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Writing as a Practice: December Writing Challenge 2023

Nephele Tempest

Welcome to this year’s December Writing Challenge. Those of you familiar with the challenge from past years already know how this works, but for newcomers, or for anyone looking for a refresher, here’s a quick rundown on how to tackle the challenge. But first, why should you participate?

December Writing Challenge 2023

December can be a crazy month. The holiday season means days crowded with shopping, travel, entertaining, and a pretty full social calendar. But the end of the year can also bring with it very busy work schedules, with deadlines looming or year-end reconciliation of one type or another. December also tends to be the month when we plan for the new year, setting goals or resolutions. This type of chaos can spell the end of dedicated writing time for anyone juggling a writing project along with a day job and a personal life. So, each year, I set this challenge. I encourage writers to make their writing a priority and keep up with their writing practice, even for a few minutes each day.

The Basics

The rules for the December Writing Challenge are simple. You can adapt them as you see fit, to work with your personal goals and schedule. Writers already working professionally, who have a deadline, might want to ramp up the challenge to meet their goals. Newer writers can feel free to use the challenge as is in order to keep up their momentum through this busy time of year. If you’re coming off of NaNoWriMo, the challenge can be an excellent way to finish up that first draft if you’re looking to take it from 50,000 words to something more publishable. Whatever your goal, the challenge can help you push forward.

1. Write daily. Butt in chair, hands on the keyboard; curled on the couch with a pen and notebook; sitting at your favorite cafe. Wherever you prefer, using whatever medium works for you. But aim to spend at least a few minutes writing every day. I do recommend you try for half an hour, but if you can only manage 15 minutes, call that a win.

2. Ignore word counts or page goals, unless you need to hit a deadline of some sort. This challenge is not about finishing a project or being super productive. You just want to keep your hand in the game so, come January when you have a New Year’s resolution regarding your writing, you can dive right in. The challenge helps keep your writing muscles limber through the holiday season.

3. Write what you want. Fiction, nonfiction, poetry. Work on a novel, a memoir, some essays or short stories. Tackle one project all month long, or write something different every day. Feel free to play or experiment. Stretch your imagination. Whatever keeps you writing.

And that’s it. Those are the basic rules for the challenge. I will say that, regarding that first rule, daily writing is the goal, but it’s flexible. Don’t look at that and get discouraged.

Officially, I give you two free days to use as needed. Swamped getting the house ready plus cooking for incoming guests? A little hung over following your office holiday party? Use a free day. Or don’t. But keep in mind, the challenge should work for you, not against you. So, don’t let it add to your stress if you only end up writing a few days a week.

Tips for Finding Time to Write

If you can carve out a bit of time each morning before you start your day, terrific. But we all know how difficult that can be, particularly if you share your house with people vying for your attention. So, a few tips for ways to make writing your priority.

1. Tell people you’re participating in the challenge and ask them to help you keep to your writing time. Put on a literal writing hat (tiara? mouse ears?) when you’re working at home, so your family knows to give you your little window of quiet.

2. Schedule writing dates for yourself, either alone or with an accountability partner. Mark them on your calendar, set a reminder, and go write. Keep that appointment the same as you would a dentist appointment.

3. Keep a notebook and pen on you at all times. Write in the car when you’re waiting in the carpool pickup or the Starbucks drive-thru. Jot notes in the waiting room at the doctor or while getting an oil change.

4. Actually leave your desk during your lunch break, and go work on your own writing instead of working through the meal.

5. Break your daily writing into smaller chunks, especially if you need to hit a deadline or other goal. Several small writing windows instead of one long one might not be ideal, but it’s better than not writing at all for want of a long enough block of free time.

These are just a few ideas to get you going, However you approach the December Writing Challenge, have fun with it. Good luck, and happy writing!

A Daily Writing Habit: Do You Need to Write Every Day?

Nephele Tempest

The idea of a daily writing habit prompts frequent discussion in writerly circles. Do you need to write every day to become a good writer? The short answer is no, of course not. Many successful writers do not write every day, for whatever reason. Their day jobs make it impossible, they prefer to write for long blocks of time on the weekend, etc. If writing daily rubs you the wrong way, or simply is not feasible, do not panic. But if you can manage a daily writing habit, I encourage you to try, because writing daily has its advantages.

daily-writing-habit

What Can Writing Daily Do for You?

