Layering Your Draft, Part Three: Frosting Your Characters

To start at the beginning of the series, click here!

Have you ever been told that your story has an interesting premise, a strong plot, and fine writing, but that the reader just didn’t “connect”? While there are many possible reasons for this, one of the most common has to do with character. The story in question needs more character-specific layers.

Character layers are the frosting of your story. People seem to think that frosting is what goes on top, but in a layer cake, the frosting runs in delicious seams throughout. It is always visible, always there, creating a beautiful depth and adding flavor to every bite. It is also BALANCED with the other story elements (ie the cake.) Character shouldn’t take over your story completely, and it shouldn’t be the only part they’re showing up for. Great frosting can’t make up for a dry cake!

This ratio looks so right to me.

Everyone has their own preferred frosting-to-cake ratio. Different genres can have different amounts of character development, and different ways to include said development. So what’s the best way to develop the balance in your work? Think about your own favorite stories, especially in the genre you’re working in. How do you connect to those characters? How do you want to use voice, banter, character desire lines, etc. to craft yours? Just remember: your cake needs frosting. Don’t skip it, and don’t skimp.

The first time I approached a draft with a layering technique, it went on to become my first published book. An early reader said that the story was working, and that the main character was coming across, but a secondary character was flat on the page. Here’s where I asked myself: what do I want from this character? Who is she in my head? Is she that person on the page?

Here are some practical tips for frosting your characters:

• Isolate the scenes the character appears in. This works especially well for secondary characters. Create a document that includes only those scenes, so you can see the development and growth of that character, his/her subplots and how they are progressing without lots of other scenes getting in the way.
• Break it down even farther. Are you focusing on the arc of a character’s desire line? Her dialogue? Her emotions or inner life? I’ve done passes for all of these things, and more. Sometimes a character needs a full overhaul, but often the more specific you can be about targeting what’s not there yet, the easier it becomes to add and tweak.
• Look for the frosting gap. Often when I’m going back to do a character layer, I’ll find that I’ve left space to add. Certain moments just seem to open up when you look at the draft with an eye to deepening character!
• What is strongest/most unique/most important about your character? Is that coming through in the draft?
• Tie it into theme. In later drafts, you will want to make sure that your characters tie into the main themes of the story. Sometimes, characters who aren’t “working” are the ones who don’t have some connection to theme.
• If you start with character, you might need to adjust or add more later. If you start with a character layer, just remember that as the story evolves, you might need to take another look at what you started with. Even if things change, that initial character work isn’t lost. In most cases, you’re not throwing out the frosting and making a new batch here. You’re just adjusting so it matches the cake perfectly.
• Don’t be afraid to cut/combine. Sometimes a layer will be dedicated to taking out a character you really don’t need, or combining characters who are doing the same narrative job. If you isolate this in its own layer, it’s easier to adjust the rest of the story around it.
• Let the main character take more than one layer. Don’t be nervous if you spend time on a character layer for your MC and people say she still needs some work. I usually devote 2-4 layers in each drafting process just for the MC. And, like I said above, I try to focus on specific drafting goals for each of these layers.

That’s all for this week—happy frosting!

~Amy Rose

PS In the last part of this series, I’ll talk about why layering works, and how to know when your novel is done baking!

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Want to work with Amy Rose? She critiques, edits, and provides writing coaching for all sorts of fiction. Just click on the Contact tab and fill out the easy form to get started!

Who Hires a Book Editor?

“Who hires a book editor?” was my question when I joined Yellow Bird and another online editing company in 2014. I had spent 23 years writing and editing for large, traditional publishing companies before getting into the online, edit-for-anybody business.

Many authors in search of an editor are aspiring novelists, and the quality of their writing varies dramatically. Some are professional level. Others are great storytellers but their grammar is a disaster—or vice versa. I’m amazed by the number of fantasy and sci-fi submissions. Some of these books are in excess of 200,000 words, with the author often asserting that his or her initial book is the first of a trilogy. I edited one author who penned a 130,000-word fantasy novel and said it was the first book of a three-trilogy set! What’s 9 x 130,000?

I have edited both fiction and nonfiction over the last two years, and I’ve been blown away by the variety of the subject matter. These are some of the online nonfiction submissions I’ve edited:

• Brennan, a special-ops soldier, wrote about his experiences in Iraq—about his desire to kill and how fellow soldiers exploded into pink mist before his eyes. Derek, a jaded platoon medic, told Brennan: “That’s why we’re dying. People want training and the military to be all soft and cuddly but then wonder why their overweight, television-addicted little pussy got his arms blown off because he wasn’t looking around properly because he has the attention span of a hummingbird.”

• Jeff, a former Hollywood prostitute and Colt Studios model, wrote about the famous gay men he slept with, including Elton John!

