Month: October 2013
Trained by reading hundreds of submissions, editors and agents often make their read/not-read decision on the first page. In a customarily formatted book manuscript with chapters starting about 1/3 of the way down the page (double-spaced, 1-inch margins, 12-point type), there are 16 or 17 lines on the first page.
The challenge: does this narrative compel you to turn the page?
[pullquote]Storytelling Checklist
Evaluate this opening page for how well it executes these 6 vital storytelling elements. While it’s not a requirement that all of them must be on the first page, I think writers have the best chance of hooking a reader if they are. The one vital ingredient not listed is professional-caliber writing, a given for every page.
[/pullquote]
Let’s Flog The Hit by David Baldacci
David Baldacci’s new thriller was in first place on the New York Times paperback bestseller list for October 6. Let’s see just how thrilling the opening page is—would this have hooked an agent if it came in from an unpublished writer? Following is what would be the first manuscript page (17 lines) of Chapter 1 in The Hit.
Feeling energized by the death that was about to happen, Doug Jacobs adjusted his headset and brightened his computer screen. The picture was now crystal clear, almost as if he were there.
But he thanked God he wasn’t.
There was thousands of miles away, but one couldn’t tell that by looking at the screen. They couldn’t pay him enough to be there. Besides, many people were far better suited for that job. He would be communicating shortly with one of them.
Jacobs briefly glanced around the four walls and the one window of his office in the sunny Washington, D.C., neighborhood. It was an ordinary-looking low-rise brick building set in a mixed-use neighborhood that also contained historical homes in various states of either decay or restoration. But some parts of Jacobs’s building were not ordinary at all. These elements included a heavy-gauge steel gate out front with a high fence around the perimeter of the property. Armed sentries patrolled the interior halls and surveillance cameras monitored the exterior. But there was nothing on the outside to clue anyone in to what was happening on the inside.
And a lot was happening on the inside.
Jacobs picked up his mug of fresh coffee, into which he had just poured three sugar (snip)
My vote and editorial notes after the fold.
Read MoreSo you are having that first marketing meeting with your publisher for your book… or that first phone call. Is there anything you should be asking in particular? Should you push for anything specifically?
If this is the first call? You want to hear their plans. Then you and your agent should go over what they said and translate it – there can be code in their answers. Ask them what they are planning on doing and listen and take notes. When they say something like – We’re doing Goodreads- ask them to be specific and write down what they say.
Chances are the first call/meeting will be more than several months pre-pub. So lots of info won’t be available yet. They wait to decide some things till they get a sense of orders. But you still want to find out as much as you can. Just remember it is only the first call/meeting. There should be another before the ARCs are sent out. At that point they’ll know more. And then there should be yet one more once they have a sense of how those orders are looking.
At every stage there’s more you can find out and more you need to know. And at every stage you and your agent should be working on and refining a wish list of marketing and PR opportunities/efforts. To do that you’ll want to get a lot of questions answered so you can see if there are any holes and figure out if you need to bring in any outside services or if everything looks good.
Also all this knowledge helps you manage your expectations and that’s half the battle when it comes to having a good publishing experience. If you know going in that they are happy to be publishing you but aren’t giving your book the “it” treatment, you’ll be happy when you go back to press for a second printing. But if you have no idea how they see your book and are anticipating it getting “Gone Girl” PR, marketing and co-op treatment, you’ll be devastated when you don’t see stacks of books in B&N.
Here’s a checklist of what you want to find out to help you figure out what they are doing, what they aren’t, where your book ranks in terms in terms of effort and juice, and what you should be thinking about doing yourself.
Read MoreThe book I’m most proud of having worked on is the memoir of a holocaust survivor – Mark it With a Stone by Joseph Horn. As you might imagine, he had a gripping, important story to tell. But when we met, he was a businessman and lacked the narrative skills he needed in order to tell his story effectively. He also warned me before we began that, because the events he was writing about were so traumatic, he might find it hard to tolerate criticism.
But he was motivated. Horn had once watched a fellow inmate in a work camp scream, “No, I must live, I must tell!” just before he was executed. Horn lived. And he told. I was able to coach him gently through revisions that made his narrative more effective, the book published, and a copy is now in the library of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.
His story raises an interesting question, though – what does it mean for a memoir to be accurate? One of the largest issues we dealt with was the matter of dialogue. He wanted to be absolutely scrupulous, telling stories precisely as they happened. But in his original draft, his characters only spoke when he could remember what they said word-for-word. Since the manuscript was written years after the fact, this meant he used very little dialogue – mostly bursts of highly memorable lines like, “I must live, I must tell!” Nearly all the rest of his conversations were narrative summary, and many of his scenes felt flat and distant as a result. He was telling the story to readers rather than letting them experience it.
