Writing Fiction For Dummies
Peter Economy, Randy Ingermanson
Language: English
Pages: 385
ISBN: B002XGICAO
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
A complete guide to writing and selling your novel
So you want to write a novel? Great! That’s a worthy goal, no matter what your reason. But don’t settle for just writing a novel. Aim high. Write a novel that you intend to sell to a publisher. Writing Fiction for Dummies is a complete guide designed to coach you every step along the path from beginning writer to royalty-earning author. Here are some things you’ll learn in Writing Fiction for Dummies:
- Strategic Planning: Pinpoint where you are on the roadmap to publication; discover what every reader desperately wants from a story; home in on a marketable category; choose from among the four most common creative styles; and learn the self-management methods of professional writers.
- Writing Powerful Fiction: Construct a story world that rings true; create believable, unpredictable characters; build a strong plot with all six layers of complexity of a modern novel; and infuse it all with a strong theme.
- Self-Editing Your Novel: Psychoanalyze your characters to bring them fully to life; edit your story structure from the top down; fix broken scenes; and polish your action and dialogue.
- Finding An Agent and Getting Published: Write a query letter, a synopsis, and a proposal; pitch your work to agents and editors without fear.
Writing Fiction For Dummies takes you from being a writer to being an author. It can happen—if you have the talent and persistence to do what you need to do.
more. We call this mix your style. Your style may be complex or simple, flat or flowery, emotive or intellectual. You’ll find your personal style over time. It’s another tool that lets you give your reader a powerful emotional experience — one that captures your essential being. Don’t try to mimic the style of some other author. Study those other authors, of course. Decide what you like in Austen, Twain, Hemingway, Faulkner, and a thousand others. But at the end of the day, realize that you
brought to justice, so the reader must not know who the bad guy is until the end of the book. (If you violate this rule, you’re not writing a mystery; you’re writing a thriller.) Mysteries are almost always shelved in the mystery section of the bookstore; one exception seems to be the serial-killer novel, which may end up shelved with thrillers. Both men and women enjoy the mystery genre, which crosses all age lines, so the category is very broad. It has many subgenres, including police
the guidelines on that publisher’s Web site and find out right now what the word count of your novel needs to be. Other categories in which you may have tight word-count requirements are mysteries or science fiction novels that fit into an existing line. If you’re targeting one of these, check the publisher’s Web site for requirements. Children’s novels are generally much shorter than novels for adults, and books for young adults are often shorter than adult-level novels, but they can be long in
21st century. This cultural driver, entailment, translates directly into gender inequality, giving Pride and Prejudice its timeless appeal. When the story begins, the status quo is that the five Bennet girls are unmarried. The weak point in the status quo is that the two oldest daughters, Jane and Lizzie, are old enough to be married, and they’re in danger of becoming old maids if they don’t find respectable husbands soon. Their mother determines to marry them off at the first opportunity. The
the POV character by name and use third-person pronouns such as he or she. This is the most common POV in modern fiction, and it has the advantage of being simple and natural. With a little work, it’s not difficult to get as deeply inside the head of the POV character as you can in first-person POV, because you have access to all the thoughts and feelings of the POV character. Here we’ve rewritten Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s original scene in third person: Still Watson had had such extraordinary