Technical Topic -- A Girl and her Blog

Today, I am blogging

Cat available in some other posting

on blogging
which is somewhat iterative,
like the Worm  Ouroboros.

This is a primer on blogging for the writer who doesn't know much about blogging.  If you do, you can just skip to another posting that will probably have cats in it.

(The title is a riff on Harlan Ellison's A Boy and His Dog, except that none of this is bloodthirsty or post apocalyptic and that is all to the good, says I.)

So.  What is A blog?
(I said we were starting from scratch.) 

Blog  is short for weblog. 

"the term weblog to G. Raikundalia & M. Rees, two lecturers from Bond University on the Gold Coast. The term was first used in a paper titled "Exploiting the World-Wide Web for Electronic Meeting Document Analysis and Management."  Popular use of the term Weblog as we know it today is from Jorn Barger of the Weblog Robot Wisdom (robotwisdom.com) in December 1997. Barger coined the term weblog meaning logging the Web. In 1999 programmer Peter Merholz shortened the term weblog to blog. " Webopedia


Every writer, the marketing mavens tell us, should have a website or blog or maybe even both to keep in touch with the world at large and to publicize since you cannot just shout out the nearest window and expect to be heard.


How to blog:  Lesson the First.

Let's begin with your Kindly Host:

To blog you need a host.  That is, you need a company that puts your blog on the web and saves all the old blogs in an archive where folks can get them and does the magic that translates your desires into pictures and words.  They do all the technical hard stuff so you, the writer, can not worry about it but just go write.

I use Blogger, which is one of several choices.

Look around.  This is Blogger.  The first word in the URL address uptop is 'Blogger', which is one of those subtle clues we writer folks pick up on.  Blogger is owned by Google.  They charge nothing for shaping the electrons into a blog and I have no idea how they make their money which is something I should worry about shouldn't I? 
Blogger is one of the three or four big blog-hosting companies.  Wordpress is another.  Livejournal is both a blog home and a community.

A blog on Blogger doesn't have to look like mine -- all cerebral and peaceful and blue with birds on it.  There are many 'looks'.   At the strip on the top you'll see a button that says "next blog".  Punching that will let you see a few more blogs before it runs into a dead end.  Then you can go back to my blog and do it again.

When you sign up for Blogger they'll walk you through the process of picking a template and choosing the fonts you want.  You have many choices.  You can be artistic.  You should probably expect six or ten hours getting familiar with the system and making all those choices as to how your blog is presented.


Hark -- Who Goes There?

Blogger can tell you how many people look at which of your blog postings.

This is on your Stats Page in Blogger.  How many 'hits' did you get on a particular day or for a particular post? -- Blogger can tell you.  What page did they visit just before they came to your post?  Did they google to come to your blog, and what did they google?  Were they on another site that links to one of your posts?

This stats page  is where you find out what draws the audience to your blog?   What are you, in fact, doing right?

For instance,  even though this is a writing blog, I talk about all kinds of things.  When I look at my Blogger analytics, I got folks looking at the posts on historical knitting and historical aprons.  The posts on historical underclothing are always popular.  And I have a post on where to find public domain pictures that folks consult a lot.

I mean, who knew there were apron fanciers out there?

Now, a writer creates her blog to attract folks who will buy the books.  If they've already bought the books -- and indeed that is why they are at the blog -- you want to encourage them to buy the next one or to recommend the books to their local library or their friends or both.

What should the blog creator write about?

Because you're a writer and an avid reader, maybe you want to suggest good books that you've found.  Maybe one of your blog features will be book lists or reviews.

Or there's research.  Maybe, if you do some interesting research for one of the books, you want to share that research with the readers.
Maybe you want to blog something related to the books.  Don't be shy writing about the Southern wildflowers your heroine is picking or the history of mountain cabins like the one she runs into the escape the storm. 
Folks really are interested in the nuts and bolts of the fictional world you create.


Search Engine Optimization:

SEO is a good thing, like flossing your teeth. 
Read here and here and you will know more than I do.

How Much Work Is a Blog?

Rule of thumb here ... Your blog should have new material added at least twice a week.  This doesn't have to be an 800-essay on Transylvanian wildlife.  It can be 250 words and some pictures.

Blogs love pictures.

