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From the mailbag, T. asks:
When you write a novel it’s like a boat-load of short stories, with the same characters, and they tie together, right? So how would someone with great ideas get them onto paper if they don’t have the time to sit down and write? Me, for instance.
Hi, T.! That’s awesome that you want to write (a novel or short stories), and that you have some great ideas. You have some very good questions.
Let’s take this one at a time.
1) No, a novel is not really like a boatload of short stories, even if the short stories have all the same characters and are interconnected. Short stories are their own discrete items that exist unto themselves.
This is a short story:
This is a bunch of connected short stories:
This is a novel:
A novel is a great big complex thing that all needs to hold together, so it is a lot harder to do than a short story. At least, for me. I have friends who would much rather write a novel than a short story, because then the get to put all those flowers and such together, whereas their short story would topple over under the weight and actually not exist as the bite-sized confection it ought to be. They have different needs, novels and short stories.
But if it’s easier for you to think in terms of writing small things rather than big things, then do so. Because that wedding cake up there? Was decorated one flower at a time. The first time I wrote a novel, I was very scared that I wouldn’t be able to finish it, even though it was going to be a very short (60,000) word novel.
(I say “short” now. At the time when the most I’d ever written was a 25 page college thesis, that seemed enormous. But now I’ve written 120,000 word novels, so 60k seems like nothing by comparison.)
How did I do it? See below:
2) Novels are not written in days or weeks or even, necessarily, in months. Some people take years. There are novels that I have been working on for years.
The first time I wrote a novel, I told myself that all I had to do was write one page every day. That’s it. Just one. If the page had a lot of dialogue, so much the better. And I made myself a deal. I really, really wanted to join a writing organization, but the dues were $100, which was an enormous amount of money for a poor, underemployed college graduate living in New York City. So I told myself if I finished writing a book, a whole book, then I had proved that I was serious enough about this writing thing to deserve to spend the money on that organization.
Maybe your “carrot” is something different. Maybe you just want to prove to yourself that you can do it. All you have to do is write one page a day. At the end of the year, you’ll have a whole book.
Don’t tell me you don’t have time. You have time to write one page a day. When I did this, when I first graduated from college, I had two jobs plus I was trying to get freelance work from newspapers. Set your alarm clock for 20 minutes early. Choose not to watch TV in the evening. Use your lunch period not to talk to friends, but to go sit somewhere quiet and write while you eat your sandwich.You have to make sacrifices.
If you don’t have time for that, then no, you can’t write a novel. There were periods in my life when I didn’t have time for that. When I had a newborn baby, for example. Maybe you’re going through a time like that. Maybe you’re caring for an ailing parent, or currently in combat, or working four jobs to keep a roof over your head, or you’re on a reality TV show that requires twenty-four hour surveillance, or you’re in a coma in the hospital. That’s okay. Don’t beat yourself up.
One page a day is 250 words. If you can do that even five times a week, by the end of the year you’ll have over 65,000 words. That’s a novel. You’re done. If you’re writing a long novel, well, bump it up to 7 days a week, or do it for 18 months.
Using this method (and, I’ll be honest, some cramming) I have written TWELVE novels, SIX short stories, FOUR longform non-fiction essays, half a dozen unfinished novels and proposals, four newspaper features, dozens upon dozens of food reviews, and hundreds of blog posts since 2002. And I’m lazy. I know a lot of people who have done like five times that much.
So if I can do it, so can you.
This year, I’m doing NaNoWriMo, which is a fun project in which I promise to write 50,000 words in 30 days. It’s not going to happen. But I’ll have fun trying. The last time I did NaNo, I did 10k in a week, and then had to put it aside to work on another project. But that’s 10k I didn’t have before.
But you don’t have to do it like that. Start with asmall goal. One page a day. You can do it!
One of the writer’s loops I’m on was discussing scenes in which characters talk on the telephone. Such scenes are often the bane of writers because they are so difficult to convey effectively, and, related, the bane of industry professionals who are always coaching new writers not to write such scenes. The problems are:
1) they can be very static. A character is standing alone, talking on the phone.
2) You can’t see the person the character is talking to, so you miss the opportunity to relay all kinds of nuances in their conversation.
But telephone conversations can also be very effective, especially if you use their constrictions to your advantage.
- For example, create a contrast between what the character is saying and what he/she is doing. Is she a ball-busting executive who is ripping her department a new one while changing her baby’s dirty diaper? Is he an assassin discussing dinner plans while assembling his rifle?
