Your First Novel Revised and Expanded Edition: A Top Agent and a Published Author Show You How to Write Your Book and Get It Pu blished
320
Your First Novel Revised and Expanded Edition: A Top Agent and a Published Author Show You How to Write Your Book and Get It Pu blished
320Paperback(Second Edition, Revised)
-
PICK UP IN STORECheck Availability at Nearby Stores
Available within 2 business hours
Related collections and offers
Overview
In this revised and expanded edition of Your First Novel, novelist Laura Whitcomb, seasoned literary agent Ann Rittenberg, and her knowledgeable assistant, Camille Goldin, team up to provide you with the essential skills needed to craft the best novel you can—and the savvy business know-how to get it published. Complete with updated references, analysis of new best-selling novels, and the same detailed instruction, Whitcomb will show you how to:
• Practice the craft of writing, using both your right- and left-brain
• Develop a flexible card system for organizing and outlining plot
• Create dynamic characters that readers love—and love to hate
• Study classic novels and story structure to adapt with your ideas
Featuring two new chapters on choosing your path as an author and understanding the world of self-publishing, Rittenberg and Goldin dive into the business side of publishing, including:
• What agents can—and should—do for your future
• Who you should target as an agent for your burgeoning career
• How the mysterious auction for novels actually goes down
• Why you should learn to work with your agent through thick and thin
Guiding your first novel from early words to a spot on the bookshelf can be an exciting and terrifying journey, but you're not alone. Alongside the advice of industry veterans, Your First Novel Revised and Expanded also includes plenty of firsthand accounts from published authors on their journeys, including Dennis Lehane, C.J. Box, Kathleen McCleary, David Kazzie, and more.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781440351907 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Penguin Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 02/16/2018 |
| Edition description: | Second Edition, Revised |
| Pages: | 320 |
| Sales rank: | 269,383 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.90(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.90(d) |
About the Author
ANN RITTENBERG acquired her first book, a biography of the Irish short story writer Frank O’Connor; Judy Kern, a genius editor, taught her how to edit it, and the late Harry Ford, the head of production and the poetry editor (at Atheneum and later at Knopf), designed the jacket. Ann became an editor at Atheneum before leaving to join the Julian Bach Agency. When Julian soldhis agency in 1992, she went out and incoporated her own, Ann Rittenberg Literary Agency
CAMILLE GOLDIN has worked with novelists in a variety of capacities: as the head of foreign rights at a literary agency, in the contracts department of a top publishing house, and at a book scouting company.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Preparations
LISTENING FOR THE IDEA
In the beginning, there is only an idea.
If you are reading this book, you want to write a novel. If you want to write a novel, you already have an idea, whether you realize it or not. When the first storytellers stood up in their caves and moved closer to the fire, when they looked into the eyes of that first audience and said, "Now listen to me," they did so because they had a story to tell. Now is the time to call your idea out of the shadows. Even if you've never written a line of fiction in your life, you can start now. Begin by writing down your idea. So far, it might be only a single sentence, but write it down all the same.
Your idea might be a character you want to follow, a setting that haunts you, or a scene that plays out in your mind. A writer conjures ideas from everywhere — by watching people pass in the crosswalks, by elaborating on childhood memories, by retelling nightmares, by taking pieces of history and contemplating alternate outcomes. Inside you there is already the seed of a story that drives you to move closer to the fire and speak. Give it a name. Not a title — that comes later. Just name the idea so it will know its master. You might call it "Hunted Preacher" or "Underwater Schoolroom."
Your idea might be an overview of the whole tale or just a glimpse. Michael Crichton conceived The Andromeda Strain by reading a footnote in one of his college textbooks. Most of my ideas start out as a single moment: A man waits in the woods for his beloved. A child sits in a bush listening to fairies no one else hears. A woman watches the farmhand praying. If this moment is meant to grow into a whole idea, it will follow you around and beg to be picked up.
Stephen King wrote The Dead Zone by imagining the last moment in the story — a lone gunman attempts to assassinate a popular presidential candidate. Under what circumstances could this assassin be right? How could he be the hero? Your idea could be the last moment of the story, or it could be the first. You see a man answering the phone: A ransom must be paid, or his wife will be killed — only he has never been married. It could be a climactic moment from some- where in the middle of the plot. You don't know why, but a woman in uniform is running through a stream, trying to get to her village before the enemy arrives.
