As we near the end of 2015, and I reflect back, one of the things that stands out in my mind about the year is that I was pretty disappointed in many of the books I read. Not everything I read this year was published in the last twelve months, but I’d say that over half of my selections came out in the last three years. I’m not sure if my standards are getting higher as I study writing more, or if the industry is getting weaker in general, or if I just picked the wrong books through bad luck.

I did find a few books that I liked. I always enjoy Brandon Sanderson, and Firefight was one of my favorite reads this year. Mark Lawrence is another one of my top authors, and Liar’s Key was a solid installment, though the books from the Red Queen trilogy aren’t as good as those in the Broken Empire. I found Brian Staveley’s The Emperor’s Blades (2014) and Naomi Novik’s Uprooted to be quality reads as well.

But I tried quite a few others that I didn’t like, some of which I found so weak I didn’t even bother finishing them. While they all had their own flaws, I think the biggest commonality among those stinkers was a failure to elevate tension throughout.

Because I’m a fledgling writer, I feel obliged to use a silly metaphor here. I like to think of creating, maintaining, and elevating tension in a (long-form) story as the act of blowing up a balloon. Take a deep breath right before you start, push it all into the balloon, and repeat. There will be short breaks for you (and the reader) to catch a breath, but make sure you never let any air leak out during the process. From start to finish, the balloon should only grow in size, until it pops at the end.

Some of the weakest books I’ve read recently either failed to work at building tension early in the story, or even worse, blew the balloon up part of the way and then let a bunch of air leak out halfway (or 1/4 of the way) into the book. I really think this kills the story.

Yeah, I’m sure some people don’t mind reading stories that meander around and eventually sorta just wander into the point. But I (usually) don’t, and I think most readers of genre fiction feel the same way. And I’m still surprised when I find traditionally published (meaning Big 5) genre novels that fail at this. Yet I still see it a lot, even among books that are nominated for awards.

When I say young, I don’t mean by age, I’m simply referring to others like me who hope to someday be a big name author, but are still working on getting there.

These days there are a seemingly endless supply of resources for aspiring authors, especially with explosion of modern social media. In this post, I’m not trying to give some kind of comprehensive list of quality sources (which would be impossible anyway). Instead, I’d like to share my personal favorites – those that I’ve found most helpful to me over the last few years as I’ve honed my craft.

If you’re looking for a somewhat more extensive list, here’s one good reference by author Dan Koboldt.

Now for my list, in pseudo-alphabetic order. You’ll notice it’s heavy on sci-fi & fantasy:

Brandon Sanderson YouTube lectures – One of the most popular fantasy authors (and my favorite) teaches a class on creative writing in SF/F at BYU. He has a series of recorded lectures posted on YouTube.

Brent Weeks personal blog (writing advice) – Another one of my favorite fantasy authors, with a nice section on writing advice on his website.

Elements of Style by Strunk and White – Classic text on grammar and writing fundamentals.

Jim Butcher’s LiveJournal – Author of the uber-popular Dresden Files, with a series of LiveJournal entries over the years covering serious fundamentals.

On Writing by Stephen King – Part memoir, part instructional guide on writing, this is the first book about writing I ever read. Excellent for beginners.

The Story Grid – A website and accompanying book regarding story structure, written by an editor with decades of experience.

Techniques of the Selling Writer – In my opinion, the single best book available for authors. Great for all levels of expertise.

Writing the Breakout Novel by Donald Maass – Comprehensive book from a big time agent.

Writing Excuses podcast – Hugo award winning podcast by Sanderson, Mary Robinette Kowal, Howard Tayler, and Dan Wells. Loads of great info here.

I’ve recently started writing my newest novel, and I finished the first scene last night. One of the things I’ve learned over the years, especially as I’ve queried agents with my more recent manuscripts, is how critical the beginning of the book is. The first page is key, but so are the first five pages. This is what readers use to decide when they consider buying a book, and is therefore a major focal point for agents/editors. Most agents will ask for the first 5 pages or so when you query them, and that’s all they have to decide if they want to request more.