- Have their words form only a small part of the conversation. Maybe rather than listening to what the other person is saying, the character is more interested in the background noises, or in the pauses.
- Have the POV character speculate on the other’s behavior and actions. Have them wonder if the potential date is paying attention to the conversation or checking their email? Is the kidnapper who claims to have your wife on the other end of the line bluffing or holding a dagger to her throat as he speaks? Stuff like that.
The characters talk on the phone a lot in secret society girl, and in several instances, the phone is the device around which major plot points hinge — like Amy getting the invitation to the interview in chapter one of the first book! There are a bunch of important phone conversations in Ascendant as well, and I had a lot of fun writing the scenes where she is trying to get in touch with Giovanni and his roommates are ridiculing her name and the fact that he’s dating a nun.
What are your favorite telephoning scenes in books?
As I’m copyediting FOR DARKNESS SHOWS THE STARS, I’ve found cause to think about one of my favorite character roles: the nemesis.
Who is the nemesis? Well, if comic book superheroes are to be believed, they are the villain. The Joker. Lex Luthor. Magneto. And yes, sometimes a nemesis is the same character as a villain. But it doesn’t have to be that way.
A nemesis is someone who opposes the protagonist. That’s all. A nemesis can fulfill this role over the course of hte whole story or even in a single scene (a lot of romance novels are premised on the concept that the main characters are each other’s nemeses.) The Greek goddess Nemesis was the spirit of divine retribution, specifically against those who succumb to the sin of hubris. I like to keep that in mind whenever I’m tempted to say that the nemesis has to be a villainous character. Sometimes, the nemesis is just the person keeping the protagonist from becoming too big for her britches.
A great example of a non-villainous nemesis is Cordelia Chase from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Cordelia almost never agrees with Buffy or the yes-men in the Scooby gang. Much comic mileage is made of the fact that she generally finds Buffy to be full of crap. (One of my favorite scenes in that show is the one where Buffy can read everyone’s thoughts and they are ALL thinking about poor, poor Buffy except Cordelia, who’s all “Bored now*, can I go?”) But she is not a bad person and is a great asset to Buffy’s team. Later, after Cordelia’s exodus from the show, the ex-demon Anya fills a similar purpose. (Spike, too.)
Veronica Mars is simply chock full of non-villainous (mostly**) nemeses — people who oppose Veronica’s goals for motivations that even Veronica agrees are totally valid. Weevil, Logan, Duncan, Mac, and even Keith Mars all regularly do battle with our heroine, and they are also the people she loves best in the world.
I love to write non-villainous nemeses, because, let’s face it — even good people don’t always agree, and you can’t have everyone around your heroine being a boring old yes-man all the time. Characters who are “good” simply because they like your protag and “bad” if they don’t are boring. (I even like to write villains who love and agree with my heroines.)
Perhaps my most popular nemesis is Poe. (“Perhaps,” she says!) There are other hunters in the Cloisters who play the role of nemesis to Astrid and Phil and Cory. The nemesis in For Darkness Shows the Stars is one of my very favorite characters of all time.
Who is your favorite nemesis character and why do you like him or her?
_______
* Yes, I know “bored now” is not her line but rather Evil!Willow’s several seasons later, but I can’t be bothered to look up what it is she actually says right at this moment.
** There can be a fluidity on the nemesis/villain divide, especially in long running series, where they can skip back and forth over the line. Logan is occasionally a villain. Spike, certainly. Magneto basically lives on the line, leaning one way or another depending on the plot requirements and Dr. Xavier’s mood.
 A few weeks ago, I got involved in a truncated Twitter conversation with writer Robin Talley that went like this:
Thanks to @deidreknight for reminding me of how much you can ramp things up by having a character actually say it out loud.
@dpeterfreund Very interesting concept – can you give an example of how it works?
@robin_talley long for twitter. Tell you what — I’ll do a blog post on subject next week.
And so here I am (several weeks late) doing just that.
Writers, like folks of any profession, accumulate a collection of tricks and tools to help them in their work. A plumber will know how to fix a particular kind of clog. A writer will know how to convey a certain piece of story information in a dynamic and interesting way.
Some become so popular that they have names of their own (and entire books devoted to their usage), such as “the MacGuffin” or a “Save the Cat” scene. If I’m having a problem with a scene, I might move it to a more active location, or switch the POV, or perform some other trick that makes it come alive on the page.
A tool I’m particularly fond of is one I like to call “Crying out Loud.”
