Fabu agent Jennifer Jackson is answering query etiquette questions on her blog. Check it out:
 |
SB: “I’ve instituted a boycott on Deleted Scenes.” DP: “But, honey, why?” SB: “Because, we put them on, and we watch them, and then at the end, I go, ‘Yep, glad they deleted that!’” DP: “I can see that.” In the comments section of the November 14th post on high concept: My contention has to do with, for instance, (as your link to the Knight Agency page explains) high concept books as “accessible” and “commercial.” A lot of my favorite novels are probably neither. Actually, if you read the article, I do not say that any book is high concept, nor that any book that is “accessible and commercial” is necessarily so. I do say that high concept is a somewhat slippery term, as it both describes an innate characteristic of the storyline, and also the way said storyline is described. Sadly, I haven’t read Middlemarch (I know, shocker), so I can’t whip out a high concept description for you, nor can I make any kind of argument for whether or not it’s high concept, but my understanding is that it’s an ensemble piece about social reform, is it not? I’m not a fan of books where “very little happens” I must say. (For the modern, trendy definition of “characters don’t learn, don’t grow, and that’s somehow supposed to show the plight of humanity, etc.” — I took that short story class in college, and it was torture.) Even in a “low concept” story (let’s say On Golden Pond, since I’m not familiar with the Eliot and can’t say anything about it), you’ve got a lot “happening” — you’re really showing something about characters in conflict and in growth. But that’s difficult to describe or show the power of in a few short sentences and thus, not high concept. Not BAD, but not high concept. However, the line is not drawn at “literary.” There are literary books that are high concept, and literary books that aren’t. Literary, as used today, is a genre unto itself, not unlike mystery, or romance, or science fiction. It denotes a certain tone, style, and often, characterization and storyline. Today, “literary” is seen as an intrinsic, objective characteristic of the text. I don’t like that definition. I believe that what is “literary” is not decided by us. It’s decided by history. What is it about Aphra Behn’s adventures and romances that make them interesting to study today, compared to so many other populist writers of the time. Do we still read Radcliffe because she was the most popular writer of that kind of book at the time, or do we read her because she was doing something that the penny dreadful folks weren’t? And what of Dickens? And what of Dumas, who, like James Patterson, wrote by committee? Nowadays that would be seen as the height of pedestrian and commercialist, but we study Dumas in English classes all over. The Count of Monte Cristo is one of my favorite novels. In fifty or a hundred years, will we be studying Along Came a Spider? I am fascinated by the way certain books manage to, over time, worm their way into the canon and gain a modicum of respectability. I like how everyone is currently in love with Du Maurier, but her reputation seems to ebb and flow. Sometimes she’s lauded; others, derided. I am fascinated by the rise of science fiction as a highly-respected genre. (In passing, I find it interesting that when we study Orwell, it’s his science fiction, and not his “realistic” character studies or reform novels.) When I read 1001 Books To Read Before You Die, I was surprised that I’d read so few of the novels from the late 19th and early 20th century. Most of the ones I had were, in fact, science fiction. I think that is because my taste runs (and always has run) to adventure stories, which are vastly out of fashion with the literary set these days. (Of course, not solely. For instance, I adore As I Lay Dying. Ironically, the title comes from The Odyssey, the most adventurest of adventure stories!) Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised. I did, after all, write my senior thesis on Lost Horizon and the social construct of Shangri-la. Hilton’s adventure novel, cribbing together as it did ideas of orientalism, the sublime, cultural reform, and eastern mythology in an unabashadly populist package, was actually the first book published by Pocket, which had been started to print light, popular fiction in mass market paperback form. And it’s also very high concept. So my romance-writing loops are all buzzing with the news that Harlequin Presents, the best-selling category romance line, will soon be going to twelve books a month. The next question everyone has is, “What is a Harlequin Presents?”
One of my college roommates (the one who turned me on to category romances) couldn’t get enough of them. One summer, we went island hopping in Greece, and those were the only books we could find in English. (We also read a lot of British holiday magazines, which introduced us to the strange concepts of “Ibiza” and “thrush.” (Neither of us could figure out what thrush meant for the longest time, and, not to get too explicit on the blog or anything, but we have a word for it in America, too, and it happens when you’re wearing a wet bathing suit around too much.) So, since we didn’t want to read about that anymore, we turned to Presents (and occasionally, to Danielle Steel). Presents novels are hard core. They have titles with keywords like “Greek” “Italian” “Billionaire” “Mistress” “Blackmail” “Virgin” “Pregnant”… and, most of all, “Revenge.” Virgins are almost as popular as Greek Billionaires. The summer I was in the islands, I read at least two whose plot sounded something like this:
This is the back cover copy description of the book pictured above, The Greek Billionaire’s Baby Revenge: His mistress…
Not for everyone to be sure. They are not feminist, nor are they politically correct. They revel in exoticism, submission, sensationalism, and revenge revenge revenge. These heroes have determined that they’ve been wronged in some way (by the heroine or perhaps her family) and they’ll pretty much steamroll over every other character in the book to make who ever is responsible pay. And they are part of a long tradition. These type of books go back to the gothic melodramas of the 18th and 19th century. Though now we think of gothics as based on the Bronte template of misty moors and haunted castles, many of Radcliffe’s stories pushed Mediterranean exoticism, such as The Italian or A Sicillian Romance. It’s amazing how long-living the archetype of the Latin Lover is. Shakespeare was a fan, Radcliffe, and now, the authors of Harlequin Presents.
