Before the holidays, I was giving updates on my writing process as I develop a new series. I’ve returned to that work this week. I’d been doing a lot of research reading to figure out what my world would be like, then once I got ideas, I began focusing my research on those areas. After completing (I thought) my research reading, I went back through my notes to pull out the things I wanted to use and organized those into categories.

This week, I did what I think of as a Brain Dump. This is one of my techniques for dealing with Shiny New Idea Syndrome, when a new idea that feels like a perfect book that will totally change my career pops up while I’m slogging through a difficult part of another project (often while I’m proofreading or doing revisions). To keep the Shiny New Idea from taking over my brain and being a distraction, I do a Brain Dump, writing down everything I know about that idea. Usually, that Shiny New Idea that I want to dump the current project for amounts to about three sketchy paragraphs, and I realize it might give me one good scene and possibly the kind of description that would go on the book cover, but it’s nowhere near ready to write. Knowing this makes it possible to get back to what I’m supposed to be doing without that idea distracting me. In the rare case when I end up with pages and pages and each idea inspires more ideas, I might actually work on it.

But this Brain Dump has a different purpose. It’s a way of pulling together all the ideas and research and seeing where I stand. I wrote out everything I knew or could think of about the world, the characters, and the plot. That made it very clear what needed a lot more development and what’s pretty sketchy. I found that although I have vivid mental images of my main characters, they actually need a ton of development to become characters I can write about. I’ve got the main society of the story pretty well fleshed out, but the rest of the world is really sketchy, and events in the rest of the world play a big role in the story. The protagonist has personal stakes and goals, but those are going to be affected by larger events. I need to know where these events are happening and what’s making them happen.

So, I have more work to do. Fortunately, I’d just bought a book a few weeks ago that should be a big help in structuring what the rival society looks like, and that will shape what’s going on elsewhere in the world. It will also affect the development of some of the characters. Once I have that all worked out, I’ll need to start doing serious character development.

Some of my recent reading and viewing has made me question the conventional wisdom about writing. The things I’ve enjoyed most have violated the “rules,” while I find that stories that do what editors say they want are much less satisfying.

One of the bits of advice is to “put your characters in a tree and throw rocks at them, and then set the tree on fire.” To keep tension high and pages turning, your characters should be in constant trouble. Things should never work out well for them, and if something they do works, that outcome should land them in even bigger trouble. They shouldn’t get what they want during the course of the book, until maybe the end, unless what they want is actually bad for them.

I’m reading a couple of books right now, one that follows this advice, and one that doesn’t. Following this advice is why I’m reading two books. I realized I can’t read the “characters in a tree” book at bedtime because it stresses me out too much, so this is the book I read in bits and pieces when I have reading time during the day. The main character in this book starts in a bad situation, gets out of that situation only to land in another bad situation, and everything that looks like it might help only makes matters worse. The main character is up against impossible odds and going through terrible things. It does make for an exciting book, but I have to admit that I’m not finding it very fun to read, and though you’d think this would make for a page turner, I can only bear to read a few pages at a time before I have to put the book down.

The other book isn’t really throwing rocks at the characters, but it may actually have higher stakes and deeper conflict. If the characters fail at their assignment, it could affect their futures, but they’re learning that if they succeed, it might make things worse for society. They do have some personal struggles, so things aren’t entirely easy for them, but we move in and out of those parts instead of things getting worse and worse. The “worse” part is more about that dilemma of what to do. I’m tearing through this book and only putting it down at night when I can’t keep my eyes open, even though it’s not as obviously tense as the other book. It’s by an established author, so I don’t know if that dilemma would count as enough tension for a major publisher to buy it from an author without a name.

The other conventional wisdom, something I hear often from my agent and from editors, is that the main character needs to have agency. The plot needs to be driven by the decisions the main character makes, and these decisions should be what leads to the defeat of the villain and the conclusion of the book.

