Characters are the heart of a novel. If your characters don’t ring true, your book may be put back on the shelf, passed over by an agent, or rejected by an editor. Unbelievable characters jar readers out of the story and distance them from the action.
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A beta reader is someone, usually a fellow writer, that reads your manuscript and provides advice on how to improve the novel. Is a beta reader something your novel needs? Watch and find out.
If you choose to use a beta reader for your novel, make sure to follow your instincts. If your gut tells you that the beta reader is wrong, don’t make their suggested changes! But make sure to thank them for their time and effort! (:
If you want to take your manuscript a step beyond beta reading, check out my editing services and what they can do for your novel.
An issue with your first chapter can mean rejections from agents and editors. If you’re self publishing, readers may put the book down before reading past the free excerpt. Whatever your publishing goals, a first chapter that is free of mistakes and cliches is vital to success.
For more help with first chapters, check out my video How to Write a Great First Chapter. For even more help, check out my editing services.
Whether you’re trying to grab an agent, editor, or simply readers, a great first chapter is vital. Agents, editors, and readers alike often give books only a few paragraphs or pages of their time before deciding to move on to something else. This video will help you learn how to write a first chapter that will grab and hold on to your audience.
The advice in this video will give your first chapters a competitive edge. For more help with first chapters, check out my other video, First Chapter Mistakes and Cliches.
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image by christgr
Writing great scenes is essential to a great novel. After all, a novel is nothing more than a string of scenes tied together with common themes, goals, and characters. But it can be easy, as a writer, to create scenes that aren’t really scenes.
But what makes a scene a scene? Well, most importantly, it has to take us somewhere. It has to move the plot forward. Something has to happen that changes things for our characters. And the characters within the scene must want something. They must have desire.
So how do you identify a scene/chapter/section that’s not a scene? Here are some indicators:
Character Introductions
Not all character introductions are a problem. But if a character is introduced within a scene that has no purpose other than to introduce the character, it’s not a real scene.
Even the first time we meet a character, there must be conflict of some variety and there must be character motivation or desire.
Motivation-less Dialog
If your characters are sitting around talking about something they both already know about, with no new information or perspectives, coming to no new conclusions or resolution, you’ve written motivation-less dialog.
Image by Brian Boulos
Characters Contemplating
This happens when you need to get something across to your readers that your character already knows. Perhaps it’s a bit of backstory, an emotion, or a character quirk.
You’ll know you’ve written a contemplation scene if your character is just sitting around thinking . . . a lot . . . and doing nothing else.
Easy Plot Advancement
If all your character has to do to move the plot forward is ask someone a straight question and get a straight answer, that’s easy plot advancement, and it’s not a real scene. A scene requires conflict. But that doesn’t mean that everything your character does must be difficult.
The key is to find places to create tension. Perhaps the person she gets the answer from requires her to pay for it, but she doesn’t have any money – uh oh, conflict! Or perhaps he lives in a tall tower and she’s afraid of heights. Or maybe he’s repulsive but wants a kiss in exchange for the info.
Get creative! But also choose things that make logical sense within the context of your characters and story.
Identifying “Fake” Scenes
If you’ve identified any of the above scenes in your novel (or if you have any other scenes that don’t ring true), here are some questions to ask yourself:
If the answer to any of these questions is no, consider whether you can move the information within the scene to another, better developed scene. If that can’t be done, come up with a way to restructure the scene so that you can answer these questions with a yes.
If you’re having particular difficulty identifying whether scenes need to stay or go (or if something just feels off about your novel as a whole), it wouldn’t be a bad idea to go through each scene in your story with these questions.
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A lot of writers, especially when first starting out, fall in love with time-based adverbs. It’s such an easy, tempting way to increase tension. But is it really doing what you want it do?
Before getting into that, let’s start with some examples:
Now that we know what they are, we need to ask ourselves: do these adverbs really have a place in novels?
Consider this passage with time-based adverbs:
Suddenly a hand clutched his arm. He immediately froze, shaking in his shoes. Then a warm trickle of blood ran down his arm. When he touched it, he felt nothing but bare skin. Finally, he turned around and saw that he was alone.
Now consider it without them:
A hand clutched his arm. He froze, shaking in his shoes. A warm trickle of blood ran down his shoulder. He touched it and felt nothing but bare skin. He turned around and saw that he was alone.
Punchier, right?
It seems logical that “immediately” would seem…well…immediate! But the opposite is true. Time-based adverbs slow down the action by taking up space.
But, you might ask, how will my readers know it was immediate without the “immediately”?
Easy! If you write something and then write something else, without writing anything in between, your readers will automatically assume that it happened immediately. Awesome, right?
Consider this passage:
Jonathon leaned in and planted a gentle kiss on my lips. My heart fluttered in my chest.
So how much time passed between the kiss and her heart fluttering? None, right? That’s because we read narration as continuous. We don’t assume that she went out and had some drinks with friends before her heart fluttered, because that’s not how we read novels.
So punch up your writing by limiting (or banishing) these time-based adverbs from your narration. Your readers will thank you!
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Describing the characters in your novel is tricky business.
You see them in your mind with such clarity that you could write an entire novel about the placement of their freckles and the messiness of their curls. And that’s great for you! But not for your reader.
So how do you write killer character descriptions? Read on and find out!
Mirrors are Deadly
(and so are puddles, ponds, shards of glass or any other reflective surfaces writers come up with)
Please, please! For the love of all things literary, do not have your character describe their reflection. It makes editors, agents, and many readers cringe in terror. Why, you might ask? Because no one in their right mind ever looks in the mirror and describes themselves.
It’s unnatural. It’s cliché. It’s painful. Just don’t do it!
Less is More
Readers love the opportunity to fill in some blanks. When you pack your character descriptions with excruciating details, it dampens readers’ natural drive to involve themselves creatively in your novel. This can result in a lack of active engagement, which may mean that your novel gets flung forcefully into the slush pile.
Keep it Simple
No one wants to read about your character’s “picture-perfect, rose-colored cheeks, like two tiny cherries perched gracefully on a delicious mound of cream.”
It may surprise some writers out there, but “her cheeks were pink” works just fine.
Keep it Real
Readers don’t like to feel inferior to your characters. So if your heroine has “long, flowing, unbearably gorgeous curls that seem to float around her like an angelic halo of light,” you might want to consider taming it down a bit.
I know, I know, you love your characters and want them to be beautiful. But the middle-aged mom reading your novel in her sweltering hot SUV while her son takes karate lessons doesn’t want to develop an inferiority complex over your character’s heavenly curls.
In romance novels, however, these unrealistic descriptions are more expected.
Don’t Beat us Over the Head
If every time your character moves a muscle, she has to “tuck her long, auburn hair behind her ears,” it gets kind of old.
Describe your characters once near the beginning and maybe occasionally throughout (if you’re really afraid readers will forget or if, for some reason, it really matters).
Spread it Out
If at some point in your novel someone is described as “a slender, petite girl with luscious breasts, lovely chestnut hair cut in a stunning bob, and electric-blue eyes that could pierce the soul,” please spread out the descriptions!
Integrating descriptions into action is a great way to “hide” them from your readers. For example: “She wiped sweat from her freckled skin” is much more interesting and subtle than “She had freckles.”
Have any advice for writing great (not sucking) character descriptions? Please share in the comments!
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Ellen Brock 