Grey Channing

SOFTER: “  stop doing that— stop trying to hide your emotions from me.  ” “  i can’t make you trust me. but i’m gonna stick around long enough for you to realize you can.  ” “  not everyone is just gonna become another scar. some people will stay, if you let them.  ” “  i feel like i’ve been living in a storm for so long, like i’m just drifting from wave or wave hoping i won’t drown.  ” “  what happened to you? what made you so scared to stay still long enough to let someone in?  ” “  i don’t wanna be scared anymore.  ” “  even when you smile, your eyes are still sad.  ” “  you’re safe with me. you can let go. breathe. ”   “  i just want to belong somewhere again. or to someone, i guess.  ” “  the thing about never having a home, is you don’t know what to do when you’re finally given one. you just feel like you’re waiting for something to take it away again.  ” “  would you just sit still? you’re gonna get an infection if you don’t let me clean this up.  ” “  i’m not gonna hurt you. i’m just here to help.  ” “  close your eyes. go back to sleep. nothing can hurt you while i’m here.  ” “  you looked so peaceful while you were sleeping…i couldn’t bring myself to wake you up.  ” “  why do you trust me?  ” “  don’t do that— don’t shut down on me. let me in.  ” “  you were talking in your sleep again. i’m starting to think they’re memories and not just dreams.  ” “  i’m not used to letting people close. i don’t like being vulnerable— but i want to, with you. i want to let you in.  ” “  how did you get this scar?  ” “ i don’t always need you to fix everything. i just— sometimes i just want you to listen. ” “  you’re so beautiful when you laugh. i wish i could see it more, but maybe it’s the rarity of it that makes it so captivating. ”

Something he said once about a popular female character has always stuck with me. The question “is this a good role model for girls?” was brought up about this character, and his response was, “why is this never asked about male characters and boys?”

knee-jerk reaction was to roll my eyes at him…but he was right. we don’t ask this of male characters often if at all. is it because we assume male characters are created for all ages and temperaments, but female main characters are only created to set examples for girls and women?

- Aesthetics or moodboards tagged with the OC’s name. The visuals could make people curious to ask questions.

- Blurbs of writing about them, either from a WIP story or something standalone about them.

- A straightforward bio with things like name, age, history, personality, interests.

- Search for prompts or lists of questions, or tag games. You don’t have to wait to be tagged to answer questions!

- I’ve seen some people include a little list of mini character bios on their WIP info page, sometimes including face claims.

Do an outline, whatever way works best. Get yourself out of the word soup and know where the story is headed.

Conflicts and obstacles. Hurt the protagonist, put things in their way, this keeps the story interesting. An easy journey makes the story boring and boring is hard to write.

Change the POV. Sometimes all it takes to untangle a knotted story is to look at it through different eyes, be it through the sidekick, the antagonist, a minor character, whatever.

Know the characters. You can’t write a story if the characters are strangers to you. Know their likes, dislikes, fears, and most importantly, their motivation. This makes the path clearer.

Fill in holes. Writing doesn’t have to be linear; you can always go back and fill in plotholes, and add content and context.

Have flashbacks, hallucinations, dream sequences or foreshadowing events. These stir the story up, deviations from the expected course add a feeling of urgency and uncertainty to the narrative.

Introduce a new mystery. If there’s something that just doesn’t add up, a big question mark, the story becomes more compelling. Beware: this can also cause you to sink further into the mire.

Take something from your protagonist. A weapon, asset, ally or loved one. Force him to operate without it, it can reinvigorate a stale story.

Twists and betrayal. Maybe someone isn’t who they say they are or the protagonist is betrayed by someone he thought he could trust. This can shake the story up and get it rolling again.

Secrets. If someone has a deep, dark secret that they’re forced to lie about, it’s a good way to stir up some fresh conflict. New lies to cover up the old ones, the secret being revealed, and all the resulting chaos.

Kill someone. Make a character death that is productive to the plot, but not “just because”. If done well, it affects all the characters, stirs up the story and gets it moving.

Ill-advised character actions. Tension is created when a character we love does something we hate. Identify the thing the readers don’t want to happen, then engineer it so it happens worse than they imagined.

Create cliff-hangers. Keep the readers’ attention by putting the characters into new problems and make them wait for you to write your way out of it. This challenge can really bring out your creativity.

Raise the stakes. Make the consequences of failure worse, make the journey harder. Suddenly the protagonist’s goal is more than he expected, or he has to make an important choice.

Make the hero active. You can’t always wait for external influences on the characters, sometimes you have to make the hero take actions himself. Not necessarily to be successful, but active and complicit in the narrative.

Different threat levels. Make the conflicts on a physical level (“I’m about to be killed by a demon”), an emotional level (“But that demon was my true love”) and a philosophical level (“If I’m forced to kill my true love before they kill me, how can love ever succeed in the face of evil?”).

Figure out an ending. If you know where the story is going to end, it helps get the ball rolling towards that end, even if it’s not the same ending that you actually end up writing.

What if? What if the hero kills the antagonist now, gets captured, or goes insane? When you write down different questions like these, the answer to how to continue the story will present itself.

If writing historical fiction has taught me anything, it’s this, so I recently analysed how I go about it and thought I’d share my studies. (Pardon the self-praise, but I should probably mention that I find I’m quite the natural at researching.)

Any additions and suggestions are most welcome, of course, since this is what works for me in particular. It might not work for you. Also, I’m interested in seeing how it works differently for different people.