But a while ago I was watching a miniseries based on a Victorian novel, and although it violated this in a big way, I found it incredibly satisfying because the villain got a huge comeuppance she brought entirely upon herself. The heroine did nothing but stand her ground and hold true to her personal ethics. She never actually tried to oppose the villain. I often find that it’s far more satisfying when the villain brings about their own downfall than when the hero defeats the villain. In this case, it was a lower-conflict situation, not really a “vs.” type of conflict. The villain wasn’t truly evil. She just wanted something and thought the heroine was in the way, but everything she did to try to get the heroine out of the way just made her own situation worse and backfired. Ultimately, circumstances shifted so that she suddenly needed the heroine to get what she wanted, after she’d spent all this time being terrible to her, and the moment in which the villain realized this was an outright fist pump of triumph moment of awesomeness. The villain bringing about her own downfall and having to eat crow was far more entertaining and satisfying than if the heroine had been trying at all to stop or defeat her.

This was based on a Victorian book, so I’m not sure you could get something like that published now, with a heroine who doesn’t have a goal other than getting through life and maybe having a little happiness and who has very little agency. I guess you could compare it to the Cinderella story, where Cinderella is just trying to survive, maybe go to a ball, but she’s not really trying to bring down her stepmother. It’s the stepmother who ends up making herself look bad to the prince.

I’ve been trying to think of ways to pull off this kind of story in today’s market because it really is so fun when the villains defeat themselves. It’s also reassuring, serving as a sign that evil doesn’t pay and that it will cause its own downfall. That doesn’t mean things are easy for the hero. They can only win by not giving in or giving up, and they may go through some tough stuff along the way. I wonder if you could make the hero fail, but then the bad guys are still defeated because they brought it upon themselves.

I think there may be a disconnect between what people want to read and what editors like. I’m sure that reading tons of manuscripts of varying quality skews your tastes. You’d be drawn to things that make you sit up and take notice, that are more intense. Quieter books don’t stand out so easily unless they have something else going for them.

Here’s another post about my writing process. Previously, I talked about how I decided I wanted to try writing a “world” series, which would involve a number of semi-standalone stories set in the same world.

If you’re writing a “world” story, though, you need to have a good world, a place where lots of interesting things can happen. Most of my books have involved a ready-made world. There was the New York of Enchanted, Inc., which was the real world with a magical layer added, so it was obvious what I needed to research. I just needed to figure out the magical stuff, and that’s all made up. For the Rebels books, I was using the Gilded Age New York, and I needed to figure out my alternative history and what adding the magic and steampunk touches would involve, but it was still obvious what I needed to research.

For this new thing, I wanted to do a more traditional secondary-world fantasy, so I wasn’t sure what I needed to research. I had a vague idea of what the world would need to be like to tell some of the stories I wanted to tell, and I knew some things that needed to exist in this world, but beyond that, I wasn’t sure. So I took the things I knew needed to be there and started my research reading.

I have two kinds of research when I’m writing a book, idea research and detail research. The idea research comes in the planning stage, when I’m looking for ideas of what might go into the book. Even when I’m making things up, I like to ground my books in some kind of reality. I think that gives them that sense that this could all be real. With a secondary world, it’s about plausibility. I like finding fun little details in the real world and spinning off of them. This kind of research is mostly about reading a bunch of stuff to fill up my brain, and then my brain will digest it all, synthesize it, and create something out of those raw materials. You may not recognize any of the source material in the finished product. It’s like the ore going into the smelter to create iron and steel, which is then made into a washing machine or a car. You can’t see the car in the ore, but you can’t make a car without it.

The detail research comes when I’m actually writing and I need some particular fact to make sure the story works properly. In my previous books set in real places, that usually means a lot of maps and things like “when was this building built?” I have no idea how it will work in an imaginary world, since no one will be able to say “Aha! There’s no bus route serving that location!”

For a couple of years now, I’ve been doing this idea research reading. I started broad, then found a couple of details that intrigued me, so I narrowed in on those topics. Along the way, the world gradually began forming in my head, which gave me more ideas for how the stories might work, which gave me more topics to read about. There have been a lot of branches and rabbit trails along the way — ooh, I could use this, but then I’ll need to know more about that and that. I have about three and a half spiral notebooks full of notes I’ve scribbled down when I’ve found something I think I might use. I’ve learned a lot about a weird variety of subjects.