But you do need new material.  You will not attract and hold followers if you have a 'dead' blog.
You saw those abandoned blogs as you scrolled through hitting the 'Next Blog' button a while back.   Blog after blog started and given up on.  The overwhelming majority of them have not been added to for a year.  So sad .... those are blogs that lost all the love and work put into them and went defunct.

That's why it's important to write about stuff that interests you.  So you won't get bored.       

You know about this need for new content because you just read the SEO info above.  Fresh blog stuff is harvested more actively by the 'bots.  So do short posting each time, but get the words up there.

Expect to spend an hour or two per week on a healthy, active blog.  If you are a successful writer and promote yourself a lot on the blog, rather than on a website, be prepared to spend more than that.

Smiley lion knows why you're doing a blog

Remind Me Again -- Why Am I Doing This?

Why am I doing this? is a question of general applicability and one I return to again and again.

Before you commit yourself to the time and work involved in opening a blog, ask yourself what you want out of it.

Do you like to write about wine making or the Kyber Rifles or your turtle breeding operation?   If so, your satisfaction will come from just writing.  Book sales are secondary.  Write about horses or mushroom collecting and mention your books from time to time and enjoy yourself,

Are you thinking of the blog primarily as a vehicle to promote your writing when you publish or self-publish?  Then try to pick a theme related to your books.  You write Historical Mystery -- write about famous unsolved crimes.  Write about the history of forensics.  Write about the Bow Street Runners.  Pull in an audience interested in the time and place and theme of your writing and you will attract people who will then go out and buy your fiction.

Post excerpts, talk about your ongoing writing, include outtakes ... everything you can imagine that will enrich the reader's experience of your books. 


When do I start my blog?   I'm not published yet.

It's a good idea to have your blog or website in place and active before you publish, because after you publish you will not have any time.  You should get your blog or website  up and running about the
time you're submitting your queries for the first book.

And yes, you really do need one or the other.
The readers have to know where to go to buy you, and then, where to go buy all your backlist.
Provide covers.  Provide links.

Reviewers need to know if you will give them free copies of your book to review.  Fellow bloggers need to be able to invite you to blog on their site.   Foreign publishers need to know how to get in touch with you so they can ask to buy your Italian rights.  


You keep saying 'blog or website'.  Do I need both?

The publicist at your publisher will say you need both.
And if you are self-publishing, I'd say you need both
But you can start with just one.  And you can pick.
There are advantages on both sides.

A website is more difficult and more expensive to set up.  It requires money to keep it in place and non-negligible expertise to modify it.  But a website requires very little feeding and maintenance once it's up. 

A blog is free, easy to modify, and gives you the chance to interact with readers.  It does the necessary.  It takes more work on your part.  

Will a Blog Give Me a Platform?

Well, geeze, I dunnoh. 

Okay.  Platform is good.  If you have a 'platform' you're more likely to sell that first manuscript.  More likely to get lots of money for it.  More likely to be offered glamorous speaking engagements.  More likely to hit the best seller list when the book does come out.

If you can blog with splendor and excellence and attract many followers, you may find yourself building a platform.
But then, if you can blog that well, your books are probably dynamite and you should be working on them.

Technical Topic - Why Are They having Sex on a Cactus?

Someone mentioned --
this is a kinda summary and paraphrase here --
the unlikelihood that our Hero and Heroine would fight a pitched battle in the morning, scamper like hell cross-country in the afternoon, and then fall onto their bedrolls in the evening with energy enough to stage a six-page sex romp.


And I have to agree.
Even when I was young and and limber I could manage no more than two out of three of those on a good day.

So why do we see love-on-rocks romps and stufflikethatthere in good Romance?

Why do skilled writers give us this sort of over-the-top scene?

More to the point -- why do readers love these scenes?
Why does the reader suspend disbelief here, when she'll go ballistic on the authenticity of the fish knives?

Couple of tropes at work here.
One I think of as 'Naked in the Heather':

genuine heather

Our redoubtable hero and heroine think nothing of stripping down to the buff and having at on a heather-covered hillside in the Highlands, in March, taking no notice of gorse bushes and rocks and bristly heather and, well . . . March in Scotland.

genuine sand

The H&H make love on beaches, (with sand in every crack and crevice and I do not mean among-the-tidal-rocks crevices,) in haystacks, on New York City ledges high above the traffic, and in public toilets at the airport, (Ewwww.)


The other trope I call 'It's Only a Flesh Wound, Honey', which is often also Glad-to-be-alive Sex.

