in the next 14 minutes I'm going to help you save your novel beginning writers often structure whole sections of their books based on these nine misss and it can really ruin their books but if you watch this video you will learn how to avoid these common mistakes we're going to be talking about points like the danger of staying inside the circle of your novel and also when digression is better than moving the plot forward but let's get started with the very first myth which is surprises are better than suspense I think beginning writers tend to
prioritize surprises because they're like oh yay surprises are fun like who doesn't like a surprise in a novel but on the whole I think they tend to give less attention to the technique of suspense but I really think suspense is kind of the bread and butter of writers surprises are like a boom and then it's over while suspense you can extend for large portions of the novel and the perfect example of this is Alfred Hitchcock he had an idea called the bomb theory surprise is when you have a bunch of people sitting around a table
and all of a sudden a bomb goes off and yes of course the reader or the viewer is going to be shocked suspense is when you have those same people sitting around a table but now you tell the reader or the viewer that there's a bomb underneath the table there's certainly no mystery but everyone is wondering when is that bomb going to go off Hitchcock believed that audiences are more engaged when you tell them what's going to happen and that allows for a longer period of suspense now myth number two is a Twist I'm not
sure you've heard before it is extrapolating check off's gun principles to the whole story check off's gun says that if you show a gun on the mantlepiece that gun must go off by the third act but I think writers have taken that principle which is a good one but they've extrapolated it out to a whole General storytelling principle anything you show in your story should have an impact later on well I mean there are limitations and downsides to that sort of writing idea it's quite often good to have moments of existence that don't neatly fit
into the plot or neatly fit into foreshadowing atmospheric stuff or stuff that builds the theme or yes just the texture of life I think what that does is it helps the universe of your book to feel real and authentic rather than contrived and artificial there's this Canadian writer named guy Gabriel K and he said that you want to show the reader that the world of your novel exists outside your characters and your plot that there is a broader world out there and so maybe you do want to show a completely random traffic accident that doesn't
actually figure into the plot in some way or maybe do want to show a fight between strangers in the supermarket just because it makes the world feel real and for those of you who need more help with plotting in my novel course in book Fox Academy I have videos like the seven elements of a bestseller which includes some very helpful PDFs and then also videos like five storytelling guide ropes which just helps you along the Journey of getting that overall plot down now this third myth is probably the most important myth in this entire video
and it is the story happens before the secret is revealed a lot of beginning writers I think have this assumption that all of the story or at least say 90% of the story should happen before that big secret is revealed in the climactic moment but the truth is that a lot of the oomph of a story can come after a secret is revealed because we get to see how all these characters react to the aftermath now Leanne moriarti wrote a wonderful book called big little lies and it was turned into a series and we're actually
going to talk about the series for this example so at the beginning of this show there are two Mysteries we know somebody has died but we don't know who and we know someone has killed him but we don't know who and then at the end of the first season we learn the answer to both of those Mysteries and spoiler alert it was the abusive husband who was killed and it was one of the women who pushed him down a flight of stairs and then there is a second season and so you no longer have that
mystery power in the plot cuz all the viewers know what the mystery is instead we are attracted to seeing how these characters deal with the aftermath now that the cat is out of the bag they are dealing with the psychological after effects of abuse they are dealing with police officers investigating the crime and it's a great example to show you that a story doesn't end when a secret is revealed it opens up so many more possibilities for where you can take your story now if you are writing a typical genre novel then yes most of
those do end when the mystery is revealed but for all of you people out there who are writing in different genres use a secret say in the middle of a book and then explore what happens once that secret is out now this fourth myth is a doozy it is narrative efficiency is always better than digression I've actually spoken about this a number of times on this channel talking about the Moby Dick chapters where it's all about like the size of whale heads and also in Neil Stevenson's snow crash all those chapters about the Sumerian language
and the history of it but recently I was reading mami's windup bird Chronicle and there are all these chapters of backstories of super minor characters and the reader wondering why are we getting all of this now usually I come down on the side of like be wary of gigantic digressions for every one reader that's like super interested in that there's going to be 10 readers that are going to put the book away and be like n i you lost me I'm not saying never do it I'm saying be wary of it but but let me
add a caveat small digressions are absolutely wonderful and really they're essential for your book let's look at The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mosen hammed this is a book about terrorism and about radicalization after 9/11 but there is a scene where they're in New York and they just see fireflies and they're wondering whether this Firefly can survive in a big city it doesn't really have anything to do with the plot but it's just this nice pause this nice degression where they watch fireflies now you could say oh that's a thematic element cuz they're feeling like they are
the fireflies and wondering whether they can survive in a big city yes but my point is like it's not plot-based it's just a nice little breather so listen in your novel remember to take breaths sometimes when I read a very popular commercial novel something like you know James Patterson novel or something I feel suffocated by just this Relentless pace and you know I'm begging them like please just take a paragraph and do something other than plot anything other than plot so yes in your book please use digressions just understand that the longer it is the
higher the chance that you're going to lose readers now this fifth myth is one that I see really often as an editor it is the payoff should come quickly after the setup so what I see in a lot of unpublished manuscripts is the writers will come up with a great setup and then they will solve that problem or give the payoff in like the next chapter or by say the end of that chapter and I'm like oh you were doing so well but then you just resolve that problem a little bit too quickly if you
