Questions to Ask When Plotting a Sequel

Since it’s President’s Day, I thought I’d post about one of my projects involving a follow-up story to WILDFIRE RUN, my book about a president’s son who gets trapped at Camp David after a natural disaster.

Basically, I feel as if I’ve been breaking my brain trying to plot out a sequel, so to help my poor struggling thought process, I finally made up a list of important elements. I hope this will help other plotters in the same situation.

I’ve discovered the character of a president’s son doesn’t lend himself to lots of adventures, because he’s surrounded by people protecting him all the time. I had to come up with plausible reasons he could be put in danger again and be the one to figure out how to get himself out of it. This is true of many ordinary kid characters. Your regular kid is not going to find treasure map after treasure map, or thwart jewel thieves multiple times, so this may be where the writer has to veer off in a bit of a different direction.

Some aspects of a sequel need to be familiar, because readers want that continuity, and they want a sense of feeling they know a character already. Other aspects need to be brand new, to give the readers a surprise, and to keep away from falling into predictability. Here’s what I’ve determined I absolutely have to keep in mind as I’m plotting:

What elements of a plot will readers expect to see repeated in a new book: (action, friendship, humor, etc.)

This is the most obvious part of a sequel, but it’s so important, it doesn’t hurt to keep it right out in front. In my case, this was easy to figure out. My new book has to include a lot of action and adventure.

What element/character is going to make the plot feel different from the earlier book?

I thought about doing another outdoor adventure, but decided it would be too predictable, so I’m moving into more of a thriller with bad guys mode. It will still have action and adventure, but I want to keep the reader guessing.

I’m also adding a new character. I think this is a great way to keep a sequel fresh. The reader knows how the original characters interact with each other, so putting a new character in their midst will add more interest, and maybe even shake up comfortable relationships.

Besides the main character, what other characters will readers want to see?

I knew I had to include my main character’s two best friends, so that made me plot it carefully to have them included in a realistic way. I also know many of my readers love the main character’s dog, Comet, but he’s a little harder to include. At the moment, he appears in the opening chapter to give that sense of familiarity, but he can’t take part in most of the rest of the story. I’m hoping it will be enough.

What traits of characters will readers expect to see? (This is so important. I’ve discovered in my own reading that I want to recognize character traits or interactions that remind me of previous books. It helps make me a part of that world.)

My main character, Luke, is prone to act before he thinks, so I wanted to put that in, but his real distinction lies in his ability to think up crazy solutions to solve seemingly impossible problems. It’s hard to think these up, but I know they have to be there, so I’m spending a lot of time thinking about this. Luke’s friends have their own important roles, and these have to be woven into the plot as well. Callie is the practical one, who solves problems the boys sometimes can’t, because they tend to get too elaborate in their ideas. Theo is the fact kid, who knows important details the others don’t.

So in writing all this down, it’s made the plotting seem a little less overwhelming. I’m not there yet, but I’m hoping that by spending all the time upfront planning, I will end up with a story that doesn’t need major rewriting. So I'm off for more plotting. Good luck to all those out there attempting the same.

~ Dee Garretson

Overcoming Writer’s Block – Making the Word Count

I hear rumors that some people do not ever suffer from writer’s block. I also hear rumors that some people actually don’t like chocolate. Hah! For those of us who do battle writer’s block, frequently or infrequently, I’d like to share some ideas. One of the hardest parts of writing and attempting to get published is the mind game involved, the game of winning over the gremlins in your brain who sow doubt at every step.

 When someone first starts writing, a common cause of writer’s block can be the fear that you will fail or that what you write will be terrible. The mind tricks you into thinking it’s better not to try because you are setting yourself up for a downfall. How do you overcome that? I found it was not to have a goal to write a polished, worthy-to-be-published manuscript. Too much pressure! I just had a goal to finish something, no matter how bad it turned out. What a great feeling it was the very first time I typed ‘the end’. If you make that your goal, you can remind yourself no one ever has to read it and that might ease some of the fear. And once the first is done, then you can think about revising it, or move on to something else, but having finished will silence a few of those vicious gremlins.

