The Yummy Proposal

I got a huge proposal package in the mail recently. One marked perishable. You know what that means? That means a yummy bribe. Someone out there has decided that the best way to charm and win me over is to send an amazing box of chocolates along with the proposal. Well I, like almost everyone else, love a good box of chocolate and I always love a gift. But let me tell you, other than making me feel a twinge of guilt, this gift isn't going to do much of anything for you. When evaluating the proposal it's all about the proposal—the writing, the marketability, and whether or not I can sell it. While gifts are always nice, don't waste your money. Instead spend your time and energy making your proposal the best it can be.

And by the way, I prefer all Milk Chocolate.

The war of the Book Stores

Amazon has pulled thousands of e-books from its catalog this past week. It seems the fight has only started as publishing companies are trying to hold ground.

Full story here

Barnes & Noble has made the statement it will not sell any Amazon published book. (Then again I have a feeling within the next five years book stores could become a thing of the past)

Full story here

Characterization, Part 5

Let's wrap this up. I've done this in the past with writes, particularly if they have been away from a character for a while. I'll interview the character. Yep, I even do it in a Q&A format and on paper and have an interview or conversation with the character they created right on the page. And the characters almost always surprise both me and them with their attitudes and some of the answers to the questions. I think it frees the mind up by getting away from plot and description by simply having a one-on-one with them.

If your in a jam and want to know more of a deep insight to your own personal character, get out pen and paper, or a new page in word, and do it. It will open up a new level to your story, as well as the people.

This really works too. Sometimes I know about a persons view, but I didn't realize they'd stayed in touch with any of the survivors or I knew nothing about another person. I hope you can see why this is worthwhile? It's all pretty much back story, but it's important back story in developing characters.

I hope you got something out of this series.

Characterization, Part 4

I seen this question come up before. How much of what you know about your character ends up on the page.

The conclusion: a lot less than you know.

The example Jon provides is our favorite aged wizard, Albus Dumbledore, who JK Rowling outed a year or so ago in an interview. God only knows what the question was, but she commented that she'd always thought of Dumbledore as being gay. The media, which apparently had nothing better to do, went a little nuts over this.

I rolled my eyes, wondering why she'd said it. Was she being honest or did she think a statement like that would create a little more furor over the books, which were already plenty popular.

I also thought, "Well, she would know, wouldn't she?"

Now, just last week I finished re-reading "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince." Starting last summer I've been re-reading all the HP books in order and, as you can see, I've got one more to go.

Nowhere in these books is Dumbledore's sexuality in question, hetero, homo or any other variety. Partly this is due to the fact that, for the most part, the HP novels are told from the point of view of Harry Potter. In the first book Harry's 11 and by the end he's what, 17? 

When I bother to muse over this question at all, I would note that except for the students in the later books, the faculty of Hogwarts seems made up of nursing home fodder. The only bit of romance suggested among faculty is between Hagrid and Madame Maxime. (And has anyone bothered to even remotely think about the sexual logistics of Hagrid's parents, a giantess and a muggle father? Okay, don't go there). In Half-Blood Prince, Harry and Hermione do briefly speculate whether the school's librarian had a thing going with the school's caretaker, Mr. Filch. But aside from that, there's no mention of Dumbledore's love life, previous relationships, current relationships or sexual proclivities. Neither is there similar mention of such things with McGonaggal, Flitwick, Sinistra, Sprout, Slughorn, Mad-Eye Moody, Umbrage (although she's clearly got an infatuation with Fudge) or the divination professor whose name momentarily eludes me. (Ah, Trelawney!)

That's not unexpected, actually. Students don't necessarily register teachers that way. They're inclined to think of them as not having lives outside the classroom, especially when they're younger.

And yet, I can attest that schools can be a hotbed of, well, leave it at hotbed. In fact, one of my friends son's teachers a year or so ago left her husband because she'd had an affair with the principal of the school. School never seemed so interesting when I was a student!

But it does bring us back to a couple more Hogwarts adult characters. First, Remus Lupin, who seems to have no sex life at all either until he apparently falls in love with Tonks, marries, and then the two of them are killed at the Battle of Hogwarts. Yikes!

And then there is Severus Snape. Ah yes. His underlying loyalty to Dumbledore and in a very odd way, to Harry Potter, was because he was in love with Harry's mother, Lily Potter. And he felt Voldemort betrayed him when he responded to Snape's revelations about the overheard prophecy by killing Lily and James. (Apparently Snape was okay with Voldemort attempting to kill Harry, who was a year old at the time).