Even reading up on them while writing this blog post has made me curious to pick one up. It might be this one, over here, by the venerable Penny Jordan (67 million copies in print, 200 novels, 30 years as a working author): Now all I need is the glass of wine and the bubble bath. All my editing and revisional concerns are done.* Now, I write! Yay, writing! How I missed thee!** I’m not one of those writers who has learned to enjoy revision. For me, brainstorming is fun, writing is mostly fun, and editing hovers in the seventh level of hell. Good for me and necessary and blah blah blah, but certainly my least favorite part of the job. I was speaking to a friend who would die before planning her books out beforehand, and her theory is that the reason I do so much brainstorming and plotting and whatnot is that I’m resistant to the idea of changing it after it’s been written down. Well, yeah. Measure twice, cut once and all that. But then I know others who love to plan and just as gleefully sit down with their red pen to edit. One of my problems is that I never have a good head for what happens once I change things. My memory of events are always as I originally wrote them. There’s a scene cut from the first book and I wrote the vast majority of the second book as if it had happened. More often than not, changing one line of dialogue makes me think that I need to rewrite the entire scene, since, in my head, each word builds on the next, and if a character says apple instead of orange, then fifty pages down the way, he can’t reference oranges, and he can’t think about oranges for those 50 pages in between. And even if he isn’t thinking about oranges on the page, he’s doing it in his head and mine, and in our heads, it is imparting an orange tint onto everything else he says. And so things seem out of place to me, as if I tried to zest an orange, only to wind up with a pile of apple peels. I remember hearing an author speak a few years back about how, after a draft of her book was finished, she changed the identity of the villain. On the page, very little changed. But in her head, it was a total overhaul. Now that I understand. Needless to say, I’m so happy to be back in the realm of pure writing! _________________ The Borders anthology, The World of the Golden Compass is on sale now, and editor Scott Westerfeld has done an interview for the Borders web page talking about the project. In the interview, there’s a tiny shout-out to my essay, “Ghost in the Machine.” (Cross posted to FFF). Been spending a bit of time preparing for my trip to Europe (only another 40 days!) I can’t believe how quickly it all sneaked up on me, but then again, I’ve had a busy few months, what with revisions, and getting married, and all. I want to thank everyone who gave me advice in my last post. You have no idea how helpful you all were! So far, I have rooms booked in Rome and London, tickets for the King Tut exhibit and for the Villa Borghese, and I’m slowly winnowing down the list of what else we want to do. Rome, for the most part, will be a “wander around at will” situation, though there are a few day trips I’m dying to take (and I am taking my husband down to Pompeii for an overnight, as he’s never been). And though we both think it’s a super long shot, we might head over to that place in London where you can snag returned and unclaimed tickets last minute to see if there is any chance of catching Ian McKellan doing Lear (hey, a girl can dream!) The irony of this whole trip is that it was originally envisioned as a research trip for Rampant, but Rampant will be almost done by the time I actually get to go. Mostly, I’m hoping that the trip will help me fill out a few scenes, jogging my memory in terms of setting. Even just researching the trip has been a major inspiration for me. As I read about the places on my “must revisit” list, I was reminded again of why I wanted to use them as settings in my story: ( inspiration and discovery... ) It’s a bit unusual for me to be doing a research trip this intense. True, setting and location are paramount in the Secret Society Girl series, but for the most part, I was writing about places I knew as well as I knew my own apartment. I’d lived there, on those campus streets, in those dorms and classrooms and tombs and cafes. I’ve visited Rome, but I’m no native (fortunately, neither are my characters!), and, of course, I’ve invented the Cloisters of Ctesias from near-scratch. Carrie Ryan can attest to the challenge I faced describing architecture that I was making up. (Can you believe that was a year ago, Carrie?) But in the end, it’s all worth it. I’m a firm believer that, particularly when you are writing fantasy, you have to get the audience to trust this huge thing you’re making up, so you have ot make sure that everything else is as believable as possible. Of course, so much of Rome is so otherworldly that maybe I’ll have to tone it down some for the book! Does the setting inspire you when you write? What kind of research do you do to make sure that it all rings true?
