I’m excited to bring you a new feature here on Learn to Write Fiction–the Write a Novel With Me Series from Virginia Gruver. Virginia’s one of my fellow writers in the Saturday Writers group and she’ll be sharing her journey through the novel process with us each month. Check back often or sign up for the RSS feed, so you don’t miss a post!

Let me take a moment to introduce myself and thank Cheryl for allowing me to guest post on this great site. My name is Virginia Gruver and I have not published in novel length, yet. I have had a short story published several years ago in a local literary magazine and I have had a slice of life column in a local newspaper, owned by Gannett. I live in the Midwest and Cheryl and I became acquainted as members of a local writer’s organization that dissolved. Because we felt the group filled something for us and a handful of other writers, we decided to continue meeting on the first Saturday of each month, thus The Saturday Writers.

I came up with the Write a Novel with Me Series of blogs because, let’s face it writing can be lonely. My day job as a REALTOR® can be just as lonely, especially in a down market. Yes, I do spend time each week with buyers and sellers but I don’t know how else to explain it, it is only a few hours each week. The rest of the time, I am looking for more buyers and sellers, doing administrative stuff, writing ads, and touring houses. Except for the time, I am face to face with clients, I am working alone.

I also tend to be a perfectionist. If I can’t do something right the first time, I start over. I have half a dozen projects half-done. But I haven’t completed a first draft, yet.

By starting this project, I may still be working alone but it doesn’t feel like it. The traffic on my blog has been phenomenal so I think I may have hit a chord with other writers like myself.

Each post covers a step of the process.

• The idea – suggestions for how to come up with an idea.
• The premise – I used a suggestion from a how-to book on how to write a premise. It is the Suppose, What if, method. My premise for the story I am working on is – Suppose a failing romance author finds that her fiancé died in the arms of another woman. What if because of pride, she lets everyone think he was with her, until the police discover he was poisoned.
• I developed my protagonist – describing her physically and what her motivation and goals are in the beginning of the story.
• I developed victims – two, so far with their secrets.
• I developed the antagonist (my villain, since I am writing a mystery) description, goals and motivation.

And I am now working on innocent suspects. I am making some changes as I go. So far, I have had to change some names that just didn’t work for me. I also plan to change who the villain is. While working on the innocent suspects, I decided maybe someone else would work better. So for the past few days, I’ve been developing those characters and to be honest, I don’t know for sure who the villain is yet myself. I may keep it that way for a while. I need some method to keep the readers of my blog interested and I feel that might be one way. I feel like I am someone who is between a plotter and a pantzer. I like the surprise of not knowing what will happen but I need enough structure to keep me going. My plans are to develop enough characters, setting, and plot points to start writing the novel.

As I complete each step, I will post a blog describing what I’ve done and what the next step is. You are welcome to follow each step while you develop your story. I hope to continue through the writing, revision and marketing of this story. I am open to comments or questions. If someone else wants to discuss what is or isn’t working for them and share some information about their story, that’s fine too. I look forward to traveling the path to publication with you.

If you want to see how I am handling each step of the process in more detail, please check out my blog and follow along.

With this series of blog posts, I have author interviews that shed a little light into how published authors write, book reviews, and conference and workshop information and updates on my author’s new releases.

I will have a more detailed post next month, on this site, about the steps I’ve taken along the way from today on. May our journey be enjoyable and may we find success at the end.

Until next month,

Virginia
Virginia’s View on Novel Writing

A good way to pick up tips or suggestions for your own writing is by reading interviews with other writers.

One of the writers in my Saturday Writers group, Virginia Gruver, has done a series of interviews with authors and posted them on the Saturday Writers blog.

• Saturday Writers Welcome Lois Greiman
• Getting to Know: Carla Cassidy
• Do You Like Your Romance Novels to Sizzle? Francesca Hawley
• If You Love a Story that Touches Your Heart – Cheryl St. John
• Interview with a Poet – Dennis Maulsby

Virginia has just started up a new blog, Virginia’s View on Novel Writing, where she’ll be continuing her author interview series. She’s also started a new series, Write a Book With Me, where she invites you to watch over her shoulder as she goes through the process of writing a book and posting about her progress.

• Want to Write a Book With Me?
• Write a Book With Me-The Premise
• Writing the Novel-Developing the Protagonist

Join Virginia as she writes a novel. As she says in her blog, “Writing can be lonely, let’s do it together.”

When a painter begins to study the art of painting, he often starts by attempting to recreate the work of master painters. To learn impressionist techniques, he recreates Monet’s paintings. To learn how to use color to capture mood and emotion, he will paint like Van Gogh. It is considered important to first mimic the masters to learn techniques as part of creating his own art.