 So once you have that goal to just finish, whether it’s your first or your tenth, how do you actually manage to get words down? I have several different methods. If I’m really struggling, I just write dialogue, because that’s the easiest part of the story for me to imagine. Sometimes I’ll switch to writing a few paragraphs describing the setting, even though I know I won’t use most of it in the final story. Other times I’ll just write a laundry list of the action, more like stage directions. The important part for me is to actually get real words on the screen, because I can’t revise without anything to work with.

 Another thing I do is to set realistic goals and force myself to keep them, by not allowing myself to do anything else until I'm done. I don’t write quickly, so a maximum word count goal for me is one thousand words a day. On days when I know I will have very little time to make a goal, I lower the word count, sometimes down to as little as 250 words. Once I start writing, I often go beyond that, but the feeling of meeting one goal helps me go back to it the next day. Those 250 words may just be a description of what a character is wearing, or what they like to eat, or a bit of backstory. I don’t care. They are words.

Some people swear by a program called Write or Die. This is a much more drastic method to force yourself to write. As I understand it, you basically have to keep writing without pauses or else your work will disappear. That’s too much pressure for me and doesn’t fit the way I write, but every person has to find their own method. Anyone else have tips to share?
~ Dee Garretson

Writing Middle Grade - Tapping into Childhood Fears of a Shoe Wolf. EEK!

Imagine a partly open closet door in a dark room and a child huddled under the covers watching that door to see if it creaks open. In the shadows it’s hard to tell if it has moved a fraction. Is there a soft noise from inside? Who or what could be in there? Monsters? Ghosts? Aliens? How about a furry shoe, a living wolf shoe from some twist on Little Red Riding Hood? That was what kept me awake at night, that and the belief there was always a gorilla outside my window as soon as it got dark.

Now I was a fairly smart kid and I knew wolves couldn’t be transformed into shoes. I also knew gorillas didn’t roam free in my small Iowa town, but that didn’t stop me from the horrors of imagination. On nights when my imagination raced out of control, I feared the gorilla was actually in my room under my bed. I also knew as soon as I stretched my legs out, it would reach out from the end and grab me, so I would lay there all scrunched up, determined to thwart the creature one more night.

I have no idea where these fears came from, except my mother did have a lot of shoes, but no furry ones beyond a pair of faux cheetah pelt high heels. (Note-I am not my mother’s daughter. I will never own faux cheetah pelt high heels.)As an adult, I have the whole array of normal adult fears of worrying about loved ones and illnesses and finances, but nothing as heart-pounding as those irrational childhood terrors.

Good thing the memories of those are there though, because writing for middle grade means bringing up as many memories as you can, not for the specific incidents, but for the feelings that came with them. In my books, I’ve never been trapped by a forest fire like the President’s son in Wildfire Run or caught in a blizzard like the actors in Wolf Storm, but I can call up the fear of disaster looming over them by remembering how I felt in less life-threatening disasters of my own.

So I’m curious, what fears or memories could you or do you use for writing? And how do you call them up? If I want to remember mine, I absolutely have to be away from people, away from all the chores of everyday life and away from the internet, as much as I love it. Sometimes I even do something I’m afraid of now to bring back the memories of those sorts of fear. After my children were born, I developed a fear of heights, so if I want to call up terror, I go out on a high place and look down. That does it. I’m also afraid of giant squid, though that’s a little harder to experience them first hand. With those giant creepy eyes they have, I don’t even have to run into a squid to get into that fear. It’s heart-pounding just to think about them.

Here’s your chance to confess and to help other writers realize the weird range of kid fear. Spill your childhood terrors!

~ Dee Garretson

Star Wars Lesson - Adding Humor When Writing Life or Death Stories

Just a reminder-right after this post is one announcing the winner of IVY'S EVER AFTER, Dawn Lairamore's fantasy adventure.

I’m a huge movie fan, and movies both influence and inspire my writing. Since I’m writing adventure stories where bad things happen, people and animals get hurt, and not everyone may make it out alive, I needed to find a way to keep readers from getting so depressed, they put the book down. I don’t like depressing books myself, and I’m sure most middle grade readers don’t either.
One of my main inspirations for WILDFIRE RUN are the original three Star Wars movies. I've watched them many times (what can I say, I’ve always been a geek), and I’ve tried to figure out all the reasons they worked so well. To me, one of the reasons comes from the bits of humor thrown in. The movies are just basically fun to watch. I saw another sci fi movie recently, called SERENITY, and while interesting, it was almost unrelentingly grim. I enjoyed, but I’m not going to watch it again.

