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Free Plotting Lessons Part Two from Author Andy Zach

Happy Mother's Day

Free Plotting Lessons Part Two – Just when you think you’ve learned all you can about plotting, then you discover F. This, of course, is a follow up to Free Plotting Lessons Here from author Andy Zach, my previous blog post.

What do you get? First, you learn about hooks.

Free Plotting Lessons Part Two from Author Andy Zach – Lesson 3 – Start with Your Hook

 

 

Second, you learn how to fill in your scenes.

Lesson 4 – Fill in your scenes

Finally, this lesson includes a free spreadsheet from me, Andy Zach!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Free Plotting Lessons Second Lesson – Start with Your Hook

What’s a hook? An irresistible opening to your book that intrigues the reader and forces them to read more. And more. And more.

A hook is a plot device. It can be:

  1. A startling or mysterious statement
  2. A dramatic or deadly situation.
  3. A heart-tugging situation – heroine tied to railroad tracks, a child in a fire.

How do you write a hook?

First, I’ll give you some examples.

From The Hunger Game, by Suzanne Collins, you have this: 

Doesn’t that set off questions? Who is Prim? Who is the narrator? What’s the ‘reaping’?

From the sublime (in terms of book sales) to the ridiculous: my own novel Zombie Turkeys hook.

 

Zombie Turkeys – Chapter 1 Bartonville

 

Zombie Turkeys Chapter 1 Icon
Zombie Turkeys Chapter 1 Icon

He felt different. More energetic, more alive. He bred with female after female in his flock without tiring. He stayed awake through the night. The turkey feared no predator.

Then a turkey hunter shot him.

The setting sun overlooked a crisp, clear evening in early November. South of Bartonville, Illinois, a farmer had leased his wood lot to two turkey hunters. Big and burly in their bulky camouflaged outfits, they had just bagged one.

“Good shot, Pete!”

“He’s a big ‘un!”

Pete and Bob walked up to the tom turkey, bleeding on the cold ground. The rest of the flock had scattered into the woods. He had exceptionally good plumage and weighed perhaps twenty pounds. Pete reached down and picked him up by the neck.

“He weighs at least twenty-five pounds!”

Then the turkey’s eyes opened—and gleamed red. He kicked with his spurs and pecked savagely at Pete’s arms and eyes. Dozens of his hens attacked the men from behind.

“Gobble! Gobble!”

He felt different. More energetic, more alive. The turkey had no memory of being shot, but a certain turkey satisfaction at killing his killers. He also enjoyed pecking at their dead meat. He had always liked frogs, but this meat tasted better. The boss turkey led his flock down the road, in search of more predators to eat.

More on Hooks here:

See Book Bub’s article on hooks: Start Your Novel with a Bang! 12 Ways to Hook Readers

Now you practice writing an irresistible hook! Submit it in the comments to this blog. The best hook gets a free ebook: Zombie Turkeys or My Undead Mother-in-law.

If you don’t want to comment, just send it to me here.

Free Plotting Lessons Second – Fill in your scenes

Each scene MUST serve a purpose.

  1. Advance the plot: X does Y to Z.
  2. Develop your characters. Make them real people with strengths and weaknesses: X is unfaithful but hardworking. Z is loyal but dumb.
  3. Give the reader information. X was abused as a child, but very kind. Z was happy as a child, but has a secret. Engage the reader. Make them care.
  4. Ideally, do all three at once in the same scene, in every sentence.
  5. Finish with a hook for the next chapter. Force the reader to read the next chapter!

Review your plot outline. Pick one chapter and break it into scenes.

What happens first? Then what logically flows from that event? What do the characters do? How do they react? Portray the effects from each scene. Tug at the reader’s heart.

For your next exercise, break one of your chapters from your outline into scenes. Post your outline as a comment or send it to me. I’ll randomly select one and send you a free ebook.

I didn’t have a scene chart with Zombie Turkeys, and I struggled. Then I learned about scene charts from Rachel Aaron in her book:

2K to 10K: Writing Faster, Writing Better, and Writing More of What You Love

 My scene chart from chapter one of my second novel, My Undead Mother-in-law:

Paranormal Privateers Now
Andy Zach and Brenda Sutton at Chambanacon

To get your copy of my scene spreadsheet, just contact me.

That’s it! Now you’ve finally gotten the whole class I taught on plotting. Ask me any questions you want. I’ll answer each one.

Your friendly, neighborhood, comic paranormal animal author,

Andy Zach

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Developing Your Plot Updated – from Author Andy Zach

Free Plotting Lessons Second

‘Developing Your Plot Updated’ is a class I wrote and taught eight years ago. Now you get to learn it all for free, with the new things I’ve learned in the past eight years and through ten self-published books. I’ll give YOU Free Plotting Lessons right now in this blog post, right from the class.

Developing Your Plot Updated – Cast of Characters

First, there’s me, the teacher character,  Andy Zach. If you’re not familiar with my biography on this site, you can go to Amazon, Square, or to Goodreads and find out about me and my books.

Then there’s you, one of many student characters. What have you written? Are you writing? What will you write? Please share your plot/novel/work ideas with me and the class by commenting below.

You MUST comment to participate in this class–or I’ll send the zombie turkeys after you!

A crowd of zombie turkeys, on Thanksgiving
Developing Your Plot Updated
A crowd of zombie turkeys, on Thanksgiving. Click to read more!

That’s my big turkey stick. The carrot is, I will give a free ebook of Zombie Turkeys to one of the commenters!

Start commenting – NOW!

Developing Your Plot Updated- Where Will You Go with Your Idea?

