Writer Unboxed

The Art of the Book Event: 9 Tips

March 23, 2019 By Ann Marie Nieves 1 Comment

It was nearing 8:00 PM on a New York City summer evening and a group of friends and colleagues had gathered at a popular book event to hear a much beloved author read from her latest. We were hugging, kissing and smiling despite the 90-degree weather. We were excited for our friend. We were excited to be among writers and good books.

Fast forward an hour and a half.

The air was stagnant. People were schvitzing. My friend’s teenage daughter rolled her eyes and whispered, “Not again, Mom.” The woman next to me suddenly clutched my arm and muttered some obscenities, abruptly forcing me out of my coma. My Diet Coke was long gone. I hadn’t an email left to answer, but it didn’t matter, because my phone had lost life.

What was happening?

The first author was still reading.

…and reading…

…And reading…

There was beautiful writing in there—really, truly—but it didn’t matter, because the author had lost us within the first few minutes. She spoke slowly without inflection. She didn’t pause or make eye contact. She never looked up (which might have been a good thing in this circumstance). And she read what seemed to be a very large portion of her book, not a well-timed passage.

This author was in desperate need of my kind.

All of us—the survivors of The Worst Reading Ever—bring up the occasion each time we see one another at book events. As I gear up for a robust spring and summer season of new, marvelous books, I think a lot about the art of a signing because I learned a whole lot from that night:

1. Script it. Your book event is more than just reading that awesome passage from pages 2—4. Weave in takeaways, tidbits about characters, what you were thinking as you wrote, and/or points you’re addressing. [Read more…]

The Ghost Worlds Within Me: A Novelist’s Journey

March 22, 2019 By Guest 28 Comments

We’re thrilled to have multi-published author Stephanie Cowell back with us today for a guest post!

Stephanie is the author of Nicholas Cooke, The Physician of London, The Players: a novel of the young Shakespeare, Marrying Mozart and Claude & Camille: a novel of Monet. She is the recipient of an American Book Award. Her next novels (she hopes!) are Blanche and the Water Lilies (the story of the profound help and influence of Monet’s widowed daughter on his last great water lily paintings) and Robbie, a love story set in the English midlands 1900 between a young male artist and a married man. Her work has been translated into nine languages.

You can learn more about Stephanie’s work on her website.

The Ghost Worlds Within Me: A Novelist’s Journey

I first heard them as a young child, murmurs of another time and place. A low man’s voice, laughter, footsteps, a door closing. I was very young and quite alone a great deal. By the time I was eight, I had an imaginary friend. Where he came from I don’t know and only I could see him. He was lonely like me. I had to protect him.

My friend was my stability; I was an only child and the fractures in my parents’ marriage were running down the walls. I hid inside myself and in my room with the ghost worlds and ghost characters who assured me they loved me. They’d always been there for me. In a way I existed through them.

Where did the voices come from? Of course I read constantly and my ghost characters partially grew from my reading but also from deep inside me. By the time I was twelve, they became stories hand scribbled in a black-and-white school notebook. Museums, old houses, graveyards, empty streets inspired me. Then I banged out my worlds on my mother’s old typewriter. In my late teens I published several stories and then left writing to sing because writing was too lonely.

But the ghost world waited inside me and in my forties, it began to emerge again. I wrote four novels in seven years and at the end of that time, an editor from a good publishing house called me and said she wanted to buy my first novel with an option for the second. I lay in bed very faint the next day. I was about to open my inner world to strangers.

That book and the four that followed were great gifts …the things that happened to me, the people I met through them (including indirectly my husband and many dear friends), the events and the very welcome checks which paid for many extra things for my family. It was more than I could ever expect. And I found a lovely agent.

Then phrases began drifting into my world from agents and editors, ones I had not heard before: “Can you get your sales up?” “You write beautifully but that subject isn’t salable.” “Can it be about her brother rather than her love story?” “Nobody wants to hear about…” “You have to build a platform….” “We need more of a social media presence from you…”

I wanted to please the publishing world. I wanted them to want me. But with my novels that editors and agents said they wanted, my writing became forced and stiff, and they asked me, bewildered, “What’s wrong?” With the books I wanted most to write, I often received back the words: “Too difficult to market.” I thought with despair, “What does the publishing world want from my writing? What do I want? – and suppose they are different things?”

I found myself in the middle of what I fled from as a child: an entirely unpredictable world.

