Post to a Young Novelist.

I'm addicted to Yahoo Answers recently, mostly answering obscure medical questions and telling new writers not to pay to be published. Today a young writer asked for general advice, and this is what I said:

Read. Read extensively. Read great books, not just ones you know you're likely to enjoy. Don't be intimidated. Get in there and read the greats. Read the big award winners. Come up with your own opinions about who's good and who's not. Reading is the only way to develop the rarest tool in the writer's toolkit: voice.

Notebook. As in, carry one around with you all the time. Keep it next to your bed. Take it into the bathroom with you when you shower. You never know when ideas might occur to you. Just don't try to write and drive at the same time.

Ideas. Skim through your notebook once in a while and write down the big story ideas. Play around with combining them. Novels are big. Huge. They usually need a few ideas to support them. You'll be surprised what happens when you combine ideas that don't seem to fit together at first blush.

Theme. This is the hardest thing to understand in a novel, because it's what's going on in the writer's head. What point is he or she trying to make? Sometimes you don't know until the last page. This is what the writer feels is true about being human. Start pondering what you believe.

Outline. The one mechanical element you need. Because novels are big. Write down what you can. If you know what comes next your creativity can be free to work on dialogue and description, and you won't always be panicking about the next scene.

Structure. This is what holds up the story and gives it shape. In the western world, there are paradigms for structure. Christopher Vogler's _The Writer's Journey_ is an excellent resource for learning structure.

Good luck, and enjoy.

Even the Really Good...

...Sometimes make mistakes. Usually not great big giant hairy mistakes, but they're there. Here's a common one I just stumbled across:

The scene is tense. A father has come in to do a photo identification on a body. It might be his son. The police detective opens an envelope and lays two photos on the table in the interview room. *Tense pause here*

And then the other detective in the room looks at the pictures, and we hear what the dead man looks like, what the detective thinks about him and the father and the situation. It's great writing, and probably only goes on for a paragraph or two, but it doesn't belong there.

Give us the father's reaction. Is it his son or not? A bit of description would be fine, a pause for suspense would be appropriate, but this went on several beats too long. It's subtle, it's a pacing issue, but for a half a page the writer got a bit too caught up in his extremely good writing to get to the increasingly urgent point. It made the writing stand out at the expense of the story.

Was the body really the man's son? Not sayin'.

How Good is This Book?

This book here:

http://www.amazon.com/Lush-Life-Novel-Richard-Price/dp/0374299250

This book is so good I am tempted to listen to the audiobook rather than watch the playoffs. The playoffs, I'm saying. That is how good this book is. And the audiobook gets extra credit because the narrator, Bobby Cannavale, has the absolute perfect voice for this book.

So kudos to Richard Price for writing an absolutely fantastic book and for having an amazing command of language. What voice. I am very happy to hear this is not your first book and there are several more out there waiting for me.

Back to the playoffs, I guess...

Inspiration and Espionage on the 769.

Did you ever dream of being able to look into other peoples' back yards at close range? Into their workplaces? Spy on them driving their cars, relaxing on beaches, walking down the street? Or how about just sitting comfortably and overhearing conversations and phone calls while enjoying a tasty beverage? Hour after hour of absorbing details of private lives. Writer heaven.

Amtrak.

As Stephen Fry Says...

In one of his estimable books, the title of which escapes me as I have just finished too quickly the delightful onion at the bottom of a gin gibson: "Stand not upon the order of your going, but go at once!"

I've remembered, that's from The Liar.

Anyway, go at once to the nearest bookstore and read the first 10 1/2 pages of Howard Jacobson's The Finkler Question. If you do not then walk out with the book— paid for, one hopes— you are questionable indeed.

That, folks, is how you do it.

Hooks & Tags.

Sewing? No. Today I'm talking about query letters and a not-so-fine distinction many new novel writers don't quite see: the difference between a hook and a tag line. The reason fiction writers often miss the difference is that the phrase "tag line" comes from the evil world of screenwriting, and the tag line has contaminated everything.

I'm taking parts of this from a post I made on a thread on AbsoluteWrite. The writer of the original post had a query letter that wasn't getting a good response. They posted the hook from their letter. The problem? Their hook was actually a tag line. I won't use that writer's tag line, but here's something similar:

"Is it worth pursuing your dreams if the search only brings you pain?"

Okay, so maybe it wasn't that bad, but you get the idea. A tag line is something a marketing department comes up with to put on a one sheet (movie poster). It is not the sort of thing that makes anyone want to see the movie (or request a partial) because it doesn't mean anything. It could apply to a thousand different books or movies or TV shows.

What is a hook? In screenwriting land, a hook is a log line. It is your incredibly interesting, infinitely-marketable, audience-ready plot. It is hopefully high-concept. A hook is the one line that makes your would-be reader or viewer or agent say "that's interesting, I haven't seen that before, I have to know how that story turns out." Here are some examples, poorly written by yours truly:

-A young boy discovers he's a wizard and is sent to a secret wizarding school.

