Check out my Book Series!
All my books have a thread of Catholicism running through them.
Ryan Mallardi Private Investigations
Jack Nolan Detective Series
Newport Vampire Stories Series
Category: Diary of all blog posts
Movie Review – The Brotherhood of the Bell
Movie Review – The Satanic Rites of Dracula
Coloring Page – Happy Holidays Santa
Check out my Book Series!
All my books have a thread of Catholicism running through them.
Ryan Mallardi Private Investigations
Jack Nolan Detective Series
Newport Vampire Stories Series
Coloring Page – Advent Wreath
Check out my Book Series!
All my books have a thread of Catholicism running through them.
Ryan Mallardi Private Investigations
Jack Nolan Detective Series
Newport Vampire Stories Series
Coloring Page – Another Thanksgiving Day Scene
Check out my Book Series!
All my books have a thread of Catholicism running through them.
Ryan Mallardi Private Investigations
Jack Nolan Detective Series
Newport Vampire Stories Series
Writing a Novel in 8 Layers – Explanation and Time-Saving Tips
LAYER 1 - Putting Together the Skeleton of the Mystery or Crime
In a mystery, crime novel, or thriller, the clues and their revelations need to be planned so the story clues can remain disjointed in the beginning, but then slowly come together like a jigsaw puzzle. This keeps the reader guessing -- which is part of the mystery readers' enjoyment.
Layer 1 requires the skill of story engineer, not so much an author. In my humble opinion, trying to write around this initial phase of story scaffolding is is one reason why novels can take authors years to finish. Scaffolding-panel.png
So the first layer is to storyboard only the crime or the mystery of your novel. This layer can look like a long list of crimes and clue elements,
or it can look like a mind map sketched in pencil on the back of a large piece of wrapping paper, or it can be done in a mind-mapping software.
But there will need to be initial planning of where the mystery begins, where it leads, and how it ends. That's what goes on in this layer.
WHAT TO FOCUS ON IN LAYER 1:
An example for a Layer 1 crime mystery would be the following:
1. Lay out the chronology of the crime.
2. Who is or are the Victims?
3. What is a list of clues that could lead to the solving of this mystery?
4. Determine what the final clue will be that reveals the true culprit and think about how you can hide this clue in plain sight. This will be the clue that solves the mystery.
5. Determine what the first three or four clues will be that will bring in multiple suspects. Give each suspect a motive for the crime and decide how and when you will reveal this motive
6. Choose an unlikely suspect and give this person a good cover story.
7. Even at this early stage, figure out how the mystery or story will end. This can be changed during the creative process, but knowing where your story will end, will give you a writing destination. This will prevent you from winding up writing yourself into a corner somewhere or writing yourself into a tangent that will have to be nixed anyway.
WHAT ABOUT OTHER GENRES?
Now, sometimes you will be writing a story that has a mystery ribboning through it but it's not as organized or as detailed as an actual crime mystery. Your outline will be shorter but will contain a skeleton of all the action. Below are two examples of writing a ghost story and writing a Gothic scary-house story.
LAYER 1 IN A GHOST STORY:
1. Who is the Ghost? Why has the Ghost arisen? Why is the Person not Resting in Peace? What is the Ghost's purpose for appearing? This is the backstory that will be dropped like breadcrumbs throughout the storyline. (Ghost-Story.png)
2. How can the Ghost first appear that will raise the question that maybe the viewer is just crazy? Or maybe the viewer is just paranoid? Give them a reason for this paranoia.
3. How will the Ghost appear and what clues will the ghost drop in order to trigger more of the mystery behind the Ghost's restlessness to play out?
4. Choose how the story will end and if the Ghost will achieve its goal and whether the ghost will now rest in peace or will the Ghost be back for another book in the series?
LAYER 1 IN A SCARY-HOUSE STORY:
1. What is it about the house that's creepy?
2. What is the House hiding? Is there a secret room? Is there a hidden person?
3. What happened in the house to make the house haunted or unsettled?
4. How will the mystery of the house play out? What is the chronology of the clues about the history of the house and why it is haunted? These are the breadcrumbs in this kind of a storyline.
