Dear Ally, How Do You Write a Book

by Ally Carter

  But how do you leave the boring parts out? Is that even possible?

  Well, for starters, you have to give your readers some credit.

  I think a lot of new writers think that if you have a scene with your heroine getting ready for school, then next you have to show her getting in the car, then riding to school, then walking into school, then saying hi to her friends … and so on and so on.

  But if you show your heroine getting ready for school and, in the next scene, she’s already at school, are your readers going to be super confused by how she got there? Or are they going to figure it out?

  Next, I think it’s incredibly important that each scene accomplishes multiple things. For example, you could have a scene where we meet your heroine. Then maybe there’s a scene where we realize what her personality is like. Then another where we learn she has two sisters. Then another where we learn her sisters have magical powers. Then yet another scene where we learn that there’s an ancient prophecy that one of the three sisters will turn into a goat on her sixteenth birthday … and on and on and on.

  Or we could have one or two killer scenes where the reader learns all of those facts in a really interesting way.

  I hear aspiring writers talk about this a lot, how they can’t cut this scene because it accomplishes this one thing. But the truth is, every single scene—especially early in your story—should accomplish multiple things. For example, you don’t need a scene to establish your character’s personality. Every single scene should already be doing that all the way through the book.

  When a lot of people talk about “filler” scenes, I think they’re particularly worried about the middle. And I get it. Middles can be really hard for me as well.

  I really struggled when I was writing I’d Tell You I Love You, But Then I’d Have to Kill You. Initially, the book was supposed to take place over the heroine’s sophomore year of spy school. In the first draft, I had a bunch of interesting stuff happening at the beginning of the book, and a bunch of cool stuff happening at the end of the book, but a whole lot of “filler” was happening in between because, well, there was a lot of school year in there. Then my genius editor said, “Why not make it take place over the fall semester instead of the whole year?”—and like magic, my problem was solved.

  That was also when I read Meg Cabot’s amazing Princess Diaries series and learned that not everything in a book has to look like a book. Which meant I could have things like a list of “Pros and Cons of What Happened That September” that literally allowed me to skip from August to October and not have a whole month where I had my characters doing stuff that didn’t really matter.

  I could also do excerpts from my heroine’s “Covert Operations Report” written in spy lingo, giving a play-by-play of her missions in a fun, different voice that allowed me to “tell” (and not show) and offered a rundown of a lot of information very quickly. (They were also the source of a lot of humor.)

  Finally, I want to point out that this doesn’t mean you should write only the fight scenes or the make-out scenes or scenes that are nonstop action. No. Not at all.

  I heard once that a great story is like a great song. It shouldn’t be the same volume all the way through. It’s not going to be the same tempo. It’s going to have highs and lows. It’s going to build and crest and fall. Make sure there is a rhythm to your story. Give your characters ups and downs—quiet moments and loud—and as long as something is at stake for them in each and every scene, then you’re going to be okay.

  Plus, if there are boring scenes? You can cut them in revision.

  Silly stories are okay. Silly stories serve a purpose.

  On the whole, society tends to believe that dramatic or serious books/shows/movies are way more important than stories that make people laugh and feel good. But laughing and feeling good is important, too. Sometimes, laughing at a book is the only laugh a person has all day. Sometimes, when the world is making you feel bad, a book can make you feel good, and I happen to think that there’s a very real value in that.

  I’ve heard from a lot of readers who wanted to thank me for writing something they could enjoy while doing their chemo treatments. I’ve gotten more than one email from a kid who clung to my books while their parents got divorced.

  I don’t write the types of books that are going to win awards. I’ll never be a critical darling. But sometimes my silly books are read by people who already have enough dark and serious and tragic in their lives. Sometimes I can make sad people smile.

  So if you’re working on a story that does that, yay! I think that’s awesome. See the meaning in your work as it is, and don’t spend too much time worrying how it stacks up against all of the great work being written today. Maybe the most important thing about your work is that it makes someone happy for a while.

  But what’s more important than that?

  In Stephen King’s amazing book On Writing, he says that we should “write with the door closed; rewrite with the door open.” I think about this advice all the time.

  (Here’s an assignment for you: Read Stephen King’s On Writing.)

  I think a lot about what my readers might want when I’m trying to decide which of my ideas I should commit to next, but I try to keep the door closed once I start that first draft.

  And boy am I glad I’ve done it that way most of the time.

  When I was working on the fifth Gallagher Girls novel, Out of Sight, Out of Time, I reached a point near the end of the story where I found my heroine doing something I never dreamed she would do. It was so much darker than anything I’d intended to write, and once I had it down, I absolutely loved it, but I kept telling myself my editor would make me cut it. I never dreamed it would be in the finished book.

  But … my editor loved it! And it ended up being most of my readers’ favorite scene in the entire series.

  If I’d been writing with the door open, that scene—everyone’s favorite scene—wouldn’t exist.

