FOCUS!

Recently, in Miss Snark’s Crap-O-Meter on plot hooks, I saw over and over in most of her comments the word, “FOCUS.”

Sometimes that was all she wrote when the hooks were all over the map; they were about this, a little of that. There was no cohesion anyone could see in many of the entries. They weren’t focusing on the job at hand, which, make no mistake about it, when you set out to write a book, it IS a job and you want to get paid for your time, am I right? Or are you still waffling around saying all you want is to ‘hold your book in your hands’? That’s a nice vision, but your attitude about the $$ will change once you get that first taste of blood.

How do you get that first $$ flavored taste?

In this blog and on my Workshop pages, I’ve previously written about several problems in constructing a novel, but up to now I haven’t talked much about focus, which is actually one of the the main things that separates a published novel from an unpublished one.

When I say focus, I’m talking about making sure your entire book is in sync, that everything blends smoothly, that it all makes sense according to what the book actually IS. Not an easy thing to do when a lot of people are telling you to just sit down and write what you love to read, is it? Write the book of your dreams? Sounds nice, right? Easy, right?

Well, by following only that advice, at least you’ll be interested in the book you’re writing.

But you have to be more than interested. You have to be aware, at the same time, of the pitfalls that can derail your book.

You have to maintain your focus in every sentence, every single word you write. You can’t let your book or your characters wander all over the place, you can’t write whole scenes where nothing happens to forward the plot, you can’t let your characters fill up pages with meaningless dialogue, or have them doing things that don’t further your plot just because you’re letting them do what they want. Can’t do that. You need to focus on your job.

First, for new authors, instead of just having a vague idea of what you want to write, you need to sit down and give some serious thought to the genre you’re aiming at AND THE TONE YOU WANT TO PORTRAY. Just deciding it’s a romance, or it’s a mystery, or whatever you choose isn’t enough. Too often we think it is, but it’s not. You need to be aware of the nuances throughout your book and make sure they’re all aiming at the same thing. Do you want funny? Poignant? Fast-paced? Lyrical? Haunting? Scary?

What, exactly, do you want this book to do for your readers? You need to think about that, because the answer to this question drives your book as long as you know what you want for your readers to feel when they read and then FOCUS ON THAT.

Here’s an example. You say you want to write a fast-paced mystery. You’re good at writing comedy. It starts out fine, the lines are snappy and funny, the book’s moving along, you’re halfway done with the book and suddenly one of your lead characters veers off into a completely different type of personality and problem than the one he started off with and you discover you really like how it’s going. Now, that is. You’re liking him better. Now. He’s got more depth, more humanity than you recognized at first. Now. You think he’s growing, the way everybody says your characters should do–and they should. But you can’t let them change enough that it starts your book off all over again in an entirely new genre.

Before, you had him racing around town looking for criminals who committed a particularly terrible crime, plus sorta kinda falling, temporarily, for every female he sees. No holds barred for this slick, wisecracking, basically romantically insincere guy. NOW he’s turned into a guy who WAS mainly looking for the killer, but suddenly THAT takes second place to a flaming romance with a woman who has turned him into a gauzy, daydreaming, waffling mass of Jello-O who is only thinking about picket fences and three-point-seven children.

What’s happened here?

You lost your focus. Changed his personality AND HIS GOALS midstream. Now most of the things he did in the first half of the book don’t make sense. Worse yet, you probably don’t recognize this because it’s hard to see these things in your own book, particularly if you’re a new, basically undisciplined writer. So you go on and finish the book the way he is NOW and then wonder why you’re collecting nothing but rejections.

You lost your focus.

You need to give him his goals at the beginning of the book and then stick with them. If he changes to any large degree, his goals are going to change because the thing that drove him at the beginning disappears when his personality and goals change. And there goes your plot. His initial goals are no longer relevant.

That may be okay if you’re really writing a romance. But you SAID you were writing a fast paced mystery with this wiseass guy, and you’ve already spent several months (if not years) with a mystery in mind. But now it’s turned into a romance, and now the romance takes precedence.

So you need to decide, at the beginning, whether this is going to be a romantic suspense OR a mystery, which are two entirely separate kinds of books with an entirely different set of reader expectations.