So why does the writing world frown on writers copying another writer’s work to learn techniques? By copying I mean to literally re-type the words from a novel, exactly as they are printed.

Fear of plagiarism is probably the main reason more writers don’t use this method to learn to write. But a painter doesn’t necessarily intend to sell their copy of a Van Gogh painting. They did the exercise to learn the techniques Van Gogh used. It was practice only.

A writer would do the same–copy the words to learn the technique, but not attempt to sell or publish since it is an exact duplicate used for practice only.

So what could you learn from copying a bestselling author’s book? You could learn their particular voice, how they characterize their story people with specific details, even how to pace a story, either fast or slow, depending on your genre.

For example, if you want to learn very fast pacing, copy James Patterson’s books. His short chapters and succinct writing draw the reader through the book very quickly. If you want to learn snappy dialogue, copy Elmore Leonard’s work.

To make the most of the copy technique, follow these steps.

• Select bestselling authors in your genre. In particular, select authors that write stories similar to the ones you would like to write.
• As an advanced technique, try selecting authors outside your genre. This is useful if you’re trying to include non-genre techniques in your story. For example, writing a thriller with rich descriptions.
• Choose short passages to copy for specific techniques, like dialogue, pacing, description or point of view.
• Pay attention as you are typing to the words used, the rhythm, and the phrasing the author used. Think about how you would have written that sentence or paragraph and focus on the differences between your writing style and the author’s.
• After a copy session, write a section of your own novel attempting to use the same style as the other author. Compare the two when done to see how close you came to emulating their technique.

Remember that the goal is to learn a technique, not lift entire sections of another writer’s novel to put in your own. Plagiarism and copyright infringement are not okay. Plagiarism, which is representing another’s work as your own, is unethical. Copyright infringement is using another’s work without their permission (violating their copyright) and it is illegal. They are similar concepts, but they are both wrong, so don’t go there.

Used selectively, the copy technique can teach you specific writing techniques that you can use to enhance your own stories. Just remember to make them solely your own stories and not those of another author.

What authors would you recommend to learn specific techniques?

When I write a first draft, it tends to be all dialogue and action. On occasion, someone walks through a door or gets in a vehicle. But most of the time, they live in a vacuum–a completely blank space of nothingness. Not good, unless you’re writing an experimental literary story.

I add setting details in my second draft. Once I know the basic action and direction for each scene, I can select the right setting details to underscore the drama that takes place.

But which details should you include to describe your setting? It’s different for every story, but here are some links to get you started.

Character and Setting Interactions – Some questions to get you thinking about how your character currently interacts with his environment.

Setting: The Writer’s Secret Weapon – How specific details of the setting can be a powerful tool for a writer.

Setting – Five ways to use setting to enhance your book.

Give Your Setting a Role to Play – How setting can function as a secondary character in your story.

What tips do you have on incorporating setting into your story?

If you write mysteries or any type of police procedural, here’s a useful article for you. It provides examples of how the FBI and other law enforcement officials analyze a suspect’s written statement to see what it reveals.

For example, in a case of a missing person, it is normal to describe the person using the present tense. “Jenny always comes right home after school.”

Making a statement about the missing person in past tense may indicate that the suspect already knows what happened to the missing person. “Jenny always came right home after school,” might indicate that the suspect knows Jenny is already dead.

The numerous examples given in the article will provide realistic words you can put in your characters’ mouths to prove their innocence or guilt.

Got a great opportunity for you to take advantage of… tonight.

Holly Lisle has created a new course… How to Think Sideways: Career Survival School for Writers. It’s a six-month course with weekly lessons that will show you how to break out of the pack to sell YOUR novel.

You’ll discover:

• How to Break the Four “Thinking” Barriers to Your Success
• How to Discover Your Writing “Sweet Spot”
• How to Generate Ideas on a Deadline
• How to Recognize and Build on Good Ideas
• How to Define Your Project’s Needs
• How to Discover (Or Create) Your Project’s Market
• How to Plan Your Project While NOT Killing Your Story
• How to Write From Inside Your Story
• How to “Plan” Surprises That Surprise Even You
• How To Design Compelling Queries, Proposals, And Sample Chapters
• How to Create, Complicate, And Solve Problems
• How to Fall In Love With Your Project a Second Time aka “Can’t I Just Kill Them All?”
• How to Find and Use Your “Planned” Surprises
• How To “Hire” Spies, And Why Your Project Needs Them
• How To Assess Your Progress And Make Mid-Course Corrections
• How To Use Story Gravity To Get To Your Ending
• How to Find the RIGHT Ending
• “What if the Book is Wrecked?”
• How To Write The Ending That Sells The Next Book
• How To Work With Editors, Agents, Marketing Departments, And Artists, And NOT Wreck Your Project
• How to Plan Your Revision
• How To NOT Fix What Ain’t Broken (While Still Fixing What Is)
• How To Deliver What You Promised And What They Want On Deadline
• How To NOT Be A One-Book Wonder: Learn to Produce Repeatable Results