Now I’ve decided that I’ve done enough reading and it’s time to start putting it all together. I’ve been rereading my research notes and jotting down notes about what might go into my world and how I might use this information. It’s interesting seeing some of the things I was researching at the beginning before I’d narrowed in on a particular place and time I wanted to work with, and I can see the point when I found something that made me decide what the basis of my world would be. There was a very clear moment of “okay, this is what I’m basing this place on.” This process is probably going to continue for a few more days. It took me a day’s work to get through one of the notebooks.

Meanwhile, I’ve also been watching documentaries on these subjects. That’s a good way to get mental images for settings and clothing. The fun thing about a secondary world is that I can pick and choose from the real world and also make things up. If I like the women’s clothes from one period and men’s clothes from another, I can do that. Or if I like parts of the clothes but dislike other parts and the hairstyles, I can do that, too. But that means looking for a variety of sources to decide what I’m going to use and then get the images settled in my head so I can describe them in words.

I’m in development mode for a new series, and I said I’d share some of my process for this, so here we go, starting with where the initial idea came from. I’m not going to get really specific about the content of what I’m working on. I’m just talking about the process. After all, I don’t want to spoil the books for readers, and I don’t even know what will end up in the books.

This idea, like most of my better ideas, came from wanting a particular type of book, with no idea about things like plot or character. With Enchanted, Inc., I wanted a chick-lit type book with magic in it, or else something like the Harry Potter books, but about adult things rather than about school. With Rebel Mechanics, I wanted a steampunk book in a Gilded Age kind of setting, with adventure and airships. In both those cases, it started with something I wanted to read, and then when I couldn’t find it, I decided to write it. It took me a while to figure out the specific stories I was going to tell with that kind of book.

In this case, the initial idea was perhaps a bit more mercenary. As you might recall, I had a bit of a meltdown early in 2019 in which I was prepared to give up writing entirely. I was frustrated with the fact that my books just weren’t selling and my income was steadily decreasing. After giving myself permission to quit, I realized that there wasn’t anything else I wanted to do, and the idea of getting a real job that would require going to an office was so horrifying that I figured I’d be willing to tolerate not making much money and dealing with the business side of writing that I hate. But if I was going to make a go at this, I needed to do much better financially.

The trouble I have is that in my most popular series, the Enchanted, Inc. books and the Rebels books, the publisher controls the first books, which limits what I can do for promotion. Almost all promo revolves around getting people to try the first book, and then pick up the rest of the series. With these books, I can’t control the price of the first books, which limits what I can do for promotion, and I can’t do anything to drive people from those books to the rest of the series. I can’t get the publishers to add the other books to the list of books by me in those books or get them to put links for subscribing to a newsletter. I just have to hope that people who read those books go looking for more. If they buy them on Amazon, Amazon might recommend the rest, but I have zero control over this. By the way, this is why I’ve been holding off on doing a fourth Rebels book. I’m close to getting the rights to that first book back, but if I put out a new books, that will increase sales, not enough to make me any more money, but enough to delay me getting the rights reverted.

So, I was thinking that what I need is a new series I control from the start. I was looking at what seems to be successful, and romance is the big seller in the independent publishing world, perhaps because the kind of series they can do there.

There are several different kinds of series. There’s the saga, which is one long story chopped up into book-sized chunks, with each chunk possibly ending in a cliffhanger. You see a lot of this in fantasy, like with the Song of Ice and Fire series. You have to read this kind of series in order, starting with book one. Otherwise, it would be like opening a book to chapter 10 and beginning to read there. It would make no sense.

Then there’s the episodic series, which follows the same cast of characters, but with a new story in each book. There might be subplots that span from book to book, generally focused on the characters and their relationships, so the series will make more sense if you start at the beginning and read them in order, but you could probably follow the plot of an individual book if you happened to pick up a later one in the series first. You see this kind of series in mystery, where the mystery plots are self-contained, but you may also be following the development of the main character’s personal life.

You may also see a hybrid of this, where there’s a big-picture overarching plot for the series, but each individual book tells a complete “episode” of the story. You still probably need to start with book 1 and read them in order, but each book has its own beginning, middle, and end. I’d put the Harry Potter series in this category. There’s the big-picture plot of the fight against Voldemort and Harry figuring out his destiny, but each book is a complete story of Harry dealing with an aspect of this fight, often defeating a minion of Voldemort. I’d put most of my books in this category, as well.

