Tag Archives: the writing process

On Pseudonyms

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In the Guardian, Jonathan Freedland, aka Sam Bourne, discusses why writers choose to publish under pen names.

Freedland’s is a special case, in some respects:

I confess it was not my idea. My agent came up with it when he sent out a proposal and a few sample chapters: he wanted publishers to react to the words on the page, rather than to any preconceptions they might have about me or the columns I write in the Guardian.

But he also notes an unanticipated benefit:

Even if the original motivation owes more to commerce than art, once chosen, a nom de plume can be liberating, taking a writer to places that might have remained unexplored.

It’s something I’ve considered, but have never quite brought myself to the point of committing to it.

How about you? Do you write under a pseudonym? Have you ever thought about it? Why (or why not) did you decide to do it?

When good enough — isn’t

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Miss Snark fields a question from a writer whose novel has been rejected repeatedly as “not competitive.” The writing is good, the story interesting, and yet the novel doesn’t seem to have what it takes to make the cut.

Here’s a portion of Miss Snark’s response:

I see quite a few books as partials or fulls that are pretty darn good but there’s nothing there that makes me say “aha!” I have to be able to answer the questions “what makes this stand out from the crowd” “what is going to surprise me” when I send this to editors. Business as usual will not do that.

The bar for becoming a fiction writer is, on the one hand, ridiculously low. You like words, you like stories, you own a computer or at least a bit of charcoal and the back of a shovel, and you’re there.

So it’s disquieting to discover that what you’re writing may not be good enough to get published. (Of, if you get a little further, not good enough to sell out your print run. Or, a little further along yet, not good enough to make you a living.)

Miss Snark’s advice:

I suggest stepping back from the project for a bit. Work on something else for awhile. Then go back and really look at your characters and plot. You have to be able to look at your work with an objective eye. That’s the single biggest weakness in writers: they can’t see how their own work looks on the literary buffet.

But (and I’m making an oblique confession, here) maybe that’s not it. Maybe we can see. Maybe the problem is that we don’t want to see. Because seeing means we have to rewrite, and not just smoothing-up-those-awkward-sentences rewriting, but the sort of rewriting that involves dismantling plot or rethinking characters — the kind of rewriting that takes us almost back to the beginning, and that, with a novel we’ve lived with for so many months already that we’re frankly sick to death of it.

But maybe that’s what it takes.

In the Introduction to Writing the Breakout Novel, Donald Maass has this to say:

Great novels–ones in which lightening seems to strike on every page–result from their authors’ refusal to settle for ‘good.’ Great novelists . . . push themselves to find original turns of phrase, extra levels of feeling, unusual depths of character, plots that veer in unexpected directions . . . Is that magic?

Not at all. It is aiming high.

I have to believe “aiming high” is what gets you to the place Miss Snark references — to the novel that “stands out from the crowd,” that is more than “business as usual.”

This is true for life, too

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In an answer to one of her blog readers, literary agent Miss Snark gave out a piece of advice that applies as well to life as it does to navigating a writing career.

The reader was worried about the chances of being published after he/she gets an agent. Here’s Miss Snark’s advice:

Right now what you are doing is the equivalent of what 15th century mapmakers in Spain did…..they drew pictures of monsters at the edge of the map. Right now you’re in Spain preparing to set sail and you’re looking at the map seeing only the unknown. Just remember that where they drew monsters is present day Hawaii.

The unknown is just that — unknown. But we do tend to populate it with scary things, don’t we?

More on plots

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Not to be confused with moron plots. We’ll leave that topic for another day.

This past weekend, I picked up a copy of Monkey Love, Brenda Scott Royce, Feb. 2006, Penguin, given the face-up treatment royale on the “new releases” table at my local bookstore chain.

So I’m reading it (because why not have four or five books going at once?) and as I’ve been thinking about plotting, I notice that in the first chapter (19 pages) no less than four major plotlines are introduced: a girlfriend’s unplanned pregnancy; another girlfriend’s professional shennanigans; the protagonist’s preparation for an upcoming stand-up comedy gig; and the protagonist’s first encounter with he-who-will-emerge-as-the-love-interest.

Advantages:

1. Fast pacing? You betcha. You can’t have that much going on in under 20 pages without having . . . a lot going on.

2. Major interest grabation. Take your pick, there’s so much happening here, you’re bound to want to know how at least some of it works out.

3. Comedic effect. A caught-in-the-headlights straight man is a comedy staple. Plot breaking out right and left is a useful device for propelling a hapless protagonist toward that lite, happy ending nirvana we’re all rooting for-o.*

Disadvantages:

1. There’s a thin line between “madcap” and frenetic.

2. Pacing isn’t pacing unless it’s modulated from time to time. When the balance tips too far toward “hard plot” and too far away from the protagonists interior life, things start to feel downright speedy after awhile.

So what’s the answer. Dunno. But if the pendulum has swung toward “plot ’til you’re punch-drunk” (and I’m by no means sure it has btw — I have exactly one data point upon which to base this) I hereby Predict it will Swing Back.

