So here’s what happened to me today. I have to say, it’s a pretty fabulous way to start my week.
This year’s complete list is in the May/June issue of Writer’s Digest.
writing
Polish Your Prose: An Editorial Cheat Sheet
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.
Toil vs. Talent: The Myth of the Natural
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
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.
LA Times Festival of Books: Recap Part 3
With apologies for the delay, I bring you the rest of my recap of last weekend’s LA Times Festival of Books. I left off Sunday morning, and so continue with my second panel of the day, Bump in the Night, featuring authors Melissa de la Cruz, Deborah Harkness, Seth Grahame-Smith, Richard Kadrey, and Paul Tremblayas moderator. This entertaining group of writers all have produced works that focus on vampires, witches, zombies, and so on, and so talk swiftly turned to the popularity of the horror/paranormal genre, particularly in recent years.
As Deborah Harkness pointed out, this is not a particularly new phenomenon. We have embraced the darkness in our entertainment for centuries, it just happens to be a cyclical love, where at some points in time we are more intrigued by the subject than at others. After all, Anne Rice’s vampires spawned a pretty loyal and voracious readership when they first hit bookstores, as well. These writers suggested that horror and paranormal taps into the imagination, but that also the sense of fear that accompanies the reading of some of these books — or the viewing of films, etc. — is an affirmation of life, something particularly important when things in the world around us seem to be less than encouraging.
Each author went on to discuss how they started writing their more well-known works. Harkness discussed her experience with the wall of vampire books at the airport in 2008, which I mentioned in the previous part of my recap. De la Cruz talked about wanting to write about the Hamptons, but the less glittery area that is really just a small community, and what it would be like to bring paranormal entities into that enclave. Kadrey talked about creating his Sandman Slim stories, which were really started based on his coming across the name he’d scribbled in a notebook on one page, juxtaposed against the idea of the hitman from hell, which he’d written in another notebook.
Grahame-Smith is the author of, among other things, PRIDE AND PREJUDICE AND ZOMBIES and ABRAHAM LINCOLN, VAMPIRE HUNTER, and he also wrote the adaptation of the latter for film. He spoke to that experience, which required him to do some serious rewriting of the book’s arc because there is no single villain or satisfying Hollywood ending in the original story. But the book idea came to him while he was traveling on his book tour for ZOMBIES. All the bookstores had that same wall of vampire books that Harkness experienced, but the other best-selling titles of the time were the Abraham Lincoln biographies and texts released in honor of Lincoln’s bicentennial celebration.
My next panel was Fiction: Visionary Eyes, featuring Aimee Bender, Elizabeth Crane, Ben Ehrenreich, Mark Leyner, and Edan Lepucki as moderator. The writers each read us a page from their work, which is always the type of thing that makes me add titles to my TBR pile. Elizabeth Crane, in particular, truly engaged the audience with her single-page story titled “Bed,” in which she imagined, among other things, a real-life encounter with Ryan Gosling, during which he calls her “girl” a great deal. Given the publishing industry’s (among others) current fascination with Gosling, it had the audience in stitches. Ehrenreich’s reading from his book ETHER was list-like but intriguing, covering a hugely disparate assortment of items his character has collected and laid out around a fire. Leyner read from THE SUGAR FROSTED NUTSACK, and really, nothing I say will convey his funny, in-your-face words and style, which breaks down that barrier between writer and audience and drags you write into the book. Bender read from THE PARTICULAR SADNESS OF LEMON CAKE, her recent fairy-tale-like novel where the young heroine discovers she can tastes the cook’s emotions when she eats whatever they’ve produced. Her passage was very neighborhood based, about the character growing up in a small patch of Los Angeles, and it drew you into the narrative in a very different way.
The differences between these writers’ styles is notable because they all managed the same thing — really involving the listener/reader in their material — in just a single page of text, even though they went about doing so in different ways. Lepucki opined that good books seem to teach you how to read them as you go along, giving you a sort of introduction to their approach and style and intent and voice within the first few pages that allows you to say, yes, okay, I see how to approach this material now. She asked if the writers were conscious of this while writing, and most had to say they weren’t — that they really weren’t thinking about the readers that much while they were writing — with the exception of Leyner, who’s style is much more obviously addressing the reader.
My final panel of the day was less book oriented than the others. I attended The Nerds Shall Inherit the Earth, featuring John Scalzi, Maureen Johnson, Pamela Ribon, and Amber Benson as moderator. This was… more of a free-for-all for fans than anything else, but it was also highly entertaining, and yet sounded very much like any one of the dinner parties my friends and I throw, so that probably tells you a great deal about me and my circle.
