Happy first of November! For most of us, what comes to mind first about this month is Thanksgiving, perhaps followed by thoughts of crisp weather, falling leaves, and Christmas shopping. For others, though, November marks the start of NaNoWriMo – national novel writing month.

If you aren’t aware, the goal of NaNoWriMo is to write an entire novel – 50,000 words or more – in the month of November. No writing may be done on the project before November 1, though participants are (strongly!) encouraged to have an outline and characters ready to go. You “win” if you achieve this goal and upload your completed text to the official NaNoWriMo website for word-count verification. In exchange, you get…well, you get a hearty congratulations, a feeling of accomplishment, and some opportunities to get some free/reduced price stuff of the self-publishing description. (Yay?) I have a mental image of thousands of poor souls with fire in their eyes gathering in front of their computers, standing tall, with shoulders back, raising their pens in their writing hand, and declaring in a loud voice, “Hail NaNoWriMo! We who are about to die salute you!” (Then the computer answering back, “May the odds be ever in your favor.” I know, I have a strange imagination.)

Anyway, I have never participated in NaNoWriMo, and likely won’t ever, simply because of the way in which I write, the time I know it takes to write 50,000 words (my first novel, unpublished for good reason and safely hidden from critical eyes, was a whopping 250,000 words, and The Quest of the Unaligned is a far more manageable but still substantial 98,000). I wrote the first rough draft of Quest in a single semester (four and a half months), with the outline and characters completely planned out ahead of time, which resulted in a 65,000 word document. That was what I view as an intense writing schedule. Trying to do most of that in just a month? Not for me.

So for those of you who want to take on the challenge, I commend you. May your words flow swiftly, your ideas be ever fresh, and your glass/mug of a caffeinated beverage of choice be ever full and near to hand. For those of you who are considering whether or not to participate, I’ve heard from participants that there are some real advantages, including:

• A supportive environment with other people to cheer you on to write
• External motivation in the form of set dates and deadlines to meet
• The chance to interact with and learn from other writers
• Social acceptance (at least in some circles) for closeting yourself away from the world for an entire month – especially if your friends are all doing it too

Support, motivation, interaction, and acceptance are all crucial factors in getting a large writing project done, and NaNoWriMo can be a good venue for getting them. But if writing 50,000 words in a month doesn’t sound like your cup of tea, don’t worry. Novel writing can be a marathon as well as a sprint, and not participating in The National Writing Event of the Year doesn’t mean that you’re a lazy writer or that you don’t take your stories seriously. For every published author who undergoes the stress and pressure of writing a first draft of their book during NaNoWriMo, there are many more who take a long time, pondering their words, writing on the weekends or in between life events, viewing writing as a treat or stress relief rather than as a job to be done. Both ways work for some authors and are a recipe for failure for others. So whichever way you go, be happy with your decision. Cheer on those who are doing NaNoWriMo, cheer on those who are working at their own pace, and encourage those who want to tell a story to start – no matter what time of year it is. May your month be filled with stories and the satisfaction of a choice well made.

Writing fiction is hard. We all know this. Authors of any kind of fiction have to make up believable characters, design a compelling plot, drive it forward using well-chosen words, and so forth.

Writing fantasy is harder. In addition to the above, an author have to set their characters and plot in a world that’s somehow different from ours, yet believable, consistent, and interesting.

But you know what I’m finding is even harder? Writing nonfictional stories. Or, as I like to describe them, stories that are having trouble finding their story-ness.

For a Christmas present, I told an older friend of mine that I would ghost-write one of the stories about her life that she likes to tell and wants to preserve for posterity. I thought, correctly, that it would be a good challenge for me as a writer – it would force me to write about characters I didn’t make up, tell about events that actually happened, and find a way to be compelling even in a world without magic.

Those have all been challenges, definitely. But what’s harder, I’ve found, is something I wasn’t expecting: giving the story direction, which basically means giving it story-ness.

