Discussion: Are Happily Ever Afters Required?

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As someone who doesn’t always write happily ever afters, I may be a bit biased in this discussion, but I do think it’s worth discussing nevertheless. 

Like most discussions hosted here at Writability, I don’t think there’s necessarily a right or wrong answer, though I suspect that genre expectations may play a pretty decent role with this topic. People reading horror, for example, have wildly different expectations than those who pick up romance novels. 

But if we’re speaking generally, I suppose the thing to consider is what people generally expect when they pick up a novel, and how acceptable (or advisable?) it is to defy those expectations. 

Usually, in genre fiction, people assume the hero will overcome the antagonist (or antagonistic situation) and live with the spoils of victory, whatever that means for the novel. But what if the hero doesn’t win? Or what if the hero wins, but the victory isn't how they imagined it, or has consequences they didn’t anticipate? 

Personally, I don’t think a happily ever after is a requirement. What is required is that all loose ends are tied up and the story arc comes to completion (more on that in this post)—but that doesn’t necessarily mean your protagonist has to gallop off into the sunset on a white horse. 

To me, bittersweet or even occasionally unhappy endings are a nod to reality. Because sometimes things don’t work out the way we planned or the good outcome we imagined turns out to be not so golden. 

On the other hand, I think it could depend on the reason people are reading: some read to escape reality, others to see echoes of reality or view their reality in a new way. For escapist readers, a not-so-happily-ever-after may be disappointing. 

In the end, you can’t make everyone happy, and as I said before, I don’t think there’s really a right or wrong answer. But it’s certainly something to think about. 

What do you think? Are happily ever afters a requirement?

NOTE: Let’s avoid spoilers, yes? If you know of a book, popular or not with an unhappy ending, feel free to refer to the book, but please avoid details and title mentions. :)

Twitter-sized bites: 

Do you think happily ever afters are a requirement? Join the discussion at @Ava_Jae's blog. (Click to tweet)  

Writer @Ava_Jae muses on the necessity of happily ever afters. What do you think? (Click to tweet) 

On Immediately Trunking Manuscripts

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Confession: I have not polished every manuscript I’ve written to a submission-ready gleam—or even tried to, for that matter.

Over the course of eight years I’ve written eleven manuscripts. Of those eleven, I brought five of them to what I at the time considered submission-ready. To be fair, one of them I only just finished a couple weeks ago and thus isn’t ready for editing, so if I remove that from my statistics, that brings me to an even 50% immediate-trunk rate. Or polish rate, if you’re half-glass full.

So now you may be wondering what happened to those five manuscripts I immediately trunked and/or thinking they were a waste of time, but I assure you they were not.

If you’re looking just at time spent, I usually take about an average of a month to month and a half to finish first drafting, so you could say that I “lost” a month with every WIP I immediately trunked. But I don’t consider it a loss, because I gained a whole lot, too.

My first insta-trunked MS, I learned just how much I enjoy making up new cultures and worlds.

My second insta-trunked MS, I learned how not to end a book, and how not to write an antagonist, and why certain clichés really don’t work. I also learned I can indeed write a book in a month. (Unsurprisingly, I don’t anticipate removing this one from the trunk ever. But I suppose you never know).

My third insta-trunked MS, I remembered certain character types that I adore—I remembered I love writing characters who are rejected by everyone, who live on the fringe of society, trying to be the best they can be while everyone around them refuses to see them for who they are. I also reminded myself that I really don’t want to write an antagonist like that. Oops.

My fourth insta-trunked MS, I learned I like writing about aliens and making up languages. I also learned that writing with an outline works really well for me.

My fifth and most recent insta-trunked MS, I learned to let my characters go and try not to strictly plan their romances. I learned writing with an outline doesn’t mean I have to stick exactly to plan, and I learned when my characters suffer real consequences for their actions, they’re so much more powerful than a slap on the wrist.

These lessons may seem a little all over the place, but in my two most recent manuscripts, I used many, if not all of these lessons to better my work.