Some ideas start as a character or a set of characters. You keep imagining a healer haunted by a past failure, three sisters building a bridge, the husband of a woman on death row who writes notes on the backs of their wedding pictures because she will not speak to him. You see your character and picture her in various situations or imagine him telling his story aloud.
Other ideas start as a setting — a place so vivid that you can smell the damp hay, hear the submarine engines hum, or taste the volcano ash in the air. If the little desert town you grew up in, the South American nightlife you adored on vacation, or the sinister factory where your aunt worked for thirty years keeps creeping into your daydreams or nightmares, it might become the setting of your novel. Of course, you don't need to have visited a place to write about it. You can create settings from scratch. J.K. Rowling conjured up Hogwarts as she stared out her train window somewhere between Manchester and London.
As a writer, you should always carry paper and pen. When your idea shows up, write it down. More pieces of the story will follow if you welcome the first. Write everything down. Don't worry about fitting the elements together yet. Just take notes. Your muse is brainstorming.
Once you get in the habit of collecting ideas, you'll find that they will come more often and more clearly. Sometimes ideas wake you up in the morning, nagging to be written down. Ideas open up like flowers in the steam while you take a shower. They evolve into other species of themselves while you drive to work. Ideas hide in the back of your mind, then slide forward when you hear a certain chord of music or smell burning leaves.
I like ideas that sit next to me during a play and nag my pen to scratch notes in the program margins, dictating phrases that help me recall the idea later. "Confuses cat with dead son," it will whisper. "Write that down."
I like characters who loiter on top of the television or under my seat at the movies and tell me how they would behave in the same situation — "Not me. I could never walk away from a crying woman," says my character. "And, by the way, I've never been able to wear a wristwatch. They stop working or run backwards. Why do you think that is?"
I like settings that keep house behind my eyes, appearing like ghosts when I blink; settings that can be heard like a phantom ocean in the cup of my hand. I like settings you can smell as you fall asleep — the creak of the bamboo in a tropical cemetery. The scent of hot wax floating from the cathedral doorway. A cigar's red ember throbbing like the eye of a cyclops in a darkened office.
Often ideas come from seeing something in a new way or combining two elements you had never pictured together before. While watching a movie, you might hear a line of dialogue spoken by a priest and imagine it spoken by a prostitute. What if those words from the lips of a serial killer came from the lips of a four-year-old boy as his mother tucks him into bed? What kind of story would you have if Rhett Butler wasn't coupled with Scarlett O'Hara but Boo Radley? Imagine Sam Spade locking horns with Eleanor Roosevelt or a partnership between Lady Macbeth and Joan of Arc.
Think about the kinds of moments you love best in your favorite novels. If you read mostly mysteries, you might love the moment when the first clue contradicts the current theory of whodunit. If you read romance, it might be the first physical contact. If you read horror, it might be the satisfaction of stopping the monster/alien virus/psychopath at the last possible second. This is what I call the "that oughta do it" moment. One of my favorite moments is the first time our protagonist comes across something that can't be explained without the introduction of the supernatural — the "wait a minute now" moment. Another favorite of mine is the moment when a character reveals something about herself that makes her real, a surprise expansion into three dimensions. Gone With the Wind's Belle Watling goes from the stereotype of a brothel madame to a woman of depth when she donates to the war effort in private to protect Melanie Wilkes's reputation. To Kill a Mockingbird's Boo Radley goes from a cardboard curiosity, the subject of childish skits, to heartbreaklingly human when the children find images of themselves carved out of soap, left for them as gifts.
If you have a favorite kind of scene in the novels you read, that might be the place to start with your own story. Ask yourself, "What is my 'that oughta do it' moment? Where is my 'wait a minute now' scene?" If you are starting with a character, imagine what that character wants the most, then imagine his moments of failure and moments of success. If your idea is only a setting, imagine what kind of problems that setting might imply — you see a garden between two skyscrapers in Chicago. Does someone want to buy that space from the reluctant owner? What is growing there? Who designed the stepping stones? Who was married there? Who hides there? What is buried there?