I have to say one thing right here that probably won’t gain me any votes when I decide to run for President of the USA. (Any day now. I’d love to see Maureen Dowd take out after me. I get weary, hearing mostly new writers blathering on and on about how “Oh, my characters just took over the book and did what they wanted and I couldn’t stop them because they wanted to do it this way, not that way…” and then you hear five hundred reasons why the writer can’t finish the book, when the real reason is, the author lost her focus. She forgot why she was writing the book. Forgot what emotions she wanted to evoke in her readers.

Face it, your characters come from inside you. If you lose your focus, so will they. Don’t blame it on them, not to me, anyway.

So what do you do with the romance you’ve wound up with, short-sheeting the murder mystery you started out with so that it barely matters anymore, but you’re STILL calling it a mystery? I can tell you right now, mystery readers will nab you sure as God made little green outer space men IF you even get out of the starting gate, which you won’t because agents and editors spot early on whether or not you have focus. They look for focus. If it’s not there, BEEP, get out of the box. Reject.

What you do is, you reconnect with your focus. You take a long, hard look at your book. What did you intend to write? What tone did you want to project? Did you do what you set out to do? If you’re not sure, ask someone with experience. They’ll spot it fast enough. And then you do a rewrite, probably one of many, and re-establish the focus you need for the genre you’re aiming at. (I think I just dropped a participle, please forgive me.)

I’m not saying everything you decide at first is cast in stone. Books can change and often do, but one thing you need to be aware of. The professional writer doesn’t want to lose weeks or months because she lost her focus and now has to rewrite before she even thinks of submitting. The professional writer picks her poison and then sticks with it. Even pro writers who don’t plot at all know pretty much where they’re going from the git-go and if they’re working, consistently selling writers, they go there. Period.

I once read a book written by a guy who was a fantastic writer, as far as writing the words and phrases went. He had written his book starting with one problem for his protagonist that he solved by chapter three, then his protagonist started off in chapter four trying to solve the big problem that was the real reason for his book. I can’t tell you how jarring that was to read because the first problem had nothing whatsoever to do with the protagonist’s main problem. Nothing. It was just there.

He lost his focus. He never found a major publisher willing to publish it.

You have to focus on the book’s main plot and make sure your protagonist/s jibe with the main plot, and this takes some concentration. If your plot is one genre, your protagonist can’t be a character who clearly belongs in another type of genre. If he/she is, then the book can’t have focus because the focus isn’t there. Tone of book, plot, and your lead characters, all three must jibe. If they don’t, something is out of kilter and you need to change it. This is really important, so I hope you’re paying attention to what I just said and think about it. Decide on what kind of book you’re writing, and make sure your characters are right for that type of book.

Focus.

As for focusing on finishing a book you’ve started and just can’t seem to finish, and I’m speaking from sad experience here, the holidays are over now. It’s hard to focus on writing when the holidays are upon us, we all know that, although the professional writer under deadline does it anyhow, so you might as well start training yourself now if you intend to be a professional author because sooner or later you’re going to have to do it. Your $$ may depend on being able to focus enough to do it.

One thing I can promise you. If you think about the tips in this blog and stick to them, it’ll make it a whole lot easier for you to keep on keeping on, because it will feel right to you and you’ll be more apt to finish a saleable book. That tiny feeling inside any author has, that something’s not quite right is always a signal from your inner self telling you something is off.

Don’t let it be your FOCUS.

Thank you for visiting our blog this week. We love y’all, you KNOW we do. Come back again next week, ya hear us?

Warm Hugs from Hotclue and Beth here in frigid Chicago, IL, USA, where it’s heading for below zero and we’re heading for a great book to read–Eileen Dreyer’s new one, SINNERS AND SAINTS. We’ll tell y’all next week how we liked it.

BUT–WHAT DO I DO NOW? I’VE NEVER BEEN THERE!

Beth Anderson here this week. My alter ego, Hotclue, became sick and tired of the warm, snowless weather we’ve been having in Chicago and a few days ago flew off to Aspen, in between snowstorms. Thankfully (I’m always grateful for the peace and quiet when she’s gone) she seems to be snowbound in some lodge there. I’m sure she’ll tell you all about it when she gets back. Meantime, since I do the majority of the writing around here anyway, I thought I’d talk this week about research.

Every once in a while the subject of research comes up on various writers’ lists, and the general concensus seems to be that you should go to the location if you’re not familiar with it and do your research on the spot. Easy for them to say. Like, why not head on over to Bangkok for lunch today and take a look around? Most of us are not that fortunate.