What romances tend to do is a “world”-based series. There’s some kind of setting or situation that involves a group of people, and each book is about a different person within that setting or situation. The main characters from one book may go on to be supporting characters in later books, and the supporting characters from other books may take their turns to step up and have their own books. If you read the whole series in order, starting with book one, you might get a better picture of things and get all the references, but you can jump into the series at any point. Any book could be a first book, and then you might want to go back and read the rest. This kind of series is sort of a best of both worlds situation. There’s enough continuity to keep you wanting to read more of the series — will that character you like ever get his own story? — but not so much that you have to start at the beginning or read all the books.

This kind of series is ideally suited to romance, since the happily ever after ending means there isn’t much story left for the characters after they get together. This way, you can shift the story to another couple while still showing what’s next for the previous couple. You don’t see a lot of this sort of thing in other genres. Mercedes Lackey has done a couple of fantasy series that are kind of like it, where there’s an established world and organization within that world, but each book is about a different main character dealing with that world or organization. Terry Pratchett’s Discworld books are sort of a hybrid of the episode and the world series. The series is about the world, but each book may deal with a different aspect of that world. There are the books about the city watch, the books about the wizards at the university, the books about the witches in the mountains, the books about Death, and various one-offs about other things. Over time, this built out into multiple miniseries within the series. You could jump into that world at just about any point, but it helps to start with the first book in a particular miniseries. Sometimes the different miniseries cross over, so that the main characters from one series will appear as secondary characters in another series. The more books you’ve read in the overall series, the more details you catch, so it rewards rereading. The first book you read will take on new meaning after you’ve read more books.

I thought it might be fun to do a fantasy series like that — create a world, then have a bunch of mostly self-contained stories within it. I have a lot of story ideas I haven’t managed to fit into any of my other series, and this could be a place where I could use them all. That was what kicked all this off. I came up with the mystery series idea around the same time and started writing that one first because this requires so much more research and development. I’ve spent the last couple of years doing research and the occasional bit of brainstorming. I’m not sure how well that totally self-contained stories thing is going to hold up because there may be a framing story to set everything up and provide some link between stories. I’ll know better how it will go once I get into more details.

In a future post, I’ll look at how I go from wanting to write a type of book to figuring out what the story will actually be.

I’ve been battling a book that I thought I had all planned out. There are scenes I’ve been imagining for ages, even before I decided I was going to use this plot for this series. But it’s been a bit of a struggle because there was something about it that just wasn’t working. I even got to a point where I couldn’t go forward because I had no idea what should happen next, so I tried something I’ve never done before and wrote scenes out of order. If there was a scene from later in the book that I thought I could write, I wrote it even if I didn’t know how I was going to get there. I wrote the “interview” scenes in which they talk to the suspects without knowing which order they were going to go in.

And the more I wrote, the more aware I became that there was a fundamental problem with the way I was handling this story, but I couldn’t think of how to solve it.

Monday night, I figured out exactly what that problem was and how to solve it — when I was less than 7,000 words away from my target word count (though a lot of those words aren’t going to end up in the book). It’s going to require some rewriting and restructuring, but the moment I changed that idea, the story fell together in my head. I tried writing one of the pivotal scenes in the way it would go with this new structure, and it was perfect. So, that’s what I’ll do.

The original plan was to finish the first draft this week, then take the long holiday weekend as a vacation of sorts, then after the holiday do the first round of revisions. With the revision I have in mind, there’s no point in making myself write to the end when the beginning is going to change, and I think a break before I start rewriting would be a good idea. So, I’m taking the rest of the week off as a bit of a holiday, and I’ll get back to work on Monday. The nice thing about working for yourself is that you get to decide when to take holidays. I don’t really like Monday holidays because they throw off my whole week. I’d rather start the weekend early, so that’s what I’m doing.

I don’t have big plans. I want to do some housework, sleep, read, and generally relax. I’ve been pushing through for the last month or so, telling myself I’d get a break after this draft, and I need that break. The next round of the book should be a lot easier. I hope!

