Advice on Novel Writing by Crawford Kilian
- Foreword by the Author
- Developing Efficient Work Habits
- Elements Of A Successful Story
- In the opening...
- In the body of the story...
- In the conclusion...
- Throughout the story...
- Style: Checklist For Fiction Writers
- Manuscript Format
- Storyboarding
- Ten Points on Plotting
- The Story Synopsis
- Understanding Genre: Notes on the Thriller
- Symbolism and all that
- The Natural Cycle
- The Natural Versus the Human World
- The Hero's Quest: Mysterious or unusual birth
- Symbolic Images
- Symbolic Characters
- Narrative Voice
- Constructing a Scene
- Show And Tell: Which Is Better?
- Character In Fiction
- ``Let's Talk About Dialogue,'' He Pontificated
- Some Dialogue Conventions to Consider:
- Writing A Query Letter About Your Novel
- Researching Publishers and Agents
- Reading a Contract
- Delivery Of Satisfactory Copy
- Permission for Copyrighted Material
- Grant Of Rights
- Proofreading and Author's Corrections
- Advances and Royalties
- Author's Warranties and Indemnities
- Copies to Author
- Option Clause
- Going Out of Print
- A Word of Advice
- Afterword by the Author
A little later tonight (Thursday, Nov 5 [1992]), I'm going to start
sending in a series of items about writing fiction for the mass
market. Some of these I posted a few days ago, provoking a remarkable
amount of e-mail asking for copies of this or that posting. So I
decided I'd start from the top and go through the whole batch in a
couple of stages.
Altogether I'll be sending 17 separate ``handouts'' from my commercial
fiction course. They range from good work habits to the reading of
contracts. Please--don't read them as divine revelation. They come
out of my experience, which may not be anything like yours or that of
other writers. But if they save you some time, energy and grief, I'll
be glad.
The files total about 180K--enough for a short book. I'll number
each one as Fiction Advice plus a number and keyword. If you miss some
of them, I'll try to post them directly, but sometimes people's
addresses don't make sense to my computer...
Why am I doing this? Well, a year or so ago someone e-mailed me with
that very question. I thought for a minute and then replied to this
effect: When you're young, and you think you have the talent, you
wonder how you can make the talent serve you. When you're older, you
wonder how you can serve the talent. This is some small part of my
service. God bless, work hard, write honestly, take pride in your
craft!
Crawford Kilian
Communications Department
Capilano College
2055 Purcell Way
North Vancouver, BC Canada V7G 1H7
Usenet: Crawford_Kilian@mindlink.bc.ca
Different writers face different advantages and drawbacks in forming
good writing habits. The circumstances of your personal life may make
it easy or hard to find writing time, but time itself is not the real
issue--it's habit. Writing must be something you do regularly, like
brushing your teeth. The writer who waits for inspiration will wait
even longer for a complete, published novel.
Writing habits flourish best in routine, but the efficient writer also
exploits opportunity.
Routine: Set aside some time every day when you can work undisturbed
for an hour or two--first thing in the morning, during lunch, after
dinner, whenever you can set aside other demands. Ideally, it's the
same time of day. Your family and friends will soon build their
routines around yours. With luck, they will resent your unscheduled
appearances during your writing time, and will send you packing back
to your desk.
Keep your writing equipment (paper, pens, software manuals, etc.) in
your writing place, close at hand. Minimize distractions like
interesting new magazines and books. Try to find a writing time when
few people phone or visit. If a cup of coffee and some background
music make you feel less lonely, by all means enjoy them.
Use household chores as thinking time: a chance to review what you've
done so far and to consider where your writing should go next. Walking
the dog or vacuuming the carpet can provide more ideas than you
expect. This is really just ``controlled daydreaming,'' letting your
mind freewheel in a particular direction: What the heroine should do
in the next chapter, how the hero would respond to escaping a car
bomb, how the villain developed his evil character. But the process
doesn't seem to work if you just sit and stare at the wall. You need
to be up and moving in some automatic pattern.
Don't lean on others for editorial advice and encouragement--least of
all people you're emotionally involved with. Spouses, friends and
roommates rarely have both editorial perceptiveness and the tact to
express it without infuriating you or breaking your heart. Empty
praise will get you nowhere; unconstructive criticism can destroy your
novel in an instant.
Instead, be your own editor: set aside regular times to write yourself
letters discussing your own work, articulating what's good and less
good in it. In the process you'll easily solve problems that could
otherwise grow into full-blown writer's block. On a computer, the
letters can form a continuous journal, recording your reactions to the
evolving work. Checking back to the first journal entries can help
keep you on track--or dramatically show how far you've moved from your
original concept.
