By: Heidi MacDonald,
on 10/25/2015
by Thaddeus Howze [Editor’s note: There’s been a lot of controversy over how The Walking Dead treats its non-white characters. While I was impressed with the number of people of color in the cast, they haven’t always survived the zombie apocalypse in heroic fashion. But everyone dies in a zombie apocalypse, you may say. I […]
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By: Brian A. Klems,
on 2/13/2015
“If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.” ― Toni Morrison
I’ve always loved Morrison’s saying. The idea that everyone has the potential to write his or her own favorite book is an appealing one, and it’s natural that writers will want to write the kind of books they like to read. But it’s not always as simple as that. What if you enjoy reading about courtroom dramas, and you’re not a lawyer or a judge? What if you love the idea of creating layers to your novel by using architecture, but you’re not an architect?
How do you write the book you want to read if you’re not an expert in the field? Here are a few tricks I learned while writing my debut novel, THE SECRETS OF MIDWIVES:
Column by Sally Hepworth. A graduate of Monash University, Melbourne,
Australia, Sally started writing novels after the birth of her first child. She has
lived around the world, spending extended periods in Singapore, the U.K.,
and Canada, and she now writes full-time from her home in Melbourne,
where she lives with her husband and two young children. Her debut US
novel is THE SECRETS OF MIDWIVES (St. Martin’s, Feb. 2015), a novel
about three generations of midwives that author Liane Moriarty described
as “women’s fiction at its finest.” Connect with Sally on Twitter.
1) Start by making a list of ALL the elements in the book you want to read
The book you want to read is more than just ‘courtroom drama’ or ‘architecture’ or ‘midwives’. While planning your novel, think about all the things that excite you when you read. Do you like a bit of romance? Some mystery? An unforeseen plot twist? (Remember: It’s okay to have more than one of these in your novel, in fact, it’s a good idea). Look at your favorite books and see what they have in common. Ask yourself: what drives the plot in the books I like to read?
Once you have your answers, make a list.
It will look something like this:
– Mystery
– Menace
– High stakes – death?
– Romance
This list will become your roadmap to writing the book you want to read. And once you have your roadmap…
2) If you are not an expert in your chosen topic, read widely
The best way to sound like you know what you’re talking about is to know what you’re talking about. In preparation for writing your novel, read as widely as you can about your topic—fiction and non-fiction—until the terminology and practices become second nature. As you read, keep your list (point 1) at the forefront of your mind, making notes of how you can incorporate what you’ve learned to create mystery and menace, heighten the stakes, and test the romances you’ve created.
(When can you finally call yourself a writer?)
3) Enlist an expert
Books are a wonderful start when researching a topic, but nothing will ever beat a flesh and blood expert. If you already know that person, wonderful. If not, don’t panic. I’ve found that when I tell people I am writing a novel, they are generally happy to answer my questions as long as I am respectful of their time. I always follow up with a small gift or note of thanks (particularly important if you want to ask them again.)
4) Stop talking to your experts
When it’s time to start the actual writing, focus on the story. If you’ve immersed yourself in enough research you’ll be surprised by how much knowledge you’ll bring to the page. Now is not the time to double-check the type of gasoline your protagonist’s car would take or what kind of plants would grow in the garden at this time of year. Write the scene as best as you can and mark areas with an X that need to be followed up on or fact-checked. And remember, when it comes down to it, you’re writing a novel not a text-book. Readers will forgive you for making a few mistakes if your novel is gripping enough.
5) Don’t lose sight of what your book is really about
Sometimes, in an attempt to jam everything on your list into your book, your plot can start to feel random. But the book you want to read should be bigger than its topic, or the sum of its plot points. The theme is what your book is really about…in effect, it is the glue that holds your novel together. Sometimes the theme presents itself right away, and other times you don’t see it until the second or third draft. Regardless of timing, when your theme emerges, grab it and use it to add meaning and layers to your plot. And when your plot is more than what happens next, guess what? You have a novel. Maybe even a great one. Maybe even the book you want to read.
(Should You Sign With a New Literary Agent? Know the Pros and Cons)
This guest column is a supplement to the
“Breaking In” (debut authors) feature of this author
in Writer’s Digest magazine. Are you a subscriber
yet? If not, get a discounted one-year sub here.
I (Chuck) Will Instruct At These Great Writing Events Soon:
Your new complete and updated instructional guide
to finding an agent is finally here: The 2015 book
GET A LITERARY AGENT shares advice from more
than 110 literary agents who share advice on querying,
craft, the submission process, researching agents, and
much more. Filled with all the advice you’ll ever need to
find an agent, this resource makes a great partner book to
the agent database, Guide to Literary Agents.
Add a Comment
By: Chuck Sambuchino,
on 2/11/2015
I’ve been selling books for more than fifteen years and learning to write novels even longer. Of all the author readings and Q&A sessions I’ve hosted (and attended), one of the most common questions among beginning writers, even curious readers, is this: Do you start with an outline?
You’ve heard the pros and cons. An outline helps organize your thoughts and prevents you from spinning your wheels and traveling down dead-end storylines. The flipside, of course, is that constructing an outline boxes you in and limits the possibility of discovery, which is the most creative and rewarding part of writing.
Column by Jamie Kornegay, author of SOIL, to be released March 10,
2015, from Simon & Schuster. The book, a combination of literary suspense
and Southern gothic, was called “gripping” and “haunting” by Kirkus Reviews.
He lives in the Mississippi Delta, where he runs an independent bookstore,
Turnrow Book Co. Connect with him on Twitter — @JamieKornegay.
First, it’s important to note that there are no ironclad rules to novel writing. Every writer works differently and stumbles upon his or her preferred method through trial and error. The novel, rather than writing advisers, should tell you what it needs.
The traditional term paper outline, with its Roman numerals and letters, is helpful to organize a finite amount of information, but a novel is more amorphous. I couldn’t begin to collect a novel’s potential in an outline, though I certainly understand the impulse. There’s something terrifying about the blank page and its stark white emptiness. What could you put there that anyone would want to read?
It’s only natural that a writer would wish to escape such a daunting task. If an outline is a way to get the paper dirty, then go for it. Just remember that those first scratchings are exploration. Don’t lock yourself into a story that you haven’t discovered through hard work. The wheel-spinning and dead ends and wasted time are part of discovering what your book is about, and if you bypass that, you’re opting for ease and convenience over depth of storytelling. Nothing worthwhile comes easy.
After the spark of an idea, the fuel for your story is character. If you don’t yet know the character as intimately as you know your best friends, then how can you decide what that character will do when matched with the conflicts of the novel?
While imagining your characters, you will naturally develop scenes and storylines and bits of history. Once these begin to accumulate, then you have something to attach to an outline. For me, an outline is an expression of the novel’s structure, which gradually reveals itself, like hacking a totem out of simple log.
My first published novel, Soil, began like many other books – with a single image. I was driving past flooded farmland and saw a stump sticking out of the muck. For a fleeting moment, I thought it was a corpse. What if it had been? That would be a nightmare to deal with. I began to imagine a landowner happening upon the body, growing scared and paranoid. He might worry about becoming a suspect. What if he didn’t tell anyone, just got rid of it? How would he cover it up completely, taking every precaution so that no trace of it would be discovered? This kind of morbid daydreaming is the stuff of novels.
I reasoned out creative answers to my own tough questions. I slowly began to understand the main character, his motivations and obsessions. I wrote wasted pages and dead ends galore. Eventually I found the right path. I could feel the story gaining traction as new characters arrived and ideas poured forth. It was time to make the outline.
I kept my outline informal, intuitive. I used the outline almost like flypaper to trap scenes and ideas that were coming quicker than words, as my characters were finally alive and could make their own decisions about the story.
The outline helped me negotiate the tricky framework of Soil, which is told somewhat out of sequence. It’s one of my favorite aspects of the book. The structure came out of a desire to maintain that initial sense of mystery I felt after discovering the “body” in the field, all the hows and whys and the slow discovery of my characters’ secrets and motivations.
The novel is divided into five sections comprised of several chapters each. Each section opens with a strange, hopefully compelling episode, and then goes back in time to reveal how the characters reached this point. I thought this looping effect generated a nice suspense, and it also informed the deeper themes of Soil, specifically the cycles of nature and our inevitable return to the earth. If I did my job right, then the complicated structure should not present a stumbling block to the reader. It took careful planning, and my own specially designed outline.
The book I’m currently working on has a linear structure, told over the course of a week. Each chapter is a day, and understanding that from the outset allows me to work out of sequence easily, depending of what inspiration strikes me or what I find during my day-to-day life to steal and apply to the novel.
Just remember that an outline shouldn’t decide the story, your characters do that. An outline is where you string up the pieces to see the big picture and make your novel is a coherent whole.
This guest column is a supplement to the
“Breaking In” (debut authors) feature of this author
in Writer’s Digest magazine. Are you a subscriber
yet? If not, get a discounted one-year sub here.
Other writing/publishing articles & links for you:
Your new complete and updated instructional guide
to finding an agent is finally here: The 2015 book
GET A LITERARY AGENT shares advice from more
than 110 literary agents who share advice on querying,
craft, the submission process, researching agents, and
much more. Filled with all the advice you’ll ever need to
find an agent, this resource makes a great partner book to
the agent database, Guide to Literary Agents.
Add a Comment
By: Chuck Sambuchino,
on 1/20/2015
While working on my book Process: The Writing Lives of Great Authors, I found that even for the best writers in the world, getting started can be the hardest part. Here’s how 5 great authors found what they needed to get started on their very first novels…
(16 things to do prior to sending your work out to agents & editors.)
Column by Sarah Stodola, author of PROCESS: THE WRITING LIVES OF GREAT AUTHORS. She has contributed to the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Daily Beast, and Awl, as well as Condé Nast Traveler and Slate, among others publications. She founded the literary journal Me Three and served as an adjunct scholar for Lapham’s Quarterly. Sarah is currently the editorial director of Strolby.
1. Toni Morrison
The Spark: A Writing Group
Morrison was a 35-year-old professor at Howard University when she joined a writing group just for fun. It soon became clear that she couldn’t remain in the group unless she actually wrote something, so she began toying with a story based on an African American girl she remembered from elementary school, who had proclaimed her wish to have blue eyes. Not too long after, Morrison divorced and moved to Syracuse, where she had few friends. To pass the time, she brought the story from her writing group back out and began expanding it into a novel. Five years after she started, Morrison had completed The Bluest Eye.
2. David Foster Wallace
The Spark: A Comment by his Girlfriend
A college girlfriend mentioned to Wallace one night that she’d rather be a character in a book than a real person. The comment hit Wallace, and he found himself turning it over and over in his mind, trying to figure out exactly what she’d meant by it. He pondered the difference between a fictional character and a real-life person, and how language could play a part in shaping our understanding of both. The idea became the catalyst for a story that developed over the course of Wallace’s final year at Amherst College into The Broom of the System, a novel about a woman who doesn’t believe in her own reality. Wallace turned the novel in as his senior thesis and a couple years later, it was published.
3. Zadie Smith
The Spark: The Turn of the Millennium
Fully anticipating a career in academia, the 20-year-old Zadie Smith nevertheless set out to write a novel about a man who comes out of the 20th century in a positive way. She worked on what eventually became White Teeth during her last couple of years at Cambridge University (“when everybody else was getting drunk,” she told The Rumpus in an interview), finishing most of it before she graduated. She showed it to a trusted group of five or so friends periodically along the way, readers she says were crucial in the development of the book. Like Wallace, Smith’s first novel came out when she was just 24.
(Excellent Tips on Writing a Query Letter.)
4. Ernest Hemingway
The Spark: A Trip to Spain
After stints as both a newspaper reporter in Kansas City and Red Cross ambulance driver in wartime Italy, Hemingway returned home just long enough to get married and gather his thoughts. Then he moved to Paris, where his fiction ambitions began in earnest. He showed promise, but nothing more, until a fateful trip to Spain with friends to take in the bullfights. The idea for The Sun Also Rises came to him and he got started before the group even began the return leg of the journey; indeed, the characters in the novel were based closely on those friends who had joined Hemingway on that particular trip. The novel spewed forth—Hemingway claimed to have averaged 2,000 words per day while working on the first draft—and he finished it in well under a year.
5. Joan Didion
The Spark: A Newspaper Blurb
A young Didion came across a newspaper article while working at Vogue in New York City and feeling homesick for her native California. It was a mere blurb about a man charged with killing his farm’s foreman in the Carolinas, but the image stuck. She relocated it to California and turned it into the seminal scene for a novel, which she worked on at night in a sublet Upper West Side apartment. With half the book written, she sent it off to publishers, the lucky 13th of which accepted it and paid her a small advance to write the last half. Run, River came out with Didion was 28 years old.
Hook agents, editors and readers immediately.
Check out Les Edgerton’s guide, HOOKED, to
learn about how your fiction can pull readers in.
Other writing/publishing articles & links for you:
Your new complete and updated instructional guide
to finding an agent is finally here: The 2015 book
GET A LITERARY AGENT shares advice from more
than 110 literary agents who share advice on querying,
craft, the submission process, researching agents, and
much more. Filled with all the advice you’ll ever need to
find an agent, this resource makes a great partner book to
the agent database, Guide to Literary Agents.
By: Brian A. Klems,
on 1/7/2015
(The column excerpted from WRITE AWAY: A YEAR OF
MUSINGS AND MOTIVATION FOR WRITERS)
6 IMPOSSIBLE THINGS (by Jenny)
It’s the New Year, and the blogosphere is teeming with resolutions. Last year, so much—well, let’s call it “debris”—hit the fan that we’re all ready for a clean, fresh start. And I think this national January pastime of resolution-making is particularly compelling for writers. Starting a new project, completing an old one, editing, querying, classes, conferences—we have no shortage of goal-worthy pursuits.
I usually make resolutions. This year, however, I’m trying something different, inspired by Tim Burton’s reimagining of Alice in Wonderland. Early in the movie, when Alice remarks to her stick-in-the-mud potential fiancé that she wonders what it would be like to fly, he asks her why she would spend time thinking of such an impossible thing. She can’t imagine why she wouldn’t and tells him that her late father sometimes believed in six impossible things even before breakfast.
Near the end of the movie, as Alice battles the ferocious Jabberwocky, she gathers her courage by reminding herself to believe in six impossible things. “One: there’s a potion that can make you shrink. Two: and a cake that can make you grow. Three: animals can talk. Four: cats can disappear. Five: there’s a place called Wonderland. Six: I can slay the Jabberwocky.”
She does slay the beast. Then she returns to tell the dull Seamus that she won’t marry him. Instead, she embarks on an exciting new business adventure with her father’s friend. Inspired by Alice’s moxie, I’ve decided that instead of making resolutions this year, I will believe in six impossible things every day before breakfast. For example:
1. Chocolate can make me thin
2. I can win a million dollars just by using my Discover Card
3. My kitchen can stay clean for longer than five minutes
4. I can master time management
5. With the right shampoo, my hair can look like Jennifer Aniston’s
6. I can vanquish the dreaded slush pile like my own personal Jabberwocky.
My rational mind knows that the odds of these things happening might not be in my favor—and probably a kajillion-to-one for #2—but there’s something very liberating about giving myself permission to be open to the idea that anything can happen. As Alice’s father says, “The only way to achieve the impossible is to believe it is possible.” What impossible things will you believe in this year?