I got to the halfway point of the work in progress on Friday, so I figured it would be a good idea to go back over that part over the weekend, since it’s easier to rewrite half a book if something’s gone wrong than it is to rewrite a whole book. I was okay with the parts I read over the weekend. Then Monday morning I realized I’d made a big goof.

I’d made the villain do something that was convenient for my plot and nice and dramatic but that made no sense, that was counterproductive to the villain’s goals, and that was out of character for the villain. I’ve spent the last couple of days rewriting to fix it, and I think that’s actually going to make things easier going forward. The tricky part has been keeping the things I like in the new context.

I go back and forth on whether to plow through a book then do rewrites after I’ve written the whole book or to revise as I go. I generally learn things near the end that change the beginning, so there’s no point in rewriting the beginning until I know the end. On the other hand, it’s easier to rewrite a chapter or two than to have to fix a whole book. I’ve compromised by doing chunks. I don’t try to revise as I go, but I’ll go back and revise halfway through, or perhaps a quarter through a longer book. If I get stuck and feel like the book’s not going well, I’ll stop wherever I am and review things. But this book is a good case study for taking a look every so often even when I feel like it’s going well because it hadn’t occurred to me that the villain did the murder the wrong way until I re-read it. And even then, I didn’t realize it until I was writing out what the villain and the other characters were doing at the same time to make sure it was all lining up, and then I had that “wait a second, why would he do it that way?” moment.

I initially got into the “push through the whole book” habit because when I first started writing, I tended to write the first couple of chapters over and over but never finished a book. I had to make myself plow through the whole thing without revising in order to finish a book. By now, I figure I know I can finish a book, so editing along the way is okay. I still have a moment of guilt when I go back, though.

I think I’ve got it fixed now, but I do have to consider how it affects the rest of the plot going forward. And now I need to write the second half of the book (well, a little less, since I’m now closer to the 2/3 point). I’ve told myself that if I have a draft finished before Labor Day weekend, I get to take a long holiday weekend to rest, relax, and reboot, so I’m motivated to get it done.

One other thing that came out of the panel on structure last weekend was a big hate for the Hero’s Journey format. I feel like I need to speak up to defend it because it’s made a huge difference in my writing. It was what taught me how to plot.

I’ve always been good at coming up with characters and situations that would lend themselves to stories. I sometimes even came up with the inciting incidents, the things that lurched the characters into the situations that would make for stories. I wrote a lot of first chapters of novels, but I couldn’t seem to get past that point. After I’d launched the story, I wasn’t sure what would happen next, what the story would actually be about.

Somehow, I managed to write and sell some books in spite of this. They were category romances, which have their own fairly rigid structure. I knew the beats I needed to hit, and I managed to write stories that hit them well enough to have them published, but I still didn’t know how to plot a book. I was trying to learn. I read a lot of how-to-write books about plotting. I tried making outlines. But it just didn’t click for me. It became more dire when the category line I was writing for folded and my editor suggested I expand the book I was working on into a single-title book, which would require me to double the length and actually have a plot.

Fortunately, around that time, someone spoke to my writing group about the Hero’s Journey, using the book written about it for writers, The Writer’s Journey, and the lightbulb went off. Everything clicked into place. The heavens opened and the angels sang. I finally understood how to plot a book.

The thing is, this structure isn’t drastically different from any other in Western storytelling (non-European-based cultures have their own story structures). They’re all just different language for describing the same thing, and this was a language that spoke to me. It really boils down to a character in a comfort zone (but not living up to their full potential), getting called to leave their comfort zone, learning things along the way, being tested on this and not fully succeeding because there’s something they’re not ready to let go of, then regrouping and trying again, and passing the final test because they can finally let go and undergo a symbolic death and resurrection.

