I’ve said this somewhere before, but writing is both absurdly hard and absurdly easy. I’ve had a bunch of jobs that were pretty bad in a lot of stressful, abusive, terrible ways, and writing is far and away easier than all of them. I get up, I have some ideas, I type those ideas, I slightly edit those ideas to be more pleasing to your eye, and then I take a nap.

The hard part, which anyone who has written knows, is doing it every day. For a large part of the writing of this book, that became hard enough that I could barely do it. Dotblue, my editor, has at several times during the writing of this book said something along the lines of “Are you doing okay? Your pace is off, and this particular sentence concerned me.” I was fine, I was alive, I wasn’t crumbling under the weight of an impossible life, but he also wasn’t wrong. I was having a hard time writing.

Normally, when I write one of these author’s notes, I talk a lot about characters and setting. This time, I’m not. If you are four books into this sucker, you know the majority of the characters and you have a good idea of how I approach new ones. Instead, I’m going to try and give you some pointers on the writing process, with bits and pieces of what you’d normally get out of one of my writer’s notes mixed in.

My hope is that the next time you are running dry, you can use some of these pointers yourself to get moving. Or, at least, that reading this is interesting. Either way, enjoy.

DEFINING POINT A

Point A, the beginning, is where your story starts out.

For book one, that was with Arthur’s face on the cobblestones in a new world, terrified of everything around him. For book two, that was a shop, a girlfriend, and a found family but not much knowledge of the world outside of that warm, safe womb. For book three, that was with an open field, a bunch of friends, but no houses, steady supply of resources, or comfort. For book four, that was with a town that had running water, enough resources to survive and enjoy life with, and an impending problem.

Defining Point A is important. “Here is our main character,” you say, and then tell readers as much as you can without being heavy-handed and weird about it. “Here’s the world he inhabits, and what kind of initial problems he has to deal with. And here are the resources, whether human or otherwise, to solve his problem with.”

Once you know what your Point A is, you have to then decide how you’re going to relate everything together, how fast, and in what order. And guess what: how well you can do this is probably the biggest differentiator between whether you get to be an author or have to go on being something else. It’s the biggest, most foundational piece (unless I’ve said this before, in which case you can read this as “this is also very important”).

Handling Point A is the most important part of your book. That’s where they are deciding whether or not they care about the characters and the setting, and whether they’re going to spend their precious energy reading the rest of the book. If you botch it, you lose them. That’s not unreasonable. At any given point of the book, the only things they know are what you’ve taken the time to show them.

A very skilled author can create a Point A that has world building, problem, and solution pieces all in one.

Let’s take an example:

If James is wielding a glowing dagger, we know he’s in a magic or techy world. If he’s wielding a glowing dagger against giant, molten-metal frogs in the lava cave, we know that world is dangerous. If he has the dagger and the frogs and has mental dialogue about how he can’t wait to get back up to the nice, cool surface tavern and have a nice, cool ale, we know a bit out about the outside world.

James pulled his dagger out of the frog, spraying himself with juice in the process.

Of course, he thought. It’s not enough that this dungeon spawned with lava and fires everywhere. Even the insides of the frogs have to be hot.

He wiped the sweat and filth from his forehead as he squared up to face the next shimmering amphibian in line. It was already sporting barbed arrows in each leg, and slowed down enough from the injuries to give him a chance to look over his shoulder at the archer.

“My balls,” David said, “are so stuck to my leg that I’m going to need a crowbar to get them off.”

“Too much information, David.” James sprung through the air, clearing the frog before rebounding off the ground, twisting in the air to face his friend again, and landing with one leg on either side of the frog’s head as he brought his dagger down again and again into the thing’s spinal cord. “Far too much.”

“It’s hot as hell down here!” David yelled. “I just want an ale. A single drop of ale. I want to look at a piece of ice, even if it’s from afar. Anything would help.”

“Are you going to bathe this time? Before getting that ale?” James dismounted from the frog before wiping off his dagger on his pants and dropping it into the scabbard at his belt. “Last time you didn’t. And I don’t think it did you any favors with that barmaid. She almost called the guard on you for stench alone.”

Look at all the stuff you have there. I mean, just look at it. There are monsters, there’s unpleasant work related to them, there’s the comic-relief friend, and there’s the implication of a safer world up top that sounds like it just might be medieval. With another page, we could give an implication of just what the MC is getting from all this, what he’s saving up for, how he met David, etc.