Finally I wrote my writer friend Susan and miserably confided in her. “I’m thinking about stopping, not writing any more novels. Pulling books together is too difficult and what they want from me is too difficult. Since I no longer work in a day job, I could work on my languages, take up country dancing, volunteer for the community garden. But I’m feeling so sad.” Suddenly my rich life full of friends and culture and travel seemed meaningless.

She wrote back at once, “I’m sure you DO want to keep writing because writing is what you do ― and being an author is who you are. Not ONLY who you are, but a major part of your identity. I think not writing would make you feel kind of rootless and depressed. It’s second nature.”

Yes, rootless and depressed…that is just what I felt, and I was wretched. So after five published novels and at least six more in draft form, I found myself asking what I wanted from writing. [Read more…]

12+

Flog a Pro: Would you pay to turn the page of this bestseller?

March 21, 2019 By Ray Rhamey 13 Comments

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.

Here’s the question:

Would you pay good money to read the rest of the chapter? With 50 chapters in a book that costs $15, each chapter would be “worth” 30 cents.

So, before you read the excerpt, take 30 cents from your pocket or purse. When you’re done, decide what to do with those three dimes or the quarter and a nickel. It’s not much, but think of paying 30 cents for the rest of the chapter every time you sample a book’s first page. In a sense, time is money for a literary agent working her way through a raft of submissions, and she is spending that resource whenever she turns a page.

Please judge by storytelling quality, not by genre or content—some reject an opening page immediately because of genre, but that’s not a good enough reason when the point is to analyze for storytelling strength.

This novel was number two on the New York Times hardcover fiction bestseller list for March 31, 2019. How strong is the prologue—would this narrative, all on its own, hook an agent if it came in from an unpublished writer? Following are what would be the first 17 manuscript lines of the first chapter.

FOR WYOMING GAME WARDEN Katelyn Hamm, April really was the cruelest month. And this year was turning out to be the worst one of all.

And that was even before she got her pickup stuck eight miles from the highway.

It was the last week of the month and she was in the middle of what was known as shed war season. Bull elk and big mule deer shed their antlers throughout the winter, and now the war was heating up due to the low snowpack and the antlers’ high price.

Shed war season was why she’d been grinding her green four-wheel-drive Ford F-150 through sagebrush, snowdrifts, and rock formations in the high foothills of the western slope of the Bighorn Mountains. Gnarled ancient cedars stood as sentinels among the granite formations towering on both sides, and she’d tried to keep her front tires in a set of untracked but snowpacked ruts meandering up and through the rough country toward the mountains.

Her destination had been a set of high, vast meadows just below the tree line of the mountains. Those meadows were designated as critical elk and deer winter range, and her aerial surveys two months earlier had revealed thousands of both. The elk liked to descend by the hundreds from the shadowed low timber to feed in the open on the meadows at night where the wind swept the benches clean of snow. Hundreds of mule deer moved up from draws and arroyos to do the same thing. Now the meadows were littered with forty-pound elk antlers and (snip)

You can turn the page and read more here.

This is Wolf Pack by C.J Box. Was this opening page compelling?

My vote: No.

This book received 4.7 out of 5 stars on Amazon. Well, I learned something about elk and mule deer, and what the scenery is like in the Bighorn Mountains. And that her pickup is green. And there was this woman who was driving and got stuck. I guess that’s her problem. The stakes? Unknown. The trouble she faces and has to deal with. Getting unstuck, I guess, but there’s no indication that she won’t or can’t. If you’ve read Flog a Pro before, you probably know what’s coming next. There are no story questions of any consequence to make me want to turn the page. So I didn’t. Your thoughts?

You’re invited to a flogging—your own You see here the insights fresh eyes bring to the performance of bestseller first pages, so why not do the same with the opening of your WIP? Submit your prologue/first chapter to my blog, Flogging the Quill, and I’ll give you my thoughts and even a little line editing if I see a need. And the readers of FtQ are good at offering constructive notes, too. Hope to see you there.

To submit, email your first chapter or prologue (or both) as an attachment to me, and let me know if it’s okay to use your first page and to post the complete chapter.

Novel-Writing Intensives: An Alternative to the MA

March 20, 2019 By Julie Carrick Dalton 10 Comments

Wouldn’t it be great if writing a novel could be like playing team sport? How great would it be to have teammates jumping up and down on the sidelines cheering for you, or running to your side if you got hurt? For most novelists—especially first-time or unestablished writers—reality looks much different. Instead of a throng of cheering fans, we are lucky if we have a dog sitting at our feet while we write.