just waited three chapters or waited six chapters or waited till the end of the book to resolve that problem it would have kept a lot more tension in the book and been much more pleasurable for the reader delay the payoff delay the solution keep things unresolved and for an example of this have you guys heard of The Brick joke now the brick joke is just a writing technique that teaches us how to keep distance between the setup and the payoff now it's called The Brick joke because imagine someone throwing a brick up into the air
which is basically like telling the premise of the joke and then you keep on telling the storyline and then later on that brick will finally come down which is you know revealing the punchline say a great example of this is from Seinfeld the episode the marine biologist at the beginning just for fun Kramer is hitting a whole bunch of golf balls into the ocean that's the setup and then at the very end of the episode George has pretended he's a marine biologist so he is forced to go into the ocean and try to save a
whale and he reveals that what was obstructing the whale's blo hole was a golf ball now the brick joke doesn't only apply to jokes it really applies to every single part of your narrative structure you just want that payoff to be as far as possible from that setup now the six Smith is a very tricky one it's tough to avoid it is and then is good enough a lot of authors end up getting stuck in this storytelling rut they're just going along with their story saying and then this happened and then this happened and then
this happened and they're really being a slave to chronology but the reader starts to get bored because there's just this repetitive sequence of events and there's not any variety to it and then storytelling you know what it resembles it resembles the five paragraph essay were any of you tortured by that in high school now I actually taught college for a decade and a lot of what I did was try to train writers away from writing the five paragraph essay which is basically first main point and this main point and this main point and try to
train them towards a more sophisticated manner of essay listen you shouldn't be writing a five paragraph story they're just not very entertaining like most five paragraph essays a good story uses different connecting words rather than just and then what you need are some good therefores in there cause and effect this event caused this next event IEM Forester said an actual plot is because the king died therefore the queen died of grief a terrible story is the king died and then the queen died that's a sequence but it's not a story or think about a transition
word like a butt right this is sort of contrast logic in your story you completely swing the events and come at it from a new angle or think about a word like previously where you go into the backstory of the character or you go into the backstory of the mom or dad or Grandpa or Grandma now the seventh myth is one that I mentioned at the very beginning of the video it is staying within the circle of the story I think a lot of writers get stuck on their plot because they're working with all these
characters and the setup that they have and then they just write themselves into a rut sometimes not always but sometimes you need to throw a grenade from outside your circle story to stir things up you guys know Raymond Chandler one of the greatest detective novelists who has ever lived and he came up with something called chantler law when you are stuck in your plot have a man come through the door with a gun what do he really saying he's saying look if you're stuck introduced a catalyst to propel the action forward if you have done
everything you can with those characters inside your hermetically sealed circle of your story then you have to introduce something from the outside to shake it up a little bit now if you're not writing a detective story maybe it's not a guy with a gun but maybe it's an out of state relative who suddenly surprised surprisingly shows up or have some sort of natural disaster occur like a earthquake or a tornado or something maybe there's some sort of accidental physical injury like a bone that gets broken for one of your characters or maybe a character is
pregnant and their water breaks now this next myth is actually one that I personally struggle with a lot it is number eight originality is the highest goal and I get it I get it you want your book to be different than everything else out there right you don't want it to seem like a knockoff and to an extent originality is definitely a good thing the trouble comes when you've made something so original that it doesn't have a place in the market or people can't figure out what it is or they can't understand it so I
think the best advice is to use basic tropes but then just make them your own I think an example of how to do this is the Martian by Andy Weir it's following a very time worn storytelling structure it's a person stranded in a hostile environment I mean think about everything from Robinson cruso to Lost to Cast Away but we are taking that storytelling concept and then he definitely makes it his own we see a lot of scientific authenticity as Mark Watney solves problem after problem after problem we also get to experience Mark's funny voice you
wouldn't expect this novel would be funny but it is and by adding in the efforts of Earth to try to go rescue him we also get this Global Perspective rather than just being isolated with this one guy on this desert island of Mars so don't get stuck in the originality trap try to make something that feels fresh but build it on top of a steady structure and the very last myth that some writers fall prey to is number nine showing is always better than telling now don't get me wrong scenes are wonderful showing is wonderful
dramatic action I'm in for that come on but there's also a real danger with showing and the danger is you'll pile up all these scenes scene after scene after scene and you'll end up bloating your novel and so it turns into 140,000 word novel rather than something a little tidier like 90 or 100,000 word it is absolutely IAL for writers to understand when to skip a whole scene that dramatizes something and just use a line or two that tells us what happened or tells us who that character is I think there's an excellent case to
be made that John lari is the best spy novelist of the last century fight with me in the comments if you disagree but he has this book called Tinker Taylor Soldier Spy I don't think it's his best novel it's probably Spy Who Came in from the cold is better but in the very first two pages of this novel he uses telling at least in five different ways that I saw one he introduces a character and he doesn't show how this kid is dull and deficient he just tells us hey this kid's a little dull and
two telling is a good way to get the plot started he just says oh if so and so hadn't died then Jim would have never come to this new school three sometimes you need telling to make time past lucari just says like oh 5 years had passed a fourth great way to use telling is just to characterize a place in this case a school he says here's a place where the afternoons are tranquil he does not show that Tranquility he just tells us a fifth great way to use telling is just history of events there's
a about why there's this big hole in the grounds of this school and he just tells us look they were raising money to finance a pool but it never got finished if lucari had tried to use showing instead of telling in those first two pages it would have expanded out to probably 10 or 15 pages easily he want at a faster Pace he knew he had to start the novel quickly and so he used telling to get the ball rolling hey don't forget to check out book Fox Academy link is in the description and I
hope that learning more about these myths helps you with your novel