So clearly JK Rowling spent some time thinking about some of the underlying relationships and romantic inclinations of her characters.

Yet, for the most part, they didn't end up on the page. (And weren't there enough pages anyway?)

I think it's a good idea to know a lot more about your characters, especially your main characters, than what ends up on the page. You should know if their parents are alive or dead, if they get along with them, if they have siblings, what everybody does for a living. You should know their sexual preferences and quirks, their favorite foods, their dreams and aspirations, fears...

Because it informs their decisions and actions. It helps take a 2-dimensional cutout and turn him or her into a three-dimensional human being. It can, with a carefully chosen passing comment or observation, give your characters more depth.

One of the key questions I ALWAYS ask myself about main characters is: if they weren't doing what they're currently doing, what would they be doing? What's my character's dream job?

How about you?

Characterization, Part 3

You can have too many "tells" or use them too often. But, be mindful a "quirks" or "character traits" do not make a character.

But why should I say it, when I can quote Lawrence Block? This is from his book, "Telling Lies For Fun & Profit: A Manual for Fiction Writers."

"It's not uncommon for writers to do a lot of labeling and mistake it for originality of characterization: 'I'm starting a detective series,' a hopeful writer said to me not long ago, 'and I think I've got something really original. My character never gets out of bed before noon, and he makes it a rule always to wear one piece of red clothing, and the only thing he ever drinks is white creme de menthe on the rocks. He has a pet rhesus monkey named Bitsy and a parrot named Sam. What do you think?'

"What I think is that the speaker has not a character but a collection of character tags. It might work to have a character with any or all of these labels in his garments.... It is not the quirks that make an enduring character but the essential personality which the quirks highlight."

Thanks, Larry!

When I was thinking about this post I kept coming back to the Lincoln Rhyme novels by Jeffery Deaver. If you're not familiar with this character, he's a brilliant forensic expert who is paralyzed from the neck down. (He was played by Denzel Washington in the film, "The Bone Collector.") 

The Lincoln Rhyme novels, to my mind, always runs the risk of being a novel about the injury instead of about Rhyme. Now don't get me wrong. I think Jeffery Deaver is a terrific writer. His strengths are plots and plot twists and I accept that the idea of putting Sherlock Holmes in a wheelchair unable to move anything but his head and little finger was a brilliant hook. It's all the other things that make Rhyme memorable. His impatience, his sarcastic wit, how he responds to his own limitations with a combination of depression and anger. How, when necessary, he can have a lot of insights into other people--but most of the time he just doesn't give a damn.

So I would say Lincoln Rhyme is a great character... but I have reservations about him for reasons I can't quite put my finger on. Maybe you can help me with that.

Part of the reason, I suspect, is the hook is so strong. For a while there I used to say, "I've got an idea for a detective: she's a black, lesbian, quadriplegic attorney," thereby getting all sorts of "hooks" into the picture (This was sarcasm, okay?).

For those of you the right age, you might remember a series of TV detective shows from the 1970s. Excuse me if I get them wrong, but: "Mannix," I believe, was a blind detective. "McCloud" was the cowboy detective in New York City. Buddy Epsen played an aging detective, whose name I don't remember. McMillan and Wife, obviously, were a husband and wife team of detectives. Hart to Hart was also a husband and wife team of detectives, but they also had the advantage of being multi-millionaires.

Some of these worked, some of these didn't, but the "hooks" were obvious. Sometimes those hooks seemed to be, frankly, character tags. They never quite came to life for one reason or another. TV's still doing this, of course. "Monk" is a prime example, and if it weren't for the brilliance of Tony Shalhoub this character would be a bunch of tics and quirks, rather than a human being. (And sometimes he isn't, but I suspect that's the writers' fault). My response to "Monk" oddly enough, is to feel sorry for the character. He's trapped by his disease and he knows it. For a show that's ostensibly a comedy, it sure seems sad to me. (But funny).

Anyway, listen to what Lawrence Block said and make sure that your quirks and labels are more than that, that it's how or why they have these quirks and labels how they respond to them that makes a character interesting.

Oh, and one last thing. In the same chapter, Block says three things are necessary for memorable characters. 

They must be plausible.

They must be sympathetic.

They must be original.

Characterization, Part 2

Here's a story. Bestselling author Michael Connelly wrote once about how when he first did research for his police procedurals he spent some time with LAPD homicide detectives. He was sitting by the detective's desk and he noticed the cop's reading glasses on the top of the desk. The glasses stems like they were chewed on. Later, when they actually went to look at a victim, Connelly noted that when the detective was examining the body, he held his glasses in one hand and chewed on the stem of the glasses.

