Category Archives: Writing

Plot, plot everywhere . . .

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Literary agent Kristin Nelson has an interesting post up today about the difference between “dramatic plot elements” and conflict. She writes:

I just want to clarify here that these two things are not the same.

Conflict is what motivates and drives your character (and can be internal and well as external).

Dramatic plot elements are simply events that occur in the story.

Not the same thing. So what I’m seeing is that writers are confusing the two and making the assumption that if they have a lot of big events in their novels, that’s enough “conflict”  to carry the story.

I’m going to ask, in her comments, if she’ll follow this up by elaborating on conflict . . . when she critiqued pitches on TWLAuthorTalks last week, she mentioned lack of conflict as a major strike against a couple of pitches. It would be interesting to get more insight from her into how successful writers build conflict into their novels.

This is my lawn

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In the back yard.

long long grass

Notice the length of the grass. And that it’s going to seed. I’m neglecting everything. Except my job, my kid, and my novel.

I’ll pick up the blogging pace again soon, but priorities is priorities ;-)

The world’s readers

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From The Forest for the Trees: An Editor’s Advice to Writers, by Betsy Lerner:

It’s easy to forget, in this ultra-accelerated culture of ours, where even fusty book publishing is caught up in the national fervor for celebrity and where the value of all things is equated with their dollar value, that what most editors truly want is good books. No matter how much it may seem otherwise, no matter how many mediocre or just plain bad books get fed into the great machine, most of us are in awe of a brilliant manuscript and will do everything in our power to see that it reaches readers . . . [E]ditors are . . . the world’s readers. And thus the eyes of the world.

“Hi, Concept!” “‘Lo, Concept!”*

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The subject of “high concept” came up this week on TWLAuthorTalks, where agent Kristin Nelson is a guest (and is going to be critiquing pitches this afternoon!)

If you’re a novelist — for that matter, if you’re involved in any aspect of the entertainment biz — you’ve probably at least stumbled across the term. And hopefully after you stumbled you did more than glance at it and kick it out of the way, since it’s one of the cornerstones you’re going to need if you want your career to get anywhere.

The members of TWLAuthorTalks’ spinoff forum, PitchClinic, have been refining our pitches this week, with an eye to showing off our novels’ high concept aspects.

We also talked a bit about what high concept is. Diana Peterfreund posted this link, to an article she wrote about high concept for her lit agency blog. Here’s an excerpt:

A high concept story has the following qualities: easily understood from a few words, and promising tremendous public appeal. When you describe a high-concept story, you can see the whole story — its premise, promise and execution — in a few words. A high concept story also “has legs” — in other words, it doesn’t need a name to sell it. It doesn’t need to be written by Stephen King or have Reese Witherspoon attached to star (though neither of those hurt, and you’ll notice that these two most often produce incredibly high-concept products).

It isn’t easy condensing your 70-100,000 word masterpiece down into one catchy sentence, but as we’ve also noted on the forum, the benefits far outweight the pain. It forces you to really focus on what your novel is “about.” If you can’t find that sentence — if it’s just not there — it may mean that you have to re-think your book. It’s that important. (More to come on that topic . . .)

*Bonus points to anyone who gets this reference hee hee hee

Above the knee? Below the knee? How long is long enough for that novel you’re writing?

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Where’ve I been, you ask?

Why, working! And editing my novel :-)

Plowed through a good 150 pages today, starting to get tired, so thought I’d take a quick break now to blog about . . . novel length.

My WIP is now at 65,000 words, and I’m betting it will finish at 67-68K.

The count has been creeping up during this latest round of editing, as I add some scenes and flesh out a subplot that I’d set aside while I worked on the main plot. Still, it’s on the thin side, so naturally I sat up and paid attention when I read this, in a post titled “Too Short” over at agent Kristin Nelson’s blog, Pubrants.

My agent friends and I just recently discussed an interesting trend on our chat loop: queries for novels with really short word counts (like 50,000 or 60,000 words) that aren’t category romance, cozy mysteries, or YA.

Queries for “full-length” novels.