Read MoreLast week I heard a snippet of Terry Gross’ Fresh Air interview with Eat, Pray, Love author Elizabeth Gilbert. Gilbert has a new book out and was on the show to talk about it.
A bit earlier in the same week, an author client had asked if I’d pitched her to NPR shows, including Fresh Air. My answer was, “Yes, of course.” It always is, because I always pitch the authors I represent to NPR — and to all the other dream-caliber, A-list outlets. But does that mean I expect interviews to pan out there for them?
Sadly, no. Not at all.
It’s an uncomfortable dilemma. Authors want to know their publicist is reaching out to A-list, dream outlets like Fresh Air, The New York Times, Oprah and The Today Show. Isn’t that one reason they’ve hired a publicist in the first place? And it wouldn’t make sense to simply leave those outlets off the list of places I reach out to even though the chances for the overwhelming majority of authors are virtually zero. For one thing, there’s the crucial dream factor for authors. As I’ve said before here on WU, I’m all for dreaming big! I also feel that as a matter of principle those outlets should continue hearing from all authors who’d like a fighting chance at recognition. They should be made aware again and again of these authors’ utterly staggering numbers, the variety of stories they’re writing about, their talent, their accomplishments.
But people like Terry Gross aren’t just looking for a good read to talk about: they’re looking for news. News, by definition, is something that’s not only new and timely, but is some combination of the following:
Of course, many of these words are subjective, so each news outlet defines them
Read MoreWhen I became a regular contributor to Writer Unboxed, I made a silent vow to write something funny for my bi-monthly contribution. Therese and Kath, Writer Mamas, gave me carte blanche to write whatever I wanted, but I wanted to write funny.
But, this time, try as I might I can’t be humorous. In fact, it’s hard to even laugh too much. Sure, there have been moments, like the pie-off at Snip ‘n’ Clip, where I get my hair cut. You see, two months ago as I was getting my hair done by Sue, Deb was cutting John’s hair. I’d never met John but within a few minutes we were having a rousing conversation about pie—how we each thought ours was better.
The conversation led to the aforementioned pie-off. I brought Quiche Lorraine, John brought pumpkin pie. “This isn’t weird at all, is it?” I asked a friend who saw me on the way to get my hair cut, when she asked me about the quiche. “Bringing pie to the hair salon?”
Sue, Deb, John, and I stood in the small kitchen area—after the haircuts—and ate pie. The quiche then the pie. I won of course. (Well, in my mind I won, we didn’t actually vote, although Deb did say, “if this writing thing doesn’t work out, I think you should open a restaurant…” I took that as winning. I’m competitive that way.)
These days even the small slices of life are tinged with sadness, though. The truth is, it’s been a tough time in our house. My husband lost his job two weeks ago. That’s a funny way to put it, isn’t it? Lost, like he might find it? (He won’t). I mean he’ll find another one. We’ve been through this before. But that one’s gone for good. The company reorganized.
The company reorganizing, my husband being home, has reorganized my life, too. I’m not going to the coffee shop anymore in the mornings. I’m writing instead at the kitchen table, a moratorium of sorts. But I am still writing. It’s what we do as writers, right? It’s what I do to work through it. The happiness, the sadness, the good times and bad. The first thing I always think is: “How will I write this?”
Read More(I am on mad, crazy deadline and traveling this week, and so posting a ‘re-run’ from the old, Shrinking Violets blog. Forgive me! Hopefully it will be helpful to some of you. I will be back next month with our regularly scheduled original posts. <g>)
Save the Cat: A Bridge To Story
Much like the budding individualists I write about, I have a love/hate relationship with structure. A closet rebel, I get twitchy whenever told I must follow rules or take a particular action. And what is structure, other than a cohesive, integrated set of rules?
When I am writing, I want to create and play and not be encumbered by this banal concept of rules and structure. I want to be freeeeeeee. Or at least until my Work In Progress becomes a sprawling formless mass that threatens to envelop the entire west coast. Right about then is when I acknowledge that a little structure, judiciously applied, can actually be MORE freeing than an absolute absence of structure.
It’s kind of like a baby who is at the crawling stage. You can let him have free reign of the house, but you will have to intervene every 30 seconds and wear yourself out and crush his soul in the process. But! If you were to put up baby gates, well then, you are free to step back and let the little fellow roam freeeeeee, just as he was born to do—knowing that the gates will keep him in place.