The humor in STAR WARS comes partly from the secondary characters and partly from the dialogue of some of the main characters. The droid, C3PO, with his absurd British butler aspects instantly adds fun, but since it’s difficult to work an over-the-top sidekick character into most stories, I looked at other aspects.
One of those is not making the characters perfect heroes. I’ve heard the original draft of the Star Wars screenplay had the Han Solo character as a very serious, humorless man. I can’t even imagine that. Here’s just one example of how a touch of light-heartedness makes a scene memorable, and gets the viewer to root for the characters.
The scene is where Luke and Han Solo are trying to rescue Princess Leia on the Death Star. They’re in the control room. Han’s confusion over what to do adds some humor as he talks on the intercom trying to pretend he is an officer.
HAN(sounding official): Everything is under control. Situation normal.


INTERCOM VOICE: What happened?
HAN (getting nervous):Uh... had a slight weapons malfunction. But, uh, everything's perfectly all right now. We're fine. We're all fine here, now, thank you. How are you?
INTERCOM VOICE: We're sending a squad up.
HAN: Uh, uh, negative. We had a reactor leak here now. Give us a few minutes to lock it down. Large leak... very dangerous.

INTERCOM VOICE: Who is this? What's your operating number?

Han blasts the comlink and it explodes.

That scene could have been written to showcase the heroes, with Han been in complete control and able to sound like a perfect military man. It is a life or death situation, so it would make sense to write it that way, but if it had been, it probably wouldn’t be something that remained in anyone’s memory. The little addition of, “We're fine. We're all fine here, now, thank you. How are you?” is funny and makes the scene.


So adding in bits of lighter dialogue will keep a story something a reader may want to go back to or recommend to their friends. Adding in too much will dilute the tension and make the characters too unbelievable, but a little goes a long way. In WILDFIRE RUN I tried to incorporate some humor in a serious adventure. For example, there’s one scene where Luke, the President’s son, is trying to figure out how to capture a snake that’s blocking a door they need to open. He’s got a LEGO MIndstorms robot he’s planning to use. Callie, his always practical friend, is fed up with some of his crazier ideas. So instead of them just having a serious discussion of whether or not the plan will work, here’s how the dialogue goes:

Luke put the robot down about five feet from the snake. “Everyone back up in case the snake gets mad.”
“You can bet he’s going to get mad. If you had a plastic pincher toy making beeping noises and coming at you, you’d be mad too,” Callie said.

It’s just a very small addition to the story, but to me it lightens it up enough to keep the scene fun.

In honor of Star Wars, I’m giving away a choice of either the Yoda at the top of the post, or this odd R2D2 pepper grinder. You know you’ve always wanted one of these. All you have to do is leave a comment by September 21st. I’d love to hear about movies you all enjoy.
And because I love my book trailer, my own version of a mini-movie, I’m including it again.

And the Winner of WILDFIRE RUN is....

Bish Denham, your name was pulled out of a magician's hat! (The stuffed rabbit that came with the magic kit disappeared long ago, so I'm happy we had such a good use for the hat.) If you'd email me your address at dee.garrestson@current.net, I'll get the book out to you.
Thanks to you and everyone else for commenting!  Stay tuned for future contests.

Getting Published - What I learned along the way

I’m thrilled to be kicking off the Project Mayhem blog with a giveaway of a signed hardback copy of WILDFIRE RUN. I was so happy when Hilary asked me to be part of this blog. Writing is such a solitary occupation that being able to connect with other writers keeps me going and inspires me.



Mayhem is a good word for life these days. WILDFIRE RUN will be released on August 31st, and I’m working on revisions of book two, WOLF STORM, while also juggling the moving about of my children, who are suddenly old enough to have lives and complicated schedules, but not old enough to have driver’s licenses. Where is the time freeze button? Life was much simpler when they took naps and didn’t expect to go out at night. Anyway, it’s a good mayhem, and I wanted share some of the things I learned on my very long journey to get to the published stage. I could natter on about writing for pages and pages, but for now, I’ll just focus on three things that helped me get to this point.


