erica Jong

Erica Jong Sources Google & Wikipedia

Erica Jong (née Mann; born March 26, 1942) is an American novelist and poet, known particularly for her 1973 novel Fear of Flying. The book became famously controversial for its attitudes towards female sexuality and figured prominently in the development of second-wave feminism. According to Washington Post, it has sold more than 20 million copies worldwide.

This Week on Writing from the Peak:

March 13      Action Cures Fear by Stacy S. Jensen

March 15      Pikes Peak Writer Conference Prequel by Patrick Hester

March 17      Sweet Success Celebrates L.S. Hawker

Sweet Success Celebrates Patrick Hester

By: Ann S. Hill

On December 13, 2016, Patrick Hester’s essay I’m Pretty Sure I’ve Read This Before was released in the anthology Upside Down:Inverted Tropes in Storytelling. The anthology of 366 pages was released by Apex Publications. (ISBN-10: 1937009440 and ISBN-13: 978-1937009441) It is available in eBook and in soft and hard cover. Following is Patrick’s description of the work and his author bio:

Upside Down: Inverted Tropes in Storytelling. An anthology of short stories, poetry, and essays edited by Monica Valentinelli and Jaym Gates. Over two-dozen authors, ranging from NYT-bestsellers and award winners to debut writers, chose a tired trope or cliche to challenge and surprise readers through their work. Read stories inspired by tropes such as the Chainmaille Bikini, Love at First Sight, Damsels in Distress, Yellow Peril, The Black Man Dies First, The Villain Had a Crappy Childhood, The Singularity Will Cause the Apocalypse, and many more...then discover what these tropes mean to each author to find out what inspired them.

Patrick Hester is an author, blogger and two-time Hugo Award Winner. He lives in Colorado, writes science fiction and fantasy, and can usually be found hanging out on his Twitter feed. His debut novel, SAMANTHA KANE: INTO THE FIRE is forthcoming from WordFire Press. His short fiction can be found in the anthologies Space Battles: Full-Throttle Space Tales #6 and An Uncommon Collection, as well as the eBooks Conversations with my Cat, Witchcraft & Satyrs, Consumption, Cahill's Homecoming (Cord Cahill Serials Book 1) and Cahill's Unfinished Business (Cord Cahill Serials Book 2).

-E-mail patrick@thenewuniverse.com

-Website www.atfmb.com

-Where to buy/read website

Amazon USA: http://amzn.to/2gv1a6p

Amazon UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Upside-Down-Inverted-Tropes-Storytelling/dp/1937009440/

Amazon CA: https://www.amazon.ca/Upside-Down-Inverted-Tropes-Storytelling/dp/1937009440/

Barnes & Noble:http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/upside-down-valentinelli-monica/1125072616

The Book Depository: http://www.bookdepository.com/Upside-Down-Valentinelli-Monic-Gates-Jaym/9781937009441

Kindle: http://amzn.to/2hs3IAf

Nook: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/upside-down-monica-valentinelli/1125322660?ean=2940157230043

iBookstore: https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/upside-down-inverting-tropes/id1187453646

Kobo: https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/upside-down-inverted-tropes-in-storytelling

DriveThruFiction: http://www.drivethrufiction.com/product/195198/Upside-Down-Inverted-Tropes-in-Storytelling?affiliate_id=87619

patrick@thenewuniverse.com

Blog: All Things From My Brain: http://www.atfmb.com

Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/atfmb

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/atfmb

The Functional Nerds Podcast: http://www.functionalnerds.com 

The SFSignal Podcast: http://www.sfsignal.com

Kirkus Reviews Column: https://www.kirkusreviews.com/features/partners/atfmb/

Skype: guitarbluesman

Quote of the Week and the Week to Come

Where the spirit does not work with the hand, there is no art. ~ Leonardo da Vinci

Source: Wikipedia -- Artist Francesco Melzi 

Leonard di ser Piero da Vinci, April 1452-May 1519, was more commonly known as Leonard da Vinci or simply Leonardo. He was an Italian polymath whose areas of interest included invention, painting, sculpting, architecture, science, music, mathematics, engineering, literature, anatomy, geology, astronomy, botany, writing, history and cartography. He is widely considered the greatest painter of all time, and many historians and scholars regard Leonardo as the prime example of a “Universal Genius” or Renaissance Man.

