Writing

Toil vs. Talent: The Myth of the Natural

Nephele Tempest

One of the most frequent debates in the writing world, revolving around workshops and MFA programs, centers on the question “Can writing be taught?” The flip side of this, of course, is can you learn to be a writer? The question implies that writing requires a certain innate talent, something you’re born with rather than something you acquire over time. This also suggests that those without said talent shouldn’t waste their time writing, but should instead go off and figure out where their own true talents lie.

Hogwash. Here’s the thing. I believe in talent, and I believe in genius. I also believe that true genius in any given subject blesses very few people, and that most industries offer far more opportunities than there are geniuses in that field. The true key to success in any given area, writing most definitely included, comes from dedication and hard work. Give me a determined writer with a teaspoon of talent and the willingness to practice their craft — to read and revise and strive to improve — over a lazy genius any day of the week.

Here’s the thing about talent, about being blessed with a natural affinity for a given skill. It can lead to all sorts of problems. Back in elementary school, I was one of those smart kids for whom learning came easily. I could listen to my teacher with one ear and get the lesson down, no problem. Homework required no thought at all; I simply worked my way through the pages and wrote out the answers. My brain organized arguments by rote, so my first attempts at school essays required a single draft. Plus my parents and teachers all told me I was smart, so I didn’t really consider that maybe, possibly, things wouldn’t always work that way. Until the day I hit algebra and couldn’t figure out what the heck was going on. By that point, I had no skills for dealing with a subject that didn’t come automatically. I’d never learned how to learn, how to study. It threw me for a loop, and it took me years to understand what the problem was and how to tackle it. In the meantime, I thought there was something wrong with me. That I couldn’t understand algebra because I didn’t get it from day one.

Similarly, a writer who is consistently praised for their early efforts, for their natural-sounding dialogue or beautiful descriptions, may take years to realize that good, solid writing takes more work than simply transcribing the words that flow from their brain. No matter how good the writer, projects still require thought and revision — clarification, the smoothing of clunky sentences, ratcheted tension, improved character motivation. The most brilliant plot idea requires follow through to do it justice. Talent must be backed up by toil, and every writer needs to learn and apply their craft. The talent might serve as a short cut, but it can never serve as a substitute for the labor that goes into each book or story. A writer needs to be prepared to experiment, to throw out what does not work, and to absorb new skills along the way.

Is writing difficult? Yes. I don’t care who you are or how talented you might be, writing is still a challenge. Plot, setting, character, motivation, pacing, description, theme, tension… a writer must keep them all in the air at once, juggle each and every aspect of a project, never letting a single ball drop. No one is born knowing how to do this. They must learn. And if some aspects of storytelling come more easily, then others will still serve as obstacles.

Writing offers no guarantees. The most talent writers in the world receive rejection slips. But the common ground of the successful writers is that they all work on their craft. They sit at their desks and write; they read the works of other writers and learn from their efforts; they put in their time and refuse to rest on their laurels. The career of the writer is a journey paved with words. Keep writing to get where you want to go.

 

A Great Start: Or How to Keep an Agent Reading

Nephele Tempest

You’ve queried or pitched and an agent (or several) has requested to see some or all of your manuscript. Whether they’ve asked for the first three chapters, 50 pages, or the entire thing, your goal is the same: Keep them reading.

But how do you do that? What keeps an agent reading, and what — perhaps more importantly — makes them stop?

The thing to remember is that we are book lovers, too, but we are very tired, overworked, and jaded book lovers. If vampires are the hot thing, we have them crawling out of our in-boxes day and night, sunshine be damned. If everyone has suddenly discovered dystopian young adult novels, three guesses what the first five partials in my submissions queue are. I have read more opening paragraphs where the heroine is awakened by a noise in her supposedly empty apartment than you will ever see in your lifetime.

That does not mean there’s no hope. Agents seek new material every day. We want to be excited about your book. We want it to pull us in. Your job is to figure out how to do that. Because if you can intrigue my worn out, exhausted, cynical inner reader, there’s a good chance that you can intrigue many other readers as well.

