Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Kill Your Darlings: 20 Advice Articles for Fiction Writers
    Kill Your Darlings: 20 Advice Articles for Fiction Writers
    Kill Your Darlings: 20 Advice Articles for Fiction Writers
    Ebook124 pages2 hours

    Kill Your Darlings: 20 Advice Articles for Fiction Writers

    By Mike Wells

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    Bestselling novelist Mike Wells shares 20 of his most popular blog posts in one volume. With more than two decades of experience in both traditional and indie publishing, Wells covers everything from a quick and easy way to write short book synopses to querying agents and editors to how to hook your readers on the first page of a story.

    "This is the best advice on creating a synopsis I've read." - Melissa Stark, Author

    "I should tattoo these tips on my arm, Angelina Jolie style." - Cynthia Wright, Author

    "This has been fantastic help." - Marie O'Halloran, Author

    "Terrific summary of what we writers need to look out for." - Julie Glover, Author

    "I am writing my first manuscript and have found this very interesting and helpful." - Dave Perlmutter, Author

    Content:
    A "Secret" Formula for Creating a Short Synopsis for Your Book
    6 Tips to Help You Get That Novel Written
    The Importance of "Candy Bar" Scenes in Your Writing
    Three Ways to Make Your Story Pull Readers In from the First Page
    The Fast Yes and The Slow No
    Should You Self-Publish or Go the Traditional Route?
    Developing a Thick Skin
    Does Bruce Willis Have a Dog? Less is More
    Developing Your Artistic Style
    5 Steps to Landing a Good Literary Agent
    15 Common Mistakes Found in Query Letters
    A Dozen+ Reasons Books are Rejected by Agents & Editors
    Common Questions about Agents & Publishers
    Writing: A Career You Can Fall Forward On
    Dealing with Rejection from Literary Agents and Publishers
    Readers, Writers, and The Curse of Genre
    What Lady Gaga Taught Me about Fiction Writing
    What's a Good Title for a Book? Ask a Tabloid Journalist
    Getting Professional Feedback on Your Writing
    How a Public Speaking Phobia Nearly Destroyed My Career

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMike Wells
    Release dateJun 9, 2014
    ISBN9781310042676
    Kill Your Darlings: 20 Advice Articles for Fiction Writers
    Author

    Mike Wells

    Mike Wells is an author of both walking and cycling guides. He has been walking long-distance footpaths for 25 years, after a holiday in New Zealand gave him the long-distance walking bug. Within a few years, he had walked the major British trails, enjoying their range of terrain from straightforward downland tracks through to upland paths and challenging mountain routes. He then ventured into France, walking sections of the Grande Randonnee network (including the GR5 through the Alps from Lake Geneva to the Mediterranean), and Italy to explore the Dolomites Alta Via routes. Further afield, he has walked in Poland, Slovakia, Slovenia, Norway and Patagonia. Mike has also been a keen cyclist for over 20 years. After completing various UK Sustrans routes, such as Lon Las Cymru in Wales and the C2C route across northern England, he then moved on to cycling long-distance routes in continental Europe and beyond. These include cycling both the Camino and Ruta de la Plata to Santiago de la Compostela, a traverse of Cuba from end to end, a circumnavigation of Iceland and a trip across Lapland to the North Cape. He has written a series of cycling guides for Cicerone following the great rivers of Europe.

    Read more from Mike Wells

    Related to Kill Your Darlings

    Related ebooks

    Finance & Money Management For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Sinister, Yet Sympathetic

      May 8, 2019

      Sinister, Yet Sympathetic
      7 min read

    • Article

      Mastering Plot Twists

      Dec 12, 2022

      Mastering Plot Twists
      8 min read

    • Article

      Building The Bildungsroman

      Nov 4, 2021

      Building The Bildungsroman
      5 min read

    • Article

      Getting Creative With Reality

      Oct 1, 2020

      What do H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald, Notes on a Small Island by Bill Bryson and Tall Stories and Wee Tales by Billy Connolly have in common? They all belong to the increasingly popular genre of creative non-fiction writing. When creative non-fic

      6 min read

    • Article

      Word List

      Mar 26, 2022

      embarrassed / ashamed / guilty / humiliated frustrated / confused / exasperated anxious / stressed / worried / nervous scared / uncomfortable / trapped / threatened grief-filled / regretful / unhappy overwhelmed / helpless / exhausted tricked / unsur

