Dear Ally, How Do You Write a Book

by Ally Carter

  —DON’T SPEND SO MUCH TIME RESEARCHING YOUR IDEA THAT YOU BECOME SICK OF YOUR IDEA. Research is a form of procrastination for a lot of people—a way of “working” without having to go out on a limb and start actually writing. But if you’re still researching after months, you run the risk of losing your love for the project before you write a single word.

  So plan, research, and strategize until you get comfortable with what you need to do, but don’t forget, the most important part is that eventually you do it!

  What’s the best writing advice you ever got?

  Kody Keplinger Don’t be afraid to deviate from your plans. Outlines can be incredibly useful, but sometimes your story is going to take you in unexpected directions, and it’s okay to change course.

  DEAR STEPHANIE PERKINS,

  How much of the story do you know when you start, and how do you figure it out?

  It takes me about two years to write a novel, which gives me a long time to think about future projects. I always know what my next two or three books are, and I keep huge files of notes about each project. Whenever I think of an idea that would be good for a certain project, I add the note. This means that when it’s time for me to actually write the next book, I already know a lot about it! However, I still take a little more time to shape the story before I begin writing.

  First, I want to know where the story begins and where it ends. I like there to be some sort of parallel. A similar moment or situation, but something important has changed. After that, I figure out the key plot points that will get me from beginning to end—the turning points and significant realizations. Then I’ll start figuring out the most important moments between those key plot points. And so on, working my way down to smaller and smaller moments.

  It’s not a perfect metaphor, but I think of it as building a spine. I start with the top and bottom, then add big vertebrae in between, then smaller vertebrae in between the big vertebrae, and then even smaller vertebrae between those. I keep adding until my structure is steady and even.

  Also, because I write a bit slower than most authors, figuring out the plot before I begin is crucial. I don’t have time to be searching for it as I go along.

  So is that it? Is your novel totally planned now? Uh … probably not. If you don’t feel entirely prepared to start writing at this point, don’t worry. You want to know a secret? I’m getting ready to start writing what will be my sixteenth published book and I don’t feel prepared … at all!

  I’m not sure anyone ever feels entirely ready to start an undertaking like this, but there are some things you can do to put yourself on slightly more solid ground.

  1.Experiment with tense and POV. Trust me, it’s a lot less painful to write your opening chapter a few different ways than to get to the middle of the book and realize you’ve picked the wrong POV character and the whole thing should be in past tense instead of present.

  2.Try writing a scene from one of your favorite books from a different character’s POV or in a different tense and see the impact that it has.

  3.Give yourself a set amount of time to research, and remember, nothing says you have to know everything when you begin. In fact, I’d wager that you don’t even know exactly what you need to know yet. You won’t know everything until you write it!

  4.Be kind to yourself. If you’re nervous, that’s normal. If you’re scared, me too! If you’re afraid you’re going to waste your time by making the wrong call, just remember that the first draft of anything is a dirty water draft and, as every writer eventually learns, you can’t edit a blank page!

  What’s the best writing advice you ever got?

  Melissa de la Cruz In Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott writes about not freaking out and getting overwhelmed by everything you have to do. You can build it one word, one sentence, one chapter at a time, and if you keep doing it, you can finish the book.

  My world-building advice for new authors is pretty simple: Don’t go crazy.

  When I hear about people trying to get an agent for a thousand-page debut fantasy novel, I start to wonder if maybe they went a little overboard with the world building.

  Now, don’t get me wrong; I understand the temptation. After all, making up stuff is fun. What if purple were yellow? What if swords were made out of fire instead of steel? What if spaceships looked like old-timey cars and ran on French fries?

  And world building probably feels like the key to success. After all, everyone loves Harry Potter and Star Wars—big stories set in big worlds! But it’s very easy to make your story more confusing than complex, more boring than nuanced.

  So how do you know which world-building details matter and which should be cut? Well, I think it really boils down to the type of detail you’re talking about.

  THROWAWAY LINES are small, inconsequential lines that color the world or characters but aren’t really essential. They’re like the decorative buttons on a coat. They make the coat look nice and cool and finished, but they don’t really serve a function.

  Without them, the coat might look too plain, though, so you want some. But if you had nine hundred of them on one coat, that would look ridiculous. So definitely throw in some details that add texture, nuance, and interest, but add them in moderation.

  But what about THROWAWAY LINES THAT AREN’T AS “THROWAWAY” AS THEY SEEMED AT THE TIME? To be honest, I’ve often thought that one of the main reasons to have throwaway lines is to camouflage the details that you want to plant now but surprise the reader with later.

  My favorite throwaway line ever is in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone when Hagrid says he borrowed the flying motorcycle from Sirius Black. That line doesn’t matter at all until you read Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban and realize that Sirius Black is one of the most important characters in the whole series. That moment was the moment I fell in love with Harry Potter and knew I’d follow it to the end because I had no idea where we were going.