  So, in answer to your question, I do let myself think about why people read my books, but the only way to get that first draft finished is to close the door and write!

  Thank you! I think that’s something that comes from reading a lot of books, watching a lot of movies and TV shows, and writing a lot of drafts.

  Generally, my biggest advice on when to reveal information is pretty simple: Your readers should get information when they need it—never before! And your readers should never know more than your hero or heroine knows (at least not for very long).

  Why? Because if we know something the hero knows for a long time, eventually—whether we even realize it or not—we’re going to start thinking that the hero is a moron for not figuring it out. After all, we’ve known that it was coming for forty pages!

  (FYI, this is also why I never reveal anything in the descriptions of my books that happens more than fifty pages into the book. Not to save the “twist” but to save the main character from looking like a fool.)

  Even more important than when a character gets a piece of information is probably how the character gets that information.

  I remember when I was writing my second Gallagher Girls book, Cross My Heart and Hope to Spy, I had a scene where the girls went trotting down to a teacher’s office and the teacher explained exactly what was going on in the plot. My editor almost broke her red pen correcting that one. What’s the use of writing a book about teenage spies if you can’t have them using their skills to get that information for themselves? Where’s the fun in that?

  Hinting at things is good. Teasing is great. But information is always 100 percent better when the hero or heroine has to earn it. Making them earn it is a big part of making sure you have enough story (and conflict) to go the distance.

  A lot of people had questions about “writing style,” which makes total sense. What you call “writing style” some call “voice.” But no matter what you call it, it’s really important, really personal, and really, really hard to teach and/or describe.
/>   First, it’s important to understand that in a lot of ways there are actually two different types of voice.

  AUTHORIAL VOICE is probably what a lot of people think of as an author’s “style.” It can be everything from word choice to sentence structure to humor to tone to subject matter. It’s a lot like an author’s literary fingerprint, and even when they don’t intend to, something about the way a person writes often carries through, book to book.

  For example, last summer, I got kind of obsessed with a particular romance author, and I read a ton of her books, one right after the other. I was super excited when I found out my library had an ebook bundle by her—three whole books I could read (for free)!

  I sat down one night and zoomed through the first one and loved it. Then I started the second book and something felt off, but I couldn’t put my finger on what.

  It was the same kind of plot. It featured the same kind of characters. All the elements that her books usually have were there, but this one just didn’t affect me in the same way her other books had. I read the whole thing, and when I was finished, I commented to someone that it wasn’t bad but it was my least favorite of her books.

  Then I looked back to see what the title was and noticed that instead of a three-book bundle by my favorite author, it was a bundle of books by three different authors.

  Why had that second book felt like it was written by a different person? Because it was.

  To me, that’s the best possible example of style—or authorial voice. That even if you don’t look at the cover page, you can tell who did (or didn’t) write it just from the book itself.

  The second type of voice is NARRATIVE VOICE, and this one is just as important. Simply put, authorial voice is the voice of the author, but narrative voice is the voice of the character.

  And that’s a really important distinction.

  After all, Cammie in Gallagher Girls sounds incredibly different from Grace in Embassy Row. Even though they’re both first person narrators written by me—and parts of me absolutely crept in! But Cammie is a far more innocent character than Grace, so Grace’s voice just has a different tone and feel and style.

  Those books sound like me. But they sound like Grace or Cammie more.

  I think your problem of having your voice take on the quality of whatever book you just finished is incredibly common. Even now I have to watch what I’m reading while I’m writing. For example, I was writing something in first person past tense a few weeks ago. Then I took a break one day and read something written in first person present tense while I was eating lunch.

  Two hours later, I was back at my desk and realized I’d switched to present tense without even knowing it and had to rewrite a whole chapter.

  So voices creep into our heads. Great voices creep into our bloodstreams.

  But they don’t stay there. The voices that stay there are the voices that come from within.

  From within you for your authorial voice.

  And from within your character for your narrative voice.

  The best way I know to make sure those voices are true and unique is to read so broadly and so frequently that all of the voices influence you. And to write so much that you purge whatever voice might be lingering on the edge of your subconscious.

  Remember the water hose theory?

  The best way to get to the words and the themes and the styles that are truly your own is to let the water run.

  DEAR Z BREWER,

  How do you find your authorial voice? How do you then also have a unique voice for each of your narrators/characters?

  Maybe it sounds silly, but I write the way I talk, so it’s literally my voice on paper. (Okay, so I say “dude” and “awesome” way less on the page.) As for my characters, when I write from their perspective, it’s almost like they whisper into my ear what they would say, what they would do, how they feel. I merely transcribe it. I guess you could say that I just do what the voices tell me to.

  What’s the best writing advice you ever got?

  David Levithan In college, someone told me, “You could never expect Mark Twain to write like Jane Austen.” The point being, they’re both great, but in their own way. So you can find your own way to be great.