And we’d be fleshing the whole world out at the same time. Settings, characters, goals, all at once. Two pages in, our readers could know what our book actually was, and whether or not it was for them. Maybe quicker, if we optimized for that.

That’s what your Point A is, and getting it right defines the entire rest of the novel.

GETTING TO POINT B

At the beginning of a book, your characters probably have problems, but they don’t necessarily have a BIG problem yet. In the world of Disney, there’s a composer named Alan Menken who sometimes talks about writing “I want” songs, which let you know what the lifelong dreams and desires of the characters are. Ariel wants a life on land. Belle wants to not be around hicks all the time. Aladdin wants people to know being poor doesn’t make him worthless.

Those are things you resolve by the end of the book, but they aren’t the big-crisis problem. For Ariel, that’s being in a bad deal with a witch. For Belle, it’s that she has a stalker who wants to murder her boyfriend and imprison her dad. For Aladdin, it’s that he’s trapped in a big lie that someone else has figured out and is using as a weapon against him.

In book four of Demon World Boba Shop, I wanted one big problem to be resolved by the end of the book. That was the monster wave. It was built up throughout the entire first quarter of the book, then resolved around the halfway point. I then went on to do a lot of lower-key stuff, which isn’t as standard but seems to have worked out.

Before you start writing, it’s worthwhile to at least have an idea of what your Point B problem is going to be. But here’s a secret: You don’t actually have to keep that problem. If you write in the general direction of one Point B, you’ll find that other big problems suggest themselves to you as you go, and one of them might be better than what you started with.

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If so, switch. It’s your book.

FINISHING POINT C

In some books, the basic form of Point C is just “the Point B problem has been resolved.” That’s definitely one part of what you need to do. Point B has to get fully or partially defeated to end your book. But Point C isn’t just about the problem. It’s also about the characters, especially the main character, and especially what dealing with the big and little problems of the book have done to them.

In book one of DWBS, Arthur is mostly just trying to find his place in the world and gradually learning that it’s okay if good things happen to him. By the end of the book, he’s resolved both, and resolving his big Point B problem by having saved Mizu.

In the second book, he ends the novel knowing he has the freedom to leave the cradle and take risks, partially because he’s finally learning to trust that the world isn’t out to get him. He’s also resolved his point B problem of not losing all his friends, but that’s sort of secondary to what he’s learned about himself and the world around him.

I think in an ideal world, you come up with Point C BEFORE you come up with point B. That “who is my character before, and who is he after?” development is so important you have to make sure the crises he’s going to deal with are consistent with it.

Again, you can give yourself the freedom to change any of this during the writing process. It’s just that Point C stuff is harder to change. “Who my character is” is so dependent on where he’s headed that changing your Point C necessarily changes Point A and Point B. It’s worth the time and thought to get a really good idea of what’s happening here before you start.

PLOT DRIVES STORY, STORY DRIVES PLOT

A lot of new writers think they need to know every single step their characters will take. To be fair, some do. I know some good writers who exhaustively plot every single aspect of their stories before they get started, follow those plans to the letter, and get very good results out of it. It’s one way to go.

I still hate it because I’ve seen far too many stories get several chapters in before the writers notice that the direction the story is going contradicts one of their pre-registered steps. This makes them feel like they are “stuck,” and they either contort the story in ways it doesn’t want to bend to make it work, or just stop writing entirely. I have seen this so many dozens of times that I’m actively afraid to plot too much, lest I build the same prison around myself and wreck my books.

But that’s not the only problem you can run into. Not having a predetermined plot at all kills just as fast as having too much.

Consider Bob and Dave:

Bob has a notebook he’s filled with every single plot point his book will ever need. He’s worked on it for years, getting every last part perfect before he starts to write what he’s sure will be a perfect book. How could it not, with all that prep work?

Once he starts writing, he realizes what a mistake he’s made. He’s now immersing himself in his world, and finding out his characters have their own voices, and react in ways he didn’t anticipate when he sketched them out in his notebook. Little details are piling up and tilting the scales of the story, and he doesn’t feel like he can abandon all his prep work to go with the grain of the story and end up where it wants to go.

Dave, on the other hand, has no plot at all. He’s working completely freehand. When something happens, his characters react to it completely organically. When the story wants to go a certain direction, he follows it.