So what do you do if you’ve never actually been there? If you do extensive, deep-down research on that location, does it matter that you’ve never been there?

I say no, not really. You can wing it successfully as long as you wing it carefully.

It helps if you can go there, of course, because you’ll pick up nuances, little bits and pieces of feelings and scenes that nobody else might notice, which always adds realism to your location. But does that help you get published? Not really, because while setting the scene is important and can, but not always does, keep you out of hot water with fans who keep every fact about every city on earth in their heads, characterization is a lot more important than where your protags are when they’re getting into whatever they’re getting into. Dwell too much on local color and you fall into dire danger of writing a travelogue, which is boring unless you keep it short and remember that your people, not your location, are your book.

Most of my books have been written without my ever having been there before I wrote the book. I’ve been heartened by letters and emails I’ve received telling me whichever book it was they’d read had sounded to them like I’d spent most of my life there. It takes extensive and careful research to do that. When or if I do go there later on, I always have to smile as I walk through the streets, or look down on them from a hotel room, because then I know I’ve got it right. And so can you.

Examples:
My first-ever published book, ALL THAT GLITTERS, came about because my youngest daughter had gone to Hollywood to try her luck. I was terrified about what might happen to her out there and one Saturday night I sat down to list what all I was afraid of. April popped into my mind. April and Jet, the boy she left behind when she went to Hollywood. I’d been trying for several years to get a book published, but as I sat there that Saturday night at my kitchen table, the hair on the back of my neck began to tingle and I knew this one was going to be published. I got a bunch of maps of Hollywood and L.A., talked to some people who did live there for local information, and off I went–not going there yet, but writing the book anyhow. Sure enough, that was my first contract. I had the location and the ambience and the characters and the story arc right. Some of that changed during the editorial process, but I had it right enough to sell it.

My second book published, DIAMONDS, was set in Vegas. I’d never been to Vegas but it seemed, now that I was interested in finding out about it, television shows set in Vegas or documentaries about Vegas were popping up everywhere. The Tennessee part, where the book briefly began, was easy enough because I’d spent time in Virginia when I was much younger and I remembered how that was. All the Tennessee scenes took part in a backwoods location, so it wasn’t too hard. Diamond was frantic to leave Tennessee and head for Vegas, looking for excitement. So between the maps of Vegas and television shows, where I took copious notes, I wrote the book. One part of that book also took place in Paris, where I’d also never been. But again, like magic, a television documentary gave me loads of local color, enough to be believable, and off I went to Paris in my book.

This happens a lot. If I need something and open my mind to it, it comes to me.

Third book, a Harlequin Superromance called COUNT ON ME, was set primarily in Illinois, in a town sort of like the one I live in now. Almost without effort, as far as the location went, mission accomplished because I could be totally authentic without being sued. I made the town up. The book itself, which was the first book written, third published, was not without effort, though. It took me eight years and many rewrites before I got the Superromance part of it down pat. But locationwise, I was set.

Fourth book, NIGHT SOUNDS, was my first murder mystery. I set it in Chicago, although I made most of the locations up except for Ravinia, the jazz venue in the opening scene, and the Gold Coast scenes. I had one scene I probably wouldn’t repeat but didn’t know any better then, of Joe, my male lead, driving from Chicago to Calumet City, and I listed places he passed as he drove. That’s pretty non-productive and I admit it. I put it there so it would make the scene more realistic. The scene itself could have been deleted and probably should have been. Live and learn. Readers familiar with Chicago liked it though, so all was not lost.

Fifth book, MURDER ONLINE, another murder mystery, was set in Chicago. I had seen a small article in the Sun Times about a young woman found strangled to death in her apartment and the police had no clues. That set my imagination off while I thought about how a killer could do that, kill someone and leave absolutely no clues. The research on this one was more on-site. I drove through the location I had chosen for her apartment and took lots of notes. Then I visited the police department in Area One, because Marty, the detective on my case, was going to be my co-protagonist and I had him working in Area One, a high-crime location. Everywhere we drove, I took notes. The small town Claire, the female lead, lived in was in downstate Illinois. I made that town up, taken from bits and pieces of towns downstate. You can do that. It’s fun. Make one up if you feel like it, but make sure you get the big cities right.

