15. Q&A Session from the Fall Two Day Writing Retreat Part 1

"And so the biggest thing that an agent is going to be looking for, or a reader, anybody, to catch them, to hook them right on that first page, which is really important, is why should I care about your character and what is it that they want?  If you can answer those things really fast and just incorporate the worldbuilding into it.

We don't want to stop the story and give three pages of worldbuilding. If you've got that right now, rip it out and find ways to dole it in."

On September 27th and 28th, 2024 Suzy hosted an Online Writing Retreat. In this recording of the Live Q&A session, Suzy answers pressing questions from participants covering a wide range of topics on everything from finding the perfect editor, to worldbuilding from page one, to keeping pacing steady in your novel. This is Part 1 in this Q&A series. 

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Intro and Outro Music is Daisy by Zight and used under a CC by 4.0 DEED Attribution 4.0 International license. For more music by Zight visit https://www.youtube.com/zight

Transcript

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Welcome to Show Don't Tell Writing with me, Suzy Vadori, where I teach you the tried and true secrets to writing fiction and nonfiction that will wow your readers, broken down step by step. This show explores writing techniques and shows you a glimpse behind the scenes of successful writing careers and coaches writers live on their pages so you can learn and transform your own storytelling. Whether you're just starting out crafting, editing, or currently rewriting your first book or maybe even your 10th, this show will help you unlock the writing skills you didn't know you needed but you definitely do. We're looking forward to helping you get your amazing ideas. from your mind onto the page in an exciting way for both you and your readers so that you can achieve your wildest writing dreams while having fun doing it. Let's dive in. Amanda, did you go through an editor and if so, did you choose copy or line editing? Okay. So I am an editor as well, so, but there's lots of different ways to do this. Copy and line editing are very similar. I only look at three different levels, really. There's proofreading, which is like crossing the Ts and dotting the Is and making sure your commas are in the right place, that sort of thing. Then there's copy or line editing, which is like that, they're slightly different, but for all intents and purposes, they're similar, is like the reworking of a sentence and making sure that there's consistency through the book. And then there's developmental editing, which is actually what I do, which is looking at the whole big picture and the scenes and does it all hang together. Something that proofreading and line editing is not going to give you. So what did I do for my book? I typically work with a developmental editor or my, just my agent and beta readers. And then, yeah, it goes through a copy and line edit and a proofread at the publisher level. But that's sort of at the final hour when you know that everything else is done. And what is a good price range for an editor? Well, my prices are all on my website, so you can take a look. And it depends on their experience, right? So I wouldn't necessarily say that you should pick the cheapest editor because typically it means that they don't have as much experience. So you're not necessarily paying by the, I wouldn't pay an editor by the hour, because that means that the slower they are, the more you pay them, which doesn't make a lot of sense to me. So when I edit a book, you're not, You're not paying me for my hourly time, you're paying me for the 15 years I've spent studying with agents and publishers and editors and working on books and working with writers, getting that experience to get you to that place faster, right? It's about skipping that learning curve and getting you there as fast as you can. There are some guidelines out there, depending on what country you live in and where you're looking. There's lots of guides out guidelines out there, uh, usually there's an editor's association and some guidelines on on what to expect. So hopefully that helps you too. Caitlin C. If book is ready for an editor, editors are expensive. How could you go about the editing process on a budget? Okay, so just like lots of things, Caitlin, there is a DIY version of this. You can definitely do these things yourself. It just takes longer, right? So you can listen to, I think Liz actually shared an example with me. We were talking about this a couple of weeks ago and she said, Yeah, you know, like I listened to when I was working on my query letter, I listened to like a hundred podcasts to figure out from all the different examples. Yeah. What I needed to do versus hiring somebody to look at a query letter that knows all of that information and can tell you specifically what you need to do right now. So there's definitely ways to reduce cost and that is to participate in things like this and to take advantage of free events or lower cost events and do a lot of that work yourself. As well, when I talk about the mentorship program that I'm offering in October. That program is designed so that you can developmentally edit your own book, okay? So, so not hire an editor, but go through that process. It will teach you the exact steps that I do as a developmental editor, so you don't