Excerpt: The Puzzle Box

Now that I have my outline to The Puzzle Box finished, I'm beginning to fill in the details of the chapters. It has been an exciting adventure to write a book this way. Now I'd like to share a portion of the text from chapter one. I hope you enjoy it. By the way... I didn't start at the beginning.

Excerpt from: The Puzzle Box

Ari found the well before Julian finished climbing over the broken-down stone wall at the edge of the ruins. He pulled off the cover and stared down into the hole.

“I’m not going down there, no matter how much the Hermit wants to pay me.”

“Why don’t you check over by the ruins of that house, while I see if there’s anything in here.” Julian smiled as he lowered himself into the dry well. “It still looks damp around the edges. I might find something.”

Ari didn’t answer because he was busy digging around in the ruins of a house near the well. He found a few Saint John’s Wort, but before he was leaving, he slipped on some loose stones and went crashing through the rotted floorboards. Beneath was a cellar that hadn’t been touched in decades. Ari could smell the dank mold and sneezed from the unsettled dust. He crawled up from the ground and began searching around in the dim light.

Ari stopped. A faint humming from under a pile of rocks caught his attention. He poked at the mound with a broken stick. When nothing jumped out at him and he knew it was safe, he removed the stones, one by one. Soon Ari was staring at the source of the humming. A dusty box sat among the stones and debris, its curious hum drawing him closer. He reached out and gingerly touched its edge. Dust and dirt fell away at his touch, and Ari could see part of a white tiled square. He licked his finger and dusted off another place and saw part of a red square, with filigree designs on it. Finally, he started to pick up the entire box, when a noise from behind startled him. He dropped the box and jumped back. Whipping around, he glared, breathless.

“Julian! Geez! You scared me!”

“Sorry. I thought you got hurt when you fell in.”

Ari turned around to face the box. “Naw, but I found something.”

“What is it?” Julian tried to see around Ari, but because it was so dim, he had to step up next to him.

Ari bent down and picked up the box, holding it in a protective cradle. At the same time, Julian reached out to touch it, but Ari pulled away.

“No!”

“I want to see it, too!”

“Let’s go out in the light so we can get a better look at it,” Ari turned his back on Julian, looking for a way out of the cellar.

Julian walked towards the wall and bumped into a stone staircase. “Over here!”

They climbed up the set of stone steps that ran up one wall and out of the old cellar, into the bright sunlight. Both young men squinted and shaded their eyes, trying to get a better look at Ari’s find. Ari sat on the edge of the broken stone wall and held the box in front of him. He let Julian pull off chunks of mud from the corners. After dusting off the dirt and gravel bits from the box, they saw it was made up of square tiles, decorated in delicate designs. Each side had a different color dragon on one tile, a cloaked man with a sword on another, and a robed magician on a third. The rest of the tiles were designs and odd writing. Ari and Julian shook their heads at each other, neither one knowing what they were looking at.

“Maybe we should try to open it,” Julian suggested.

Ari shook his head back and forth. “No. Let’s take it to the Hermit. He knows about the history of this place. Maybe he can tell us what it is.”

Outlining Your Next Novel

I'm raising my head from working on my new book, which is still in the outlining stage, so I can tell you about an excellent book on outlining. K. M. Weiland, author of Outlining Your Novel - Map Your Way To Success, offers a detailed approach to your outlining project. You can also find her at her blog, Wordplay: Helping Writers Become Authors, HERE.

Not only does she offer suggestions on how to begin your outline, she offers in depth questions on characterization and theme. Since I have been following her ideas, I've found the process long and involved, but worthwhile. That's because when you do character studies and development of the inciting event, you will create many pages of notes for your story ahead of the actual writing. Besides character sketches, she explores backstory, character interviews and setting.

Ms. Weiland offers two kinds of outlines of explore; the extended outline or the abbreviated outline. By choosing what works for you, you can draw your own road map to success. She walks you through each kind with examples from other authors.

One feature I like about this book is after each chapter she has a section called Asking the Authors. Each chapter has a different author she has interviewed about outlining and they give candid answers about their own feelings about outlining and the different topics. I found some of the answers sparked with humor and alacrity.

If you are serious about learning how to make a working outline for your next book, this is an excellent tool to begin with. I bought my copy from Amazon for my Kindle reader and the only disadvantage to having it on ebook was I couldn't make notes in the margins. I found myself writing on any scrap of paper that was handy. I did finally put it all in a three ring binder so I could move pages of the outline around.