  • Creativity is like a muscle; the more you work it, the stronger it becomes. A daily writing habit helps you train your brain. When you sit down at your computer or pick up your notebook on a very regular basis, your brain understands it’s time to create. If you write every day, even just for a little while, you will see a change in how ideas flow. Everyone knows that feeling of being “rusty” from not writing for a while. The opposite is true, as well. Writing daily helps prime the pump and keeps your creative mind nimble.
  • A daily writing habit helps you fight a tendency to procrastinate. If you plan to write three days per week, it is easier to put off that day’s writing. Whereas, if you write every day, you don’t have to decide whether to fit a writing session into your schedule. There is no questioning “Is this a writing day?” because the answer is always yes.
  • Writing daily can also help lessen the pressure of deadlines. It’s no guarantee that you won’t need an all-nighter or two to finish a manuscript, but it certainly makes it less likely than if you’ve been procrastinating for weeks.

No rule of writing says that you must write every day. Even writers who do write daily will take time off here and there. Writers are human beings, and all human beings need to take breaks from their work, no matter how much they love it. Nor is writing daily a cure-all for every writing issue. Everyone faces a block now and then. But if you’re serious about writing, or trying to improve, or looking to build up new habits for the new year, give writing daily a try. Join my December Writing Challenge, or just promise yourself to write every day. You might find that writing daily works for you.

 

Want to Be an Author? Finish Something

Nephele Tempest

Writers write, but authors publish. If you want to go from writer to author, the first step is to finish something, then go back and rewrite it until it is ready for submission. But finishing that first draft really is key. It’s impossible to edit a blank page, and equally impossible to sell something without an ending.

Most writers starting out have written plenty of beginnings. They get an idea and sit down to write. They rush through those first pages filled with excitement, developing cool characters and describing the setting and sending everyone off on their adventure brimming with conflict. But then something happens around page fifty. Maybe page 100 if they are lucky and have plenty of momentum. The writing starts to slow down. That initial idea is no longer sufficient to carry the action forward. More is required, and the beginning writer isn’t sure just what that more entails.

And then comes the shiny new idea.

Everyone’s had them, sometimes even while staring at the computer screen, willing the current idea to shape up and get marching. That niggling thought — a weird new hero, a fantastic scenario, a compelling situation, a snippet of dialogue in the back of the brain — that sounds like the answer to everything. Because this new shiny idea feels so much better than the work in progress. It’s new! It’s shiny! It’s so much more exciting! And it lures you away from the current project that hasn’t been behaving and into its shiny clutches.

Before you knows what’s happened, you have a stockpile of beginnings. Partial novels that have never even made it to the half-way point. Because there is always a shiny new idea lurking around the corner, looking to distract you. The more ideas you have, the more ideas you get. It’s the way creativity seems to work. But there are several problems with this.

  • Shiny new ideas are not actually always good ideas. Sometimes they’re just plain ordinary ideas that, if given time, will fade completely from your mind and go unmissed.
  • Chasing shiny new ideas means setting aside current projects and never finishing anything. And you can’t sell something that’s not finished.
  • Writing the middle and the end of a story requires different skills than writing beginnings, and you can’t get better at writing middles and ends if you never actually write them. You want to hone all your skills as a writer, not just some of them.

Shiny new ideas will always pop up and wave at you, but it is vital that you set them aside and continue with whatever project is currently on your plate. That doesn’t mean forget them entirely. Jot down notes in your journal, start a computer file for the potential new project, and then get back to business. Consider that shiny idea on the to-do pile. Maybe you’ll get back to it in a year and find it’s percolated into something wonderful, or maybe you’ll wonder what the hell you where thinking. Either way, it gets its due eventually, and you get to push through and finish the project at hand.

But what about the argument that the new idea is better or more interesting than the one you’re writing? Of course it seems that way. The new idea is a mystery. You’ve spent virtually no time thinking about it, which leaves it wide open to play with. The current idea, on the other hand, is starting to come together. You understand the characters more than you did at the beginning, you’ve begun to piece together the plot, and things have moved forward. The easy thinking has been accomplished, and you need to dig deeper. Further the conflict, ask tough questions, maybe backtrack on a couple of points. You are past all the surface material and mining for treasure, and that’s work. Hard work. Of course the idea of something new and shiny appeals. That doesn’t make it better.

Writers write, and if all you want to do is write, you can play with as many ideas as you wish. But published authors commit to finishing their projects and resist the distraction of every new idea that catches the light. Of course, occasionally there are projects you find just aren’t working and you decide to abandon them, but that’s a question of the project’s merit, not the distraction of a shiny new idea. So when the next little tidbit flits along and catches your eye, tuck it into a folder for future thought and get back to work.

Writing 3rd Person: Maintaining Limited POV

Nephele Tempest

Writing in first person presents the challenge of maintaining a voice that sounds like a distinctive character instead of that of the author, but third person narration comes with its own set of issues and these can be less clear. Writers need to determine whose third person point of view they are going to use. Are they using a single character? Rotating between two or more characters? Or will they zoom way out and use an omniscient narrative style? Once a writer makes their choice, they need to guard against slipping between them.

