the biggest lesson I learned writing my first book is that you can’t craft a story, or even a scene, if you’re writing towards a resolution rather than a hook.

What do I mean by that? In the first book, I figured out what problems were arrayed against my heroine, figured out how to get around them, and wrote towards that moment when the problems were resolved. It turns out, of course, that some of the resolutions I had weren’t completely satisfying. Both my critique partner pointed this out to me, and I grumbled to myself for half an hour or so about how it was FINE, and DON’T BOTHER ME and all that stuff. But the truth was that the resolution wasn’t very satisfying because the problem wasn’t very hard. And I realized this a little bit later, and then I whined to myself a little bit harder, and I said, “But if I make the problem hard there’s no way to solve it!”

So imagine you’re faced with a castle and you’ve got three men, one of whom can barely wiggle his fingers. You’ve got to stop the wedding and kill the man with six fingers, and you’ve got to do it now. It’s not possible. And you say to yourself, “If only we had a wheelbarrow!” “What I wouldn’t give for a good Holocaust cloak.” Buh. Right. I am, in fact, the author. It’s actually quite, quite easy as an author to solve problems your characters have. All you have to do is recite the rules, and boom. Problem solved.
The rules? Ah yes. The rules.

  1. The character must solve the problem him or herself.
  2. In a way that’s true to the character of everyone involved.
  3. And it has to be a real problem. None of this: “Oh, you said goats? I thought you said BOATS. Never mind then.”
  4. The problem presented should be one that the character must have grown to overcome. If presented with the problem at the beginning of the book, the character should not be able to solve it.

Once you set up those relatively rigid rules, the right solutions become rather obvious. And so I made the original problem intractable. I took away the person who she could turn to to solve the problem, if only she got the nerve up. I took away the safety net, the thing in the background that every reader would see and say, “Look, you don’t need to throw your life away. Just step over there.” And then I forced my hero to solve the problem using the tools he knows best.
Having figured this out at the end of my novel, I’ve finally realized that I wrote the book exactly backwards. I started off with the solution. But the solution isn’t the book; the problem is the book. The solution is what wraps everything off, but a great problem with a lame solution is a better book than a great solution with a lame problem. (Think: The Stand by Stephen King.) This is not to say that I advocate lame solutions, of course. But you cannot have a great solution in the first place without a great problem.At this point, I started thinking–again, as pressed by a critique partner who pointed out that all my scenes started way too soon–about what a scene was supposed to do. Silly me; I thought scenes were where things happened. Nope. Not at all. Scenes exist to set hooks. Nothing else. If there’s a scene that doesn’t set a hook in it somewhere, that’s a scene you can delete from your book.

At this point, I’m looking at my first book and shrieking, “But how else will I tell everyone about X!” Yeah–not the problem. Expository scenes–no good. They all have to go. There is no place for an expository scene in a novel. I’ll tell the reader about all that when I have the chance. i just need to work it in somehow. Working it in to a scene that has a hook is way better than working it in anywhere else.
So I have a lot of work ahead of me, but it’s exciting work, because I can now see all the places that I screwed up. I still have one subplot problem I’m
thinking through. I’m still shocked though, at how little I knew when I first started writing. There’s no other way to learn, though. You can buy all the books you want, attend all the workshops out there. But until you write it wrong, and see the wrongness staring you in the face, you’ll never get it.

What’s the most important lesson you ever learned from your own writing?

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