More Course Materials

Along with the lessons each week, you get

• a monthly movie to get you started with each month’s topic
• copies of some of her manuscripts in multiple drafts so you can see how a pro writes and revises
• full access to her private writing community where you can meet with fellow students and course graduates
• access to a private workgroup where you can securely post and discuss your writing problems and triumphs with a small group of classmates
• discounts on other courses at the Student Bookstore

Graduate Bonus

You also get the Graduate Bonus - a three-week mini-course with video, MP3s, and transcripts on How NOT to Write a Series… And Why You Don’t Want To. I’m very interested in writing series novels, so this bonus is exceedingly attractive to me. I want to know how to do it right, so I actually get my novels published.

Charter Member Bonus

Holly’s offering charter memberships in the Think Sideways course until midnight Eastern time TODAY, so you have to hurry. If you DO sign up before midnight tonight, you also get the Charter Member Bonus. It’s a live-interaction writing workshop called Graduate Novel. In this workshop, Holly writes a novel and details the process of writing it. Graduates write their novels and go through the process of writing them, and together, Holly and the graduates work through the course a second time, discussing problems and progress.

You could pay hundreds of dollars for an opportunity like the Graduate Novel workshop and most “gurus” would happily charge you that much to dispense their wisdom and knowledge. And Holly’s giving it away as a FREE bonus to her Charter Members. If you’re serious about your writing, and I know you are, you don’t want to miss out on this incredible opportunity.

Money’s tight these days with all the bad news about the economy, so I know you’re probably worried about what it will cost. Holly has two payment options available:

Option 1
$47 today, plus $47 monthly for five months. Lessons delivered via your secure student page every week for 25 weeks.

Option 2
$25 today, plus $25 a month for eleven months. Lessons delivered via your secure student page every other week for 50 weeks.

$47 a month for six months seems like an awful lot of money, I know. But think of it this way…

That amounts to:

• 1 medium pizza a week OR
• 2 McDonald’s meals a week OR
• 1 and a half new paperback books a week OR
• movie tickets for you and your honey once a week OR
• four Starbucks coffees a week

For me, getting my novel written and done right is way more important to me than pizza, McDonald’s or even books, right now. And I know it is for you, too.

If you decide to take Option 2, the cost is even less each week and very affordable.

I’ve been buying and using Holly’s books on writing for years and she gives incredible value for the money in everything she produces. Check out the amazing things that Holly will show you in the course and sign up for it tonight. You don’t want to miss out on a great opportunity to learn from one of the pros in writing.

I’m signed up and taking the course myself. Come join me, but do it before midnight Eastern tonight!

This week, February 23-27, is Read Me Week. Read Me Week highlights the importance and fun of reading. It’s the creation of Book’em, an organization that seeks to inspire a love of books and reading in all children.

It’s probably safe to say that most writers are also avid readers. Our love of the written word drives us to enjoy other people’s words as much as our own.

A couple of years ago I had the stunning realization that I had stopped reading books. As a child, I read constantly, a book always in hand. Even the newspaper or a cereal box would suffice, as long as I had something to read. My parents even forbade me to read at home for a while, because they thought all the reading was interfering with finishing my homework. Unwilling to give up my favorite pastime, I began reading in all my free periods at school – the time when I normally did my homework. Stop me from reading? No way. I went through at least a hundred books a year, probably more, which is substantial since most of them came from the school or public library and I had limited access to each.

You can imagine my surprise then when I realized that as an adult I was reading less than 10 books a year, if even that. Not a good circumstance for a writer or a happy circumstance for someone who professes to love books.

So in January 2006 I decided to fix it. My method was simple – I began to write down the title, author and date that I finished each book. A simple list to keep track of what I was reading and how many books per year.

In 2006, I read 44 books. I discovered Patricia Briggs in March and finished all of her then in-print books by the start of April. I also started reading outside my favored genres (science fiction and fantasy) to round out my reading – The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold (literary), Emma by Jane Austen (literary), The Queen’s Gambit by Walter Tevis (contemporary), A Morbid Taste for Bones by Ellis Peters (mystery), The Book of the Dead by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child (mystery), and The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion (memoir). New genre authors discovered include Michelle Sagara, Holly Black, Marie Brennen, Kat Richardson, and Lynn Viehl.