It works like this. You are trying to write an emotionally-charged scene. Characters are… arguing, or talking, or whatever. (For all values of “whatever.”) And the POV character thinks something rather powerful.
Fine. Okay. Not bad. But how much more powerful would that scene have the potential to become if instead of thinking it, the character actually says those words? The other character then has to respond (or not, which is its own drama and power).
Crying Out Loud accomplishes the following:
1) It deepens the relationship between characters: now they KNOW what the other person is thinking, and how it they would respond to it.
2) It forces change. Whereas before you could stretch the status quo out past the scene, you are now dealing with an entirely different situation. This moves the story forward.
This falls under the same the writerly advice that posits that misunderstandings are false conflict and lazy writing. You know the old adage that stories aren’t interesting if everything could be resolved with a conversation? One way to find out if that’s true is to make the characters have that conversation and see if you’ve still got problems. If so, then you’ve got real conflict. And the reader knows it. So now, instead of the reader sitting there thinking, “Man, why doesn’t she just spit it out already?” She spits it out and has to deal with the consequences and the reader is thinking, “Whoa, now that he knows, what are they going to do now?”
K asks:
I just finished reading ‘Secret Society Girl’ and enjoyed every page and wanted to thank you for writing such a page turner.
I’m writing a book at the moment, as well as working a full time job and I wanted to know if you have any advice in how to find time to write?
Thanks so much for reading. I’m glad you enjoyed the book. How exciting to be writing your first book! I wrote both Secret Society Girl and Under the Rose (as well as four other unpublished manuscripts before that) while working full time. This is how I did it:
- Set a goal — either a daily/weekly page goal or a “due date” for your draft. I found that working with a due date meant I would keep my eye on that goal. For me, having the yearly contest of RWA’s Golden Heart was a way to always make sure I had a manuscript to enter for the contest. There are lots of contests. FInd some if that would be a good motivator for you.
- Admit that you need to sacrifice in order to reach that goal. Stay home on a Friday night instead of going out with friends, etc.
- Get things done in snippets. I would commute by subway, put on headphones, and write to and from my commute to work. I would write during my lunch hour. I would cook in the crockpot so I had time after work to write instead of making dinner.
- Fifteen minutes first thing. Set your alarm fifteen minutes early, get up and write for fifteen minutes before doing ANYTHING — eating breakfast, getting dressed, checking your email. I found it would “set” your mind on the book for the day.
- Remember, you only need to write ONE page a day to have a finished manuscript at the end of the year. One page a day — you can do that. Get up early, give up a little, try to write in snippets. One page a day.
Good luck!
I was recently reminded of an old phenomenon I remember well from the days before I was published (and before I realized that my blood pressure was best served by staying off listservs and forums populated by aspiring writers): that of trying to play the stats, rather than concentrating on your book.Usually, they are asking about the probability of their book being published, or their X-written manuscript being the one that makes it, or how much they can be expected to make, or what’s the likelihood of a movie being made from their debut novel, or any one of a dozen quantifiable answers to what are inherently unquantifiable questions.
But the question asked on Daphne Unfeasible’s blog the other day was a new take on the stats topic:
“I know editors at publishing companies ask for re-writes, both great and small, depending on the manuscript. But would you say there is a typical percentage range of changes that authors should expect to make on their novels before publication? For example, are most authors you work with usually asked to change 5% of their original work or closer to 30%? Or nowadays is it simply typos and grammatical errors that are changed? Or does it depend on how busy an editor is and how much time he/she’s willing to spend on rereads?”
Yes. No. 25%.
Bless Daphne — she has more patience than I did fresh off maternity leave. If you want a really nice answer, go click on that link, above. I’m going to be mean blunt:
This is a pointless question. I’m really sad that the writer had the chance to ask an agent something and this is what she chose to ask. It does nothing but serve to bolster her writerly neuroses. Some editors have time for a lot of rewrites. Some don’t. Some manuscripts need a lot of rewrites. Some don’t. Some manuscripts are worthy of working through a lot of rewrites. Some aren’t. There are so many variables going on here that asking for numbers is utterly ridiculous.
What purpose does it serve, really? Are you going to NOT submit your book for publication if you hear the average amount an editor “asks you to change” of your original work is 10%? Are you going to pull a fit if your book is above the average number that you are told by an agent on a blog one day? Are you going to rush around preening like a peacock if you don’t get that amount of changes?