In a good fictional story, you start with a direction in mind before you even start writing. Characters want to do something, achieve something, or possibly keep something from happening. This direction becomes the foundation of the story, and its driving power, until something happens to give the characters a new direction. This keeps happening until the story finally reaches its climax. This sense of narrative is a large part of what makes a story an actual story. The narrative direction of The Quest of the Unaligned, for instance, is obvious: Alaric wants to deliver the Prince’s Crown to the Cadaerian capital city by the summer solstice so that he can go home to Tonzimmel and never again have to deal with crazy people who believe in magic. This direction is gradually, or suddenly, replaced by others throughout the course of the book, but the characters always have a goal towards which they are working. This goal is passed along to the reader, who keeps turning pages because he or she feels the urgency of the characters. A good story, even if it meanders a bit, will always keep its goal or direction in the back of readers’ minds.

The problem with real life is that stories often don’t have this direction. Very often, the stories we want to tell are about funny, strange, or meaningful things that happen to us, but they don’t make sense from a narrative perspective. In other words, they aren’t actually stories.

For instance, I could tell you a fish story. If I were making one up, I could tell you that I was on a lake in Minnesota and feeling down because I’d failed a test. I was already feeling like a failure, and let me tell you – after hours of catching nothing, I was feeling even more helpless and incompetent than I had when I started. So I was thrilled when I finally felt a tug on my line. I reeled it in, fighting the fish on the other end for a good ten minutes before I finally pulled it into the boat and found that – you guessed it – it was just under the size limit. I was so frustrated that I almost decided to keep it anyway. But that wasn’t who I was, so I got to work. With the fish squirming in my hands, I jiggled the hook out of its mouth. What do you know, though, that dumb fish bit right back down on the lure again. Now even more frustrated, I grabbed the lure again. After another minute of slippery and delicate maneuvering, I had almost extracted the lure, when the fish squirmed once more and chomped down on the hook so hard that I couldn’t see how I would get it out of the creature’s mouth.

Why? I thought. Why should I do this again? Again, I thought about keeping it – the fish did seem to have a death wish after all – but then I looked at flopping pitifully in my lap and shook my head. No. This fish just needed a little extra help. It was going to live, if I had anything to say about it! Setting my jaw, I wiped my hands on a spare towel I kept in the boat, and carefully wiggled and pulled and twisted that hook until I got it out of the fish’s mouth. And when I slipped the fish back over the side of the boat and watched it swim away, full of life and shining silver in the clear water, my feelings of helplessness slipped away with it.

Okay, so that story isn’t fantastic, but at least it has a general driving theme. Person feels helpless, person is given a situation in which she addresses her helplessness, person no longer feels helpless. Yay.

Now that’s a nice story, but here’s what actually happened. I was out on the lake fishing with my sister and father, and we were having a great time. At least I was; my sister was quite young, and so was a little bored with the whole process. I hooked the fish in question but wasn’t good enough yet to actually land it, so my father pulled it into the boat. It was way too small to keep, and he did the dirty work of actually getting the hook out of the fish’s mouth. The next part of the story was true, however: it was so stupid that it bit down another two times on the lure before my dad could finally release the fish. As he worked, getting ever more exasperated, my sister and I were giggling about how dumb the fish was. He finally got the hook out for the last time, released the fish, and we all continued on in our quest to catch something big enough to eat.

This is an amusing happenstance, an anecdote to tell around the dinner table that night, “You wouldn’t believe how dumb this fish was that we caught!” but not a story of the sort that gets written down and shared. It has no driving force, no reason that things happen, no beginning and end. It just is. And things that just are, aren’t stories.

That’s why, I’m discovering, it’s difficult to write compelling nonfiction. The same collection of astounding happenings that’s fun to hear about in person just falls flat when it’s written out on paper. But since it’s nonfiction, the author doesn’t have the liberty to create themes and purpose where they don’t exist, or to change or streamline events to make them more narratively coherent.

So what do you do? I’m not sure what the best solution is, but here’s what I’ve come up with so far: sandwich the true story in between a realistic (but made up) opening and closing. The opening and closing will exist to introduce and then to sum up the “point” of the story, which I will try to emphasize by stressing certain parts of the narrative and leaving others out. (For instance, certain individuals, while telling a story in person, might describe the exact outfits that everyone wore when they went camping and were chased by a bear. That doesn’t mean these details should actually make it into the final story.) I’m hoping that this will strike an appropriate balance between keeping the story “the way it happened” and writing something that will be readable and interesting.

