chapteronesucks

This is going to be quite an eclectic post, but I’ve received a few questions relating to time in creative writing. So, I thought I’d just make a post to address a few things.

1. Keeping track of narrated time

You as a writer need to keep track of the time that passes in your story and what happens when. Inconsistencies and incontinuities will pop up if you don’t have a good knowledge of your WIP’s time-line.

The easiest way to do this is to keep track via a visual time-line. If you outline, you can use that to make a rough time-line ahead of time. If you’re a pantser, then you can fill in the time-line as you go along.

Use this time-line to keep track of holidays, seasons, lunar cycles, healing time, travel time etc.

This is especially crucial for parallel storylines, where you might want to draw separate time-lines that you can hold up next to each other to ensure that everything matches up.

In certain instances it might also be necessary for the reader to keep track of the passing of time. You can either ensure this subtly within the writing (by sprinkling in little references to the season/date/time) or expressly by getting creative. Maybe each chapter starts with the date or the phase of the moon. Maybe your book is divided into seasons etc. If you do something like this, though, you have to be sure that the information plays a crucial role in your story.

2. Time-lapses between scenes

Time will inevitably pass in-between your scenes. But how do you communicate that time to your readers?

Firstly, you have to ask whether it’s relevant. If all your character did in the in-between time was brush her teeth and put on a nightgown, you don’t have to tell the reader that. You can use a simple sentence at the start of the next scene to familiarize your reader with the time of that scene e. g. “The next morning” or “After a night of tossing and turning”. This way the reader knows that time passed, but that nothing particularly important happened during that time.

If there are important points that you don’t want to dedicate an entire scene to, you can use the technique of telling. This should be used with circumspection, but can be a great way of relaying lots of information in a few sentences. E. g. “That morning after breakfast she had decided to head to the library to continue her research. She’d combed through shelves upon shelves of manuscripts only to end up back at square one.” Then, you can truly start the scene with the character sitting in the library, despondent. This way, the reader gets a quick catch-up as to where the story is at that moment, but you don’t have to spend too many words on it. You can also use this technique for deeply emotional events that the character may not want to spend a lot of time talking about e. g. “Lorna did not wake up that afternoon. She would never wake up again. And all Nancy had done all evening was weep.”

Comment if you guys want me to do a post about showing vs telling.

3. Flashbacks

I love flashbacks, but they have to be done well and they have to be necessary.

Flashbacks are a great way of telling a long, complex story in less words. It’s also a very valuable tool for revealing plot twists and character backstory.

Ensure that your flashbacks are adequately separated from the rest of your scenes. I don’t mean that they have to exist in a separate chapter (although this is an option), but at least use a different formatting style so that it’s clear to the reader when they’re dealing with a flashback.

Make it as easy as possible for the reader. Achronology can be disorienting and confusing. So, if you’re working with different timelines, make sure the reader knows which timeline they’re reading at the moment. You can do this by clearly indicating the time of the flashback at the beginning or woven into the writing of the scene.

Remember that these flashbacks should be relevant to your story/character arc. Don’t just throw in flashbacks for the hell of it. These scenes should reveal something important about the character or the plot.

4. How do the characters tell the time?

This is a bit of a weird one, but it should be taken into account nonetheless.

If you write contemporary fiction or historical fiction set in recent(ish) history, you don’t have to worry about this. However, those of us writing in made-up worlds or ancient/futuristic times have to think about this shit.

Have wathes/clocks been invented? Do your characters have micro chips in their brains that have them knowing the time automatically? Do they use a sundial? Are there calendars (and do they differ from the contemporary one) etc.

If your characters live in a Stone Age world, but they know when it’s 13:45, you’re gonna have to explain how the hell they know that.

Keep historical accuracy in mind if you’re not writing your own world e. g. if you’re writing a book set in Ancient Rome, you should do some research to figure out how they told time.

5. Consistency in time periods

This cannot be stressed enough. Keep healing time, travel time, seasonal changes etc consistent and realistic.

If you’re writing something set in the real world, you should research how long it takes to heal from certain wounds or how long it takes to travel between places etc.

Even if you made up your own world, own creatures and own laws of physics, you should keep the times consistent throughout the work.

That’s all I have for you on time. I hope that this very random post can be helpful.

I’ve read too many books and watched too many shows where pacing has ruined a good story. So, here are some of my tips for getting pacing right:

1. Don’t take too long to get to the inciting incident

Look, showing the ordinary life of your protagonist might be interesting if there’s something strange about their life, but readers want stuff to happen.

