How books get from my head to your hands.

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NaNoWriMo begins in six weeks. It’s hard to believe November is almost here again! In the next few weeks, I’m going to cover several different methods of novel planning. Most people think of this as “writing process” though that term covers things that go beyond the actual writing of words. I will probably cover that later in the blog series as well.

Outline

The outline is the most common form of book planning. It works well for some people and not so well for others. (I personally don’t outline my books as I shared in this post about my own planning process.) 

An outline consists of headings, followed by subheadings. The absolute simplest way to do this is to divide your novel by chapters and plan one heading for each chapter, followed by each of the plot points that fall under than heading. 

For instance, if you are planning a 50,000 word novel (as is the case for NaNoWriMo), and you hope to have 1,000 words in each chapter, you’ll need 50 headings (or chapters) with subheadings/plot points for each.

Practically speaking, most chapters are more like 1,500 to 2,000 words long. To make this goal attainable, let’s figure 25-30 headings.

Now, once you have a basic idea of what happens in the beginning of your story, your inciting event, the rising action, the climax, and the conclusion, you can break this down into those 25-30 headings. Then, you’ll need to include just enough detail in your subheadings so you remember what you want to write, without “prewriting” your novel during the outline process. I’ve also seen people include notes about their characters and setting in the outline.

Many people write their outline on index cards, one heading and subsequent notes per card. If you don’t have access to index cards, a notebook works well, too. You can write one heading per sheet.

The advantage of this is that you can easily rearrange the plot as needed, should you change your mind about how you want the story to progress. You can also see broad story arcs or patterns before you even sit down to write the book.

The disadvantage of this is that if you decide to make a major change somewhere in your story line, you have to rewrite your outline from that point on, or at least from that point until your prior outline will work again.

This week has not gone as originally planned. That is not a bad thing. In fact, it’s been a good week. I just didn’t get a few things done that I had planned — like writing blog posts. I’ll get back to it in the next few days, but I decided to use this short hiatus to talk about a couple things.

Email Newsletter Sign-up

My techie husband helped me set up an email list. “Why do you need an email list if you already have a blog?” you might ask. 

I’d like to use the email newsletters to give more personal news and happenings than I’m comfortable with in a public blog. I can also keep people informed about upcoming writing projects. My goal is to send it out once or twice a month. If you’d like to sign up, you can do so on the sidebar here at my blog or on my Facebook page under Email List Sign-up.

Helpingauthors

I posted this image on my Facebook page a few days ago and thought I’d elaborate on it.

Every new author is starting from scratch. They have to build recognition and readership. This takes takes time and the help of their readers. An author is nothing without someone to read their books.

How can you help a new author get their book out?

1. You can read their book.

We spend hundreds of hours planning, writing, and editing our book. We’ve got blood (hopefully not literally 😉 ), sweat, and tears invested in this. We desire nothing more than to share it with the world so you can enjoy it, too. It’s our art. 

But all that is worth nothing if no one reads what we’ve created. 

2. You can recommend their book.

Did you like that book you just read? Tell someone about it. It’s great when a book is shared online, but the best recommendation you can give is in person. Tell a friend. Share it with your mom or sister, dad or brother. Tell the ladies at church or your friends at the gym. Tell someone.

Personally, I’m more likely to read a book if it’s been recommended to me by a friend. Most people are. So spread the word. It helps more than you know!

3. You can rate their book online.

Sadly, no matter how much personal interaction helps, some interaction online is needed. Once you’ve read the book, it helps so much if you leave some feedback about it online. wherever you bought it, whether Amazon or Barnes and Noble or somewhere else. Every time you rate the book, it improves its discoverability on those sites.

Have you read the book? Rate it! You’re doing that author a favor!

Talents Huckabee

One of my favorite books is called A Tangled Web by L.M. Montgomery. It tells the story of a family, any of whom could receive a priceless heirloom based on the decisions they make in the year following the reading of the family matriarch’s will. The decisions that follow are sweet, funny, and sad. In the end, everyone is surprised, yet satisfied, with how things turn out.

