Nikki Bennett

My travels inspire my stories.  If you’d like to get transported to some wonderful countries and magical places, buy my middle grade book FOUR FIENDS!  Your kids (and yes you too!) will love it! Just click on the book image to the left and you can buy either the paperback or the kindle version from Amazon!

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Does anyone write like how I used to write?  Trying to craft every sentence as soon as you wrote it, getting so bogged down with perfecting each chapter before you moved on to the next that at some point you just got frustrated with the whole thing and put it aside?  This happened to me all the time.

Even with FOUR FIENDS, I did this.  It took me two years to write that book, because I refused to move ahead with new chapters before I went over the previous one with a fine-toothed comb.  I’d burn myself out, then have to walk away from the whole project for a couple of weeks (or months) just to get the courage to start again.

All this changed when I tried just writing from start to finish, without stopping.   Now, I don’t even go back and look at what I wrote, unless I really need to.  If I forget a character’s name maybe, or if I can’t remember what city my character was in, I’ll peek at some of my previous pages.  But I don’t worry about anything else.  I don’t care if I contradict myself, if I forget where I was originally heading with an idea, if I change my character’s persona halfway through.  I keep writing.

Why?  Because I want to get to the end.  Sure, once I do, I’ll have to do some major re-editing.  I’ll have to cut out stuff and fill in missing points.  But what I’m learning is the most important thing to do is get to the end of the book first.  Once I’ve written the book from start to a plausible finish, I’ve accomplished something.  Something I can feel good about.

I’m writing a book right now called Night at the Basking Iguana.  I’m more than halfway through, and I think the characters, in the form they are in now, are pretty wooden.  They need a heck of a lot more polish, more character, more depth.  But I’m not going to worry about that now.  I’ll go back and change or delete characters if need be, once I’m done.  Right now, I’m getting my characters to their journey’s end.  Then I’ll go back and make them more interesting (I hope!)

I’m not saying this is the only way to write.  I’m not saying it will work for you.  But in the past six months I’ve finished three books, and I’m almost done with the Basking Iguana one.  Two of the three are edited, polished, and have been sent out to agents.  One is still going through review.  And the rough draft of Basking Iguana will be done by the end of April.  For me, that’s pretty damn impressive.  And the most important thing is, they’re good books and I like ‘em.  Whether the rest of the world will like them I’ll have to see when the books get published!

Any thoughts?  Please leave your comments!

Every house has a history.  This House has a Mystery.

That’s my one-liner for Once Upon a House, a short children’s chapter book I’ve written.  I was submitting it to an agent today, on one of those sites where you submit on-line instead of through snail or e-mail.  One of the boxes asked for the one-line pitch–some folks call it an elevator pitch (although I guess elevator pitches could be longer.)  I hadn’t even thought about writing an elevator pitch for this book, so I had to think up one on the spot, and the above is what my exhausted, end-of-the-day brain came up with.

It isn’t too bad, actually.

Why is it so hard coming up with these things though?  We’re authors, right?  We’re supposed to be good at this kind of stuff, but I stink at it.  I also stink at full pitches.  At least with the one-line pitches your mind only has to focus on one sentence.

My first attempt went something like this: “Join Susie, Tucker and the twins as they discover the mysteries surrounding their new house.”

Barf, that sucks.  I tried to pretend I was a Mad Man (or Mad Woman I guess) and I was at one of those on-the-spot advertisement meetings where I had to think up something wonderful and clever right away.

Well, I’m probably not cut out for advertising.  But “Every house has a history.  This House has a Mystery” doesn’t sound too bad, does it?  I hope it doesn’t.  I’m sticking with that.  Unless somebody else comes up with a better one.

Now to think up one for Mukade Island.  Blah.

One problem I’m seeing over and over during my indie book reviews is the use of passive sentences.  I encourage anyone during their manuscript edits to search for their passive sentences and change to active as much as possible.  While active sentences encourage readers’ imagination and keep the story propelling forward, passive sentences stall the reader.

Basically, in an active sentence, the subject “acts upon” the verb and the direct object follows: “I walked the dog.”  In a passive sentence, the direct object ends up first, making for a more awkward sentence: “The dog was walked by me.”

Try this as an exercise: stick “by” in your search engine and see how many sentences in your story contain it.

This isn’t a hard and fast rule, but the more active sentences in your story, the better.

Another problem I’ve seen a quite a bit: using “There is” or “There are” to start a sentence.  If you use this too much, your sentences sound like you really haven’t put much thought into them.  Put “There is” or “There are” into your finder and try to change these sentences also.

Here’s an example:  “There was a light shining in the tunnel.”

A better sentence: “Light shone from the tunnel.”

If you tidy these sentences up, your work will flow better, and folks will enjoy reading it!