5. Choose how the story will end and if the house is destroyed or if the house destroys someone, etc.
FORMAT OF LAYER 1:
Layer one can be done in a list format or with a mind-mapping software, or even with a pencil drawing your own game board or storyboard on the back of a large piece of wrapping paper. Choose whatever format helps you the most. If you're new, try each one. Finding the right tools for the right job is very helpful.
If your Level 1 looks like any of these, you get A+ Layer 1.
LAYER 2 - Break up the Story into a four-part structure or 3-act structure.
Open up a fresh manuscript document and split the clues and events into a four-part novel structure or a 3-act-story structure, whichever one you prefer. So this layer is easy and takes about five minutes.
LAYER 3 - Writing the Scene Outlines (Scaffolding & Storyboarding)
In Layer 3, you will refer to the Skeleton of the crime outline you already created. Following the chronology of the crime and the clue drops, write an outline of each scene. This is nothing more than another list of what needs to happen in each scene. You are not the writer yet. You are still the story engineer or the storyboard creator. This is the second phase of scaffolding that is setting the story up for when the writer comes in. The list should be concise, more like a list than big paragraph chunks.
Below is a Scene Template I use. I don't worry about the Point of View in this layer because you can wait to choose it. I wait to see who "steals the scene" when I'm actually writing. But I include it in a Scene Template.
POV:
TIME/LOCATION:
PURPOSE/CLUES:
CHOOSE A TIME AND LOCATION:
Choose a time and location, but don't describe any locations or characters yet. Purpose and Clues is a reminder that everything written has to have a purpose and every scene in a mystery should have some clues or a crime.
In the video on this subject matter below, I go into a few extra tips on using the scene template to help you in other ways.
LAYER 4: DOWN-AND-DIRTY FIRST DRAFT - NOW YOU'RE THE WRITER!
In Layer 4, you are finally the writer. The scaffolding is in place and now it's time to start writing the story. The first draft is the hardest layer of writing.
It may help to think of yourself as more of a Town Crier.
Your job in this layer is to blurt out the entire story. Just get it down in paper. Don't worry about spelling, grammar, descriptions of people. Like the cops say -- Just the facts. Write out the story and don't look back. Don't re-read anything. Don't get lost in verb tenses. Write and don't look back. Only look at your scene outline to make sure you have covered everything. That's the only concern.
THINGS TO WORRY ABOUT IN THE FIRST DRAFT:
Choose a location for the scene and a time. (Nothing is written in cement)
Make sure all of the clues and anything else from your scene outline gets into the scenes.
THINGS THAT DON'T MATTER IN THE FIRST DRAFT:
Spelling, grammar, sentence structure, too many adverbs, scene or character descriptions, foreshadowing, cliffhangers, quote marks, etc.
Just write what happens in each scene with whatever dialogue comes to you.
In the video below, I go into some detail about why this is important and how it can save you time in the end.
Layer 7 - The Hardcore Proofread
Below is a list of things I do in Layer 7:
1. List Troublesome words - Just, like, adverbs. Compile a list of your favorites. I have compiled a long list of words that trip me up and I go over them in this layer.
2. Check your chapters in Grammerly for grammar verb tense.
3. Then I compile from Scrivener to a Word .docs file and paste it into an eBook template and save it as a Manuscript. I file it in a folder called Pre-Publication. Then I open it in Word and run Word's spell check and grammar check on it again.
4. Then I read it as a final proofread (even though it's not the final proofread!)
5. Check all Chapter Names are in Heading 1's for the Table of Contents
6. Fill in the Other pages: Title Page, Other Books By Page, Title and Author Page, Copyright, Table of Contents, Note to Reader, Acknowledgements, About the Author, Other Books By Page)
6. Find and check all quotes to make sure your quotes are in sets.
LEVEL 8: - FINAL PROOFREAD AND NARRATION
1. Using the read aloud feature in Microsoft Word, I read the book aloud as I read along with it. This gives you an idea of how the book will sound in the reader's mind.
2. I make any final corrections in this last proofread.
3. From here the manuscript goes to an Editor.
4. Then I forward it to myself as an ePub and while it's being edited, I read it again on my Kindle to see how it looks and feels from the reader's perspective.
VIDEO ON WRITING IN 8 LAYERS IS BELOW:
Movie Review – Gosford Park
Above is my movie review of Gosford Park from an author's perspective. I started watching mostly older films to see what I could learn about plotting, foreshadowing, keeping my dialogue tight, etc. It has become a labor of love!
