The Process of Writing a Historical Novel Blog 1

By: Jason Evans

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Was your holiday restful? Was it crazy and fun? Did you have to put out a lot of dysfunctional family fires? Regardless of whether or not you enjoyed your holidays, they are now over. Time to get to work on that book. More importantly, it’s time to start working on that book of historical fiction.

Over the course of 2017, I will blog about my process of writing a historical novel. It could be action, romance, mystery or any genre grounded in the history. We will cover ALL the steps required to finish your novel. From concept to research to organization to publication. We will cover it all.

In addition, if I bring up something here that you wish I could discuss further, simply cross over to www.jason-evans.net for further details. On my website, I will go into further details about all the stuff you’ll read here, first. But enough of my shameless self-promotion!

YOUR BIG IDEA.

Have you ever watched a television show or film and thought, hey! That’s an interesting character! I want to learn more about her! Or, have you ever read a magazine article and thought, Wow! That was a really fascinating time period! I wonder how they would have reacted to ________________?

These are the beginning of story ideas. Ideas that you can chew on in your head and develop into novels that other people will read.

Stephen King was working a custodial job at his high school when he was asked to help out in the girl’s locker room. He saw the little metal boxes for tampons in the shower stalls and thought, What would happen if a woman had her first period, here, in the shower stall? From that Carrie was born.

Lin-Manuel Miranda was on vacation and read Ron Chernow’s biography of Alexander Hamilton, which inspired the hit Broadway musical, Hamilton. Inspiration is all around you.

Maybe you only have a character in your head. A scrappy young heroine, or a grizzled, bitter veteran of a thousand campaign. Maybe you have a setting that excites you, like Mexico City as the U.S. Army is about to attack it in September or 1847. The intrigue! The tension!

Maybe you only have an event in your mind. You see a sad woman all dressed in antique white lace about to put a veil on and walk down an aisle. Why is she sad? Will she marry for duty? Does she wish a loved one was there to see her marry? What’s going on?

Whatever kernel of a story you have, at least it’s a beginning. There is something about that character, that event, or that place that excites you, gives you the flutters, and motivates your story. Now it’s time to tease it out.

Before I go on, let me just say I am a BIG fan of Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat trilogy of screen writing books. I will refer to his wisdom often during our writing journey. Here is my first ode to Save the Cat. You gotta have a log line.

A Log line is a simple couple of sentences or short paragraph that describes what your story is about. It is really important you have this down before you go writing, willy-nilly. Let me explain why.

Chiefly, I don’t want you to get excited and go write a kernel of a story. I want you to write the whole blasted thing. Writing your log line will help you create an antagonist, a conflict and a hero’s journey.

“But Jason,” you say, “I’m not a planner, I’m a pantser! I don’t organize anything when I write.” My response is this: “I’m just asking you to write 3-5 sentences, so you can anchor your story, give it some depth. I’m not asking you to write a five-page outline with subplots detailed out and 50 pages of written back story. Writing a log line will help focus you as you write the opening chapters of your book. But there’s another reason why you should write your log line.

I want you to go up to people you know and read them the logline. Do they get as excited as you do? Do they think it’s a good idea for a book? If so, you probably have something workable as a story. If you don’t, figure out why. Is it because your ideas aren’t fully formed or is it because you weren’t clear about how awesome your story is?

Both are fixable. But do you want to know the REAL reason you should write a logline?

If you pitch to editors and agents, you’ll have to come up with a logline, anyway. A quick way to give them a synopsis of your book. It is better to do it now, before it’s written, then to do what I did and write it afterward.

See, I was so proud that I had written a book. So proud of my dialogue, my subplots, and my twists, that I blathered on about the characters and the challenges they faced. I talked about the minor characters, the historical events it surrounds, and everything but the conflict, the heroes, and the road they walked.

Don’t be like me.

If you write the logline now, then it will act like a compass, a beacon, that will guide you back to your book’s true purpose. If you feel like what you’re writing is true to your logline, but you just don’t like it, then change your logline to better reflect the story you want!