However it turns out, though, I’m glad to have had this chance to experience a very different kind of writing process and keep improving my skills. If I can write a compelling nonfiction narrative, after all, my next fictional story should be a piece of cake!

Your turn: Have you ever attempted to write a nonfictional story? If so, do you have any tips or experiences you’d like to share?

What do your characters do for fun? If you’re a writer, the answer to this question can go a long way toward helping readers connect to your stories. While many writers develop long lists of attributes of their characters that never make it into a novel, a character’s favorite activities should be high on the list of things to be mentioned – even if that favorite activity has nothing to do with the plot. Why? There are three reasons: simple character building, personality/motivational character building, and abilities character building

First, we as people are built to connect with other people. Learning interesting things about others – how they’re different and unique individuals – hooks our interest and makes us care about what happens to them. For instance, take Suzie. Suzie is a girl. She is nine years old. She is an orphan. From Zimbabwe. Who was adopted into an upper-class African-American family. Her favorite colors are pink and silver. She does well at school – especially math – but she loves playing soccer.

With each additional piece of information, we learn something about Suzie and thus become more attached to her as a person. At the beginning, Suzie is indistinguishable from any other girl. By the end, we know a bit about her, and might care enough to find out more.

Note, however, that we still only know facts about Suzie. We don’t know why she feels the way she does, or how her love of soccer might be relevant to anything else that happens in her life. This leads to the second thing that sharing a favorite activity in a story can help you with: giving the audience a “hook” into the character’s personality or motivations. Let’s say that our story about Suzie revolves around her settling into her new life in America with her new family. This, clearly, has nothing to do with soccer. However, an author could use this love of soccer to show readers what Suzie is like.

Suzie might talk about how she loves soccer because she doesn’t have to speak English to play, so she can be part of a team, and be valued by her teammates. She might say that when she played soccer in Zimbabwe, she was able to forget about being hungry, about the guns and kidnappings and the fear that hung over the orphanage like a cold mist, and focus on winning the game. In this case, revealing Suzie’s love of soccer and why it’s important to her helps readers understand where this girl is coming from. It gives readers a glimpse into her past, how it shapes her present, and helps them see how Suzie might react to future events. By using soccer as the vehicle to discuss Suzie’s past, the author doesn’t have to spell out for readers that she is embarrassed by her poor English abilities, wants friends, and is afraid of bad things happening that she can’t control. These facts can come out in the context of a story, and also give insights into who Suzie is as a person.

Finally, favorite activities can give insights into characters’ abilities or actions that relate to the plot of the story. For instance, Suzie might in a fit of anger kick a rock through her new parents’ window with devastating accuracy, and readers would believe it because she has a background in soccer. More positively, Suzie might be able to use her practice at focusing her attention on winning a game and letting all outside distractions go, as she attempts to study for a test, play in her school orchestra, or clean her room.

As another example, we learn in The Quest of the Unaligned that Alaric, the main character, likes to engage in knife-throwing competitions in the local bar. He gambles on his abilities as a way to earn some pocket-money, and happens to be very good. This reveals things about his personality (he’ll take bets as long as he thinks they’re safe, and he’s confident in his physical abilities), his skills (he’s athletic, good with weapons in general, and good at throwing knives in particular), and also hints at future plot points that will take place in the novel.

Another dimension to consider is whether a character’s hobby “makes sense” given their current job or situation (e.g. a sailor liking to gamble, or an English major who lives to write poetry), or is unexpected (e.g. a Ph.D. student in Marketing who loves writing fantasy novels). Both types of hobbies work, and both give insights into your character. Hobbies that “make sense” tend to be good for establishing abilities and motivations, but aren’t as good at making people care about a character. (They add depth to the dimensions that have already been established, but not breadth. For instance, knowing that a thief practices picking locks for fun is nice, but doesn’t distinguish him/her from a multitude of others.) Hobbies that are unusual, in contrast, are harder to relate to a character’s abilities and motivations pertaining to the story at hand, but can round out a character more easily.

So what do your characters do for fun, and how will you put this information to use in your next story? Leave a comment below!