Our H&H take time out for some nookie while fleeing packs of ebil men armed with AK-47s or rising hurricane waters or, nowadays, zombies. Nor are they deterred by various wounds acquired in their travels.
One can only marvel at the good health and general enthusiasm of all concerned, frankly.

Why are these tropes not merely tolerated, but popular?
I haz theories.

genuine passion

One is that readers see sex in these unlikely situations as a sign of overwhelming passion. They know they would be distracted by the prospect of hermit crabs scuttling over their private parts on some secluded beach.
The heroine isn't ...
because she's transported by passion.

Many folks come to Romance genre for a fix of exactly such overwhelming, transformational, the-world-well-lost-for-love, crazy passion . . . an indifference to gorse bushes and gunfire being absent from most folks' real lives because they are not fruitcakes.

And readers enjoy the mix of desperate, adrenalin-producing action and sex because it's just plain exciting. They'll tolerate the unlikelihood that one would pause for a quickie in the middle of hot pursuit if the sex is really, really good.

Romance writers use these old reliables because they work. The tropes heighten emotion. They feel familiar and comfy to long-time readers. 

Now.  Full disclosure here.  I did the Glad-to-Be-Alive-Sex thingum once that I know of.  It was in  .... um ... My Lord and Spymaster.  Jess and Sebastian have escaped, unhurt, from the lair of Lazarus.  Jess had done some knife fighting in that incident.

genuine Romance book

****

Oh, but she was amusing him, wasn't she? 

 [Sebastian said,] "When you brush up against death, you want to couple afterwards.  I found that out years ago.  I didn't know it worked the same with women.  Does it?"
 
"Does this time," she said frankly.  "Mostly I was real young.  And the last couple times I was so seasick I didn't want to do anything but curl up and die. 

******

So that is my own particular contribution to this trope.


Writers have the special joy of watching really good writers subvert these tropes.

not quite a sex scene, however

Remember the scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark where a bruised, exhausted Indy falls asleep before the H&H can make love? Spielberg pokes fun at 'It's Only a Flesh Wound, Honey,'and makes the writers in his audience fall in love with him.

Technical Topic -- Why the First Scene Should Be a Ghost

This topic is dedicated to all those people who keep working and working and changing stuff and
rewriting but never quite get past the first chapter or so.  They know the story they want to write. 
But they're stuck.

My advice.
Ahem.
Please. Just please.
Stop rewriting that first chapter.

Look,
the First Scene is plain bloody hard to write.


You have to juggle six or eight difficult initiating requirements to set up the story while also making sure the reader doesn't just shrug and put your book back on the shelf.

And these first couple scenes are hard because you know about nothing of what your characters are like and how they act and talk.  You don't even have all your plot laid out unless you're one of those annoying folks who do.  Yet here you have to write the First Scene as if you were familiar with all that stuff.

The first draft is a hit-the-ground-running-in-the-dark sorta thing, and the first thing you run into are the gorse bushes of the opening scene.

Ask me how I know this.


Anyhow
there is an intrinsic mismatch between having to open with fully developed characters, story knowledge, voice, and tone -- and the sad fact of not having these when you open your document and write  Scene One,  Chapter One, for the first time.

This a mismatch you maybe can solve by writing the First Chapter . . . last.
Or at least, later

Here you are in media res, as it were, struggling with Chapter Three and not really able to write it because you can't let go of an incomplete and imperfect Scene One.
You have to make the opening perfect.  You have to.  But, by the very nature of writing, you can't.

So maybe try this:
Go into your document and recolor the text of the First Chapter pale gray.
Like this.

That will remind you that the First Chapter is now a ghost.
It is insubstantial. It doesn't count.
Ignore it and move on. 
The First Chapter is allowed to be ugly and full of errors because it is a ghost and doesn't count.


You will return triumphantly to that First Chapter after you've written 50,000 words in the WIP, at which point you will wake up one morning and know what to do with Chapter One which will be a whole 'nother way than how you are handling it now.

Okay.  This won't help you if you're seriously paralyzed by doubt and perfectionism,
(in that case you go read Bird By Bird,)
but it may help if you just keep stumbling over your feet at the starting block.

Technical Topic -- What to do when you've done what you do

Congratulations on finishing your manuscript.
Woot woot.
Go celebrate.

We'll wait.




...  All through with dancing and whooping it up?
Now there are a few necessary steps to take to get from here to publication.