Kerrie Flanagan is the Director of Northern Colorado Writers, an accomplished freelance writer, author and publisher. Her articles have appeared in the 2015 Children’s Writers and Illustrator’s Market, as well as the past four Writer’s Markets,Writer’s Digest and The Writer. She is the author of three books and the founder of Hot Chocolate Press. Jenny Sundstedt is a member of Northern Colorado Writers (NCW) and serves on the creative team for the annual NCW Writer’s Conference. She writes long and short fiction, essays, overly ambitious to-do lists, and since 2010, has been a regular contributor to the NCW blog, The Writing Bug. Their book, WRITE AWAY, is available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kindle, Nook and Kobo. The book combines monthly insightful and humorous stories with tips, tools and interactions that encourage writers to reflect on where they are and where they want to be. Here are two essays from the book for you to enjoy.
MOVING BEYOND WANT (by Kerrie)
Those who become successful writers are not always the most talented ones, but they are always the ones who did not give up. They pushed through the tough times, they passed those who dropped out, and they made the decision to cross the finish line.
Someone told me that what you want becomes irrelevant without a decision. This is so true when it comes to writing. I come across people all the time who say they want to be writers. They talk about all the things they want to write, or all the novels they want to finish. But they never do anything about it.
There are so many things I want. I want to spend a year in Alaska, I want to see the Northern Lights, I want to attend the Book Expo of America, I want to publish a short story… Are all of these things possible for me? Of course they are. I just need to make a decision to stop wanting and to start doing.
Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen created the Chicken Soup for the Soul empire. This would not have happened if they hadn’t decided to publish the first Chicken Soup for the Soul book. They also decided that NOT publishing it was NOT an option. So, they persevered. They didn’t quit after 20, 50, 100 publishers said no. When someone said “no,” Jack and Mark would say, “next.” After 123 rejections, Heath Communications gave them the yes they had been waiting for. They have now sold over 100 million Chicken Soup for the Soul books.
Is this the year you will move beyond wanting to write and make the decision to actually be a writer? Are you willing to do what it takes to finish that novel, write that article, start that blog, or find an agent? Are you ready to invest time in your writing, have confidence in your abilities, and push through to the finish line? If so, this is going to be a great year for you.
Other writing/publishing articles & links for you:
Your new complete and updated instructional guide
to finding an agent is finally here: The 2015 book
GET A LITERARY AGENT shares advice from more
than 110 literary agents who share advice on querying,
craft, the submission process, researching agents, and
much more. Filled with all the advice you’ll ever need to
find an agent, this resource makes a great partner book to
the agent database, Guide to Literary Agents.
By: Brian A. Klems,
on 1/5/2015
There is nothing that jolts a reader out of a sense of place and time more effectively than using a modern voice for a Victorian heroine, no matter how richly detailed the description of her gorgeous crinoline and pantalets. “I need my own space,” certainly informs the reader that your heroine is upset, so upset she must be alone. But any young woman from the 1800s was more likely to murmur: “I have some letters to write.” And before her startled beau has a chance to respond, has left the room back rigid with outrage. Authenticity enhances atmosphere and keeps the reader in the world you have created for them. Otherwise you are writing a costume drama set in 21st century America. Here are five ways to take your readers back in time and keep them there…
GIVEAWAY: Tessa is excited to give away a free copy of her novel to a random commenter. Comment within 2 weeks; winners must live in Canada/US to receive the book by mail. You can win a blog contest even if you’ve won before. (Please note that comments may take a little while to appear; this is normal).
Column by Tessa Arlen, the daughter of a British diplomat, who lived
in or visited her parents in Singapore, Cairo, Berlin, the Persian Gulf,
Beijing, Delhi and Warsaw by the time she was sixteen. She lives in
Washington. She now lives in Washington, DC. Her first novel is
DEATH OF A DISHONORABLE GENTLEMAN (Minotaur, Jan. 2015),
which Publishers Weekly described as “Lively… Mystery fans eager for
yet another look at the quasi-feudal system that prevailed in England before
WWI will be most rewarded.” Library Journal said “Readers of this debut
set in Edwardian England will feel as though they’ve stepped into an
episode of Downton Abbey, complete with murder and intrigue
upstairs and downstairs.” Connect with Tessa on Twitter.
1. A passion for the period. Become familiar with the time you are writing about: eat, sleep and breathe it. What time in history is popular for fiction? It doesn’t matter. There are thousands of historical novels about the Tudor period, but there is always room for one more if you are prepared to dig to find other perspectives on Henry VIII’s reign – other than his interminable love-life and his tendency to execute wives that disappointed. Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall and Bring up the Bodies are a testament not only to her diligent, painstaking research but to her decision to reverse our perceptions of two of the Tudor court of Henry VIII’s bad-boys: Thomas Cromwell and Cardinal Wolsey. She made them sympathetic, loyal men who struggled to do their best for their monarch in trying times, while keeping the events that took place contextually accurate. Mantel created an entirely new perspective on a well-used period in history.
(What are the BEST writers’ conferences to attend?)
2. Complete Immersion is the name of the game. When you are compiling your reading list for research add several works of fiction contemporary to the time you are writing about. This will help you tune in to the way people expressed themselves and what they were interested in. If possible listen to music that was played at this time, read the plays that were performed and find out about the period’s pastimes and hobbies. English Victorians for example loved to play parlor games that were often rowdy and boisterous with names like Clumps and Dumb Crambo! The politics of the age are a huge indicator as to what was going on in the world you want to your reader to experience. Find out what people ate according to their station in life. Nothing makes mediaeval history come alive more vividly than describing a feast in sumptuous detail: “They feasted on roasted swans, geese, heron and quail. A peacock was cooked and then reassembled in its feathers. There were meat pies and fish tarts, and thick soups of Egerdouce and Bukkeanade.” From Aliki’s Mediaeval Feast. Far more exotic than another description of the dress your heroine wore to the banquet! Collect photographs and prints of the time period, the houses they lived in, the clothes they wore and have them around you as you plan your story.
3. Homework before play. No matter how intriguing the plot you are cooking up and you can’t wait to tell this wonderful story, do your research before you start writing. Once you are a master of your subject you are less likely to commit horrendous mistakes like inadvertently describe someone happily pedaling their bicycle down a lane in 1830. Not everyone will know that you mistakenly invented the peddle-bicycle in 1830 instead of 1869 – but those who do will be infuriated and they might write a review in Goodreads telling everyone that your knowledge of the 1830s is sketchy! It took me days to find out how fast a motor car could go in 1912, and I am sure no one really cared that the top speed for a two-seater Bugatti was 60 mph, but I cared and it kept me on point. Accurate research is a habit.
4. On writing Brit-speak. If you are writing about English history subscribe to the Oxford English Dictionary on-line and you will be able to check the first usage of a word and whether it is of N. American origin or English or Scots. So much less in keeping to say: “He landed his Farman airplane on a grassy field, four miles outside of Oxford.” When the English referred to these contraptions as aeroplanes in 1912. Or: “He ran up the steps to the stoop of a London row-house.” Rather than: “He ran up the steps to the portico of a terraced house in London.” And be aware that in Scotland, Ireland, England and Wales they use the same basic vocabulary but often use different colloquialisms. If you are writing about the British aristocracy two very useful books to have in your library are Burke’s Peerage and Debrett’s. This way you can research the ranks of the aristocracy for accuracy when creating your upper-crust characters and not call a baron: Sir Esmond.
(9 Tips on How to Write a Query Letter)
5. Real people. A wonderful way to keep your time period authentic is to include both historical and imagined people, places and events without informing the reader which is real. Try including a historical figure if he or she was involved in whatever kind of situation or political movement the novel is about. This will help create a strong sense of time and place and allow the reader to see the issues that were relevant to the time you are writing about. If you have several historical figures you can give each of them a brief bio at the back of your novel under Historical Notes.
Beware! Historical research is addictive! In the years it took me to research and write the first book in my Lady Montfort historical mystery series: DEATH OF A DISHONORABLE GENTLEMAN, I began to find the other-world of the early 1900s a far more attractive place than the one we inhabit today. But that is the delight of writing historical fiction.
GIVEAWAY: Tessa is excited to give away a free copy of her novel to a random commenter. Comment within 2 weeks; winners must live in Canada/US to receive the book by mail. You can win a blog contest even if you’ve won before. (Please note that comments may take a little while to appear; this is normal).
This guest column is a supplement to the
“Breaking In” (debut authors) feature of this author
in Writer’s Digest magazine. Are you a subscriber
yet? If not, get a discounted one-year sub here.
Other writing/publishing articles & links for you:
Your new complete and updated instructional guide
to finding an agent is finally here: The 2015 book
GET A LITERARY AGENT shares advice from more
than 110 literary agents who share advice on querying,
craft, the submission process, researching agents, and
much more. Filled with all the advice you’ll ever need to
find an agent, this resource makes a great partner book to
the agent database, Guide to Literary Agents.
By: Chuck Sambuchino,
on 11/5/2014
How many emotions do you experience in a week? A month? If someone told your story, what emotions would they put on the page? Think about your lowest moment and your best experience. I know it’s scary, but if you want your stories to have power, you have to be willing to be vulnerable. You have to be willing to translate your emotions and experiences into ink and paper.
Maya Angelou said, “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” This is true for life and fiction. Emotion is what will carry your story to the end and leave your readers with a lasting impression. If you can make someone laugh, cry, or ache, you have done your job as a novelist. You have made them feel.
Column by Brandy Vallance, author of the acclaimed historical inspirational debut
THE COVERED DEEP (Worthy, Oct. 2014). Brandy fell in love with the Victorian time
period at a young age, loving the customs, manners, and especially the intricate rules
of love. Since time travel is theoretically impossible, she lives in the nineteenth century
vicariously through her novels. Unaccountable amounts of black tea have fueled this
ambition. Brandy’s love of tea can only be paralleled by her love of Masterpiece
Theater Classics, deep conversations, and a good book. Brandy is the 2013
Operation First Novel winner and the 2012 winner of the ACFW Genesis Contest
for historical romance. Find Brandy on Twitter and Facebook.
Suspense author Brandilyn Collins says, “You should never apologize for human emotion.” I think as writers sometimes we’re afraid to let people know that we feel as deeply as we do. We’re tempted to write half-truths in the fear of being judged. But you have to decide what kind of writer you’re going to be. If you truly want to write fiction that is unforgettable, you have to be willing to go deep.
Think of your favorite novels. Why do you love them? Did they portray real, raw, deep emotion? It wasn’t until I embraced this that I began to succeed as a novelist. My critique group partners started saying my scenes made them laugh or cry. Shortly after, I began placing in writing contests.
(Definitions of unusual literary terms & jargon you need to know.)
As you’re writing, remember that to be human is to feel. So get all that on the page—all that anger, hope, passion, love, rage, despair, anxiety, and shame. Go toward the subjects that scare you. As Ernest Hemingway said, “There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at the typewriter and bleed.”
If a scene I write doesn’t make me feel, then I know I need to work harder, go deeper, explore more. My particular rule for writing—If it doesn’t scare me, there’s no power. When what you’re writing scares you, it’s usually a sign that you’re being real. When you start to worry about what others will think, that is the writing that will affect people the most. The only way to achieve that is by going to your most vulnerable places.
As most of you know, there is courage needed to finish a book. Sometimes you have to get up early just to write. Sometimes you stay up late. Months go by and people question what you’re doing. This, in and of itself, is a place of vulnerability. You wonder if all the hours you’re pouring into your book will come to anything.
But then, there comes a point when you can’t live without the writing. You look up at the clock and the hours don’t matter anymore. A smile comes when you get a phrase just right. You start to dream your story. It, and its characters come alive. The story is part of you now. You breath it and it breathes you. You begin to believe that someday it will make a difference. Amidst a feeling of unparalleled euphoria, you finally type THE END.
Now comes the scariest part of all, and a step that requires a great deal of courage. You know your story is good. You’ve laughed, you’ve cried . . . In other words, you’ve been vulnerable, your writing has made you feel, and it will do the same for others. You’re going to put your story out into the world and believe that something will happen. You know there’s a chance you’ll get rejected, but hey, you’ve read accounts of how all the greats went through that too. And now, since you went through all those dark hours that required vulnerability and courage, your finger hovers over the send button and you know that you can. So you press it. You feel all happy and light, but then in about 2.5 seconds you’re kind of terrified. And then you have to go gather your courage again.
(Classifying Your Book: How to Research & Target Literary Agents.)
But, this is what we do. We’re the brave ones. By writing fiction, we are vulnerable. We tell stories, and that is no small thing. If you’re on the fence about writing something or submitting, just employ that thing you’re so good at already—courage and vulnerability. Here’s a secret: I almost didn’t enter Operation First Novel, but at the last minute, I hit send.
Yes, being vulnerable is hard. But, it’s the only way to succeed as a writer and have a powerful story. You can do this. Go change the world.
This guest column is a supplement to the
“Breaking In” (debut authors) feature of this author
in Writer’s Digest magazine. Are you a subscriber
yet? If not, get a discounted one-year sub here.
Other writing/publishing articles & links for you:
Want to build your visibility and sell more books?
Create Your Writer Platform shows you how to
promote yourself and your books through social
media, public speaking, article writing, branding,
and more. Order the book from WD at a discount.
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By: Chuck Sambuchino,
on 11/3/2014
When I first started writing fiction, I never expected to end up writing YA. But once I discovered what a vibrant, challenging category it was, I was hooked. I love young adult fiction, and I love the authors working in the category. Explaining to my friends and family, though, what YA is and why I was taking my career in a new direction was a bit of a challenge. Here are some great reasons to write or read YA, and why I do it myself:
Column by Kate Brauning, author of HOW WE FALL, a YA first cousins
romance releasing November 11, 2014. She grew up in rural Missouri and
fell in love with young adult books in college. She’s now an editor with
Entangled Publishing and pursues her lifelong dream of telling stories
she’d want to read. Kate loves unusual people, good whiskey, dark
chocolate, and everything about autumn. Visit her on Twitter: @KateBrauning.
1) A wide audience. By writing YA, we’re not crossing out adult readers. YA isn’t a reading level, it’s a category of story about a particular stage in life. Many of my adult friends thought if I started writing “teen fiction” it wouldn’t be a story they’d enjoy. But about half of YA readers are over 18, and a huge portion of the adult readers of YA are over 30. I didn’t find YA and start reading it myself until I was in college—and I’m so glad I did find it, because it reminded me how honest and surprising and deeply human fiction can be.
When you write YA, you’re writing to a wide, diverse audience. Adults buy and read YA all the time. Of course, it’s important to write with teen readers in mind, too, since they’re a significant portion of the audience, and no one can sense preachy messages or condescending stories like a teen.
(Headed to a conference? Learn how to approach an agent.)