(No seriously. I had a writer friend that did this — that actually sent smart-ass letters to her critique partners saying her editor thought her MS was perfect so there. Um, no. Your editor was busy.)
And while I’m on the topic, I think it’s best if the writer stopped thinking of her relationship with an editor as so adversarial. I often talk to aspiring writers who have somehow got it into their heads that they sell their perfect little books to editors who then force them to make horrible, injurious changes.
No.
The editor who buys your book LOVES your book. They have fought for it, in house, which is why they have managed to pry dollars out of the grasping hands of their publishers and marketing departments in order to publish it. They will live and breathe this book as they edit it, as they help come up with cover concepts and back flap copy. They believe this book should be in the hands of the readers of the world. And they want to make it as good as possible. The changes they will ask for are meant to accomplish that.
Is the writer going to agree with every change? No, of course not. I have yet to get the editorial letter where I’ve agreed with every single thing my editor asks for. Sometimes she asks me to change something I don’t want to change at all. Sometimes she has pinpointed a problem but her proposed solution doesn’t appeal to me, and I have to find something else that will make us both happy. Sometime she’s totally spot on.
And my books? Sometimes they require a LOT of editing. Sometimes very little. When I first sold Rampant, it was told from the points of view of Astrid, Cory, AND Philippa. My editor suggested I rewrite the book to be solely from Astrid’s perspective. As you can imagine, that’s a LOT of rewrites. Compare it with Secret Society Girl, which was also the start of a series, also my first book at a particular publishing house, and also my first time working with a particular editor. I did edits, but not wholesale rewrites that changed the format and point of view of the book, because it was right the way it was.
However, just because I sold a book and then rewrote it completely doesn’t mean everyone will, or can. There were people who chose not to put in an offer for Rampant that may have done so had it come to them in the form that my editor suggested. (Actually, I know this for a fact.) My editor made it better. Editors are there to make your books better.
If you’re lucky. I know a bunch of writers who have editors who are too busy to do substantive editing of their work. I know a writer whose manuscript came back from her editor with a smiley face on the top and that’s it. One of my friends actually hires her old editor, who got out of the business, to edit her manuscripts freelance because she’s not getting it at her publisher. If you’re in this business for any length of time, you learn to consider yourself extremely lucky to get editors as invested, talented, and fantastic as the ones I have had for my last eight books.
So, to sum up: don’t ask questions about stats. Books are not widgets. Love your editor; she’s there to make your book better. Write hard.
From time to time, I receive requests from near or complete strangers to help them in their quest for publication.
(Also, occasionally to help them in their quest for college admissions, since, you know, my first series was set in college and that somehow makes me an expert into how to get in?)
Most often, these requests come from folks I know peripherally through one of my writing organizations, like RWA, or from a reader of my books. (It is very difficult to say no to a person who starts off their emails with “I love your books!”)
Now, it’s pretty easy to say no when a complete stranger asks me to introduce them to my agent (my agent accepts queries at her website), or to read her manuscript, or to critique her first chapter. It’s a lot harder to say no when they are asking for help on their query letter. It’s just a few hundred words. This person is such an earnest young aspiring writer! I remember being an earnest young aspiring writer, and how much it meant to me when a published author (in this case, Julie Leto — HI, JULIE!) offered to read my query for me.
And these requests have become rather ubiquitous lately, as the story about how I helped Carrie Ryan (HI, CARRIE) with her query letter made the rounds on the internet. (What this story does not seem to include is the information that Carrie and I had been critique partners for over six months at that point, which means I’d READ HER ACTUAL BOOK.) And now, they are not necessarily coming from fans of my books (HI, READERS!) or even people I may have had drinks with once at a conference. They are coming from random people who stumbled on this story somewhere on the internet or at one of Carrie’s events and somehow came away with the impression that I run a free query-writing service.
And despite having received these requests for six years, and despite them ALWAYS TURNING OUT THE EXACT SAME WAY, I have not learned my lesson. Because I keep saying yes.
So I’m writing this post as a lesson to you, future requester of my assistance, after the latest effort in which I spent several hours assisting a perfect stranger with her query and received absolutely no response whatsoever.
You may certainly ask me to read your query letter. I will not necessarily say no, but I will not necessarily say yes. And if what you mean when you ask me to “read your query letter” is not, in fact, “read your query letter” but instead “tell me that my query is brilliant and you’re handing it off straightaway to your agent” then you can go jump off a bridge.