As I was coming up with the idea for Talents, I knew I wanted to write a book that intertwined the lives of seemingly unrelated characters toward a common goal in the same spirit as A Tangled Web.

I started thinking about this book sometime in 2012. Like any good story 😉 the plot evolved from the question “What if?”

What if several people were given a gift to invest in their community? How would it affect the community? How would it change their lives? What if the real gift wasn’t the money but the impetus to step out and instigate change around them?

Thus, Talents was taken from my imagination and put on paper. This didn’t actually happen until fall of 2013. The story wasn’t finished until January of 2015. (Hey, I’m a busy wife and mom! I don’t get a lot of time to write!)

I enjoyed developing the plots for each of the characters, but my favorites turned out to be Parker and Ed. The challenge with Parker was keeping it believable. I’d get ideas, then I’d think “would this work in real life?” I’d go looking for people in real life who’d done things similar to the idea I had. You can see an idea I had for the book come to life in the book trailer for Talents in the form of the graffiti art I found to photograph.

Ed’s was challenging, because it *needed* to be over-the-top, but not to the point of becoming unbelievable. Unfortunately, I knew of real-life situations that weren’t much different than what I was writing for my character though some of it came from my own imagination. Art imitating life or the other way around? I don’t know. You be the judge.

A few people have asked me about Jackson’s character – Why didn’t I expand his story further in the book? Two reasons: Talents wasn’t about Jackson and his story, though he did provide a springboard to the real story. Second, I might come back to Jackson another time. This is, after all, only book one.

Both the ebook and the paper book are available for purchase today on TouchPoint and Amazon. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it!

Talents Huckabee

Another important part of a story is the setting, or where a story takes place.

The setting in Talents is just as important as the plot and characters. It’s part of what drives the story.

Lincoln Square is a fictional city based on the real life area in which I grew up. We lived blocks away from Riverview, Baden, and North St. Louis City. Some of my earliest memories were driving through these areas to places like the St. Louis Zoo and Forest Park, the St. Louis Symphony, and the St. Louis Arch. I remember admiring the old, brick houses. They had character. I loved them! Even after I married and had kids we lived in this area. I jogged and biked on trails that went from my house all the way to the St. Louis Arch. We ordered take-out from little hole-in-the-wall Chinese restaurants and got donuts from a shop that had been there for 50 years.

Like any city, you could drive for blocks, seeing only houses that were in good shape, well cared for, with well-kept yards. Then you’d hit blocks of vacant buildings. Some of those houses were beyond repair. Sometimes the city had torn down houses and put green space or playgrounds in their place. I taught 5-Day clubs in these areas, did summer outreach in these areas which weren’t all that far from my home.

Ponticello’s was an old, family owned restaurant in Baden. They’d been on that corner of Riverview and Bellefontaine Road for decades before they closed. I only got to eat there once or twice but their food was delicious!

Even today, I look at my hometown and see, not what it is, but what it was and what it could be if enough people cared to make the investment in it. It needs jobs. It needs better schools. It needs people willing to make the investment in their community.

That’s what I wrote into my book – people willing to invest more than just money to make a difference in their community.

You can see the book trailer for it here. The graffiti images in the trailer tell a lot about the setting and plot of the book. You can also pre-order the book on TouchPoint and on Amazon. It will be available for purchase tomorrow! 😀

Talents Huckabee

My novel releases on Friday and I thought I’d use the next couple days to share the “behind the scenes” of how the book came into being. Ideas come in all shapes and sizes, but this one was more than two years in the making.

When you plan a book as an author, you plan three parts — the characters, the setting, and the plot. Personally, I prefer a book with engaging characters over a book that is driven by plot, though you do need both.

I thought of the parable of the talents in the gospels. How would a person write a modern day spin on that? I started thinking about it. I thought about the characters, about how their lives could intertwine. Then, I planned the plot points for each character.

The interesting thing about this book is that it’s really a collection of four books I wrote, then combined. I wrote each character individually and then put them all together. The very first readers got a rather disjointed book as I smoothed out all the junctions.

Let me introduce you to the characters.