Sixth book out, SECOND GENERATION, was totally, completely research except for the Washington D.C, part, where I grew up and I remember well how it was at that time. But Bogota, Colombia? San Francisco? Never been there. However, because of, again, extensive research both online and in the library, maps, magazines (I did a lot of research with this book), I’ve had people tell me my opening scene, which took place in the Andes Mountains outside of Colombia was exactly the way it actually is. So it can be done. I’ve never had anything to do with running a cocaine cartel either, but there’s research on that everywhere you look, if you look in the right places. I did have a close relationship with politics because of my stepfather, so I could write with great authority there. The upshot of this weird research combination is that this book has won five unsolicited reviewer awards and many other great reviews both on my website and at Amazon.com.

The one I’m re-working right now because of a few structural and characterization flaws, pointed out by an independent editor, is called THE SCOUTMASTER’S WIFE. It takes place in Valdez, Alaska, and yes, I have been there. I spent three months in Valdez but the most awesome thing was on my first day there, as I stood watching fog rolling down the mountainsides instead of lifting like it does everywhere else I’ve ever been. I heard a voice inside of me whispering, “The voices of my ancestors call to me through that fog,” and suddenly I was transported into the head of a female Athabascan (Alaska Native) and the story grew from there. Even though I’d been there, I still brought back, and bought afterward, tons of research material on both Valdez and the Athabascan culture. I did meet a woman there who was an Alaska Native, Athabascan tribe, working in the white man’s world and basically straddling both cultures. She is a lovely, lovely young woman who inspired me to create my female lead, Raven.

So for me, research has been a hit-and-miss thing. Sometimes I write from experience and observation, the rest of the time I do a ton of research because I want my locations to be as realistic as possible. In SCOUTMASTER, the location, because of its extreme beauty and remoteness and uniqueness, is really a character in this book.

If you’ve been worrying about not being able to visit the places you want to write about, get on the Internet, go to the library, buy maps (you can order them online), talk to people, read books about it, watch television documentaries every chance you get and take notes right then and there and file them, because you never know which location you’re going to need information on in the future.

And good luck! This is a tough, tough occupation/career. Give yourself every possible chance to get it right, even if you’ve never been there. Loads of authors do the same thing I do–research. You’ll learn a lot of little things by doing that, which is also a good thing. I’ve found that things stick in my mind that other people never notice, but that’s what we do. We look, we feel, we learn, and then we write about it.

I just spoke to Hots on our cell phone and she said to be sure and tell you she LOVES you, you KNOW she does. We both do, we’re truly grateful for every one of you, so come back soon, ya hear us?

Beth, not-so-subtly subbing for Hotclue this week.

Surrounded by Sluts

No, I’m not talking about politicians, although I. AM. DY. ING. TO. I could probably do five hundred miles of narrative and opinion blog pages all by myself between now and November 7th regarding our current politicians. But I’ll be quiet and just let The NY Times and The Washington Post and The LA Times and The Boston Globe and Newsweek take care of all that. I do have my standards.

By the way, I’m not including The Chicago Tribune, that’s all local politics and it’s all just disgusting. The only good thing I’ve seen come out of Chicago lately is Barack Obama, and I’ve already told you the minute he decides to run for President, I’ll be first in line to volunteer to man the phones. Then again, that might not be a good thing for Barack, but we do what we can. Our hearts are in the right place most of the time, even if our heads are in the wrong place all of the time.

What I am talking about this week are my crit partners, all of whom laughed and said I could call this week’s blog Surrounded by Sluts as long as I spell their names right. Typical writers, no shame whatsoever. We’re all book whores when you think about it.

I have five of the most talented, hilarious, competitive, intelligent, street-smart-type crit partners in the universe. I think I’m extremely lucky to be surrounded by them even if they are sluts. Or maybe because of it, I don’t know. They’re all just terrific.

I write crime fiction. I’ve written romance, mystery, suspense, I even whipped out a historical saga (that would be Second Generation, which is about a woman who wants to be President of the USA, the idiot). Now you’d think, wouldn’t you, logically I’d have surrounded myself with mystery writers.

But that wasn’t to be. I chose wallowing in sluttery instead.

First, Sloane Taylor. Sloane writes erotica. Hot erotica. She has one of the wildest, most diabolical senses of humor I’ve ever seen or heard anywhere. It’s a riot just being around her and she doesn’t let us get by with anything. “Just shut up and do it” is her mantra, and we all listen because we’re all afraid of her. I’ve gone on several fun but probably illegal capers with Sloane that would fill several books if we dared to write them. Hell, I don’t even dare blog about them.