 I. Get Crits

What:  Turn some chapters of your manuscript over to harsh, knowledgeable critters.  Listen to what they say.  You need critters who haven't been with you every step of the way as you wrote.  Critters who are not your family or friends.

This is not putting a saucer of milk out for the tabby.  This is wrapping yourself in raw meat and stepping into the lion's cage.

How:  There's a Writer's Workshop in the Books and Writer's Forum.   Here.  Absolute Write, here has a 'Share Your Work' section.  Writer's Forum here has a Writers' Workshop.
If you are writing genre, there are probably specialized sites for writers of your genre.

Why:  Intelligent criticism of your work will help you write better and will prepare you to edit your manuscript.

II.  Let the manuscript rest

What:  Put the work away for as long as you can.  Six weeks.  Three months.  Six months.
(You spend this time working on the next ms and critting other folks' manuscripts, which is an excellent way to improve your own writing skills.)

How:  Print it out and put it in a locked drawer in the bottom of your desk.  Put all the work in a folder named "Open in January.

Why:  This lets you look at your own work with a critical editorial eye.  It gives you distance.

III.  Learn how publishing works

What:  Spend a solid 40 hours studying the publishing industry. 

How:  Start out by Googling everything you can find on the subject.  Then drop into places full of knowledgeable folks and ask questions.

Why:  If you were going to (a) take a job in Thailand for a year or (b) go to State Aggie to study animal husbandry or (c) work for Avis Rent-a-car, you'd do that much research about (a) the country, (b) the university or (c) the business.
Why would you go into writing with less preparation?

III. Learn about agents

What:  Start making a spread sheet of agents who work in your field.  See who they represent.  See who they sell to.  See what kind of deals they're making.  Find out what folks say about them. 
If they have an on-line presence, get a feel for who they are.

How:  Google.  Look at the acks in the front of books similar to your own writing.  Publisher's Lunch and Publisher's Marketplace.

Why:  That's the list you will query, when you query, if you decide you want an agent.  And after all, you have some time while your manuscript is resting. 

IV.  Revise

What:  When the manuscript has aged like, y'know, fine wine ... take it out of hiding and read it over.
Now you will revise.  Now you see what's wrong.

How: Read and correct as if someone else had written it.

Why:  Because, unless you have indeed done this, the manuscript is not as good as you can make it. 


V.  Find Beta Readers

What:  Beta readers take an entire manuscript that is ready for submission and crit it.  Beta readers, if possible, have never seen the manuscript before.

How:  Find them by doing beta reads for others.  Find them by making friends in writers forums.  Pay them in chocolate.

Why:  Because they will tell you if the whole thing works.  They'll point out illogical story lines.  They'll improve the manuscript.

 
VI.  Re-revise in light of the Beta read

'nuff said.






VII.  Get an agent ... or not

Three months have passed since you declared your manuscript finished. 

You will have read 10,000 words arguing Indie/Big Press/Small Press.
You'll have the best manuscript you can write in one hand and a significant bit of WIP in the other. 

Now you make this decision.

Technical Topic - Show Versus Tell III: The Motivation

Elsewhere, a writer asks:

"Can I just SAY why a character does something?  Can I just state it outright?

Isn't that 'telling' instead of showing?"

Well ... yes.
And so what if it is?

Sometimes we shows and sometimes we just sets ourselves down and tells.

Reveal motivation in action, in dialog, in facial expression, in physical reactions, by foreshadowing, through symbolism and metaphor. Let the other characters note what's going on in their dialog. Use internal Monologue.
Show. Tell. Send up smoke signals. Let there be a Goddamned voice coming down from the sky.

Your reader picks up the book with the TV blasting in the next room, her three small children running back and forth, and she's got 15 minutes before she has to go fix dinner.
Do her a favor. Be accessible.
Be clear.


Just plain stating the motivation is one vegetable in the minestrone, the kris knife in your arsenal, the metric torque wrench in your toolbox.

Any writing 'rule' that tells you to toss out a useful technique is doing you no favor.
There's no writing technique that can't be done well.

Technical Topics-- Those Gestures

Somebody asked elsewhere

 -- paraphrasing here --

"How do we find ways to describe the exact motion of jerking a thumb in some direction or nodding in agreement?"

It's hard to find lovely unique ways to describe some of those, "He jerked his chin in the direction of the cyclops," or "He pointed to where the treasure was buried," situations.

But we can step back and consider gestures in a wider sense.