This week on Writing from the Peak:

Jan 9            Meet the Member J.T. Evans

Jan 11          Writing your History Novel by Jason Evans (Blog 1)

Jan 13          Sweet Success Celebrates Patrick Hester

How to Craft the Ultimate Page Turner

By: Patrick Hester

Hi there! My name is Patrick Hester. I’m a PPW member, have taught at Write Brains and PPWC, and volunteer as a board member for Pikes Peak Writers. I’m also an author, leaning toward science fiction and fantasy, though I have dabbled in all sorts of fiction. I have a critique partner named JT Evans. You might know him as both a contributor to this blog, and as President of Pikes Peak Writers. One of the kind things he and others have said to me numerous times is how well I do scene and chapter breaks. That means a lot to me, because I work hard on them. I want my readers to turn the page and keep reading, not take a break.

The secret to doing that well? The answer might surprise you.

Two of my favorite things: comic books and Classic Doctor Who.

Now, I know that some of you are rolling your eyes and grabbing for your mouse to close the browser window. I’m gonna encourage you to stick around. Even if comic books and Doctor Who aren’t your thing, I assure you these two things are not as strange as they may seem on the surface.  And the lessons they teach can impact your writing and ability to hook your readers and keep them engaged. And isn’t that what it’s all about?

One of the most popular forms of storytelling is the serial, which utilizes cliffhangers to keep the reader, or watcher, coming back for more. Comic books and Classic Doctor Who both used this structure quite well, and instilled in me and hundreds of thousands, if not millions of fans worldwide, the same sense of wonder, excitement and anticipation at what will come next. Will the Doctor and Sarah Jane escape the Daleks this time, or is it all over? How will Spider-Man manage to beat Doc Ock and pay his rent on time?

Okay, I admit the second one is a little odd, but that was part of the fun. Allow me to delve a little deeper into this and bring it around to your writing.

Comic books have a formula to them. So do Classic Doctor Who episodes—the stuff before the recent relaunch under Russell T. Davies.

But let’s stick with comics for a moment. The page of a comic book is designed to guide you through the story, panel by panel, and make you turn the page. Here’s an illustration of what I’m talking about.

Now, comic book pages have become quite sophisticated through the years, but the premise is still the same. Pages are split into ‘panels’. The lower right hand corner of the page is: The Hook. Some question is asked here, some action is taken, maybe a fight begins, or an explosion, or someone ‘off screen’ suddenly says something. It’s such a hook the reader must turn the page to see what happens next.

Which brings us to the upper left hand corner of the page: The Reveal. This is the resolution of whatever happened in that last panel on the previous page. It’s the reward for having turned the page, and it satisfies readers, justifies their attention and the fact they kept going. And it restarts the cycle for the new page.

If you’ve ever read a comic book, you’ll notice that the last page almost always ends on such a hook—an unanswered question, a surprise attack or mystery of some sort. All intended to bring readers back in a month to see what happened, learn the truth and keep moving forward.

Let’s put it into context for the fiction writer, because it’s a powerful tool for us to have.

What makes for a good scene break or chapter end? When some writers start out, they see chapters as having a beginning, middle and end— a resolution. That’s not horrible, but if your chapters end in resolution without asking new questions or revealing new dangers, you’re giving your reader an out and an ending. They can now stop reading, take a break, grab food, watch TV, scratch the cat behind the ear, hug the significant other across the shoulder, or maybe walk the dog.

That’s not what you want to happen. You want the cat to be singing its mournful song, the significant other to feel abandoned, and the dog to leave a ‘surprise’ on the kitchen floor, all because your readers couldn’t tear their eyes away from your story, your book.

Think about the last book you read that you simply couldn’t put down. The one that drove you nuts. Every free, waking moment of your day, you longed to spend with your nose planted between those sweet-smelling pages. When you couldn’t do that, couldn’t read it, you were fidgety and anxious. Kept finding your mind wandering back to the story, the characters, and where you left them— precariously balanced on the edge between life and death, happiness and despair. And when you were reading it, and came to the end of a chapter, you took a breath, turned the page and told yourself, “Just one more chapter and then I’ll stop.” Only you didn’t stop. You kept going.