Perhaps if you knew me at all, instead of just having heard my name associated with the writing of a query of a big debut novel that hit the bestseller lists and got a movie option — perhaps if you’d spent five minutes reading my blog, you’d know that it’s not all puppies and unicorns around here. (Well, it is, but the unicorns? Not so nice.) I do not believe in some glittering representation of the publishing industry. I am a realist. Selling a book is hard. Writing a query is hard. It’s not pretty, it’s not art. It’s business. And though you slaved over your precious manuscript for who knows how many months or years, realize that the agent or editor who looks at it is going to give it approximately 90 seconds of attention over a tuna sandwich on their lunch hour.
And when I read your query, I’m putting myself in that agent or editor’s shoes. I’m not going to spend much time worrying about whether or not you’ve started with a rhetorical question or saying thank you at the end or whatever randomly specific thing some blogging agent (who may or may not be even agenting anymore) says to do — because I promise you, if the rest of your query is compelling, this is all just window dressing. And I’m not going to dress it up in soft language for you. If it’s a mess, I’ll tell you so. If you packed it with cliches or 70-word sentences or managed to completely neglect mentioning one of your main characters — I’m going to tell you so.I’m not going to couch it in pretty soft sell language. If you want someone to fawn, ask your friends or your mother or your significant other. I don’t know you. We aren’t friends.
If this hurts your feelings, well, you’ve now been warned that it might. If you are so astonished by the idea of me not blowing smoke up your ass about your query, then please do not send it to me. (Personally, I’d rather have my feelings hurt than a ton of rejection letters, but hey, your mileage may vary.)
And, if you ask anyone I actually know, anyone I am actually friends with and have critiqued with, you’ll find that I shoot straight. It’s constructive criticism, not bashing. But it certainly ain’t flowery. If I see something that’s a problem, I tell them. They are free to take my advice or leave it, and I don’t care. I often do not take the advice of my well meaning critique partners. My opinion about the query is just one opinion. But you asked for my opinion for a reason. Presumably because you think that I, having written a few successful queries, somehow know what I’m doing.
So if you, perfect stranger, do ask me to read your query, and I do give you advice, even if you think it’s traumatizing that I tore apart your little darling, remember that I took time out of my day –time I cold have spent working on my own books, time I might have been spending ACTIVELY PAYING A BABYSITTER, time I DEFINITELY could have spent hanging out with my baby — to give you, perfect stranger advice on your query letter.
And you disappeared. I never heard from you again. I didn’t hear “thanks” or “wow, that helps a lot” or even “you unholy bitch, how dare you say that about my darling little baby query letter!” I heard nothing.
You know what that comes across as?
“Hi, writer. I know this is your living, but I don’t care. In fact, I have so little respect for you as a fellow writer that I’m not even going to PRETEND that I’ve read your books before I ask you for help. All I care about is what you can do for me, and I heard that you wrote a query letter for a bestselling author. Please read and rewrite mine, or better yet, tell me it’s brilliant just as it is. And no matter what, don’t ever expect to hear another word from me again.”
I am not some google translator that you plug your query gobbledygook into and out spits something (hopefully) more coherent or helpful or even just a different perspective. I am a person. You asked me for a favor. I am not expecting a freaking parade. But an acknowledgment of receipt might be nice.
So, now you have been warned. Feel free to ask, with no expectation that I might say yes. And if I do say yes, feel free to send, with no expectation that I’m going to like the darn thing. And when I do write back to you with my thoughts, please give me some common human decency, or next time I’ll call you out by name.
On one of my writer’s loops, a writer is bemoaning the fact that she’s been waiting to hear back from an agent about her submission since last summer. When last she wrote in for a status update, the agent responded that she’d been swamped with travel.
“Why do agents travel so much?” the writer asked. Why are they out there attending conferences and presumably garnering new submissions if they have a pile of submissions on their desk already waiting to be read?
The answer is easy, but it’s not easy to hear: They do want submissions. Just not that one.
(Now, there is a class of agents who are, in my opinion, playacting, similar to those “writers” we all know who have been working on their Great American Novel for ten years. They don’t make any sales, or maybe they have one or two sales but only to houses that don’t require agents to get in the door (Harlequin, etc.) — but boy do they show up at every conference and judge every contest!
There are also some agents that do a lot of travel. Any agent located outside of NY must travel to NY several times a year to conduct business. As other mentioned, a lot of agents do travel to conferences so they can sit in a room with their clients and the editors at the same time, and then of course, there are the overseas rights fairs.)