You’ve got your great idea for your novel. What’s next? Authors fall into a spectrum of two approaches. First, there are plotters, who plan out the plot of their book and then write to that plan. Then there are ‘pantsers’, those who sit on their pants and type away until a book emerges–or not. Then there are endless variations between the two. I’m firmly in the first group. If you want to learn the pantser approach, find another author! I can’t even imagine how I’d write that way, and I’ve got a good imagination.

Let’s take my first novel, Zombie Turkeys. I created a chapter outline of the book on my first day of writing it during NaNoMo.

Free Plotting Lessons
Developing Your Plot Updated
Click on the Zombie Turkeys book cover to hear Andy read a free excerpt.

Read my Zombie Turkeys chapter outline:

Continue reading Developing Your Plot Updated – from Author Andy Zach
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Get Your Free Zombie Turkeys Before It’s Too Late!

Free Zombie Turkeys Before It's Too Late!
Get Your Free Zombie Turkeys
Free Kindle edition of “Zombie Turkeys”. Click to download.

Get Your Free Zombie Turkeys Before It’s Too Late! It’s never too late for zombie turkeys to show up; they’re diurnal. But in three days it’ll be too late for Free Zombie Turkeys. Click the book cover below to get it now.

What is about? A comical zombie turkey apocalypse where the turkeys regenerate rather than rot.

It’s about Sam Melvin, a high school graduate pursuing a story to his possible death.

It’s about Lisa Kambacher, his editor, driving him onagainst the zombies to vault her small town newspaper into prominence.

Get Your Free Zombie Turkeys–have a look inside

Have a taste of Zombie Turkeys, read by your’s truly, Andy Zach, on my Youtube channel.

 

Get Your Free Zombie Turkeys – Listen to Reviewers

Check out some of the over one hundred glowing Amazon reviews!

Read what laughing readers have said since its publication last October 31st, 2016.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars 

This one is definitely NOT a turkey!

By Elara

5.0 out of 5 stars This one is definitely NOT a turkey!, July 18, 2017

‘He felt great, he was full of energy. He had many hens to breed with, and he was the leader of a great flock.’

Sam Melvin is a reporter with the Midley Beacon, it’s a tiny local paper – with an online presence – run by its penny-pinching editor Lisa Kambacher. When Sam sees the two turkey hunters on the slab in the local mortuary, he knows he has a story to cover and he sets out to do so with great gusto. As the zombie turkeys multiply, Sam and Lisa are the leading media team on the ground and the Midley Beacon goes international, solving their financial woes and syndicating their work across the globe. But it’s not all good news. After all, there are those people-killing zombie turkeys heading into town…

This was a book I picked up with trepidation as it seemed all too possible it would be a ‘one trick pony’ stretching a single joke to beyond breaking point across the length of an entire novel. Wrong! It is like a bowl of potpourri on the sideboard of life – lots of subtle blending examples of humour – many of them very American so I suspect there were even more than I noticed, handicapped by my British perspective. This is a book that takes ironic comedy to a whole new level – maybe ‘steelic’ comedy…? Humour is a very personal thing, but this book hit me right on the funny bone.

‘Wanted badly: .30-06 carbine. Will trade hunting dog or wife for it.’

This is a well-written book which takes a totally deadpan approach to a thoroughly – hysterically – funny sequence of events. It is dark comedy, so avoid if you are squeamish. The pace of the book rolls along in a perfect, unhurried way – screaming up into the action sequences and taking time to enjoy the more delicious moments of humour.

The story itself is a lot deeper than many real zombie books and the explanation for the zombie phenomenon is as clever as it is satirical.The characters are well portrayed, deep enough to engage with and care about, but not so deep you get distracted from what they are doing by their personalities. They are the agents through which we see the events unfolding rather than the focus of the story. But the humour is subtle, all-pervading: like the idea of the survivalist organic turkey farmer, part of a network of such, living off grid – except for ordering things from Amazon on his wife’s credit card of course…

‘The most disheartening thing was, she’d stab one through the heart. It’d drop fifteen feet to the ground with a satisfying thud. Then it’d stagger to its feet five minutes later and fly back up fifteen minutes later.’

The downside is that maybe some of the humour is lost on a non-US reader. There were a couple of moments I thought ‘Huh?’ then decided it was probably a reference to something outside my cultural parameters. The only other criticism I had was that it maybe played the theme along a tiny bit too far and perhaps had a few scenes been a bit shorter, a bit less detail on the way the plague spread, or a couple of turkey attacks left out – it might have been a sharper read. But these are very minor nit-picks against the whole.This is a book I can recommend wholeheartedly to anyone who enjoys slow-boil satire and does not mind a few gory giblets thrown in the mix. If you want a good comedy read, you should gobble this up!

Did Someone Say “Gobble”?

Watch another video of a gobbling turkey:

Next, take a gander at this one:

What Can Top Getting Free Zombie Turkeys?

Maybe some cranberry sauce? How about a sequel, My Undead Mother-in-law? You can get it on Kindle by clicking here:

Andy Zach TV Version for "My Undead Mother-in-law" Launch
Get Your Free Zombie Turkeys
New Book Coming! Get It by clicking here!
My Undead Mother-in-law, Chapter 5 Icon
Get Your Free Zombie Turkeys
My Undead Mother-in-law, Chapter 5 Icon

Or you can have a print book shipped to you by clicking on the chapter icon ==>

Or you can subscribe to my newsletter and get a free copy of Zombie Turkeys. Click here!

Finally, you can leave a comment here.