Have a great weekend, everyone! There’s a discussion going on on one of my loops about the ethics involved in posting Publisher’s Marketplace/Publisher’s Lunch announcements. It’s done quite a lot on loops and blogs. My general feeling is that if it appears in the free lunch that anyone can sign up for (which many deals do, a week later), or if it is posted with permission from the writer, then it’s fine. Otherwise… I feel uncomfortable about it. As the full PM announcement is a paid service ($20 a month), and those paid subscriptions are what keep the program going, it feels odd to just pass out that information. If the information in PM is available everywhere, then what is the incentive for someone to pay for it? If no one pays for it, then maybe they’ll stop providing this service, which I think is one of the best around. I’ve been known to slip and talk up particular books that I’m super excited about (my sitemeter regularly checks in on the hits I still get from posting on Ellen Emerson White’s latest Meg book) so I’m certainly not perfect on this stance. I did this once in February of 2006, and once (much more recently) in April of 2007. I also occasionally discuss something I learned in a conference workshop. But I don’t go around posting full Deal Lunches, nor do I report in from a conference with every tidbit that all the other conference goers are paying for (except, you know, the ones who sneak in). Is it “fair” that people who can’t afford access to this subscription can’t get the benefits from it? Well no, of course it’s not fair. Fair would be free. If I want information that it costs money to get, I pay for it. I’m not a subscriber to Publisher’s Weekly, so I know I only get to see a few of their articles in their free online version. Ditto with RT. Don’t even get me started on Bookscan. PM isn’t cheap, but it’s a subscription I think is worth it. For those who can’t afford it, I have often suggested signing up for one month and doing an archive deal search. best $20 you’ll ever spend if you’re about to start on an agent search. Meanwhile, there is SO MUCH information that’s freely available online, it’s astounding. The first year I was writing, I amassed a huge amount of knowledge from free online sources. I was too poor for any paid services. Too poor for RWA. I practically lived on Writers Weekly (which taught me the fundamental rule of writing: money flows toward the writer). I got the free version of Pub Lunch for years and managed just fine before I finally splurged on the full version (supposed to be just a trial, but I loved it so much I made the full-time investment). And now, six years later, there is even more information, in the form of industry pro blogs, newsgroups, etc. Most of these didn’t exist in 2001. So what do you think? Is it fair to post Deal Lunches that only subscribers should receive? Is it fair not to? A few weeks ago, I read a proposal by my critique partner. Since I’ve been working with this writer for over four years, I’ve read a lot of her proposals, as she’s read a lot of mine. When you reach that level of familiarity with another person’s work, you develop a sort of extra-sensory perception about it. You know when a project has that certain something that is going to make it pop. She knew, for instance, that I’d sell SSG on proposal. In fact her email to me on the topic said I’d sell it on proposal, and at auction. (She’s awfully smug about being right.) And I knew, when I read her latest, a few weeks back, that we were dealing with something very special indeed. The enthusiasm and freshness fairly shone out from the pages! I barely made notes. I said it was going to sell fast, and sell well, and I’m happy to be smug about that now:
Sadly, the rest of you all are going to have to wait until 2009 to read this fantastic new series! I think the above description of Marley’s new series is also a top-notch example of high concept. In just this short, one-sentence description, you get a great idea of what the book is going to be about. You get a good idea of the heroine (fish out of water city girl), the setting (historic southern town), the secondary characters (other ghost hunters), and the storyline (latent psychic abilities, ghostbusting). She could have called it Medium Meets Mean Girls or Veronica Mars with Ghosts, but I think this gets the point across best. The nice thing about high concept stories is that they immediately get across that the story has “It.” A lot of detractors of high concept say it only works with action-style stories. That “quiet,” character-driven stories can’t be expressed in a high-concept manner. I disagree with this. Last month, I saw the movie The Jane Austen Book Club (based on a book), which is a character driven piece about a group of multi-generational women (and one evolved if nerdy guy), each dealing with their own romantic issues, who decide to read all the novels of Jane Austen as a source of inspiration and comfort, and discover how Jane’s stories can create a template for their own life changes. Less than 50 words and you’ve got a great idea of what happens in that story. I’ve been eagerly reading the Bookends blog and the pitch reviews that Jessica Faust has been doing for the past week or so, and the more of these you read, the more you begin to see what stories have It and which don’t. (I had the same experience watching the Snarkometer entries a year back.) Now, not all of the pitches worked, even if the idea was solid, but there were instances where I could see that with a bit of cutting and trimming, that story would emerge. And now, for the writers in the group: what do you think of High Concept? Of the sample pitches on the Bookends Blog? And how about a big woo hoo to Marley on her fabulous new series sale!
|
|
|
Syndicate  Subscribe to this site's RSS feed. Sitemeter 
|
|
 |
|||||||||||||||||||||||