But none of those things is the issue. It’s not “why do agents travel so much?” Even agents with a packed travel schedule will make room to read a hot submission if it crosses their desk. The real question — the question the writer isn’t asking but should be is, “Why is this agent uninterested in getting back to me in a reasonable amount of time?” And we can sit here and analyze it like girlfriends trying to figure out why some guy isn’t returning our call, but it’s simple: He’s Just Not That Into You. In which case, you are better off without him.
An agent who doesn’t read your submission in eight months (EIGHT MONTHS — longer than my baby has been alive), is not an agent who is all fired up to represent you. It’s entirely possible that this agent has already read your submission, or glanced at the first few pages, and isn’t interested. But… writing rejections? Not fun. Maybe the agent thinks they need to come back to it when they are in a better mood. Maybe they’ll like it this time. Maybe they can’t think of a good reason to reject it and they aren’t the kind of agent who likes to send form letters. Maybe they honestly haven’t read it.
But it all adds up to the same thing — they’re just not that into you.
I have said this before, but it is the truth — your writing career is not one book. If the book you’ve written is failing to get very far, then write another book. When you have the right book, getting an agent is a relatively straightforward process. Wouldn’t you rather get the agent of your dreams with a book that everyone thinks has a strong chance of selling rather than wait around for months or years begging agent after agent to please put down their rollaboard suitcase for five minutes and look at this book that they aren’t really all that interested in?
Please note that I’m not saying “good” book for a reason. I’m saying “right” book. There are plenty of “good” books that aren’t going to get agents excited right now. Maybe the market is bad. Maybe the market is small. Maybe the market isn’t ripe for a debut in that particular subject. Or… maybe the book isn’t good enough.
And you might as well get used to it now. This doesn’t stop when you get published. You will write books that will fail to find an audience. You will write books that won’t sell to publishers, or that your agent tells you isn’t a good idea to shop. Yes, everyone loves to tell the stories of the plucky writer who thumbed her nose at the establishment and switched agents/sold it elsewhere/published it herself and made a mint. So it’s very tempting to believe that your book is also one of those exceptions. And maybe it is — this advice is not universal.
But for every one of those stories, there are more stories of writers who retired manuscripts or listened to their agents or sent something else to their publisher and sold it and made a mint. Every writer I know has a book collecting dust in the recesses of their closets/hard drives, and most of them are relieved that it’s back there. This could also be the situation you are in.
And, if it is, and you do write a new book — a book that does get some attention, maybe in eight weeks instead of eight months — and sell it, who is to say that interest might not circle ’round to your other, older-but-beloved book?
Story Time: Before I sold Secret Society Girl, I was shopping a paranormal romance novel. At least, that’s what I was calling it. It had done very well on the contest circuit, but it wasn’t really catching the agenting world on fire. I’d sent it out 20 times. I had gotten a smattering of full requests, but in the end, I was looking at 18 rejections. Two agents still had it.
Meanwhile, I wrote SSG. I sent that out 4 times and got 4 offers. One of the agents was the one looking at my other book, the romance, and when we spoke about forming a business relationship, she said that after we sold SSG, we could look into marketing the romance novel.
We never did. And I’m glad. That book was not going to be a strong contender in the then-burgeoning paranormal romance market. (As one of the rejecting agents, who now works for my agent’s agency pointed out — what was selling in pararom was paranormal boyfriends — werewolf or vampire or etc. boys falling in love with human girls. This book was about two humans and some ghosts.) It was a good book, but it wasn’t great for the market, it wouldn’t have grown me as an author, and it wouldn’t have been a good use of my time.
What would have happened if I’d thought about the book, instead of my career? I’d spent over 18 months writing that book. What if I had despaired over “wasting” all that time and had sent out that book to 20 more agents? Or 100 more? It would have gotten a bite eventually (actually, it did — an agent who had mistakenly sent me a rejection called a few months after I sold SSG to offer me representation for the para romance). But the agent would have had as hard a time selling the weak-for-the-market book as I’d had trying to get representation. What if it had sold, but poorly. What if it hadn’t sold, but, having gotten farther (i.e., securing agent representation) with that book than I had with any other, I kept harping on it, maybe for years? What if I’d done that rather than writing a new book that was right for the market and sold very quickly for good money?
Instead, I sold nine other books. Books that I love every bit as much. My career is not about one book.
L asks:
Could you please post a section on your website providing tips to novice writers (like myself) on how to successfully get your novel out there. I’m very curious to read your query letter.