At least with genre fiction, you shouldn’t take too long to get to the action - the event that gets the story going.

If you can do it well and have readers invested from the start, you can start with the inciting incident. However, for most works I would recommend having it in the second chapter.

Your readers want to know what the story is about, not what the character thinks of his English teacher

2. Keep it moving, but don’t rush

Action is important. It drives the story and it’s interesting. You should make sure to put enough action in your work. Things should be happening.

BUT a novel is not a play or a movie or a comic. What makes reading a full-length novel so entertaining is the detail. The in-depth characterisation and description. The emotion and thought processes.

So, keep it moving, but don’t sacrifice the juicy details. Don’t skip from one action or dialogue scene to the next without taking your readers deeper into the intricacies of the story and characters.

It’s a delicate balance that can only truly be found by reading a lot and practicing.

3. Avoid a sagging middle

Your beginning is solid. Your end is exciting. But the middle is a chaotic mess that bores the reader. Trust me, it happens more than you might believe.

Sagging middle syndrome is a thing, and the only way to avoid it is to plan.

Look, I like pantsing, but planning the middle of your novel will help your pacing exponentially.

Make a rough outline of what needs to happen to get your characters to the climax. Add a few lighter/character-driven scenes where there are too many action scenes in the sequence. Remove events which are unnecessary. And make sure that everything makes sense!

This counts for second books in series as well. It should be good on its own, not just as a filler.

4. Don’t fast forward to the end

I’m looking at you, Game of Thrones.

If you’ve built up the story and set up everything for the final big bang, you have to deliver.

Keep the pacing somewhat similar to that of the rest of the story. Your readers have gotten used to it. And if they’re still reading at that point, they probably like that pace. Don’t write a relatively slow book and then have the climax be over in three pages.

I know you want the climax to be exciting. So, yes, make it a little more fast-paced than the middle. But not massively different.

5. Trust your characters

As with every aspect of creative writing, character is most important.

Is your character experiencing the scene quickly and choppily? Or are they slowing down and taking in everything?

If you stick with what your characters are feeling, you will get it right.

Look, exams have fried my brain. So, this isn’t the most well-formulated post I’ve made. But I hope that it can be helpful.

Under describe things

Fingers, teeth, and eyes

Short sentences in rapid succession build tension

Single sentence paragraphs build dread

Uncanny valley=things that aren’t normal almost getting it right

Third person limited view

Limited explanations

Rot, mold, damage, age, static, flickering, especially in places it shouldn’t be

Limited sights for your mc -blindness, darkness, fog, refuse

Real consequences

Being alone -the more people there are, the less scary it is

Intimate knowledge, but only on one side

The cousin explainer

– A lot of the time, we know there are plot holes in our stories but it’s difficult to identify them, and even when we do, it seems impossible to fix them. I decided to make a list of the most common forms plot holes manifest in and some suggestions on how to resolve them. Happy writing!

Events That Make No Sense

If you have a villain with a reputation for being “all powerful”, it shouldn’t take 10 minutes of hand to hand combat to kill them and make everything go back to normal. If a character has been a warrior for a thousand years, defeating hundreds of powerful enemies, chances are that their young, naive little apprentice will have a very difficult time killing them or even catching them off guard. If an event in your story doesn’t make any sense, you have to add an element or two that make it more believable, like adding more obstacles in front of your protagonist that add to the suspension of disbelief.

Unexplained Changes

If your character is speaking to a colleague in New York and is described as being in Los Angeles 5 pages later, that has to be explained to the reader, or they’ll be more focused on looking for context than the actual story taking place. If your character suddenly has blue hair, you need to explain to your reader why they’ve dyed it. Context is important, people.

Continuity Errors

If your main character has freckles in the first half of your book and then no freckles in the second, that will confuse your reader. It’s an easy fix, so just make the final choice and revise wherever it’s inconsistent.

Forgotten Characters

If you introduce a side character, then they go off to grab something and never come back, either explain why or pick them back up and insert them where you meant to. If they’re just an extra, that’s fine, but make that clear to the reader by not going overboard on making them seem relevant. If they’re just there to shout “fire!”, don’t spend a paragraph explaining their appearance and backstory.