-A girl returns to her family home to find a cure for a curse that is causing her feet to turn to glass.

-A five-year-old boy raised in a single room must escape from the man who has held him and his mother captive.

-A young woman falls in love with a man who travels through time.

All are novels, obviously, and most literary fiction. It can be done. A hook is what is driving your book, the underlying question that must be solved. At their best, they give the reader an idea of a unique problem that is big enough to drive an entire plot and get them started thinking about how they would handle the same issue.

As a side note, it's not necessary to have a high-concept hook. In a novel they can be much softer:

-A young man rides his horse away from his troubled family and tries to build a new life in Mexico.

-A man tries to reclaim the love of his youth, having waited sixty years for his beloved's husband to die.

Note that these softer plots may be of less interest from a beginning writer. An agent reading your query letter might not trust that an unknown writer will have the chops to pull those two stories off as well as Cormac McCarthy and Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

In short, a good hook makes an agent think your book can be marketed, has a target audience, and will sell. It is the heart of your query letter. There's no room in a query letter for a tag line.

I'm a Bigot.

I'll admit it. I am a fiction bigot. I am prejudiced when it comes to what I read. I am on a quest to read the best fiction I can find. So in my prejudice I scour the book reviews and the fiction awards. I'm one of those annoying people at the writers conference standing in the corner with the group leaders arguing the merits or lack thereof of this year's Pulitzer or Man Booker winner. In short, I'm a snot.

I fear I'm prejudiced against books that are— I confess it here— fun to read. The kind of book you can blast through on one rainy day. Granted, some of these books— some of them bestsellers— are, well, rather poorly written. But certainly not all are. There are certainly sufficient books out there that are both well-written and fun. Dare I say— exciting. But when I read them why do I turn into a Puritan trapped in the appurtenances of sin?

*cough*

The confession is prompted by a quote I read today:

There's a hunger for stories in all of us, adults too. We need stories so much that we're even willing to read bad books to get them, if the good books won't supply them. - Phillip Pullman.

Have I been fleeing from good stories for fear of reading bad books? My mother never allows my father to tell dirty jokes in her presence, saying she doesn't want that sort of thing in her head. Am I doing the same, with a self-installed warning system that goes off if I'm enjoying myself too much? How did story become the enemy of good writing?

I've mentioned a friend who forgave and enjoyed some truly bad movies (trust me) by saying "it's just a good yarn!" Well, I was looking at the stack of books I read last month that have not yet made it upstairs to the fiction shelves. There are a couple in there that were both literary fiction, both well-written, critically well-received and, well, high-concept. They have a central plot idea that can be stated in a short sentence. They are Emma Donoghue's Room and Ali Shaw's The Girl with Glass Feet. I enjoyed both. And felt guilty.

But turn this on its head. Let us consider Tana French. Wonderful writer of mysteries. Fantastic way with the English language. And her books are as packed with high-concept story as anyone could want. And I feel no guilt reading her books. Is it because they are firmly planted in a genre?

Much as I hate to do it, let me paraphrase George Bush. Or rather, one of his speechwriters, who was writing about the school system with the phrase "the soft bigotry of low expectations." Maybe that's what I have. I pick up the occasional genre novel and am so delighted if the writing is good that it becomes a memorable book. While waves of literary novels pass through to my "already read" pile with little notice and I applaud myself for getting through another award winner.

The entire fault, then, is not in genre. It's perfectly possible to find good and even great writing in genres. What is letting me down is literary fiction. Because in that same stack of books that I finished last month are a couple of books I either shut early or wish I had. They were— I admit it here— boring. One was a recent Pulitzer winner. And the writing— my reason for buying it in the first place— was all very nice and clean, but you know what it wasn't? Good. Great. It was all perfectly functional, but it was bland. Another book I just finished on audio read like a 600-page excuse to insert a couple of dozen of the author's most closely held political views. Views I agreed with and enjoyed and found very clever and worthy, but the other 575 pages? Oy. Stick a fork in it, already.

So I'm sorry, award committees out there in the Land of the Literary, you fail. You are failing miserably. Not just the Nobel committee that says it will never again hand the literary prize to an American, but all y'all. You are suffering from the same narrow-minded bigotry I am. You're awarding too many boring books. Story is not the enemy!

I shall take baby steps to recover. I shall not buy award winners by reflex. I shall trust reviews more than awards, and seek out more reviews from more sources. I shall eagerly await Tana French and Ali Shaw and Emma Donoghue's next books. Heck, I was going to do that anyway.

The first step to recovery is admitting you have a problem.

p.s. I have the latest Man Booker winner here in my to-read piles: Howard Jacobson's The Finkler Question. It is supposed to be *gasp* funny. Heaven forfend! Man Booker committee, I hereby issue you a temporary reprieve.