A few things to keep in mind:

  • Start as late into your story as possible. Most writers go on for quite a few pages before getting to the real beginning of their novel. Don’t bore your reader with endless information leading up to the action. Can you chop off your first paragraph? Your first page? Be honest.
  • That said, don’t just throw us into the middle of the action without a life preserver. A big battle? An epic argument? Someone’s death? Okay, but who are these people? Who is your protagonist? Am I meant to pick a side? It’s all well and good to put your reader in the thick of it, but remember to give them some perspective as well.
  • Start with a strong first line. Plenty of people throw this piece of advice around, and that’s because it’s excellent advice. But keep in mind that you don’t have to write that fabulous opening line first thing. You might actually write the whole book and go back and rework the opening after the fact. Later material can inspire the opening. Also, if the very first line is more generic in nature, you can still pump up sentence number two or three and draw your reader in that way.
  • Keep the story moving. Don’t give the reader a bang-up start and then wander off into back story for thirty pages. Each scene needs to move your story forward, drawing your reader further into the depths of your novel. Back story is fine and can be important, but keep it to small doses, blend it in with the rest of your action, and keep on marching.
  • If you are opening your novel with a prologue, think again. Approximately 95% of all prologues I see are useless and simply keep the reader from getting to the actual story. Occasionally they do work. More often they can get cut and that information (often back story) can be shoehorned into the book somewhere else.
  • Keep it short. When in doubt, less is more. Include just what needs to be there. J.K. Rowling rewrote the first chapter of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone endless times, because each version gave away too much of the story up front. Less. Is. More.

Much of this advice works for the rest of your book as well. Keep things moving, keep it interesting, make each scene pull its weight, avoid overused actions or plot twists, and keep character motivation in mind as you go.

Again, this is old advice, but there’s a reason it gets repeated: Pull a bunch of your favorite novels off the shelf and read the opening chapters. What’s working? What keeps you engaged? How is the protagonist introduced? Or antagonist, if the writer has started there? How is setting handled? Action? Dialogue? What do you love? And what could be done better? Try the same thing with a handful of books that disappointed you, especially if you could not get into them to start. What kept you from getting pulled into the story? Can you think of anything you might have altered that would have allowed you to keep reading?

I keep reading if I’m interested. I keep reading if I’m excited or touched or enchanted by what I encounter on the page. I stop if the writing is bad or cliched or sloppy, if I’m bored, if things feel unbelievable, or if the pace has crawled to a virtual standstill. Probably the same reasons you do. It’s a lot of balls to keep up in the air, but that’s the challenge of the craft. Happy writing.

 

Market Mania: Why a Book Flies Off the Shelves

Nephele Tempest

If you follow the publishing industry at all, the chances are you’ve heard of Fifty Shades of Grey by E.L. James. For the uninitiated, this is the first title in an erotic trilogy that first garnered attention as a popular e-book climbing the rankings at Amazon.com. It later went on to have a small printing through an Australian publisher, and just this week sold at auction for a reputed seven-figure sum (for the trilogy) to a major New York publishing house. The original e-book version was pulled from all vendors and a new, more expensive copy loaded in its place. At this point, hard copy orders still result in the print copy from the Australian printing, though the official listing has the name of the New York publisher.

So what’s the big deal? This title has already sold approximately a quarter of a million copies, and will be receiving a reported 750,000 copy print run under the new publisher. Someone, somewhere, feels there is a market for a million copies of this book. Maybe they’re right, maybe they’re wrong, but the real question is why do they feel this is worth the gamble?

The Shades of Grey books began their lives as Twilight fan fiction, reimagining Bella as an innocent young woman just graduating college who enters into a BDSM relationship with a wealthy Seattle businessman–Edward. The combination of the subject matter, which was handled in an almost tutorial-like fashion as Edward “educated” Bella about the lifestyle, and the Twilight link, made the stories incredibly popular with their audience, which was Twilight fans interested in a more adult view of the relationship from the original Stephenie Meyers books. Subtract vampires, add sex. E. L. James gained a measure of fame within fandom and beyond, and eventually decided to pull the fan fiction version of her stories from the internet, change the details to make them completely original fiction, and publish them in electronic form. Many of her fans supported her, and sales increased thanks to word-of-mouth.

It remains to be seen how many “mainstream readers” — meaning those not plugged into the internet or fandom — will be interested in these books in their latest incarnation. While some areas of the media seem to consider it a revelation that there are women out there interested in reading about sex — and not just your standard variety, missionary position sex, either — the reality is that the erotica market has experienced several major upticks in recent years, spawned in large part by the online vendors and the availability of electronic formatting. This is the equivalent of the brown paper wrapper; naughty, sexy reading material that you can download at will and delete or store in the cloud when you’re done. Will readers embrace these books to the point of purchasing them in paperback? Do three quarters of a million readers want these books on their shelves? I don’t know.