A logline should have the following:

An adjective to describe the protagonist

An adjective to describe the antagonist

A compelling goal we identify with as human beings

It should offer the most conflict in the situation

Show the protagonist has the longest way to go emotionally.  

Proud Farmer’s daughter (adjectives describing protagonist) Elizabeth mean girl Sue always picking on her. (adjective describing antagonist,) But the Founders Day picnic is coming up and Elizabeth has the fastest horse in the county. She’ll show Sue, she’ll show everyone when she wins the blue ribbon. (Compelling goal: vindication, revenge, respect of peers,) There’s only one problem, Elizabeth’s father won’t let her compete. (Most conflict: How can I win if Pa won’t let me?) He says such competitiveness is sinful pride, that Elizabeth should love her enemies. But Dad doesn’t understand. Will Elizabeth defy her father to save her pride, or allow Sue to humiliate her again? While Elizabeth chooses, she learns what true respect and love really are.

  

I hope this has been helpful. Next month, we’ll talk about organizing, shaping and sanding out your story so all your characters have depth, your conflicts are intense and the stakes are high.

Come over to my site at www.jason-evans.net if you want to learn more about the logline and how to twist your story concept so it’s more compelling. There, I’ll also explain how I got inspired to write my first unpublished novel, The Gallowglass.

About the Author:  Jason Evans always wanted to be a writer, he just didn't know it. He grew up in Pasadena, California, in the 1980s where he watched way too much television, but was introduced to literature by his grandfather and his favorite middle school and high school teachers. He wasted his youth working at the So Cal Renaissance Faire (a dangerous place because it’s the gateway drug to other historical costumes,). In his leisure time he’s an educator, a writer, and a bon vivant. He is a graduate of UC Santa Barbara, with degrees in History & Renaissance Studies, a teaching credentials from CSU Los Angeles, as well as a graduate degree from the University of Colorado, Denver. He currently resides in Denver with his wife, the fetching Mrs. Evans, their three dogs and a mischievous cat who calls him his thrall. 

You can visit Jason at his website at www.jason-evans.net

You can like his author page on Facebook at Jason Henry Evans

Follow him on Twitter @evans_writer

What an Intermediate Writer Needs to Know

By DeAnna Knippling 

I blogged earlier about what a beginning writer needs to know.  At least, that was the title.  Really it was a collection of what I learned (or should have learned) as a beginning writer, combined with what I observe from other beginning writers now, the struggles that they go through.

And now for intermediate writers.

writersleague.org

What makes an intermediate writer?  How do you know that you’ve moved on from beginner status?  Do you need to master everything on the beginner list?  (Even master writers haven’t mastered everything on the beginner list.)  No, what seems to happen is that an intermediate writer is born one morning when they wake up and say, “I am incompetent.  I am completely and utterly incompetent.  Although, admittedly, not as incompetent as Jane Doe over there who wants to tell me all about the novel she's going to write someday.”  Beginning writers seem inordinately cocky and arrogant.  The life of an intermediate writer is filled with rejections, self-doubt, and redefinition of what one previously thought of as strengths.

I’ve seen a lot of people stall here with some variation of “But I’m doing everything the writing books are telling me; why am I not selling?” or “I just don’t have time anymore.”

In no particular order, what I’d advise an intermediate writer to do and learn:

