Spring is the time of renewal and new growth. Time for planting
seeds and nurturing them into being. I’m not just talking gardens here – spring
it the perfect time to plant all kinds of new seeds in your life!
Perhaps that “seed” you want to plant takes the form of an
idea for a new book. The seed could be a character name, a tricky situation, an
unusual adventure, or even a full-fledged orchestrated trilogy. It’s still just
an idea – a seed – until you get started.
Where to begin?
Just like with planting a garden, you need the right tools
and some planning to successfully nurture your book idea and help it grow into
a manuscript. The most obvious of a writer’s tools is the computer on
which to type your manuscript. But there are other, less obvious tools that an
aspiring writer might want to take advantage of.
You might want to sign up for a Writing Class. Here on Cape Cod we are lucky to have a plethora of published
authors and writing coaches who teach classes outside of traditional college classrooms.
But it doesn't matter where you live - many community education programs offer writing classes for beginners and so do local libraries. Seek and you will find.
What are the benefits of taking a class? The first and most
obvious is community. Writing is a lonely business, and it’s helpful to have a
support group to both cheer your progress and keep you going over the rough
patches as you master the learning curve of a new skill.
A class also has the benefit of a teacher, who can give
pointers about basics like dialogue, verb tense, and punctuation. They also
offer direction on your story arc and character development, as well as more
ephemeral writing aspects like hook, conflict and flow. If you don’t know these
words and phrases from the writer’s toolbox, I strongly urge you to consider a
class.
Think of “story arc” like a bell curve: you want the action
to start at the beginning and rise to a crescendo before resolving itself into
your happily-ever-after. The concept of “character development” is whether your
main characters grow and change throughout your story, whether you are
challenging your character and giving the reader someone worthy of rooting for.
Your character needs to hook the reader from the very beginning and make them
care about what happens next.
A critique group
is another option for writers looking for the community aspect. The group
setting offers a safe space among peers to road test ideas on other readers, to
figure out if you’re the only one out there who thinks shape-morphing robotic
werewolves from Planet Gulag would really make for a blockbuster bestselling
novel…or if maybe you need to shift your focus.
Beta readers are
another important tool in an aspiring writer’s toolbox. As the author, you are
the “Alpha,” or first, reader. The next set of eyes (be it one person or ten
people) are the betas. If you read the acknowledgments of any New York Times
bestseller, the author always thanks their initial, or beta, readers by name.
These are the select few whom you trust to both read your baby and give you honest feedback without breaking your heart
(or your will to keep writing.)
Betas play an important role in any author’s life. This is a
reader who will read your whole book, start to finish, and tell you where the
holes are and what the character flaws are. Someone who will say, “your hero is
cute enough, but kind of whiny. Make him rescue a kitten out of a tree and
maybe I’ll feel more sympathetic.” (Thanks again for that one, Shawna!) You might open that email and scream, but in
the end you know she’s right.
If you go through these steps, your seed of an idea will
undoubtedly blossom into a full-fledged manuscript.