These books are not art. They are not even particularly original or well written. What they are, is an exploration of a world that hasn’t received much public attention recently. It’s impossible to point to the market and say “this is what you need to do to sell a lot of books.” People’s interests are not that cut and dry. You can, however, analyze successful titles to see what has made them different. In this case, the author is giving the reader a tour of the BDSM world, something many of them have never read about or heard much about in their daily lives. I suspect there is also a level of curiosity about the titles for those readers who are familiar with the BDSM lifestyle — wanting to know if the author has her details right. Layer that on top of a relationship that is fashioned after one that’s already proven highly successful, and you begin to get a glimmer of why these books are doing so well.

It’s easy to say sex sells, and that the titillating aspects of the books are the draw, but the original Twilight novels included very little sex and have been enormously popular. So clearly sex alone is not the key.

What makes a bestselling book? There really is no one thing, no formula. If you look back at the vampire craze of the late seventies and early eighties, you find the novels of Anne Rice. Rice’s Lestat books were fresh and different in that they gave the reader the vampire’s point of view. Rice asked what it would be like to live so long, to be forced to keep up with history and technological advances, to see everything you knew and loved as a child or young adult gradually change and vanish — the experiences of becoming old but in the extreme. What is it like to have no one to live your life with? What is it like to have that level of power over humans? And what would it be like to be turned as a child, to age and mature over the years while your body remained undeveloped? Her approach was intriguing, her characters fascinating and multifaceted compared to the more traditional vampire stereotypes. Set against the lush backdrop of New Orleans, with Rice’s stylistic, almost baroque writing — very in keeping with the over-the-top eighties — the books became a sensation.

The Harry Potter books are another example of a fresh take on old ideas. J.K. Rowling’s series is far too popular for anyone to simply dismiss her as lucky, or the books as children’s literature that happened to appeal to a lot of readers. Statistically speaking, a huge proportion of the population has read at least one Harry Potter book or at least seen one of the films. They are well crafted, thoughtfully plotted, and packed full of details that make readers wish they could visit Rowling’s world — enough that one theme park has been built to answer to that desire, with another one in the works.

Yes, Rowling started writing about wizards at a time when fantasy was just experiencing a resurgence in literature — and she likely contributed to that rise. She also set her stories in a boarding school, a fascinating new world for readers in the US where most children attend school locally, thereby layering her intriguing worlds instead of supplying just one. But the reality is that the stories engage readers through multiple themes and age-old traditions of literature. They are packed with examples of good versus evil, practicing what you preach, being tolerant, how even the best people can be hypocritical, following your conscience, standing by your friends, and much more. At a deeper level, there are religious themes of rebirth and resurrection that tap into cultural beliefs. And of course, all of this rests under the veneer of a series of mysteries the characters must solve, not only on a smaller level — one for each book — but on a grand scale across the series. These are books that may be read for pure enjoyment, but they also stand up to rereading and to digging deeper for a greater meaning — which cannot be said of many of the Harry-inspired titles that have been published in years since.

Popular author Tom Clancy has detailed knowledge about how our military and government work to keep the country safe, and an interest in the broader political area, that allowed him to craft very in-depth action adventure books that put the reader in the thick of the action. But his sales were definitely boosted when a certain President of the United States mentioned he was reading a Clancy title. The books were well written, and worth the discovery once a reader picked them up, but they found their market through the best sort of word-of-mouth. More recently, Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland received a presidential mention as well. And many books have achieved high sales thanks to their Oprah Winfrey book club listings.

The market is a strange and fickle place. It is virtually impossible to plan for success — to sit down and decide to write a particular type of book, including specific details, and know that it will fly off the shelves. Tastes change rapidly, and what is popular when you pick up your pen or sit down at the keyboard might very well be last week’s news by the time you finish your first draft. As for publicity, well, unless you know a book-minded politician who likes to name drop, or are on Oprah’s Christmas card list, the chances are good that you can only dream of your book receiving that sort of endorsement. There will always be fads, there will always be fascination based on some quirk of the times we live in, and there will always be lucky coincidences that can help a writer soar to recognition. But these are just the fates at work.