I started with Beatrice Sutherland. Hers was the first story I planned and wrote. Originally, she was to be the main character. However, I discovered as I wrote her that she was more of a supporting character. A widow, she has become almost reclusive in her grief. She desires to participate in her community, but doesn’t think she has the talent to do anything.

Then I wrote about Collin O’Neill. A lawyer in a big company, he knows he has plenty of talent, but he has no desire to do anything with it for the good of others. Then his friend, Justin, gets him to step outside his comfort zone and his life is changed. Collin ended up being a supporting character, too. (I plan to tell more of Collin’s story in another book in this series.)

Parker Wilson ended up being my main character. I started writing him and his story flowed. He sees the needs and longs to do something to help in his community, but lacks the resources to do anything. But, given the opportunity, he takes his talent and turns it into ten talents. (Parker and Alice appear in another book in this series as well.)

Finally, I wrote Ed Raines. Ed was the hardest to write because he was the one who made terrible life choices. He is also, quite possibly, the most realistic character in the book. It pained me to write his story, knowing that as the author, I could write anything I pleased about the character. That’s the myth anyway. Sometimes characters take on a life of their own and you just write it down as fast as you can lest you miss it.

Another supporting character in the book is Pastor William Conner. I love Pastor Conner. He will be making an appearance in every one of the books in this series. He’s a gentle, gracious man who has stuck it out in a difficult area against insurmountable odds. I know men like him in real life. No, I didn’t write these men into my book. but I knew I could write his character the way I did because real people had done the same things in real life.

Talents goes on sale on Friday, July 28. You can preorder it on TouchPoint and on Amazon. I hope you enjoy reading the characters as much as I enjoyed writing them!

It is with great excitement and deepest pleasure that I reveal to you…

The Cover of My Novel!!!!!

Talents Huckabee

Release date set for July 28!

Can you tell I’m excited?! Did I use enough exclamation points?!

My best friend, Rachel Miller, just released her second novel. She is prepping for the sequel to those books and blogged about it on her author blog. She finished her post with the questions: Are you an author? What plotting/outlining methods and tools do you use? I decided to answer her question in my own blog post.

My own plotting methods differ greatly from Rachel’s. This is not a bad thing. I would imagine there are as many methods as there are writers. I’ve read a few books about novel preparation and every author has his or her own ideas of how to do it. In my experience, we fall into one of three categories:

  1. Plotter – A plotter plans their book from start to finish before they sit down to write the actual words and scenes. This might include an outline, historical research, character profiles, and back story. Tolkien wrote an entire language for his novel preparation. Stephen King (who claims to do as little research as possible, but wrote an 800 page book about the Kennedy assassination) has written entire novels from the back story he created for his characters. 
  2. Pantser – Chris Baty coined this term in his book No Plot? No Problem! It refers to a novelist who does little to no preparation for their novel. They may have an idea of a character and a beginning plot device, but they “go where the story takes them” as they write it. This may be an over-simplification of the term, but you get the general idea. 
  3. Plantser – This combination of the last two terms sums up where I fall into the novel plotting/outlining spectrum. It refers to basic plot/character/setting development, followed by “going where the story takes you” ;-). 

When I’m planning a novel, I think of the basic plot premise, beginning, middle and end. I make mental notes for myself, high points – or plot points if you want to call them that, scenes I want to include in the book. I know I need 20-25 of these in a 50,000 word novel, though this number is flexible, depending on how long it takes to write each point and how many perspectives I’m using. (Talents has 4 main characters and each section was 12,000-20,000 words long. I didn’t need as many plot points for each character since I was intertwining the stories of 4 different people.)

Then, I think through the characters. I name them. (This is my biggest struggle. The main character names come easily but the supporting characters are harder.) I think about who they are, how they would respond to different situations and to each other. I’ll work through sample conversations in my head before I ever write a word. I picture what they look like. 

This is how I resemble a pantser:  I don’t write anything down. It’s like watching a movie in my head so I just write down what I see. Sometimes an additional scene will present itself, so I’ll write that into the book. Sometimes I decide I don’t like where it’s going, so I’ll change it as I go. It’s more fluid than an outline but more planned than just winging it.