*The “o” is so that I won’t be using a preposition to end that sentence with-o

Stitching a contemporary plot

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I now have three partials out to agents, which puts me at a crossroads as far as my completed novel goes. I could continue to query additional agents, but my gut says to hold off. See how this goes.

Which means that now, I wait. For quite awhile, probably. Months, probably.

So, the next question becomes: what do I do in the meantime, in my “for me” writing time, while I wait?

I’ve got two other novels outlined that feature the same protagonist as my finished ms, but I am inclined to go off, right now, in a completely different direction. This is partly by choice. I want to add another basket for my eggs. But also, a new character introduced herself to me over the weekend, and tonight, I met one of her companions.

I’m going back to them in a minute. But in the meantime, I am actually feeling a bit nervous, because I don’t know where these two are going to take me.

Contemporary literary fiction, being post modernist, is often stitched together by absurdity; absurdity serves as a kind of surrogate plot. I don’t aspire to be a literary novelist, however. I want something much simpler (ah, yes, “lower,” lol): to tell stories. I want to tell stories and get out of the way in the telling.

So I have this woman. She’s divorced, I can see where she’s landed, I can hear her voice. But I don’t know her story. That’s what makes me nervous. It would be easy to fall back on absurdity, and it’s funny to find how tempting that is, at my age, this distant from my twenties & from college. I’m having to make myself not write, as I hunt about for the story, lest I begin filling up pages with absurdity, which will pass the time, but what good is passing time when the end of it all is a select all/delete?

What genre am I?

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To sell a novel, you’re usually best off getting an agent. To get an agent, the first step is the “query letter.”

A query letter is your mountainous labor of love distilled down into a couple of paragraphs. But not just any “couple of paragraphs.” It has to be a couple of paragraphs that grab an agent’s interest, raise the possibility that you’re a good writer, and plant the idea that your book may have a market.

Also, it can’t set off any danger bells. You can’t come across as desperate (“if this novel doesn’t sell, it’s all over, and I’m taking at least 46 people with me, right after I eat the last saltine in my cupboard”) or hopelessly amateurish (“you’ll notice a lot of spelling errors in my manuscript, but I promise I’ll clean them up in draft #2”).

Alas, some of those danger bells can’t be taught, because nobody knows what they are except the agents themselves, and although they will happily share their information with you there’s no way of ensuring you’ll stumble over it in time.

This is experience talking. About two weeks ago, after I’d sent off some eight e-queries that described my novel as “chick lit,” I came across this blog entry by agent Kristin Nelson. Turns out there’s a shake-down going down in chick lit right now. Chick lit was hot. Now it’s not. And none of those queries resulted in so much as a nibble.

Fortunately I hadn’t broadcast that query to every agent in the known universe. So I revised it to describe my novel as “commercial women’s fiction.” Also fortunately, that description isn’t a stretch. My novel has a chick litty voice, but doesn’t fit into the genre 1:1. No mentions of clothing by brand name, it’s not set in NYC or London, and my protagonist is an animal control officer, not an office employee. Oh, and her best friend isn’t a gay male. ( “Not that there’s anything wrong with that,” lol)

Since I made that revision, I’ve queried another five agents, and of those, I’ve received two requests for partials (first 40-50 pages and a synopsis). I can live with those odds :-)

That said, lest I tempt fate, let me quickly add: I’m still a long, long way away from getting an agent at all, let alone seeing this novel in print. But based on my experience, I’d say that with a query letter, you need to walk a fine line between giving specific information about your project and pigeon-holing it in a way that may work against you. If your novel fits neatly into a particular genre, by all means, say so. You don’t want to bother agents who aren’t interested in selling that type of book. But if you can stick to more general categories, you may increase the odds that you’ll at least get a few pages of your ms into the door. Which is what a query letter is supposed to do.

The peril of abstract spaces

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In the Toronto Star, Nicholas Hune-Brown surveys the way the ‘burbs have been depicted in literature and film, then veers off into his own, equally peculiar gloss.

He begins, reasonably enough, with this observation:

The North American suburbs of 2006 are a world away from the imagined suburbs of Cheever or Lewis. Traditional suburbs have grown and aged. Many of the once identical houses of Levittown and other subdivisions have now been customized and renovated. As developments on the urban fringe have become increasingly independent from their urban centres, the very existence of “suburbia” in the traditional sense has been questioned.

Fair enough. But Hune-Brown’s most earnest complaint is not that writers fall back on cliche when setting their narratives in the ‘burbs. It’s that they “ignore the real problems of suburban development,” that is, the “hideous” esthetic of the modern subdivision, segregation, and “sprawl.”

So. Hune-Brown would have writers jettison one set of the over-exposed abstractions, only to pick up another.

But that’s the wrong fix. I mean, think about it, a movie on the evils of sprawl? Characters adrift in emotional malaise because they they burn too much gas to get to work? And not only that, they have to drive past ugly 7-Elevens all the time, and don’t have ethnically-mixed neighbors?

“No ideas but in things.” William Carlos Williams. Anyone looking for artistic inspiration needs to start there. Not with abstractions, because beginning with an abstraction makes for lousy art, even if your abstraction is the political cause du jour.