Writers can only control so much of their career and their process. You have to write, and rewrite. You have to read good books, and the occasional bad book, so you know what makes them what they are. Read the bestsellers to see what is working but form your own opinions. Just because it sells, does not mean you’ll like it — or that it is the type of material you wish to write. Write from the heart and keep at it, and know that while certain levels of success will always be a matter of luck, your talent and efforts will eventually pay off.

 

 

 

Everything Old Is New Again

Nephele Tempest

It isn’t news to most writers that there are only a finite number of stories in the world. If you distill a novel down to its core, to its very basic structure and motivations, it will fall into one of several basic plots, though how many there actually are varies according to whom you ask. Seven seems to be a popular number, though some will argue there are even fewer. If you’re interested in learning what these plots are, you can take a gander at Christopher Booker’s THE SEVEN BASIC PLOTS: WHY WE TELL STORIES, or, if you’re more of a purist, Aristotle’s POETICS. But the point is, whatever you’re writing, chances are that you have not reinvented the wheel. Your story will adhere, in some fashion, to the classic storytelling structures we have enjoyed through history.

So how do you write something new? And what does it mean when an agent or editor says your work isn’t fresh, or that your story has been done? Of course it’s been done — they’ve all been done, right?

The catch is taking those tried-and-true plot structures and bringing your own experiences and influences to your interpretation. In his recent essay for The Millions, Madison Smartt Bell writes about arriving in New York City in 1979, a Southerner with an Ivy League education and a love of classic authors, but without a real sense for the state of modern urban fiction. His writing grew out of his own experiences of New York — his time spent in Washington Square Park, his view of Manhattan from Williamsburg in the days before gentrification, the economic and political and social issues of the period that he likens to a kind of war. These influences combined with his background and education to create his personal outlook — one that enabled him to write with fresh perspective and details.

It’s easy to see how writers have taken popular subjects and plots over the course of time and turned them on end, making them new. Take vampire fiction. If you go back and read Bram Stoker’s DRACULA, you get a very specific type of novel that addresses good versus evil, looking at the darker side of human nature through various elements, including sexuality (as perceived in Stoker’s day). Next take a look at Anne Rice’s INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE. Again, vampires are portrayed as evil, but Rice takes you inside of their perspective, their lives, looking at the price of immortality and the consequences of having to live a restricted existence over centuries. Human beings play very little part in Rice’s vampire chronicles. While Stoker’s story pits man against evil, Rice places the vampires in the role of man and sets them against nature, albeit a twisted version of nature. More recent popular vampire fiction has made vampires the heroes, misunderstood creatures with needs that have enslaved them, but who love and yearn for a human-type life. Teen fiction, in particular, has taken the sexual nature of the vampire mythology and romanticized these creatures, making them more human and less monster-like.

But even fresh ideas can be used and reused to the point of saturation. When an agent or editor says an idea is stale, it does not mean your novel is identical to those already on the market. However, the chances are that you have fallen into similar patterns as the latest popular fiction, and they are more interested in a story that goes in a different direction. To continue with the vampire premise, the “good” vampires have appeared in many, many novels over the past decade. A writer searching for a way to write within the vampire sub-genre might do well to look back to the original source stories and revisit the evil vampires again, instead of hopping on the current bandwagon with another heroic vamp. Elizabeth Kostova’s THE HISTORIAN, while published in the midst of the vampire craze, did just that.

Modern stories that update classics are also a popular way of revitalizing traditional plot structures. Romance writers turn old fairy tales on their heads; sf/f writers look at classic quest stories and give them a futuristic spin; mystery writers look at old noir classics and give them creative, fresh surroundings. This doesn’t mean you rewrite Cinderella or The Thin Man; but if you have a favorite classic, there’s a reason you identify with that particular plot. Take it apart, poke at its components, see what makes you return to it again and again. Use what you love as the foundation for your own work, then let your imagination roam.

As a child, I loved the books that were split into three sections — top, middle, and bottom — where each section was a different part of a person on every page. You could flip the heads, the feet, the bodies, back and forth, creating your own combinations. Maybe you’d have a woman’s head with a straw hat, a man’s vest and arms, and a little girl’s legs with striped tights and black mary jane’s. Or the head of a tiger, body of an elephant, and legs of a dog. Creating a fresh, exciting take on one of the traditional plots that make up our literary history is very similar. You mix and match pieces of story, characters, locations, adventures, pasting them together in different ways until you discover something fresh that excites your imagination.