In the past, I’ve struggled with writing great openings to my books, but I hope that I’m getting better as I continue to write. In this post, I’ll be talking about the current strategy I use, but my thoughts here are somewhat speculative – I’m still working through the challenges of making my beginnings pop.

A common approach writers use to hook their audience (agents, editors, or consumers) is to drop the reader right into the middle of an action scene. While this is an effective way of cutting out the common fluff that most newbie writers like to load up their openings with – long descriptions of scenery, backstory, detailed worldbuilding – there is a major downside to this strategy. Openings that show a character fighting off demons, or attempting to pull a damaged plane out of freefall sound really compelling, but if the reader doesn’t know anything about the character, or have any way of connecting to her, it’s very possible the reader won’t care about the character’s success or failure. And if the reader doesn’t care, the scene loses all potential tension.

It’s hard to find the right balance in a novel’s beginning, giving enough characterization to make the reader care, while also making interesting stuff happen so the reader isn’t bored. In my current novel (and the previous) I’ve found myself starting in the middle of what’s known as a sequel – not book 2, but a scene that involves character reaction and decision making.

If you’re not familiar with the scene/sequel format of writing, I recommend Dwight Swain’s Techniques of the Selling Writer. I’ve found it to be a great resource, and I think it’s valuable for writers of all experience levels. The original edition was published in 1965, but it’s remarkably relevant to contemporary writing.

The basic breakdown of scene vs. sequel is this:

• Scenes involve a character goal, conflict, and a setback or disaster
• Sequels are based on a character’s emotional response to a disaster

Scenes are where the action takes place. They are full of tension, and up until the end of the story, they always end with something going wrong.

Sequels are “scenes” where characters react to problems, work through them, and come to some decision that propels the character into the next scene.

A conventional novel is formatted as scene-sequel, scene-sequel, scene-sequel, …

But I’ve found that I like starting my books in the middle of a sequel, where some disaster has already occurred. The disaster need not have happened just before page 1, or even on the same day, but it should be something weighing heavily on the character.

I think this gives me a good balance of characterization and conflict/tension, because it immediately puts the character in an emotional situation, forces her to make a tough decision, and allows me to lead right in to a scene with real conflict. I think it’s key, though, that the sequel portion of this sequel-scene combo is short. Right now, my opening sequel is about 1,100 words, which may be too long. I’ll need to work on cutting that down.

Anyway, I don’t mean to say that I believe this is the right or best way to open a novel. I’m not even completely confident that this is a good technique. But my current opinion is that this approach can provide a nice way to get the reader to care about the main character and quickly give a compelling hook.

I’ve begun writing the first draft of my newest novel, an as yet untitled epic fantasy. Assuming I finish this project, hopefully some time in late winter, this will mark my sixth book, not counting a couple of manuscripts I never finished. It will be my third epic fantasy novel – my other projects were horror, contemporary fantasy, and YA fantasy.

I spent a lot more time pre-writing for this project than any of the others, and I even put together a chapter-by-chapter outline, something I’ve never done before. For my first two books, I think I spent a combined total of about six hours planning before I started writing. I used to be completely in the gardener/discovery writer/panster camp, but over the years I’ve moved more and more toward the architect/outliner style of writing. This has been more of a conscious attempt at changing my ways rather than an organic shift, as I’ve tried to improve my craft. I don’t know if this transformation will actually make my writing better, but I think I needed to get to this point in order to be capable of handling what I think will be my most complex story yet.

One of the resources I’ve found useful during my pre-writing process is the Story Grid website by Shawn Coyne, editor at the independent publisher Black Irish Books. I’ve adapted some of his editorial tools for my own purposes, tweaking them to suit my own personal needs, and I think they’re going to provide a great deal of help for me as I write. I will probably talk about these a little bit in future posts, discussing how I’ve applied the lessons I learned from following Shawn’s blog.

In the meantime, I #amwriting.