Technician’s Thoughts: Thank You, Sir, May I Have Another?

Posted on April 27, 2013 by jane

I took the following picture at Barnes and Noble the other day:

photo (1)

Do you notice what I notice? That every book is trying to look like Fifty Shades of Gray? What am I saying? Of course you notice. “Domination romance” has taken over the romance market, tied its wrists with silken cord, and demanded that it call this previously non-existant sub-genre “sir.”

I’ve been predicting for a while that fetish romance was going to become mainstream. But this was not how I expected it to happen. What I expected, actually, was that it would all happen in the form of e-books.

See, here’s the problem fetish romance faces: in order to be sold, they have to communicate what they are to the reader. And the established way of doing this is through what I like to call “cover code,” the pictures, palette, and font types on a book’s front cover that indicate what subgenre it belongs to. Over in mystery, a red and black cover, with a thin, spiky font indicates a grisly serial killer mystery; a candy-colored palette, with cartoonish images and a pun in the title, indicates a lighthearted cozy mystery.

In order to sell a spanking romance, a bondage romance, a domination romance, you would need to invent a cover code, because how else would readers know what they were buying? But then the readers would be compelled to carry that cover around with them, everywhere they wanted to read your book. You might be able to read a traditional romance in front of your mother-in-law, fifty people on the bus, or your teenage son—but you are never going to do that with a domination romance. It’s just too weird.

Or so I thought. But evidently there are plenty of people who are willing to pick up Fifty Shades of Gray (or one of its many clones), carry it to the register, pay for it, and, presumably, read it. There are enough of them to move the entire romance market. My prediction, that these types of books would become popular through the oh-so-discreet e-book format, was obviously a big bust.

I was wondering aloud to my husband why this was—had we become a less private people, due to Facebook, blogs, and all this modern sharing? And Mark pointed out that the only way you possibly can create a cover code is in the bookstore.

He’s right. In order for a cover code to work, it must be widely understood by the reading audience. And for that to happen, it must first become prevalent. And the only way it can become prevalent is in public. It has to be seen, and seen widely. It has to enter the public mind.

This difficulty is something for self-publishers to keep in mind. One of the things that excites writers about the new availability of self-publishing is that books that don’t easily fit into a genre are much easier to get out into the world. Writing a cross-genre zombie mystery? A sci fi romance? You can publish it now, and readers can be the judge.

Except, there’s the problem of cover code. On your own, can you establish a cover code? Maybe. Fifty Shades did it. But it did it with the help of an existing Internet fan base and a huge marketing campaign. Most self-publishers aren’t going to have those resources to bring to bear.

And, as more and more self-published books enter the market, are we going to see a dilution of cover code? Self-published books typically have privately produced covers, and if the artist you hire doesn’t understand the cover code for your genre, the cover is likely to be slightly off, slightly confusing, slightly less communicative to potential buyers than the cover produced by a traditional publisher. That’s a problem.

So, no matter how effective e-books are at opening up the world of publishing, I think it’s clear that we writers are not done with the brick and mortar bookstores just yet. They still have a lot to offer us, and a lot to teach us about how to sell.

Posted in My Life, Romance, Self-Publishing | Leave a comment

On Clumsiness, and Balance

Posted on April 22, 2013 by jane

The House Girl by Tara Conklin
Publication: Traditional
Genre: Literary
Verdict: No

The House Girl is a dual story. One narrative takes place in 1852, and it’s about Josephine, a slave about to make a run for her freedom. The other is present-day, and concerns Lina, a young hotshot lawyer who, according to the back of the book, will soon be working on a Supreme Court case addressing reparations for the descendants of slaves.

I say it was on the back of the book, because on p. 34, the last page of the sample, I have yet to see this plotline introduced. Mostly what has happened to Lina is that a dude at her law firm dangled the case in front of her, but didn’t actually tell her what it was about. And then she went home and had a conversation with her dad.

If you can’t tell, I’m not too into Lina as yet. Which presents me with a bit of a dilemma when confronted by the Buy button, because I am into Josephine’s story. In a big way. It begins like this:

Mister hit Josephine with the palm of his hand across her left cheek and it was then she knew she would run.

Josephine doesn’t really know why her master is pissed at her, just that he is, and that it’s his right to hit her. And the petty, casual cruelty of that moment rankles deeply, for her and for me.