Your wish is my command. Over the years, I’ve amassed quite a few posts on the writing industry and bits of writing and publishing advice. In the column on the right, you’ll find several of my favorites listed under “On Writing and Publishing,” including the query letter that landed me my agent six years ago. Keep in mind that these posts have been written over the better part of a decade. Some things that may have been true (or at least more prevalent then) might have changed. For instance, when I queried my agent, she was one of only a few agents accepting electronic queries. Now, I believe that’s the norm.
Regular blog readers, if there’s a post of mine you think belongs on this list but isn’t there, let me know! (You can find a lot of them under the tag “writing industry“.
And if there is a burning writing or publishing question you have that isn’t answered on that list, let me know that as well. I’m always happy to do more!
Last night, my pal Pam Bachorz and I were supposed to participate in a chat on worldbuilding at yalitchat.org. Unfotunately, neither Pam nor I are a member of that particular organization. We were confused and thought we were participating in a Twitter chat using the hashtag #yalitchat. Oops.
Anyway, I felt bad that we missed out on the chat and so I thought I’d give anyone who wanted to chat and wasn’t able to the opportunity to try again. So this week on the blog we’ll be doing a worldbuilding Q&A. Go ahead and ask your questions in the comments, and I’ll answer them in the comments. And maybe Pam will come by, too. I don’t know. I haven’t asked her yet.
And to make it extra fun, I thought we could do a giveaway. Everyone who asks a question is entered into a contest to win either a copy of RAMPANT or ASCENDANT (winner’s choice).
Before we start, I thought I’d give a little overview about my personal take on worldbuilding. Worldbuilding, in my mind, is not something that belongs solely to the realm of speculative and paranormal fiction. It’s something that every writer worth his or her salt engages in. Intricacies of setting, of the relationships between characters, of the world they live in — that’s all worldbuilding. If you set your story in an office building and the office manager decrees that Fridays are casual dress days, that’s worldbuilding — you know why? Because then when you have your main character score an interview for a much better job on a Friday afternoon, you have to find a way for her to sneak her suit in so everyone else in jeans doesn’t get suspicious about what shes up to. Which brings me to:
Diana’s Personal Worldbuilding Rule #1: There must be rules.
Vampires are allergic to sunlight. People who know how to use The Force can move things with their minds. You can use magic to do anything but bring people back from the dead (this appears to be one of the few rules in the Harry Potter universe). “There can be only one.” I don’t care what the rules are, and I don’t care if the reader knows them all — or any of them. Maybe figuring out the rules is part of the fun of reading. (Wait, I take that back. Tell the reader at least one or more of the rules. Give the poor guy a toehold!) But the writer had better know the rules. Which leads me to…
Diana’s Personal Worldbuilding Rule #2: Break the rules only at great peril — and if you have it under control.
The best known examples of doing this the right way are in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Buffy used to explain the rule of its world in the start of every episode: “Into every generation is born a slayer, one girl who has the power to blah blah blah the vampires.” ONE. One Slayer. If Buffy dies, a new slayer is called. That’s the rule. Except, Buffy brilliantly bends that rule, because prophecies are for losers. People don’t die the way they used to, and what’s technically “dead” isn’t permanent in today’s world. So when Buffy briefly drowns at the end of the first season, another slayer is activated. And then there are two, which makes for a LOT of lovely plot twists in seasons two, three, and four, when you see what happens when two very different slayers are at odds with one another.* And then they break the rule all over again in Season 7 when Buffy decides that the whole idea of a bunch of potentials waiting around for a Slayer to die is ridiculous, and gives them ALL Slayer powers, which leads to a big awesome battle at the end of Season 7, and which I’m sure leads to some good plot twists in the comic books — I haven’t read them — but did lead to one very interesting episode of Angel wherein Angel and Spike are forced to battle a crazy and abused Slayer. So yes — that one broke the rules in a good way.
But, you have to lay the groundwork for breaking that rule. You have to have Buffy go, “Let’s cross the streams and see what happens,” (another excellent rule-breaking moment). It has to be important and it has to be game-changing. Otherwise, you’re going to alienate your reader. You’re going to have midichlorians on your hands, or you’re going ot have that random moment where Neo controls the robots in the real world and then NEVER DEAL WITH IT EVER** and your die-hard fans are going to be saying, WTF, George Lucas? WTF, Wachowskis?