QUICK PLOT SUMMARY WITHOUT SPOILERS:
In 1932, wealthy industrialist Sir William McCordle, his wife Lady Sylvia, and their daughter Isobel hold a shooting party at their country estate, Gosford Park. Lady Sylvia's sisters and their husbands and a few friends are invited to the party as well. The invitees all show up with their lady's maids or valets and the movie gives an inside look at how the division of the classes is handled in a situation like that.
Sir William's cousin, Ivor Novello, who is a movie actor and matinee idol, also comes to the party and gets an invite for a Hollywood Producer, Morris Weissman, who wants to attend the party for his own reasons. That's the setup.
There is a crime that occurs, with a subsequent police investigation that plays out in the movie, but there's much more going on than that. This is really a study of the British class system during the 1930s and how these two classes needed each other, used each other, and what they really thought of each other.
I won't rehash everything I say in the movie review above, but I will say that I would recommend this movie to writers or authors who are interested in learning about:
- Writing social commentary - this movie was written by Julian Fellows who wrote Downton Abbey and he's a master writer. For new writers, pay particular attention to how he writes very serious lines for the actors but sets them up to be comical in his overall social commentary.
- I heard an author say -- and I can't remember who it was unfortunately -- that every storyline needs a mystery of some kind going on to hold the reader's interest. I have since seen this play out in all the best movies. There is a crime that occurs in this movie, but it's not really a who-done-it. But it is enough to keep the viewer watching.
- This is also a great movie to watch if you are planning a large ensemble cast. The more characters there are, the harder it is to get too deep into their character. However, in this movie, Julian Fellows writes dialogue where every line is giving backstory, commentary or moving the mystery plot along. This is a good movie to learn from.
- Wardrobe, costuming and set decorations gets A+ in this movie too.
If you haven't seen the movie yet, above is a panel letting you know who to watch if you're a writer. These characters are very strong and there's lots to learn from their performance.
- Maggie Smith plays a stuck-up aristocrat who is almost always offended and no one on the planet plays this type of role better than she does. When she talks to the actor/singer about his last picture, it's a riot.
- Robert Balaban plays Morris Weissman who gets an invitation to the hunting party that is the setting of this movie. He is an outsider and represents the "Hollywood culture" amid the "British blue-blood culture". His performance is serious but he's also a riot.
- Jeremy Northam played an actor in the movie and I assumed he was picked because he's very handsome. However, he sings in the movie and he was amazing.
- Helen Mirren played one of the servant class and she was very reserved and controlled. However, by the end of the movie, you do see the range of her acting abilities.
WRITING EXERCISE:
T
here are many great sets where the action takes place in this movie. A good writing exercise would be to choose one of them and describe it in one paragraph. See how much information you can get into that amount of space.
As you watch the movie above, put the closed captions on and watch how much Julian Fellows gets into every line he writes.
5 Mistakes I Made in Publishing My Vampire Book Series
LET ME SET THE STAGE:
This post will be about 5 Beginner Mistakes I made in Self-Publishing one of my book series and what I did about it -- which was pretty much nothing. I'll also go into what I am going to do about it now that I learned a lot more about what went wrong.
Most of these mistakes were ones that were not even on my radar at the time they were made.
Let me give you a bit of context: As I came close to retirement, I decided to write a novel or two. I chose to self-publish for many reasons that I've gone over in other videos and I won't go over now. And to this day, in spite of the mistakes I've made, I still consider self-publishing a good fit for me. (Just me)
When I first got the idea of writing a novel, I did research for about a year. I read several how to books on every subject under the title of writing a novel and self-publishing. (Cat on book shelf)
I also watched hundreds of videos on the subject. Like most people, all the information I came upon, especially in video format was great advice, but none of it was curricularized. When you self-study online, you take in just a steady stream of random information and then we're all left to sort it out ourselves. That's how free education works on the internet. (Text Panel 2: Information wasn't curricularized
So above is a list of the chronology I pieced together as being the proper chronological list of how to write and publish a book:
MISTAKE NUMBER ONE:
In this big cloud of random information I took in, I got ARC Readers and Beta Readers kind of mixed up or thought they were too closely related. But they are two different animals.