Second up, Erika Kire. Erika writes erotica. Hot Chika Erotica. She also has one of the wildest senses of humor I’ve ever seen or heard. Erika doesn’t let me get by with anything either and in fact, she’s worse than all the rest combined, because She Loves To Find BooBoos In Other Peoples’ Manuscripts. Oh, not hers, no way! She’ll fight like a demented salmon swimming upstream to keep every single word she wrote or ever thought of writing. But after she thinks about it, which usually takes a day or so, she’ll say okay, you’re right, I’ll fix/change it. Then she gets even when she gets her hands on something we’ve written. Tit for tat or something like that. Whatever it is, I’m happy, because she’s an absolute BIRD DOG’S BIRD DOG when she’s critiqueing. Thank God.

Third on the list, Jenna Marshall. Jenna writes erotica. Hot erotica. (Are you detecting a pattern here?) I’ve known Jenna for many, many years, and I never once dreamed underneath all that Sweet Southern Charm there was a Boiling Red Hot Mama lurking in the weeds, or wherever Hot Mamas lurk. In fact, after critiqueing HER new book, I’m just amazed at what she comes up with, if you’ll pardon the expression. Who’d a thunk it. Not me. She surprises even me, and I’m hard to surprise.

Fourth, we have Yasmine Phoenix. Now to date, Yasmine hasn’t exhibited many erotica writer tendencies, but that woman Does Love to Talk About It. At this point in her writing career, she’s working on a paranormal with romantic overtones. But I’ll tell you a secret. She’s a closet erotica writer if I ever saw one. I shudder to think about the day she breaks out of that closet.

Fifth, Melissa Bradley, who hasn’t yet chosen a pseudonym so I’m outing her here. Melissa writes fantasy. Long ago fantasy. Actually, long ago historical fantasy. At least that’s what she’s working on right now and her story is phenomenal so far. BUT. Melissa READS erotica like Halliburton reads government contracts. She can probably recite every name of every good erotica author in the universe, AND the names of all their books AND the page numbers of their hottest scenes. Mel likes to say it’s all just research, but it truly has me wondering what she’s researching. Whatever it is, I’m convinced it has something to do with loads and loads of good hot yummy sex.

These ladies, and I use the term VERY loosely, are fantastic to work with. Even though I probably bore them to tears with my little gothic/suspense/thriller/mystery/younameits, they sit politely and listen while I read the latest murder or abduction or coroner’s scene, and then they all critique nicely, although they probably want to put duct tape over my mouth and stuff me in a closet while they get to the good stuff.

But yanno (T/M Miss Snark), good writing is good writing, and they’re all good writers. And over time, I’ve (unfortunately) trained them to speak up whenever something doesn’t sound right, or even quite right. I’m thinking I have a mile-wide masochistic streak to even be in this business, much less let erotica writers critique my gothic/suspense/thriller/mystery/younameits.

However, dang it all, these women are GOOD! They truly know what they’re doing! They’ve helped me at least as much as I’ve helped them, even on days when helping me consists of handing me the Kleenex and listening to me bitch and moan and write my Last Will and Testament because I figure I’ll die trying before I Ever Get It Really, Really Right.

I truly don’t have a clue what I’d do without them. They’re amazing.

So here’s to critique groups and all inhabitants thereof. May all of you be as thrilled with each other as we are. May you all have many, many loud, raucous debates that last far into the night because you’re having so much fun you’ve forgotten what time it is. May you all have International Bestsellers.

I know my critique buds will.

Sorry I was so late getting this done, folks. My crit group, those wonderful, long-suffering ladies (koff koff) have just wet-nursed me through another traumatic week with my book, The Scoutmaster’s Wife, doing their darndest to help me over the hump even though it contains no erotica–although if it did it would have sold by now–and I just didn’t have enough time to sit here and give y’all a proper blog until this evening.

One of these days I’m going to take a page from THEIR book and write y’all an improper blog. I bet if I do my readers will quadruple that week. Right? Call your friends and neighbors.

Love y’all, you KNOW I do. Come back again over the weekend, I’ll have something else new for you by then.

The Hotclue, whose next book is going to be a…guess what?

The 95% They Never Tell You About When You Start Writing A Novel

That would be the 95% of the time when you don’t feel like writing.

