I got interested in the 80/20 rule more than 10 years ago, when Amazon added a feature to their Author Central site that showed each author how they ranked among all the other authors. I immediately realized that this revealed exceptional insights about the earnings of all published authors. (Amazon removed this feature after a few years, maybe because they realized that it gave away more information than they had intended.)  How could this feature give away “too much information”? Because sales of books follow (approximately) the 80/20 Rule: about 80% of the money is earned by the top 20 ..read more

Here’s an exercise you can do to make your current novel better: Search your manuscript for the word “as”.  Remove it from every sentence that uses “as” to make two events simultaneous. That’s it. very simple. Extremely effective.  A few examples will make this all clear. In each example, I’ll show you the wrong way to do it, followed by an explanation of why it’s wrong, followed by a better option.  Example 1 Wrong: Joe threw a punch at Eric as he approached.  Why it’s wrong: Your purpose as a novelist is to create a movie in your reader’s brain. This sentence throws up ..read more

I’ve run a critique group for years and years. Every member of the group typically brings one scene to each meeting to be critiqued. By far the most common question I ask after reading a scene is: “What happened in this scene?” It seems like a simple question, but it covers a lot of ground: How is the lead character’s situation different at the end of the scene from the beginning of the scene?  How does this scene advance the main story?  Is this scene a story in its own right, with a beginning, a middle, and an end? Let’s look at each of these questions to see why they matter. As ..read more

Writers often ask me how to plan out a series of novels. They usually phrase the question like this: “Can I use the Snowflake Method on a series, instead of just using it on a single book?” The answer is that it depends. You can always do it, but the way you do it will depend on what kind of series you’re writing. There are three kinds of series that authors typically write: Every book stands alone, so a reader can read them in any order without losing anything. Each book works as a story, all on its own, but they combine into a larger story, so a reader would typically want to read them in o ..read more

Most novels have a few viewpoint characters and maybe a couple of dozen other characters, set in one or several locations.  But what if you’re writing a novel with hundreds of characters in many dozen locations? How is your reader going to keep track of it all?  That is what I call “Fiction on a Big Stage.” It’s not for the faint-hearted.  Recently, I reread Tom Clancy’s epic novel of a putative World War III, Red Storm Rising. I got a cheap copy on BookBub and made the mistake of reading the first chapter. Four days later, I came up for air. The book was written about forty yea ..read more

A story is not like real life. Very often, real life feels like it has no direction. Lots of random stuff happens, and we get through it, or we don’t. We may have plans, but they usually don’t work out. Or they do work out, but then we discover we didn’t want what we thought we did. That’s real life. A story is different. In a story, your lead character has direction. They don’t know it right away, but they soon figure it out. Then the story is about whether they get where they’re trying to go. They run into roadblocks, and at first, they have no idea how to tackle them. But they learn, and pr ..read more

I’ve been thinking lately about where ideas come from. They often seem to blip into your head out of nowhere. And that feels very random. Do you just have to trust to luck for your creativity? I’m pretty sure the answer is no. Creativity is not about luck. There seem to be three common elements for a creative leap to happen. And you have control over all of them.  Just Showing Up A long time ago, somebody told me that “90% of life is just showing up.”  That doesn’t mean just showing up and doing nothing. It means showing up on a regular schedule and putting in the effort.  For a ..read more

If you’re trying to sell your novel to a traditional publisher, you must learn to write a synopsis. It’s almost impossible to sell a novel without writing a proposal, and a key element of your proposal is a synopsis of the plot.  If you think you can avoid this by hiring an agent to sell your novel, that’s not going to work. It’s very difficult to get an agent without showing them a proposal, which must contain a synopsis. And once you’ve got an agent working for you, they’ll insist you write a proposal for every novel you write, before they submit it to a publisher. An agent will critiqu ..read more

Modern life forces you to make impossible choices. It’s easy to feel overwhelmed by all the stuff that needs doing. When you get overwhelmed, your anxiety level rises, you lose traction, you get even more behind, and you feel more and more overwhelmed. Writers are very susceptible to getting overwhelmed. Besides everything else that Normal People do, we take on the gargantuan task of writing a novel, getting it published, and then marketing it. This is a lonely, difficult journey of a thousand miles, even for those lucky few who make lots of money at it. For the other 99%, it’s even harder.&nb ..read more

In my last blog post, To-Fu For Novelists, I talked about the importance of creating a Reader Magnet, a free piece of your writing that you can give away to your fans and potential fans.  You give it away free as an inducement to sign up for your e-mail newsletter. Then whenever you release a new book, you’ll run a great launch by notifying your e-mail subscribers.  That only makes sense if your e-mail list contains people who really love your fiction. If the subscribers to your e-mail list don’t care about your novels, that’s a problem. Your list costs you money. You can’t afford to ..read more