  But most world building is bigger than mere throwaway lines. Let’s call those things …

  WORLD-BUILDING PILLARS. These are the things that matter so much that if you took them away, a part of the story or world would crumble.

  So how do you build those? Well, I think that boils down to your initial question: How do you create a world that feels realistic?

  That means that every action has an equal and opposite reaction. That means your world-building decisions have to have consequences. They matter. They influence the plot and/or the characters. If you changed your world, you would somehow change your story.

  In that sense, every world has to be realistic. It doesn’t matter if you’re writing a story about a boy who joins a band in Cleveland or a band of warlocks who go to war with an ancient elven race—you have to commit! You have to act and write in every way as if everything you’re writing is real.

  When I think of examples of realistic world building, I always remember a very small detail in Holly Black’s amazing Curse Workers series. In that world, magic is real and people perform magic by touching other people with their hands. So, in Holly’s world, everyone wears gloves.

  Gloves are essential, and bare hands are edgy and dangerous. I remember a line where the characters go to sanitize their gloves when, in any other book, the characters would be washing their hands.

  That’s it. Just that one little, simple thing, but I still remember it years later and think about it a lot. Because right then I got it. The fact that the characters wear gloves wasn’t just a fun character trait or quirk. It was a part of that world, and it mattered. It mattered so much that it had changed everything about the society—right down to the fact that there weren’t sinks in the bathrooms; there were glove-sanitizing stations. In that moment, that world was real to me.

  So don’t just think about the facts or the quirks or the details of your world. Think about the ripple effect those facts and quirks and details would have.

  And remember, in the long run, people may be fascinated or entertained by worlds,
but it’s the characters we root for. It’s the plot that we follow. World building exists to shape and support great characters and great plots. It’s never, ever a substitute for them.

  DEAR MARIE LU,

  What are the steps that you go through when you’re building a world?

  I usually build a world by first building a character. With Warcross, for example, I knew early on that I wanted to write a story about a girl hacker and bounty hunter. Emika’s personality, problems, and passions came first to me, and I spent a long time developing her profile before I started thinking about what kind of world would need to exist in order for her to be this person that I created. So, around Emika, I built the world of Warcross—a game that she would hack, technology that she would use in her bounty hunting, and so on. When I decided that I wanted to set this in our world in the very near future, I did a lot of research about real-world tech that is on the cusp of becoming mainstream. I tried to flesh out how those elements would be incorporated into our everyday lives. And within that, I placed Emika. I tend to build a world out about halfway before I start writing my first draft, and as I’m writing that draft, the rest of the world building will fall into place. It’s all a very organic, shifting process for me, and I will constantly add to the world as the series goes on.

  This is something that will, again, vary a lot author to author. Whenever I do events, I’m always asked if the characters in my series could ever meet—do they live in the same world? (Which is why I wrote the novella Double Crossed a few years ago, featuring characters from both the Gallagher Girls and Heist Society.)

  So the answer is yes, they do live in the same world. But that fact isn’t really essential to the stories—it’s just something fun I’ve done for myself and my readers. A lot of authors will call these things “Easter eggs”—little lines you might insert into one series, giving a nod at another.

  For example, in Not If I Save You First, the hero remembers that someone once told him he would have made a good candidate for the Blackthorne Institute—the boys’ school in my Gallagher Girls series. Some readers will catch that and get a kick out of it, but some readers won’t, and that’s okay.

  If you decide to write multiple books or multiple series, you have a few options:

  1.You can set everything in what is obviously the same world—where the fact that the worlds overlap is essential to the stories. This might be a great idea, especially if you’ve got a large world or a complicated magical system. Maybe some of the characters from one series might cross over or appear in the other, but the two properties will be linked more by world than by characters.

  Leigh Bardugo is a master of this. So is Cassandra Clare. But it isn’t limited to the sci-fi and fantasy genres. All of Sarah Dessen’s books are contemporary stand-alones, but Sarah has also built a world in which her characters all exist together (and which her readers love returning to every time there’s a new Sarah Dessen book).

  2.Another option is to create an elaborate world, and when it’s time to write a new series, you decide to create another one! The good news is that, with this model, you get to start with a clean slate and build everything from scratch! But the bad news is … you have to start with a clean slate and build everything from scratch.

  There are pros and cons to each. Obviously, if your first series is selling really well and you have a ton of rabid readers, it would probably be smart to keep your next work as tightly linked as possible to the thing that people already love. But maybe your first series didn’t sell at all and you’re still trying to find an agent? Or maybe it got published but never really found its readership? Or maybe you’re just ready for a new world, and getting a fresh start with a fresh slate is what gets you excited to write again.