2) A point of change. YA explores the teenage years of a person’s life, and those years are a significant point of change for most of us. Teens are tackling adult issues for the first time—serious relationships, jobs, shifting authority structures, new limits and opportunities—but they’re doing it without the experience and often without the resources that adults may have. It’s a vulnerable, heady, thrilling stage in someone’s life. Teens are also adjusting to greater independence and more authority in their own lives, but might still be dealing with limitations at odds with those things, like curfews, not having a car, house rules, and the structures of school. I didn’t start reading YA until I reached my twenties, and I wish I’d found it earlier—seeing so closely into the lives of other teens who are wrestling with the same changes and struggles I was would have been so helpful as a teen. I still find myself identifying with the characters in these stories, because people never stop struggling with change. You don’t grow out of YA.
The experiences we have in our teenage years are formative ones, and the mistakes and choices we make can follow us into adulthood. There’s great opportunity, uncertainty, and passion in those years, and they leave a mark on us. So when you write YA, explore that point of change.
3) Trying new things. Experimenting with craft is another reason I love YA. It’s a brave category. Novels in second person and novels in verse. Unreliable narrators. Thick, several-hundred-page stories. Companion short stories or novellas. Genre-blending, and epistolary-style novels with texts, blog posts, letters, and graphics. So much can be done in YA, and no story is off-limits. I love being challenged as a writer, seeing a tough story and figuring out how I can tell it, and YA is a great place to be doing that. Don’t let yourself be limited by what has or hasn’t been done before—explore new devices, new ideas, and new ways of telling these stories. Like teens themselves, YA is known for being brave and taking risks.
Writing books/novels for kids & teens? There are hundreds
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latest Children’s Writer’s & Illustrator’s Market.
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4) Exploring tough issues. One of the main reasons I love reading and writing YA is that the category tackles such tough issues. Along with all the new independence, vulnerability, and vibrancy of teen life come problems—things we’d like to think teens don’t have to deal with, but are so often a part of their lives. Our ideas about adolescence are often at odds with the struggles of it. The weighty, bitter truths of growing up sometimes get painted over when we think about childhood. Like adults, teens have to deal with bullying, neglect, abuse, physical and mental illness, assault, discrimination, addiction, broken relationships, loss, regret, and personal failures. YA fiction is a great place to explore what those teen years really look like, and how we can adjust, heal, and reinvent ourselves. And sometimes those harsh truths take over, and YA can give us those stories, too. Sometimes the biggest struggles are crushes and cliques at school, but that’s not usually the case. The best YA is genuine and honest about what it means to be a teen.
(What writing credentials will impress an agent or editor?)
5) Why not? A final reason I love YA is that there’s no reason not to. Teens are every bit as complex as adults, and they can think as deeply, too. Of course they can. Teens aren’t a more simplistic or less demanding audience, and their stories aren’t any simpler or less worthy. When I came to YA as an adult, what drew me in was the depth of these stories, and that’s what I’ve stayed for, too.
Teens are people, and people have fascinating stories. There’s no reason we shouldn’t write or read their stories, and there’s every reason to do exactly that. We read and write YA to remember that stage in life, to explore, to see someone else’s life, to empathize. To keep the teenage part of ourselves alive. For catharsis. For fun. To be challenged. To think. To create, and to participate.
The stories in YA are first and foremost human stories. When you write YA, keep that in mind, because regardless of which category we put it in, that’s the core of a good story.
Other writing/publishing articles & links for you:
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By: Chuck Sambuchino,
on 11/1/2014
We writers are familiar with what I like to call Itchy Finger Syndrome. It’s that sensation of words backed up in your veins, yearning to escape onto the page. Stories whispering in your ear that want to be told. Yet, as writers we tend to get blown about by that elusive creature: the market. Here’s why you should write what you need to write — even if others are telling you otherwise.
Headshot credit: Colleen Barrett.
Column by Emmie Mears, who, when growing up, yearned to see girls in books
doing awesome things, and struggled to find stories in her beloved fantasy genre
that showed female heroes saving people and hunting things and decided the best
way to see those stories was to write them herself. She now scribbles her way through
the fantasy genre, most loving to pen stories about flawed characters and gritty
situations lightened with the occasional quirky humor. Emmie inhabits a cozy domicile
outside DC with and two intrepid kitties, where she is currently hard at work on an
epic fantasy and preparing for her next urban fantasy release, STORM IN A TEACUP,
due out in late January 2015. Her first release was the urban fantasy,
THE MASKED SONGBIRD (Harlequin, summer 2014). Connect with
her on Twitter.
1. The Market Can Launch You by the Seat of Your Pants…Or Just Give You a Wedgie.
You’ve heard the advice not to follow trends just to follow them. Publishing is a slow-moving beast, and just because something’s selling like frozen lemonades in a Manhattan July now doesn’t mean two years from now it’ll do the same. I still remember the words of a prominent literary agent at the 2012 Writer’s Digest Conference when she told me, “Four years ago I could have sold this in a heartbeat.”
If you try to write what seems popular right now, there is a chance you’ll hit a trend on the upswing. Maybe. But you might end up like I did: with a novel involving vampires that no agents would touch with a haz mat suit and a claw-grabber.
The thing is, you don’t know until you try. If you have a book burning inside of you to be written, write it. If it’s vamps? Maybe you’ll bring them back from the dead.
(Hear from authors who are marketing themselves and selling books online.)
2. Only You Can Write It
You are a unique person with a unicorn-shaped cache of experiences. No one out there has a history just like yours. It doesn’t matter how crazy your idea sounds on paper until you actually get it on paper. Don’t try to write someone else’s best story; write your best story.
When I wrote my first books, a lot of the story was abysmally derivative of the books that influenced me as an adolescent and as a young adult. Anyone who’d grown up on the same books would be able to point to them and know exactly where certain ideas had come from. But they helped me find my voice. It takes writers a while to find that style, that flavor, that je ne sais quoi that sets you apart from everyone else. So do your thing and learn yourself. You’ll be better for it.
3. Writing More = Better Writers
No one wants to hear that their book might not sell, but that’s a sharp truth of this business. The flip side is that each book you write will teach you how to be a better writer if you let it. Writing outside your comfort zone challenges you to think differently about what you do write when you’re mentally lounging in PJs and leaving chunks of popcorn in the keyboard.
And you know what? Even if you have to trunk a manuscript now, five years from now you might end up digging it out, giving it a good primp and polish, and selling it.
4. It Frees Your Brain
Sometimes we all get sucked into projects that we don’t “feel” 100%. Maybe the original spark of inspiration fizzles. Maybe we’re under contract and have to let a pet project simmer until we finish something else and send it packing to our editor or agent. Maybe we’re getting paid for it. I always try to have a project handy that is my passion project. If I’m lucky, all my projects fit that description, but sometimes when you’re mired in revisions for what seems like the fourteenth decade in a row, you need to clear your head.
That’s what writing that passion project can help you through. Whenever I’m stuck on a project, I take a day and work on one I really want to do, whether it’s creating a new calendar for an epic fantasy or plotting out the next book in a series I can’t wait to return to. Not only does this allow me some breathing room, but I crank out more work when I go back to the necessity project.
(What query letter mistakes will sink your submission chances?)
5. It’s Why We Do It
It’s easy as writers — especially when slogging through the query trenches, hunting the elusive Agent Beast, and generally trying to get your name on a shelf — to get caught up in the stress of chasing the next milestone. Writing the book that begs you to write it brings you back to why you started in the beginning. The itch of the fingers, the tickle of a story coalescing in your brain, the rush of watching a world spin into being under your keystrokes.
So do it. Write the book you need to write. Maybe it’s the book others really need to read.
Are you a subscriber to Writer’s Digest magazine
yet? If not, get a discounted one-year sub here.
Other writing/publishing articles & links for you:
Want to build your visibility and sell more books?
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and more. Order the book from WD at a discount.
By: Chuck Sambuchino,
on 10/29/2014
2014 was a busy year—I released my first middle grade book, THE JUNCTION OF SUNSHINE AND LUCKY, and my third young adult, FERAL. Both books actually started out in younger age categories: the first draft of THE JUNCTION was a picture book, and the first draft of FERAL was an MG. Having been through the process of changing manuscripts’ age categories, I’ve learned a few tricks for better understanding, at an early drafting stage, which category is right for a juvenile WIP:
1. Don’t forget your overarching concept. My MG, THE JUNCTION OF SUNSHINE AND LUCKY, is about a young girl who becomes a folk artist; with her grandfather’s help, they turn their home into a folk art environment. My initial idea was to write a picture book—the illustrations, I imagined, would grow increasingly wilder as the property became covered in sculptures and whirligigs. Consistently, though, early editorial response was that the concept of folk art was just too advanced for the picture book readership—teaching me not to get so caught up in ideas external to the text that I lose sight of the main concept that the book is built around.
GIVEAWAY: Holly is excited to give away a free copy of either one of her two most recent novels to a random commenter. Comment within 2 weeks; winners must live in Canada/US to receive the book by mail. You can win a blog contest even if you’ve won before. (Please note that comments may take a little while to appear; this is normal).
Column by Holly Schindler, author of the critically acclaimed A BLUE SO DARK (Booklist starred review, ForeWord Reviews Book of the Year silver medal recipient, IPPY Awards gold medal recipient) as well as PLAYING HURT (both YAs). Her debut MG, THE JUNCTION OF SUNSHINE AND LUCKY, released in 2014, was called by Kirkus Reviews as “…a heartwarming and uplifting story…[that] shines…with vibrant themes of community, self-empowerment and artistic vision delivered with a satisfying verve.” FERAL is Schindler’s third YA and first psychological thriller. Publishers Weekly gave FERAL a starred review, stating, “Opening with back-to-back scenes of exquisitely imagined yet very real horror, Schindler’s third YA novel hearkens to the uncompromising demands of her debut, A BLUE SO DARK…This time, the focus is on women’s voices and the consequences they suffer for speaking…This is a story about reclaiming and healing, a process that is scary, imperfect, and carries no guarantees.” Find Holly online with her blog, on Twitter, or on Facebook.
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2. Listen to your character’s voice. Auggie, the protagonist of JUNCTION, speaks in frequent simile and metaphor—her poetic worldview is the reason she’s able to become an artist using found items or “junk.” (Metaphors compare two dissimilar objects—which is much like the process of Auggie seeing a potential flower in a broken toaster or wind chimes in a rusted old car.) Many of the same poetic phrases from the original picture book are included in the final MG version—a sure sign that the book should have been MG all along.
(Is it best to query all your target agents at once? — or just a few to start?)
3. Try your hand at description. FERAL was originally drafted as an MG mystery. During the revision process, the description began to take on a much darker tone—so much so, I began to suspect the book needed to be a YA.
I know now that rather than working all the way through a draft, focusing primarily on plot development, it’s best to take some time to write several passages of solid description. What kind of details do you find yourself gravitating toward? Would you call your passages gritty or sweet? Simple or complicated? This will give you a better idea of whether your book is trending younger (MG) or older (YA).
4. Examine your character’s life experiences. We aren’t the same people at seventeen that we are at thirteen. In fact, when I got the inkling that FERAL needed to be a YA, I realized that my original protagonist would no longer work. I had to brainstorm a new, older main character. When I explored this new protagonist’s backstory, I discovered that she’d endured a brutal beating. That was when I knew that my theme (or overarching concept) would actually be recovering from violence—and the genre would be psychological thriller. All of this only confirmed my suspicion that the book needed to be YA.
(When can you refer to yourself as “a writer”? The answer is NOW, and here’s why.)
Your own main character can help you early on, as well—long before the revision process. Brainstorm your character’s likes and dislikes, his or her attitudes. Of importance here is not only the attitudes themselves, but the reason(s) why your character has these views or beliefs. What experiences has this character had? And, of equal importance in juvenile lit, what has your character not yet done? This will give you a glimpse into how old your protagonist is (and, as a result, what age category your book should be).
I still believe in the power of successive rewrites; going over a book multiple times allows an author to include subplots and to tie together themes, making a book richer and stronger. But bumping a draft up (or down) to a new age category can result in a complete overhaul—it’s far better to nail the age category right from the start.
GIVEAWAY: Holly is excited to give away a free copy of either one of her two most recent novels to a random commenter. Comment within 2 weeks; winners must live in Canada/US to receive the book by mail. You can win a blog contest even if you’ve won before. (Please note that comments may take a little while to appear; this is normal).
Writing books/novels for kids & teens? There are hundreds
of publishers, agents and other markets listed in the
latest Children’s Writer’s & Illustrator’s Market.
Buy it online at a discount.
Other writing/publishing articles & links for you:
Want to build your visibility and sell more books?
Create Your Writer Platform shows you how to
promote yourself and your books through social
media, public speaking, article writing, branding,
and more. Order the book from WD at a discount.
By: Chuck Sambuchino,
on 10/13/2014
The first revision is probably the most important factor in sculpting your novel. One of my favorite quotes to express this idea is by Shannon Hale who wrote: “I’m writing a first draft and reminding myself that I’m simply shoveling sand into a box so that later I can build castles.” The first revision is the building of those sand castles. There are numerous tips to a successful rewrite, but I’ve found three that I’ve put at the top of my list to make my novel better.
Conflict check.
On my rewrite, I first do a conflict check. Kurt Vonnegut once wrote that every character in a scene should want something, even if it’s only a drink of water. On my first draft, I will usually focus on the main plot point of the scene. In doing so, I miss opportunities to add tension, great and small, to a chapter. On the rewrite, I ask myself: what does every character in that scene want, and what obstacles are standing in his or her way.
(Classifying Your Book: How to Research & Target Literary Agents.)
— 
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Column by Allen Eskens, author of THE LIFE WE BURY (Seventh Street Books Oct.
2014), a debut thriller that Publishers Weekly called a “masterful debut” in a starred
review. Allen has been a criminal defense attorney for twenty years. He honed his
creative writing skills through the MFA program at Minnesota State University as well
as classes at the Iowa Summer Writing Festival and the Loft Literary Center in
Minneapolis. He is a member of the Twin Cities Sisters in Crime. Find him on Twitter.
I have an equation taped to my computer; it reads: “The greater the want + the greater the obstacle = greater conflict. Conflict = suspense.”
Suspense is a state of mental uncertainty. Readers have a need to resolve that uncertainty and will forge ahead to find resolution. Adding more tension and conflict creates page-turning prose. Rarely does my first draft take advantage of all of the opportunities for tension and conflict.
Transitions.
Another aspect of a first draft that I skimp on is my transition from one scene to another. In the haste to get the first draft on paper, I tend to jump abruptly from one plot point to the next. During the rewrite, I remind myself that transition paragraphs need to do more than move the reader from plot point to plot point. They should be eloquent and have a weight of their own.
Reading a novel is like kayaking down a river. Sometimes you shoot through rapids, bound up in the excitement of the action. Other times you float along admiring the beauty of the hills and wildlife. The pace of a novel is the balance between those two competing forces (between plot and scene). As I revise, I ask myself, do I want this paragraph to float through the valley or dive over rapids? If I am floating, I spend time on it, maybe go off on a tangent that deepens the character or enriches the scene. If I am heading for rapids, my focus should be on a shorter transition.