Omniscient narration has fallen out of style, but when done well it offers the advantage of not keeping secrets from the reader. However, close third-person POV — either of a single character or several — has become much more of the norm for third-person narratives, in part because many writers like the way it puts the reader right into the action. The trick with this point of view is to maintain that strict closeness and not slide into a more omniscient viewpoint. Some aspects of close third are obvious, and simply a matter of keeping track. Who knows what? Who has learned what facts, been present for a given discussion, overheard which secret? When it comes to plot points, it’s not difficult to determine if a character should know about something.

The tricky part of close third-person POV comes with description. There is a tendency to think of third person as the writer setting up their movie camera where the character stands, and writing as if they were filming from that specific spot. It’s logical — the description consists of whatever that camera “sees” from that position. But close third provides more than the view from the character’s eyes — it’s the view from that character’s brain, as well. Descriptions from a character’s POV must be both what they see and what they think about what they see, and here is where things often slip from the character’s POV to the writer’s — or from close third to omniscient.

In close third person, a character should see and observe in a way that makes sense for them, not just as a way to inform the reader of what a room looks like or what is going on in a scene. A wealthy society matron or an interior decorator might walk into a well-appointed living room and recognize the rug as a French Aubusson, but most characters probably would not. An actor who spends a lot of time on the red carpet and with stylists might identify his date’s dress as Armani, but an accountant for a computer company would be much less likely to make the same observation. A writer needs to know their characters, and understand how they see the world. Does the protagonist stick their head out the third story window and see a Porsche coming up the block or a red sports car? The reader must see what the character sees, and nothing more.

This distinction also comes into play in smaller details, such as how other characters are referred to within the text. When the protagonist walks into a room full of strangers, it makes sense to differentiate with physical details, such as the redhead, the woman in the black dress, the taller of the two men. But these vague descriptions should end the minute specifics are assigned. Once the POV character meets the beautiful redhead and knows her name is Susan, they should stop thinking of her as the redhead or the knockout or the beautiful woman, because people don’t reverse their thinking process in that way; she’s Susan.

Similarly, if a male protagonist is speaking to another man, and they are the only characters in the scene, the second character should never be referred to as the other man. Doing so pulls the reader out of the protagonist’s head, out of the room, to a place hovering above the scene where they are aware of two people talking. The protagonist doesn’t think of the person he’s speaking to as the other man — he just thinks of him as Joe or Dad or whoever he is. These sorts of errors often come into play when writers are looking for a way to avoid using a name or a pronoun too often, but it’s much more important to maintain the established POV than to avoid using he or him a few times in a paragraph.

Writing close third person involves really getting into the characters’ heads. When reviewing a scene, a writer needs to consider whether all of the details coming through make sense given the character’s POV. If vital information needs to be relayed, it’s important to determine how the character will know or discover it before it can be presented for the reader, and to keep the author’s voice from sneaking into the narrative.

 

 

Polish Your Prose: An Editorial Cheat Sheet

Nephele Tempest

No matter your resolutions for the year, regardless where you stand with your current writing project, the time will come when you need to edit. I don’t mean rework your plot, heighten dramatic tension, or beef up your protagonist’s motivations. Rather I’m referring to that nitty gritty editorial process of looking at your work word by word, sentence by sentence, and examining the language you’ve used. Do your descriptions dance on the page? Have any cliches snuck into the mix? If you had to read aloud in front of an audience, would you find yourself running out of breath?

Sentence-level editing involves more than checking for missing words or making sure your Find-and-Replace changed a character’s name all the way through your manuscript. This is your chance to shape up your prose and show your skills, not just as a storyteller but as a wordsmith. But a manuscript can be a fairly long document, and sometimes it’s hard to remember everything you want to check as you work your way through from first page to last.

Here’s a handy cheat sheet of things you might want to keep in mind while editing:

1.  Cut your adverbs and make your verbs stronger.

2.  Rework any cliches.

3.  Eliminate filler words and phrases, such as “currently”, “that”, and “in order to.”

4.  Refer to people as “who” not “that.”

5.  Cut repetitious words and/or phrases.

6.  Divide long, hard-to-read sentences into two or more shorter sentences.

7.  Fix any inadvertent double negatives in long, complex sentences.

8.  Hyphenate modifying words.

9.  Minimize use of “very” and “really.”

10. Beware of overusing passive voice/passive verb structures (is/was/-ing verbs).

11. Double check the definitions of any words you’re not 100% sure you know.

12. Determine and weed out any words, actions, or punctuation that you personally overuse as filler, such as characters smiling or taking deep breaths, ellipses in the middle or end of dialogue, exclamation points, etc.