      1 min read

    • Article

      Movement and Flow

      May 10, 2019

      A FEW YEARS AGO my mother had a phase in which every three or four months something would short in her heart or brain, and she’d slump to the floor. Whatever did this left no trace; we guessed some kind of seizure. By the time I’d find her in the eme

      11 min read

    • Article

      Anna-Marie McLemore Speaking in Magic

      Aug 16, 2021

      A family of tightrope walkers with feathers growing in their hair. Five queer Latina cousins creating the lush estate gardens that reveal their shared love for the same woman. A girl appearing from an enchanted water tower. Magic is often how I write

      2 min read

    • Article

      Storm Cellar

      Oct 16, 2021

      Storm Cellar
      3 min read

    • Article

      The Anger Short-cut

      Mar 26, 2022

      The Anger Short-cut
      4 min read

    • Article

      Sari Botton

      Oct 12, 2022

      Sari Botton
      4 min read

    • Article

      Revising

      Apr 27, 2020

      Revising
      6 min read

    • Article

      10 Reasons To Write A 100-word Story

      Oct 31, 2022

      Shortly after my novel Daykeeper won the Indie Author Project’s inaugural Indie Author of the Year Award and the Black Caucus of the American Library Association’s Best Fiction E-Book Award, I stopped writing novels. It wasn’t because I felt I had re

      7 min read

    • Article

      Nonfiction Book Proposals

      Oct 13, 2021

      FOR years journalist Chloé Cooper Jones, who was born with a rare congenital disorder called sacral agenesis that affected the development of her hips and legs, had been filling free moments between assignments by writing journal entries on how stran

      8 min read

    • Article

      The First Five Pages

      Jan 7, 2021

      The First Five Pages
      5 min read

    • Article

      Classifieds

      Jun 15, 2022

      REBEL Anthologies is currently accepting submissions for our upcoming anthology for August. We are a boutique publishing company and offer a white-glove experience, a book launch in Manhattan, podcasts, and reviews. Deadline: August 5. Website: www.r

      22 min read

    • Article

      The Story of Getting a Book Published

      Aug 16, 2021

      What do you know about the book publishing process? What needs to happen to get a book published and for it to find success? Who is involved? I love finding out what surprises other writers encounter in the publishing process, and I think through the

      3 min read

    • Article

      How I Remember It

      Jun 20, 2020

      This is the way I remember it: We’re all gathered in the kitchen on Christmas Eve, too many bodies for one small space, and my grandfather is telling stories. We clear the dishes as he starts recalling the first time he made mashed potatoes as a fled

      3 min read

    • Article

      Romance Writing Academy

      Dec 18, 2021

      Romance Writing Academy
      3 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Kill Your Darlings

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      Kill Your Darlings - Mike Wells

      Kill Your Darlings:

      20 Advice Articles for Fiction Writers

      by

      Mike Wells

      Smashwords Edition

      Copyright 2014 Mike Wells

      The names, characters, places and incidents are products of the writer’s imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblances to persons living or dead, actual events, locales or organizations is entirely coincidental.

      All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any form whatsoever without written permission from the author.

      Foreword

      The following chapters are actually blog posts that I’ve written for my website over a number of years.

      They are in no particular order.

      I hope you find them helpful.

      Chapter 1

      A Secret Formula for Creating a Short Synopsis for Your Book

      If you're like most authors, summarizing your book in a couple of sentences is a daunting task.  However, if you're going to sell your book, it's simply something you have to do.  If you choose to go the traditional route, agents and editors alike are bombarded with so many queries that if they find themselves having to do much mental work to understand the gist of your book, they will simply pass on to the next one.  The same goes for self-publishing—all the retailers and distributors require short descriptions of your book.  For example, Smashwords requires a description that can be no more than 400 characters, including spaces!  That's short, folks!

      To help you do this, I want to share a formula I learned a long time ago, one that was created in Hollywood.  I can tell you from my dealings with the people in the movie industry that when it comes to stories and story structure, they really know their stuff.

      Each and every story is composed of the same five basic elements.  If you can identify them in their purest, simplest forms, you will be well on your way to writing a good two-sentence synopsis of your book, regardless of its length or complexity.

      The five elements are:  a (1) hero who finds himself stuck in a (2) situation from which he wants to free himself by achieving a (3) goal.  However, there is a (4) villain who wants to stop him from this, and if he's successful, will cause the hero to experience a (5) disaster. 

      Actually, what I've just written above IS the two-sentence synopsis that will work for any story, no matter how complex the plot or characters may seem.