This is an opportunity to show your writing skill. The transition doesn’t have to be long, but it should be fresh. Take for example, the opening line from chapter four of The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath. She writes, “At seven the next morning the telephone rang. Slowly I swam up from the bottom of a black sleep.” A simple transition, beautifully written. In a first draft she might have written: “the phone woke me up at seven the next morning.” The small addition of “I swam up from the bottom of a black sleep” turns it from a standard transition to something enjoyable to read.
(Headed to a conference? Learn how to approach an agent.)
The “was” edit.
The third thing I include in my first revision is what I call my “was” edit. I use my word-find function to locate every time I used the word “was.” On my first draft, I tend to be lazy and describe things using “was.” “He was taller than me.” “She was standing on the porch, waiting for him.” These are passive voice, and they violate the “show, don’t tell” rule. But in the haste of the first draft, I will type “was” and move on.
In the rewrite, I revisit each time I use the word “was” and ask myself if there’s a better way to write the sentence. It could be as simple as changing “he was taller than me” to “he stood three inches taller than me.” Or it could be more elaborate, like changing “She was standing on the porch, waiting for him” to “She found herself pacing back and forth across the same porch planks that her mother walked thirty years earlier, waiting for a man to return from the war.” I could go even further and write a tangent about the mother that gives the reader insight into the daughter’s character. But, then again, sometimes “was” fits just right and no change is needed. At least by doing a “was” edit, I’ve forced myself to examine my choice.
There are so many other considerations to a first revision, and every writer should have their own method, but these three tips have helped me in my writing.
This guest column is a supplement to the
“Breaking In” (debut authors) feature of this author
in Writer’s Digest magazine. Are you a subscriber
yet? If not, get a discounted one-year sub here.
Other writing/publishing articles & links for you:
Want to build your visibility and sell more books?
Create Your Writer Platform shows you how to
promote yourself and your books through social
media, public speaking, article writing, branding,
and more. Order the book from WD at a discount.
By: Chuck Sambuchino,
on 10/12/2014
It’s obvious that technology in the last ten years or so has changed our daily lives to an extreme. Cell phones, Facebook, Twitter, texting…on and on the list goes, and it’s growing every day. The way we communicate has been utterly transformed. Face-to-face interactions have decreased, while gadget-to-gadget interactions have increased. What does all this mean for the writer? Especially regarding our characters, and the way they communicate with each other inside our stories?
First, I think writers have to learn to walk the tightrope of not letting technology interfere too greatly with characters or plot, while at the same time being realistic with it. For instance, it would be unthinkable not to have a single mention of a character using a cell phone in a contemporary story. But how much technology is too much? Two main points worth considering, when it comes to characters and technology:
(Chapter 1 cliches and overused beginnings — see them all here.)
Column by Traci Borum, writing teacher and native Texan who’s an avid reader of
women’s fiction. She also adores all things British and even owns a British dog (Corgi).
She’s also completely addicted to Masterpiece Theater–must be all those dreamy
accents! Traci’s first novel, a romantic mystery titled PAINTING THE MOON, will be
published by Red Adept Publishing in June of 2014. (See the book trailer here.) It’s
the first book in her “Chilton Crosse” series. Connect with her on FB.
1) Character interaction is still better in person.
In real life: Let’s face it. Technology has created a new level of social rudeness. People tapping on phones in movie theaters or libraries, talking as loudly as they please, ignoring the scowls around them. I went out to dinner with an old friend last year, and he spent about eighty percent of the meal texting someone else! I was too nice to call him out, but honestly, it was just plain rude. He was having at least three different conversations with people. But I was the last one on the totem pole, even though I was right there in front of him, live, and in person!
In fiction: When I have two characters out to dinner, I’m probably going to forgo the sad reality of people texting at the table and ignoring each other, and instead allow my characters an actual conversation, face-to-face. (The exception, of course, is if I want to show that a character is rude, and therefore, I might have him/her texting the entire time. But unless there’s a purpose to technology being at that table, I’m going to push technology aside, to favor actual character interaction, no matter how old-fashioned it might feel).
2) Technology may hamper your plot choices and suspense.
In real life: Looking up a long-lost friend or sweetheart is as quick and easy as spending two minutes on an internet search or hopping on Facebook. Want to find that old boyfriend? Search for that long lost best friend you quit talking to in 1988? Just get online, do some quick searching, and voila!
In fiction: But what if I want a character’s search for someone to be slow? What if I want to let it simmer over 200 pages, have a character wonder and wait and second-guess herself as she tries—in vain—to find that lost love? It’s not realistic, in a contemporary story, to have her be out of touch with technology to the point that she doesn’t even attempt an internet search. So, I have to get creative. Draw out the search. Have her look for that person online, but come up empty (that still happens, so it’s in the realm of realism). Or, have her try and chicken out altogether. In order to create tension, to have the reader wonder if/when a reunion will ever occur, I might even have that lost love be untraceable.
(Secrets to querying literary agents: 10 questions answered.)
Funny thing is, the inspiration for this blog post came from an old episode of Seinfeld. I watched an entire episode devoted to a movie theater fiasco. Elaine, Jerry, George, and Kramer were supposed to meet at the movies, but things got in the way. In a comedy of errors, cabs got stuck in traffic, movies sold out, and everyone ended up missing each other (and the movie!).
Of course, it took place in the early 90’s, when cell phones weren’t attached to everyone’s ear. And as I watched the episode, what cracked me up more than the episode itself was that I kept thinking, “If the characters could just whip out a cell phone and call each other, they could’ve all met up at the right time and the episode would be over in about thirty seconds.” In that case, a cell phone would’ve changed the course of the plot entirely!
Bottom line: Using technology or not using it in your novels is completely up to you. There’s definitely a time and place for it in modern fiction (and, if it’s ignored completely, it can make the story feel unrealistic). Even better, writers can use technology to their advantage, to make a plot more compelling and suspenseful. But that’s a blog entry for another day…
Agent Donald Maass, who is also an author
himself, is one of the top instructors nationwide
on crafting quality fiction. His recent guide,
The Fire in Fiction, shows how to compose
a novel that will get agents/editors to keep reading.
Other writing/publishing articles & links for you:
Want to build your visibility and sell more books?
Create Your Writer Platform shows you how to
promote yourself and your books through social
media, public speaking, article writing, branding,
and more. Order the book from WD at a discount.
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By: Chuck Sambuchino,
on 10/8/2014
There isn’t a certified qualification or course on world-building (well, not in my neighborhood), but every story requires it. Whether your tale is set in a real place or an imagined one, you need to establish your characters’ world so that the reader can suspend disbelief and fully engage with their story.
Of course, the more differences to our own world you introduce, the more you need to focus on getting those details absolutely right – but you need to do it in such a way that they almost fade into the background so the reader is instead focusing on the characters and the story. You don’t need to explicitly create and explain all aspects of your world in the first couple of chapters. Without some story developing in these chapters your reader may not persevere further into the book.
GIVEAWAY: David is excited to give away a free copy of his latest novel to a random commenter. Comment within 2 weeks; winners must live in Canada/US to receive the book by mail. (Otherwise you will receive an e-book.) You can win a blog contest even if you’ve won before. (Please note that comments may take a little while to appear; this is normal).
Column by David Hair, a New Zealand-based author of three fantasy series.
The Aotearoa Series is a YA series published by HarperCollins in New Zealand.
The first novel, THE BONE TIKI, won Best First Book at the 2010 NZ Post
Children’s Book Awards. The series is built around the concept of two parallel
New Zealands — the modern world, and another magical world peopled by
legends, historical personages, and the ghosts of ordinary New Zealanders.
Hair has also written a four book YA series, The Return of Ravana, set in India
and published by Penguin India. Book One, PYRE OF QUEENS, won the
LIANZA award for Best YA Novel in 2012. The series is set to be re-released
in the UK in 2015 through Jo Fletcher Books. SCARLET TIDES, published
in October 2014 by Jo Fletcher Books (an imprint of Quercus), will be the
second book in his fantasy series The Moontide Quartet. Four books are
planned for the series. David currently lives in Auckland, New Zealand with
his wife Kerry. See more info about all his books here.
Personally, as a fantasy writer, I’m primarily interested in worlds where there are different rules to our own, changes which require the reader to go on a journey: to take on board a bunch of unlikely and/or impossible things. That could be an urban fantasy or horror story, where we’re dealing with our world plus, for example, adding some magic or supernatural elements) or it could be fantasy set in a completely imagined world (where everything from physical appearance to personal values, from languages to landscapes, are different).
So these are the things I think about:
1. What’s important in this place?
At its heart, a story is about conflict. Without that, there’s really little to tell. This could be two people or two nations, or even one person or group of people against society or the environment or nature. It might even be one person in conflict with themselves: that’s up to you: but once you’ve worked out what it is, you need a world for that conflict to inhabit:
For example, in the Moontide Quartet, I wanted to tell a story of intercontinental conflict in a fantasy world. The idea of a bridge linking the two continents sprang to mind, and thereafter the world-building for the Moontide world became about creating and justifying that bridge. Of course, the bridge has nice symbolic connotations about uniting and joining. To justify the intermittent nature of that bridge required tidal factors, and that had impacts upon the nature of the landscapes, and from there, the world began to take shape.
Once you’ve done this, you’re ready to think about the protagonists in the conflict, and how the landscape might impact on them. Drawing a picture showing these groups, and even a proto-map, is often useful now, as we populate our story (I love maps!).
(Would your story make a great movie? Here are 7 tips on writing a film script.)
2. Put the pieces on the board
If you think about what you’ve just done as setting up the game board, the next step is to lay out the pieces. Societies are not amorphous blobs: they are made up of people who are all trying to do their best to survive and perpetuate themselves and those they care about. Start with the basics:
This is where you have the opportunity to impart your own worldview: the things you hold to be true in the nature of the society you are creating. How is the society organized, what do they emphasize, what is their relationship with the environment and each other. Yours might be completely different, but the principles I apply to this are:
(Secrets to querying literary agents: 10 questions answered.)
You have to think about how the society you are creating actually functions. What are the lines of disagreement between groups? I like to think of society as being divided up into groups whose primary (but not exclusive) concerns are:
3. The Past
You don’t want to give the impression that your story world winked into existence just before Chapter One. How long has it been here? How did it get here? What are the big events that shape people’s behavior today? What are people’s beliefs about their creation, their purpose, their past and their futures? What divergent interpretations of these real or imagined events are present in society?
The more credible these things are, the more real your world will feel. But you have to build rationally, even in a fantasy setting. ‘Fantasy’ is not a synonym for illogical behavior!
4. Do the detail
Having created the big stuff, now you’ve got to think about the small stuff. It’s often the little details that make the world you’ve created real: tiny customs of dress or behavior that make a group of people come alive. I found inspiration in my observations of our world, partly because I wanted Urte to resemble Earth, but also because we have so much variety, so many fascinating people and places that it I think they’re worth celebrating.
So do some research into other cultures and think about how you might use variants of what you learn in your creation – always taking care to fit it all together seamlessly so that it feels right. Create cultures with their own speech patterns, dress codes and belief systems. How do the people relax? How do they express themselves creatively? To what do they aspire?
The thing to remember is that all of this needs to serve the story, not the other way round. Don’t lose sight of your central premise. If something looks like it is taking over, you need to pare back its importance, but still have it make sense.
5. The People Factor
Now, having set up the board and laid out the pieces, you need to personalize it. Each grouping will have opinion leaders and powerful people with needs and desires. They need to be fully rounded people, with positive points as well as flaws – people are always flawed, even someone who’s apparently perfect. And even if they’re almost ideal, you can bet their family or friends won’t be. Use them to move the conflicts along. And you need to keep in mind that if they’ve achieved a degree of success, despite their flaws, they must also have strengths: they must be worthy of the role (or at least capable of gaining it and holding it,) and they must fulfil it to the satisfaction of a powerful portion of those they lead (or have intimidated those they lead into letting them keep the role), or their time at the top will be short-lived. Give them a back-story, and think about their goals, in particular, what they think about the big issues, especially the conflict that is the heart of your story. In the Moontide Quartet the big conflict is the proposed crusade, and every important figure and group has a view.
As the events of your story unfold, you will find that the reactions of these opinion leaders to the latest events in your story will help to drive it forward, so stay on top of what they are thinking and doing, even if it is off-screen.
Next, having built your house of cards, prepare the wrecking ball . . .
(Hear from authors who are marketing themselves and selling books online.)
6. The Chaos Factor
So far, our goal has been to create a dynamic but mostly stable society. The important factor in that last sentence is ‘stable’. Society is always changing as it adapts to new things, but most of the time it does so in an incremental way.
But conflicts are inherently destabilizing, and that new factor could throw everything into chaos. This ‘chaos factor’ might be ultimately beneficial for most (like a revolt against a tyrant), or not (like a plague virus), but that’s up to you. The important thing for the story is that your world and the people in it react in a credible way to the disruption. Work toward a resolution:
– either the change leaves the world altered, or
– the change is averted and your society continues (relatively) unchanged.
As you can see, you can slice and dice your imaginary society in lots of ways, and what you get is COMPLEXITY. This is good: a complex world is believable, while a simplistic one isn’t. As a storyteller, you need think about how much complexity you want to show; never forget that all of this is to support the story, not be the story. You need to know all this stuff, but you don’t need to show it all. Often just making reference to your world-building (local jargon and customs, oblique references to past events, etc.) can be enough in the early chapters to let the action hook the reader; you can let the back-story seep out bit by bit as the plot develops.
Never forget the world-building is the backdrop and the props; the story close-ups should always be on your characters.
Finally, a couple of books I’ve found useful:
• Jared Diamond: Gun, Germs and Steel, for its brilliant explanation of how and why our world has evolved anthropologically the way it has; and
• Robert Kaplan, The Revenge of Geography, for its clear explanation of how the shape and nature of land shapes politics in our world.
GIVEAWAY: David is excited to give away a free copy of his latest novel to a random commenter. Comment within 2 weeks; winners must live in Canada/US to receive the book by mail. (Otherwise you will receive an e-book.) You can win a blog contest even if you’ve won before. (Please note that comments may take a little while to appear; this is normal).
Hook agents, editors and readers immediately.
Check out Les Edgerton’s guide, HOOKED, to
learn about how your fiction can pull readers in.
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By: Chuck Sambuchino,
on 10/7/2014
“Absorb what is useful, discard what is useless, and add what is specifically your own.” – Bruce Lee
Think of rejection and writing and you likely think of publishing. An author submits their work and receives a resounding no thanks. This, however, is only one form of rejection that writers face during their career. Bad reviews and paltry sales are also forms of rejection. Authors must also prepare themselves for these hits to their ego.
Column by Elene Sallinger, who hails from Washington, DC and first caught the
writing bug in 2004 after writing and illustrating several stories for her then four-
year-old daughter. Her writing career has encompassed two award-winning
children’s stories, a stint as a consumer-education advocate, as well as writing
The Chrysalis Series (romance/erotica). Her debut novel, AWAKENING, won
the New Writing Competition at the Festival of Romance 2011. Book 3 in her
Chrysalis series, UNSETTLED, was released July 2014. Connect with her on Twitter.