have to pay me to do it. You can do it on your own book with my support in a group setting. So yeah, there's definitely, definitely things that you can do. Editing is expensive because it is a really, really detailed skill and to, to work with a great editor is amazing. I've, the reason I became an editor, I mean, I've shared a few different reasons, but I've worked with amazing editors who taught me and who explained it and who helped me see my book in a different light. And I've worked with really crummy editors. My first book that was, by the time it got published, traditionally published, it had been through five editors and only one of them I would say was really helpful. And so that was a really eye opening experience. So I used to get really frustrated when people would get their books edited and say, I don't know, like, they told me all this stuff, but I don't really understand it. And I look at the edits and I'm like, what, what? Like, how? Like, why? It's, it's just somebody's opinion, right? And so you got to be careful. Make sure that you work with an editor who knows your genre really well and knows what they're talking about and also can explain it. What I do is I teach. So every time I make a suggestion, Or correction, I teach the rule, and I have tons and tons of material that I share, and I share all of this in my developmental editing mentorship as well. Okay, hopefully that helps. Okay, Amanda. How can I find the perfect pacing? The beginning of my book has great pacing, but I find that the more I write, the harder it is to keep the momentum up. Okay, Amanda. So pacing is all about the speed at which a reader can get through the information, right? So is something happening quickly or something happening slowly? Pacing is all about speeding it up and slowing it down, and depending on what you write. I write, write YA. I write YA. Young adults, uh, for young adults, for teenagers, and they need it fast, right? They want the pacing to be tickety boo, like boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. So yeah, you do need to have pretty high pacing. If you're writing literary or women's fiction or something a little bit more reflective, then you might want to actually slow it down at times and give the reader a chance to to catch up. But crime and, um, romance and crime, they're quite formulaic. You do need to keep that pacing up and people expect that. So the ways that you can speed it up, if you feel like something is lagging, flag it. The ways that you can speed it up are to condense some of the things. So I talk about show, don't tell, but there's a place for telling. If you find that you're telling us everything that happens, summarize. So just pick out the things that are important or exciting and summarize the rest. So if you have a really long pages of like dialogue or something, Maybe we could skip the salutations. Hi, Susie. Hi, Amanda. How are you? Oh, I'm good. Fine. How are you? How was your day? It was good. Thank you. We don't need any of that, right? So watch for those things, for sure. And then beyond that, if you find that a place is dragging, see if you can summarize it in a line or two and skip ahead. Skip ahead. Skip ahead. Or do a scene break. And keep going. So hopefully that helps. How can I show better in my novel and tell less through dialogue? Okay, so dialogue is one of the five elements of writing that I talk about. Keep a good balance, right? So you've got dialogue, you've got actions, you've got reactions, you've got setting, and you've got I'm missing one. So I'm missing one. There are, there are five different things. Dialogue is one of them. So sometimes when we want to show more People talk about using dialogue to show more. Well, what's neat about dialogue? So if you're summarizing, then you're sort of like that camera, you're way zoomed out and you're like doing this like montage of things. You might be telling, Oh, and then time passed and this happened. And then when you go back to the moment, you're like zooming in. Onto people on a bridge standing having actual dialogue. Okay, so now we're in a scene, we're in a moment. So we've got half of it. So we've got half of the thing. So if we're zooming in and we're hearing their dialogue and we're being right there, then you know that you're in a scene and you're in a moment. The danger with that is sometimes when we think that we're doing it. We then have people say, well, it's really great to see you there, Bob, on this bridge that we're standing on. Yes, it is, Susie. And, well, can you believe what's happened in the last ten years is this and that and this and that, and we dump that into dialogue? So just putting quotations around it does not fix the problem. Right? So what you need to do, rather than think about putting showing into dialogue, think about putting showing into a moment. And have a scene where that backstory that you need to put in or that telling or that information that you need to put in is shown. So create a scene where you can parallel, you can either compare or contrast or something, some reason why you can bring that backstory in. Okay, to that story present moment. So maybe they're looking at the water running or they're looking at. We're standing on the bridge, and I'm going to make this up so I don't know how good it's going to be. They're standing on the bridge and they can see that the whole bank has collapsed, and all the houses are now gone, right? Then we can