The discussion kicked off with the defining of “nerd,” and for the sake of the panel it was agreed that they would not bother separating it out from all those other titles, such as “dork” or “geek,” but assume nerd encompassed all the sub-genres, so to speak, as well. From there they agreed that to be a nerd is to love something at an extreme level, without embarrassment or apology or concern for whether it is cool or in fashion. As Scalzi noted, if a nerd meets a person and hears that they share a love of X, the nerd will want to be best friends and discuss X until the end of time. (Whereas a hipster will immediately panic that their interest has become too mainstream, if that person likes it, and will disavow any interest in the subject.)
After that conversation rambled around things the panelists loved or were nerdy over, their first “nerd crushes,” and whether or not there were too many nerds in the world these days. They also discussed how technology has advanced and become sufficiently mainstream as to make being a nerd much more acceptable, unless, of course, you’re in high school, at which point it’s still pretty hard to be a nerd.
To give you a vague taste of the panel, we heard about Maureen Johnson’s experiences on the trapeze (worst thing she’s ever done), Pamela Ribon’s love of the horse-break-up videos teen girls seem to be posting on YouTube, Scalzi’s strategy for winning fantasy football (he lets the computer make his choices), and more. It was a very enjoyable way to close out the festival.
LA Times Festival of Books: Recap Part 2
I’m back with more tales of my adventures at the LA Times Festival of Books, continued from my post yesterday. In the afternoon I attended a panel on Fairy Tales, that specifically addressed current works of fiction that use fairy tales either as their jumping-off point or as their thematic foundation. Speakers included authors Aimee Bender, Sarah Shun-lien Bynum, and Trinie Dalton, with Nan Cohen as moderator.
Fairy tales seem to be experiencing something of a resurgence in modern-day fiction. The panelists discussed the appeal of this format, and how at their heart, fairy tales are very simple, basic tales that focus more on imagery and emotion than on character or plot. In fact, characters in fairy tales can more often than not be described as their archetypes rather than by any distinctive characteristics: the witch, the princess, the king, the prince, the fairy, the giant, etc. The authors found that framework appealing, since with the structure already imposed on a story to some extent, the author is no longer burdened with having to come up with a unique, original story structure. Instead, they can look for ways in which to partake of a rich storytelling tradition; how can their fairy tale play off the tropes and foundations of the genre’s history? One example was the way in which many popular recent novels have turned the fairy tales on end by addressing the point of view of the villain, and giving the reasons behind their actions.
My final session on Saturday was titled Mystery and Magic in Mind and Matter, and featured K.C. Cole as moderator, Deborah Harkness, and Tim Page. This panel fell into one of those mysterious categories that appear on the festival schedule every year, where you have to squint a little bit and maybe peer at the panelists sideways to get an idea what they have in common. In this instance, the common thread seemed to be a curiosity about the world; Cole has spent years as a journalist covering virtually every topic imaginable, Harkness is the author of the recent novel A DISCOVERY OF WITCHES as well an academic specializing in the history of science from the 1500s through the 1700s, and Page is a professor of journalism and music with a varied publishing history as well. These people love learning things. They’re interested in the world, in systems, and in uncovering information. Harkness came to write her novel, in part, because she stumbled across what she calls the “wall of vampire books” in an airport bookstore in 2008 and realized that if all these supernatural beings existed, it might be interesting to know what they did for a living. The panel was an intriguing demonstration of all the ways in which a writer can turn their own fascinations in fodder for their books.
Sunday morning kicked off bright and early with Fiction: World Building, featuring John Scalzi, Lev Grossman, Frank Beddor, and Charles Yu as moderator. That’s quite a few colorful characters for 10am, and I was glad to have had my morning coffee already, because they were certainly on their toes. Discussions ran to how one creates a fictional world, specifically whether one builds from the inside out or the outside in. The difference here is that some books are written because there is a story and a protagonist, and the writer creates the world around that focus, whereas when building from the outside in, the writer creates the fully fleshed out world and then runs a story or adventure through that existing landscape. Tolkein, for example, built up Middle Earth and created the various languages of the land because that was his primary interest, and then he went back and inhabited his world with the stories of THE HOBBIT and THE LORD OF THE RINGS. He worked very much from the outside in. Grossman cautioned that, whichever way an author approaches that world building, it is important to keep the world from overshadowing the story you’re trying to tell. It is possible to get so caught up in the details of your world — politics, architecture, history, food, clothes, creatures, geography — that it drowns out your characters and their adventures.