I think a lot of the criticism comes because Hollywood glommed onto this so hard following the success of Star Wars, since George Lucas cited the influence of Joseph Campbell and his Hero with a Thousand Faces. That made this a very rigid structure that film studios follow slavishly, which can result in cookie-cutter movies. One of my issues with all those Marvel movies was that with most of them, I could predict each major event based on the Hero’s Journey by watching the clock. But if you’re looser with following the structure and don’t take it so literally, I think it’s a more useful tool. Another criticism I’ve heard is that it’s male-oriented and about separating from society, and that is what Campbell’s analysis is about, but the first book I applied it to was a small-town romance about fitting in to a community, so it doesn’t have to be about solo journeys and separations. If you look at the Jungian work that Campbell based his analysis on (yes, I’m a nerd), all the journey stuff is metaphorical, anyway, and is a representation of an interior journey. You can use the Hero’s Journey for plotting a story about someone who never goes anywhere, whose journey is strictly internal.

These days, I think I’ve internalized enough about plotting that I may not consciously use this structure to plot, and it is only one of the tools I use. It’s a good way to test a story idea to find if you’ve got enough material for a story in that idea. I use it for the big-picture plotting before I dig deeper, and I layer it with other things. Once I had that plotting epiphany because of the Hero’s Journey, all the other plot stuff I’d read made a lot more sense to me.

So, use it or don’t use it. Just find what speaks to you, what makes sense for your brain, but don’t be rigid about following anything. Unless you’re working in Hollywood, where they have their own issues, you can do whatever works for your story. If people notice your structure, you’re probably doing it wrong. The structure should exist to provide a framework for the story, with the focus on the story.

Last weekend was the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America’s Nebula Awards Conference, and one of the panels really got me started thinking. It was about story structure and looking beyond the three-act structure that’s fairly standard in modern Western storytelling, whether it’s film or novels. As part of the discussion, one of the panelists mentioned reading a lot of fan fiction during the past year because regular fiction is just too stressful. In fan fiction, you can find stories that are pure fluff, just the characters doing things like hanging out in a coffee shop and talking, with no plot or conflict. Other panelists agreed with the need for fluff, and this was discussed further in an online chat that followed the panel. I’ve seen that sort of thing mentioned a lot lately, that “fluff” is really popular among fan fiction readers, and yet we keep hearing from editors and agents that stories need more conflict and tension. I certainly would enjoy just spending time with characters I like.

But then I started thinking about it some more, and I wonder how well fluff would work outside the fan fiction realm. Would you be interested in reading about a bunch of unknown superheroes hanging around in a coffee shop and talking about their lives, or is that only interesting if it’s the Avengers—characters you already know and care about? I’m sure you could write a fun story about random superheroes in a coffee shop, but it would probably be about their work lives, which would bring in the conflict and tension. You’d have to establish something about their superhero lives for their leisure hours to have any real meaning. On the other hand, you could have Steve and Natasha hanging out in a coffee shop, with him talking about his cute new neighbor and her trying to give him tips for dating in the 21st century, and if you’re a fan of the franchise you’d already know that he’s Captain America and she’s Black Widow, and this is a scene that might have taken place between the first Avenger’s movie and Captain America: Winter Soldier. You enjoy seeing them in their free time because you’ve seen them saving the world. The same sort of thing between someone like Super Soldier and Ninja Lady, but in their civilian personas, wouldn’t have the same interest since we don’t know what their superhero lives are about, so their story would have to be about them being superheroes, or why bother making them superheroes? I’m not sure you could do pure fluff outside an existing franchise with familiar characters.

That realization sparked two big thoughts. One is that maybe it’s not fluff I’m looking for, but rather things with less dire stakes. I don’t particularly want to read about characters I don’t already care about hanging around in a coffee shop and talking, with nothing else happening. I just want to read about adventures where the fate of the world isn’t at stake. There’s got to be a happy medium between the invincible villain whose plan is to destroy half the beings in the entire universe and the coffee shop. I think the vast majority of fantasy novels I’ve read involve some ultra-powerful villain who’s going to bring about the end of the world as the heroes know it, so all will be lost if the heroes don’t stop him, and they have to fight off swarms of evil minions along the way.

