Fiction Writing Archives - Page 13 of 16

Challenges of Writing Your Novel (After Your First Draft) & Resources to Help You Survive and Thrive

Posted on August 17, 2013 Written by Pinar Tarhan

red_editing_pen — Image via urbanmusewriter.com.

I know this blog has taken a turn towards fiction, but I promise you it’s not absolute or permanent. I’ve always written fiction, and I’ve become addicted to non-fiction as of late 2009 (aka when I discovered blogging).

However it is hard to find a balance between the two, and with many contest deadlines being in spring, summer or early fall, I’ve been cheating on my non-fiction a bit. That, and I’m still waiting for my text-to-speech software, which endured a long adventure on the way to me, which soon you will read about.

Completing your first draft is no easy task. You need to fight blocks, doubt, urges to edit and give up. But while it is an essential step on the way to getting published, it is still way down on the ladder – with so many more steps left to climb up.

My first draft for my first novel (attempt) was finished some months ago. Now it’s being re-read and edited. I’ll soon be submitting it to two contests and later to agents and publishers.

– Editing: It goes without saying. You need to pay attention to punctuation, grammar, story flow (are the events in the right order?, do the scenes follow each other smoothly?, etc), fact-checking, research to you left to be added later.

My favorite editing resource is Sigrid Mcdonalds’ Be Your Own Editor.

– Formatting: You need to correctly format your manuscript including anything from spacing to font size. There’s a lot of software (both free and paid) for novel writing on the web. But while I adore my scriptwriting software (Final Draft), I couldn’t find one I prefer over Word when it comes to writing novels. Old-fashioned Word-lovers like me shall not worry, though, because formatting with it is not that complicated. I use a lot of Writer’s Digest books as resources, and I own Formatting and Submitting Your Manuscript by Chuck Sambuchino.

– Writing your synopsis: Well, this is a form of torture. Yes, it is a necessary evil. I can’t argue with that. But I doubt there are many authors who claim to love writing this one-page (or two) summary of their manuscript where you have to give all the main points without the freedom of space. Oh boy.

Burdened with this obligatory task, I dug into the Internet, and I found Jane Friedman’s article and list quite useful: Back to Basics: Writing a Novel Synopsis. I also recommend: Movie Synopsis Examples on Writer’s Digest.

thinking writer — Image via nancydimauro.blogspot.com

– Prologue or no prologue: My story starts in the present with some necessary flashbacks (yes, I’m adamant they’re necessary). However I have two scenes involving the male protagonist that take place before the flashbacks’ (these flashbacks belong to the same year) date. They aren’t description-heavy scenes, but rather dialogue-based bits that tell us plenty of information about the main character. So yes, I wrote a prologue.

Obviously if judges/agents/publishers like what they see but insist on I give it up, I’ll. My story is my child, but I’m not above cutting her hair so that she’ll get accepted to a prestigious school. I’m just saying.

– Chapters: How long and compelling are your chapters? True, there is no obligatory maximum or minimum length, and every story is different. But you might want to check if the events are separated optimally.

– Flashbacks: Do you have flashbacks? And do they add to or take away from the flow of your story?

In my case, I have no story without the flashbacks. They strengthen (and give the reason for) the main conflict. They make you care about the characters more. They also provide motives. So, for this particular story, I say “Yay!” for them.

I’m all for applying tips from industry veterans, and most writers aren’t crazy about flashbacks. But don’t forget there’s always room for breaking some rules.

– Frustration: Whether it’s loneliness, writer’s (or editor’s) block or just general frustration that makes you want to connect with people who go through similar ordeals, I suggest you have writer friends online and offline. I happen to know more writers online, and this Facebook group is awesome when it comes to support, response rate and being fun.

– Collecting agents’, publishers’ and contests databases: Where will you try to sell your book?

It’s important to construct your database so that you can get right into action as soon as you’re finished editing, formatting and polishing. You might (and probably will) get rejected in the process, but not sending out work (to the right markets) prevents acceptance too.

Where to Find Free Market Listings by Jane Friedman is a good start.

– Preparing for, and accepting rejection: Since it happened to a lot of the writers you admire, it’s safe to assume it might happen to you to. The secret to success is knowing how to deal with it. Below are several articles to guide you through the unpleasant, but usually unavoidable, event of rejection:

How to Manage the Evil Three: Rejection, Depression & Procrastination

How to Handle Rejection (and When It Might Be A Good Thing)

One of the benefits of writing a blog for writers is that I get to share my to-do list and advice in a fun way. I enjoy helping out other writers, and frankly, blogging is more fun than a boring to-do list written on a piece of paper to be forgotten later…

Writing Your Best First 10 Pages, Crafting Impressive Loglines & Getting Read

Posted on August 9, 2013 Written by Pinar Tarhan

screenplay — Image via writingwonderland.blogspot.com.