So far, I’ve never struggled with the dreaded writer’s block. There have been a few times when I had scenes I didn’t really feel like writing, maybe they were painful or included events I’d rather avoid. I’ve even put off writing those for days. A couple times I wasn’t sure how to get the protagonist from where I had him to where I wanted him without using an obvious plot device. (Other times I embraced and flaunted their use! Hah! Sometimes you just need a good plot device in a book!)

My rather loosy-goosy method has produced 8 novels so far. It’s by no means an exact science, but I don’t care as long as it gets the job done. Now I just need to buckle down and get those books edited.

Medium Madeleine L Engle

Hello. My name is Anna and I am an addict. A journal addict.

I got my first diary when I was ten. I’ve sporadically journaled ever since. Sometimes I’d get busy and not do anything for a few years, then I’d pick it up again and fill notebooks with words.

I heard about this new form of journal-keeping called a ‘bullet journal’. You write short statements about what you need to do, what you’ve accomplished, how you feel about it. It’s short, concise, and uses few words. It does not work for me. Apparently, the thing that draws me to journaling is its verbosity. I need to spill words all over paper. Sometimes I need to share raw emotion, hurts, joys, pain, excitement, fears, goals, ambition. Other times I just record events for posterity. My memory is terrible. If I don’t write it down, I’m liable to forget it.

So, because there isn’t one perfect way to journal — just do whatever works for you; some people even make voice recordings or videos— I thought I’d show you some of my journals. The last few I’ve used have been unique and special.

When we first arrived in Africa, I was using a journal my best friend, Rachel, had gotten me in Russia. The next journal I used was a journal she made for me. It has one of my life verses on the front, which is appropriate, considering the journal is filled with events from our life in Africa.

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I got the journal I’m using now in Egypt at Abd-Elzaher Bookshop and Binding. I like the Arabic word ‘life’ on the front since, when I’m journaling, I’m writing about just that: real life with all its ups and downs.

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Abd-Elzaher’s a tiny store up a road that resembles an alley or a footpath. A car passed us on this road and we had to squeeze against the side with all the other pedestrians.

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Inside the store, you can see a workshop where someone binds the books. They have a small reading room, and shelves and shelves of their hand-bound journals. I went journal crazy there and got three for myself. We walked past its nondescript door the first time. But, Oh! the wonder inside! It even smells wonderful — like paper and leather and ink. 

Since then, my friend Toni at Red Pen Travelers introduced me to the travel journal. She sells hand-made leather journals and inserts (bought separately) in a variety of sizes. I have the passport size in this journal: 

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I’ve always thought Rosie the Riveter was cool. Muscular. A woman forced to take a man’s job in a time when men were off fighting a terrible war. I love this journal with Rosie on the front in my favorite color. I also have Toni’s Hearts for Africa notebook. (I believe my reason for loving this is self-explanatory. 😉 )

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The best part about the Red Pen Traveler notebooks is that I can change out the journal insert and the cover will last for a long time. Even better — I can buy inserts for them in Africa.

My goal for journaling? Write at least once a week. 52 journal entries in 52 weeks. Sometimes I get more than that, and sometimes I struggle to keep up. Either way, my thoughts, feelings, opinions, worries, and so much more are written down so I can look back on them and remember all that God has done for us.

(I covered the second and third things on Madeleine L’Engle’s list here and here.) 

When my kids were all little I got away from reading real live adult chapter books. I wished I could read them. I even started a few. But after weeks of not reading them, I’d have to start over again to remember what was going on (I have a terrible memory!) and I normally just gave up.

In 2012 I set a goal to read one book a month out loud to my kids. That was the beginning. We made our way through classics like Treasure Island, Robinson Crusoe, A Christmas Carol, and The Secret Garden among others.

In 2013, on our first furlough, I signed the kids up for the Library Summer Reading Program. We’d done our own version of the program the previous two summers but we were limited to the books in our personal library in Africa. All of the kids finished the reading program that summer!