In fact, according to one agent friend, she says that about half the queries she receives highlights this short word length.

We are all stymied by this.

Where are writers getting the info that this might be an appropriate length for a work? That it would be a marketable length? Standard word length is usually between 70,000 to 100,000 words for a novel. Fantasy can push up to 110,000 but for a debut, it’s going to be a tough go if the word count is higher.

About the same time the issue of manuscript length came up on Deanna Carlyle’s Chicklit Yahoo forum. The discussion offered a new twist: using a computer word count (i.e. MS Word’s utility) gives a shorter length than calculating word count the old-fashioned way — i.e., use Courier 12 pt text, then multiply your page count by 250 — Courier 12 pt gives you an average of 250 words/page.

So a couple days ago, just for fun, I reformatted my WIP from the default font — Times Roman 12 pt — to Courier 12 pt. It jumped from 265 pages to 340.

Is that the secret to legitimately “padding” your official MS length?

Unfortunately, the answer is “probably not.” I actually had a chance to put this question to Kristin Nelson herself, since she’s the guest this week on TWLAuthorTalks (still time to click and join if you want to ask her a question yourself!)

Kristin said that agents and editors use MS word count — and that although published authors can get away with shorter books, first-time novelists are going to have a hard time selling anything that falls outside that 70-100,000-word rule (excluding the genres she noted in her blog post).

She does give a ray of hope for those writers whose work is coming up too long–or too short. If your novel is good enough, word count won’t matter as much.

If your novel is good enough.

I’m not worried about my WIP btw. Partly because I’m totally enamored of it, right now — flaws? What flaws? lol

But mostly because I made a conscious decision, with this book, not to worry about length. I’m focusing on the plot and the characters. I do tend to write rather spare prose, and frankly I don’t want to cure that. I want this book to move, and I want its bones to show.

One day I’ll know whether I can sell it, at whatever length it comes out to be, but until then, it’s just not a problem I’m going to let climb into the boat ;-)

Literary mags

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When literary agent Jenny Bent was the guest on the Yahoo Forum TWLAuthorTalks last week, someone asked her what literary journals a writer should target to help build his/her reputation.

The journals Jenny listed are: Missouri Review, Prairie Schooner, Indiana Review, Shenandoah, Paris Review, Granta, Tin House, Glimmer Train, A Public Space, Zoetrope, Atlantic Monthly, Virginia Quarterly Review.

Well guess what? Several of these journals are participating in a promotion — they’re discounting their subscription price if you subscribe to three or more. Details are here on the Emerging Writers Network blog.

Agents read these journals, keeping an eye out for promising new writers — and being published in them is a great way to move your query to the top of an agent’s stack. Need I say more? ;-)

When he said “evil” . . .

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I thought Evil Editor was, maybe, a cutesy nickname for a kinda reckless guy who’d bumped his noggin too many times, ya know, like Evel Knievel, only instead of jumping a bike over a canyon he’d just never listened when his teachers told him not to rock on the back two legs of his desk chair.

Or maybe it a coolish reference to EE’s passing-ultra hipness, like, “wow, those new adverbs you backformed are really eeeeevil.”

But look at this. In a critique of a query letter describing a paranormal romance, Evil Editor posted a link to this painting of an incubus by Henry Fuseli.

I clicked on the link . . . I looked at the painting . . . I looked AGAIN. . . Am I the only one who noticed this?????

evil editor's true identity???

Yikes!!!!

Pitch slam AND pitch clinic!

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It’s big bonus time for writers!

Starting Monday, July 12, literary agent Kristin Nelson will be the guest at TWLAuthorTalks.

Not only will you be able to ask her questions about the writing biz, but she will also be critiquing one-sentence pitches, like Jenny Bent did this last week.

Don’t have a pitch? Not to worry! With TWLAuthorTalk owner Dorothy Thompson’s blessing, I started a spin-off Yahoo Forum, PitchClinic. Join up by following the link, and you can send along your pitch and other members will give you feedback and help you refine it.