Blake Snyder’s SAVE THE CAT plotting template, referred to by those in the know as the Beat Sheet or the “BS2,” is my writerly version of baby gates.
As consumers of story, we all have a very strong, intuitive sense of the elements that need to be in place to make a book or film satisfying. But as writers, sometimes intuitive knowledge isn’t enough to create a gripping, compelling narrative drive. For that we need help.
One of the things that I especially love about the beat sheet is that it takes narrative structure out of the lofty realms of literary criticism or writer’s workshops and puts the structure in terms that any reader would understand. Which is exactly as it should be, for that is who we are ultimately writing for—the reader—and Blake’s terminology and definitions help remind us of how the reader will experience the various stages of our story.
There is a question that many writers like to ponder: Which is more important, plot or character? Of course, the correct answer is that they’re both equally important; in fact, plot = character, for if you change one, you change the other.
I have come to believe that there is a similar correlation between narrative and structure. Story = structure. If you change one, you change the other. Without structure, there is no plot and without plot, there is no story, only a character study or an existential experiment. Without plot, characterization fizzles, since characters are best defined through their actions.
A story is an ephemeral thing—ideas, make-believe characters, things that never happened. It is all illusion and lies. What makes it all hang together in a believable, cohesive unit is structure. And if you get […]
Read MoreI spent the morning working with a very talented writer. An extremely well-placed agent had recently rejected her manuscript, but told her that he’d be happy to consider a revision, or anything else she submits. This is rare praise.
I wasn’t surprised, either by the praise or the rejection. This writer has a great voice; she’s a wordsmith of the first order. Problem is, she can’t tell a story, so as the agent pointed out, the manuscript was meandering, aimless and didn’t add up to anything. And here’s the thing: the writer knew it. But she couldn’t figure out what she was doing wrong.
Talking to her, I said, “Here’s what most writers do, and why they fail: They come up with an interesting character and an interesting situation, and then they start writing to see where it’ll go. They figure that both the story and the character will come clear to them as they write. What they end up with is a narrative that’s basically just a bunch of things that happen.”
“Yes,” she said, “That’s exactly what I did! And when I went back to rewrite, I didn’t know what to do, or how to make it better.”[pullquote]”Story first, “writing” second” is a fundamental guiding principle when it comes to writing an effective story. Ignore it at your peril.[/pullquote]
In fact, before we spoke, she’d written to tell me she was ready to chalk it up to a good try, and start over with something else. Which was heartbreaking, and happily, turned out to be unnecessary. Instead, she’s now going back to find the heart of the story was aiming for, and only then will she begin writing forward.
“Story first, “writing” second” is a fundamental guiding principle when it comes to writing an effective story. Ignore it at your peril.
November is a Terrible Month to Waste
Why am I telling you this now? Because next month is November, aka National Novel Writing Month, aka NaNoWriMo. It’s that time of year when writers across the country hunker down and let ‘er rip, the goal being to write 1,666 words a day for thirty days.
And then in December, all those writers will go back over those words to see if there’s anything worth salvaging. Which is when the vast majority of them very well might end up feeling like the woman I spoke with this morning. If they’re lucky. Others will spend months, if not years, trying to massage a bunch of things that happen into a story. They’ll send them off to agents who will say, “This didn’t add up to anything.” And then they’ll give up, maybe deciding they aren’t writers after all, and vowing to take up interpretive dance instead. Now, that is genuinely heartbreaking.
And utterly avoidable.
Read MoreSarah here, with a Public Service Announcement for anyone searching for an agent: You are not desperate.
Sure, you may, at times, feel desperate. You may think, dear not-yet-published writer, that your chances of getting an agent are very slim. You may think it is arrogant to be picky, that if an agent—any agent—wants to represent your work, you should sign with her, no questions asked. You may think that because you’ve heard “no thank you” or maybe nothing at all from your first fifty queries that you will absolutely say “YES!” if numero fifty-one offers representation, signing on the dotted line without a moment of hesitation.
But you won’t do any of that because you are not desperate. Remember? Repeat after me: I am not desperate.
Good. Now, please say these words: I will thoughtfully consider what I need in an agent before I start an agent search.
Because here’s Part II of my PSA: It’s not enough to have an agent. You need to have the right agent.
Of course, “right” looks different for each of us. In fact, finding the right agent is a lot like finding your “right” romantic partner or the “right” nanny for your child. Let’s explore that nanny analogy . . . when you are searching for a nanny, trying to figure out if a particular person is the right in loco parentis person, you do your research. You consider the following questions: Will this nanny love your child (almost as much) as you do? Will she keep your child safe? Will she want your child to have solid skills before she’s launched into the Real World? When she takes your beloved to the park, will she push her in the swings and sing to her and read to her on a picnic blanket and make up silly haiku poems about squirrels and teach her the multiplication tables and maybe a little French OR might this nanny plug into her iPod and iPad and iFriends and smoke ciggies while your crying leibchen is plopped in front of Elmo TV?