When I started working on my first novel, I craved the camaraderie of a team. I wanted a coach and drills and discipline. I needed someone to care when I finished that first draft or finally nailed that tricky scene. Someone other than my dogs, that is.

In my quest to find a writing community, I applied to the Novel Incubator program run by GrubStreet, a writer’s organization based in Boston. Every year the Novel Incubator chooses ten authors from a competitive applicant pool. Together with instructor Michelle Hoover, those ten writers spend a grueling year revising and polishing their books.

I feel incredibly grateful I was accepted into the program in 2017. I revised my full manuscript three times during my Incubator year, and I critiqued my nine classmates’ manuscripts three times each. That amounts to thirty manuscripts in a year, in addition to weekly craft lessons, outside readings, homework exercises, and essays. There were late nights, early mornings, and more than a few tears.

I learned how to pitch my book, write a query letter, and talk to agents (without hyperventilating.)

Then, just when I was starting to feel confident, we graduated from the Incubator and Michelle pushed us out of the nest. I was scared.

Part of my Incubator tuition included admission to The Muse and the Marketplace, a large writer’s conference hosted by GrubStreet every spring. The Incubator hosted meet ups at the Muse for Incubator graduates to connect with agents and editors.

I attended the Muse with my cohort of Incubator grads (the Inkies), sad to have completed the program, wondering how I would survive in the publishing world on my own. But I quickly realized that I was no longer alone.

My classmates were right there, jumping up and down cheering for me. I was no longer writing by myself with my dogs. I was part of that team I had always longed for.

I pitched my book at that conference (and did not hyperventilate.) When I signed with an agent I met at The Muse, the Inkies lifted me up on their shoulders and carried me around Boston Common for a victory lap. (Okay, I made that part up, but it felt that way.) And when I’ve stumbled over rejections, my classmates have been the first ones to help me back up.

When Desmond Hall, the first in my Incubator cohort to sign a book deal, announced he had a two-book contract earlier this year, I couldn’t have felt prouder. Des is part of my team. It was a win for all of us.

In addition to being supportive, these programs produce successful writers. I can’t speak to the publication rates of other programs, but the Des is the fourteenth Novel Incubator to sign a publishing contract.

I feel myself getting sentimental (possibly mushy) when I talk about the Novel Incubator. I don’t have enough words to express my gratitude, not only for the elements of craft I learned and for the support I’ve found, but also for the team I became a part of.

When I tell other writers about the program, I sense a longing in them. They want to be part of a tight community too. [Read more…]

The Lessons of Genre

March 19, 2019 By Dave King 28 Comments

I once heard an editor say that, if you wanted to break into print, turn your current work into a mystery. Just pick a character, kill them off, and go from there.

Not great advice, but there is some truth behind it. It’s always been easier to break into print when you’re writing in a genre. Readers prefer to buy books they know in advance they’re going to enjoy, and just the fact that your book is shelved next to other genre books tells them there are some elements of your story they’ll like. Mystery readers will get their denouement, science fiction readers will get their speculative future, thriller readers will get their fast-paced page turner.

In addition to making them easier to sell, the conventions of a genre can make the books easier to write. After all, some of your storytelling decisions have already been made for you, just from the genre you’ve picked. You have the frame of your novel already in place and just have to fill it out.

But as any genre writer can tell you, genre novels aren’t taken as seriously as mainstream novels. Major awards rarely go to popular genre books, which are often dismissed as “commercial fiction,” as if popularity undermines a book’s quality. There is some truth behind the prejudice, though. Great writing can exist within any genre, but the same thing that makes a genre book easy to write can make it easy to turn into formulaic hackwork.

Why?

Most genre novels focus around and are defined by a single storytelling element, and when you’re writing one, it’s easy to focus on that one thing and forget everything else. A great novel, though, is a complex ecosystem, with all sorts of different aspects feeding into one another. And the way to transcend mediocrity even when you’re working in a genre is to look beyond what defines the genre.

Rex Stout and Kinsey Milhone don’t simply deliver effective puzzles with surprising answers. They also deliver witty, engaging characters with distinctive voices. J. K. Rowling doesn’t just create a clearly-imagined magical world. I’ve read a review that favorably compared the plot complexity of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire with John leCarre. And Jane Austin is great literature in addition to being great romance because she handles her plot twists with the skill of a modern mystery writer – as in Sense and Sensibility, with the revelation that Lucy Steele married Robert Ferrars after Edward was disowned. [Read more…]