This is a wonderful opportunity even if your novel isn’t ready to shop. Think about it: you have a chance to run your premise/concept and main conflict/story arc past one of the industry’s top agents. What better way to find out if you’re on track? What better way to find out if you’ve got a gem or need to rethink your novel’s basic elements?

See you there!

More on literary vs. popular novels

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From Michael at 2Blowhards, the transcription of a speech by novelist Richard Wheeler. Wheeler notes that the novels “we call classics . . . were largely written for ordinary people, not educated elites” and then offers this explanation for the creation of “literary fiction” as a category:

[T]he distinction between literary and popular fiction is quite recent, three or four decades old. When I was a youth it didn’t exist. Yet today it is a given: we assume that there have always been two branches of literature, and we writers need to make one or the other our own. Where did it come from? I had no idea how it evolved until my friend Win Blevins, who has an advanced degree in criticism from Columbia University, enlightened me. The distinction between literary and popular fiction arose, he told me, about the time when colleges began to offer workshop courses in creative writing, especially in the 1960s and 1970s.

Teachers used the term “literary” to describe what was to be taught in these workshops. These seminars would teach students the art of writing a “serious” novel, and not something light or transitory or appealing to popular tastes. This distinction gradually became the norm, and in modern times “literary fiction” has become a distinct branch of literature.

Wheeler also says this, but doesn’t elaborate further:

Until recently, authors who wrote popular fiction thought it provided a better income than literary fiction. Publishers threw their publicity resources behind blockbuster and midlist novels, and the result was real rewards for the commercial novelist. But times are changing and who can say what the future will bring? I suspect that just now, most literary novelists earn more.

I wonder if that’s true, and why it is . . . are there too many pop fiction writers out there eating from the same pot? Is pop fiction a commodity, whereas literary fiction is a luxury, and so able to command higher prices?

Interesting questions . . .

Posted about this subject as well here.

Update: and here.

Pitch madness

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I’m on a handful of Yahoo forums for writers. One of them is TWLAuthorTalks, owned by Dorothy Thompson.

I joined the list not long ago when I read on another list that she’d invited an agent, Jessica Faust of BookEnds, to join as a guest and answer member questions.

As it happens, Jessica read and rejected my very first completed novel, an inspirational genre romance that I wrote about 7 years ago.

Then last week, Dorothy announced that her next agent-guest would be Jenny Bent of Trident [update: Jenny now has her own agency] — who, coincidentally read and rejected my second completed novel last winter.

That has to mean something! just don’t know what, lol

Anyway, first Jenny was only going to be on for one day. Then she agreed to stick around for a second day, and then (much to her later regret no doubt!) yesterday morning she agreed to critique one-sentence elevator pitches submitted between 4:00 and 5:30.

Just to be clear, this all happened yesterday so it’s too late to send a pitch. However, if you join the group, you can read the pitches and critiques in the message archives. I highly recommend it — you’ll find it’s quite an education.

Seeing this happen in real time was an incredible experience as well. The group had 18 members when I joined a few weeks ago. Now there are over 200. The pitches were FLYING.

Here’s the pitch I sent, for my current WIP:

As word spreads that divorced biologist Libby Samson has seen real live “little folk” on her property, she must decide whether a sexy neighbor’s subsequent betrayal was in reality an act of love, intended to save her dreams of organic farming from being destroyed by unwanted celebrity and the crazy demands of her self-proclaimed devotees.

I was thrilled by Jenny’s critique, because what she liked was the set-up, and what she didn’t care for was the conflict (“she must decide . . .”) — which is a flaw of the pitch, not the novel. I put my poor protag through a lot in this book! But when I was writing the pitch I was trying to figure out how to work in that the book includes a romance — and with only one sentence to work with . . . well. That’s the challenge. What to put in? What to leave out?

Anyway, I have some great feedback to use for when I start querying — which may be pretty soon. I am deep into my second draft of this piece, plus I really have to get it wrapped up this month. I’m in another Yahoo group, Deanna Carlyle’s 52Days, the purpose of which is to write a novel in 52 days — and the kick-off is July 1 . . . tick tock tick tock tick tock

lol

[tags] writing, literary agents, querying [/tags]