I’ve seen it in so many writers and I’ve done it myself. Write a little, stop. Write a little, stop. Put it down, put it away, put it where you don’t have to look at it, under your bed or hidden away in an obscure computer file where even Bill Gates AND the CIA couldn’t find it. Anything to get it out of your sight and off of your mind, because dammit, you don’t WANT to write today. Today stretches out into tomorrow, into the next day, and all of a sudden you discover you’ve wasted an entire week, month, year, and have not even one page to show for it, when what you originally SAID, and meant with all your heart, was, “I want to write a book.”

Sound familiar?

I thought so. We’ve all done it.

But authors who get book after book after book published year after year don’t allow themselves to do it often.

Here’s what you need to realize: Someone a lot smarter than I said, “Writing is mostly re-writing.” And it is. Pages of great prose don’t just fall there by accident when you’re typing away thinking about something else. Oh sure, sometimes a brilliant thought or phrase or an unexpected scene does happen and you don’t have a clue where it came from, but that’s one of those magic days when you’re blessed with some otherworldly sense and it flows from your fingers.

Those magic days don’t happen often. You usually have to work at it.

Most days it’s just slogging away, hating hell out of what you just wrote, KNOWING you’re the world’s biggest fake because your dialogue is the suckiest ever, your narrative would bore even the most desperate reader half to death, and nothing jells.

That’s when you really have to buckle down and keep at it, because that’s the 95% of writing you never hear about in author interview blogs. Pubbed authors rarely want their readers to know what goes on behind the scenes, but y’all know me, I don’t care. I’ll tell you.

What happens behind the scenes, those tough days when nothing jells, is that if you’re smart and you want to be published any sooner than 2075, you keep noodling with it until it does jell. I would venture to say most of what most authors write is done like that. You just sit there and force yourself to keep writing whether you like it or not.

And then, when you save it to go back to the very next day, you’ll either find that it’s not nearly as awful as you thought it was and a few words here and there will salvage it, or it is as awful as you thought. If it is, if you’re anything like me, you go back and start noodling with whatever’s bothering you until you Get It Right.

I don’t recommend my method for everyone. Many authors say they keep on writing till it’s completely done, till they type THE END, and then they go back and fix everything. That works for them. It doesn’t work for me, and I’ll tell you why.

Because I know me.

If I know something isn’t right with a scene I just wrote, I can NOT go on until it is right, and sometimes that means days on end of shifting words, paragraphs, deleting this, adding that, sometimes swearing the whole time, but I have to Get It Right. Then, and only then, can I move on. The good news about doing it that way is, when I write THE END, it’s almost as good as I can get it. And then I go back and fine-tune it. And then I have someone else go through it for typos and continuity.

I think a lot of that, with me, is that I’m extremely conscious of character development, which is supposed to be happening all the way throughout the book. To me, character development is the most important part of the book because my characters ARE my book. Nothing else is as important because if readers don’t like your characters, there goes the book, no matter how slick your plot might be.

What happens in one scene leads to the next, and to me, if the wrong thing happened I’m usually going to know it right away, even if I did just type it myself, and I’m going to want to fix it so that the character development makes sense. If I don’t, I’ll flounder around and the rest of the book will be off-kilter until I go back and fix what happened way back when things went wrong.

That little voice always tells me something’s not quite right. Experience has taught me that if I don’t listen to that little voice, an agent or editor will nab me on THAT VERY SPOT sure as hell. It always happens. Every time. So if I hear that little voice, I go back until I find where it went wrong, and fix it. I might as well get it over with while it’s fresh in my mind.

You may be different. Things like that might not bother you.

They do bother me.

The point I’m making is, writing a novel isn’t just a matter of sitting down and typing out a book in a month and sending it off. It never works that way. I doubt it even works that way for Nora Roberts, although I could be wrong about that. But most of us have to re-write until boiling hot blood spurts out of our foreheads. I sweated on one paragraph in one of my earlier books for almost two weeks until I finally wound up deleting what was bothering me so much. I do that routinely now and I don’t even miss what I deleted.

Writing a novel isn’t always fun. You don’t end every day thrilled with what you wrote. You may have to completely rewrite it tomorrow, and the day after that, and maybe even a week after that.

But isn’t that better than writing nothing at all?