  3.You can also do what I’ve done, where, yes, I make nods to my other series and characters, but each of my worlds can (and do) stand entirely on their own.

  People ask me all the time if I ever get confused while I’m writing. If, for example, when I was working on Not If I Save You First, things blurred together and it suddenly turned into a Gallagher Girls or Embassy Row novel. The answer is no, I’ve never had that problem. Maybe if your worlds are incredibly detailed and complex (and confusing), that could happen.

  But if you have a feel for your characters …

  If you’ve fully developed your world …

  If you’re really invested in that story and know why all of those backstory and world-building details matter (and they aren’t just thrown in for the heck of it), then I don’t think you’ll have a problem in the long run.

  The key to all of these things is that you don’t have to decide right now. Right now, you just have to think about the world you want to build for your next novel and try to make that world as amazing as possible. What you do three or four or fourteen books from now? That’s a problem for Future You. And that’s okay.

  DEAR SARAH REES BRENNAN,

  What comes first for you: plot, character, or something else?

  First for me comes a premise—the premise usually becomes the selling point of a book, what you say when people ask you what it’s about. (“Girl falls through hole into magic world” is the premise of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and “children go through wardrobe to magic land” is the premise of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.) It’s the thing you have before plot, where there are some people, and they have a problem to solve, or an adventure to set out on, and for me there’s also the mood, a feeling of what might be in store, whether that’s wonder, or love, or despair. Then I work out characters—the specific people I want this situation to happen to, who will be brave enough or weak enough or love enough. Only then comes the plot—what happens to the characters, after the premise.

  DEAR HOLLY BLACK,

  How do you create a magical system that makes sense and enriches your story and world?

  There’s a temptation when thinking about writing fantasy to believe that because anything can happen, there aren’t any rules. Not true! It’s on you, the writer, to create rules for your fantasy world—and your magic systems—that are consistent, interesting, and thematically resonant.

  Herewith, I am going to ask you a few questions that I hope will help you on your path. Firstly, what can your magic do? It’s possible to make a system where there’s only one type of magic—like, say, flying—or a magic system where magic does lots of stuff, so much stuff that it would be impossible to list it all. But figuring out what the magic does, insofar as you can, is still a good place to start.

  Secondly, what are the limitations of your magic, and what’s the cost of using it? Without limitations, there’s no story, because magic is going to solve every problem and overwhelm the narrative. And without a cost, magic doesn’t have any value.

  There are lots of possible limitations to magic, and many of them are also costs—it tires the user out, it drains their life force, it requires years of training, it requires a bunch of rare components, it takes a long time to cast a spell, some of what the spell does affects the caster, there are ways to be immune to magic, spells fade over time, magic users are shunned, magic is illegal, etc. Keep calibrating until the magic isn’t overpowering the story you want to tell.

  Thirdly, is there a model for how your magic users are organized? Vampires who function like solitary hermits are going to be very different from vampires who are organized like a board of directors.

  Fourthly, what is the metaphorical value of your magic? Magic is always metaphorical, whether we want it to be or not. For example, a magic system that has men and women using different kinds of magic is saying that men and women are profoundly different. And what about nonbinary users of magic? You want to be sure that while you’re building something cool, you’re also building something that says what you want to say about the world.

  And lastly, ask yourself how magic will be used by real people to get the things that real people want—power, love, sex, money, etc.

  After you’re do
ne, recruit friends—especially friends who love gaming—to try to break your story by using the magic you’ve built to disrupt the world of your story.

  And keep calibrating! Good luck!

  Thanks for asking this! In truth, it’s one of my pet peeves when people talk about world building and only include speculative fiction (fantasy, sci-fi, dystopian, etc.). The truth is that every type of author writing every type of book should pay a lot of attention to world building.

  I grew up in rural Oklahoma. We had cows and baled hay. I graduated in a class of seventy-six, and I had the grand champion steer at my county fair three times. That’s the real world. In fact, that was my real world.

  But people who live in big cities and ride the subway and go to school with thousands of other students, they’re living in the real world, too! It’s just a very different world from the one that I knew as a kid.

  So if I were to write my story, I’d have to make sure my world felt real to people who have never even seen a steer—much less showed one at the county fair. I’d have to keep in mind that going to school with seventy-five other kids is different from going to school with four thousand.

  Those experiences are all going to be very different, and those worlds should feel incredibly unique.

  In many ways, writing in the “real” world is far easier than creating an entire world from scratch like people have to do with speculative fiction. After all, I’ve never had to describe how cars work in any of my books. Cars are just cars. Gravity is just gravity. Europe is just Europe. But I also have the option of building my own little sandbox inside the real world and playing in whatever parts of it I want.

  You see, on the surface, my worlds look exactly like the real world, but it’s what goes on beneath the surface that allows me to have a lot of fun.