talk about the apocalypse that happened, where there was a big flood and everything happened, right? So see if you can, see if you can do that. Okay. What is next? You guys have the best questions, by the way. I hope you're taking lots and lots of notes. Okay, Amanda had one more question. How can I get over worrying about my readers, that my readers will like what I write and just write what I want? I know that taking into account what my readers will like is important, but I think I might be too worried about what they will think. Okay. Again, Amanda, if you're excited about it, they're going to be excited about it. Put down what you want, but then take that extra step to do those showing things, all the things that you're just asking about, to make sure that their experience is good. Right? You should care about what your readers think. What you can do is actually just pay attention and learn those skills so that you don't have to guess. You don't have to guess. If you, if you use those techniques and you use those skills, you don't have to guess. You will know that your reader will love it. Okay. Well, it cut. Elika. Elika says, I hope to be able to start brainstorming and writing the second book of the series. It's been over a year since publishing the first book. Okay, so second book. I want to talk about your second book. So I want to offer some tips for second book because we think that the second book, and this book is easier in lots of ways, but we think it's going to be easier for the wrong reasons. We think it's going to be easier because in book one, especially if it's in the same series, we've already created the characters and the world and the setting and all this stuff and the back story and. Everything, we know all of that, right? Second books should be really easy because we don't have to do that, except here's the problem is you've already created the characters and the world and the setting and the backstory, so what the heck do you put in it without repeating everything? It's tricky, right? So what I like to say for the second book blues, right, is that you need to blow it up some way. You need to either introduce a new character, do it from a different point of view, change the time period, change the location, have them go across the country on vacation for the second book. I don't care what you do, you've got to change it up so that you don't get into the same habits. Otherwise you're going to find yourself recapping all of book one and it's terrible, right? Like, you know it's terrible, you can feel yourself doing it. Your readers are going to be bored. So yeah, you need to have a little bit of recap and a little bit of, but treat that recap the way that we've been talking about backstory. You have a whole new adventure. Choose that new adventure. Choose that new arc that you're going to take your character on if it's the same character or choose a different character. And, and go with it, right? And, and mix it up and expand your world. If everything happened, so, if everything happened at a school, maybe now it's happening at a school and home. Or if everything happened in one city, maybe now that city is under siege. Change something. Change something big. And, and then you'll get more excited about writing a book too. I hope that helps. Tazine. My background is in screenwriting, so whatever I write is very dialogue heavy, heavy, but I struggle in creating the atmosphere and mood. Okay. We just talked a little bit about this, but yes, I work with screenwriters all the time that want to learn to write a novel. So I'm going to try this again because I'm sure I'm going to get it this time. Um, we've got dialogue is one of the five, right? We've got dialogue, actions, reactions, inner thoughts. That's what I missed. Inner thoughts and setting. Hey, dialogue, actions, reactions, inner thoughts, and setting. So in, in a screenplay, you only have two. You've got these two. You've got dialogue and you've got setting and even the setting usually when you're the screenwriter is fairly sparse and you do have actions, but usually leave that up to the director producer. And so you're not working with all the tools in the tool shed. Right. And so it's, it's hard to unlearn that. And what I see. A lot of times with screenwriters who go to write novels is it's very dialogue heavy and then all the actions and reactions and stuff are there but they're like in a paragraph below. So one of the things that I like to teach is to mix those five elements of writing all together and you can tell when you're doing this well. You need to have a mix of all of those to make it feel well rounded. That's what that showing or that immersion is in a book because we don't have all the other things that you have. We don't have that physical play in front of us happening, right? Um, we don't have those characters acting in front of us. We don't have music. We don't have like lighting. We don't have a lot of things. And so the, the other three tools that you're going to use are your actions, reactions, and your inner thoughts, right? So inner thoughts is one of the coolest ones. It is the only medium. Book writing is cool. It's way more advanced than lots of other things because you've got inner thoughts to play with, right? You can actually be right inside a character's body and feel what they're feeling and think what they're thinking. And screenwriters need to learn to trust that and start to use it. And