For a writing contest, I have been creating – and more recently, revising – a classic fairy tale tweaked and adjusted to take place in Cadaeren. It’s been a fun process and I’m pleased with how the story is turning out. BUT…it has also been frustrating. Why? Because in general, Grimm’s fairy tales don’t follow a straightforward, easy-to-plot narrative structure.

Let me explain.

The current way that authors tend to think about plots is as follows. You begin with a protagonist, who has goals. Something happens, which threatens or changes the protagonist’s goals. The protagonist struggles, epically, to try to reach his/her goals, though he/she faces greater challenges at every turn. The protagonist then either reaches or does not reach his/her goals, and this fact is either good or bad for his/her ultimate wellbeing. (I’ve written more about these four types of story endings for anyone who is interested.)

Getting a bit more nuanced, the challenges that the protagonist faces should be in some way tied to what has happened before in the story, and to what will come after it. In other words, there should be foreshadowing, and the events of a plot should be linked rather than random. At a deeper level, one hopes that all of the events of a story would tie together to illustrate a theme or a character arc through which the author says something worth saying.

Fairy tales tend to have problems with both of these aspects of plot. This makes it difficult to stay true to the overall events of the story without doing some major revisions to characterization, significance of events, and in some cases, what actually happens. Let me give an example.

Sleeping Beauty is a fairy tale that we all know. In its original Brothers Grimm form, it goes something like this: A king and a queen have a baby daughter, and rejoice by summoning all the fairies in the realm to a feast. They fail to invite one fairy, however, who curses the princess out of spite, saying that she will prick her finger on a spindle and die. A different fairy is able to reduce the curse: the princess will only fall into a deep sleep, from which she will be awakened by true love’s kiss. The king tries to avoid fate by having all spindles in the kingdom burned. However, the princess, as foretold, pricks her finger and falls asleep. A handsome prince comes many years later, finds the princess, and kisses her. She awakens and they live happily ever after. (For a more complete version, head to http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/grimm050.html).

Who, here, is the protagonist of the story? The king and queen are the ones who take action in the beginning: they have a goal of having a child, they have a goal of protecting their child, and they face challenges that, ultimately, they cannot overcome. But the story isn’t about the king and queen. Is it about Sleeping Beauty herself? It can’t be: she has no goals or desires in the entire story. The only thing the tale says that she wants to do is try using the spindle when she sees it in action – which leads to her being cursed. All right, then. Is the protagonist the prince? He has a strong goal (to brave the mysterious castle to find the princess) and overcomes challenges to reach it, but he isn’t introduced until three quarters of the way through the story. Thus our first problem in retelling it.

In terms of tying elements of the plot together, Sleeping Beauty also has trouble. First, the evil fairy who curses the princess shows up in the beginning of the story, curses the girl, then vanishes, never to return. There’s no reason why there has to be an evil fairy at all. There could instead be an ancient curse that the firstborn of the line always dies, or the king could have found a cursed magic ring that grants the opposite of any wish the wearer requests, thus cursing his daughter with death rather than long life. Any of these would set up a similar problem that could be solved in exactly the same way as the original story is: a good fairy “reduces” the curse or threat to “only” a hundred-year sleep. Sure, why not.

In contrast, a tightly written story has a problem that is specific and unique to the plot and thus can only be solved in a way that is also specific and unique. The Disney version of Sleeping Beauty did this well: Maleficent becomes a character who fights against Sleeping Beauty and her prince, eventually turning herself into a dragon whom the prince must slay in single combat before he can reach the princess. This is a villain whom a nameless ancient curse couldn’t replace, and who the audience cares about defeating.

Second, in the original story, there is no explanation for why certain events happen: the way to reduce the curse is to make the princess instead fall into a hundred-year sleep. Why? Who knows. When she turns fifteen, there simply is an old woman spinning whom she finds, and pricks her finger on the spindle. Why, when spindles have been outlawed? Who knows. After the hundred years pass, there simply is a prince who shows up at the right time. Where did he come from? Why does he want to succeed? Why do we care about him in particular? Who knows.

Finally, there is no character arc – either steadfast or change – that the story puts forth, and no deeper themes (except the simple “one cannot escape fate” message that lies at the heart of many fairy tales) that a retelling could draw upon. Is the princess the same person after her hundred years of sleep than she was before? She might be – or she might not. One retelling might portray the princess as a bold, independent girl who knows and fights against her fate, while another might portray her as a sweet, innocent spirit who knows nothing of what is to happen to her. One princess might come to face her fear of death and be bolder and wiser for it, while another might be humbled after finding that she isn’t as in control of her fate as she realized. Both of these tales could use the same events, thus being equally true to the story, but the characters involved would be completely different.