Beta Readers often times read books very early in the process -- before the book is even finished to give early feedback. This is a great idea if you're not sure about your characters or if the plot is good enough, etc. Let's face it, in the beginning it's hard to think you're book is a masterpiece when it's your first one -- at least it was for me. There is a definite high-level purpose in having Beta Readers. They are worth their weight in gold.
However, here is where I made the terrible mistake and found out the hard way about this particular landmine: I offered my Vampire book Darius - A Vampire Story as a beta book but it had not been finalized, professionally edited or proofread. Now, in the ad copy for the link to download, I clearly posted it as a beta copy that had not been edited, etc. However, once a book is downloaded to an eReader, no one will remember this book is only a beta copy. And the second mistake I made here was that I didn't put anything in the book itself.
I didn't put any explanation paragraph before the First Chapter. I didn't add a watermark. I assumed my explanation about the Beta copy that invited the download was enough.
Well, when I finalized the book and released it, I got slaughtered in early reviews. I assumed as a new author that maybe it wasn't that good. However, several of the reviews referenced typos and/or grammar mistakes. When I went to the finalized copy to of course correct them -- they didn't exist.
The first time this happened, I just thought the reader was a bit crazy. But after this happened several times, it was only then that I realized that I had released hundreds of beta copies that now lived on people's eReaders. And for some reason, there are a lot of readers who take typos or grammar errors personally. It seems to trigger them and their reviews are more like rants.
So poor Darius got all beat up in the early review.
MISTAKE NUMBER 2
Mistake Number 2 was what I did about this problem -- which was pretty much nothing.
I wish I could say that I recognized the gravity of the mistake right away, but I didn't. I just thought that some people had read an earlier copy and that's a shame, but what can I do about it now? I didn't realize that there were probably hundreds of these copies out there. I had no list of who I sent these early copies to.
Now, I also didn't realize that this series was going to go on for 5 books. So, in hindsight, what I should have done was pull the first three books and re-release them as a second edition. This is what I plan to do in January of 2025 because that's when I'll be releasing the fifth book in the series. So doing nothing about this was the second mistake.
Now I have a hard and fast rule: I never give Beta copies in download format. I now only pay for beta copies and send them in Microsoft Word format. I also include verbiage that it is a beta copy and hasn't been edited or proofread.
MISTAKE NUMBER 3:
GoodReads is probably the largest single pool of avid readers and book lovers out there. But goodreads can be a tough crowd for new writers. This is where Darius's bullying started. If I had to do things over again, I would not have focused on Goodreads as a first place to release my books -- even after they were fully edited and proofread. Unfortunately, many of the videos I watched during that first year, talked about how great goodreads was helpful to find beta readers and arc readers and launch a book.
To be honest, I never found any true beta readers or arc readers there. I found mostly people who like to download free books. So I would just caution newbies that GoodReads is not the only game in town and you may need some boxing experience before you enter that ring. That's all I'm going to say about that.
A SIDE NOTE ABOUT GIVEAWAYS:
Goodreads has been purchased by Amazon, I believe, and they did offer a giveaway for $119. At least that's what it was at the time I used that service as a giveaway for edited books. However, I found the reviews very harsh or even snotty at times. I had much better experience giving the books away with Freebooksy and even Fussy Librarian for less than $119. I also got better reviews using Bookfunnel and Storyorigin free book giveaways. As long as you don't put your books into Kindle Select, you can still give them away on these websites.
MISTAKE NUMBER 4:
I didn't realize that the categories on Amazon have a hierarchy to them. It may have been because we were originally allowed to put each book into 10 categories. I had watched a video by Author Chris Fox about writing to market and he was explaining about drilling down in the categories and writing to a specific sub-category. Now, he writes sci-fi and in particular, military sci-fi.
At the time he said this, I thought writing to a specific market just to make marketing easier would be awful. It would be like pulling an assignment out of a hat and having to produce a book about it. I'm just not that type of writer. So I let that concept float away in the wind and just picked ten categories that seemed like they would be a the best fit for my books and the rest of the concept of writing to market was lost on me, at least at that time. I moved onto other things.