As for why I put them away to begin with? The reasons varied, but generally it was because somewhere between the first read-through and deciding on edits, I came to realize I either wasn’t ready to start editing for one reason or another, or I didn’t love the story as much as I had while drafting. Which isn’t the end of the world, but in order for me to get through edits (and do them well), I need to believe in the story completely.

Now I’ve said this before, and I’ll probably say it again, but trunking a manuscript does not mean it’s forever condemned or it’ll never escape the trunk. All it means is that I need to put it away for the time being, and true, some of them will probably never escape the trunk, but I have hope for others that when the time is right, I’ll polish them up and they’ll be ready.

But until then, I’ll keep writing.

Have you ever immediately trunked a manuscript? 

Twitter-sized bites: 

"Trunking a manuscript does not mean it's forever condemned..." (Click to tweet) 

Have you ever trunked a MS? Here's why one writer put five WIPs in the drawer without querying them. (Click to tweet) 

How (Not) to Write a Fantastic Opening

Photo credit: Nomadic Lass on Flickr

Getting the opening right in your book is possibly one of the most important parts of writing your masterpiece. After all, without a gripping, life-changing opening, many readers won’t get to the real meat of your story.

So how do you ensure that you’ve written an epically amazing opening? Fear not, my lovely readers, for the formula to a brilliant opening is here.

How to Write the Most Incredible Opening in the History of Incredible Openings*:

1. Dialogue in the void. Before a single line of description, before any characters are introduced, there must be super stupendously thrilling (or hysterical, or tragic, or snarky, or thought-provoking, or all of the above) dialogue. Forget dialogue tags and action beats—give us the good stuff and skip straight to voices before we know who anyone is, or who is speaking, or even where they are. 


2. Start with an entirely irrelevant prologue. This is where your void dialogue should be—in the epic prologue with elves, and magic spells, and dragons, and that hovercraft bombing everything with super cinematic explosions, and an epically amazing ninja fight, and don’t forget the car chase with really expensive, flashy cars. Oh, you’re writing a YA Contemporary? Use the awesomesmash prologue anyway—it’ll only add to your book’s insane level of genius. 


3. Moral of the story narration. This should be at the end of the irrelevant prologue. After all, no one is going to want to read your book if they don’t know what valuable life-lessons they’re going to learn. Honestly. 


4. Beautiful description. If you don’t have pages upon pages of uninterrupted beautiful literary-styled description, you fail by default.    


5. Introduce no less than fifteen characters…then kill them all off. You know, a la The Iliad. 


6. Delve into every character’s detailed backstory. Before you kill them off, or as a eulogy afterwards, tell us every detail about their lives—from their favorite color to their very first memory, and that time their cat Colonel McMeowsers brought them that dead pigeon. This is the only way to make them feel real. 


7. But don’t mention your protagonist until page ten. Or preferably later. You have a lot of ground to cover before you even begin to tell us who the story is about. 


8. When you do get to your protagonist, start at the beginning of their average day. I mean, how he brushes his teeth (clockwise or counterclockwise circles? Up and down? SIDE TO SIDE?), and what kind of brush he uses to brush his hair, and what his favorite cereal is is totally fascinating stuff.


9. Tell everything (and don’t show anything). Jimmy is angry when he hits his alarm clock. He doesn’t know why he’s angry. Maybe it’s because the bristles on his tooth brush are too hard, or maybe it’s because his mother left three days after his second birthday and that ridiculous chihuahua bit his pinky finger when he was four. He stares into the mirror while brushing in counterclockwise circles and stares into his gorgeous green eyes. Coincidentally, green happens to be his favorite color. He’s very attractive, but he doesn’t really think so. Some girls say his wavy dark locks framing his face make him look handsome, but they just remind him of his mother.
   
   Jimmy loves Cap’n Crunch cereal. 


10. Author foreshadowing. Because who doesn’t love the disembodied voice telling us what’s going to happen? For example:
    
    But what Jimmy didn’t know was that this would be the best day of his life, and also the day he died. All because of that Cap’n Crunch. 

So there you have it! Now go forth and awesomize your opening.