If you want to get published and stay published, you don’t have a choice. You have to do rewrites and you have to keep at it day after day. Even then, you may have to do more rewrites when an agent or editor gets their hands on it, but I covered those kinds of rewrites in an earlier blog. This is about keeping after it day after day no matter how bored you are or no matter how badly it’s going. Because only keeping at it at least ensures you’ll have a stab at getting where you want to go.

Not keeping at it ensures that you won’t.

Oh, and if you’re wondering how my skiing lessons went last week…well…I don’t want to talk about that right now. Maybe next week, after my ego heals a bit more. Or maybe I’ll talk some about character development. We’ll see how it goes.

Love y’all, you KNOW I do! Come back soon, ya hear me?
Always and Forever
The Hotclue

Ya Gotta Have Hope…

…Musn’t sit around and mope,
When the odds are sayin’ you’ll never win,
That’s when the grin should start…

Okay, so “start” doesn’t rhyme with “hope”. That’s because I borrowed the idea from the song Ya Gotta Have Heart. Which would have rhymed with “grin should start”. Well, too bad. I’m fresh out of miracles today. I have serious stuff on my mind.

What I’m thinking about today is, when you’re starting out or even if you’ve been working your buns off for five or six or eight years and haven’t made your first sale yet, you’ve gotta have hope that you will. BUT you’ve gotta have just a little more than that. You’ve got to be able to take a long, objective look at your book and understand whether it’s marketable or not. You have to have a clear understanding of “high-concept”.

I’ve been reading Miss Snark the past couple of weeks (okay, forever, if you want the truth) but in the past couple of weeks she had that Snarkometer thing going on, whereby she had people send in their query letters, which she often slices and dices and with very good reason, I might add. Some of them, with all the best intentions in the world, were truly awful. And still, some of the truly awful queries got an “okay, I’d take a look at this one” because she saw the first page and knew what she was seeing. And what she was seeing was money. No slam intended there, you just need to understand that the whole business is about $$$.

Here’s the deal. If you’re sending query after query and getting shot down every time, sooner or later you have to face it: Something’s wrong with your submission and you need to take a good long, hard look at the whole thing, not just the grammar although it might be that too, but we covered grammar in a prior blog. You also need to take a good, hard look at the market right now and see if you can figure out why they’re saying no. That is, if you’re sure your query letter has all the requisite components.

To refresh your mind: That would be about three pargraphs. One, a quick and dirty log line/paragraph about the thrust of your book. This is a one-paragraph overview that’s supposed to have them salivating and reaching for the phone so they can call you and demand you overnight your mss to them collect. Right? Well, yeah, that’d be nice. It’s not gonna happen, but it would be nice.

Next, a paragraph on what genre or type of book it is, how many words, is it finished. By what type it is, you don’t want to get all wound out with a six hundred line paragraph. Basically the agent or editor needs to know what genre the book is, what the protagonists’ problems are, what’s standing in their way. That’s about enough for one paragraph, I’d say.

Finally, one about you and how you’re qualified to write this book. This would not include the fact that you love to knit afghans for Tasmanian orphans and you’re really, really good at it, or that your grandmother who was an English teacher back in the 1950’s said she loves your book, or that you teach Yoga classes right now but you’re ready to move on into the ranks of bestsellerdom, or that you’re proud to announce you belong to a bowling league that meets every other Tuesday night for beer and pizza.

You don’t want to get friendly right away. I made this mistake myself early on. I’d had the presumably good fortune to make friends with the first editor I ever wooed. We traded letters back and forth for quite a few months before she moved on quite unexpectedly and so did I, at the request of her successor. The successor didn’t like it that I told her they’d had my manuscript for twenty-one months and I could have given birth to a baby elephant by that time. Even though I said it nicely. But see, I could joke with the first editor. I couldn’t with the second, drat the luck. That editor managed to clear off the prior editor’s desk pretty efficiently, I’d say, by mailing every manuscript in her new office back to the offending authors so she could nab her own victims. Them’s the breaks. It happens. It’s funny now. It wasn’t funny then. But dang it, the prior editor loved my sense of humor. This one didn’t. You just never know, so it’s better to be just a wee bit cautious and if you tend toward sarcasm like I do, train yourself to muzzle it at least a little while you’re wooing an editor or agent.