The words that describe the movement of body parts depend on:
Whose POV are you in?
What emotion and meaning do the physical movements represent?
What reaction are you trying to call from the reader?

(My first advice is to get hold of some Dorothy Dunnet and watch her characters do gestures and indicate things. She is just so good.)

Now, I have my WIP in front of me -- the Pax Manuscript.  Let me look at some of the head/face/hand movements and try to figure out why I did them the way I did.

***
"Something stronger?" Galba nodded toward the upper shelf where a bottle of twenty-year-old brandy inserted itself into a row of books.
****

Simple straightforward nod. You get to do five or six nods in a manuscript. Don't beat yourself up about it.
Not everything has to be fancy.

(Never use nods to tag dialog. You're just wasting one of those five or six nods you're entitled to.)


***

She tossed her last handful of crumbs to the birds, dusted her hands, and motioned to the errand boy who was heading out into the square with a package under his arm.
***

Now 'motioned' is about as weak as you can get in the way of description.
Does she raise her hand up over her head and wave it back and forth? Does she make a beckoning with just her fingers?
We don't know.

But we don't have to know.
We can be vague for three reasons.

(a) The purpose and outcome of the gesture are crystal clear and straightforward and have no hidden depths.
The gesture doesn't mean more than 'come here'.

(b) We have a picture of what's going on. We 'see' her dust her hands of breadcrumbs. With that strong visual laid down, we can be vague about the beckoning part that comes next.

(c) Doesn't matter what the reader imagines that gesture to look like. We don't minutely describe it because it is inherently not important.

All that said, we don't use weak words like 'motioned', 'gestured', 'moved', 'pointed', 'indicated' and so on but two or three times each in any mansucript.


Here's another:
***
He'd left France with various English coins, handy for bribing. He fumbled one loose. Turned out to be a shilling.

He held it up. "There's two of these waiting for you at Number Seven, if I catch up with her." He

closed his hand and got ready to tuck the coin back in his pocket.

The boy's eyes shifted. "Down there." He pointed east. "She give me halfcrown to say she gone t'other way."

He flipped the shilling to the boy. Collect two more tonight."
*****

All these motions with the coin, with the boy's eyes, with his pointing, convey complex intention. But this is one of those counter-intuitive cases where the gestures are filled with information, but the intention doesn't live in the details of the motion.

We don't have to describe the exact gesture of tucking the coin away. The meaning of that gesture stands there shouting. It doesn't need the support of visuals. It doesn't need the internals to spell out what's going on.


Sometimes, a gesture needs support.
If we say merely,
She thumbed at the air behind her in the direction of Codyville.
"We go that way."
the motion sticks out like ... well ... a sore thumb, and we keep wanting to say something exciting and specific about the thumb motion itself.
But the motion of the thumb is not important.

It's the mood, intention, meaning and so on that's essential. So you put your creative energy into talking about mood, intention, internals and so on of the thumb stick rather than trying to describe the arc of the thumb with great beauty and vividness.

She clenched her teeth, making a sound midway between a dentist's drill and a pot boiling over. When she thumbed the air behind her in the direction of Codyville, it was if a particularly nasty ghost was following her and she had some hope of putting out its eye.
"We go that way," she said.

The second passage doesn't define the movement of the thumb any more clearly,
but we've added so much value to that motion in internals we don't have to add value to the simple physical act.

Thumbing toward something or jerking a chin in the direction of something you can maybe do twice in a manuscript.

After that your folks have to keep their chins and thumbs still and maybe just glance that way (2 times), indicate with a subtle lift of an eyebrow (once), roll their eyes toward (once), motion a languid hand in that direction (once), indicate with a hunch of the shoulder (once), nod toward (you have 5 or 6 nods, total), grimace at (once), twist to look at (once), notice over their left shoulder (once) ... well, you get the idea.

Another movement of hands:

***
She pressed her hands together in her lap, knuckle to knuckle, and waited.
****

Here, the motion and placement of the digits is important. We describe the exact location and placement of the hand because it is the visual that creates atmosphere for the reader. The visual itself becomes the comment.

I don't add internals. I pack information into the gesture.







****
Deliberately, she calmed her hands and set them together, loose in her lap. Her hands would whisper,

"I am not worried. I'm prepared to deal with you." It was an old saying of the Baldoni that lies are not words only. One deceives with every fingernail and toe.
***

And here we have both detailed motion and internals. Here the reader doesn't need to interpret the meaning of the hand motion and placement. I tell her what it means. Belt and suspenders, as it were.

