Use this coming weekend to get to know your characters just that little bit better. 

1. Create a detailed backstory for each of your main characters

You don’t have to tell readers the entire backstory—in fact it’s best if you only reveal the minimum needed to carry the story along—but you need to know it.

2. Be mean to your characters in order to create change

I know it’s hard to create wonderful characters that are real to you and then make horrible things happen to them, but you have to. The struggle against odds, against the bad guy, against injustice, and so on, that’s what makes us root for a character, it’s what makes us want to see what happens in the end.

3. Show who your characters are through action

How characters react to the challenges you present them with, how they reach their goals, that tells a great deal about a character. But you all know this. If a person tells you one thing and does another, which are you going to believe?

4. Learn from what you like

Choose your favorite book, or books, put on your editor’s hat, and study how the author made you care about her characters. Perhaps you love them, perhaps you hate them, study how they shaped their characters to be what they wanted. 

All these points from Karen Woodward are great, and will be an excellent jumping off point for your weekend writing.

So you’ve got this brilliant idea for a novel. But as you write it just doesn’t come out the way you imagined it would. The plot becomes instantly tangled and confused. The characters won’t keep themselves coherent and sometimes they even change their names from page to page. You find you’ve lost track of your story question. You’ve just wasted hours writing pages of terrible guff.

Do not despair!

This is what first drafts look like. You just have to embrace it.

Here is author Ramona Ausubel on first drafts:

For me, the first draft is really just a big mud-rolling, dust-kicking, mess-making time in which my only job is to find the story’s heartbeat.  I allow myself to invent characters without warning, drop them if they prove to be uninteresting, change the setting in the middle, experiment with point of view, etc.  I figure that the body will grow up around the heart, that it’s always possible to bring all the various elements up and down, sculpt and polish, as long as I’ve got something that matters to me. The second draft (and the 3rd through 20th, Lord help me) involves getting out the tool belt and thinking like a carpenter.  But the first draft is all dirt and water and seeds and, hopefully, a little magic.

Of course, this method means that my first draft is almost unreadable.  Maybe someday I’ll invent a way of making a slightly cleaner mess, but until then, I try to enjoy the muck.

Click here to read more author comments on those darn first drafts.

(Source: dish.andrewsullivan.com)

If you’re feeling blocked or stuck this weekend, head on over to YA Highway and check out some recent quick writing exercises by author Kody Keplinger to get those words flowing again.

Among them:

1. One Letter, One Minute

This is the simplest writing exercise I’ve ever done, and it’s my personal favorite when I’m having trouble just putting words on paper.  First, pick any letter of the alphabet or have someone else pick one for you at random. Next, set a timer for one minute (60 seconds). In the space of that minute, write as many words as you can that start with that letter. For instance, if you pick L, start writing all the words you can think of that start with L - like, lily, lunar, love, llama.  You get the point. Try to write as many words as you possibly can before the timer runs out.

I like to do this exercise two or three times when I’m struggling with words. It just opens up your mind and makes you focus on putting words on paper so that when you start writing, you’ve already sort of opened the dam.

We love all the advice from our friends over at YA Highway, and this particular post came to our attention via that Alpha Reader Danielle Binks - who has excellent writing exercise of her own (look at the comments!)

Kody Keplinger’s website

Hey Ampersanders! What happens when you shuffle around words and ideas and play with the natural and expected order of things?

Consider:

• Beauty visits once a year.
• Bad news is the best medicine.
• Silence makes the heart grow fonder.
• Strike while the head wears the crown.
• A rolling stone is worth two in a bush.
• Uneasy lies the head that gathers moss.
• A penny is the mother of invention.

This weekend, write a paragraph or some pages or a whole story using these idiomatic mash-ups as inspiration.

(Source: be-a-better-writer.com)

sonofstageandpage (also known as book blogger Braiden) asked: Opening lines/sentences to draw/excite the reader? What makes great ones?

Kate Pullinger in the Guardian says:

Is the beginning too slow?

The first few pages of any novel are crucial to its success. A brilliant opening line like ‘Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again’ can hook your reader and draw them directly into your story. Too much scene setting can bog things down when most readers like to get straight to the heart of the story. But while you are getting a book started you will likely find that you return to the opening pages over and over again, polishing them so hard and bright that they end up rather inert and lifeless. A good tactic is to forget about the beginning until you get to the end; many writers find that they have to get to the end of a book before they can write the beginning.

Here are some classic first lines for you to admire.

Nonetheless, our advice is thus: don’t dwell on your first line. It will most likely be the last thing you write. It’s only once you know exactly what your story is about (and that this is where it has to start) that you can really start to hone that grabby, inspiring, hook of an opener.

Writing is a solitary, lonely pursuit and many writers are notoriously unhappy people.

We HATE to think of you out there languishing, Ampersanders, and we were so happy to stumble this post of 25 ways to make sure you’re a happy (or happier) writer-person.

Even just the first two tips are gold:

1. Write

Writers write. If we were little simulated characters in a video game, we’d have various meters to fill up (liquor, pee, self-esteem, tweets) and one of them would be labeled with two tags: HAPPINESS and WORD COUNT. The happy writer is a writing writer.

2. Care less

We come to the page with too many expectations. Each poor little story is like a trembling donkey upon which we heap tons of weight. We don’t just want a good book, we want a bestseller. If it isn’t perfect, we hate it. If it isn’t 100% right, it’s 1000% wrong. Problem: we care too damn much. It’s all or nothing with us and that’s the kind of dichotomy that shanks our happiness right in the kidneys. So: care less. Ease off the stress stick. Have more fun with what you’re doing. When your kids and dogs play in the mud, you can either freak out that they’re too dirty, or you can laugh and jump in the mud, too.

Click through to read all 25 tips.

Please note there’s a language warning for this link.

Sorry for the radio silence of late, Ampersanders.

We’ve been busy setting LIFE IN OUTER SPACE out into the world, and having a fine old time doing it. The launch party was a brilliant success. Thank you so much to The Little Bookroom for hosting, to MWF Director Lisa Dempster for launching and to all who came for filling Degraves Street (and blocking the cars in).

Have a look here for some photos from the night!

We have also started to read all the manuscripts that came in … and there are quite a lot of them. We don’t have a photo of the leaning tower of manuscripts like we did last year, because we’re embracing it digitally. Less visually impressive, but more ecologically sound.

We’ll be back on board next week with all the helpful writing tips and industry insights you could ask for.

In fact! Why don’t you ask us things. What do you want to know about YA publishing? We’ll try our best to answer.

Getting feedback is horrible (as we’ve discussed before) but it is only a good thing, as long as it’s good feedback. And it is so important that you are open to feedback and criticism - even if it’s scary or hard to hear. It will be helpful to you as you revise and rewrite.

Here’s a great post by Veronica Roth, called Beginner’s Mind and Revision on this very topic:

Good feedback forces writers to re-envision certain parts of our work. To the stubborn, defensive writer, this new vision is hostile; it threatens us and our writing, and we try to come up with excuses or defenses for what exists in our work so that we don’t have to change it. To the writer with a beginner’s mind, though, this new vision is an opportunity to experience our work in a new, different way— like a Choose Your Own Adventure book, offering a different path that may actually be more enjoyable than the first.

Click here to read more.

Thanks to YA Highway (as usual) for linking to such great things.