Why? What was it about that book that made it impossible to put down?

Most likely, it was some form of what I describe above. Which can also be called ‘beats’. The author used them and played you like a virtuoso, pulsing at just the right times, luring you in and keeping you so focused that anything short of continuing on was unacceptable.

That’s powerful writing, and you are just as capable of it as that author you were reading. Understanding how the author did it is half the battle. Translating that understanding to your own writing means breaking it down. Like with the page of a comic book.

Let’s be honest. You can’t design the pages of your book the same way you can a comic. It won’t work. Or, it could work, but your publisher would hate you because it would involve a lot of complicated layout, design and probably some PhD level math. Instead, think about the structure of your book as a whole, see how it flows, how the sections and chapters break the way you have it now, and how they could break with a little tweak.

Think of your story as a self-contained serial where each chapter feeds into the next. Like Classic Doctor Who.

See? I told you’d I’d tie all of this together.

Classic Doctor Who was an oddity on American Television full of half-hour sitcoms and one hour dramas. Broadcast on PBS (mostly), an ‘episode’ of Doctor Who had its own formula, broken into parts similar to the acts of a play. The episode itself might be 60-90 minutes or more, but split into 20-25 minute acts, each with a cliffhanger ending and an opening resolution. They went something like this:

•        The Doctor and his companion arrive on a planet.

•        There’s something wrong with the TARDIS requiring them to spend some time here.

•        They begin to explore.

•        They encounter the locals, and get split up.

•        One or both discover there’s more to this place than they originally thought, and something isn’t quite right.

•        Suddenly, either the Doctor, or his companion’s life is in jeopardy!

•        Queue music.

Trust me, as soon as the music started, you were up and out of your seat shouting, “No” because you knew you’d have to wait to see what happens next. In the UK, that meant a week. In the US? You’d have to wait through a pledge drive bit and then they’d get on with the next part of the episode. Not horrible, unless you absolutely couldn’t wait to see what happens next.

And there it is. That reaction we want as writers. Getting it is as simple, and difficult, as applying the idea of the cliffhanger to your writing.

To get the reader to keep going when the chapter ends, raise the tension and the stakes for the characters. If you’ve just resolved something, drop in the next thing on the list of crap that’s happening, or about to happen to them. They got out of the haunted forest and to the house on the hill, but that house isn’t the haven of safety they thought it was… They stopped the bomb from blowing up Air Force One, but something is still beeping… The hero ran the villain through with the great sword and, spinning, lopped off his head, which is still talking from its perch on the throne…

Learning to play with these beats and rhythms starts by emulating what you’ve read and seen in your own writing. Remember that book I mentioned above? The one you couldn’t put down? Why couldn’t you put it down? What did that author do, and how can you apply it to your own writing? Analyze and adapt.

For me, I almost always have some sort of cliffhanger at the end of my chapters, large or small (sometimes you have to let your readers take a breath. A short one) so they can turn the page and say, “Just one more chapter…”

About the Author: Patrick Hester is an author, blogger and 2013 Hugo Award Winner for Best Fanzine (Editor - SF Signal), and 2014 Hugo Award Winner for Best Fancast. He lives in Colorado, writes science fiction and fantasy, and can usually be found hanging out on his Twitter feed. His debut novel, SAMANTHA KANE: INTO THE FIRE is forthcoming from WordFire Press. His short fiction can be found in the anthologies Space Battles: Full-Throttle Space Tales #6 and An Uncommon Collection, as well as the eBooks Conversations with my Cat, Witchcraft & Satyrs, Consumption, Cahill's Homecoming (Cord Cahill Serials Book 1) and Cahill's Unfinished Business (Cord Cahill Serials Book 2). His Functional Nerds and SF Signal weekly podcasts have both been nominated for Parsec awards, and the SF Signal podcast was nominated for a 2012, 2013, and 2014 Hugo Award. He writes a twice-monthly column for the Kirkus Reviews blog, for his own site atfmb.com, SF Signal (now closed) and Functional Nerds.