Ask the Author #2

Woot woot! I’m back with another ask the author post. You guys sent me some great questions and I’m really excited to answer these. So let’s get to them!

I recorded a video version of my answers, if you want to watch that.

Or keep reading if you prefer the written version.

The first question that I have came from a Goodreads user who asks:

How do I how I get my ideas down on paper?

There are two parts to my answer.

First, there are two steps to getting your ideas down on paper. The brainstorming phase and the first drafting phase.

The brainstorming phase is when you develop the idea from the initial spark of “Oh, I have this great idea for a story!” into something that is ready to actually become a story. Because having an initial idea doesn’t necessarily mean you know exactly what the whole story is going to be.

For example, the initial idea for Oh. My. Gods. was “a girl who goes to a school for the descendants of the gods.” But the actual story is much more complicated than that.

So you need to spend some time developing that, which is the brainstorming phase.

Here are some of the tools that I use in the brainstorming phase:

• Index Cards — Different cards for everything from story beats to character notes to things I need to research. Sometimes I used different colors for different plot threads or different card types.
• Notebooks — My faves right now are the Moleskine Volant, but I’ve used all different types in the past. When I was first writing I liked to use pretty spiral-bound ones that matched the style of the book. These notebooks will be full of scene notes and torn up post-its and highlights and character notes and all different things that might help me figure out what the story is going to be. The notebook helps keep it all collected in one place.
• Post-Its — Writing something on a sticky note feels less permanent and lets me feel like I can play around with the order or have different colors for different things like maybe blue for the main external plot and pink for the romance plot and yellow for the secondary plot.
• GoodNotes — I’m trying to be a more paperless and more self-contained so I’ve been using my iPad a lot more and especially the GoodNotes app. It lets me create notebooks so I can have a different one for each story I’m working on. It’s basically a digital version of a real notebook, so I can write text, scribble notes, doodle maps or symbols. Plus, it’s like having an entire rainbow of highlighters and pens and markers with only my iPad and the Apple pencil.

Those are pretty much the tools I’m using a lot right now for brainstorming right now.

The first drafting phase requires an entirely different set of tools. Here’s what I use for that phase:

• Alphasmart — This device is a super lightweight, durable keyboard with a tiny screen. I can drag it anywhere, it has a huge battery life (like hundreds of hours), and can hold hundreds of pages of text that I can download into my Scrivener or word processing file when I get home. They don’t make them anymore, but you can find them cheap on eBay.
• Scrivener — I have used this for YEARS. This app/software is basically the reason I switched to Mac. (They have a Windows version, but it’s not quite as fancy.) Before Scrivener, I would have folders within folders within folders full of files. Now, every single thing related to a book or series is contained in one place. It can hold all of my text files, reference and inspirational images, web pages, pdfs… pretty much anything. Plus it’s good at tracking revisions and compiling into other document formats, like Word, PDF or ebook.

I hope this answers the question. If you want to know more about how to actually develop that idea into story, you should check out this post I wrote about that.

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The second question comes from my Ask the Author form.

Should I send my book to a beta reader I don’t know?

First of all, it’s great that you are seeking feedback for your novel. You always need to get an outside opinion on your work.

Especially early in your career, because there are just going to be things that like you don’t see. Things that make sense to you or you didn’t even think about that someone else is able to point out.

It’s almost always valuable to have another set of eyes

BUT… the caveat to that is that not all feedback is good feedback.

Getting a review—especially a really harsh review—on a finished book is hard enough, let alone on a draft of a book. Let alone a draft of one of your first books.

My personal suggestion would be that you should start with someone you trust. Someone that knows you, maybe, and knows how to word things in a constructive way.

Because people can be just critical or, they can be constructively critical.

You need someone who is going to be able to help you turn your book into a better book and some ways that some people give feedback just make you want to crawl into a hole and cry.

I would also suggest if at all possible you start with someone who knows how to critique. Someone who won’t just be like, “Oh, wow, that’s really great!”

Some people—either because of their relationship to you or because of their relationship or experience in reading or writing—just aren’t capable of giving constructive feedback that’s actually going to help you make your book better.

Basically, I would say start with someone you trust with both your words and your feelings.

There are just so many crazy things out there on the Internet and if it’s someone you don’t know even casually in real life, I probably wouldn’t take the risk.

And if you don’t have another choice, make sure they have other people who can vouch for them as a beta reader.

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The final question(s) come from a blog comment.

Who was your favorite character from the Forgive My Fins series? And is my next book about a merman?

So, to answer the first question… I’m not really allowed to have favorites when it comes to my characters. They’re like my children. These are people that I created and brought into the world and I can’t just choose one.

But of course it’s Quince. Because of course it’s Quince.

Who else would it be?

However, I do have a soft spot for writing my bad girls. If you’ve read any of my series, there is almost always a bad girl who kind of turns out to not be so bad. Or at least to be slightly more sympathetic.

In the Forgive My Fins series, that would be Dosinia and maybe even Astria, who is one of the terrible trio.

(Side note: I wrote a short story about Astria, called A Shore Thing, which you can read for free.)

Now for the question about whether my next book is about a merman…

I do have an idea for a series about a merman (a mer prince, naturally, named Taro) but I’m not sure yet what I’m going to be writing it.

Subscribe to my newsletter if you want to know as soon as I have details to share about that.

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That it for this Ask the Author session.

As always, if you have a question you want me to answer next time, you can just drop it in comments below or submit it at teralynnchilds.com/ask.