Get Down to Writing Tip No.5

Last tip of this series: I promised to have a look at publishing.
Fact No. 1 is that it is very hard to get published these days.
Fact No. 2 is that if you persist and you are good enough, the chances are high that you will find an agent and eventually a publisher.
Fact No. 3 is that you can self-publish, using Amazon's CreateSpace for a paperback or KDP for a Kindle version of your work. This requires computer skills, an excellent knowledge of grammar and an idea of how to market your work. Or you can get a company specializing in this to do it for you.

So now you have written your Red Riding Hood novel and think it is good enough to send out to an agent. If you can afford it, get an editor to go over your manuscript. If you can't afford it, get a few good friends to read it and if one of them is a whizz kid on spelling and grammar, so much the better. Sloppy writing, as agents often refer to it, i.e., writing that is full of grammatical errors or which is illogical (for example: calling one of the main characters John, an orphan, in the first ten chapters and then changing his name to Jeff with five siblings by the end of the book - you think this doesn't happen? - believe me, it does!) is a big turn-off for agents. If you have your story checked, obvious errors will be weeded out and the agent can concentrate on the story you are telling and on your style of writing.

First thing is to research agents. There is no point in sending Red Riding Hood to an agency which only deals in women's fiction or horror.
In addition to finding an agency which deals in the kind of book you have written, it is advisable to research who they represent.  This will give you an idea of what they like - agencies have preferences, too.
The agents themselves (and I have met and chatted with many leading UK agents) are human beings not monsters. They are looking for THE NEXT BIG THING and until they find it, they are looking for an author who can write a novel every year which will hit the publishing mid-list and bring in revenue for them and for the author.  When you have accepted that fact, it gets easier, I feel.

Once you have chosen your agent and checked out their website for what they require, your next thorny task is to write a synopsis and then a covering letter. Every writer has groaned over a synopsis - what to say what to leave out. A good solution is if you can get your long-suffering friends to write one and then go through what they have written. There are websites and books which give tons of useful hints. Agents will tell you that, knowing the difficulties here, they will skim over synopsis and concentrate on the covering letter.
A covering letter should be one page with around three short paragraphs. In your covering letter you should introduce yourself very briefly, state the name of your novel and the genre - this will be crime in Red Riding Hood's case - and having done your homework you can add something like "the story will appeal to readers who like Agatha Christie" or better still name an author the agent represents provided of course that your story is in that genre and of that type (hard-bitten, cozy mystery,police procedural, etc.).  As you can see, you really need to know quite a bit about what is on the market and the publishing terms for it.
Be prepared to get a standard letter with a refusal. When the agent writes a few lines such as "liked your story but don't feel it is right for our list", you are getting places. I have been lucky in the past where agents have taken the time to point out a few mistakes or given me advice on finding another agent.
Above all:  develop a thick skin.  Don't take it personally.

If you prefer you can open an account with KDP and publish your book with Amazon as a Kindle e-book.You will need reasonable computer skills to do this and it is advisable to get a professional cover design for the book. KDP will also convert your Kindle book into a print on demand paperback. Or you can use CreateSpace instead. CreateSpace will convert to Kindle e-book as well as paperback.
It is very difficult to sell books like this without doing a lot of marketing. If you are prepared for the long haul, this way of publishing can be very rewarding. You are in command of what you write, are not tied to deadlines, you don't have an editor who wants you to change and correct your manuscript. It is very important, however, to present your book as professionally as possible. There are many complaints from readers on Amazon about bad spelling and bad grammar. Despite our fast-paced world of communications and texting, readers still do notice this.

Above all, whichever path you take, do your absolute best to produce a quality product. Most important of all:  have fun!

GetDown to Writing Tip No. 4

Now that you've got your characters, their names and what makes them tick all sorted and you know how the story is going to develop, it's time to take the plunge and start writing.

Where to start? Every author starting off a story has sat down to a blank page. The good news is that you can start at the beginning, in the middle or do the ending first. What you have to do is to make the story interesting to your readers.
If you area a seat-of-the-pants writer, you'll write a couple of pages to start off the story : Red Riding Hood walking through the woods on her way to her grandmother's. Sounds pretty dull, doesn't it?  What if she feels she's being followed? Or she hasn't heard from her grandmother in a while, which is uncharacteristic. There's a rustling in the bushes, last summer's leaves crackle underfoot, a bird calls in the distance signalling that it has been disturbed by something. Now you're on the way to getting a bit of tension.
If you are a planner, then you will have outlined your chapters, so now you have to write what you planned. The same applies as for the seat-of-the-pants writer. You have to draw in your readers and make them wonder what is going to happen next.
More importantly, you have to make them care enough about Red Riding Hood to want to know how things work out.  I have read or tried reading to be more exact, stories with excellent plots but where the main character was so lifeless that I couldn't have cared less what happened to them.
Develop your characters, this is vitally important.  You can fudge the plot any way you like, but characters are what drives the engine.
So now you have written the first three pages or so. Tomorrow you may look at these and clap a hand to your forehead: what was I thinking?  Don't worry, this is all part of the process. Every writer worth their salt has to delete, change, add to everything they write. This gets easier as you go along, by the way.
So, off you go. Write and then write some more. Don't look back, you can change just about anything. You might find half way through Chapter Ten that another character steps out of the shadows, one that you hadn't actually planned on. This happened to me while writing my Christmas novella (Christmas at Castledarra available on Amazon around the middle of October) and I had to re-write chunks of the story.
The golden rule is that the story can be anything you want it to be. Give it your best, always. And enjoy every minute of its creation.
In my final tip on writing I will discuss getting published.