The world revolves around the same series of plots, the same stories we have all loved and grown up with over the centuries. The hero’s journey. Boy meets girl. Man against nature. The list goes on — but it’s still a fairly short one. What makes these old stories new is the writer. Take your dreams and aspirations, your experiences, the places you’ve seen, the people you’ve met, the conversations that have made you laugh, cry or scream; take the things that make you unique and pour them into your story. That is how you will write something that is purely your own. Happy writing.

Starting from Scratch

Nephele Tempest

Where do story ideas come from? It seems to be a universal question, one I frequently hear asked of published writers when newbies are able to corner them. Where did you get that idea? How did you find that premise? Whatever made you think of that?

More often than not, writers seem unable to respond. At least not with any specificity. Sometimes they can give you a where or a when — “I was touring a rain forest on my vacation…” or “It was New Year’s Eve, 1997, and I was home with the flu…” But this is unusual. They’re even more unlikely to reply with a step-by-step explanation of the story’s evolution. Not because they’re being difficult, and not because they can’t recall (though I suspect sometimes they cannot), but because the answer is neither simple nor straightforward.

Story ideas are complicated things. Writers might come up with a kernel that they suspect could bloom into a story, but often it gets tucked into the back of their minds to play with the other kernels — for years, in some cases — until they rub up against each other, and make friends, and figure out which ones should continue on together into a more fleshed out concept.

Of course, that makes the process sound magical, and the reality is that it’s not. The reality is that generating ideas — great ideas, that can grow into salable manuscripts — is work. Real work, not daydreaming or wool gathering or whatever label non-writers sometimes put to writers’ efforts. If you simply wait for inspiration to strike, chances are you’ll be staring out the window well into your dotage, with very little to show for it.

The truth about writing is that “Where do you get your ideas?” is the wrong question. The question people should be asking is “How do you create your ideas?”

So, you’re starting from scratch. You sit down at your computer and open a new document, or pick up your pen and notebook and turn to a fresh page. Whatever project you’ve been working on is completed — turned in to your agent or editor, or off with your critique partners, or sitting in the bottom drawer until you’ve sufficient distance for your next round of edits. Today you’re starting a new project, and you have no idea what it will be.

Sound terrifying? Or exciting? Maybe a bit of both. But what do you do? Put the date at the top of the page, perhaps. Then it’s no longer blank. But it’s not a new idea, either. So how do you set about beginning?

Chances are good you already have something in mind. Even if it’s not a story or novel idea yet, you have a character, a brief encounter or situation, a location, even a weird object that you’ve been obsessing over for whatever reason. So you write that down.

Then begins the idea generation, because kernels are just the start of an idea, not the idea itself. You play the “What If?” game — what if this happened or that? What if the character got a phone call or a telegram or a visit from a stranger? What if war broke out? What if someone’s recently died and there’s no will? What if there’s more than one will? You write a bit, and then ask again. What if? What if? If, then, if, then. It builds a pattern. Not all the details will capture your fancy. Maybe you’ll start over and head in a different direction. Perhaps you’ll like the latter parts of the scenario best, and discard your original kernel entirely. Maybe you’ll file the entire thing away for further thought, and try something different instead.

How else can you generate ideas? Read nonfiction. Skim encyclopedias (or Wikepedia — do encyclopedias even exist anymore?) for intriguing facts. Scan the newspaper for real-life events, crimes, fundraisers. Read the obituaries to discover interesting career paths or inspirational lives. Borrow from everywhere to build a character or a community or a disastrous event.

Sit in a coffee shop and eavesdrop. Listen to conversations in the locker room at the gym. Wander through an antique store or a flea market and imagine who used to own the shabby items on offer. Go through an old family photo album and check out your oldest relatives — people you may never have met. Note their poses, their clothes, their expressions. Who were they? Who might they be in your imagination?

Do you have other methods? A system you use to come up with your next project or to fill your idea book when you’ve got a few spare moments? Please feel free to share.

Ideas rarely come from somewhere. They aren’t floating through the atmosphere, trying to determine whose mind to grace. Writers create ideas — they craft them, search them out, uncover them, design them. Generating ideas is the first step to generating the larger story. Start from scratch and build from there.

One of my favorite writing quotes comes from author Jack London: “You can’t wait for inspiration, you have to go after it with a club.” Words to live by. Happy writing.