*This is another sarcastic post! I beg you not to take these points seriously and please don’t use any of these suggestions. Please.

What so-called “tips” would you add to the list? 

Twitter-sized bites:

Do you have trouble writing openings? Here's a fun post from writer @Ava_Jae on ten ways (not) to open your book. (Click to tweet)

Getting your MS's opening right is very important, so writer @Ava_Jae shares 10 ways (not) to write a great opening. (Click to tweet) 

NaNoWriMo is Over...Now What?

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It’s December! Which means Christmas is coming and Thanksgiving is over and NaNoWriMo is complete! Now many of you have 50,000 new words or maybe even a new manuscript all nice and shiny on your computer. So what now?

What to Do:

• Finish your manuscript. Assuming you haven’t already. 50,000 words isn’t always a full novel, depending on the genre and how lean your first drafts usually are. But if you didn’t finish, keep going! You’re nearly there. 


• Celebrate! You deserve it! Writing 50,000 words in a month is nothing to scoff at—watch your favorite shows, read your favorite books, eat something delicious and enjoy some time with your family and friends. You’ve done something pretty fantastic, so enjoy it. 


• Back up your files. No really. Go do it right now. I’ll wait. 


• Make pre-edit notes. As many of you raced through that first draft, you may have some ideas already as to what will need to be adjusted or researched for and during the editing period. Write these down now, before you forget them. Because chances are, you will forget them. 

What NOT to Do:

• Submit to agents or editors. A lot of agents and editors close to queries and unsolicited submissions in December both for the holidays and to avoid the NaNo rush. Do not under any circumstances be part of the NaNo rush. You’ve done something you should be proud of—you wrote a novel, or a large part of one at least. But what you have is a first draft, and first drafts need to be re-read, and revised, and ripped apart and edited to death before they’re refined enough to be submission-ready. And that takes time.
  
  Don’t sabotage your future efforts by submitting your manuscript prematurely. Take your time to get it right and you’ll be glad you did. 


• Publish. Same as the above. Take the time to get it right before you upload your book.

Consider:

• Give your manuscript some space. I’ve already written about the importance of letting your manuscript cool between drafts, as well as how to read your writing objectively, so I’m not going to reiterate the whole thing here. But the short version is giving your manuscript some space allows you to develop distance from your words, which in turn makes editing much more effective. 


• Edits and revisions are not optional. I basically went over this in the first bullet, but if you want to publish your work, whether traditionally or independently, editing is not optional. Ever. The only way to make your book as good as it can possibly be is to put it through extensive edits and trade with critique partners and revise revise revise. There aren’t any shortcuts in writing. 

So those are my post-NaNoWriMo tips—what would you add to the list?

Twitter-sized bites: 

Now that #NaNoWriMo is over, writer @Ava_Jae shares some post-madness tips. (Click to tweet)  

With #NaNoWriMo over, writer @Ava_Jae shares some dos and don'ts for your shiny new WIP. (Click to tweet) 

Discussion: Does the Protagonist Have to Be Likable?

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So today I’m asking a question I don’t actually know the answer to. But I think it’d be interesting to discuss.

I’ve often heard of people putting a book down (either literally or in a review) because they contain unlikable protagonists. Of course, what qualifies as likable is entirely subjective, but it’s made me wonder—do our protagonists have to be likable?

I don’t think this is necessarily a hard yes or no answer. I think protagonists should be likable to an extent—if they’re entirely unlikable not many people will want to put up with them—but the goal shouldn’t be to aim for perfection by any stretch (in fact, that’d probably only aggravate the situation).

While I don’t think it’s impossible to enjoy a book with an unlikeable protagonist (I personally didn’t find Tris from the Divergent series to be especially likable, nor Warner from Destroy Me…at the beginning, anyway), I suspect this may vary from reader to reader. I have a friend who stopped reading Hunger Games because she found Katniss unlikable, and I’ve seen others rate books poorly because they weren’t a fan of the protagonist.

So now I ask you: do you think it’s necessary for the protagonist to be likable? 