This is a nice thing for authors, on the one hand. By using a fairy tale framework, you are free to create characters who have unique personalities and motivations, while still giving audiences enough cues so that they know what they’re getting into. When one reads a tale of Sleeping Beauty, for instance, one expects there to be curse, a long sleep, and a prince at the end of the tale with whom the awakened princess can live happily ever after, even while one hopes for new and exciting twists on the plot and characters.

On the other hand, however, adding these unique personalities and motivations makes it difficult to stay true to all the “random” elements of the story. If you make Sleeping Beauty the protagonist, with goals of her own, these goals will somehow have to be pursued throughout the course of the book. To keep the classic plot points from becoming just superfluous happenings along the heroine’s journey, you’ll need to tie them in somehow with her goals. It wouldn’t do, for instance, to have her goal be “becoming the world’s greatest pastry chef,” then have her prick her finger on a spindle, fall asleep, wake up, get married, and finally become the world’s greatest pastry chef. In other words, if the classic events of Sleeping Beauty don’t add anything to the grand plot, then it probably isn’t the story of Sleeping Beauty – or, at least, it shouldn’t be.

In contrast, one plot that might work would be for Sleeping Beauty to have the goal of caring for her people no matter what happens to her. The story might, then, have her rush against time to set up a system of government that will last for a hundred years. She would then prick her finger (either by mistake or as the result of her Evil Enemy) just before signing the final document, waking up a hundred years later to a national disaster and a shambles of a government. She would then need to summon all her wits and resources to try to bring her country back together and defeat the Evil Enemy once and for all. You would have to incorporate, though, what role the prince would play in this, who the Evil Enemy is, and why the princess fell for the whole spindle thing.

In other words, any plot you pick, no matter how interesting it is, has to address the “why” issues raised earlier. There is often a significant tension, in fact, between staying true to the plot of the story and making the story coherent. One answer is to change parts of the narrative to make them flow better. Again, the Disney version of Sleeping Beauty does a good job of this. Sleeping Beauty pricks her finger because Maleficent bewitches her. Also, changing the original story to address the “why this prince” issue, the Disney version compresses the time span. The prince who saves her has been part of the story from the beginning, which not only makes the audience care more about his success, but also answers the question of why he is the “chosen one” from the story’s perspective to save the princess.

Even the Disney version of Sleeping Beauty, though, is weak on characterization and protagonist goals. The movie Maleficent, for all its clichés, was far stronger in this aspect. By introducing a new character, and making her the driving force behind all the “random” occurrences in the original story for her own aims, the new story was able to have a character arc, be goal-driven, and still be recognizable as the “Sleeping Beauty” story. Unfortunately, it’s much harder to do this when one is retelling many common fairy tales from the perspective of the protagonist.

It’s still worthwhile, entertaining to write, and hopefully fun to read. Some of my favorite childhood books were fairy-tale retellings. (Ella Enchanted by Gail Carson Levine, for instance.) But even so, it’s a challenge. I look forward to sharing with you the result of my Cadaerian fairy tale and seeing what you think of how I addressed these issues above.

I was delighted last week to have an opportunity to be a beta reader for a fairly successful author of middle-grade adventure books. In my opinion, this is one of the best parts of being a novelist – being asked to enter into other people’s worlds, make comments, identify things that can be done better, ask questions about their plot and world-building and characters (and hopefully get answers), and have those suggestions be listened to and used to make the story better.

Being a beta reader is an exchange: an author lets you into their world before it’s quite polished, before it’s set in stone and unchangeable, before Readers – that great nameless crowd of critics – is allowed to see what the author’s mind has created. As a beta reader, you are one of a few lucky ones chosen to be the first to read a new story, and more than that, one of the very few given permission to meddle with the words on the page. You are given permission to make suggestions for wording changes, character changes, even large future changes in plot development – with the guarantee that an author will actually listen to what you suggest. Wow.