Will You Publish Me?
The most commonly acknowledged form of rejection for a writer is the rejection of one’s work by a publishing house. After spending months, if not years, shaping a story, you submit it hoping for acceptance and publication. Sadly, this is the exception, not the rule. The average writer is more likely to have a story rejected—often multiple times—rather than published immediately.
It’s important to note that this does not immediately translate to fault on the writer’s part. The acquisition process is subjective. A writer is at the mercy of the preferences of the editor and the publisher’s existing catalog. In other words, it may be that the story isn’t right for that publisher, not that the story isn’t worthy of publication. Hand-in-hand with this is the preference of the acquiring editor. As much as we all want to believe we are 100 percent objective, this isn’t so. Bias always exists and your story may not resonate with the editor leading them to reject it.
Many international bestsellers were rejected multiple times before finding the nirvana of fit and preference that launched their success. Twilight was rejected fourteen times. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone was rejected twelve times before the insistence of the CEO’s eight-year-old daughter convinced him to take a minimal risk on the book. The list goes on. Finding a publisher is like finding your mate, the first person you date is rarely the one you marry.
(What should you do after rejection?)
They Don’t Like Me, They Really Don’t Like Me
Here is a basic fact: You can’t please everyone, and the moment you try, you cease to write anything interesting. When asked why they write, most writers will say it’s because they have stories to tell; they can do nothing else. However, this fails to answer why a writer shares their work. One can write indefinitely without ever sharing a single word. I believe that writers share their work, because at our deepest psychological level, we seek to move people emotionally.
Like with publishing, most of us fantasize about this in a positive way. In our minds, our work resonates with readers leading to public acclaim and praise of our story. In truth, no book goes without negative reviews. Even the classics had their detractors. Publishers Weekly ran a hilarious article about famous authors trashing books now considered classics. Reading it certainly puts bad reviews in perspective.
You got a bad review, so what! The very fact that a person was moved enough to write that review means you did your job, you sparked an emotional reaction. Shake the negativity off. Unless they are pointing out functional errors like poor proofing or continuity errors ignore them. They represent one person’s individual opinion. Don’t make mountains out of molehills, and, above all else, don’t reply!
They’re Not Buying It
When a book doesn’t sell, or fails to sell in quantity, the immediate conclusion tends to be that the problem lies in the story. However, there is a fundamental difference between writing a book and selling a book. Clearly, writing a book is a function of plot, character development, etc. However, selling a book is a function of packaging and promotion with emphasis on the former. All the promotion in the world won’t help a poorly packaged book.
If you’ve released a book and it’s just sitting there rotting, before scrapping the book consider your promotion efforts. Are you getting the word out effectively? If you can comfortably answer yes, or you make changes with no effect, you need to reevaluate how the book is packaged. By this, I mean the cover and the blurb. Test your blurb with friends and colleagues. Would they read that story? Once you’re satisfied with your blurb, consider changing the cover.
(11 Frequently Asked Questions About Book Royalties, Advances and Money.)
Book cover design is an art that is rooted in psychology. Typeface, color choice, and imagery all spark autonomic emotional reactions. A bad cover on a good book can impact sales dramatically. Always consider changing a book’s packaging before turning to the story itself.
In the end, the thing to remember is that rejection, in any form, is subjective. Once you eliminate the functional, or the technical from the publishing process, what you’re left with is strictly subjective opinion. What you do with that is up to you.
What could be better than one guide on crafting
fiction from wise agent Donald Maass? Two books!
We bundle them together at a discount in our shop.
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By: Chuck Sambuchino,
on 9/22/2014
I am a traditionally published thriller author. My latest book No Time to Die just hit shelves this week. When I first started writing suspense fiction, though, I had very little idea what I was doing. It took a humble amount of trial and error to get in a groove and overcome basic rookie errors. Now, seven years later, I like to think I’ve figured out some tricks of the trade. I’ve also been extremely lucky to receive the support and mentorship of some of the top names in the biz, like Jack Reacher’s creator Lee Child and the late Michael Palmer. So without further ado, here are some tips for budding thriller writers that I wish I’d known from day one…
GIVEAWAY: Kira is excited to give away a free copy of her novel to a random commenter. Comment within 2 weeks; winners must live in Canada/US to receive the book by mail. You can win a blog contest even if you’ve won before. (Please note that comments may take a little while to appear; this is normal).
Column by Kira Peikoff, a journalist and novelist in New York who has written
for the New York Times, Psychology Today, Slate, Salon, and Cosmopolitan.com,
among many others. She is the author of LIVING PROOF (Tor, 2012) and
NO TIME TO DIE (Kensington, 2014), which was praised by best-selling
author Lee Child. Connect with her on Facebook and Twitter.
1) Structure Scenes like Mini-Novels: Each one should contain its own narrative arc, with rising action and a climactic moment that signals the end of the chapter. It’s good form to finish most chapters on a cliffhanger—especially the first one. A major dramatic question should be raised in the opening scene, and then resolved in an unexpected or unfavorable way to hurl the main character further into the conflict (and thus drag your readers into the story). Get your protagonist in trouble as soon as possible and never let her get too comfortable or too safe. As far as chapter length, I’ve found that an average of five pages (double-spaced, size 12) works well for keeping up the pace.
2) Plot Strategically to Avoid the Sagging Middle: This rookie error is one I had the misfortune of making early on: I wrote the beginning of a book and then abruptly ran out of steam about sixty pages in. When you’re staring down 240 blank pages without a plan, it’s easy to freeze up. Now I have a method. Once I have the main cast of characters and their conflicts, I conceive a new book in four sections. At the end of each section, I devise a major twist to launch into the next section and keep up the narrative momentum. Once I’ve figured out my four big plot points, I go deeper into plotting the concretes of each individual section, dropping red herrings and hints about the twists to come so that they will be logical without being predictable. This is the most challenging part of the process for me and is apt to change when I actually get to writing. I think of the outline like a highway: you can go off-roading from time to time but you get back on the highway to get to your final destination.
(How many markets should you send your novel out to?)
3) Alternate Character POVs: I love writing in third-person multiple vision, alternating between protagonist, antagonist, and usually another main character who has a stake in the central conflict. Getting into each character’s head increases suspense for the reader, who knows to anticipate the moves of competing characters and either roots for or against them to succeed. It’s the easiest POV choice to use in writing a thriller. When you follow Tip 1 and end each chapter on a cliffhanger, then switch to a new character whose scene also ends on a cliffhanger, the reader will be tearing through the pages to learn what happens. A word to the wise: the hardest POV choice is writing in first person—and keeping with only one character—for the entire story, because then you can’t create dramatic irony. (i.e. when the reader knows more about the stakeholders in the conflict than each character alone knows.)
4) Obscure POV when useful: Say you’re writing a murder scene but you want the killer’s identity to remain a secret. I wanted to pull this off in my new book, since the killer was someone surprising in the story, but I didn’t want readers to know who until way later. The trick is to write the scene from the victim’s perspective. Don’t allow the victim to know or recognize the killer—so you can have a dramatic, intense scene without spoiling the mystery. This is the first chapter of No Time to Die.
(Book Payments and Royalties — Your Questions Answered.)
5) Raise questions and delay the answers: This technique is the absolute key to suspense. Pique people’s curiosity and then make them wait for a resolution. While they’re waiting, introduce a new tantalizing question, and then delay that answer too. Once you can layer these successfully, you’ve got a page-turner. The famous author Pete Hamill told me once that writing suspense is about planting diving boards and then jumping off them later. Best advice I ever got.
Go forth and good luck!
GIVEAWAY: Kira is excited to give away a free copy of her novel to a random commenter. Comment within 2 weeks; winners must live in Canada/US to receive the book by mail. You can win a blog contest even if you’ve won before. (Please note that comments may take a little while to appear; this is normal).
Hook agents, editors and readers immediately.
Check out Les Edgerton’s guide, HOOKED, to
learn about how your fiction can pull readers in.
Other writing/publishing articles & links for you:
Want to build your visibility and sell more books?
Create Your Writer Platform shows you how to
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By: Chuck Sambuchino,
on 9/13/2014
Above your desk is a bulletin board, crammed with outlines, assorted index cards with character descriptions, fliers from places you went for research, cards from agents and editors you met at assorted writers conferences, a postcard from a favorite book (note to self: next query don’t forget to mention your story is just like this one!), yellowed movie stubs from Crazy Stupid Love and Pride and Prejudice, a calendar indicating all the dates from sent queries, and a plethora of erratically stuck Post-it notes of varying colors and sizes holding minutiae ranging from brilliant snippets of dialogue to the color of the suit your villain will wear when he jumps the hero behind the warehouse.
Below it is a bookcase full of craft books, 2009 Rand McNally Road Atlas, three Marble compositions crammed with notes from various lectures and last year’s Writer’s Market. Next to that is a desk supporting a dictionary, thesaurus, a votive candle/pen holder, a stapler, hand lotion, various manila folders holding bits and pieces of paper, a lamp, a coaster and coffee cup, a mouse and mouse pad, a spoon, your phone–charging–and lastly, the font from which all springs, your laptop, repository of two works-in-progress, five novels, three novellas, ten short stories and six or seven random pieces all patiently cooling, simmering, boiling within its hard drive, but even more so, the receptacle of your benighted heart.
Column by Gwen Jones, an Assistant Professor of English at Mercer County
College, in West Windsor, NJ. Her work has appeared in The Kelsey Review,
and The Connecticut River Review, and she is the author of WANTED: WIFE,
book one in the HarperCollins/Avon French Kiss series, and book two,
KISS ME, CAPTAIN (August 2014), which is about Captain
Dani Lloyd and her adventures with French shipping billionaire
Marcel Mercier. Book three is due by the end of 2014.
A writer of women’s fiction and romance, she lives with her
husband. Connect with her on Facebook or Twitter.
So there’s this, there’s all of this, and yet as hard as you work, shuffling schedules to make room for those two blissful hours alone, polishing that manuscript until it screeches surrender, querying in bunches and crossing your fingers, there it comes again, that blasted, callous bit of communication that so effortlessly denies you entrance. So you steal more hours, polish some more and once again type that header: QUERY: Historical Thriller 80k–and it’s almost as if you’re stuck in a copier churning out denied, denied, DENIED.
So what’s the secret? Who do I see? Where do I go? What do I do? Who must I screw? Oh don’t tell me–that’s got to be it! Why I know this person and she can barely write her own name and her fifth book is coming out next month! Don’t give me that “subjective” crap—that wears thin after the first hundred times! You have to know someone. You need to to get in the door. Or you have to write Steampunk. Zombies. New Adult.
(How can writers compose an exciting Chapter 1?)
Dystopian. Cozies. Historicals. Contemporaries. Thrillers. Forget Chick Lit! Nobody reads Regencies anymore. World War One’s Hot! She’s the new Nora! Stephen! Patterson! Asimov! We don’t care! Just as long as it’s original! The hell with the Big Five! Self-Publish! Trade paper. Mass market. Hard cover. Who needs paper? It’s a virtual world. Get a website. Blog. Tweet. Get a Kindle. Nook. Tablet. Download an audio file. Put the damn thing on Facebook and let the whole world see it. Churn out some fan fiction, tweak with some kink and watch your Bank Account Explode.
*facepalm* *headdesk* Sigh…
How much longer can this go on? How much can you possibly stand? When will you finally reach that tipping point when you can NOT take it any longer and you throw out your hands and give up? How much is finally enough?
(How long should a synopsis be? Is shorter or longer better?)
Got news for you sweeties. If you’re reading this and nodding your head then you’re in way, way, way too deep to get out now. You’ve got it bad and you’ll receive no sympathy from me. Congratulations. You are officially at the point of no return. Sounds like you’ve become what so far, you think you’ve been denied from becoming.
Sounds like you’re a writer.
Such is the writer’s reality. There isn’t one of us out there who hasn’t gone through similar trials and humiliations. We’ve all had to walk through fire. The thing is you earn the right to call yourself a writer if you keep going back for more. And why is that? Because writers write. We can’t help ourselves. It’s what we do because it’s what we are.
So get back to work. There are dozens of interns out there working late with fingers twitching on the “reject” button. Let’s do our damnedest to disappoint them.
Need help crafting an awesome plot for your
story? Check out the new acclaimed resource
by Ronald Tobias, 20 Master Plots.
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By: Chuck Sambuchino,
on 9/12/2014
You know those times when you wish you were completely alone? Not because you wish for peace and quiet, but because you hate the fact that others witnessed what just happened to you? I’m talking about those embarrassing moments, the ones when your face burns so hot that you feel like you might just melt down into the ground – and you wouldn’t mind if you did! You know, those moments!
Here’s my advice for what to do next time you have a mortifying moment: harness it. Use it to fuel your writing. Allow yourself to be empowered by embarrassment. It can add humor to your writing and boost audience appeal. Trust me, humiliation is hot. It is!
GIVEAWAY: Kami is excited to give away a free copy of her novel to a random commenter. Comment within 2 weeks; winners must live in Canada/US to receive the book by mail. You can win a blog contest even if you’ve won before. (Please note that comments may take a little while to appear; this is normal).
Column by Kami Kinard, who enjoys humor writing. Her latest novel,
The Boy Problem: Notes and Predictions of Tabitha Reddy released from
Scholastic in April 2014. (See the book trailer here.) Her first novel,
The Boy Project: Notes and Observations of Kara McAllister, debuted
from Scholastic in January 2012 and was a 2013 Children’s Choices
Reading List Pick. Kinard’s poetry, fiction, and nonfiction pieces have
appeared in and been purchased by some of the world’s best children’s
magazines including Ladybug, Babybug, Highlights, and Jack And Jill.
A former educator, she enjoys speaking at conferences and teaching
writing courses for children and adults. Kinard lives with her family in
Beaufort S.C. See her blog, Nerdy Chicks Rule, or connect with her on Twitter.
I cannot tell you how many times I’ve heard editors or agents at writers’ conferences say they were looking for humor. The fact is, humor sells because people love to laugh. And most people find it humorous when humiliation happens…as long as it happens to someone else! I can convince you of this with four letters. AFHV.
Because what is America’s Funniest Home Videos other than a video catalogue of embarrassing moments — moments so awkward that all you can do is laugh? This television show has held a prime time slot almost continuously for over two decades – proof that embarrassment sells!
(What should you do after rejection?)
Need further proof? Consider this: The teen magazine YIKES is entirely focused on embarrassing moments. It contains celebrity bloopers collected by the editors and embarrassing reader moments submitted by the audience. I hate to admit it, but each issue of YIKES magazine sells more copies than my first novel sold in its first year. Yikes indeed!
So now that you’re convinced there’s something better to do with your embarrassing moments than to push them out of your memory, try to work them into your writing. Start with your own embarrassing moment and project it onto one of your characters. There, that feels better, doesn’t it? You can apply that moment many different ways. Use it to evoke empathy for a main character, or to make the audience cheer when a villain gets what is coming to him! Want some hilarious examples? Check out one of Carl Hiaasen’s humor novels like Nature Girl.