A "tell" is a bit of shorthand to a character's inner life.

It can be subtle or it can be a sledgehammer, but it's a good idea to have them. There's a tendency for writers to give us our character's inner lives, particularly in first-person narratives:

I was worried. What was going on with my sister? When we were five-years-old...

Might work. But better:

A sharp cramp made me wince. I pressed my hand against my stomach and reached for the bottle of Maalox that I kept in my top drawer. My gaze rested on the photo of my sister and I when we were five years old...

In other words, show don't tell.

The other day I mentioned about being specific.

A "tell" is a good example of both "show, don't tell," as well as being specific.

I want to mention a general method that readers and writers may have some ambivalence about, but which I often use. Call it a gimmick or a technique, but I like it. Sometimes, in a description, I look for the descriptive metaphor, something general, that gives a sense of the character. These could be:

She was as sharp and elegant as leaded crystal.

He was like a shark, he never stopped moving.

You get the idea? We can describe a character from their toes to their hairline and physical description is fine (although I'm convinced that it's mostly lost on the reader, who provides their own physical descriptions of characters based on subtler cues than a line-by-line description), but these are also shorthand to the "sense" of the character.

So what are your characters tells? Is there also a broader metaphor you can use to give the reader the sense of your characters at the same time?

Characterization, Part 1

This will be a multi-part series on characterization.

I read somewhere, "Make Your Words Work,"

A girl I knew told me that when her mother nagged her to eat everything on her plate by saying, "Millions of people are starving to death in China," she would reply, "Name one."

The point being, of course, that millions of Chinese is an abstraction, but Wu Fong, who is 8 years old and has only had a cup of rice to eat this week is something very specific and very tragic.

We can relate to her at some level. We can sympathize. Even more so, if we don't just say what I just said, but feel her hunger pangs, her desperation, how she plunges into that cup of rice with her fingers, gobbling it down (or staring at it listlessly with no energy).

So characterization is about the specific. Specific details, a universality of emotions.

There will always be people to harp on your writing for not being quite emotionally authentic. They will think the characters aren't responding properly to the situations they find themselves in--not enough fear, not enough wonder or amazement.

Someone turned down a book deal over something like this. A action hero that gets scared. He has panic attacks. In fact, he finds himself in the midst of horrific events and he's not necessarily calm, cool and collected. He's often fearful, neurotic, and panicky--but acts effectively despite those. To bad it became the last American Hero the TV show, or we would have signed it.

I have friends that fought in the first Gulf War. They commented that when the artillery started going off around them some of the soldiers' reactions was to try and hide under the tank. Even the ones who acted the way they were trained to pretty much were scared out their minds.

But how often do you see a movie or read a book where the soldier or cop or whomever acts totally calm and in control?

But in real life, few of us are that way.

So one of the keys to characterization is authentic emotion appropriate to the experience they're having. A mousy secretary being harassed by her boss might be burning with fury and shame inside, but may not be reacting on the outside (yet). A cop under fire in a warehouse may be sweating bullets and his hands might be shaking and he might want to puke, but he will presumably be doing his or her job.

This is an important lesson, one we should pay more attention. Make the emotions specific, identifiable, universal, and appropriate. That way your readers can identify with them.

What Can Authors Do to Sell Books

What does an author have to do or what can an author do to help sell books?

When asking around you are going to hear over a million and one answers to this question. You are going to hear that you need to spend at least your entire advance on publicity or that you have to have bookmarks. You’re going to hear that a Web site is a must and blogging is essential. Well, do you want to know what I think? I think that no one, not one person out there, knows what works and what doesn’t. What everyone can do is speculate that what they did either worked or didn’t, but the truth is that no one knows for sure whether there is a correlation between what the author did and what actually sold books.

I do think a Web site is essential. I don’t think it needs to cost you thousands and thousands of dollars, but it does need to look professional and it does need to be updated regularly. So yes, it will cost some money. Web sites are where a fan base will first start searching for you. If a reader finishes your book and enjoys it, the first thing they’ll probably do is Google your name, and in any situation the best thing you can do is ensure in a Google search that you provide what the readers what. Every single author Web site should include:

• jpegs of book covers
• review blurbs
• information on upcoming projects
• author bio
• contact information for fan mail

Other bonus material that I think readers will enjoy and others might find useful

• a photo of the author and covers in a downloadable file with high enough resolution that reviewers can use it if needed
• fun facts, recipes, games, etc., related to the book
• updates on the author’s progress
• links to other sources that might relate to your book

Whether you join a blog or group blog is entirely up to you. I think guest blogging can be useful and maybe more useful than your own blog, since it will hopefully reach out to people who don’t yet know you. A blog should only be done if you really know you can and want to commit to it. I’m here to tell you firsthand how time-consuming they can be, and the last thing you want to do is spend time writing a blog when what you should really be doing is writing your next book. So yes, go ahead and start or join a blog if it’s something you really want to do, but not because you feel like you have to.