Write down every idea, and make a file folder or envelope in which to keep them safe. These are the fragments of your novel that will fit together later. Imagine taking a story and ripping it up, tossing the scraps like confetti. It's like that, only backwards. You are gathering the bits of the story you will one day hold in your hands.
PREPARING THE LEFT BRAIN
You have a split personality — everyone does — your right brain controls your creative side, and your left brain controls your logical side. Some people call them the writer and the editor. Or the artist and the critic. Whatever you call them, you'll want to keep them on good terms with each other, because you'll need them both.
When you prepare to write, you need to satisfy your left brain's desire for organization, correctness, and good old-fashioned work ethic. When your left brain is given more than half the control, though, it becomes judgmental and starts calling your right brain an undisciplined dreamer, doomed to failure. You want to keep your left brain in line, but you don't want to kill it. If it weren't for your left brain, you'd rarely get any work done and what you did produce would be unstructured and riddled with mistakes. You don't want to shut down your left brain — you want to keep your left brain happy so it will allow your right brain to fly free.
The Necessity of Reading
Reading feeds both sides of the brain. To the right brain, reading is the air, the water, the rich soil where your spirit grows. Your right brain reads to escape into worlds unknown and fall in love with people who don't even exist. It's magic.
To your left brain, reading is exercise, analysis, and research. The left brain likes the cerebral calisthenics of reading. But remember, you are what you eat. If you only read bad writing, your brain will unconsciously give out what it's been given.
Read the kind of novels you admire. The more your mind hears what great writing sounds like, the better equipped you'll be to produce great writing of your own. Some beginning writers wonder why they have to read at all. Why not use that extra time to write? Warning: If you are the only writer you want to read, you will be stumbling over your ego for months and years to come. Get a grip. We can all learn from other authors.
The left brain also likes to analyze what works and what doesn't in the fiction you read. When you read a novel you love, write down some notes on why it affected you. You fell for the hero. You were so scared that you stayed up all night to find out who murdered the nun. You couldn't get those foster children out of your head because they were so sad and funny.
When you read a novel that disappoints you or drives you crazy, try to figure out why it failed. Where did the author go wrong? Usually you'll know exactly why. The love story was not believable. The dialogue was awkward. The protagonist wasn't likable. The ending has been done to death.
Go into detail: Why was the hero unlikable? He didn't care about the wounded woman. He was dishonest with his partner for no good reason. He did everything for his own benefit until the last three pages — by that point it was too late, you already hated him.
When you write your own novel, you will now have these notes in the back of your mind. You'll write protagonists who are worth caring about because you'll remember how one author succeeded while another one failed.
Read novels in your chosen genre — novels written for the audience to whom you want to sell your own story. If you want to write romance, read the best romance novels. If you want to write a Western, read them. You need to research what's out there and what is doing well. You should always write the story you feel called to write and write it the best way you can, but you should also be well informed on what your potential fans desire.
Give yourself permission to close the cover halfway through if a book fails to hook you. Start something else. Life's too short. You will never read everything, so choose books that are the most helpful. You don't need to put off writing your own novel until you've read every bestseller in your genre, but if you haven't been much of a reader so far, start now, read every day, and never stop.
Practicing the Craft: Left-Brain Exercises
Only about one out of every billion humans will sit down one day, having never written a word, and produce a masterpiece. Writing is mostly practice. Think of the number of laps a track star runs before she breaks a record or the number of hours a dancer spends at the barre before he's ready for a performance. There's nothing wrong with hoping your first draft will be brilliant — hope is required — but know that it's normal to need practice before you succeed.
Some baseball coaches use a training trick on their players, a machine that shoots tennis balls at 150 mph. Each ball is painted with a colored number. The player at bat has to call out the label on the ball (red three, blue seven) before he swings. This exercise improves one's batting average because it brings back the basics — keep your eye on the ball. The player stops thinking about every detail — his grip, the distance to the pitcher's mound, the angle of his shoulders, the turn of his hips, or the spacing of his feet. Writing exercises do the same thing — they give you something else to focus on so you don't trip over this word or that comma. You want to keep your eye on your idea.
Here are some exercises to warm up your right brain and satisfy your left brain's desire for a workout.