I'm excited about the outline I'm working on. I can see the story developing on paper as well as in my head. By the time I get to write this book, it will flow out of my creative side and I won't have to worry about the mechanics, since they will be mapped out in the outline.

Do you outline? What's your process for getting it down? Can you recommend any books?

How Well Do You Know Your Main Character?

Most books start out defining the main character in bits and pieces, giving the reader just what he needs to know to see how he fits into the story. I had a fun time exploring my main character, Ari, as I was outlining my new book. I wrote a character survey on him, defining all factions of his life, including a history of his past. This left me aching to include all kinds of extraneous details as I began filling in my story.

How much is too much?

Sometimes I want to explain my characters so the reader will understand the whys behind the action. But recently I read a comment that stopped me dead in my tracks.

If you have to explain your character, you've killed him.

In other words, if the reader doesn't see, by your character's actions, why he's acting the way he is, then you haven't built a strong enough history on your character. You need to prepare for your character's sudden change in direction. If your character is going to save the bad guy from sure destruction, the reader needs to be savvy about it and not sitting there scratching his head, asking why?

I'm learning how to present a character in a story and how to build on the information given. Here is the beginning of my new story The Puzzle Box:

“Ari! You let the fire die again! How often do I have to tell you to keep this fire hot?”

Ari’s father threw a piece of wood on the fire and fanned the bellows to re-light the coals. After the coals were glowing, he jabbed an iron bar in the fire, waited until it became white hot and pulled it out. Then, with the hammer he held in his right hand, he pounded on the sizzling hot metal.

Ari watched his father with a dismal frown. He hated iron work. Even though his father was a master sword maker for the King, he’d rather be in the forest studying his magic tricks or gathering plants for the Hermit.

So what did this beginning tell us about Ari? He's unhappy at what he does and wishes to be doing something else. Of course, he gets his adventure when he finds the puzzle box and tries to open it. To me, writing is an adventure and I get to travel with all my characters to unexplored places. Learning about characterization is an adventure of its own and creating a character out of bits and pieces is a challenge I invite you to continue on with. Have a great adventure!

 

So what if?

I'm working on the premise for my new book and in a book I'm reading about outlining, it suggests that you ask yourself "what if?" so you can create an extensive list of options for your story. Not all the "what ifs" will be good for your story, mind you, but in order to cover all the bases, you are instructed to write them all down. Then, you can eliminate the extraneous one that don't work.

My working premise, so far:

Ari, an unhappy apprentice, attempts to solve the riddle of a puzzle box he finds in the ruins of Chaldea, and is faced with the challenge of magic gone awry.

My what ifs, so far:

• What if puzzle box can't be opened?
• What if Ari sells the box to a magician, who opens the box and falls under the spell of what's inside?
• What if Ari opens box?
• What if Ari and his friends fight with what's inside, but lose?
• What if what's inside begins to haunt the land and Ari must stop it from destroying Chaldea.
• What if Ari likes what's inside and joins forces with it?
• What if Ari's enemy makes him trade the puzzle box for his sister's hand in marriage (Ari is in love with her)?
• What if Ari's enemy opens the box and falls in league with it?
• What is Ari goes to King with Puzzle box and offers it to him as a pledge?
• What if King opens box and causes havoc throughout kingdom?

So here we have only ten different ideas that are different avenues to take my story. Here is the catch: I have to decide which, if any, are going to be incorporated in this second book of magic and mayhem that I'm working on.

How do you create your premise and decide where its going? Do you do an outline? Or do you write by the seat of your pants?

A Bright Idea!

Bulb by George Hoden

Welcome to my blog!

Have you ever had a bright idea for a story that kept you up until all hours, but you still didn't get all the pieces put together? That's where I'm at right now. I've realized that my niche is definitely YA Fantasy and Science Fiction and have decided to gear my stories for that group.

That said, I'll go back to my crackling idea. It's like this tree up above. It starts out with bare branches going this way and that, and the leaves and blossoms begin to grow. With nurturing and watering (and a lot of research), those blossoms bud into fruit. But I have to be careful at this stage, because the fruit can be attacked by insects (bad ideas) and it will fall off the tree, dead. In other words, trying to merge bad ideas with the good ones and coming up with bland, sand-in-your-mouth ideas.