One of my favorite fantasy stories, in both book and movie version, is Stardust, where the stakes are pretty much just about whether the hero is going to figure out who his true love is before he makes a big mistake that will limit his life. There is the problem of the witch who wants the star’s heart, but they only really have one encounter with her before the final confrontation (in the movie; in the book they don’t even have that final confrontation), but they’re not focusing much attention on having to fight her. Then there’s the issue of the prince trying to get the gem that will make him king, which the star has, but our hero doesn’t even know or care about this and isn’t actively in opposition. Things will probably not be super for the kingdom if this guy gets the throne, but he doesn’t seem like he’ll be any worse than any of the previous kings. The stakes are pretty much that the hero is going to ruin his life if he doesn’t figure things out, and yet I find the story utterly captivating.

I recently read a retelling of the Beauty and the Beast story (that may be its own post later), and the only thing at stake there is that the beast will be stuck as a beast unless he can break the curse. The kingdom isn’t going to be sunk into an abyss, from which demons will come pouring out, if he fails. He’ll just be stuck as a beast. No one else will know, care, or be affected. The Beauty doesn’t know that he can be saved, so even she will merely have the status quo continue. But I still found it engaging. In fact, I may care more about whether the Beast will be redeemed or whether Tristan will get his act together than I care that an imaginary world will be taken over by orcs. It’s like the saying that one death is a tragedy while many deaths are a statistic, I guess. When it’s too big to comprehend, I just shut down and don’t get emotionally involved.

I think that’s the kind of thing I’d like more of, stories where the stakes are more personal than epic, where it’s not going to be great for the characters if they fail, but the fate of the entire world isn’t at stake. It does take really strong characters and solid writing to pull that off. Making readers care and turn pages is easy when the fate of the world is at stake. Making them worry just as much that a character will have an unfulfilling life if he fails is trickier to execute.

The other thing that occurred to me from this discussion was that there’s room for authors to write these fluff stories within their own franchises. The main books may have all the big conflict, but it might be possible to write those “coffee shop” scenes for fans of the franchises. I understand that some authors do this kind of thing on Patreon. I did the one story for the Enchanted, Inc. universe that you can get if you subscribe to my newsletter, but otherwise my shorter pieces have been very plotty—not “end of the world if we fail” plotty, but still with action and conflict. Now I’m pondering if I could write the sort of fluff pieces that are popular in fan fiction for my own work and have any kind of market for them, whether selling them as individual works or doing some kind of subscription thing. It might be fun to write missing scenes for my own books, the things editors make me cut out to improve pacing but that readers might enjoy.

Because I really need to sell more books, I’ve been reading a lot about the business of publishing. And it seems that I’ve been doing one thing wrong if I want to make money. I’m apparently writing the wrong books.

My general way of deciding what books to write has started with the ideas I have, and that usually comes from me thinking of a kind of book I really want to read, trying to find it, not being able to find it, and then writing it myself. From a creative standpoint, that’s not a bad method. It means you love what you write, and it may mean you’re filling an unserved niche. I see people giving the advice to write the book you want to read but can’t find all the time.

From a sales and marketing standpoint, it doesn’t work so well. If you’re going the traditional publishing route, you run up against the problem of “comps” or comparable titles. When a publisher is trying to decide whether or not they want to publish a book, they want to get an idea of how well it might sell, and to do that, they look at other books that are similar. If there are no similar books, they can’t get the numbers to put in their spreadsheet. That’s when you get the “I love this but wouldn’t know how to market it” rejections. They have to really, really feel strongly about a book and have some other reason to think it might be successful to go for a book they can’t find comps for.

In independent publishing, all the advice is to look at the categories and make sure your book fits well within a category that sells well but that isn’t so crowded that your book will be lost. You try to find as narrow a category as possible, then hit all the expected tropes for that category and make sure that your cover makes it really obvious that it belongs in that category. There’s software to help you analyze the categories that tells you about how many books you need to sell a day to make the top ten of your category.

When you’re writing the book you want to read and can’t find, that gets difficult because your book doesn’t fit well in any one category, it doesn’t have the popular tropes readers are looking for, and the expected style of cover in that category doesn’t fit your book.