Read MoreLast month I wrote a post exploring some of the problems I encounter most frequently when critiquing people’s query letters.
This month I’m going to continue down that path, identifying some more frequent trouble spots, along with some thoughts on how you can fix or avoid them.
The name game
Many queries are bogged down with an extensive laundry list of names, including the main character, her spouse, her ex, her best friends, the name of the town she lives in, the company she works for, the products they sell, where she goes to school, and so on.
Writers do this because they want the agent to get a sense of their characters, settings and situations, but the result is often information overload. Consider what happens when you’re at a party and you get introduced to half a dozen people in rapid succession. By the time you get to party guest number 6, chances are those first five names are long gone from your memory banks.
As a general rule, characters’ names are not important in a query; their roles are. Think about it: “Joe Smith” tells you nothing, but descriptions like “the local preacher” or “the meddlesome neighbor” give you a much clearer picture of who these people are. You can often get by with just the name of your protagonist.
In fact, you might even be able to avoid using any names in your query. Don’t believe me? Sara J. Henry, Anthony-award winning author of A Cold and Lonely Place, had excellent luck with a name-free query. Here’s the paragraph she used to describe her manuscript, in her query for what became her debut novel:
Read MoreWhat do George Pelecanos, the Iowa Summer Writing Festival, and the Giant Foods in Baltimore have in common? They all played a role in the journey that brought Robb Cadigan’s debut novel PHOENIXVILLE RISING to publication. I’m thrilled to bring this interview with Robb to the Writer Unboxed community.
Q: Welcome to Writer Unboxed! And congratulations on the release of your debut novel, Phoenixville Rising. Can you start us off with a brief summary of what the book’s about?
RC: Thank you! PHOENIXVILLE RISING is about a man who returns to his hometown for the first time in decades and revisits the tragic October when he was a teen delinquent hanging out at the abandoned steel mill. The book moves back and forth in time between the beginning and end of the Pennsylvania steel industry. I don’t really believe in genres, because life doesn’t fit neatly onto one shelf. PHOENIXVILLE RISING is part coming-of-age novel, part crime story, part historical romance. Just like life.
Q: I was lucky enough to read an earlier version of the book, which you had set in a fictional town called Wiltondale. But Phoenixville is real. What prompted the change?
RC: I was fortunate to have you and a few other very talented readers help me with that early draft. As you remember, the story was always set in a thinly veiled version of Phoenixville. I did that primarily because I needed to change some geography and dates of actual events for the sake of the story. But two things changed my mind about maintaining that charade. The first was a brief conversation I had at a conference with the novelist George Pelecanos. Pelecanos argues that an essential part of a novelist’s job is to chronicle a location and era, to document history through fiction. So he coached me (in a gentle but firm way) to avoid fictitious settings and write about real places.
The second thing that changed my mind: the early feedback on the manuscript identified setting as one of my strengths as a writer. I enjoy striving to create a sense of place. In the revisions of PHOENIXVILLE RISING, it became obvious that the setting was as much a character as the protagonist or any of the leads. In fact, it can be argued that the town of Phoenixville IS the main character in my novel. So there was no question that I had to drop the veil and write with accuracy and truth. I still made some minor changes to geography, but I think the novel captures the spirit of the town.
Read MoreToday’s guest, Kathleen McCleary, is a journalist and author whose work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Ladies Home Journal, More, and Good Housekeeping. She has written three novels: House and Home (2008); A Simple Thing (2012), and most recently Leaving Haven (2013). Kathleen has taught writing as an adjunct professor at American University, and she’s an instructor with Writopia Labs, a non-profit that teaches creative writing to kids. She has also worked as a bartender, barista, and bookseller—all great jobs for providing material for fiction. She lives in northern Virginia with her husband and two daughters and Jinx the cat.
Writers so often hear the advice that there’s nothing like putting your butt in the chair day after day in order to get something done. And that’s true, but it’s not the ONLY truth. The other truth is that creative work requires periods of rest, time during which all those things that simmer beneath the surface can percolate and bubble and burst or ripen. Rest is a necessary part of the creative process, and one we too seldom grant ourselves.
Follow Kathleen on Twitter @KAMcCleary and Facebook, and check out her blog.