Doing something scary and challenging for the first time can be difficult. It took a lot of persuading on my friend’s part to get me on my first roller coaster (that also turned you upside down) and then I couldn’t get enough. I made her ride the same thing over and over again after that.

The process of sending my first query letter was intimidating, but now I actually like querying. Sure, it’s annoying when you aren’t drowning in exciting sellable ideas and the wait is never fun, but querying is no longer the nerve-wracking part.

Now that I entered a screenwriting competition (where you got to submit your entire script), I’m on the constant lookout for other contests. Two scripts (one movie, one TV pilot) are ready, the loglines are written and all I have to do is find approaching deadlines.

There are several prestigious competitions with awesome rewards (yes, this will be a post later), and coming up as a finalist from those can give you a decent break in the industry.

Sure, most charge a certain fee to enter, but I think it is worth it. If anything, you are even more tempted to make your story tighter and more compelling since you don’t exactly have money to burn in the beginning of your career. And you cringe at the thought of a judge hating your idea or your storytelling. So you try harder.

But how patient are the judges? How much time do they give you before they toss your story away and pick up the next entry? I’d like to think they read about a third before giving up, but maybe that’s just wishful thinking on my part.

What brought this on? Well, as writers we are always told to make our openings and first pages (and obviously the following pages after that) as unputdownable as possible. This is common sense. We don’t read stories that bore us. So it’s only fair that we make our stories interesting. It’s also fair to us too – it’s not like we’d be wiling to put hundreds of hours into something unexciting.

But completing the first 10 pages is a bit tricky, isn’t it? There’s a lot to be introduced, and there is a certain purpose to our scenes. Yes, we experiment a lot and come up with the best order possible, but in the end, we choose what makes the best sense for our story, characters and genre. Shaking up things for solely attention’s sake wouldn’t get us very far.

Why the first 10?

I was researching about other screenwriting competitions when I came across a comment from a writer who had participated as a judge in a contest and said they were allowed to pass after 10 pages. Ouch.

Thinking back, a lot of the movies I watched and novels I read weren’t that amazing in the first 10 pages or minutes. If I had passed on all the novels and movies with non-brilliant (but quite alright) starts, I’d have missed on a great deal of amazing work.

Ah, the limitations of a logline…

A logline is a short description of your story (preferably 1-3 sentences, depending on the preference of the competition/agent/etc).

Yes, it is a must element of fiction writing. You need to be able to come up with a concise yet intriguing description of your script – you will need to impress agents, studio execs, other writers, etc. in a very short time frame. And it is also great writing practice.

But the problem with brevity is that it doesn’t involve any of the alluring details that made the story worth writing; something other than a generic, done-a-million-times-before premise.

And even if you manage to squeeze in a unique point without breaking an essential logline rule (like acceptable length), it is still far away from what made your story worth telling.

John Evans’ How to Craft a Compelling Logline (obtained via PAGE International Screenwriting Awards’ newsletter) is one useful logline writing resource, and it lists some good examples of some famous stories (it also includes how it shouldn’t be done):

Potential Logline for Gladiator: “When a Roman general is betrayed and his family murdered by a corrupt prince, he returns to Rome as a gladiator to seek revenge.”

Potential Logline for Up in the Air: “A corporate vagabond’s high-flying lifestyle is jeopardized when a woman just like him captures his heart and an ambitious new co-worker threatens his job.”

Now, I watched Up in the Air and I liked it. I also find Evans’ logline to be spot-on. But would this logline compel me to read the script or watch the movie? I’m not so sure.

This is where your 10 pages (or hopefully at least bit more than that) come in. Along with your logline, your beginning is your chance to hook your readers.

After reading the 10 pages comment that inspired this post, I went back and read my first 10 pages of the two scripts I submitted. And while they do a good job introducing characters and foreshadowing, they need a bit more time (aka more scenes) to escalate.

Fingers crossed for patient judges who see what you see in your story and keep reading. And may we write better and better loglines and the most impressive beginnings (and more.)

How do you feel about loglines?

The Unbearable Lightness (and Sleep Deprivation) of Having Submitted Your Screenplay

Posted on July 31, 2013 Written by Pinar Tarhan

screenwriting competition big break — Image via bigbreakcontest.com

* I wrote this post on the morning of the 25th (of July), but I could post it today because I was on vacation (and very happy about it) with a rare and impossibly slow Internet connection (not that I cared that much about it – thanks to the holy trio of sun, sand and sea.)