With that fantasy book I’ve been working on, the one with the journey that leads to romance, you’d think that would fit obviously into a category, but it doesn’t. The “fantasy—romantic” category isn’t really that thing at all. If I were to describe what’s there, I’d lure a lot of spambots (let’s just say there are a lot of covers with bare, sculpted male torsos). I kind of wish there were a separate category for books that aren’t quite as focused on the romance and that aren’t so steamy. I wouldn’t really consider it epic fantasy. It’s not based on fairy tales. It doesn’t have magical creatures (maybe I should throw in a dragon so I can go with that category). It’s got sorcery but no swords, so isn’t sword and sorcery. I’m not sure how they define “historical” fantasy. It’s secondary world and not based on any particular culture, period, or place in our world, though it does deal with the history of that world.

The problem for me is that I don’t seem to have story ideas in the obvious, strong categories. My ideas almost always come from the place of “I want to read this and I can’t find it.” I know there are a lot of other readers like me out there who want those books, too. The trick is finding them and making sure they can find my books. That’s where I have to rely on my readers telling other readers about them. That’s the best way for like-minded people to be able to find the books they want.

I do think that the Kindle Unlimited program skews the perception of the trends and tropes, though. Those are readers who are paying a set price per month for all the books they want to read, and I think when you’re not paying for each book individually but can read all you want of the sort of thing you like, you choose books differently. If you remove the KU books from the bestseller list, the remaining books look very different. The problem is that the KU books tend to fill the Amazon bestseller lists, so everything else gets buried. Maybe it looks different on other retailers, but their interfaces aren’t quite as easy to scroll through. This is part of why I keep my books on wide release instead of in KU. I don’t think I fit the niches that do well in KU, and I’d lose the readers who don’t buy books through Amazon.

Last week I saw something reposted on Twitter about a writer admitting that she doesn’t really like the process of writing. She likes having written, but the process is difficult and frustrating.

There are days when I can totally relate, though while I do like having written, the part I really love is “going to write.” I love coming up with story ideas and characters, doing research and worldbuilding, even figuring out plots — all the stuff that falls under the category of “prewriting.”

The hard, and less fun, part comes when it’s time to put all that stuff into words. Sometimes it’s the words that are hard, finding a way to convey those things in your head. Sometimes it’s the nitty gritty of the plot, when you go beyond the big-picture arcs and need to come up with specific scenes that develop the plot.

That’s ironic when you consider how many times writers have people tell them that they have this great idea for a book, and if the writer will write it they can split the income 50/50. I think that happens at least once per booksigning (there seem to be people who go to every booksigning just to approach writers to tell them about their brilliant idea and present them with this proposition) and at just about every party where we meet new people who learn what we do.
New person: So, what do you do?
Writer: I’m a writer. I write books.
New person: Really? I have this amazing idea for a book. I should tell it to you, you can write it, and we can split the money it makes. I’m sure it’ll be a bestseller.
Writer: Oops, I need to go refill my drink. It was nice meeting you.

Ideas come all the time to writers. We don’t need to buy them from others. I’ll never get to all the ideas I want to write. Writing is the hard part, the part that takes time and real effort. That “brilliant” idea would probably take a ton of development and probably isn’t all that different from dozens of other things already on the market.

There are certainly days when the actual writing is fun, when I can see the scene playing out in my head like a movie, and all I have to do is describe it, and those words come so easily that I can forget I’m writing and feel like I’m just watching a movie. I usually love my characters, so I enjoy spending time with them. But a lot of the time, it really does feel like work, finding the right words, figuring out how to make things happen to get to the event I need. It’s at the end of one of those days when it’s been a real struggle but I still manage to get there that I love having written.

Sometimes I fantasize about being able to plug my brain into my computer so that the brilliant book in my head will just pour into the computer, but I suspect even if I could do that, the book would still require a lot of work. That brilliant book in the head is generally only a highlight reel or a trailer for the real book that has to be written. It’s the good parts, the scenes that come to life, without all the work of stitching those pieces together in a logical order that flows with good pacing. In other words, the hard part about writing.

Even if I could find someone to write my ideas for me, so that I just got to do the fun part without the hard part, I don’t think I would. I’m too proprietary with my ideas. I couldn’t hand them over to anyone else because no one else would be able to bring them to life the way I would. And so, the hard part is the price I pay to get to make up fun stuff and be able to share it with others. If I don’t write it, I can’t share it with others, which means I don’t make money, which means I’d have to get a different kind of job, and I have no idea what I’d do.