by Gene Turnbow | May 15, 2025 | Uncategorized
I’ve started querying agents. This might take a while.
I keep reading about how long it takes to get an agent, and that much of the time “no” doesn’t mean your book is bad, it just means it doesn’t fit the flow of what they’re doing this year.
And, I have to assume that most people who query don’t even know what a query is supposed to look like but submit anyway, i.e., most people who think they’re writers don’t actually have any idea how the game works (and it is a game). That’s got to be skewing the numbers big time.
When I wanted to get into the FX industry, I just went ahead and did it and ignored the people who said how hard it was or that I would never pull it off. The same thing happened when I went into the game industry, and when I wanted to get into UCLA Film School, and when I wanted to work in feature animation. I did all of them. The lesson I learned is that all the horrible statistics take into account the most wildly stupid and self-destructive applicants in each pursuit who never get past the front door.
Screening applicants for positions at the feature animation studio taught me that for each successful hire, there would be 300-400 applicants, out of which perhaps a dozen might have the basic requirements for the job, and only two or three might actually have everything we were looking for.
That’s only about 3% that make the “I’m not an idiot” cut. And less than one in three of those got hired. Which is FASCINATING, because that’s the same ratio of would-be authors who start a book that go on to see their work published. It doesn’t prove correlation, but it suggests it really f-ing hard.
It also suggests that I’m probably a lot closer to getting published than I think I am. We’ll see.
by Gene Turnbow | Mar 4, 2025 | Uncategorized
Outline.
Write the ending first. Make sure you know how your characters get from one scene to the next for every scene. There’s no such thing as a ‘pantser’. They end up writing a bunch of extra crap and wasting time and going back and working out the outline after the fact, and trust me, it’s twice as hard coming up with an elegant way of resolving your plot and story arcs that way, because you have to retrofit stuff and throw out a ton of crap you thought you needed but don’t.
So, to recap, write the biggest landmarks first. Then fill in the smaller landmarks in between. Then smaller than that. Keep going down in granularity until you’re writing scenes, then write the scenes, and you have a draft.
If you do not start with the broadest strokes first, building your story framework true and solid so you know where all the corners and leddges are FIRST, you WILL FAIL. The same rules apply to creating in EVERY OTHER ART FORM.
You can do the ‘pantser’ stuff when you get down to the level of writing scenes, and if you hold that off till then, it’ll be fun, because you’ll already know what the scene has to do in your story, what your characters need from each scene, and how everything works relative to the chapter that comes before it and the chapter that comes next.
Then you can do a polish pass and make everything look like you planned it all along in the first place.
Then get beta readers at minimum, a story editor if you can afford one, and a copy editor to make sure there are no spelling mistakes, because nothing pisses off a reader more than finding typos in your book and it makes you look like an amateur. Listen to your editor and your beta readers, they’ll tell you things you don’t want to hear but that you’ll have to fix.
And that’s how to write a novel. If you stick to this and you write a thousand words a day, you can write two full length novels a year.
Go write.
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