• Keena grew up in the African bush as the daughter of paleontologists. Her diaries discussed her life-and-death adventures with lions, hippos, and crazy baboons…and the scariest creatures of all: junior high girls when she returned to suburban Philadelphia.

• Rex penned a biography of fellow Vietnam War veteran Ace Cozzalio, an eccentric, heroic helicopter pilot who always wore an 1800s cavalry uniform, complete with white hat and saber.

• Tina was raised by a coldhearted mother who adopted (basically stole) Tina’s two children and prevented her from seeing them for 15 years.

• Author Damon reminded me of a black Forest Gump. He was confined to juvenile detention simply because his father wanted him to be more disciplined; was unjustifiably bullied by cops on the streets of L.A.; lived through the Watts riot of 1965; and explored drugs in Vietnam, which caused him to attack his officer.

• David, who created the live play-by-play technology that you see on MLB.com and ESPN.com, described his court battles with Major League Baseball, which tried to use its legal muscle to invalidate his patents.

• Tana was looking for a roommate after her divorce. She found a seemingly nice fellow who owned a house in Florida who agreed to rent her a room…then turned psycho and wouldn’t let her leave the house!

What’s your story?

Layering Your Draft Part Two: Let’s Bake A Novel

Aprons are highly recommended.

Want to start at the beginning of the series? Click here!

Before I go much farther into writing-as-baking, I feel like I have to put my money where my metaphor is. I can’t tell you to run out and buy an apron until I show you how this works in a stripped-down, practical way.

If you’ll remember from the previous post, I don’t really love the idea of separating rough draft and revision. Pretty much all writing includes some of each—most writers do some revision in early drafts, and pretty much all revisions include new writing.

Instead of starting with the idea of a rough draft to bash through, let’s start with this: whatever writing gets you into the story. For some writers, this might be a first full pass that they write quickly and then use as a jumping off point, but for others it will be extensive pre-writing. Maybe a few chapters or important scenes. For others it will be writing their way into the story for as long as it takes to figure the basics out, and then starting back at the beginning. This process might stay the same, or vary from novel to novel.

I’m going to call this searching for your ingredients. You’re gathering up what you need to tell the story. When you go looking in the kitchen, you might find some things easily, while others take significantly more cupboard rummaging. You might discover that you have the ingredients to make something slightly different, which is even MORE exciting than your original idea. Or you might realize you are missing something important (no baking soda = no conflict to raise the stakes)—and you have to decide if you want to put in the time to get that missing ingredient, or if you want to adjust your plans.

Your novels will be the wordy equivalent of this. I promise.

Then you start baking.

The layers will involve different amounts of work—some full passes, some fast passes, some where you only look at the scenes affected if you’re talking about a secondary character or a subplot.

Here is a (simplified) list of layers that I’ve done on a novel:

1. Voice and setting
2. Main character
3. Plot and structure
4. Removing a story element that isn’t working
5. Missing plot details
6. Narrative tightness and pacing
7. Main character’s arc driving the story
8. Emotional climaxes got wonky–work on these
9. Smoothing out the language and narrative pace
10. Secondary character dangerously underdeveloped!
11. Working in suggestions from an edit letter
12. Timeline issues
13. Working in feedback about another secondary character
14. Yet more editorial feedback
15. Copyedits!

(If you’re feeling really ambitious you can assign a flavor to each of your layers. I definitely have a dark chocolate setting in my new novel.)

One of the best things about this method is that it responds to the needs of the manuscript and the editing process. It’s infinitely flexible. Some novels require multiple passes to work on character; others have tricky plots. Some have lots of research layers that need to be incoporated. This also allows a writer to focus on their story elements, taking time to craft them without the pressure of fixing everythingatonce.

Which, to me, sounds delicious.

-Amy Rose

PS Next time, I’ll talk about the magic of character layers.

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Want to work with Amy Rose on your novel? She critiques, content edits, and provides writing coaching for all sorts of fiction. Just click on the contact tab & fill out the easy form to get started!

Layering Your Draft, Part One: Revision is a Jerk

The word revision is a problem for me.

I understand that it works for some people. If it works for you—great. But words have power, and the word revision has always seemed like a jerk to me. It shouts (yes, revision ALWAYS shouts): You messed up your draft! Ruined it! Pretty much everything in it is WRONG! And now you have to fix it! Otherwise—” At which point revision ominously points to the closet where WIPs go to die.

Fair warning: this blog series might make you hungry.

Lots of classes, workshops, and craft books seem to be focused on the idea that you can get to a good story by telling someone everything they’re messing up. I just don’t happen to believe that.

Do we need to know what’s not working in our novels? Absolutely. But is it just a case of troubleshooting and portioning blame? I think it’s bigger than that. When we’re aware of what IS working in our stories, it helps us see them much better. Then we can build a strong foundation. Then we can figure out what we still need. Then we can keep what is unique and delicious about our story intact. It can be a process of adding. Of making better, of always improving, of stacking good on top of good.