I’ll use my WIP Blackbirds which is set in 17th-century Norway for the examples.

No. 1: Trust your intuition.

This one seems obvious, but it’s not. If something feels off about your facts or if you feel you should check or double-check something, do it. 

Example: People use fire for light and warmth in the 17th Century. Duh. To make a fire, they need wood. Well, duh. Right? No, it’s not. Most of my WIP takes place on an island which is above the treeline, so I got suspicious when I realised wood might not be that easy to come by.

No. 2: Do not trust Occam’s razor.

In case you’ve never heard of it, Occam’s razor is the idea that, when compared to each other, the easiest solution to a problem is the right one. It’s not.

Example: But people did use wood to make fires. That’s a fact. I also knew they did, in fact, own wood on that particular above-the-treeline island, because they used it to build boats, houses, and drying racks for fish (fishing industry being their main income). And that’s what rang a bell. Wood is invaluable. And they’d need a huge fucking lot of it for fire. Seems almost like a waste …

No. 3: Do not trust only one source or the first source you come across.

Unless you tried your best (more or less) and can’t find another one.

Example: I went through three sources that told me people used wood as a combustible. The fourth one told me that people in marshy areas (particularly in Scotland) would use peat instead. Bingo!

No. 4: Do not aim for perfection.

That’s the most important rule, and for me, it’s the hardest to follow. I’m a perfectionist, but there is no such thing as perfection when it comes to research, especially historical. I constantly need to remind myself that even historians don’t know everything, no matter how many sources they combed through. A lot of it is also based on interpretation and common sense.

Example: Since the area my WIP takes place in is in fact pretty marshy, I figured the people might indeed have used peat, which was way easier to produce/harvest than wood and which they also used for their houses. But that doesn’t mean I’m right. I could be entirely wrong about my interpretation, but it does make sense and sounds logical. And I’ll never know* the real answer, unless I’ll complete the time machine which I’ve been building in my attic for the last five years. (Kidding. Unfortunately.)

This is pretty simple. Authors get paid when you buy their books. If you don’t buy their books, they don’t get paid. They get paid a percentage of the price you pay for their books. If you buy highly discounted books (from amazon or B&N or Scholastic book fairs), they get paid a lot less. If you borrow a book from the library, they got paid for that one time (in the US), but at least they got that. If you read a book from a pirated site, they don’t get paid.

The problem I see is that most people don’t understand this very simple equation. They think that authors get paid by publishers just to be authors. Hint: we don’t. Authors don’t get paid to do book tours. Unless people buy their books. Authors don’t get paid by the government to be authors. Authors don’t get paid by Hollywood for their books unless they get a pittance if they’re actually given an option (1% of authors get books optioned, 1% of those get made into movies). If an author gets a movie made, they still make very little of that money, except for if books are purchased. If an author wins an award, most of the time, they make no money from that directly, only if more books are sold.

Are you starting to understand what my point is here?

Yes, some authors make money on the side doing school visits for children. A lot of them don’t even make that, especially in Utah, where local publishers are using school visits as a promotional opportunity and have nearly eliminated the market for paid visits from authors who AREN’T trying to push books on kids. (Yes, I have strong feelings about this.)

Yes, these days authors make money sometimes by being youtube celebrities (I can count on one hand the number of authors doing this). Yes, authors sometimes make money through Patreon, though this is pretty new and we’re still figuring it out. Think about this for a minute. Authors have to hustle to make money because actually writing books doesn’t pay them very much. What? Yeah, even NYT best-selling authors are not making enough to pay mortgages sometimes.

In the UK, there’s something called Public Lending Rights, where an author gets about 8 pence per borrow of their books (it’s a little more complicated than that, because they sample from a subset of libraries, but that’s the basic idea). So if a hundred people borrowed my book over the course of a year, I would get about £8. That may not sound like much, but that’s kinda the point OP is making.

IF am author is paid an advance by the publisher – and that is getting rarer and rarer – it is basically “back payment” for 2+ years of work to write the book, and the average advance is $5000. For two years of full-time work – so that’s about $1.00/hr if you imagine it as payment for a 40-hour work week. AND AUTHORS DO NOT START TO EARN ROYALTIES UNTIL THEY’VE EARNED OUT THEIR ADVANCE. That means paying the publisher back in full for that advance money.

So really, authors make nothing until they’ve sold at least ~1000 books.

Most bestsellers sell roughly 5000 books. So to sell 1000 books and earn out the advance is extremely rare and extremely difficult. Most authors never sell enough copies to start earning royalties per sale, or else it takes 5+ years… and that’s IF despite low sales the publisher keeps your book in print at all. Most won’t.

If an author has not earned out their advance the first 6 months, most publishers stop printing that book, and the author never makes anything from what has already been sold because it goes to paying the publisher back for that advance.

Also when we say authors earn money for each book sale: it’s about $0.60 per book.

Yes, you’re paying $17.99+ for a hardcover or $8.99 for a paperback or ebook, but that is NOT how much the author gets. So if you imagine that an author DOES become a bestseller – let’s say they sell those 5000 copies and earn out their advance, so they get to make some money on the remaining 4000 books sold – that’s still only another $2400. It has likely been an additional 2-5 years at this point since they sold the book to a publisher.

So for 4-7 years of full time work, an average author makes MAYBE $7500. IF they are extremely successful and lucky.

That’s less than a dollar an hour for almost a decade of work.

Do not pirate books.