Over watering (too many ideas) can cause the fruit to rot and fall off also. That's why I need just the right amount of water and fertilizer to make the story come alive. I'm excited with all my ideas, so what I'm doing is making a list of all the ideas on 3x5 cards, so I can shuffle them around and decide which ones to keep.

So what's a good idea, as opposed to a rotten one? I suppose I'd have to say if it cracks with energy and sparkles with excitement, I'll keep it. But, some of those bad ideas have merit also. Not everything in life is hunky dory, 100% A-1 okay. There are those spooky, unsettled moments that are just as important in a story. By making a list of all my ideas I can weed out the extraneous material and work with the rest.

How do you set up a story? Is it part of your regular plan, or do you just get in there and write?

Back To The Drawing Board!

I've just finished the first draft of my book Call of the Dragon and I've realized that my main character (MC) is lacking something that my readers can grab on to and say: Yep! I can relate to that! I thought because he was unhappy about his situation in life and wanted it changed, it would be good enough. But without a real outstanding character flaw, his character comes off as just so-so.

I plan on re-writing my novel and re-structuring it so my MC will have more of a challenge at getting what he wants and he'll have a character flaw he must overcome in order to reach his goal. While I'm not looking forward to that kind of major overhaul after finishing the draft, at least I can say it'll be easier to do it now than when I get all finished with the book.

Have any of you ever had major overhauls on your manuscripts that seem insurmountable? I like to think positive about it and say that it can only make my story that much more sensational to the reader and much more palatable in the long run.

An edit today means one less tomorrow!

 

5 Ways To Turn Up The Suspense...

I'd like to pass on some suggestions from Brian Klems article: Five Ways To Make Your Novel More Suspenseful. This was in an e-mail I received from Writer's Digest Magazine. I found the article to be what I would call a keeper. For the sake of brevity, I'm only paraphrasing what I read. If you'd like to read the entire article, please click here.

#1. Turn up the sensory detail.
Suspense is sustained by the absence of anything terrible happening, and the continued focus on detail. By focusing in on the little things like a car back-firing, the hiss of a cat or anything that would keep the reader holding their breath, you are building the suspense.

#2. Turn down the velocity.
Slowing down time increases suspense.
a. Complex sentences. Stay away from the short sentences that speed up the action.
b. Internal thoughts. Let the reader hear what your character is thinking.
c. Bring the reader as close as possible to the scene. Let them experience the tension of the sequence first-hand.

#3. Modulate suspense. 
Building suspense takes time. Break the tension by having something happen that advances the plot or provides a moment of comic relief.
a. Insert a pause. A telephone rings. One of the characters cracks a joke. Remember, in real life, humor is used to ease tension.
b. Reveal something that seemed menacing to be ordinary. A scary shape turns out to be the shadow of a tree in the moonlight. A hand on the shoulder of the protagonist turns out to be his best buddy.
You can use this technique to give your reader a respite, then continue to crank up the suspense to keep them hooked.

#4. Foreshadow rather than telegraph.
Creating a suspense sequence that ends harmlessly is a good way to foreshadow something more sinister that happens later on in your novel. Be careful to foreshadow and not telegraph: giving away too much too soon is guaranteed to ruin the suspense.
The line between foreshadowing and telegraphing is subtle. When you insert a hint of what's to come, look at it critically and decide whether it's something the reader will glide right by, but remember later with an Aha! That's foreshadowing. If instead the reader groans and guesses what's coming, you've telegraphed.

#5. Always end with a payoff.
You can have a suspense sequence early that ends with nothing more than a harmless tabby padding off into the night. But as you near one of your novels end-of-act climaxes, the suspense sequence should pay off. The payoff can be an unsettling discovery of evidence of a crime: finding a dead body, bloodstained clothing, a weapons cache, or that the floor of the basement has been dug up.
The discovery might reveal a character's secret. Finding love letters might reveal a hidden relationship between two characters.
Or, the payoff can be a plot twist. The bad guy confesses, the sleuth gets attacked, or locked in a basement, or lost in a cave, or the police show up and arrest the sleuth.

I hope these ideas have given you food for thought and have stirred your juices around enough to check on the suspense in your novel. The main thing is to enjoy the process. And write!