In the process of getting books to and from the library, I picked up some of the books the kids were reading (the Percy Jackson series, specifically). I was hooked. For the first time in years I was sucked into books, finishing them soon enough to be able to remember the beginning when I got to the end. After that, I read “adult” books – in other words, books you’d find in sections other than the children’s section of the library. Bigger words. More complex plots. I felt like a grownup again.

2014 was the first year I set a personal goal for reading, but I made one grave error. I didn’t make a plan for keeping track of what I’d read. I probably came close to reading 52 books that year, but I couldn’t remember everything I’d read at the end of the year.

(Have I ever mentioned I have the *worst* memory? I can remember meaningless details and forget other more important things. Non-essential? Right out of the brain! Essential? Well, we’ll get rid of that, too! Make room for more of that meaningless stuff!)

So, in 2015 and 2016 I started a list at the beginning of the year. I also participated in a challenge with some online friends for accountability.

This goal has been a great way for me to stretch beyond what I would normally read and try new things. 

I started reading Stephen King novels — not his creepy horror books, but some of the ones that would fall into the Science Fiction or Fantasy category. His book, On Writing, has been a huge help.

I explored and discovered new authors. One of my favorites has been Jeff Wheeler. He writes youth/YA fantasy. It’s clean and always gripping. The first series I read of his, I could see the plot devices coming a mile away. The second series was better and contained some surprises. The last series I read of his, some of the plot developments made me so angry, I almost stopped reading the books. (But I’m thankful I didn’t!) I’ve watched him grow as a writer through these books.

I read Unbroken. That book was so powerful. It’s one of the best books I’ve ever read. It moved me in ways a book hasn’t in a long time. We were going through a rough time when I read it and the way God used people in that book gave me hope and healing in our struggles. 

There have been series I never thought I’d read, yet found that I enjoyed them and they were nothing like I’d imagined (Harry Potter). There have been books that helped me with my own writing. Other books made me see things from a different perspective. Still others were pure fluff and fun.

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This year, one of my goals is to read 52 books in 52 weeks yet again. I already have a reading list going for the first books I’m going to tackle. The book I’m working on now is a collection of essays and articles by a St. Louis reporter all published in Al-Jezeera between 2012-2014 (an ebook not pictured above). Her perspective of events that took place during that time is refreshing and very Mid-western, even if I don’t agree with her 100% on everything. If nothing else, I can understand her perspective better than I do most of what I read in the main-stream news media.

Maybe you can’t set a specific goal for a number of books read in a year. Maybe all you can do is go get a book and set a goal to start and finish it. Maybe you could read a book a month or try to read through a particular series of books. Whatever you do, I encourage you to make a plan to read this year. You’ll get farther than you’d ever get if you never set a goal at all.

It’s that time of year again!

NaNoWriMo started today and goes through the end of the month. I love NaNoWriMo. I look forward to it and plan for it all year.

My first NaNoWriMo was technically in 2008. I barely wrote 20,000 words. In fact, I don’t know if I even created a novel on the website. There is no record of it. I can’t find the novel I worked on that year and don’t even remember what it was about.

2011 we had been in Uganda for almost two years and I had a 10 month old baby. I wanted to teach my kids creative writing that year and a friend told me about NaNoWriMo’s Young Writer’s Program. I went through it with my children that year and we all set out to write our novels. That year, my first “real” year of NaNoWriMo, I finished over 50,000 words by the end of the month. 

I’ve participated every year since and even a couple times during Camp NaNoWriMo in July. (Sometimes during Camp, I’ll edit a novel I worked on during NaNoWriMo.)

I splurged this year and got the 2016 NaNoWriMo shirt (and a mug, not pictured!). The Blast Off theme is so cool this year and I love the shirt! (I also love that it is warm enough to be outside in a t-shirt and shorts on November 1!)

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This month, I set off on that journey yet again. 50,000 words (or more!). 30 days. Every year I wonder “Can I do this thing? Do I have 50,000+ more words in me?” Every year so far I’ve finished. This year, as I stand at the cusp of the month looking ahead to 30 days of work and creativity I say to myself…

Let’s do this thing!