The Fiction Formula

Getting Ready

Part One

One

A Brief Overview of the Formula

All righty. After all the explanations and caveats and comparisons to The Matrix, what exactly is this formula we speak of? We know it’s not a turn-the-crank, pull-the-lever, do-exactly-what-other-authors-did path to assured success. So what is it?

In this chapter, we’ll lay out the entire formula in brief, with promises to give you a lot more depth on each step in the chapters to come. This one will be short because the last thing we want to do is waste your time — but we’re still writing it because you’ll understand each piece better, as we roll it all out, if you have at least some idea what’s coming.

You should have some idea if the full path you’ll take from New York to Los Angeles before you set out … even if today you only plan to reach Buffalo. Knowing the full journey gives actions context. I don’t know about you guys, but I handle Step One in a process much better if I’ve got some clue why I’m doing it.

So let’s begin, starting with…

What Should I Write?

The answer’s obvious, isn’t it?

You should write what interests you.

Or … wait. That’s not right, is it? You should write what readers want most.

Or is it what will sell best? Maybe it’s what you’re passionate about. Or possibly what drives you in your quest to use stories to change the world.

The answer is all of those things — or at least as many of them as grab you.

At Sterling & Stone, there are plenty of times we believe in or, but story motivation isn’t one of them. When you operate from or, you’re choosing one thing or another but not both. You can go to a movie at 7pm tonight or you can chop down a tree. You can’t do both unless you’re a serious asshole. You can put out a fire or you can let it burn. You can be tall or short or somewhere in between. Whether it comes down to choice or happenstance, there are many situations where you can or should only do one thing and not try to have that cake and eat it too. In an or world, you choose one option and discard the others. Or has its place. In the past, we used to say that Sterling & Stone made stories and smarter artists (i.e., educating creative people). We should have — and eventually did — say or. We make stories or smarter artists, but not both. Doubling down on the former while discarding the latter was the best thing we’ve ever done for our futures as storytellers.

But when it comes to deciding what to write, you often don’t have to choose. In the next chapter, we’ll kick off our in-depth exploration of the Fiction Formula by explaining how you can and should try to get everything you want out of the next story on your plate. It’s not a free-for-all; there are definitely times when or choices will be necessary. But it’s probably a lot less often than you think, if you do things the right way.

There are other decisions as well. Like whether to write to market or write your passion — a false dichotomy if ever there was one, in our humble opinions. For your second book, there are a few additional choices. Should you write in a new genre or stick with the genre you wrote last time? Should you write a sequel to your first book or create stand-alone novels instead?

All good questions, and all things we’ll explore in the next chapter.

Genre Therapy

Have you chosen a genre? Do you know whether you’d like to write romance, sci-fi, historical fiction, suspense, or something else?

If you think you know the answer, our Genre Therapy chapter will encourage you to think twice. We work with a lot of writers, and in our experience at least half of them start out writing the wrong thing. Wrong, in this case, isn’t a value judgment. Nor is it a statement of absolute fact. Right and Wrong, in the way we mean them relative to a process we call Genre Therapy, compare you only to you.

Are you writing what truly suits you best?

Are you writing as well or as fluidly (as in the zone) as you could be?

Do your interests and abilities align as well as they could?

These are all questions we’ll explore when we dive deep into Genre Therapy.

This section is a teaser, so right now you only need to know that it’s a way of determining not just what you want to write most or what you might be able to write best, but instead seeks to uncover a holistic ideal genre for you with all factors considered, known and unknown. If you think the idea is silly, guess again. We have story after story of Genre Therapy transforming careers — and in every case, the author who went through it was sure at the start that they already knew what they were born to write.

The truth is that you probably don’t know yourself nearly as well as you could at a subconscious level. And even if you do know your subconscious ways fairly well, chances are you could know it even better … and enhance your performance as a result.

Wouldn’t that make you a happier creator?

Planning

If you’ve been around this writing stuff for a while, you probably know the difference between plotting and pantsing. Plotting is what it sounds like: nailing all the twists and turns of your story in advance — usually as a thorough outline — before you write Word One. Pantsing, on the other hand, is about flying by the seat of your pants. In practical terms, it means that you don’t know what happens at any given point in your story until you start writing that part. Pantsers are free spirits of the author world. Whereas plotters always seek the trail map before they venture on their hike, pantsers prefer to start walking at the trailhead and see where it ends.