Taking a Break
For the nine years I’ve been writing fiction, I have read (and written) plenty of advice on how to write and complete a novel. But it wasn’t until recently—after finishing my third novel—that I understood something elemental about writing: It’s equally important to not write. At all. For an extended period of time.
Writers take breaks every day—churn characters and situations and obstacles over and over in our brains until we have that moment (typically in the shower or out walking the dog) when what needs to happen next springs into place. That’s the process—put your butt in the chair for so many hours, walk away for a while, and put your butt back in the chair to forge on, the hokey-pokey of creation. But you never leave it for long.
I sold my third book before I wrote it, based on a first chapter and outline. At the time the deadline was more than a year away—very doable. Until my elderly mother moved to town and my “easy” teaching gig turned out to be hard and my kids needed the time and attention kids need. I missed the deadline, but my editor understood. I missed the next deadline, too.
Read MoreLongtime WU contributor Sophie Masson recently released not just one but two books–Moonlight and Ashes, and Scarlet in the Snow! We’re so pleased she’s with us today to tell us more about them in a brief Take Five interview.
Q: Tell us a little about these two new books. How are they similar—and different?
SM: Both of these books are what I’ve dubbed ‘fairytale thrillers’–that is, they are each based on classic fairytales: Moonlight and Ashes on the Grimm version of Cinderella (Aschenputtel) and Scarlet in the Snow on The Scarlet Flower, the Russian version of Beauty and the Beast, plus another Russian fairytale, Fenist the Falcon–but around that classic fairytale core I have created a romantic thriller with many twists and turns, set in a world that is like an alternative-world version of the latter part of the 19th century, only with magic as well as technology. Each book is set in a different country within that world, inspired by real places but very much its own thing too: in Moonlight and Ashes, it’s Ashberg and the Faustine Empire, inspired by Prague and the Austro-Hungarian Empire; in Scarlet in the Snow, it’s Ruvenya and Champaine, which are respectively inspired by Russia and France. They’re not sequels of each other and have very different characters and stories; but they’re linked by the fact that they are set in the same world (and there is a minor character who appears in both). They won’t be the last, either; the third one, The Crystal Heart, comes out next year, and I’m just working up an outline for the fourth!
Q: What is the flavor of these books? Is this a fairytale world we’d want to visit?
SM: The flavor is very much a mix of traditional fairytale magic and themes, blended with steampunk-style elements, romance, mystery and adventure. It’s a pretty exciting and enthralling mix, if I say so myself–I was very much caught up in it myself and thoroughly enjoyed visiting it and so far it seems readers do too!
Q: What sort of challenges do you place before the characters in these stories, and why did you choose those challenges?
Read MoreMathias Klang
Today’s guest is Martin Fletcher, a Special Correspondent for NBC News and PBS Weekend Newshour and the author of four books, two nonfiction and two novels. His most recent novel, JACOB’S OATH (St. Martin’s/Thomas Dunne), which will be released on October 8, 2013, is about the end of World War II and a man who must choose between avenging the past and building a future.
Said Booklist:
Fletcher, formerly NBC News’ Tel Aviv bureau chief and author of The List (2011), has crafted a moving love story, a vivid portrait of a devastated and chaotic Germany immediately after the war’s end, and a remarkably insightful look into the minds of two survivors of the Holocaust. Fletcher’s style is spare and graceful, and it enhances the power of this small gem of a novel.
Follow Martin on Facebook.
Internet Writer
When I think of the Internet, www for me means a writer’s web wonders.
The web was a revelation for me when writing my new novel, Jacob’s Oath.
I had read a passing reference to a place called the Human Laundry in the liberated concentration camp of Bergen Belsen. I wanted to start my story there, where British doctors and German nurses washed and disinfected lice-ridden survivors before sending them to the rehabilitation area. But I had no idea what it looked like. I searched through dozens of books and hundreds of newspaper reports only to find no mention of it. The survivors I spoke to didn’t remember.
Then belatedly I thought of trawling through Google images. I typed in “Bergen Belsen human laundry” and lo and behold, there they were. The only pictures in existence, as far as I know, are fourteen images in the British Imperial War Museum collection that can be found on the web, as well as one painting, which is also there.
The scene of blonde female nurses with their hair pinned back under kerchiefs drifting through the mist of steam, ghost-like, angel-like, administering to skeletal naked figures laid out on metal tables in a former stable, became the opening description on the first page of my book.
Another wonderful resource, which I first came across on the web and subsequently bought the disk, is The Complete New Yorker, which contains every issue since the first in 1925. Its great writers provided eyewitness descriptions of almost every major event in 1945 that I was interested in.
Read More- « Previous
- 1
- 2
- 3
- Next »