Twitter-sized bites: 

Do you think it's necessary for the protagonist to be likable? Join the discussion at @Ava_Jae's blog. (Click to tweet)  

"Protagonists should be likable to an extent...but the goal shouldn’t be to aim for perfection." (Click to tweet)

Operation Thanks

Photo credit: Flying Pig Party Productions on Flickr

As it’s Thanksgiving in the States tomorrow, I’m taking a minor detour from the usual writing-related posts to talk about some real-life applications.

You see, as many of you are aware, tomorrow is a bit of a strange Thanksgiving, because not only does it blend with Chanukah, but many large retail stores have decided to extend Black Friday and start the sales on Thursday. 

I’ve heard a lot of people calling for boycotts, and telling people not to go, and starting petitions against it, but that’s not what this post is about. Boycotts or petitions or not, the stores are still going to be open and employees are still going to be working on Thanksgiving. 

Instead of focusing on the negative, however, I’d like to try to do something positive. There are going to be a lot of tired employees who are missing Thanksgiving dinner tomorrow, so why not go out and make their day a little better? 

If you plan to go out tomorrow or Friday for Black Friday sales, consider buying your cashier or another working employee a small gift. Maybe it’s a candy bar or a pack of gum, which may not sound like much, but as someone who has worked as a cashier during the holiday rush in the past, I can tell you little gestures go a long way. 

Let’s take some time this holiday season to show hard-working employees that you’re grateful for their work and you understand that they’d rather be home with their families. Let’s show them the true meaning of being thankful and spread some holiday spirit. 

Even if you don’t go, I encourage you to spread the word to others who might. I’m calling this Operation Thanks, and you can easily spread the word by reblogging this post on tumblr or sharing one of the tweets below with the #OpThanks hashtag. We can all do a little something to help make someone’s day better, and it starts with remembering to be thankful. 

Happy Thanksgiving and Chanukah to all who are celebrating! 

Twitter-sized bites: 

Going out on Black Friday? Consider giving back to employees working long holiday hours with #OpThanks. (Click to tweet)  

Shopping this Black Friday? Consider spreading some gratitude this Thanksgiving with #OpThanks. (Click to tweet)

On Writing Characters Who are Nothing Like You

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Fun fact: up until recently, I found it more difficult to write female POV characters than male POV characters. 

Now that’s not to say that I consistently wrote one with a greater degree of success than the other, but I often found the voice harder to nail with my female POV characters than I did with the guys. 

For the longest time I couldn’t really figure out why that was—as a heterosexual woman, it would make sense that I’d find it easiest to write from a female POV…right? 

Problem was, I often got bored with the voices of my female characters. They largely came out sounding the same, which I knew was a problem, and if I was being honest with myself, they really weren’t all that interesting. It wasn’t until I wrote a WIP with a female POV character who was absolutely nothing like me that I realized the problem—my previous female characters were too much like myself. 

Writing is an opportunity to take a journey through someone else’s eyes. It’s a chance to step out of yourself and experience someone else’s life. I love that about writing, and so it makes sense to me that I love to write characters that are very different from me. 

Granted, parts of myself do slip into my character’s personalities. Many of my MCs share my love for sarcasm and have analytical minds. Some of them have trouble with empathy, like me, and many of them are pretty strategically-minded.

I’ve often seen people online ask how to write characters different from themselves, and the biggest bit of advice I’ve seen is one that I couldn’t agree with more: think of them as people first. Beyond race, gender, religion or sexual orientation, our characters are people first. They have opinions, desires, fears and dreams like everyone else, they have tempers and motivations and pet peeves and loved ones. 

If you figure out who they are first, the rest falls into place. It’s just a matter of getting to know them well enough so that you can. 

Do you find it difficult or easy to write a character unlike yourself? Why? 

Twitter-sized bites: 

"Beyond race, gender, religion or sexual orientation, our characters are people first." (Click to tweet) 

Do you find it difficult or easy to write a character unlike yourself? Join the discussion at @Ava_Jae's blog. (Click to tweet)