I finally did it! I finally submitted my screenplay to Final Draft’s Big Break Screenwriting Competition.

After weeks and weeks strenuous of editing, and double-checking the page limit (80-120 for feature scripts, over 150 to be disqualified), I managed to rewrite my originally 240-page script to a tightly written 142-page one.

To my delight, it had become a lot tighter, and I hadn’t lost too many solid scenes. I was congratulating myself on the delicate balance I had found between showing and telling. It was past 2 on the morning of *my self-inflicted deadline (more on this in a bit), and I was still not completely finished editing.

Every time I looked I noticed stuff I could word better, repetition I could avoid, extra spaces that had been previously missed. But I had to give it up sometime, and I was looking forward to some shut eye: I was to get up only 4 hours later to catch a plane towards my hard-earned vacation.

So I crossed my fingers, hoped I hadn’t overlooked some deadly errors and opened the submitting page and to my horror, I saw the note: 135 pages max. Oops. Anything over 135 couldn’t even be downloaded. So cursing myself for not having checked the tiny number on the submission page earlier (but in my defense, why mention 150 as the absolute max. here and have a different number on the submission page?), I started, in panic, to brainstorm about what more I could possibly cut, without damaging the story.

I did my best to sharpen the dialogue further, edit some obvious parenthetical stuff and I did cut all the transitions (though I think some of them remained – I know you are not supposed to edit at the last minute, but desperate times…).

So I submitted my freshly edited, 135-page story at about 3.30 AM. I crossed my fingers, and got my confirmation email shortly after.

The irony is, I was hell-bent on not rushing things. I had started the rewrite months before. But I am one of those people who sometimes get the best inspiration hours before the impending doom deadline, even if the deadline is self-inflicted.

As opposed to the latest possible deadline of 31st, I’d wanted to finish it by 24th, since I’d be on a plane on the 25th and I wouldn’t have access to a fast and secure internet connection.

Some of my favorite scenes were actually finished on the night of 24th, and you did read about my final editing adventures…

This part was written today:

I submitted another script today, this time the pilot episode of a comedy/drama series.

Funnily enough, this time if I were to have a problem with the page number, it would be that I didn’t have enough. It’s 41 pages, and an-hour dramas are supposed to be a bit more than that, typically somewhere around 60-65. And well, it is not a sit-com. So I guess it would be an half-hour comedy/drama. Oh well…obviously I do hope it is liked. And if it is liked, the initial page number won’t matter a bit.

The thing is, when I created it, I didn’t know that much about standard lengths, and my episode page numbers (I wrote about 22 for this series) ranged from 40 to 90. Ah, the sweet oblivion of writing freely when you don’t have a clue about industry standards…

Wish me luck. And I do wish you the best of luck with all of your writing ventures. May luck, inspiration and correct (and timely) editing be with us all…

The 7 Challenges of Writing a Screenplay

Posted on June 26, 2013 Written by Pinar Tarhan

frustrated-writer — Image via susanarscott.com.

Nope, I am not going to talk about the challenges of trying to sell one. Not here. Because I’m not at that stage yet. Although considering the plausibility of my script events has been keeping me awake a bit (Plausibility is included in the list below)…

This post isn’t about finding that brilliant idea either. Yeah, your journey starts with that idea. But it is merely the beginning. Funnily enough, I didn’t use to know that. The naive, pre-writing career me used to think that the most frustrating part of being a writer was finding a great story concept. An idea worth pursuing, characters worth living with…

And while it is indeed a challenge to come up with a story that you won’t mind sharing your life with, the road after you have found your inspiration is not exactly smooth either.

Below are the current 7 challenges I’m facing:

1) Writing dialouge. Writing compelling, flowing, natural dialogue. Most of the time my characters have interactions in my head. When this just happens, I don’t intervene. I just write down whatever they say.

But keeping the dialogue engaging for 100+ pages is not exactly effortless. And it’s important to write a story that will hook you. But will it also hook the agents or studios or contest judges?

2) Finding the right title is one of the most difficult aspects of any kind of writing. But I find it harder when it comes to naming fiction.

And let’s face it, a lot of movie titles suck. If all fails, they go and name it after the characte(r), and it can work like magic if characters (and the names) are interesting and colorful.

Tango & Cash, to me, works as a title because the movie has enough conflicts and humor from the main characters’ differences and interactions. But I’ll admit that when I first heard it I thought it’d be about dogs. It’s not. It’s a cop action/comedy with Stallone and Russell from 1989. Tango and Cash are our characters’ surnames. Oh, the creativity…

3) Plausibility. Especially if you are adding some crime elements. I didn’t think I’d have to deal with this one until I started writing mysteries and thrillers. After all, grounding a drama/romance/comedy in reality isn’t that difficult.