Now ask yourself what could make the moment even more embarrassing? You write fiction, you’re allowed to embellish! Here are some tips for heating up the humiliation:
1) If it looks funny, it is funny! Alter your character’s appearance in a way that heightens the humiliation. Could your character be wearing a ridiculous costume? Be barely dressed? Author Robin Mellom takes full advantage of this strategy in her novel Ditched, where most of the action for the main character takes place while she’s wearing an 80’s prom dress her mom found in a consignment shop then guilted her into wearing – with shoes dyed to match!
2) Bigger audience = more embarrassment. You can easily raise the embarrassment quotient by raising the number of people who witness the moment. Tom Angleberger uses this technique in his best-selling book The Strange Case of the Origami Yoda. Tommy, the main character, is embarrassed by his friend Dwight who acts particularly odd at a school dance where everyone witnesses his antics. Mortification is multiplied by the number of viewers!
(How to help an author promote their new book: 11 tips.)
3) Eyes matter. Increase the intensity of the moment by ensuring key people are there to see it. The eyes of a love interest, boss, or celebrity make embarrassment even more awkward than it already is! When Tabbi, the main character of my novel The Boy Problem, trips over the cymbal stand in band and falls, of course her new crush is there to see her crash to the floor. (Plus the crashing cymbals amplify the anguish!)
4) When it comes to embarrassment, more is more. Extend the moment. Drag it out. In Sarah Mlynowski’s Bras and Broomsticks, the main character, Rachel, is klutzy. But her klutziness is taken to a whole new level during a fashion show when she steps on the skirt of another model, toppling an entire line of girls “like dominos.” Then things get even worse. There are screams, gasps, and a demolished Eiffel Tower prop.
Put all this together and you have one single piece of advice: apply your own real-life embarrassing moment to your characters, and ramp it up until it’s SO bad we just have to laugh. Next time you fall down the stairs after rejecting someone, or knock over a full container of straws in a packed McDonalds’s, don’t feel embarrassed, feel empowered! Your audience will love you for it!
GIVEAWAY: Kami is excited to give away a free copy of her novel to a random commenter. Comment within 2 weeks; winners must live in Canada/US to receive the book by mail. You can win a blog contest even if you’ve won before. (Please note that comments may take a little while to appear; this is normal).
Agent Donald Maass, who is also an author
himself, is one of the top instructors nationwide
on crafting quality fiction. His recent guide,
The Fire in Fiction, shows how to compose
a novel that will get agents/editors to keep reading.
Other writing/publishing articles & links for you:
Want to build your visibility and sell more books?
Create Your Writer Platform shows you how to
promote yourself and your books through social
media, public speaking, article writing, branding,
and more. Order the book from WD at a discount.
Add a Comment
By: Chuck Sambuchino,
on 8/29/2014
We have been writing Steampunk since 2009; and even after five years, we still face the question of the ages: What is steampunk? Perhaps a lazy, shallow way to look at the genre is to simply call it “Victorian Science Fiction” and that be the end of it. Truth be told, this is merely your first step.
While history looks at the 19th Century as the Industrial Age and the late-20th century as the Computer Age, the concept of computing devices were realized by mathematician, inventor, and engineer Charles Babbage as early as 1812. His mechanical computation devices at the time were considered more of a curiosity rather than innovation, but Babbage’s theories served as inspiration for The Difference Engine by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling. Best known for their offerings in cyberpunk, Gibson and Sterling created an alternative Industrial Revolution where Babbage’s inventions were the norm, creating a struggle between the working class Luddites (who fear technology) and an “enhanced” elite that wanted as much integration with these technological wonders as possible.
(What is the definition of “New adult”? That, and many more definitions explained.)
Column by Pip Ballantine and Tee Morris, who have been writing professionally
for over a decade, but The Ministry of Peculiar Occurrences series is their first
collaboration as writers. Their first title in the series, Phoenix Rising, won the
2011 Airship Award for Best in Steampunk Literature, while both Phoenix Rising
and The Janus Affair were finalists in Goodreads Best in Science Fiction of 2011
and 2012. In 2013, they released Ministry Protocol, an original anthology of
short stories set in the Ministry universe. The collection won the Best Fiction
category in Steampunk Chronicle’s 2014 Readers Choice Award. Following a
Parsec win for their companion podcast, Tales from the Archives, Tee and Pip
celebrate the arrival of their third novel, Dawn’s Early Light, released by Ace
Books and Tantor Audio.
Here’s where Steampunk becomes far more than just “Victorian Science Fiction.” Steampunk envisions an Industrial Age that brought to fruition theoretical designs like Babbage’s analytical engines, flying machines, and advanced electrical engineering. How would society react? What would be the impact on a global scale? What would happen not only on a sociological level, but on a political one as well?
Early realizations of Steampunk, pre-dating author K. W. Jeter’s coining of the term, can be found on film. Walt Disney’s lush, lavish, and epic 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea serves as a warning of technological achievements potentially turning on society. Jules Verne was not a stranger in using science fiction as a vehicle for cautionary tales, but Disney’s 20,000 Leagues adaptation fulfills Verne’s intentions while remaining true to the luxuries and indulgences of the 19th Century. Another memorable motion picture encapsulating the definition of Steampunk is Nicholas Meyer’s Time After Time. In this film, H.G. Wells invents a time machine, intending to witness the futuristic Utopia he has speculated will occur. Instead, his best friend, Dr. John Leslie Stevenson (revealed as Jack the Ripper) uses Wells’ creation to escape capture by Scotland Yard. Here, the underlying theme of this adventure across centuries is responsibility and atonement, something Victorians rarely took in account in the pursuit of science or innovation. The question Wells faces is not “Can I build a machine that can travel through time?” but “Should I have invented a machine that can travel through time? Are we responsible enough to wield such technology?” Quickly, he discovers that some inventions, regardless of the intentions behind them, can affect not only societies of the present, but societies that have yet to happen.
Whether it is The Wild, Wild West or the “Castle” episode “Punked”, the works of K.W. Jeter (Morlock Night) or Gail Carriger (The Parasol Protectorate), or the podcasts, role playing game, and novels from our Ministry of Peculiar Occurrences, Steampunk offers you a variety of historical watersheds to choose from, now integrated with technology that can either be new, familiar, or exploited by your work’s protagonists and antagonists.
But where exactly does the “punk” comes into play in Steampunk?
Beyond romantic Victoriana, goggles, airships, and brass fixtures, the “punk” in Steampunk comes from going against convention, not necessarily in undermining establishment but through creativity and declaration of one’s individuality. That individuality can come across through style, gadgets, or attitude. In our own work, the “punk” is embodied in Eliza D. Braun, an agent from the farthest reaches of the Empire where women have the right to vote, where “natives” co-exist with “colonials,” and where everyone speaks their mind frankly and honestly. Eliza goes against the standard norms at the home office in London, England. She is everything her partner, Wellington Thornhill Books, Esquire—a man to the manor born now serving at the Queen’s pleasure—is not; and it is their chemistry and unorthodox approach to peculiar occurrences that make them unique within a society striving for conformity.
(What are the best practices for using social-media to sell books?)
We’ve been a gateway for many people into Steampunk, but that doesn’t mean we have stopped learning, or even changed a few opinions, about the genre. Steampunk is a voyage into science, ambition, imagination, and adventure; and all we can hope for is that in the years to come, people will still want to undertake this journey with us into the Past That Never Was. It’s been a fantastic ride since 2009, and now with seven awards, two of them Reader’s Choice Awards from The Steampunk Chronicle, we believe we must be doing something right.
Why not see how far we can go together in this journey? Make yourself at home in the Archives. I’ll put the kettle on.
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By: Chuck Sambuchino,
on 8/19/2014
Let me first begin by saying I love working as a literary agent. Since opening Greyhaus Literary Agency in 2003, I have had the chance to work with a lot of great writers, agents and publishers. Let’s face it – there are very few jobs out there where we get to do something many consider simply a hobby. However, with all of the great things about the job, the one thing I hate the most (and I know many other agents and editors feel the same way) is the part about writing rejection letters to authors. This is simply not a fun activity.
Now, there are really two different types of rejection letters. The first one I don’t have a big problem with. These are the letters for projects that might not be quite right for what I am looking for, or for stories that might not be ready for publishing yet. With stories like this, we can often take the time to provide a few suggestions for improvement, or to discuss why the story is not right for us. Yes, writing the letters takes time, but when I hit “send” I feel as if this author might be one step closer to publishing.
(How NOT to start your story. Read advice from agents.)
Column by Scott Eagan, owner and agent of the Greyhaus Literary Agency.
Scott has made sales to publishers including: Harper Collins, Pocket, New
American Library, Source Books and Harlequin. Scott is currently acquiring
authors in most areas of romance and women’s fiction, but, as the article
states, take the time to visit the website first to make sure that sub-genre
you write is what he is looking for! Authors can also visit scott at
www.scotteagan.blogspot.com, on Twitter @greyhausagency.
It is, however, the second letter of rejection that really gets frustrating to write. These are for authors submitting projects that the agency does not represent. Over the years, the number of these rejection letters has increased significantly. In fact, on one recent day in March, as I was answering submissions, I requested 2 partials, passed on 2-3 because the premise just didn’t work for me, and rejected 30 projects simply because these were not projects Greyhaus Literary Agency represented. What added to the frustration was the number of those submissions that were sent directly from my website.
If receiving rejection letters is as equally as frustrating as what I feel writing the letters, there are some very easy steps authors should take to remedy the situation.
Begin your research with general guides. Books such as Chuck Sambuchino’s Guide to Literary Agents are great starting points. Add in websites such as Query Tracker and you have a good list to build your research from.
Go to the source! No matter what resources you use to build your list of potential agents, make sure you visit the websites of the editors and agents. Review their website submission guidelines. Please note this is the most accurate information. Along the same lines, do not send something that is not on their list. Agents and editors will not acquire something that they don’t represent just because they think it might be a great read. Authors need to understand that agents and editors specialize in areas they are knowledgeable in and have the resources available to really help you as an author.
Going to the source is also crucial since many agents and editors will shift what they want, or even close for submissions, depending on the needs of the market or their own work load. Publishing is a constantly shifting market and authors need to take the time to stay up to speed!
(What writing credentials will impress an agent or editor?)
Know your genre. This is a small one but very important. Know what genre you are really writing in. For example, just because you have a romantic relationship in your story does not mean it is a romance. Just because your heroine is the protagonist does not mean it is women’s fiction.
Stalk the editors and agents. Next, if you think you have narrowed your search down to a list of specific editors and agents, start following them on social media. Listen to what they “chat” about. Pay attention to the books they like, the books they hate and the books they acquire. This will guide you in determining if your story is still a right fit.
E-mail and ask first. And finally, if you are still confused. You have read their submission guidelines and when they say, “I do not acquire young adult romance” and you don’t understand what they mean by that, then email and ask. Do not send it as a submission letter; just ask the question – “Hi Mr. Eagan. I am just inquiring if you accept young adult romances? I have reviewed your website submission guidelines and there is not mention that you do or don’t.” A simple word of warning though – Make sure you did read the submission guidelines. It makes you look like an idiot if you ask a question that is clearly stated on the submission guidelines.
I always say that researching the editors is not that hard. It does take time though but in this business, you need to have patience. Taking that time will certainly increase your chances of having an editor or agent read your submission. Getting them to publish it? Well, that depends on the quality of the work.
The biggest literary agent database anywhere
is the Guide to Literary Agents. Pick up the
most recent updated edition online at a discount.
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By: Chuck Sambuchino,
on 7/27/2014
Fight scenes are dangerous territory for writers. On the surface, they seem as if they’re guaranteed to keep the reader glued to the action in the same way as they often do at the movies. In reality, though, readers tend to skip over fight scenes – skimming the long, tedious, blow-by-blow descriptions in favour of getting back to the dialogue and character-driven drama that truly engages them in the story.
My novel, Traitor’s Blade, is a swashbuckling fantasy in which fight scenes are a crucial part of the storytelling. This means having to ensure that every piece of action is vital and engaging; it means that every duel must draw the reader in and not let them go until the end. So how do you keep the pacing, flow, and more importantly, the drama moving forward with so many fights?
GIVEAWAY: Sebastien is excited to give away a free copy of his novel to a random commenter. Comment within 2 weeks; winners must live in Canada/US to receive the book by mail. You can win a blog contest even if you’ve won before. (Please note that comments may take a little while to appear; this is normal).
Column by Sebastien de Castell, who had just finished a degree in archaeology
when he started work on his first job. Four hours later he realized how much he
hated archaeology and left to pursue a very focused career as a musician,
ombudsman, interaction designer, fight choreographer, teacher, project manager,
actor, and product strategist. His first novel is TRAITOR’S BLADE (Jo Fletcher
Books, July 2014), which can be found on Amazon or IndieBound. The
swashbuckling fantasy was recently praised by NPR. Connect with the
author on Facebook or Twitter.
1. Make every fight advance the plot
No matter what you might think, violence is actually boring. Watching two hulking brutes bash at each other with clubs isn’t interesting. Only when one of the brutes is smaller, weaker, and trying desperately to stay alive long enough to let his people know that the enemy is coming does the action start to matter to the reader. But don’t just think in terms of climactic battles or killing off enemies. Sometimes the fight provides a crucial piece of information about the antagonist such as a particular type of cut they make that could explain the wounds on a victim the protagonist discovered in the previous chapter. The fight might also wound your protagonist, slowing them down in later scenes and giving you a chance to make their lives harder and therefore increase the suspense.
2. Reveal character through action
The way your protagonist fights – and when they choose to fight or walk away – tells the reader a great deal about them. Your hero might be a skilled but retiscient warrior or they could be an amateur but with a bloodthirsty streak that comes out when confronted with violence. But don’t just stop with your protagonist or their opponents. Think about what the action reveals in those watching the fight. Does the seemingly helpful mentor figure suddenly become enraptured watching the blood flow? Do the innocent bystanders just sit there or do they scramble to help? Fight scenes that reveal character are by far the most compelling ones for readers – they get to investigate your characters by seeing how they deal with violent situations, allowing you to follow that classic dictum of modern writing: show, don’t tell.
(Hear agents get specific and explain what kind of stories they’re looking for.)
3. Your fight scenes must fulfill the promise of your book
Traitor’s Blade is a swashbuckling fantasy so every fight has to give the reader some of that sense of wonder they first encountered watching classic adventures like the old Errol Flynn and Douglas Fairbanks films. But perhaps your genre is gritty historical fiction. If so, the last thing you want to do is break suspension of disbelief. You have to carefully ensure that the weapons and fighting styles are true to your era (note: this doesn’t mean you can’t have a longsword in the 18th Century since they were around for long periods of time after their proper era, but you can’t have King Arthur swinging a rapier around in 6th Century Britain!)
4. Make every fight unique
I read a YA fantasy recently in which almost every fight involved the main character jumping up and spinning in the air to kick opponents in the face (usually two or three.) Regardless of how unrealistic this would be (after all, realism only matters if it’s part of the promise of your book), the fact is you probably couldn’t remember one fight from another. By contrast, think of a movie like The Princess Bride, in which every fight is special – every conflict is resolved using different means, whether trickery or skill or simply iron-willed determination.