1. Look up the Dunning-Kruger effect again.  Understand that a loss of confidence does not necessarily reflect a lessening of abilities.  It gets better.
2. Deliberately experiment with different genres, both in reading and in writing.
3. Looking at stories from different perspectives is often beneficial, both in asking other people to read your work, and in reading them out loud or in a different format or font.
4. Heinlein’s rules are practical instructions rather than an ideal to be strived for at this point. 
5. The focus changes from “learning the rules so you can break them” to “learning control.” 
6. What once seemed a strength now seems like a particular weakness.  It’s all relative.
7. Jealousy may become a serious, career-killing problem.  Several considerations:  Is this person a hard-working writer who obviously spends a lot of time putting words on the page?  Is this person being coached or edited by a much more skilled writer?  Has this person retreated from the writing world since their one big hit?  Is this person using a ghost writer?  Identify the person involved with the greatest amount of skill and study their work. 
8. “Craft” and “skill” are excellent watchwords--at this point.  Beware of any writer who spends more time talking about art than technique--at this point.
9. The working definition of a story tends to be, for now, “a collection of story elements that don’t suck.”  Characters that don’t suck plus setting that doesn’t suck plus plot that doesn’t suck, etc., etc.
10. Steal from life.  You’ll rarely get caught.
11. Focus on becoming a working writer:  work.  Everything you write should be treated as part of your profession.  Do not turn in sloppy, late, unclear work.  Blogs, query letters, synopses, stories, social media, interviews, appearances:  all your work should be done in a timely, professional fashion.  As often as possible, prove yourself reliable, agreeable, willing to learn and take feedback.
12. Continue typing in material and testing it with various methods of analysis.  The question to answer, at least on a subconscious level, is:  Why do I like this so much?  or, from a darker perspective, Why am I so jealous?
13. Build writing speed.
14. Start working on releasing any dependence on editing and re-editing and tweaking and quite possibly editing again, well, a revision would be nice, there’s always another typo to find or another mistake to fix, ha-ha, of course I haven’t submitted this yet, it’s only been seven years, are you kidding?
15. If you have not involved yourself in your local writing community, consider doing so.  Feel free to retreat from it as necessary.  You will take different things from the community at different times:  for now, focus on learning practical information and on meeting people who are as driven as you.
16. Be kind rather than honest with feedback to people who are not begging for criticism.
17. Beg for criticism, but do not respond to it.  Say “thank you,” even if thanks are unwarranted in this particular instance.
18. Areas of interest:  

• Openings
• Closings
• Scenes
• Conflict
• The wide variety of ways any given beginner’s element can be addressed
• Atmosphere/mood/theme/emotion
• Style
• Finding weaknesses or missing pieces from your beginner’s journey and ameliorating them

  19.  Don’t pretend to be an expert, but people are always desperate for honest information.
  20.  Continue to maintain your health, relationships, and sanity on a daily, practical basis.  Stories are an addiction; expect nightmarish withdrawal symptoms if you manage to work up a habit.

I was constantly swamped with the mosquitoes of doubt during this period--I can’t stress this enough.  This is something that can only be pushed through by work.  If I had stopped to think about art for art’s sake, or whether I was making anyone’s life any better for having read my stories, I would have stopped writing.  Put your head down in the weeds and write:  that’s about the only thing that will get you through this period.  Be a worker, not an artist; keep dreaming of large and wonderful things, but put your nose to the grindstone, blindly and unceasingly.

Here are some of my favorite reading  and research suggestions for intermediate writers:

• The Copyright Handbook, Nolo Press
• NaNoWriMo
• Save the Cat!  by Blake Snyder (the whole series)
• 2K to 10K:  Writing Faster, Writing Better, and Writing More of What You Love, by Rachel Aaron
• 45 Master Characters, by Victoria Lynne Schmidt
• Wonderbook, by Jeff VanderMeer
• Techniques of the Selling Writer, by Dwight V. Swain
• Anything by Karen Elizabeth Gordon, but especially The New Well Tempered Sentence: A Punctuation Handbook for the Innocent, the Eager, and the Doomed
• GMC: Goal, Motivation, and Conflict, by Debra Dixon
• Story Engineering, by Larry Brooks
• Hooked:  Write Fiction that Grabs Readers at Page One & Never Lets Them Go, by Les Edgerton
• Any Internet search for “craft writing books” or “craft writing blogs”
• Books by publishing writers on how to sell work in your genre
• The Dummies/Idiots guides related to writing
• Duotrope.com, Ralan.com
• The website Preditors & Editors (yes, it’s spelled like that)
• Following or friending your favorite living authors on social media
• Setting up your own blog, not named after your first novel
• Make sure to have watched and studied the following movies:  The Fugitive.  Star Wars (the original one).  The Princess Bridge.  The Avengers.  Fight Club.  Titanic.  Thelma & Louise.  They will come up repeatedly in classes and discussions

What are yours?