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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/31911
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/31911
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

> I do not have enough knowledge about the book-reading community as to what pleases them.

What pleases them is what you see published and sell, they wouldn't buy it and read it if it did not please them.

Note there is a distinct cause and effect here: They don't like it just because it got published! It got published because editors thought it would sell and make money, and they have been reading all day, every day, for ten years or more and know the business of what the book-reading community really likes enough to buy.

If you like the books you read, and can write a book like that, then do it. Use the book as a reference. It will show you the proper way to format dialogue, for instance. (You can search or ask here for advice on things not done in your book.)

It will show you what dialogue **_looks like,_** see how the author intersperses attribution (who said it), descriptions of what characters are thinking, feeling, or doing, and the actual text of what they said.

Look in your book for when characters are **introduced,\*** and see how the author did that for each of them. How much description do they get? Some introduce characters with nearly zero, and leave the description up to the imagination of readers.

You can go further, to see structure and pacing. Before "structure", find "scenes": Just like on TV, a scene is characters doing something and interacting in one continuous chunk of time, usually in one place, that advances the story.

Summarize scenes without the drama: "Hagrid comes to Harry's House, to tell him he is going to Wizard's School (Hogwarts)."

Like on TV or a movie, a scenes vary in length and can be long or short. In Star Wars, the scene of Luke fighting Vader is long. The length is for dramatic effect, the summary is "Luke has a light saber duel with Vader and loses badly. Vader cuts off his hand. Luke learns Obi Wan lied to him: Vader did not kill his father, Vader is his father."

A short scene is Leia confessing her love for Hans Solo before he is frozen in Carbonite. All scenes DO something, either making the characters do something in response (including go other places), or change the characters in some way (give them knowledge or understanding, new feelings, new experiences (good or bad) or cost them something.)

A summary of the scenes will show you a summary of these changes. Together for a character we call that an "arc", how a character changed from when they were first introduced to the last scene they appear in.

Characters that don't change in the story, appear in only a few scenes (like a store clerk) are props. In many cases they can do double duty: Not just a store clerk, but comical, or they illustrate something about the culture, technology, attitudes, religion, and so on. Or they may be props to be killed, to prove the villain is one bad ass dude.

The reason for doing this analysis? It becomes a lesson in writing a book you liked, that was part of your inspiration to write.

So copy it. Or more accurately, emulate it. These summaries of scenes show you how a professional, published-for-pay, popular author **_structures_** a story. How complications are introduced, how characters are introduced and taken away. Importantly, note how characters **fail** in the story, a story with just one success after another can be boring.

More specifically boring **to readers:** We call those "wish fulfillment" stories to be kind, or "mental masturbation" to be mean: They satisfy nobody but the author's fantasies of a perfect life. For a story to be interesting it must have conflict and the reader must believe the MC (main character) is at risk and may not succeed. Something or someone must stand in the way of their success. It could be the environment, e.g. say the MC is mugged by a sketchy taxi driver in a foreign country and winds up in a ditch in some unknown corner of India with no passport, identification, money, luggage or even shoes. It could be a villain, specific or not, e.g. the MC witnessed a mob murder, and now mobsters have sent people to kill her.

The last thing to notice in this book is perhaps the most important thing to get right. You will find it on this site as "Show don't Tell". Notice what types of things the author **describes** (shows the reader) and what kinds of things are just **told** to the reader.

Summaries can help here, too. You can summarize descriptions into something short and pithy, like "the author could have just written the landscape is beautiful and awe inspiring." But instead she spent a page describing mountains, forests, lakes, ice caps.

Or there was a description of action that shows you Harry is very mad, when she could have just said that: "Harry is very mad, so mad he frightens Sarah."

If you can summarize paragraphs of exposition like that, it means you **_should not_**. These are examples of where you **should** describe things and **not** just tell them. These help the reader imagine these scenes and feelings, where simply telling them "Harry is very mad" does not help them imagine much of anything, at best a facial expression. This is why the author describes things they **could** have summarized, to help the reader imagine the **experience** , not just understand the fact that Harry is very mad. Facts don't last long in the reader's mind, imagined experiences do.

So pay attention to where the author describes things they could have summarized as a simple fact, and where they just state simple facts (because the experience was not too important to the story). For example, "The bellman hailed a taxi, and she arrived at the airport with an hour to spare." The taxi driver, the smell and appearance inside the taxi, any dialogue they had, the traffic, the sights along the way, whether she tipped him: All unimportant to the story and skippable, so just a sentence of "telling" of a connecting fact to get her from the hotel to the airport is all we need: she took a taxi.

Note the TYPES of things the author "shows" (tries to give you an imagined experience) instead of telling, and tells (imparts a fact the reader likely needs to not wonder what the hell just happened) instead of showing. You want to emulate that too.

It can be more difficult. One of the biggest mistakes of beginners is to tell when they should have shown, e.g. "John was the most attractive guy in the school." In published stories, such facts are seldom stated, they are shown: If it is true, it should have consequences, things happen to John, people interact differently with him, he has a different attitude toward them. Perhaps he exploits his good looks to get what he wants and is successful where other guys would fail miserably. The reason it can be difficult to spot is because the author, having **shown** you John is the most attractive guy, may never ever **tell** you that John is the most attractive guy. At most, some character tells another character this, or perhaps a character resents it (telling somebody "He is not that good looking!"), or wishes him harm because of it. But the "fact" is never baldly stated. That is why you summarize, to get to the fact of what the author is trying to convey, and then you can see how such a fact is **shown** and never **told**.

You do not have to read a hundred books before you write. You do need intellect, but one bestseller that you personally like and admire is enough: It contains all you need to get started, from formatting to plotting to many examples of what professional writing looks and feels like. You can take it apart, piece by piece, along with a search or two. Don't think of it as a work of art, think of it as a machine, and by Google or on this site, you can learn how all the parts of this machine work to make something fun to read and worth buying.

Original score: 6