So, to reiterate, if you’re going to break the rules, you better know what the rules are, how you plan to break them, and how you plan for that to complete change the game in the world you’ve created. Which leads me to
Diana’s Personal Worldbuilding Rule #3: There must be a reason.
Not only must there be rules, there has to be a reason for those rules. It doesn’t have to be a good reason, or a fair reason. (The rules in my killer unicorn world are misogynistic and dangerous, and that’s kind of the point for me.) But there has to be a reason, if only because you must have a reason to mention every thing you mention. There has to be a reason you made them vampires. If not, why aren’t they just men, or elves, or ageless liver-eating mutants who live in air ducts? If there’s a magic wishing well on the princess’s property, she’d better, at some point, do something more than draw water from it. This is not unlike my favorite advice from Chekov about the gun on the wall. There HAS to be a reason. There has to be a reason that you made the choice you did. Sometime in the future, I will be discussing this in great detail. And there must be a reason that your magical element has the rules it does. It doesn’t have to be a good reason. Maybe the vampires in your book are not allergic to garlic, but you wrote that in because you really like the idea of Dracula working in a pizza parlor and taking a nip of the guests who’ve had too much chianti, which, naturally, wouldn’t be possible if they couldn’t deal with garlic. In the movie The Lost Boys, there’s a rule that says there are “half-vampires” who have all the qualities of vampires but don’t become full-fledged until they kill someone, and can be turned back if you find the head vampire and kill him. This is a weird and unusual vampire rule (though not entirely unlike Mina Harker’s experiences in Dracula, where she is freed from her trance only after the death of Dracula), but is very important to the plot, since the main character is one of these half-vamps, and so is his sexy girlfriend.
And here’s an example of how solid worldbuilding can help you in your writing. In an early, early draft of Rampant, (it wasn’t even going to be called Rampant then) I had magical closets. That’s right: magical closets. The characters could stand in front of the closets and think about certain things and when they opened the closet doors, the things they needed would be inside. This had a lot of backlash for them, in that if they stood in front of the closet and thought about how dangerous unicorn hunting was and about all the hunters who came before them who’d probably died for the cause, then opened the door, they’d drown in a pile of bloodstained clothes belonging to old hunters.
This was a Bad Idea. As the worldbuilding for the story solidified, I realized that to keep it under control, I had to limit the rules of the magic in the world to two things: hunters and unicorns. Everything everything everything had to be about the relationship between a hunter and a unicorn. Not clothes or wood, not things magically appearing or disappearing. If I wanted magic in the actual setting, I needed to relate it back to my primary magical constructs: The body and soul of the hunter, the body and soul of the unicorn, and how those two things intersect. Therefore, if I wanted magic, it had to be magic MADE from that mystical connection between hunter and unicorn. If I wanted magic in my nunnery, it had to be because the walls were made of unicorns, and the hunters (and only the hunters) could feel that. But once I had nailed down that this was my primary, inviolate rule, it became pretty clear that the magical closets and their room-of-requirement style voodoo had to go.
Which leads me to my last big rule:
Diana’s Personal Worldbuilding Rule #4: The more fantastical the fantastical elements are in your story, the more you have to ground everything else.
This is where I’m especially glad that I use the term “personal.” Your mileage may vary on this, and lord knows there are many beloved stories where this isn’t the case. But as my friend Carrie Ryan says, you get a certain number of gimmes in a book. Use them wisely. If you try to shove too much magic into a story and you fail to ground it in reality with either setting, characters, background info, laws of physics — what have you, people aren’t going to buy it. And gimme points aren’t even. Someone writing a book about vampires has a lot more gimme points left over than I do, writing a book about unicorns. Because people are familiar with vampires — to say “oh, this is a vampire book” might be only one gimme point out of a hundred. For me to say “oh, this is a book about killer unicorns” — people are already skeptical going in. That’s 40 gimme points. I only have sixty left to play with.
So what do you do? You limit the magic. You make the characters oh so much more human and lifelike. You don’t all of a sudden introduce elves or magical closets on top of whatever else you have going on. You make sure that your reader has something safe to retreat to whenever the supernatural element of the story starts to erode their willing suspension of disbelief.
So those are my first few rules. Question away!
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* That a new Slayer isn’t called when Buffy dies again at the end of the fifth season always made Sailor Boy and I wonder if the “Slayer Line” isn’t now flowing through Faith — which would make sense because Faith was called after Kendra died, and the “extra Slayer” is really Buffy. But all that was negated in season 7.
** I really REALLY hate the subsequent Matrix films.
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