Over time, pretty recently, I did figure out that the categories are hierarchical and Chris Fox' advice came back to me. What he was saying was that new authors can focus on subcategories in order to dominate in those smaller categories in their to number 1 on the best seller list. In other words, you can rise to number one in a sub-sub category way faster than rising to the top ten in Romance, which is a top tier in the hierarchy.
In the video below, I do go live at Amazon and demonstrate how the categories are hierarchical and how to dig down and see which ones are available for you.
So the time to think about the categories is before you even plot out or write the book. Once you have a plot idea, that's the time to look at the categories and think about where the book would fit, and what you can tweak about the storyline to fit into a sub category or a less competitive category? Can you make the story happen in the west to be a Western Romance? Can you put the story into olden times to make it a historical novel, ore even better, put it in a specific time period? The time to think about categories is right after you have know you have a workable plotline.
In looking back, I could have tweaked a few of my books to fit them very easily into sub-sub categories without changing the storyline much.
MISTAKE NUMBER 5:
Mistake Number five requires a little explanation. My inspiration for my vampire series was the old Dark Shadows Soap Opera from the late '60s and early '70s. I never watched it as a kid but everyone I knew did. I didn't watch it because I had to walk too far to get home from school in time. This vampire series, like most soap operas at that time, was melodramatic and being a gothic and supernatural story, the storylines were completely crazy. But I loved the show anyway.
What I didn't realize at the time I watched it was that these crazy storylines came from real books. They just seemed crazy to me as they played out in this soap opera. In fairness to the writers of Dark Shadows, they had to produce 5 shows every week without fail.
So, with limited knowledge of the whole vampire genre, I went on to write a vampire book series. My vampire owns and operates a funeral home and keeps a bevy of 3 women to supply the blood he needs. He normally picks up runaways from the train and bus stations, but he winds up falling in love with the daughter of a wealthy, influential family in Newport Rhode Island. There is also a monastery of monks that live on the opposite side of the cemetery that Darius also owns.
No one in the area has any idea they are living next to a vampire and there are some supernatural events that start happening around the Balmont Funeral home, one of which is a mobster from New York looking for his daughter who was last seen with Darius. That's all I'll say about the plotlines.
Now, my series does follow the classic rules on vampirism with a tweak or two. However, there is also a little subtle tongue in cheek narrative in the story, which was more prevalent in the 1960s and 1970s vampire movies.
So how does all this fit into mistake number 5? Well, there's no category for tongue-in-cheek vampire stories. Also, fifty years have passed since this show ended and a lot has happened to the vampire genre in that time. First there was Anne Rice and her books and subsequent movies which are all dead serious and there's no tongue in cheek humor of any kind. I only read the first book and it was steeped in darkness and despair. Because I read for enjoyment, the level of despair was too much for me so I never read the other books.
Then there were the Twilight movies, the TV shows of True Blood and The Vampire Diaries, which were targeted to much younger people. Some of the backdrops were high school or college. And there was the rise of the vampire hunters. My book is a vampire book for adults or young adults who are not interested in high school or college anymore. But there's no amazon category for vampire books for adult. And my books also have no vampire hunters.
None of these were on my radar when I wrote the book. I thought books were judged on how well they were written and if people liked them. I didn't know reader expectations was even a thing!
Then I came upon two videos on a channel called Tristan and the Classics that changed that. It changed my whole trajectory and sent me on a new journey where I learned so much information that is not only helpful but I consider it crucial for newbies.
So as I realized that my books were not really fitting well in any of the vampire categories, I went on to create my own Teach Yourself Gothic Literature course based on Tristan's suggestions. This journey helped me to understand more about writing to market, and about reader expectations in particular, both are which I now feel are critical in self-publishing.
I actually took Tristan's suggestions about the self-study program one step further which I'll go into in the next blog post and video.
CONCLUSION:
So to sum things up, this is the new chronology that I will now use and suggest to beginners that this will be more helpful to you regarding what comes first and then next in writing a book:
And below I'll post my new hard and fast rules on Beta Copies and ARC copies:
Below is a Video I did on all of this in case you want to view it too.
Coloring Page – Thanksgiving Day Scene
Check out my Book Series!
All my books have a thread of Catholicism running through them.
Ryan Mallardi Private Investigations
Jack Nolan Detective Series
Newport Vampire Stories Series