In exchange for this honor, of course, a beta reader has some responsibilities. The beta reader is supposed to engage with the text. To note errors or clunky wording or situations that don’t make sense. To raise questions that the author may not have thought about – because other readers will, and it’s better for an author to know now (and prepare or fix things) than to find out later in negative Amazon reviews.

At least, this has always been my understanding. Until, that is, I received a glowing and surprised email from the author of said middle-grade adventure book in response to my comments. “I certainly didn’t mean for you to invest this much time and thought into the story,” it said. “I didn’t expect it, but I’m grateful.”

I was just as shocked as she was. It’s not like I wrote a novel in response to her novel. I just followed the steps for being a Good Beta Reader. (I think I learned these in college…if not, they should be taught there!)

1. Specific notes. As you read, identify places where you stumble over wording choices. If you’re working in a Microsoft Word document, leave a comment. If not, use a “notes” document. Note the page/sentence, and state why it was confusing or suggest an alternate wording.
2. Similarly, mark/note all typos that you find. These slip by even the best authors.
3. If something seems odd, out of character, or brings you up sharply, note that too. Basically, you want to flag anything for the author that kept you from “living” the story as it’s being told.
4. Write comments as you progress, noting things you like and things you would improve.
5. General notes. After you’ve finished the story, think about a few good things overall from the book, and a question or two that lingers in your mind after you’ve finished. Authors want to know how their books impact readers – tell them! If you have concerns or questions about where the book/series is going, you should also include these.
6. If you have more general notes on writing style, plot, character development, etc. after reading the book, include these as well.

Writing these notes doesn’t take very long if you’re making them as you go through the novel. The end result isn’t horribly lengthy either. I ended up making about a page and a half of general notes, questions, and fangirling about the book. (As a side note, this last term, if you’re unfamiliar, consists of putting on paper the things I really liked about the work and that I thought the author did a good job with – whether it’s good descriptions, excellent true-to-life characters, deep relationship portrayal, exciting action, or all of the above. I like doing this when I can in good faith. As an author, I know how powerful specific compliments can be. And as a reader, I like being able to acknowledge authors for the things they really are talented at!). In addition, I also noted about 15 instances (in an entire full-length novel, so pretty good!) in which I suggested that the author change wording, either because of typos or confusing structure.

It was fun for me, and part of the job of being a responsible beta reader.

So why was this author so surprised?

Whatever answer I give isn’t going to make writers as a whole look good. Do writers not know how to critique others’ work? They must, because as writers, they have to rewrite their own work – and noting mistakes and places of confusion in someone else’s is far easier. Do writers not want to take the time to critique others’ work? If so, it’s an abuse of the system: one should not agree to be a beta reader unless one is willing to give the author something in exchange for letting you read the book before everyone else. Are the criteria for being a good beta reader something other than what I was taught? This is, I think, closest to the truth – and if so, then the truth is a sad one.

If this is the truth, then I have not had a normal experience in my writing situation; I have had an absurdly blessed one. In college, I found two separate small groups of fantastic writer-friends who would give me significant, thoughtful beta-reading feedback on my works in progress, and I would do the same for theirs. I learned how to beta-read and critique along with them, and now, years after college, we’ve continued doing it for each other.

Just this past week, one of these friends pointed out that I should entirely remove one of the secondary characters from a short story I had written – he didn’t do anything to move the story forward, he wasn’t a strong character, and his removal would increase the story’s tension by a large amount. I would never have considered doing that on my own, but she was right. I revised the story, and it is significantly improved.

As an author, I treasure my beta-readers, and I take the beta-reading process seriously. Let me urge you to do the same. You don’t have to have a degree in English or even think that you have “the right answers” when you make comments on a story. Authors value your thoughts – because you’re a lover of words who hasn’t seen their story before. That fact alone makes your opinions uniquely valuable. Will you share those opinions with authors, while they still have a chance to take your insights into consideration? I hope you will.

Final question for authors: what has been your experience with beta-readers? Would you be surprised to receive feedback from a beta-reader that follows the steps listed above? Would you be frustrated if you DIDN’T receive feedback from a beta-reader that addressed all these points?

Final question for readers: How much feedback do you think is reasonable or normal for beta-readers to give to authors? Why?