Contradicting Details

This is extremely common in Fantasy and Science Fiction, where the rules of the universe are different and difficult to keep up with. This is totally okay in your first draft, as you don’t usually have your whole world built before you begin writing, but once you’ve fleshed out that first draft, you have to review and establish the system of rules in your universe, then go back into your draft and apply them. If an event relies on a phenomenon that is impossible according to your world system, then either cut the scene, fix it so it follows the rules, or rewrite the events but under a different premise.

Unresolved Subplots

If two of your side characters have some romantic chemistry and it’s emphasized at one point then never revisited, your reader will be left confused and unsatisfied. It’s okay to leave these subplots unresolved if they’re going to be continued in future installments of a series, but in a standalone, you have to take the time to wrap them up in a nice little bow. This can usually be accomplished by tying the subplot’s resolution in with the overarching conflict resolution.

Lack of Relevant Information

If a beta-reader (someone who is essential to detecting subplots because they don’t know your story inside and out as you do) has questions about how something happened or what happened to such and such, you probably forgot to explain an element of your world or revisit a character in an event, which can easily be resolved by adding a paragraph or two that refer back to that event or character and add some information the reader needs to satiate their curiosity.

Un-synced Timeline

Your story happens in a set period of time. Events occur in a certain order. The past has a specific order of events as well. Make sure these events are on one consistent timeline and that you don’t mix up the order of events when explaining stuff in a story. Information comes to readers in bits and it’s easy, as a writer, to forget that certain things have happened that you’ve already explained, so my suggestion is to, while writing, keep track of every event that you retroactively describe and that occur in the timeframe of the story and record them, in their order, so you have a timeline of your own to fact check when editing.

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FAQ //monthly writing challenges // Masterlist

•A new character comes along

•A new event happens

•A new idea is introduced

•The setting changes

•A new person is speaking

•Time moves forward or backwards a lot

If this sounds way harsh, let me explain what I mean, and where this comes from. As an author who got a book published at a relatively young age, I get a lot of questions from young(er) writers about how that happened, and a lot of those questions seem to be searching for some kind of loophole in the normal publishing process. They want to know the shortcuts, the secrets, the path of least resistance. Here’s the truth: unless you’re a celebrity, there are no loopholes, no shortcuts, no secrets. There’s just the same process everybody else goes through, and a lot mistakes to make along the way. The biggest mistake you can make is tricking yourself into thinking that the publishing industry and the craft of writing are going to be somehow different or easier for you than they are for everyone else. 

Spoiler alert: they’re not. 

I don’t think people fall into this trap because they’re arrogant. I think they fall into this trap because they just want to be published writers so badly and it seems almost impossible when you’re looking at it from the outside. The natural inclination is to hope for a lucky break. But if you’re really serious about writing, the smarter thing to do is accept that you’re going to have to go through the same rigmarole as everybody else. I’ve talked a lot about this under the writing advice tag and the publishing tag (and I encourage you to peruse those if you’re curious about the art and the industry), but I want to answer a lot of the questions I get from aspiring authors in the same place. It probably won’t be what you want to hear, but it will (I hope) improve your odds of success. 

Is it true that many writers don’t publish their first book?

Yes. I don’t have statistics, but I would actually venture a guess that most writers don’t publish their first book, and that’s because first books usually aren’t ready for readers. Writing is an art and a craft and you can’t expect to write something brilliant the first time you pick up a pen. Your first novel will probably be garbage (mine certainly was), and years later you will be so glad you didn’t publish it, because you were simply too young and too new to the publishing game to have any idea how embarrassing it would be five years later. Most published writers I talk to wrote several books before they felt like they had one worth an agent’s/reader’s time. I wrote five. It took ten years. That’s not unusual.

Do I really need to do revisions and get beta readers?

Yes. If there is one thing I could say to all aspiring writers, it would be “Do not underestimate the importance of revision.” A first draft is never perfect (nor is the last, but that’s another conversation), even if it’s your tenth novel. Your job as a writer is not only to put a story down on paper, but to reread that story with a critical eye and rewrite it as many times as you have to until you have the best possible version. My debut novel (not my first novel) went through forty-five drafts, all told, and I did a dozen of those drafts before I even started querying. Revision is not optional. It’s essential, for everyone.

What’s the best way to get an agent’s attention?

Write something worth reading and follow the rules. Nothing makes agents angrier than writers who think the rules of the publishing industry just don’t apply to them. Don’t send letters to agents who aren’t accepting queries or aren’t looking for books in your genre. Don’t sent them pages if they didn’t ask. Don’t ambush them in an elevator at a conference when they’re not on the clock. Agents hate this kind of thing and it is a surefire way to guarantee they will not offer you representation. Don’t be obnoxious. Let your work speak for itself. 