Making your character the victim of an injustice is a quick and powerful way of putting the reader firmly on her side. And on her side I very much am. It also seems that Josephine’s story is quickly going to involve a lot of danger, drama, and emotional conflict (there are, after all, people on the plantation who she loves).

In other words, it’s going to make damn good reading.

Lina’s story hasn’t really kicked off yet. That may be a function of the length of the sample, but I think it also illustrates the difficulty of making a dual story like this work. Frequently when I read these I find myself drastically more committed to one narrative than the other; this unfortunately has the effect of making my B narrative a bit of a chore, a slog I have to get through to get back to the story I’m actually trying to read.

The only dual story I can think of that really worked for me was Art Spiegelman’s classic graphic novel, Maus, which dealt with the survival of the author’s Jewish father through the horrors of the Holocaust, and also with their strained relationship in the present day.

I think what made this one work was a deliberate imbalance between the stories. The Holocaust story was clearly the primary narrative, where most of the reader’s time would be spent. If you didn’t care much about this narrative, you knew to put down the book. And if you didn’t care much about the father-and-son narrative, at least you knew those sections would be brief. By clearly setting the reader’s expectations, Spiegelman removed the necessity of balancing the narratives perfectly.

Back to the House Girl. Conklin has set herself up for a really hard task, balance-wise, because it seems unlikely these stories are going to match in intensity. Josephine’s about to be running for her freedom, and her life. Lina’s about to be reading legal briefs. The book is marketed as literary, not thriller, so I’m just not optimistic that Lina is going to be dealing with stakes that match those of a runaway slave.

The only thing, then, that is drawing me into Lina’s narrative is the subject matter, slavery reparations. I don’t know much about the subject, and I’m interested to see it discussed in an intelligent, fair, and thorough manner.

But do I have faith that this will happen? Not really, and the reason why brings us back to that first sentence.

Mister hit Josephine with the palm of his hand across her left cheek and it was then she knew she would run.

Clumsy, clumsy, clumsy! Why not just “hit?” Why not just “slapped?” Why include the detail about the left cheek at all? Why use thirteen words to do what three could do with more punch?

This inelegance is the sort of thing I could forgive in the middle of a book, but on p.1, it makes me leery. It speaks to a lack of effort on the behalf of both Conklin and her editor. And that translates to mashing Delete.

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Plot is Tech: My Four-Act Formula

Posted on April 19, 2013 by jane

Spoilers for: His Majesty’s Dragon, by Naomi Novik; The Princess Bride, by William Goldman; Speaker for the Dead, by Orson Scott Card; Star Wars series

As a writer, I consider myself to be in the journeyman stage of my career. Even though I haven’t really made any money at it yet, I feel like my apprentice years are behind me. I’ve written a couple of books. I no longer find “How to Write” books particularly interesting. I’m sort of in the middle stage of my expertise, even if I’m still in the beginning stages of my professional career.

Part of being a journeyman, I think, is developing your own tricks of the trade, the little knacks and small arts that, along with the philosophies behind them, eventually earn you the title of “master.” One of mine is my Four Act Structure, which I use in plotting a novel. I don’t know if it will work as well for everyone, but I find it a serviceable tool.

Act One: The Challenge Accepted

This takes up maybe a quarter to a third of the book. It’s the part wherein your amateur detective decides to investigate the murder; the young soldier marches off to war; the swineherd decides to kill the dragon so he can claim the princess’s hand.

Except sometimes the challenge seems to be accepted right at the outset of the novel. You’re writing the third book in a detective series, and everyone knows the detective’s going to take the case the moment the client walks in his door. In that case, I think it’s useful to have a secondary challenge, one that can ultimately serve to bring this arc to a close. In the case of the detective series, The Challenge Accepted likely ends when the detective decides to take a personal interest in the case before him, or when he decides to continue pursuing it despite some very persuasive reasons not to.

Naomi Novik’s fantasy novel His Majesty’s Dragon, begins with Captain William Laurence discovering a dragon egg. Over the course of the first thirty pages or so, he determines that the egg will soon hatch, that a member of his crew must make an effort to bond with the dragon and become its rider, and furthermore, that that person must be him. He undertakes this task with dedication, but no enthusiasm, as it will mean the end of his Naval career. And on page 28, there he is, inextricably bonded with his dragon, Temeraire.