13. Replace general words with specific ones, such as “thing(s)” or “stuff.”

14. Cut unnecessary chit-chat from dialogue; limit conversations to substance that moves your story forward.

15. Limit distinctive dialogue quirks or movements to a single character; don’t give “signature” details to more than one person unless there’s a reason (child emulating a parent or older sibling, etc.).

Of course, these are just a sample of common errors you should be checking for at this stage of the editorial process. Depending on your writing style and personal habits, you will add to (or maybe subtract from) the list to customize it for your own use. Likewise, many of these are aspects of usage to keep in mind but not hard-and-fast rules. For instance, I don’t expect you to wipe every single adverb from your work, merely to avoid overusing them. Reliance on adverbs suggests your verbs need to pull more weight, but adverbs on their own are not evil parts of speech.

Clarity should always be your first goal. You wish to tell a story and have your reader understand it. Beyond that, you combine your personal voice and writing style with the style in which you’ve chosen to write this particular work in order to impart everything else to the reader — setting, tone, atmosphere, culture, etc. Use this editorial phase to hone those details for consistency and strength of impression. It’s your last chance to polish your prose, eliminate the ordinary and unnecessary, and make your work sparkle.

The Taxman Cometh

Nephele Tempest

We’re counting down to tax day — April 15th here in the U.S. — which means some folks are scrambling to find their receipts and their statements and all of their various forms to take off to their accountants, while others are playing with tax software or reading through the intimidating tax brochures meant to walk you through filling out the forms yourself.

Writers and taxes have a contentious relationship at best. Writers understand that several aspects of their chosen careers are the very things that raise red flags with the IRS, such as taking a deduction for a home office space, research trips, and other costs of doing business. But that’s no reason to panic.

Whether you’re a new writer who has yet to make any money or a seasoned pro, it’s important to be diligent in your record keeping throughout the year, and to consult with a tax advisor in order to be certain of the tax laws, which tend to change pretty frequently.

A few tips:

Save everything. All those receipts from your trip to a writers’ conference, your books, cabs taken, office supplies, everything. Make sure you jot down a quick note on the back of the receipt regarding what the item was, and its purpose. If it’s a cab or restaurant receipt, indicate if you left a tip, and the amount.

Keep records of bills. If you work from home, you can deduct a portion of your heat, electricity, etc., so be sure to have copies of those household bills in with your work receipts. Likewise, if you pay for your own health insurance as a self-employed writer (as opposed to receiving coverage from a day job or through a spouse’s plan), those bills are also deductible.

Take pictures of your home office space, including any furnishings you’ve designated for work use, such as your desk, computer, bookcase, etc. This documents the existence of your dedicated office so that if you move and are later audited you have proof of that office’s features.

Don’t assume everything you do or purchase that seems “writerly” is automatically deductible. If you spend a thousand dollars every year on novels for your own reading pleasure, you can’t necessarily consider them all “research” materials. Talk to your tax advisor about the sorts of items that you can legitimately call work expenses, and under what circumstances they count.

Organize as you go. Set up a system that’s easy for you to remember and then take a little time once a week or so to keep it going. A simple accordion file with A-Z labels can be an easy way to track receipts. Designate categories that make sense to you and that will simplify the tax process when you sit down to actually do your taxes — whether on your own or with an accountant. For instance, you might separate your receipts out by Technology (computer, printer), Travel (accommodations, food, transportation), Conference fees, Office supplies, Insurance, Books and magazines, Utilities, and so on.

Plan for quarterly taxes. Self-employed individuals, for whom there is no company withholding a portion of their paychecks to send to the IRS, are required to pay their taxes on an installment plan, sending in a partial payment four times over the course of the year. The first year you file as a writer, you won’t need to worry about this, but as you wrap up that first tax return, you will be given the option to calculate your quarterly tax payments for the following year, with the first payment due April 15th, and subsequent payments to be sent on the 15th of June, September, and January. You will pay next year’s taxes based on whatever you earned this year, and must pay at least that amount. If you make more money than anticipated, you will make up the difference the following April. If you end up making less, you’ll get a refund. However, if you pay less than you did the previous year, and also end up owing more, you’ll owe a small penalty on top of the difference.

The safest bet is to plan to pay each quarter, and that means setting aside a portion of every check you receive as a writer to cover those tax bills. It can be difficult, especially in early days when the money might seem like small potatoes, or even later, because writers’ paychecks tend to come in waves — money when you sign a contract and then nothing until you turn in a manuscript, or royalty checks only a few times each year. But the better you become at remembering those tax bills on the horizon, the more likely you’ll be to set aside the money necessary to cover Uncle Sam’s demands. With a little planning and some good deductions, you’ll end up with some money left over at the end of the day.

 

Obligatory disclaimer: I’m not a licensed tax professional, so please do speak with your own tax advisor regarding how to best handle your own tax return.

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.