  Wanna know a secret? Transitions are probably my least favorite thing to write. I hate them! I have no idea why it’s so much harder to write the sentence that starts a scene than it is to write the entire scene sometimes. But it is.

  So how do you do it? Well, I think a lot depends on the two scenes you’re trying to transition between. And I think the key might lie in why the two scenes were split in the first place.

  Is it because a great deal of time has passed between the two scenes? Then the passing of that time—showing the reader how much it is and what all has changed—is a good approach. For example, if you’re going from Tuesday night to Wednesday morning, it can be as simple as “The next morning, XYZ character was …” Seriously. They don’t always have to be fancy or poignant. Sometimes they just need to get the job done.

  Are you splitting up two scenes because you’re going from one POV character to another? Then your transition should probably show that, both to signal to the reader that we’re now in someone else’s head, and also because, presumably, that jump was important. For some reason, you needed to know what that other character was thinking or feeling, so get right to those thoughts and feelings when possible.

  Maybe you’re going from one scene/chapter to the next because something super big just happened, marking the end of one moment and the beginning of a very different kind of moment (taking place just seconds apart). For example, if you’ve got a scene with your hero and heroine making cupcakes and then a dragon busts through the wall—well, I’d say the dragon is probably a great place to start the next scene. (You’ll notice this is all closely tied to the earlier question about when to include a chapter break.)

  Transitions need to show a lot of things: whose POV we’re in (when writing in third person or multiple first person), where we are, how much time has passed. They can also be really funny sometimes. For example, when you end a scene with We’ll be fine as long as it doesn’t rain! and then you open the next scene with It only rained nine inches.

  Sometimes a transition is a great opportunity to sprinkle in some backstory.

  Imagine the scene that ends with a dragon bursting through the wall. Maybe you start the next scene with something like When Chloe was six, she wanted a lizard for a pet. When she was seven, she asked for a reptile cage. And for her tenth birthday, she’d begged and pleaded with her mother, arguing that she was now mature enough to handle a much larger animal. But as the dragon turned her mother’s favorite dishes into ash, Chloe had to admit that she might have been mistaken.

  In the end, this is one of those things that won’t make or break your novel, especially in the first draft. Just write what feels natural and get a draft down on paper. That’s your first—and most important—job.

  My mom is a really, really amazing cook. When I went away to college and moved into my first apartment, I’d get homesick sometimes and start craving some of the things that Mom used to make. So I’d call her up and say, “Mom, how do you make chili?” And she’d say, “Oh, you know … you brown some ground beef in a skillet and then you just kind of make it.”

  Or I’d ask, “Mom, what’s your gravy recipe?” to which she’d laugh and say, “There’s no recipe for gravy! You make some sausage, then add some flour and milk, and you just make it. You’ll be fine. You know what gravy’s supposed to taste like.”

  You can probably imagine how frustrating that answer was to a hungry college student. (No, Mom, if I knew how to make it, I wouldn’t be asking you how to make it!)

  But eventually I did learn how to make chili. And gravy. And a lot of other things—and now when someone asks me for the recipe, I shrug and say, “I don’t know. I just kind of make it.”

  In a lot of ways, writing is just like this. There isn’t a
recipe you can follow, a firmly established game plan. It’s a matter of taste and feel, experience and gut instinct.

  But most of all, it’s about knowing what it’s supposed to taste like.

  Look at the books you’ve loved from your favorite authors. Maybe get a cheap copy of one and mark it up with different colored highlighters. Put the romantic parts in one color, the action parts in another. Maybe bracket the flowery parts and flag those pages with a Post-it. Maybe you can underline the parts that made you laugh.

  Go through several books that way, and when you’re finished, how many Post-its do you have? Where do they come in, with the blue or yellow or pink highlights? This process isn’t just about reading a book; it’s about doing an X-ray of a book. This is you taking a look at all the little pieces that you know are in there but you’ve never really studied before.

  So how do I balance prose and action? (Or romance? Or comedy? Or … anything else?) I’m not really sure. I just keep editing and working and tweaking things until it tastes right.

  DEAR ELIZABETH EULBERG,

  What’s the hardest part about writing a book?

  Overall, it’s the faith that I can do it at all. I write at my desk with a set of my finished books staring at me. I often look at them and say to myself, “You’ve done it before, you can do it again.” So much of being a writer is in your mind. You can look for outside validation, but at the end of the day, you have to be happy with the book you’ve written. It’s your name on it. You’re the one that will have to talk about it for many years (if you’re lucky!). I think everybody struggles with imposter syndrome and I’m no exception.

  Craftwise, it’s writing description. I want to get to the action, the character banter, the development of relationships, the drama! I usually have to be told by my editor that I didn’t describe something. But I also like leaving the main character’s physical description rather vague, as I want the reader to be able to put themselves in their shoes. Plus, I figure, would you rather me describe a house or get to the kissing? Yeah, that’s what I thought.