There are pros and cons to each, of course. Plotters sometimes box themselves in, and pantsers can occasionally get hopelessly lost. But as with the what should I write? section earlier, you don’t entirely have to choose. Plotting vs. pantsing isn’t like flipping a coin. There aren’t only two options. There’s a spectrum. Sean and I write somewhere in the middle, working from a rough, loose-style outline we call beats — something we’ll explain in more detail later. Doing so gives me, as the draft writer, the freedom to go where the story takes me without forsaking the guideposts entirely.

But for the storytellers at Sterling & Stone, the question of writing beats or outlining (plotting, pantsing, or somewhere in between) is only one part of the planning process. We also cast our stories like movies cast their characters. Also like movies, we do location scouting to better understand where our stories take place. Once all of those pieces are ready, we give our outline a StoryJacket, which is basically a developmental edit at the planning stage. Doing these at the pre-production level saves us a lot of time and hassle over the traditional way of doing things, which brings in a dev editor only after the book (or a good chunk of it) is already written. It’s always better to know what’s wrong with your ideas and get aware of your plot holes before you start writing.

Once you’ve made your plan and vetted it with an editor, partner, or story-minded friend, it’s time to start…

Writing

You’d think this section could be little more than one word: WRITE.

In truth, there’s more to it than that. If all that needed to happen was for an author to sit down and write, all aspiring novelists would begin and finish their novels. But that’s not how it works. We all know someone — maybe many someones — who can’t quite start, or soldier on after starting. Maybe they get halfway through a manuscript before quitting. Clearly, there’s more going on than just write.

We’ll delve deep on the writing phase later, but for now understand that there’s a lot at play here.

You must defeat the procrastination that comes with starting each day, and after taking a break.

You must find your flow states, so that the words come easily rather than hard and slowly.

You must banish worry and concerns and distractions. It’s hard to write when there’s something heavy on our minds. Unresolved conflict, problems that need solving. Everyone has these triggers. You must root yours out and defeat them.

Get started, and push forward to The End, even if you get lost or start to doubt yourself. Everyone’s different on this point, but for us it’s always a mistake to go back to the beginning on a difficult project just to smooth the wrinkles before moving forward. If we’ve got something inconsistent at the start of our story, we never go back and fix it. We push until we’re finished … and only then go back for surgery.

Be consistent. This means little more than making a schedule and sticking to it. Sean writes every day. I write every weekday, excluding major holidays and vacations. Some of our studio writers have day jobs, so they get up early and write for an hour or do it after work. Whatever you choose, get it done. You made the schedule, so it’s up to you to honor your expected results.

Get that first draft finished, by hook or by crook. It doesn’t need to be perfect. It won’t be perfect, so don’t aim for perfection. Because luckily, the next step is…

Editing

There are a few expressions about editing. The truest among them might be writing is rewriting, which doesn’t sound like it’s about editing at all, but actually is. Rewriting — at least the way we’d use the term — doesn’t mean sitting down fresh and writing again from scratch. Instead, it means digging into that finished first draft and massaging the words, making them better, clearer, devoid of the garbage passages we call throat clearing, which is what happens when you’re telling the story to yourself … but which will bore your reader to tears if you leave it in.

The true story is born in the edit. Every writer creates different types of rough drafts. I tend to write clean copy that requires only light editing, whereas other authors make such messes of their first drafts that they have a few derogatory names for them: vomit draft, or perhaps CFD, which stands for Crappy First Draft. Whether you produce a shiny first pass or a total CFD, it doesn’t matter.

The purpose of the writing phase is to get the story out.

It’s a little like emptying your overstuffed junk drawer onto the carpet before organizing it. You have to get it all out before you can start combing through to see what there is to work with.

Don’t be afraid of editing. We’ll give you our best tips, and maybe a few of them might help your attitude to change. The first-pass edit might take your book from CFD to good. The second might take it from good to great. Editing is where you polish — taking what you intended and figuring out how to articulate that from all the messy words on your page.

There are many facets to editing, and we’ll cover them when we reach that section: self-editing, developmental editing, proofreading, how to work with an external editor, and killing your darlings.

(Maybe don’t kill any darlings if you don’t know what that means yet.)

Post-Production

Post-production happens after a book’s production. Or to keep the jargon simple, post-production is a blanket term referring to all that’s required to prepare a book for sale after the words themselves are in place. You write, you edit, you send your book to a pro editor and maybe a proofreader. Then what? That’s where post-production takes over.

Formatting for ebook and print, design and the addition of any images or icons (ex: to head chapters for a nice bit of flair), writing a description to entice buyers on Amazon and elsewhere, contracting for, shepherding, and approving cover art, creating paperback and hardback versions if desired, finding an audiobook narrator and managing that process including quality assessment at the end, uploading all formats of your books to whichever stores you want them on, pricing, and more.