But that isn’t where The Challenge Accepted ends. Instead, Laurence spends a good third of the novel learning to see Temeraire as a fellow being, rather than a burden. The Challenge Accepted ends when Laurence accepts the second, hidden Challenge—becoming Temeraire’s true friend and companion.

Act Two: A Grave Setback

This act also takes about a third of the book, maybe a bit less. It involves the characters proceeding along with their efforts, until, bang! A Grave Setback occurs. The prime suspect in your murder mystery turns up as another victim; the young soldier’s unit is mowed down in battle; the swineherd learns that the dragon is not only not the one who’s been terrorizing the peasantry, but is actually a pretty nice guy.

The ideal Grave Setback challenges everything that has gone before it, and makes things immeasurably harder for your heroes. It leaves the reader asking, “Yeesh, what are they going to do now?”

In The Princess Bride, the Grave Setback occurs when Westley dies. He dies! The hero dies! That is, as Mercutio might have said, about as grave a setback as you can get. The plot marches forward, and Westley comes back, but in a much-reduced state. Everything he does from this moment on must rely on strengths other than the ones he’s used to get this far.

Note: I know you’ve seen the movie. If you haven’t read the book, read the book!

Act Three: All is Revealed

This act takes up most of the remainder of the book. Any mysteries you’ve developed along the way are laid bare here. Here’s where your murderer is unmasked; where the young soldier discovers the betrayal that led his unit to their doom; where the swineherd learns that the king is actually the evil sorceror who has been making the peasants’ lives miserable.

All is Revealed is where all the little pieces click into place, where your reader can finally make sense of what’s come before. It should surprise the reader, yes, but a moment after that surprise registers, he should begin to slowly bob his head, to realize that this is the only way things could have gone. In other words, All is Revealed should grant answers that feel both surprising and inevitable.

In Orson Scott Card’s Speaker for the Dead, this act concludes when we finally learn the reason for the strange and brutal murders committed by the race of aliens called “piggies.” It all makes sense, then: not just why they committed those crimes, but also why their behavior doesn’t sem to gibe with their feelings of respect for the murder victims. A dozen little mysteries are cleared up with one revelation, which winds up seeming inevitable indeed.

Act Four: Someone Wins

This act is basically comprised of the climax and denouement. Note that it’s not called “The Hero Wins.” It is only necessary that someone win. Failing that, you can go for some sort of stable resolution or compromise—but that’s not my style. I like a good, solid victory or defeat.

In The Empire Strikes Back, it’s the villain who wins in this act, setting us up for the heroes to be in deep trouble at the beginning of Return of the Jedi. I do feel that letting the villain win works best in a series, where you have room to correct the injustice in later novels. But it can work in standalones, too. One of the members of my writing group has written a standalone literary novel with a bitterly shocking Villain Wins fourth act, which leaves the hero alive but forever diminished.

And so…

Not every book will easily break down into these four acts, or even break down into them at all. Like all writers’ tools, the Four Act Structure is a guide, not a harness. It’s meant to give you a way of thinking about your novel that can help you chart your way through the murky first stages of plot-work.

It works for me, and I imagine will continue to do so. But I won’t be afraid to step away from it if it isn’t serving the needs of a particular novel, and I’ll always be looking for ways to change it up and make it freshly surprising.

 

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Dragon Maths

Posted on April 16, 2013 by jane

His Majesty’s Dragon, by Naomi Novik
Publication: Traditional
Genre: Fantasy

In my first post, I blogged about how I rejected Code Name Verity because, while it had a great hook, that’s simply not enough; a book must follow up the hook with a reason for the reader to care.

Ok, great. Gotcha. A reason to care. But, from a technical standpoint, what does a reason to care consist of? And how do you know if you’ve given your readers an adequate one?

There are a lot of possible answers. But one of the most powerful ways of making your readers care is giving them someone to care about.

That’s what Naomi Novik does in His Majesty’s Dragon, the first book in her justly famous Temeraire series. It’s narrated by William Laurence, captain of a British Naval ship during the Napoleonic Wars, and Novik lets us know exactly who he is with efficiency on p. 2, after Laurence has captured a French ship:

Many of [the French sailors] lay dead or dying upon the deck; he shook his head at the waste and eyed the French captain with disapproval; the man should never have offered battle… he ought to have done better by his men than to bring them into so hopeless an action.…

He hooked the captain’s sword on his belt; he did not think the man deserved the compliment of having it returned, though ordinarily he would have done so.