But unfortunately one of my main characters in the romantic drama I’m working on has to go and do something extreme. And I need to be able to justify how he pulls it off.

Of course, in theory, I could change what he is “pulling off”. However, if I did that, the impact would lessen, the stakes would get lower and a lot in the story wouldn’t make sense.

If I get to sell this story, in one form or the other, I’ll tell you what inspired me to write it. And the inspiration alone needs me to write that extreme and make it worth.

On the other hand, some of the stuff we watch doesn’t make much sense. We love them despite the ridiculousness. If any fans of The Following are reading this, they will probably relate very easily.

I love, love that show. I can’t wait for season two. But even though it is set in our reality, you’ll see some of the most illogical, incompetent, amusing law enforcement behavior ever portrayed.

Yet despite those flaws, or maybe because of them (the behavior results in the villains winning over and over), the show is damn fun and addictive. But of course that show’s script comes with Kevin Williamson’s (Scream series, Dawson’s Creek, I Know What You Did Last Summer…) name and Kevin Bacon and James Purefoy are starring. My story doesn’t have such priveleges. Or any creepy yet charismatic villains (James Purefoy) going around slashing people…

But the existence of The Following does give me hope in the possibility of selling the implausible in the name of some delicious drama and conflicts.

4) The scene order. Do you go linear or non-linear? Do you write it in form linear with the occasional flashback? Do you do a crazy linear where it starts with the end and ends with the beginning? (Memento is a terrific example.)

Perhaps you just write different timelines for different characters and then have them interact, while the audience has to watch the drama like a detective solving a puzzle. 21 Grams, anyone?

The possibilities are endless. And eventually the director can play/mess with the order so that he will have his version.

But our goal is for our script to get to a director in the first place. It is crucial to write a winning version to get read and liked.

For the most part, I prefer a well-written linear story. I like to surprise and move and entertain in order, though I do have a weakness for some relevant flashbacks.

Some of my favorite linear films:

–Braveheart

-The Man without a Face

-A Perfect World

–Equilibrium (has flashbacks)

–A Royal Affair (through letters, the narrator takes us back in time and tells the story in order.)

-The Crow (has flashbacks- the character has returned from the dead)

The list goes on.

5) The ending. The ending matters. Big time. It might even matter more than it should. There are movies with a huge fan base, mostly related to the ending. The Sixth Sense, anyone?

The perfect ending makes you happy that you spent time watching the film. It shouldn’t be too happy if a happy ending would betray the story.

But make it too depressing, at the end of a depressing movie, you could question the writer’s motive. Was he trying to create tragedy for tragedy’s sake?

Then there’s the matter of being obvious. Ideally you shouldn’t see it coming from scene one, especially if it is a thriller/mystery. If it is a drama/comedy/action, it is more or less doomed in the predictability department.

Of course you can go with the modern romantic comedy trend and base the entire premise on the guy not getting the girl (or vice versa.) You might please a lot of cynics and romcom-haters this way, but a part of your audience will feel cheated. Just like you shouldn’t kill Bryan Mills at the end of a Taken movie (and of course he doesn’t die!), I think the main girl and boy should end up together – given it is really love and they aren’t hideous human beings. (Yeah, I’m talking about personality.)

And one other pet peeve…Ambiguity. A little open ending can be inspiring. But too much ambiguity can get in the way of closure.

No one said finding the right ending is easy.

6) Rewriting. You might decide to submit a previously written manuscript, thinking all you need to do is edit and format. But then you realize the whole thing will need to be rewritten because (fortunately) you are a better writer now, and you know at least a bit more about writing and selling. Of course realizing you have 2 weeks for all the rewriting, editing and formatting is one of the many “delights” of screenwriting.

7) Length. After you’ve poured your heart’s work onto the page, it might be troubling to realize that you are a couple dozen pages short. Or over.

This is one of my current problems. I do need to cut it much shorter (about 100 pages). But I find that shortening is easier than coming up with events that aren’t there. And since I’m doing a major rewrite anyway…

Right now rewriting (to match a deadline) and plausibility are my most troubling problems. After all a title can be changed. Directors can change the plans to suit their vision and for the most part, adding or subtracting a few scenes comes naturally when I’m going over the manuscript anyway.

To see how “valid” these challenges are, I recommend reading Breaking & Entering: Great Writing – A Love Story on Script Mag, a useful industry resource.

Now, it’s time to head to work and work on the screenplay for this writer. Wish me luck, and please feel free to share all your joys and frustrations about screenwriting or any kind of fiction writing.