• TIMED WRITING SESSIONS. Set a timer on your computer or cellphone. You want to hear it go off, but you don't want to see the seconds tick down since that might break your concentration. It doesn't matter what you write — no one needs to see it. You can write about your characters or what you dreamed the night before. The trick is to keep your fingers moving on the keys or your pencil scratching on the paper. Don't worry about spelling or punctuation. Don't stop to think or rewrite. Just write at full speed. Now read it. You might end up with a great sentence or idea for your novel, or you might have nothing you want to save, but it doesn't matter. The point is to warm up.
• JOURNALS. Write in a journal or diary each day before working on your novel. It doesn't matter if you write a list of what happened the day before or your innermost fantasies — the act of putting words on paper is a warmup.
• VOCALIZATION. You can literally talk aloud to yourself, or you can dialogue with yourself or your characters on paper. Talk to your novel. Ask where it hurts. Don't be surprised when it starts answering back. Play truth or dare with your hero. Play twenty questions with your villain.
• BOOKS ON TAPE. You can turn your commute to the office into a grown-up story time. Browse your public library. Look for research materials, novels in your genre, and writers who inspire you.
• FIRST LINES. Take a stack of novels, and read only the first sentence of each.
The year that Buttercup was born, the most beautiful woman in the world was a French scullery maid named Annette.
— The Princess Bride, by William Goldman
There are two things you know. One. You were there. Two. You couldn't have been there.
— Challenger Deep, by Neal Shusterman
The church was all heat and white sunlight, dust and the smell of dry grass and manure pushing in through flung-open doors.
— The Blackbirder, by James L. Nelson
Her body moved with the frankness that comes from solitary habits.
— Prodigal Summer, by Barbara Kingsolver
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.
— Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen
Getting through the night is becoming harder and harder; last evening, I had the uneasy feeling that some men were trying to break into my room to shampoo me.
— Without Feathers, by Woody Allen
Opening a novel and randomly choosing a line can also work, but the magic of first lines is that the author is setting the stage for you and trying to hook you. As you prepare to start writing, think: "What is it about my own story that will draw the reader in?"
• FIRST-LINE STORY STARTERS. This time choose a novel, copy down the first line, and continue to write your own version of what comes next. Go for five minutes. Again, no one needs to see it but you, so let your imagination run wild.
• WORD ASSOCIATION. Write down one word, then write down another word that the first word brings to mind, and create a chain of single words or phrases in this way.
novel, book, shelf, cupboard, hiding place, stowaway, tall ship, storm, tempest, magic, curse, secret, clue, code, puzzle, joke, seltzer bottle
Often this process leads to an idea for a scene, as in this imaginary list for Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol.
snow, winter, Christmas, high spirits, ghosts, the past, the Ghost of Christmas Past, the ghost taking Scrooge to his childhood, Scrooge seeing his classmates without them seeing or hearing him, him seeing himself as a child sitting alone and unwanted, the schoolhouse not quite deserted — a solitary child, neglected by his friends, left there still
• BACK READING. Reread some of what you've already written before you start writing for the day. Hemingway used to read everything he'd written the previous day before he'd add any new material.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Your First Novel"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Ann Rittenberg and Laura Whitcomb with Camille Goldin.
Excerpted by permission of F+W Media, Inc..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Foreword 1
Part I Writing Your Novel
1 Preparations 10
2 Beginning to Write 33
3 The Bones of Your Story 56
4 Fleshing Out Your Story 73
5 Making Your Story Vivid 86
6 Being Unforgettable 99
7 Nuts and Bolts 119
8 Repairs 126
9 Making It Shine 134
10 Preparing to Be Read 146
Part II Publishing Your Novel
11 What a Luterary Agent Does-and Why 151
12 Before You Submit Your Manuscript 163
13 The First Steps on the Path to Publication 174
14 Query-Letter Babylon 189
15 The Best Path for You 205
16 The View from the Other Side of the Desk 213
17 Becoming an Agented Author 226
18 Working with an Agent Through Thick and Thin 237
19 Getting to Yes 249
20 Becoming a Published Author 267
21 If You Self-Publish Your Book 286
22 Publication Day-and Beyond 296
Epilogue 307
Index 308