Scalzi and Grossman did entertain the audience for a bit with an impassioned argument over who has the last say in world building, specifically in reference to fanfiction and its effect on canon. Scalzi insists that the writer, as original creator, can know things about his/her world that might not be included in the books, but that makes the knowledge no less valid. Grossman, on the other hand, believes in the sanctity of the text, where it’s only true if it ended up in the book.
The example used was J.K. Rowling mentioning in an interview after all the Harry Potter books were complete that Dumbledore was gay, despite never having said so specifically within the books. According to Grossman, this was not to be considered part of canon, despite the source, whereas Scalzi felt it certainly was canon, whether or not fans liked the information. He went on to point out that Rowling had mentioned the fact to Steve Kloves, the screenwriter, at an earlier point, to keep Dumbledore from making a remark in one of the films that would have suggested he was heterosexual, and that in an intolerant society such as the one these stories depicted Dumbledore was not likely to be out of the closet. (Personally, I felt that the descriptions of Dumbledore’s clothing and the hints of scandal revolving around his friendship with Grindelwald pointed toward his sexual orientation; she wasn’t likely to be explicit in a children’s book.) Regardless, it was interesting to hear a debate surrounding fanfiction that had nothing to do with concerns of copyright or legality.
And on that note, I’ll leave the final bits of my recap for tomorrow. Check back to hear about the rest of my Sunday panels.
LA Times Festival of Books: Recap Part 1
The LA Times Festival of Books is one of my most favorite events of the year. I don’t always manage to attend — it depends on my travel schedule and what else is going on — but if it is at all possible, I go for the entire weekend. The festival takes place over two days and features a combination of open-air stages with performances, readings, etc.; panels and interviews held within the classrooms of the University of Southern California (and previously UCLA); and tent after tent of goodies from the various exhibitors, ranging from bookstores to literary magazines to writing programs to publishers and more. There is music, cooking demonstrations, poetry readings, and random moments of entertainment. This year I spotted a man in full cowboy garb, doing rope tricks in front of one of the tents. There are plenty of activities geared toward beginning readers, as well. Best of all, the festival is free to attend, though tickets are given out on a first-come, first-served basis for the indoor events due to limited seating. Needless to say, they draw a huge crowd every year.
There are always more panels that I wish to attend than actual time to go, with things overlapping all over the place, forcing me to make hard choices. I try to get a balance of subjects, but inevitably I find myself gravitating toward certain speakers. This year I seemed to be following John Scalzi, Deborah Harkness, Aimee Bender, and Lev Grossman around, not through any conscious effort but just because it worked out that way.
The first panel I attended was Lev Grossman interviewing John Green. Green, for those unfamiliar with his work, is a successful author of several young adult novels, most recently THE FAULT IN OUR STARS. Grossman is a senior writer and book reviewer for Time magazine, and gave Green’s novel a stellar review when it came out at the beginning of the year. They discussed the book, of course, and Green’s own background and how that led him to write STARS. They also discussed how books about star-crossed lovers often seem to feature other books within them — books one of the characters finds important or inspirational — and how Green himself used this in his own work. He made an intriguing comment that the book within the book — unlike the book you actually write — can remain the perfect vision from your head, exactly as you imagine it without getting muddied by the actual effort of writing it down. It remains perfect because it’s not real.
He also talked about shitty first drafts. About writing hundreds of pages that eventually got discarded because they were more about him showing what he’d learned while researching for the book than they were about what worked for the story. It doesn’t matter where an author is in their career; shitty first drafts are inevitable.
From there I went to a panel on Writing Young Adult Fiction, featuring authors Libba Bray and Pete Hautman. These writers are notable for the diversity of their subject matter. Neither has allowed themselves to get too focused when it comes to genre or story type; they write the books they want to write and readers keep coming back for the quality of the worlds they create, be they realistic or fantastical.
The discussion kicked off with a look at the young adult market overall. There’s been a great deal of talk about how popular young adult books have become, with some going so far as to call it a golden age for YA lit. Hautman pointed out that there were more people writing, which made for more competition and a need to bring your A game to the table. Distribution has also improved, making it easier for readers to get hold of the books they want to read.
Bray added that, despite all the progress that has been made, there is still so much more that needs to be done to improve the young adult books in the market. She stressed the need for more diversity of subject and of characters — race, religion, sexuality, geography, etc. She and Hautman both suggested that this is not just the job of the publishers, but of writers and readers. People need to demand the books they want, and support the appearance of books that fit the categories that interest them. If a certain type of book does well, publishers look for more of that type of book — regardless of the characteristics making it popular.
I’m going to end this recap here. Check back for more on the festival tomorrow.
Market Mania: Why a Book Flies Off the Shelves
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
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
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.