When I first started writing, I assumed it couldn’t be too hard to write a book. After all, I’d read thousands of books. (I’m old enough to be able to claim this.) My early attempts sounded good to me, not so good to everyone else. Major ego deflation, but necessary to let me know I needed to improve. Over the years I wrote short stories, picture books, mysteries, and one failed romance so bad I’ve blocked most of it from my memory. I helped someone write his memoir. I rewrote stories over and over. All in all I wrote thousands of words, and by the mere act of writing, I learned. Just trying to get words on paper forced me to learn.


My first breakthrough didn’t come, though, until I decided to go beyond the advice to read, read, read, and to really study what made particular books work. I picked a few authors whose books I loved and took those books apart. I figured out what made me laugh, why I was interested in the characters, and most importantly, why I kept reading and rereading. In the process, I learned a tremendous amount about pacing, dialogue and description. I still go back to certain books for inspiration when I hit a dry spell.


My next light bulb moment came when I was struggling to write a synopsis, the bane of a writer’s existence. This is where other writers reading this will emit a sympathy groan at the sight of the word ‘synopsis’. I discovered a book on writing which not only helped me manage a synopsis, but also helped me develop characters who were more than cardboard versions of heroes, villains, mean kids and sidekicks. The book is called WRITING THE FICTION SYNOPSIS. Good title, right?


Shockingly, the book’s worksheets actually wanted me to organize my thoughts, to list the characters’ goals, motivations and conflicts. I hate to admit it, but I’d never really been organized about writing. I was one of those writers who just wrote, thinking the story would miraculously happen. Maybe it does for some writers, but I’m not that talented. My stories needed some intensive care and planning to be readable and interesting.


The last major breakthrough came when I realized I had to find a plot that would spark some interest, and a mystery story I had rewritten four times didn’t have it. At conferences I pitched the mystery to many agents who were polite but clearly not excited, which was incredibly frustrating for me, because I thought I finally had something with all the elements in place.


As a last ditch effort I signed up for an intensive writing workshop, and from it I concluded my mystery was not the right story for me to focus on as an unpublished writer. The workshop organizer stressed over and over that unknown writers have a hard time getting noticed with quiet stories. It’s not impossible, but it adds more difficulties on top of an already difficult process. There is a market for quiet stories and many people write them beautifully, but I decided in my case it was time to try another approach.


I decided I needed a loud story, a story I could describe in a few sentences, a story that would make people (agents and editors) lose the glazed look in the eye I had seen so many times before. I trunked the mystery and wrote something else. That’s how WILDFIRE RUN came about, the story of Luke Brockett, the son of the U.S. President who gets trapped at Camp David after a disaster. Luke and his friends Callie and Theo have to find a way to escape the security systems gone haywire before a wildfire overtakes them. When I got the offer from HarperCollins to publish the book, it made all those years of work worthwhile. I’m excited that the book has been selected by the Junior Library Guild for the fall in their new high interest middle reader category. You can view the book trailer of WILDFIRE RUN below. A teacher's guide and a book club guide can be downloaded from my website: http://www.deegarretson.com/


One of my writer friends, Alice Loweecey, who has had an equally winding publishing journey, has a saying I’d like to appropriate to end this post: “Never give up! Never surrender!” That’s a good motto to live by in the publishing world.


So I hope everyone reading this sticks around with us. Other members of Project Mayhem will share some of their publishing journeys in later posts, and I’m very interested to hear their stories as well. To enter for a chance at the copy of WILDFIRE RUN, please follow us and comment below. (My children are very excited because I told them they would get to pick the winner in a random drawing.)

 

Our first "official post" coming Monday!!! Author Dee Garretson, WILDFIRE RUN Giveaway!

Our first "official" post goes up this Monday, August 23rd! Team Member Dee Garretson will be talking about her debut novel, WILDFIRE RUN (Aug. 31st, HarperCollins) and giving away a signed hardcover!

Help us celebrate her debut and errr...ours too!!!!!

TEAM MAYHEM