Technical Topic -- When They Get It On and Story Structure

Elsewhere, someone asks
-- I'm paraphrasing here --

"Can I put my big consummation scene as the end of the story?"

I love to see the straightjacket sructure of genre Romance shaken up a little.  I really do.  But I had to be a bit discouraging about this.
 
This below is me being discouraging because I am just the slave and dogsbody of plotting structure.

Problem? -- Denouement resolves it

Romance genre books have a conflict, (often two conflicts -- one in the outer world, one in an inner, emotional world,) that keeps the H&H from their happy ending.

In plottingspeak, the scene where the conflicts come to a final, explosive resolution is the climax or denouement.

Digressing here: 

Dénouement is a French word meaning literally, the untying'.   
Dénouer = 'to untie'  Noer = knot.
Denouement seems to have entered the English language in the mid Eighteenth Century, before which we presumably didn't do this in our plots.

So, the resolution of about-all-conflict is the denouement scene.
And it comes near the end of the book because -- hey -- solve the conflict and the book is over.

To get a sense of how denouement works, pick thirty books off your keeper shelf. You know what the conflict/s are in each of these. Flip to the tail end and work your way backwards till you come to the moment these conflicts are resolved.

What does the author put in after that denouement?

All's well

After the denouement we generally get an 'all's well' scene or two, a return to normalcy, a tying up of any bits that weren't clear before, an epilog to show a happy future. And this part of the book is short, because the reader is already leaning forward in the chair, about to put the book down with a happy sigh and go fix a pot of tea.




In movies, we see denouement and falling-off ending very clearly.  When Luke blows up the Death Star, the next scene is a set-piece of him getting a medal. When the Disney Prince battles Teh Ebil and wins, the next scene is H&H riding off into the sunset.

Folks who watch more movies than I do would have better examples.
  

Does the Big Consummation scene belong after the denouement?

detailed consummation happening onstage

In straight Romance -- this isn't true of Erotica, of course -- a unique 'detailed consummation happening onstage' is a Big Deal Scene.
We expect emotional consequences of the First Sex Act.
We expect plot results.
We want to know what happens afterwards.
We are enthralled by it.

This emotional impact, this expectation of fallout and change, this sheer story 'size' of scene, make the First Big Sex suited to the onrushing torrent of the main plotline. This Great White Shark of a scene doesn't fit well into the little spray puddle that is the plot space after the denouement.

Technical Topics -- How Does Action Relate to Length?

Starting out with an honi soit qui mal y pense, we're talking about how plot action relates to the number of words we need to write it.

Down in the comment trail, someone asks:

. . .  how do you judge if your plot is long enough? if you've got enough scenes or enough things going on to make a full length novel? This is a problem for me because I end up never writing because I've fretted over the story to death, wondering over the length.

It's an interesting part of writing -- this relationship between what's going on in the book and how long the book is.  How many words will we use to convey our action?

Now, the short answer is; everybody has to find this out for themselves.

The Writer's Journey ... if the writer is a dog

What we do -- we write and write and write and build up a stack of stories.

This is the writer's 'prentice work.  This is the garage band years.  Among the very many things we're learning on this first leg of our writing journey is how many words it takes us to get a particular bit of plot action across.

We sit down and put words on the page and -- hey -- we find out that a fight with six bad guys in a back alley needs 2000 words.  A love scene, on the other hand, just keeps stretching out and stretching out till it logs in at 8000.   Walking across a street might be 30 words of action in one scene and the same 30-ish words plus 1000 words of introspection in another.

We learn the flavor and grit and idiosyncrasy of our own writing only when we have some writing to look at.

Some of those half million words, y'know

After the first half-million words
-- did I mention we serve a half-million-word apprenticeship? --
we get a practical sense of how much heft different sorts of scene are going to add to the manuscript.  We get a storyteller's 'feel' for how words run the pacing to build that narrative drive we want so much.

I guess maybe this wasn't the short answer after all.

Okay.  Short answer:
Everybody writes differently and you won't know how many words it takes you to write your action until you've done some writing.

Will you be one of those excellent writers who shoot through 60 plot points in 70,000 words and the reader does not feel rushed?  Or will you be one who tells essentially the same story in 120,000 words and not one of those words is trimable excess?