Two things are important here: Laurence’s individuality, and his virtue. His sternness, attention to ceremony, and martial viewpoint comprise the first; they make you feel as though you have met a real, nuanced person. His compassion and his sense of a captain’s duties comprise the second; they make you feel as though the person you have met is worth knowing.

Together these things give the reader someone to care about. Now, all the writer has to do is get him in trouble.

That’s what happens as the sample continues. In short order, Laurence will discover that in capturing the French ship, he has also captured a dragon egg, which will shortly hatch. It becomes clear that one of his officers must attempt to harness the dragon, becoming its rider and ending that man’s Naval career. And when the young man selected for the task proves unequal to it, it is Laurence’s sad duty to step into his place.

And throughout all this, Laurence’s individuality and virtue are fully on display, particularly in the way that he sees it as his duty to sacrifice his own intended future to secure the hatchling for Britain’s war effort. And thus, when the sample leaves off, although the plot is still in its opening stages (indeed, nothing has happened that isn’t revealed on the back cover copy), we are deeply invested in Laurence and in what will happen to him. We care.

So, broken down into a mathematical formula, that leaves us with:

(Individuality + Virtue) + Difficulty = A Reason to Care.

I like math. And also, Temeraire.

Posted in Character, Fantasy, Historical, Reviews | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

What is Fiction Technician?

Posted on April 8, 2013 by jane

There’s been a lot of talk recently about how e-books are changing the publishing business. It’s generally agreed that the effects are enormous, but as yet unknown. E-books are having an effect on the profitability of brick-and-mortar stores, on the cost of self-publishing (and therefore its prevalence), on basically every aspect of publishing.

But they’re changing more than that. They’re changing the way we buy books.

For people like me, who do most of their reading on an e-reader, I suspect that the book buying process has become much the same: download a sample of the book and read it. If you get bored, stop. If you get to the end and you’re still interested, buy the book.

For the first time in history, readers have an infinite amount of time to spend with the first pages of a book before they decide to buy. The implications of this for writers are simultaneously completely obvious, and hard to completely get one’s head around. But one thing is clear:

The first ten percent of your book has become your last, and most critical, selling tool.

And that means that you must sustain reader interest at a pretty high level throughout the length of the sample. If it drops off, the reader just isn’t going to hit Buy.

The last book to fall victim to this drop-off, for me, was Code Name Verity, by Elizabeth Wein. It’s about a teenage spy who is captured and tortured by Nazis. The book takes the form of the confession they are forcing her to write. In the first pages, she makes it clear that she will confess all.

I was very into the premise, and very into those first few pages, wherein Verity outlines her grim circumstances. Had I been perusing the book in a bookstore, that’s as far as I would have read before I needed to move on with my day. On the strength of those first pages, I would have bought the book.

But as Verity moved into the meat of her confession, my interest waned. And when I got to the end of the sample, there on page 40, I wrinkled up my nose, trying to decide whether it was worth ten bucks to turn the page. I decided it wasn’t. I hit Delete.

For a while, it was hard for me to figure out exactly what it was that made me lose steam on Code Name Verity, until I remembered something Orson Scott Card said when I attended his Literary Boot Camp in 2010.

Forget “hook,” he said. Give us a reason to care.

It was then that I realized that Code Name Verity was all hook, and no reason to care. The hook was top notch: Girl spy! Being tortured! By Nazis! But once we moved past that initial hook, there was nothing to hold me. Her confession dealt with characters who the narrator seemed to find fascinating, but who I frankly did not. In fact, I found them rather typical: plucky girl pilots running about being plucky—without, as yet, any real problems to deal with. I knew they would be recruited into the war effort eventually, but it hadn’t happened yet, and I didn’t know how long it would take. And I didn’t care about any of them.

That hook was enough to get me through 40 pages. But it wasn’t a reason to care, and it wasn’t enough to sell me the book.

And that, essentially, is what Fiction Technician is about: looking at the initial samples of e-books from a writerly point of view. I’ll look at character, pacing, tension, et al, all trying to answer one question: Why is this book selling? Or why isn’t it?

If you’ve recently walked away from a book that couldn’t hold your attention throughout the sample, let me know about it in the comments. How are you buying books these days?

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