so, as you go through, you can tell if you are, if you're doing something too heavily, you're already aware of the dialogue. But as you practice, you might find that you're doing other things too heavily too as you get used to it. You can't rely on one or two of those for very long before your reader starts to get tired, right? Their brains are like, ooh, but it will feel like it starts to drag. If you've got a character who is sitting around on their bed and they're in their inner thoughts for three pages, you have a problem, okay? You need to bring it into the moment and find an action, a reaction, something else to mirror, contrast, compare, push that thought and make it relevant. All right. To feel like a complete scene. Otherwise what you've got, you've got what's called talking heads. Which can happen either dialogue, or it can happen in their thoughts. Where like, it's just like, your reader's like picturing these two people yammering at each other, or one person yammering at themselves, which is even worse. And their brains get tired, and they lose the grounding. They lose that they're supposed to be in an immersive scene. So I hope that helps. I'm excited to see what your journey is going to be, but yeah, there's, there's some, definitely some cool tools in novel writing that you didn't have. So you got to learn to use them. Okay, Mia, you said that you were writing a book and you felt like your voice was more YA, so you think you're writing YA. I want to just clear something up for a minute. YA is young adult and that means that you're writing for teens. There are different areas of young adult, so there are different categories. There's middle grade, which is sort of 9 to 12 year olds. There's young adult, which is 14 plus usually, like upper young adult. And then there's sort of that no man's land in the middle, which I rate for, which is called lower YA, but you don't hear about it that much. And it's sort of that 12 to 14 range. And usually the difference is content, not necessarily the reading level. But the cool thing about Young Adult is the only thing that matters, so it spans all genres. Young Adult can be science fiction, it can be literary, it can be anything you want it to be. It can be historical fiction. So Young Adult isn't really a genre in itself, it's kind of an umbrella. The only thing that matters, your voice matters, yes, but the age of your protagonist matters. Readers in those categories will only read about The protagonist that is older than them, a 12 year old that will not read about the adventures of a 10 year old. They are not interested. They want to read up. They want to read about older kids. And so if you think you're writing YA, pay attention because if you, if you're, if your protagonist is older than 17, you are not. Because there are things that adult brains do that are different, right? So writing, and even like, there's books out there that call themselves YA because it's easier to market them that way, but that aren't. They're from an adult perspective, thinking back to when he was coming of age. That adult thinks of things differently and knows things that that person in the moment doesn't know. And so if you're not writing in this moment, it's not technically YA. It doesn't mean you can't market it as YA. Okay, so I hope that's helpful. Um, and keeping imposter syndrome at bay. Yeah, it's really just about knowing that you can do it and giving yourself those skills. Okay. Carlos, hopefully that helps. GrammarlyProWritingAid readsy. Are they ethically wrong to use? Okay, here's the big AI question. I don't talk about this a lot publicly, but I'm going to address it here today because it's becoming, but I'm thinking about it because I have some very strong opinions on, on AI and what it means for writers. I don't personally believe that they are ever going to replace writers because of all the things that I talked about here today, they can write a formulaic novel, but I find if I work with a writer who isn't doing something that's really personally deeply meaningful and they're not bringing their own perspective, it's a book. So I'm not threatened by the idea of AI. However, there is a difference between using Spellcheck, which is AI generated, right? It's using Spellcheck or ProWritingAid or some of these other ones and using generative AI. So generative AI is something that can write for you, right? Or make the corrections for you or edit for you, which these are all going in that direction. So here's what I will say about that. Certainly using spellcheck and using things to decide and flag things for you, and then you're making all of those decisions. So you could use those tools, and I, I mean, I don't use them in my client's work, but I use them in my own because it's hard to get that perspective on my own work. I love Autocrit because it's got some tools in there that specifically for young adults are really cool because it will tell you the reading level. Right? Which is important in young adults. And so it will tell you the reading level, it will tell you how your book compares to other books of that nature, it will tell you it's got some really cool tools. But I'm making all of those decisions, and I'm looking at them and deciding. It's not writing the book for me, and it's not correcting the book for me. It is flagging things, and lots of times they get it wrong. Don't just accept everything that they, they do. The problem is, is a lot of