In 2007, I read 92 books – nearly two books a week. A sampling of the numbers – May – 8, June – 11, July – 8, August – 11, September – 17, October – 11. 2007 featured several runs of book reading from the same author. June was primarily S.L. Viehl, her Stardoc series. August was Sara Douglass. September was a mix – Eileen Wilks, Karen Chance, and J.R. Ward. October and November were Sherrilyn Kenyon.

It is fascinating to look across the lists and see the patterns in the books I’ve read or find the day when I first read a particular author.

How is your reading going? If you’ve fallen behind in your fiction reading, take Read Me Week as your opportunity to commit to reading more books in 2009 to support your writing.

When you’re deep in the middle of your manuscript, the last thing you want is a writing slump. Here are four ways to prevent a slump from hitting:

1. Work the same hours every day. The routine will keep your brain primed and focused on your story.
2. Stop writing each day at a point where you know what the next sentence will be. If you already know what you’re going to write next, you’re less apt to hit a slump.
3. Read over the last few pages of what you wrote the day before to get yourself back into the swing of the story.
4. Retype the last page or two that you wrote the day before to put yourself back in the story.

What other methods do you use to keep your momentum going?

January is also National Clean Up Your Computer Month. Starting a new year is a great time to clean out the old and unneeded. Most writers depend on their computer as a vital part of their writing process. To keep yours in tip top shape, follow these steps:

If you have a PC:

1. Organize your documents in your My Documents folder. Delete unneeded documents and create folders to store the ones you need to keep.
2. Delete temporary files.
3. Clear the cache.
4. Delete old email.
5. Clean off your Desktop of outdated shortcuts.
6. Uninstall programs you no longer need or use.
7. Review your Favorites or Bookmarks folder and get rid of any sites you no longer visit.
8. Run Disk Cleanup in System Tools (Start menu, Accessories, System Tools, Disk Cleanup)
9. Run a spyware detection program. I use Ad-Aware. It’s free for personal use.
10. Install an anti-virus program if you don’t already have one. I use AVG. They have a free version for personal use.
11. Run Disk Defragmenter (Start menu, Accessories, System Tools, Disk Defragmenter).

Perform these steps once every three months, at the minimum, to keep your computer running well. (For more information on how to run these steps, read How to Clean Up Your Computer.)

If you have a Mac:

I don’t have a Mac myself, so I’m just going to point you to some resources for cleaning up a Mac.

How to Use Apple Computer Disk Utility to Clean Up your Mac

Clean up a Thumb Drive

Physical Cleaning

As a final step, shut down your computer and get out your vacuum. Using a brush or wand attachment, vacuum out the computer fan on the back of the computer. The fan pulls air in through the front of the computer and across the processor to keep it cool. It pulls in dust as well, a lot of dust if your computer normally sits on the floor. Vacuuming off the back fan will help it run better, so you don’t run the risk of overheating the processor.

While the vacuum is out, run it across your keyboard. If you tend to eat at your computer like I do, the keyboard becomes a crumb catcher. Even just turning the keyboard upside down and shaking it will allow some of the crumbs and dust bunnies to fall out.

If you keep your computer in good condition, it should help you write your bestsellers for many years to come.

Do you have any specific steps you use to keep your computer clean?

January is Get Organized Month, a great month for writers, though we may not appreciate it so much. As a writer, you have to keep yourself organized or you’ll make your writing life a lot harder than it has to be.

Organize Your Research

If you’re writing a book that is heavily dependent on research, you’ll need a way to organize your notes so you can find what you need, when you need it.

Lisa Janice Cohen uses a “wiki” to organize her notes. A wiki is a collection of web pages that can be modified by anyone with access. Wikipedia is one of the best known wikis. You can read her posts on how she uses a wiki . And she put together a PDF with screenshots to give you a better idea of how it works.

Infocollector is another online application for collecting and tagging information.

Jason Penney shares how he uses a mind map to organize his novel notes.

Organize Your Novel

There are a lot of details to track when writing a novel. Creating a Project File might help.

I use yWriter software to organize and write my novels. (Love it!) It’s a free download and here’s a good review of the software.

Organize Your Submissions

Greg Knollenberg shares how to track your submissions.

Sonar is free manuscript tracking software from Spacejock Software.

The Writer’s Technology Companion reviews Sonar as well as Slushomatic and Writer’s Database.

LitMatch is an online submission tracking application.

Organize Your Business

Shirley Jump gives some tips for how to keep the business side of your writing organized.

You can also download 1-4-all Account software to help you keep your books, manage your writing business and more.

Paperback Writer shares thoughts on tracking writing expenses.

What tools do you use to stay organized?