(The skinny on why to sign with a new/newer literary agent.)
5. Let the reader choreograph the action
If you describe every action of the fight, not only will you bore the reader but your pacing and flow will fall apart. So think of your job not so much as having to meticulously choreograph the fight but rather to give the reader enough insight into the action that they can build the scene in their minds. Show them early on in the fight how each weapon moves through space—make that vivid and visceral. Make the reader feel as if they could actually pick up that weapon and defend themselves even just a little bit. Then you’re free to focus on the character’s actions and reactions—making them distinct, personal, and emotionally motivated just as you do with their words. The reader will then be able to fill in the action while you describe what your characters are saying, what they’re thinking, and what’s showing on their faces. In other words, help the reader to choreograph the fight so that you can spend your time on the drama. This also lets you vary the length of your fight scenes, which helps to keep them from becoming predictable. In Traitor’s Blade there are fights which span an entire chapter and others which are told in four lines.
Think of it this way: violence is dialogue. Make your fights into a conversation spoken with actions in which the real conflict is happening in the hearts of the characters and in which the reader themselves are helping to tell the story.
GIVEAWAY: Sebastien is excited to give away a free copy of his novel to a random commenter. Comment within 2 weeks; winners must live in Canada/US to receive the book by mail. You can win a blog contest even if you’ve won before. (Please note that comments may take a little while to appear; this is normal).
Need help crafting an awesome plot for your
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By: Chuck Sambuchino,
on 7/23/2014
I was ready. I had an edited manuscript. I had a tiered list of agents. I had a spreadsheet. I’d read every scrap of information about getting an agent, and I was prepared, at last, to submit my novel. The process could take months, maybe years, I’d heard. I was in for the long haul, baby. The good news is it didn’t take years to get an offer of representation. The even better news: That offer came in the form of four magic words, words I’d been told to wait for by all the experts: I love your book.
Not just a Facebook-worthy thumbs up, not a “I think I can sell this.” Love. The reason you wait for true love in publishing is because publishing requires it, and not just from the author. Remember the feverish crush that helped fuel your first draft? Your agent needs that same big-eyed reverence for your book to take it out to editors, hoping for another love connection.
So how do you snag one of these lovey-doveys for yourself?
GIVEAWAY: Lori is excited to give away a free copy of her novel to a random commenter. Comment within 2 weeks; winners must live in Canada/US to receive the book by mail. You can win a blog contest even if you’ve won before. (Please note that comments may take a little while to appear; this is normal).
Column by Lori Rader-Day, author of the mystery THE BLACK HOUR (Seventh
Street Books, 2014), which received starred reviews from Booklist, Library Journal
and Publishers Weekly. Born and raised in central Indiana, she now lives with her
husband and dog in Chicago. Her fiction has appeared in Ellery Queen Mystery
Magazine, Time Out Chicago, The Madison Review, and others. Best-selling
author Jodi Picoult chose one of Lori’s short stories for the grand prize in
Good Housekeeping’s first fiction contest. Lori is a member of Mystery
Writers of America, Sisters in Crime, and International Thriller Writers.
Find her on Twitter at @LoriRaderDay.
Revise
You’re not ready until you can bounce a quarter off your manuscript. You’ve already revised, I know. Leave it alone for a month, then go back. Make sure your pages say precisely what you meant. Make your sentences sing.
Read
Meanwhile, the best way to see how it’s done is to read. Read widely. When you don’t like something, figure out why. Apply everything you learn to your draft until further ideas ping off it.
Research
Gather your intelligence. Which books are like yours, not just in subject but in tone and style? Who agented them? Read the Writer’s Digest archives. Use online resources to sort through the known universe of agent submissions. Learn as much as you can, and start a list. Rank agents in order of likelihood of love match.
Package
Learn to write a query letter. Write a synopsis. What’s a log line? Get one. If at any one of these steps you find something lacking in your story, don’t ignore the problem. Every step of this process is a chance to get it right before someone else can tell you you’re getting it wrong. Go back over your draft until your product is perfectly packaged for sale. Did your eye just twitch? Get used to thinking of your baby, your life’s creative work, as a prototype that might yet be tinkered with by other people.
Network
Time for some allies. If you have a writers’ group, they should have already had a swipe at your pages, but having a writing network isn’t just about first readers. What you want is a group of people who can tell you how the road ahead looks. Research writers’ associations in your genre and beyond. Ask at your local library, bookstores, or universities for writing groups or workshops.
Read again
The guidelines, in this case. This is your last chance before you click send to take a look at your list of agents and take note of what they want from your initial query. Getting through the front door is often about playing by the rules. Don’t send anything less—or more—than each agent has asked for.
Submit
Submit to four to eight agents only. Send each a separate email or mailed package (as they requested) with only the information they asked for. Keep things professional. No gimmicks. Save the rest of your list for now.
Write
Start something new. No, really. Go write another book. You need to think about something else and even if everything goes just as you’d like it to on the first book, you’ll still want a new draft in short order.
Track
Keep track of your submission results—and learn from them. If you aren’t getting any page requests, your query letter needs work. If you’re getting partial requests but then nothing, your first pages aren’t snagging the reader. If you’re getting full requests but no nibbles, it’s time to take a look at the full manuscript again. Make note of each reply, give it time, and then—
Submit again
This is why you saved the rest of your list. Submit, again, to four to eight agents only, using every step, every rejection, every encouragement to better prepare your work for the next round (and the next), as long as it takes to find a match.
Commit
Just like in love, things might not always go as planned. Keep writing. Maybe the next book is the one that will put stars in an agent’s eyes. Of course, that’s not really why you write, is it? If you commit to writing for reasons beyond publishing, it won’t take you long to find the love of your life, in the words right there on the page.
GIVEAWAY: Lori is excited to give away a free copy of her novel to a random commenter. Comment within 2 weeks; winners must live in Canada/US to receive the book by mail. You can win a blog contest even if you’ve won before. (Please note that comments may take a little while to appear; this is normal).
The biggest literary agent database anywhere
is the Guide to Literary Agents. Pick up the
most recent updated edition online at a discount.
Other writing/publishing articles & links for you:
Want to build your visibility and sell more books?
Create Your Writer Platform shows you how to
promote yourself and your books through social
media, public speaking, article writing, branding,
and more. Order the book from WD at a discount.
By: Chuck Sambuchino,
on 7/9/2014
“Rising from a winter’s sleep / Coming right up from the deep / Shallow pleasures beckon me/ Here’s my new life set me free.”
– “Come On Spring” by Kim Salmon
You’ve written a book. You know what it is to work with the elements, to muster something slippery and intangible into something with form. Likely, you’ve sweated on it and dreamt it.
Finishing my first novel, The Untold, felt to me like crawling out of a dark room after a winter that lasted too many seasons. Draft after draft, revision after revision, I had remained in that dark room determined that what was on the page would eventually match the vision I held for it. These things take time, as it happens, so much time. And it must be a solo process. I don’t know any writers that work well with their legs or arms twisted around another. So, aside from the inherent challenges of actually writing a novel, you must also get very good at spending long periods of time with yourself. For better or worse. There are times when I felt that I had aged a year in a day and that the book might actually bury me. But it didn’t. I finished it. The winter ended.
(Querying? Read advice on how to find the most target agents to query.)
Guest column by Courtney Collins, an Australian author. Her first novel,
THE UNTOLD (Amy Einhorn Books/Putnam, May 2014), has now been sold
in 11 countries. The novel has been nominated for a swag of awards and has
been optioned for a feature film. In a starred review, Library Journal said
“Collins’s gripping debut novel is based on a legendary wild woman . . .
A fast-paced, heart-wrenching story that never loses speed, this
extraordinary first novel is not to be missed.” Courtney is at work
on her second novel. Find her on Twitter.
Completing a book represents a renewal. It’s a chance to live again unburdened until you shackle yourself to your next challenge. However long it lasts, it’s the same sort of all-over tingling feeling that comes from love and long-awaited for sunshine.
Completion may also come with its own surprises. Like, there’s more to life than writing a book.
My first novel, The Untold, was first launched in Australia on the first day of spring. It was a Saturday and I took it as the perfect date to hold a launch party.
Apparently, very few publishers throw cash at book launch parties these days. There’s some rationalist argument that goes along the lines of “friends and acquaintances that you invite to the party are going to buy your book anyway.” I’m not much of rationalist. To me that way of thinking misses the big fat point.
A book launch is not about book sales. It’s a right-of-passage and it sets an indelible pattern for the fate of your book. It’s like the idea that what you do on New Year’s Eve can color the mood of a whole year. Whether or not you take that to be true, with a book launch there’s a chance to throw your book up like a bird in the air, to gather your nearest and dearest to wish that bird well.
In that wintery time of writing the book, in a catastrophizing way, I wondered if there would be anyone left, friend or family, on the other side of it. I feared they might all vanish on me through neglect. But it’s extraordinary how loved ones can hold faith in you, and for how long. For years they’ve seen nothing as proof of your labor and watched you grimace and wriggle at their question, “How’s the book?” If nothing else, having a book published allows you to hand it over to your family and friends to make good on their faith and to account for where you’ve been. A book launch party celebrates their generosity and, on a Saturday night in spring, it seems all absence and neglect can be forgiven.
(16 things to do prior to sending your work out to agents & editors.)
To get to the practicalities of a book launch party without publisher funding, I approached wine makers in my area with the gift of an advance copy of my book. This impressed them enough that six independent wine makers gave me a couple of cases of wine each. So good wine was flowing. Along with the wine, and lots of it, I wanted dancing. I knew my friend’s Dad was itching to get his old-timey bush band back together. I found them a hall and gave them a few bottles of that good wine and soon enough The Stringer’s Creek Bush Band lived again. On the night, half a dozen friends made platters of cheeses, breads, olives and pickles, just because they’re good friends. I got my family onto fruits and flowers and sent out a challenge of a baking competition because I know that, even when it comes to baking, my people are competitive. Despite my pre-party anxieties and thinking, well, I know at least 15 people who will show, about 150 people turned up.
As a surprise for me, a couple of my friends who are talented musicians took to the stage and sang a kind of anthem for the night – a song called “Come on Spring” by Australian music legend Kim Salmon. It’s an age-old combination, this alchemy of wine, music, dancing and feasting. Call it Bacchanalian. Call it Pagan. Why would you ever want to miss raising the roof to launch your book? Why would you ever want to miss singing loudly and badly with your friends:
‘Come on spring, do your thing
You got something for me?’
This guest column is a supplement to the
“Breaking In” (debut authors) feature of this author
in Writer’s Digest magazine. Are you a subscriber
yet? If not, get a discounted one-year sub here.
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By: Chuck Sambuchino,
on 7/4/2014
In the fall of 1986, I was ten years old, and I found myself sleeping on the muddy ground of a temperate rainforest on an island in Washington State. The muddy bed was supposed to be temporary. My alcoholic Salvadoran stepfather was building a wooden pyramid for us to live in, one that would channel the occult magic of ancient Egypt. My mother was convinced he was the messianic revolutionary hero she had foretold in clairvoyant visions.
Before the pyramid could reach its glorious completion, however, my stepfather threatened to kill the neighbors in a drunken rage. We had to break camp hurriedly, before the cops arrived, struggling down the trail with our most prized possessions. The first thing I evacuated out of the mud was my crate of journals, the repositories for my creative writing and poetry. My correspondence with myself was often my only form of friendship, my only mechanism for processing the chaos and violence around me, and, most fundamentally, the only proof that I ever existed. I wrote to live.
(16 things to do prior to sending your work out to agents & editors.)
Column by Joshua Safran, an author and attorney and was featured in the
award-winning documentary Crime After Crime (Sundance, OWN). His first
book, FREE SPIRIT: GROWING UP ON THE ROAD AND OFF THE GRID
was published by Hyperion/Hachette on September 10, 2013. In its starred
review of Free Spirit, Publishers Weekly concluded that “Safran, an attorney,
has written a beautiful, powerful memoir that shows how a son and his
mother both grew up and survived amid chaos. Even better, he recalls
events without condemnation or condescension. This assured debut
is reminiscent of David Sedaris’s and Augusten Burroughs’s best
work: introspective, hilarious, and heartbreaking.”
It was only natural, of course, that I would write a book about my remarkably unconventional childhood. Yet I hesitated–for years. I grew up, became a successful lawyer, and relentlessly pursued the American Dream. And I always wrote: scholarly articles, humor, fiction. But my story lay dormant.
The courage to write Free Spirit: Growing Up On the Road and Off the Grid was born in a maximum security prison for women. I was in the prison to meet with my pro bono client, Deborah, a woman serving a life sentence for the murder of the man who had tortured and battered her for years. When I took the case, I naively thought that obtaining Deborah’s release would be easy. Under a new law, essentially all she had to do was tell her story of abuse. But, not surprisingly, Deborah didn’t feel comfortable talking about all of the most horrible things that had ever happened to her. Not in a public document, not in front of a judge. Not even with me. “I can’t help you if you won’t help yourself,” I advised her early on, feeling very wise and lawyerly. But she didn’t trust me – I was, after all, a man. And she wasn’t going to talk to another man about what he had done to her.
A year went by, and Deborah was still only talking about the buildup to the beatings and the aftermath – everything but the details of the abuse itself. “It was crazy,” Deborah said, shaking her head. “The next day I’d be walking around the house like this.” She held an imaginary raw steak up to the side of her head to bring down the swelling. This image was instantly recognizable to me, and it sent me plunging into my own deeply buried past.
“My mother used to do the same thing,” I remembered out loud. “Steak on the eye, steak on the cheek. Her whole face was a wreck.”
Deborah dropped her reenactment in midsentence and narrowed her eyes at me. “Was it your father?”
“Stepfather.”
I had crossed the line between professional and personal, but this inadvertent breach in the attorney-client relationship achieved something my lawyering never could. We spent the next two hours swapping stories back and forth, talking like a couple of veterans showing each other their scars around the kitchen table. When I left the prison, my yellow legal pad was full of the testimony I needed to prove her case.
Shortly thereafter, the San Francisco Chronicle called, wanting to run a profile about Deborah’s legal team. I’d been pitching story after story to the media to help in Deborah’s case, but this was one interview I didn’t want to do. How could I resurrect my memories of violence and powerlessness, spill them into the paper of record, and watch them pollute the hushed white-carpeted halls of my corporate law firm? It was unthinkable.
“Why don’t you want to do the article?” Deborah was puzzled.
“The problem is,” I said, looking down at my hands, “if we open it up to be about the lawyers, we could lose control over the story.
“Are you afraid to talk about what happened to you and your mom?
“Well,” I mumbled, “it wouldn’t be very professional.”
“Are you kidding me!?” She was angry. “After all the things you told me? How I had nothing to be ashamed of, how it wasn’t my fault, how the world needed to learn from my story so that the cycles of violence would stop? How are you any different?”
I had to concede that I wasn’t any different and, as I walked out of the prison, an opening chapter began composing itself in my head.
(Hear advice from authors who are marketing themselves and selling books online.)