Six months later, he realizes the book is nine tenths done, and while he’s written a lot of good scenes, he hasn’t really written a story. There’s been no progression towards a goal. In a panic, he loads the last tenth of the book with all the plot points, notices that this does nothing to fix his meandering, terrible pacing, and burns the whole novel in a fire.

You have to find a balance between these things. Point A, B, and C beginning-middle-end stuff above is the bare minimum you need to not be Dave. More defined story points than that are fine, but you need at least that much, and to always be glancing up at the signposts to see how far you are from each point to get what you need to finish accomplished in time, and without crowding your pacing.

Avoiding being Bob is a bit harder. There’s a writer who wrote tons of westerns name Louis L’Amour who once said this, “Start writing no matter what, the water does not flow until the faucet is turned on.”

And it’s true. There’s some small amount of work you can get done on your book without writing. Later, once you’ve written a ton of novels and know how things generally go in your stories, you can get a little bit more done. But there’s only so much you can optimize without actually turning on the tap.

For me, this looks a lot like this: I define who my character is at the start of the book, and who I want him to be at the end, and then I write a few chapters, and let some problems that stem from who he is spring up organically. I take a look at those problems, think about what they’d look like if they were much larger, and try to create a brand-new point B.

As I’m writing the book, I’m keeping an eye on that point B constantly, as well as what’s happening to my main character. If the book goes in a wildly different direction, I try to notice that as soon as possible and adjust before I’m too buried in work that’s taking me in a direction the story wants to go.

For you, that might be different. It might involve more plotting or even less. It might be more rigid and work anyway. The main thing I want to do is draw your attention to the problem. Yes, plots drive stories. But the stories also drive the plots. You have to respect both to make it to the end of a worthwhile book.

CREATING CHARACTERS

There are two ways to create characters. Plot characters and story characters.

Plot characters are created to fill some sort of plot need. If our character is starving in the woods, he might need someone to teach him how to hunt. Creating a hunter that he meets by the side of the road makes sense for this. When we make a plot character, everything that character ends up being is secondary to that role.

Story characters are written with a primary focus on who they are. They exist to be pleasing, entertaining, and interesting. To the extent they exist in a plot, the plot either bends around them to accommodate who they are, or squeezes them into a different shape.

Milo was a plot character. Arthur needed to meet a male peer who could introduce him to the world of people his own age, so one was provided to him. Now, four books in, Milo is still an interesting and good character, but it’s taken him a long time to really establish a full personality. I like Milo, but he’s not the best character in the book and never will be.

Ella was a story character. I specifically wanted someone specifically like Ella in the story, cooking and giving advice. I wanted a turbo-mom who was great in all respects, who was an amplified version of the best parents you’ve ever met. Because of this, Ella is one of the best characters in the book.

Is there overlap between plot characters and story characters? Sure. And you need both kinds of characters. I needed a mayor for the city at some point. I needed a trainer for Arthur. I gave these characters as much story-character flair as I could, but I think in both cases you can feel the parts where they were first and foremost cogs in a story. But since I couldn’t do without them, there they are. They are good characters, but not the best.

And then there’s Lily and Mizu, both of whom are pure story characters. And guess what? They’ve driven more plot than anyone around them because they simply are good enough that I care about them, and know you will too. It’s more interesting to have things happen to them.

My advice is to lean heavy on story characters as much as you can. You can’t avoid plot characters entirely. But to the extent you maintain a flexible enough plot that your characters can brush it aside as they make their way through the world, you can avoid them quite a bit and populate your world with people instead of plot-machines.

CONCLUSION

Does all this advice seem stale? It’s because you’ve read a lot of it before, in different words. I think every writer who finds even modest success eventually stumbles onto these concepts. They all have different takes on them, sure. But for almost everyone I’ve talked to about this, it feels like we are discovering them for the first time, even as we know we aren’t.

The reason I’m comfortable restating something as well-tread as “have a beginning, a middle, and an end” is because the advice is just that valuable, and because I hope that putting it in different words helps drive it just a bit deeper.

And then, hopefully, you eventually get to a point where you can safely break those rules, knowing exactly why you are doing it. I hope that one day you reread this and say “I disagree with basically all his takes on this subject” because you are so firmly established in your own style that none of it makes sense anymore.

We’ll see how that goes.

As always, I can’t write without you all reading. With every page you turn or friend recommend my stories to, you make it possible for me to live dreams and have thoughts just like these. I’m more thankful for it than you could ever know.

Thanks for letting me have a nice world.

RC