All that said -- and wasn't that a lot of 'all'? --  I am not going to condemn you to months and years of writing before you get an answer to your question.
No.  I am not going to do that.
Because I know that would discourage me and I see no reason why it wouldn't be daunting to even the brave soul I imagine you to be.
So.

Sure to be interesting scenes in your story

Best answer to your question is to write maybe eight of nine scenes that occur in the story
-- scenes that you are particularly fond of and can picture very well --
and see how many words you use.

This will give you a ballpark estimate of your action-to-words ratio . . . remembering that your first ratio is not necessarily where you are going to end up after a year of hard work writing and thinking.


Two common problems writers may start out with are being prolix, (that is, being tediously lengthy, long-winded, verbose, flowery, writerly, indirect and generally slowing the pacing to a crawl,)  or, on the other hand,  telegraphing the story, (which is talking about the action and racing along, never adding the description and internals and suchlike that draw the reader in.)

The first sort of writer comes up with 257,000-word Historicals.  The second, with 45,000-word Contemporary Romances.  Both of these are ... problematic when it comes to selling them.

But, while the gift of storytelling is just that -- a gift -- and inborn, the craft of writing can be learned.  (Though 'prolix' may end up being fixed by your long-suffering editor who pulls out the blue pencil and just crosses out paragraph after paragraph of internal nattering.)
(Ask me how I know this.)

What's important here is that these technique problems and many others get fixed only after you lay down words to fix.  No draft material lined up in neat pixels on the screen = no way to learn how to lean down or buff up the prose.  No way to acquire the fine art of padding a too-short manuscript with an exciting subplot.  No set of deft editing scalpels with which to cut away the excess.  

Write because you delight in writing.  Let the story come as it will.  Trust that you will solve whatever technical problems beset you.

And if in the end you discover that your 'natural' writing length is epic fantasy or novella --

We live in exciting times.  There's a market for writing at about all lengths. 

stack of paper attrib elchupacabrito

Backstory -- Finally, Two Rules

For various complex reasons -- none of them interesting -- I was reading an old post I'd written about backstory.  I found two rules I've decided to repeat here, since -- heck -- it's already written.

Two Rules for Adding Backstory.

The first rule is the 'Packing for Tahiti' rule

which is to say

you don't need as much as you think ...

because mostly you'll end up swimming along fine

and wrapping a towel around you 
when you get out
and sometimes,

you can just go naked.

The second rule is the 'Tangled Skein of Fate' rule, where,
 (and this might only apply to me and my tendency to construct silly and complicated plot lines)
if you find yourself having trouble slipping in the backstory,
then maybe you should reconsider
the very existence of
your backstory.

Do you need all this who-struck-John complication?

But then, with me, the need to reconsider my backstory
strikes with great frequency.

Technical Topic -- Character and Query Letter

Someone asked elsewhere --

(I'm paraphrasing here)  "My story is about several main characters.  Which one do I build my query letter around?"

I have answers for about anything.

An ensemble cast of four, heigh-ho

So let's say your story follows four characters' intertwined lives. You want to know which of these four stories to emphasize in your query letter.

The really short answer is -- Any of them.
Your query letter can approach the manuscript  using any main character as your focal point.
I don't say you necessarily can talk about this manuscript mainly from the experience of the dog, but close.

If you have a strong instinct to cast the query using the story of LolaJo instead of Kindle, Edward, or Framis, then do so.
Nobody knows the story better than you.


But which is the optimal character?

Oh.  You want optimal?
I'd look at the manuscript as a whole and ask myself:

What's the point of the story?
What am I saying here?
Who gets the most on-stage time?
Who is present from pretty much the beginning to the end?
Who feeds us the most internals?
Whose problem fuels the action?
Whose resolution provides the emotionally satisfying ending?
Who has the most to gain or lose?
Who does the reader identify with?
When the last chapter rolls round, whose goal has been reached?'

This sort of stuff tells you who owns the story.

The general shape of the story also tells you.

Selecting the most important character in the room

If the manuscript is paced and plotted as a mystery -- if the point of the story is that a mystery gets solved -- I'd use the mystery-solver as the center of my query.
If the story is a Romance, I'd talk about the romantic couple.
If it's a coming-of-age story, I'd talk about my young person coming of age.
If this is a story of transformation of the antagonist, I'd choose the antagonist to talk about.

Your main and most active character is probably the one to pull front and center when you talk about your manuscript in the query.