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By: Chuck Sambuchino,
on 6/28/2014
When I first got the idea to bring Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow back to life in a young adult novel, I was faced with multiple dilemmas:
• Write it in a modern day or historic setting?
• Portray the outlaw couple as monsters…or humans who made mistakes?
• Create a love triangle, a love ‘em and leave ‘em story, or skip romance altogether?
• Who should tell this story––Bonnie, Clyde, or someone else?
• Do modern teens even know who Bonnie & Clyde are?
GIVEAWAY: Kym is excited to give away a free copy of her novel to a random commenter. Comment within 2 weeks; winners must live in Canada/US to receive the book by mail. You can win a blog contest even if you’ve won before. (Please note that comments may take a little while to appear; this is normal).
Kym Brunner‘s debut novel is WANTED; DEAD OR IN LOVE (Merit Press, June 2014).
Her second novel (also YA) is ONE SMART COOKIE (Omnific Publishing, July 2014).
When she’s not reading or writing, Kym teaches 7th grade full time. She lives in Arlington
Heights, IL, with her family and two trusty writing companions, a pair of Shih Tzus
named Sophie and Kahlua. She’s repped by Eric Myers of The Spieler Agency.
Find Kim on Twitter, Facebook, or her blog.
First things first.
My basic underlying question was this: What would a teen girl do if she met a charismatic guy and started to fall for him BEFORE she knew he had a rap sheet?
This sorta-kinda happened to me when I was a teenager. I started dating a hot guy, a year or two older than me, who rode a motorcycle. Side note: my parents were not happy about this, but I was young and he was cute, so let’s just say that safety (and my parents’ wishes) weren’t my first priorities. On or about our third or fourth date, he lets it slip that he got his motorcycle for free. I was like, “How? Ohmigod, did you win it?” Okay, so I wasn’t the quickest draw in the West, but eventually he admitted that….why no, he stole it, but isn’t it a cool ride? My answer: Um…yeah. And wow, look at the time! I need to get right home.
I was so totally out of my element that I wasn’t sure what to say, how to act, or whether I should even get back on his bike or not. I wondered if I should give him a quick kiss goodnight or make an excuse not to, since I knew I wouldn’t be going out with him again (but didn’t have the guts to tell him that to his face).
Transport me decades into future and zhrriip! I’m at home watching a breaking news story about the Barefoot Bandit (a cute teen guy who had been eluding the Feds for two years) and I was immediately reminded of my own adventure with that handsome, motorcycle-stealing outlaw. And right then, I realize I wanted to capture (no pun intended) that queasy, mixed-up feeling of what would/could/should you do if you were a teen girl and met a sweet-talking boy who turned out to be a lawbreaker?
(Learn why writers must make themselves easy to contact.)
Now that I had the driving question in mind, I needed to execute it. I started to write about a random girl meeting a guy on the run, when the idea of bringing Bonnie and Clyde back to life sprung into my head. I wondered how many dates those two went on before Clyde admitted his criminal background to Bonnie. Based on history, I’m guessing she kissed him goodnight that evening, despite his declaration.
What made Bonnie stay with Clyde? Did he tell her flattering lies to her to get her to stay, or did she believe she couldn’t live without him? Did Clyde continue his life of crime because he really couldn’t get an honest job, or because he loved the thrill of having his name splashed across the headlines?
Ultimately, I realized that a dual POV was needed––one from a modern day teen girl and the other from Clyde Barrow himself––with the voices of the other two personalities (Jack Hale, a teen male, and Bonnie Parker) popping in as the tension increased. I wanted the reader to know each character’s true thoughts about what was going on, while at the same time, reveal which lies they kept to themselves. My intention was to write an intense and psychologically suspenseful tale, while also staying true to the historical details of Bonnie and Clyde’s lives.
It took several years of rewrites and sage advice from many brilliant minds, including my two awesome critique groups (*waves), my rock star agent Eric Myers (The Spieler Agency), freelance editor Jennifer Braunstein Rees (who edited the Hunger Games’ trilogy) and the editor of Merit Press, the hard-working and unflappable Jacquelyn Mitchard (author of many novels, including NYT bestseller The Deep End of the Ocean)–––to make all the various POVs sing like canaries.
My advice? Surrender to the calling of multiple POVs if your story demands it, making sure each character has his or her day in court to tell the truth, the whole truth, or nothing even remotely close to the truth. After all, you’re the one orchestrating this caper and it had better be good, or your book could get tossed into solitary confinement for a very long time.
(Check out the book trailer for Wanted: Dead or In Love here on YouTube.)
GIVEAWAY: Kym is excited to give away a free copy of her novel to a random commenter. Comment within 2 weeks; winners must live in Canada/US to receive the book by mail. You can win a blog contest even if you’ve won before. (Please note that comments may take a little while to appear; this is normal).
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By: Chuck Sambuchino,
on 6/25/2014
Someone once told me, “You can’t get by on just being nice.” But in the publishing world, if you’re nice to readers they will adore you and you’ll sell more books. Here’s proof.
I had no intention of buying John Searles’ novel Help for the Haunted when he visited Colorado recently. I have two shelves full of books by local authors I want to support. But I haven’t read them all. (You’re a reader and writer, so you own these lonely books, too. Admit it.)
Guest column by Katherine Valdez, who blogs about author events and
recently quit her job to write a novel. She eats a lot of ramen. Please,
pretty please, subscribe to her blog, like her Facebook, and
follow her on Twitter.
Help for the Haunted, his third novel, is about a girl determined to learn the truth about her parents’ murder. The book jacket boasts the teaser “Two Sisters. One Dark Secret.” Even the cover quote – “Dazzling…A novel both frightening and beautiful” – written by Gone Girl author Gillian Flynn, wasn’t enough to convince me to spend $26.99, even though I idolize her.
But Searles, a Cosmopolitan magazine editor for the last 17 years, spun me 180 degrees toward the book signing table, all because he was kind, bubbly, and told dozens of anecdotes – including one of his late boss, Helen Gurley Brown – that left everyone laughing. He said he’d be happy to answer any questions and would stay as long as necessary to sign everyone’s books.
Swoon.
During the book signing – for which I was first in line – he was sweet enough to write “For Katherine! Best wishes for all your writing! With love, John Searles, XOOX.”
I floated to my car, smiling and clutching the novel as though I were Golem and it was the One Ring. My precioussss….
The son of a truck driver and stay-at-home mom, Searles accepted a job at the DuPont factory close to his home because his parents told him, “We don’t have the money for college [and] you don’t have the grades.”
But Searles never gave up on his dream. “I always wanted to be a writer,” he said. One of his early stories featured a main character who collected wallpaper swatches. And Searles gave the stories titles like “Over The Rainbow” and “Behind the Rainbow,” saying with a laugh that his parents shouldn’t have been shocked to learn he’s gay.
(Can you re-query an agent after she’s rejected you in the past?)
Still, they wanted him to learn trucking “to make a man out of me.” It was on those trips with his father that he read books by Sidney Sheldon, Stephen King, and John Irving, whatever paperbacks he found at truck stops.
He eventually spent many years waiting tables before applying to New York University, and was accepted on a writing scholarship. To support himself, he read tarot cards and continued as a waiter. He later moved into magazines, first reading Redbook submissions for 50 cents a story, then working his way up the ranks at Cosmo.
Searles told a story that demonstrates why he’s so kind and encouraging to aspiring novelists (including yours truly). Years ago, he sent a manuscript to Doubleday Books. It was rejected. But the rejection was not the worst part. He found an in-house note inadvertently left in the returned package, which said his novel was “dry, unsophisticated, and trite…I barely made it to page 60 and I feel really badly for anyone who has to go through to page 400, EG.”
He laughs now, but the experience taught him a valuable lesson. From then on, he jotted encouraging notes to writers whose magazine stories he rejected: “ ‘Keep going, live the dream, don’t give up!’ ” he said. “I didn’t want to pull an EG on them.”
Who knows where EG is now. But we know where nice-guy Searles is.
At the top of the best-seller list.
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As an educated, socially-aware white male, I completely agree with the views in this essay. There is a strain of toxic representation that goes back to the first season, when they chose to name the black male T-Dog, as if Blackness is only recognizable according to our ideas of urban culture. Or what about the introduction of Michonne as a sword-wielding, magical negress whose duty is to protect the white woman? Or later, when she is a bargaining chip in a power struggle between a while male named The Governor and a white male southern deputy? The writers have since expanded upon her character, but let’s consider this:
In the comic, her beef with the Governor comes from being brutally raped and beaten by him. In the television show, that dynamic is replaced by the the mere threat of rape against a white woman.
And he’s right about accurate representation: statistically, there would be more black survivors than white. Replace Rick and Daryl with black men, then replace Bob, Noah, etc with white men… nevermind, you probably wouldn’t be watching show with a mostly black cast, would you.
Thaddeus Howze is unequivocally on point in his reading of the show. If you disagree, ask yourself: am I white? Then you’re already approaching it wrong.
There was a time when if you didn’t like something, you didn’t listen to/read/watch it. If there was a line crossed, you could boycott, write letters, or protest it in some form. Now if you don’t feel “represented” you go to social media and demand that changes be made because you personally don’t like it. I feel that there is way too much of that going on involving entertainment these days.
As a White Brit, it seems like race is projected onto everything in the US – and from outside looking in (and have been to the US) I understand why… but I really don’t see it here other than perhaps in trying to break stereo types – where else is there a Carol in TV or film?
I always find you can test the validity of a theory by reversing it – so lets do that. Why not ask “what would the walking dead look like if a bunch of white red neck republicans were writing the script”? Could the shows version of Tyrese exist in _their_ mind? A black male who risks everything to protect someone else’s baby, but is naturally non-violent and the most moral character in the show? No – I can’t see that at all. Would the main moral voice of the show come from the black/non-white male characters in the show (post Dale being bitten) – i.e. Glenn and Tyrese?
Would Bob be their go to depicition of a black male, or Morgan or Gabriel or Noah? These are so non-stereo-typical, which makes them interesting and actually real – if not a statistically representative slice of a demographic. What about Sasha and Michonne as that of black women?
What if Rick was black? In his descent to animalism, biting out the neck of an assailant or executing Pete would people be projecting race onto this too? Would Rick be the black male without a moral compass that middle class white republicans fear when walking home at night? Maybe there is racism at play here – maybe the show is sensitive to creating a black male stereotype – i.e. gun welding amoral thug. Maybe…
These are interesting questions…. and I don’t claim to know the answer. But I do feel that race gets projected onto everything in a way that makes it paradoxically impossible not to be racist unless you are actually racist. By that I mean, if you spend the entire time when writing a story trying to consider what is racially representative – that is, in itself, racist by definition. This is a story about people who happen to have a certain gender or race or sexual persuassion. The world is, by definition, full of deviation from the mean events, otherwise its a highly contrived story.
We all know that TV programmes are aimed at what they think is their demographic – which in this case was originally presumably the comic book crowd – which I perceive to be white male nerds/geeks. It’s a pity that they couldn’t have made another core character black at the start – I think it couldn’t be Rick for reasons I stated above so Daryl maybe would be obvious since he wasn’t in the comics (but then, would Merle have been an example of a negative black character? Indeed would Daryll from where he started from).
I do agree that so far in the series, we haven’t seen strong black _male_ leadership. We now have it in Morgan – a bad ass as well as the new moral compass of the group. I do know that I have really enjoyed watching Bob, Noah and Tyrese and I wish they were still in the programme – particularly Tyrese. I’m a father of 3 young kids and if I was leaving my kids with someone – it wouldn’t be Rick or Glenn or Dayrll or Michonne and definitely NOT Carol – it would be Tyrese. I think killing him off was the show’s one big mistake.
I don’t see any “demands” here. Instead, I see a profoundly honest description of what Mr. Howze finds offensive on a television show he wanted to like.
If you don’t wish to consider his point of view, that is your privilege. No one is taking away your WALKING DEAD.
For myself, I stopped watching last season, when I thought the stories (and characters) became too repetitive. These included racial stereotypes, but much more so gender stereotypes, and all sorts of other things that, quite frankly, were boring.
As a black woman who’s actually an avid fan of the show I will say this. You certainly have your strong points about the lack of screen time given to black men on the show. This is actually something I’ve pointed out myself plenty of times but as much as I support alot of what your saying I will have to say this in the show’s defense.
Many of the gripes you have about the show’s depiction of black men is actually coming off as a lot of over-reading and outlandish reaching. Tyrese was possibly one of the most beloved and greatly acted characters on the show. Yes, even I had to call BS on Rick’s takedown of him back in season 3, but I attribute that to Rick’s shield of being the main character. Also, here’s the positive of his character that you left out in your negative rant. I was actually relieved to see a black male character who showed a deeply caring, nurturing, and protective role for children, especially children who weren’t his, which contrasts completely with the image the media likes to portray of “the deadbeat black daddy” stereotype. It was really refreshing to see that. Did I think they made him soft? Yes, but can you actually say that it would have looked great for a big, hulking black man to have been the one to shoot down a little white girl on national TV? Even if the show went out of its way to depict he would have been justified in doing so? Tyrese was a far cry from his comic book counterpart but I don’t think that made his TV character weak or spineless and his death was truly heartbreaking and sad.
T-Dog’s characterization was weak but even he had his shining moments. Such as his famous rant about how he was very aware that black men like him didn’t last in scenarios such as the show’s setting and when he was revealed to be a man of faith enough to sacrifice himself for Carol. In regards to Bob, honestly I didn’t care for this character, but I wouldn’t have cared for him, no matter what race he was. As for Father Gabriel, another character I don’t care for, but the show does seem to be setting him up for a great redemption arc, only time will tell however.
In regards to Morgan, I like his characterization in the show better than the comic where he was just a raving lunatic that was hooking up with Michonne. Is his pacifism becoming frustrating? Yes, but I think he’s being set up as a foil to Rick who at this point is killing Willy nilly and nowhere near the individual he started out on the show to be. At the end of the day, almost every demographic had a gripe about the show. Like how earlier in the series feminist complained about how all the white female characters were useless and nothing more than eye candy. How a religious character like Hershel was stubborn to the point of stupidity in his initial introduction. My BF, who is Hispanic, often points out that at least black women and men are getting screen time. There hasn’t been a strong representation of any Hispanic males in the entire shows run. At least one that wasn’t villainous or disappeared after their intro. The list can go on.
I still like the show and I know plenty of people of color who still do and still like the very characters you bashed. I highly doubt the writers on the show are going out of their way to offend anyone and just want to do a good show. I respect your perspective, and hopefully your respect my points as well.
I’m sorry if I offend anyone, but I am so sick and tired of everything being racist! Enough is enough. It seems to me that there are way too many people in this country who look for racism in everything. Racism does exist but its not one sided. There are racists of every culture and race. I can point out hundreds of racist rap songs and black movies and TV shows. In fact in today’s day and age it is a handicap to be white. I see past skin color and believe we are all of one race, the human race. I am so tired of people in this country trying to keep us divided. Get over it!
>>>In fact in today’s day and age it is a handicap to be white.
via GIPHY
It’s true, everywhere I go around my home town I see white people struggling to buy $1 million apartments and find enough fresh kale.