We’re aware that the list above might feel scary — or totally unappealing. We do this stuff constantly, and typing the above paragraph still gave me hives. Most of what we’ve listed isn’t difficult, but newcomers are often overwhelmed because it’s impossible to know what they don’t know. Our advice is to not worry about it at this point … and when you do eventually turn to this stuff, focus on one piece at a time. Most post-production can be outsourced, meaning you need to know if your outsourcing partners are competent.

You’ll need money to hand jobs off, of course, but we’ll delve deeper on all of this later.

Marketing and Selling

Sean’s outline for the marketing section you’re reading right now began with the rather apt note, "This is where the average author starts to be all, ‘Ah, fuck.’"

And, yeah. That’s about right. We’ve seen more authors put off by the prospect of figuring out how to handle marketing than anything else, including editing and post-production. You might look at your vomit draft and despair over just how you’re going to jigsaw that piece of crap into making some sort of sense, but apparently even that torture is infinitely better than the hell of figuring out how to hit the bricks and sell.

Some people will tell you to get out there and do your thing on social media in order to market yourself and your books. Or you need a website, but of course that one opens another box of questions: What kind of website? Where? How should I arrange all my information? Social media isn’t any easier, given all the options and the fact that in addition to participating on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or elsewhere, you can advertise with them, too.

Speaking of advertising, you can also buy Amazon ads. Or BookBub ads. But keep in mind, BookBub ads are different from BookBub Featured Deals. And you don’t want to do any of those things without a strategy or a way to track your returns, lest you just throw your money away.

What about blogging? Podcasting? Are book tours still a thing? It goes on and on and on.

We know what some of you are thinking: Forget self-publishing. I thought going indie sounded good, but not if I have to deal with all of that. I’ll just get a traditional publishing deal, and handle the downsides rather than figuring this all out!

We’d encourage you to go back and skim what we said about trad deals and how much they (don’t) help most authors with their marketing. If you’re a huge author, then yes — HarperCollins or whoever will pay handsomely to do all of this for you. But if you’re small potatoes, expect a small potatoes budget and a small potatoes amount of help and hand-holding. For most little guys and gals, trad publishers still make you do the work. That means you’re still figuring it out. Or you can roll with whatever they do arrange for you, knowing it won’t be much … and that in all likelihood, their tactics will be outdated (because traditional publishers, like most traditional things, are slow to change) or unsuited to smaller players (because trad thinks big, and big strategies don’t work as well at a smaller scale).

It’d be easy to read the above paragraphs as, Plan A is too hard and Plan B won’t work, so you’re screwed. We’ll encourage you to relax if that’s what you’re thinking, and to know we’ll offer a Plan C.

Plan C says that all you’ve heard about marketing your books that people say is necessary isn’t mandatory at all. We’ll walk you through the most important parts of our own Fiction Marketing Formula later in this book. Learning those things will take practice and trial and error because all non-bullshit, non-miracle-cures do. But we promise it isn’t beyond you. You don’t even need to do it. Once we get there, all you’ll need to do is begin.

All the Business Stuff

Whether you’re indie or traditionally published (and whether you like it or not), being an author is a business. You are the president and CEO of your own tiny company even if it’s just you, working alone. You make the big decisions; you steer the ship; you decide how much to invest per asset (book) created and how best to maximize its income.

If you’re smart (and we’ll talk about this), you won’t literally do it all alone, and will choose to outsource parts of the process. But in the end, you are still Head Honcho, Top Dog, and Big Cheese. Even if a professional designer creates your cover, you still need to find them, decide whether the resulting art is good enough, and pay them. Even if an editor checks your copy, the same things apply.

It’s enough to make a creative person’s head spin, especially if all you want to do is write.

The bad news is that going traditional won’t save you from the job of running a business. No matter what the publisher handles, you’ll still end up with more of the grunt work than you want. What’s more, you’ll ultimately need to monitor what the publisher is doing … and decide whether the publisher’s business is a good ongoing fit for your business. That takes acumen.

But the good news is that while this book isn’t a comprehensive guide to the business of being an authorpreneur, we will take you through the basics. The least you need to cover your ass instead of losing it. We’ll talk a bit about all the above stuff, plus how to find the right advisors and providers for tax planning and business structure, basic legal advice to protect your work, and so on. We’ll cover the basics of time management, money and investment, entrepreneur mindset (because that’s what you are), and creating the support structures required to thrive.

If you treat authoring as the business it is, you’ll have a much clearer road ahead than if you stick your head in the sand and wing it. Treat it like a hobby like most writers do, and your best efforts will get pushed to the