How do I avoid getting rejected?

You can’t. Everyone who wants to publish their writing gets rejected, and you have to learn not to take it personally, because 99% of the time it isn’t personal. Agents offer to represent writers whose work they’re passionate about–and as the writer, you wouldn’t want anything less. Think of it this way: how many books have you read that you liked but wouldn’t want to read over and over again? Agents face the same dilemma when thinking about who they want to represent. Because they’re going to have to work on that book for years, they’re only going to offer to represent things they really love. And what one agent doesn’t love another one might. Variety is the spice of life. (However, if you’ve done hundreds of submissions and gotten nothing but rejections, it might be time to consider revising your query letter or your book or both.) Here’s the other thing to remember: you will continue to get rejected even after you have representation and after you’ve published your first book. Destroy the fantasy that getting an agent or a book deal means instant, uncomplicated success. You’ll still be fighting an uphill battle; you’ll just have someone on your side.

Does it really take years to get a book published? 

Absolutely. Excluding the years it takes to learn to write anything worth publishing in the first place, most books still take years to go from first draft to pub day, and that’s because you’ll be querying agents, doing revisions with your agent, submitting to editors, negotiating contracts, doing more revisions with your editor, doing more revisions with a copy editor, looking at (and often revising) cover art, helping put together a marketing plan, etc. There are also a lot of factors in a book’s release date that the author has no control over. What else is on the publisher’s list for that year, for instance, or what other big books are slated for publication. If you’re a debut author, you don’t want to be competing with Jennifer Egan. There’s no fast track, and trust me, you wouldn’t want one.

Can I make a living writing?

Don’t count on it. Most authors make a lot less than you probably think they do, and even if you get a sizable advance, that money is going to be paid out in installments over literally years, and you don’t make any royalties until your publisher makes back your advance. Many authors never make royalties at all for that reason. I’m certainly not going to see any anytime soon, and that’s on a book that’s been out a year already and even hit the bestseller list in the UK. Let me be clear: I’m not complaining about the size of my advance, because it was incredibly generous. I’m trying to illustrate how money in publishing works. Unless you’re James Patterson, sales are probably going to be disappointing and it’s probably not going to be a steady source of income. Plan on having another job.

What can I do to make this easier?

Educate yourself. There are no shortcuts in publishing, and this is one of those things you, like everybody else, have to do if you want to have any hope of success. You have to learn about the industry and learn what normal is precisely because you’re not an exception to the rule. Take writing classes and workshops and find some beta readers. Follow published writers and agents and editors online and learn the dos and don’ts of query letters, conferences, submissions, etc. Attend a publishing institute if you can. Do the research to find which agents represent the kind of stuff you write. Do the research to find out what else is out there in the world that might be comparable to what you’re writing. Learn about why you might want to hire a publicist and how to put together a decent website. Give yourself every advantage you can, not by trying to beat the system, but by learning how the system works.

There are a dozen other questions I could include here, but I think you probably get the point by now. If you really want to make a career for yourself as a traditionally published writer, it’s going to require a lot of work, a lot of commitment, a lot of disappointment, and probably years of your life before you have anything to show for it. Are there exceptions to every rule? Of course. But odds are you probably aren’t one of them, and your chances of success will be much better if you don’t buy into that fantasy. You have to put the same time and effort in as everybody else. No loopholes, no shortcuts. 

Getting stabbed is an experience that no one in their right mind would want to have. But, what if you do get stabbed? What would that feel like?

It usually feels like you’re being punched.

The description of being punched really hard comes up a lot when people describe the experience. One woman said she didn’t even realize she was being stabbed, she just thought her attacker was punching her as hard as he could. Many people don’t feel the actual puncturing, just the force of the knife hitting them.

You might feel nothing at all.

This wasn’t as common as the feeling of being hit, but some people said they literally felt nothing. One person said they felt nothing, but their brain started racing and their fight or flight kicked in. Another didn’t realize someone stabbed them until they saw that they were bleeding profusely.

Occasionally, it feels like you got shocked.

A few stab wound survivors described it as a very quick, but powerful, electric shock. One person described it as static electricity, while another said it was like lightening hitting them. The pain of the initial shock goes away as quickly as it occurred.

Eventually, over time,  it’s probably going to hurt.