Back to the paragraphs. Finally, you want to say thank you and goodbye. You don’t have to tell her you’re hoping to hear from her soon because hell, she already knows that. You don’t have to tell her you’re enclosing SASE in that paragraph, which you are, because she can see it’s there as long as you stapled it to the query letter. Just kidding. A safety pin will do it. Just kidding again. Really, any paper clip, the same one you use to attach your business card, is fine. You DO have a business card, right? Then add a tiny line beneath your signature that says: Enclosed: SASE. See how easy that was? And you said it without begging, which may cause them to feel a twinge of guilt but not enough to request a book they don’t think they can sell.

Now one would think, wouldn’t one, that three paragraphs would be the easiest thing in the universe to crank out, but it’s those three paragraphs that strike lethal terror in the hearts of anyone who wants to submit their masterpiece, because while you’re telling, in a matter of fact way, what your book and you are about, you’re trying to at the same time wow her with your brilliance. In three short paragraphs.

But guess what. While you do have to present yourself and your book in those three paragraphs, and they do have to be eminently readable and punctuated correctly, and you do have to have the exact name and title of the person who’s presumably going to receive it, and you do have to succinctly describe your book to the best of your ability, and you do have to use good grammar because otherwise she’ll be onto the fact that you’re careless and can’t write Jack by the second line if you don’t, there are other things that enter into a rejection before they’ve even seen the mss, and this is what you need to understand. Plus, I think I just wrote the world’s longest run-on sentence. I should win a prize for that, right?

IF you tell them a bit about your book and they know there’s no market for it, even if you have hired the New Ashmolean Marching Society and Students’ Conservatory Band and they all walked on their hands while they played their bagpipes and delivered your query at the same time, it’s going to be rejected anyhow. Yes, even if the editor adores bagpipes.

That’s one thing you need to research ahead of time, and that’s the hardest thing in the world for an author to do, admit or even face the fact that their idea may not be marketable. Because we always, ALWAYS think our book is marketable. After all, our mothers and all of our friends said so, they all read a book just like it and that one was an award winning novel so ours is going to be an award winner too. Right?

Ummmm….

Well, here’s something to think about: Nowadays everyone’s looking for a high-concept book. What does high-concept mean? Does it mean a 600-page spy novel with international repercussions? Not necessarily, unless your name is Norman Mailer or Nelson DeMille or Gayle Lynds, or any of fifty other fabulous spy fiction novelists.

It’s nothing as detailed as that. High-concept means, simply, a book the publishers and their marketing department absolutely believe will sell to hopefully millions of people. It means a novel with universal appeal.

The hard part is realizing your novel might not have universal appeal, in which case right now it might have a harder time making The List at a good publishing house unless you’re writing a genre novel, and even then, it had better be good. It has to be. HAS to.

But ya gotta have hope. No matter what the odds are against you , you have to believe your book is the best thing to ever hit New York or wherever you’re trying to send it. If you’ve done your market research and asked enough people in the business and read Publishers Marketplace religiously to find out what IS selling nowadays, if your book is anything like those books, you may have a shot at getting it read, at least. And then, if you’re lucky, if you reach the right agent or editor who sees the potential, and believe me when I tell you this, IF it HAS potential, they’re going to see it. Then, if all that jells at once, you have a shot.

The point I’m making is, you’ve gotta have hope or it’s almost impossible to keep on keeping on because keeping on year after year is so hard. But at the same time, you’ve got to have open eyes and an open mind if you’re going after that mainstream market.

Look around you at the books being reviewed nationally. See what kind they are, see who’s writing them, who’s buying them. Buy one or two yourself to see how your book compares–advice given to me, by the way, by a great agent. And then, if you still feel your book is on a par with those books, if you’re right, the agent or editor you’re querying is going to know it, and you’ll have a shot at The Big Gold Superbowl Ring.

I wish you all the luck in the world if that’s what you’re after. Always remember this: When you go into a bookstore and see all those books, realize deep in your heart that once upon a time every one of those authors was exactly where you are right now, this minute. And if they could do it, so can you. It takes work. It takes patience. But you CAN, with the right book, do it.

Gotta go, the private Learjet’s waiting out on the tarmac. I’m heading out to Paris with Count Babalallapaloozo. Ah, Paris in the fall…chestnuts in blossom–no, wait, OMIGOD, that’s SPRINGTIME! Dammit! I packed for springtime! SCREEEEEM!

HOLD THE PLANE!

Love y’all, you KNOW I do! Come back soon, ya hear me? We’ll talk again next week.

Hugs and More Hugs,
Hotclue Herself