Like a layer cake.

That’s how I like to think about drafting. Not in terms of right or wrong, of rough draft or revising. It’s all layers.

The reason I like this is because it reminds me that there’s no one way to get everything right in a single draft, whether it’s the first or the fourteenth, because that is simply not the way the craft of writing works.

Joss Whedon is famous for telling writers, “eat your cake first.” Focus on the parts of the story you love, and fill in the rest later. It’s a great way to get writing in the face of a long and daunting process. But I’m here to tell you that, if you love the story you’re working on, and if you let yourself care about each layer, it can ALL be cake. Will some of the layers be a little more exciting to create: the ambitious pistachio-honey-almond sponge layers? Yep. Will some of them be more basic: the vanilla layers? Yep. Will some of them be devlishly hard to make and stack with the others? Of course. Will some of them crumble and need to be replaced or started over? Absolutely.

But a novel can be built like this. And when it is, it turns from something painful and mysterious into a matter of showing up, rolling up our sleeves, being fine with getting covered in the ingredients and making a significant mess, and getting to work.

-Amy Rose

P.S. Next time I’ll be breaking down one of my own drafts into layers to show you how it works!

P.P.S. Also, more pictures of cake.

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Want to work with Amy Rose on your novel? She critiques, content edits, and provides writing coaching for all sorts of fiction. Just click on the contact tab & fill out the easy form to get started!

How to Sell 10,000 Copies of a Book

Brennan Morton published DYING FOR STRANGERS only on Amazon, and despite zero publicity sold 30 books a day over the first several months.

In my 20 years at Publications International, I edited books that generated more than $15 million in revenue. They never made the literary circles, but they did stack high on tables at Costco and Sam’s Club—and to a lesser extent they lined the shelves at Borders and Barnes & Noble. We were in the “bargain book business”; i.e., we published attractive coffee table books on subjects with wide popularity—Players of Cooperstown,America’s Lighthouses—and sold them for a relatively low price. They often made nice gifts for Junior on his birthday or Grandpa on Father’s Day. We’d easily sell 10,000 copies of a book, and sometimes we’d sell in the hundreds of thousands. My book The Love of Baseball sold close to 300,000 copies.

Unfortunately for Publications International, people don’t buy bargain books anymore. They’ve lost their wow factor in this era of smartphones, tablets, and online videos. Every publisher struggles to sell books nowadays, and 10,000 copies is usually an unreachable goal.

But it can be done, and you don’t need to be an established author to pull it off.

One way is to choose a subject that’s immensely popular and strike when the time is right. Triumph Books, which specializes in sports, struck gold with books on New Direction, which hit stores just as the boy band was rising up the charts and girls’ hormones were raging. These books were by far Triumph’s biggest sellers in recent years.

Another example is Derek Jeter #2: Thanks for the Memories, authored by my colleague David Fischer. David understood that a tribute book on the legendary shortstop would sell like hot dogs at a Yankees game if it came out around his retirement. Yankees fans would want a keepsake of their hero, and—since he would retire in the fall—it would make a perfect Christmas gift. Fischer pitched the idea to publishers about a year in advance of DJ’s retirement, and Skyhorse bought it. The advance was low but the royalties were high, because the book sold more than 10,000 copies from October 2014 to January 2015.

Now, a traditional publisher won’t just let any shmoe write their books. Fischer, for example, already had several baseball books under his belt, including tomes on the Yankees. You typically need to be a skilled writer and build a body of work before a publisher will put its faith in you. However, if you have a great idea and a winning proposal, you could consider partnering with an established author. You’ve got the goods; they’ve got the cred.

Through rare, it’s also possible to sell thousands of copies of a self-published book. Recently I edited the raw manuscript of Dying for Strangers: Memoirs of a Special Ops Operator in Iraq. Author Brennan Morton, a highly descriptive writer, provides little-known, fascinating insight into the Iraq War. Here he describes his emotions after a general told his platoon to, for PR and political reasons, release Iraqi aggressors: “Fat tears burned down my cheeks as I gripped the steering wheel so tightly I thought the tiny bones in my hands would finally shatter. I cried so hard that I could hardly see the road. My anger choked me until I gasped and screamed as the men seated around me dealt with the anger in their own way.”

Brennan not only enchants readers with his writing ability and subject matter, he also writes to a large, underserved audience: those searching for unfiltered truth about U.S. military operations. Brennan published the book only on Amazon, and despite zero publicity he was selling about 30 books a day over the first several months. In other words, he was on a 10,000-a-year pace.

Writing skills. Subject Matter. Timing. If you get it all right, you could be on your way to 10,000 copies.