Bookmarks, pens, postcards, and other handouts are only useful if you use them. I don’t think that shipping postcards or pens all around the country or the world to conferences so they can sit on tables and be tossed in the trash later is useful. I do, however, think that if you use your promotional item, whatever it might be, as a way to introduce yourself and make a personal connection with readers, they are worth the money. A author once asked me if I thought she should reorder her promotional items and my response was that she really seemed to enjoy her items. She loved passing them out to readers and potential readers and using them as a way of introduction. She agreed. To her they were fun. She reordered. Promotional items don’t do any good without a personal connection. If they are simply picked up off the table they only become another pen at the bottom of a purse.

Video trailers and other multimedia promotion are something picking up speed. I know authors love them and certainly they are a fun way to present your book, but do they really work? You tell me. Have any of you ever bought a book based on a trailer. I think they can be a great addition to your Web site and certainly a different way of presenting the book, but unless you are really going to spend the money and make sure they shine and get out there to the public they can become just another thing sitting on your computer.

So what is my feeling on what you can do to sell your book? The truth is that the best thing you can do is write the best book of your life and follow it up with an even better book. The rest, the Web site, the blog, the pens, the postcards . . . should only be done if they are fun for you. If you use them to make a personal connection with potential readers. Remember, the point of promotion is not just to pass things out to those who love you and your work already, it’s to introduce yourself to someone new.

Conflict Is Best

As many of you know, when you write a book proposal you don't have much time to grab the publishers eye. You have about thirty seconds to grab a publishers attention. Think of that, thirty seconds to convince me that I want to drop everything on my to-do list and read your material immediately.

So what is one of the biggest problems I see in book proposals? Lack of conflict. And for those of you who are published or have an agent and think this post isn’t for you, think again. The same blurb you used to pitch your agent is the same type of blurb you should be writing to pitch your editor a new book idea, give cover art and text suggestions, or grab a reader through your Web site or advertising.

We all know how difficult writing that query letter is, but we also know how important it is. When it comes to grabbing a publishers attention, it’s the packaging for your product. I don’t care about the envelope, or whether or not you wrote requested material, I only care about the material itself and how exciting it sounds when I am reading it. That’s the packaging. So here’s what’s not going to excite me: the type of relationship the characters have, the themes your novel explores, or the type of person your protagonist is. This isn’t what will get me to buy the book when I find it in the store and it isn’t what’s going to get me to offer representation now. What hooks people in is the conflict. Is the heroine racing against time to prove her innocence before the police catch up with her? Is the hero a vampire fighting his own demons while battling to save the only person who can save him? Don’t say things like, “These characters find themselves in increasingly dangerous situations. . . .” Yawn. What are those situations?

Think about it. Do you buy a book because the back cover says it explores themes of religion and the afterlife? That it takes a look at the themes the author has fought to understand his whole life? I doubt it. I suspect you buy a book because you’re either hooked by the protagonist’s hobby and the idea that she was wrongly convicted of a crime or because she’s fallen in love with the guy who is so totally wrong for her.

So here’s what I want to know about your book in the cover letter. I want to know what makes it different from every other romance, mystery, fantasy, or thrillier fiction novel I see and I want to know how the conflict makes it exciting and thrilling. That doesn’t mean I want you to say, “this book is different from . . .” No, I want you to weave it through your letter. I want it to say something like:

“Troy Smith is a vampire hunter, skilled with the crossbow and the stake. But he knows nothing of a woman’s touch—or how to control the unmanly-like dreams that haunt his sleep. That is when they come, two women of unearthly beauty who ravish him in sweet carnal games, taking him to the precipice of exquisite desire and unimaginable erotic pleasure. It is scandalous. Forbidden. Unholy. For his lovers are not women, but vampires—the very beasts he and his father have sworn to destroy.”

Do you see how that works? In one paragraph I get conflict and I get a hook. It’s short, it’s sweet, and it works to make me want to read more.