these tools are going towards the generative AI. Without getting into the ethics of all of that, here's what I will say. If you use a generative AI tool to edit your manuscript, like, please go and fix it and make it better, and it rewrites your whole manuscript, because it can do that now. You no longer own that copyright. Okay? You've lost it. It's not yours. Because you're using, you're using works from others. And you didn't do it. You must also disclose that. Thank you very much. You must disclose it if you publish it yourself. You must disclose it if you work with a publisher. It was written by AI. And that's a big problem. Because what it means is you don't own that work. The other thing that happens is if you upload your entire manuscript to those places and you allow them to use it as an input, It can use your writing to write somebody else a book. So, I don't personally use that. I don't personally recommend using it. I think it's all gonna shake out. It's, it's gonna shake out in a weird way. I don't think that it's gonna be writing books for you. What it's really good at is planning. What it's really good at is helping you generate a list of titles for your book. There's some things that you can use AI for, there's not, you know, anything to be afraid of. But if you're using it to actually generate your, your book, know that, number one, you're stealing from other people's copyrighted work. And I don't know how that's all going to shake out. I'm sure that my books are being used in there too, without my consent. It's a new frontier. It's a new frontier. And that's going to all kind of shake out. But know that whatever you write is always going to be better. Microsoft What was going to be better? Okay. I have a hundred thousand word YA graphic novel, gothic novel, sorry. I was like a hundred thousand words of graphic novel that I'm writing. I'm currently in the editing process and I keep going over the first few pages over and over. I feel like I'm bombarding the reader with information about the village, but it's all necessary to the story. I'm also anxious about the fact that literary agents look at the first few pages and make a decision based on that. If you have a book that requires a lot of world building. What's the best way to approach the first few pages, for instance, describing the village, where the character is at in her life, and identifying her name? So this is a great question to end on because it's kind of a culmination of a lot of different questions. How do you incorporate world building? We definitely don't want to have three pages of the sky was green and the clouds were pink and the, you know, like bird's eye view. What you want to do right away is make us care. And so the biggest thing. that an agent is going to be looking for, or a reader, anybody, to catch them, to hook them right on that first page, which is really important, is why should I care about your character and what is it that they want? If you can answer those things really fast and just incorporate the world building into it. We don't want to stop the story and give three pages of world building. If you've got that right now, rip it out and find ways to dole it in. So what you want to do is have your character interacting with the world, right? We don't want to say the sky was green and you know, and the clouds were pink and the houses were all in a row and all of those things. We want to show little Johnny delivering to each one of the houses. Like. Get them involved. Get them involved. And if, if we can leave the first couple of pages knowing what your character wants and caring a little bit about them, because we know what they want and we know what they're after, that's the only way that we can cheer for them. We can only cheer for them if we know what they want. It's the same reason that we defined our goals here today. I gotta know what you want. in your writing life to be able to cheer you on and help you, right? That's what we want as a reader. We want to cheer that protagonist on. We want to be in their shoes and we want them to succeed. We are also going to see them fail, but we also want them to succeed, right? So yeah, so that's where you want to be. So if you've got three pages and you're still in description, just rip it out. Give us a detail or two and dole it out as it comes along. Use the most exciting ones, first pieces about your world first, if you're trying to hook a reader. This has been an amazing time. Thank you guys for being here. Thanks for tuning in to Show Don't Tell Writing with me, Suzy Vidori. To help me continue to bring you the straight goods for that book you're writing, planning to write, please consider subscribing to this podcast and leaving a review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you're listening. Also visit SuzyVidori. com forward slash newsletter to hop on my weekly inspired writing newsletter list to stay inspired and be the first to know about upcoming training, events and writing courses in my community. If you're feeling brave, check the show notes and send us a page of your writing that isn't quite where you want it to be yet for our Show Don't Tell page review episodes. Remember, that book you're writing is going to open doors you haven't even thought of yet. I can't wait to help you make it the absolute best it can be. If you're feeling called to write that book, keep going, and I'll be right here cheering you on. See you again next week!