      Before I go further, I want to stop for a moment and address the Is this a formula? question that will undoubtedly come up in many writers' minds.   Anyone with any experience in writing (or painting or composing music, etc.)  knows that formulas do not work when creating a new piece of art, that the most you can hope for is a cookie-cutter type result that will be mediocre, at best.  

      However, what we are doing here is summarizing a piece of art that has already been created.  Because we know that each and every story must contain these five elements, if we can step back from our own story and identify them, it makes the job of summarizing the story much easier.

      The only thing formulaic about this approach is the order in which the information is presented, and the structure of the sentences.  You can change this around later and make the synopsis appear as original and unique as you desire.

      So, back to the method.  Another way to write this compressed synopsis is to move the goal into the second sentence into the form of a question, as follows:

      Hero finds herself stuck in situation from which she wants to free herself.  Can she achieve goal, or will villain stop her and cause her to experience disaster?

      All you have to do is identify the elements and plug them in to create the most basic two-sentence synopsis for your own story.  By the way, you don't have to put the second sentence in the form of a question—you could write, She must achieve goal, or villain will stop her and cause her to experience disaster.    I posed it as a question only because it emphasizes the main narrative question in the story—discovering the answer to that sticky issue is what keeps readers turning the pages until (hopefully) they reach the very end of your book.

      The best way to demonstrate the process of creating a two-sentence synopsis is with a real example.  As virtually everyone knows the story of The Wizard of Oz, let's use that.  The five elements are:

      HERO  Dorothy, a Kansas farm girl

      SITUATION Finds herself transported to faraway land called Oz.

      GOAL  To find her way back to Kansas

      VILLAIN  The witch

      DISASTER  To be stuck in Oz forever

      Plugging the elements into the two-sentence structure, we have:

      Dorothy, a farm girl, finds herself transported to a faraway land called Oz.  Will the witch kill her before she can find her way back to Kansas?

      Now, before you begin to think that this sounds too simplistic for your story, or if you don't believe your book contains one on more of these elements, or that they seem too melodramatic, etc.—you're wrong.   Your story has all five elements, or it would not be a story.    

      Your story must have a hero, even if that hero happens to be a cat.   And your hero must be stuck in an untenable situation and develop a goal to escape that situation, or you have nothing but a character study, not a story.   The untenable situation could be something as mundane as boredom or as abstract as a blocked unconscious need to act out rebelliousness.  But that untenable situation is there, and the hero must have a goal to escape it.  Furthermore, if there is nothing to stop the hero from achieving her goal (i.e., a villain), then you have no conflict.   No conflict, no story.   

      Granted, some of your story elements may require some thought to identify.  For example, your villain might be society as a whole, Mother Nature, or even your hero's self-doubt.  Similarly, your disaster could be little more than your hero having to live with an unbearable self-concept or overwhelming guilt.  It's also important to remember that the disaster is seen through the eyes of the hero.  This is usually the worst possible scenario he or she can envision at the beginning of the story, but may in fact be the just outcome, or the outcome that does the hero the most good in the long run.

      Back to The Wizard of Oz.    While the two-sentence synopsis we wrote is accurate, it is also painfully dull.   This because we started with the five story elements distilled into their absolute minimal forms (done intentionally by me for the purpose of this exercise).  To jazz it up, let's go through the list and expand each element:

      HERO - Dorothy isn't just a farm girl, she's a lonely, wistful farm girl

      SITUATION - Dorothy isn't merely transported to Oz, but is whisked away by a tornado and dropped there.  Also, Oz is far more than a faraway land, it's a magical but frightening place, full of strange characters, little people call Munchkins and witches, both good and bad.

      GOAL - Dorothy's main goal is to get back to Kansas, but she soon learns that only the great and powerful Wizard of Oz can help her do that, and he lives in Emerald City, a long and dangerous journey from her starting point (You'll note that in any story, the hero's main goal breaks down into a series of sub-goals).

      VILLAIN - The witch is more than just a witch—she is the Wicked Witch of the West.

      DISASTER - Dorothy's possible fate is actually worse than being stuck in Oz forever—the Wicked Witch of the West is determined to kill her.

      So, let's plug these expanded elements into the original formula.

      Dorothy, a lonely, wistful farm girl, is whisked away by a tornado and dropped into in a faraway land called Oz, a magical but frightening place, filled with strange and wonderful characters—little people called Munchkins, and witches that are both good and bad.   Can Dorothy make the long and dangerous journey to Emerald City to see the Wizard, the only one who can help her return to Kansas, or will the Wicked Witch of the West kill her first?

      Note that

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1