Terry Ibele: Toronto Stop Motion Animator
Read the first chapter of The Moon King here 🙂
Check out my writing tip videos:
Here’s the link to last month’s watercolor newsletter
That’s all this month. Happy Write-o-ween!
From Terry!
Having trouble writing your villain?
When I wrote my first novel, I focused so much on building up my main character that I seriously neglected my villain. Turns out my villain was as flat as a board and it seriously impacted my story (not in a good way). It wasn’t until I thought of my villain as the hero of his own story that I was able to make him come to life.
If you’re struggling with writing your villain, maybe this tip will help.
If you think the first chapter of your novel could use some improvement, there’s one simple test that can tell you how to make it better.
Kill the main character at the end of your first chapter.
This will tell you how compelling your first chapter is.
Write something like, “Jim slips off the bridge and falls to his death.”
Now your main character is finished. He can’t achieve any of his goals.
Next, list out all the consequences that come into effect since the main character can’t achieve their goals.
If the list is short and lacklustre, it’s a good sign that your first chapter has room for improvement.
The consequences matters because they give the reader an idea of what’s at stake. The larger the stake, the more compelled your reader will be to find out what happens next.
A great example is Katniss Everdeen from Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games.
Let’s kill her at the start of the novel and see what happens.
“The train to District 1 crashes and Katniss Everdeen dies.”
Now what consequences come into play if Katniss can’t accomplish her main goal?
Main Goal:
Consequences:
The consequences of Katniss’ death are very high and the reader doesn’t want any of those things to happen. The reader eagerly turns each page to find out what happens next, because Katniss must accomplish her goal above all cost.
A great thing about this test is that you can keep killing your main character at the end of each chapter to see if the consequences are still high enough to keep the reader engaged.
As in The Hunger Games, each chapter proves to test Katniss’ ability to survive and raises the consequences even higher:
A lot of emerging authors don’t realize that the consequences must be clear from the start. It’s why most first-time novels don’t make it. It’s why mine didn’t.
When I finished my first novel, The Moon King, I used the first few chapters to introduce the setting, characters, and the main character’s goal, but I didn’t spell out the consequences until later chapters.
The initial feedback I got was very telling. It was to the effect of, “The first half is boring and drudges along, but the second half is super exciting and I couldn’t stop reading.”
Now that I’ve learned about building up consequences right away using the “Kill the main character” test, I’m editing my first few chapters to be much more compelling.
If you think that your first chapter could use some improvement, simply kill the main character and list out the consequences that you’ve written about so far.
If there aren’t many, or they aren’t very high, then you may need to do a rewrite.
Here’s a simple template you can use to do the test on your chapters (it’s a downloadable word doc)
Happy writing!
Heyo! If you’re looking to get your work published, you already know that you have to go through an agent first.
Here are 4 free tools that will help you to find your perfect agent!
This is what you want to use to find an agent.
Not sure how to find an agent? Start with agentquery.com. Simply choose which type of genre your manuscript falls under and agentquery.com will instantly pull a list of hundreds of agents looking for your type of manuscript.
It’s super simple to scroll through agents at a glance, or read more about each agent in their profile. Perhaps the most helpful thing is that agentquery.com lists each agents’ requirements and links directly to their website.
This is what you want to use to keep track of which agents you’ve contacted.
This website is awesome. It has pretty much every agent you could hope to find on the internet. What’s also even more awesome about it is that it allows you to track who you’ve queried, and what their response was.
Before I stumbled across querytracker.net, I was keeping track of all my query letters in excel. I had columns for agents’ names, emails, requirements, what I’d sent them, and their response. Querytracker.net does this all for you in an even more simple way.
3) Twitter #10queries
This will let you see agents critique query letters.
#10queries is a great # to follow on twitter, because agents use it to critique their slush piles of query letters. They’ll usually write a few words about what the query is pitching and tell you what they like and don’t like.
I use it to see what types of things agents are looking for and also what to avoid.
4) Twitter Pitch Parties
This is what you use to get in touch with agents as fast as possible.
During a pitch party, you tweet a one-sentence synopsis of your novel and include a certain #. During the pitch party (often just one day), hundreds of agents will peruse the tweets associated with the # and favourite the pitches that they like. If they favourite yours, it means they want you to email them directly with your full query.
This is the fastest way you can get in touch with agents, without waiting for them to go through their slush piles.
Carissa Taylor keeps an ongoing calendar of upcoming pitch parties on her blog. I suggest scrolling through her list and seeing if there are any coming up that you can participate in.
Happy Writing!
You need to know how to write a killer query letter!
After years of writing (and receiving a mountain load of feedback), I’ve created a guide on how to write better.
Here’s what I’ve learned and try to follow so far. Add your tips to the comments!
STORY INTRODUCTION
STORY PROGRESSION
MAIN CHARACTER(S)
SECONDARY CHARACTERS
ANTAGONIST
Traditional Storytelling Framework
You need to know how to write a killer query letter!
Terry Ibele: Toronto Stop Motion Animator