Writing a letter to yourself is especially helpful if you're beginning
to have anxieties about the story. Sometimes we try to suppress those
anxieties, which only makes them worse. Anxiety turns to frustration
and despair, and finally we abandon the whole project. If you can
actually write down what bothers you about your heroine, or your plot,
or whatever, the answer to the problem often suggests itself. The act
of turning our chaotic thoughts into orderly sentences seems to lead
to much quicker and more satisfying solutions.
In addition to these self-addressed letters, keep a daily log of your
progress. Word processors with word-count functions are powerful
encouragers. The log can give you a sense of accomplishment,
especially on big projects, and can enable you to set realistic
completion deadlines. For example, if you know you can write 500 words
in an hour, and you write three hours a week, you can have a completed
novel manuscript of 75,000 words in 50 weeks. If you write ten hours a
week, the ms. will be complete in 15 weeks.
Compile a ``project bible.'' This is a list of facts, names, and so on
that you expect to be using for constant reference. If you have some
important research findings you plan to use, put them in the bible
along with their sources. Include lists of characters' names (with
descriptions, so their eyes don't change color), unusual words or
spellings, etc. The best format for this bible may be a looseleaf
binder you can carry with you. (A word of caution: If your bible gets
too big to carry easily, you're defeating its purpose.)
Opportunity: If you decide you ``can't write'' unless you're seated at
your Gigabyte II computer with Mozart on the stereo and no one else in
the house, you're just making life harder for yourself. Your ordinary
domestic routine will always contain ``dead time''--periods when you're
away from home (or at least away from your workplace) with no other
task at hand. You might be waiting in a doctor's office, on a bus, or
trapped in a large, dull meeting. Use that dead time constructively
by carrying your notebook bible in which you can record at least a few
lines of a rough draft. Or you might jot down some background notes
about your project, or a self-editing idea that's just occurred to
you. You can then use these when you're back at your desk producing
finished text.
These are general habits that will help you at all stages of the
novel-writing process. But you may also find that you need to
understand those stages and adapt your habits to each of them. You may
not do yourself any good if you plunge into the writing phase before
you've worked out a decent outline. So let's take a look at the stages
of the novel-writing process, and then consider some techniques to
maximize your efficiency in each of them.
If your novel or short story is going to work, it's going to need all
the right components. Used without imagination or sensitivity, those
elements may produce only formula fiction. But, like a good cook with
the right materials and a good recipe, you can also create some
pleasant surprises.
Many writers, like many good cooks, don't need to think consciously
about what they're throwing in the pot. But as an apprentice you
should probably think about how your story matches up with the
following suggestions. They all have to do, essentially, with bringing
your characters and readers from a state of ignorance to a state of awareness: Can our heroine find happiness as a journalist?
We don't know, but we'll find out. Can our hero found a family dynasty
in the Nevada wilderness? We don't know, but we'll find out.
In the opening...
Show us your main characters, or at least foreshadow them: We might
see your heroine's mother getting married, for example. Or we might
see a crime committed which will bring in your hero to investigate.
Show one or more characters under some kind of appropriate stress. For
example, if the hero must perform well under enemy fire in the climax,
show him being shot at in Chapter One--and performing badly. If the
heroine must resist temptation at the end, show her (or someone else)
succumbing to temptation in the beginning.
Show us who's the ``good guy,'' who's the ``bad guy.'' That is, in whom
should we make an emotional investment? Whose side are we on? Even if
the hero is morally repugnant (a hired killer, for example), he should
display some trait or attitude we can admire and identify with. The
villain can be likable but set on a course we must disapprove.
Show what's at stake. Editors and readers want to know this right
away. (That's why the blurb on the jacket usually tells us: ``Only one
person can save the West/defend the Galactic Empire/defeat the
vampires...'')What does the hero stand to gain or lose? What will
follow if the villain wins?
Establish the setting--where and when the story takes place.
Establish the area of conflict . If the setting is the Nanaimo coal
mines at the turn of the century, the area of conflict may be
relations between miners and owners, or within a family of miners, or
within a single miner's personality.
Foreshadow the ending. If the hero dies in a blizzard at the end, a
few flakes of snow may fall in the first chapter.
Set the tone of the story: solemn or excited, humorous or tragic.
In the body of the story...
Tell your story in scenes, not in exposition. A scene contains a
purpose, an obstacle or conflict, and a resolution that tells us
something new about the characters and their circumstances.
Develop your characters through action and dialogue. Show us, don't
tell us, what's going on and why (not He was loud and rude, but ``Get
outa my way, you jerk!'' he bellowed.).
Include all the elements you need for your conclusion. If everything
depends on killing the victim with a shotgun, show us the shotgun long
before it goes off.
Give your characters adequate motivation for their actions and words.
Drama is people doing amazing things for very good reasons. Melodrama
is people doing amazing things for bad or nonexistent reasons.
Develop the plot as a series of increasingly serious problems. (The
heroine escapes the villain in Chapter 5 by fleeing into the snowy
mountains; now in Chapter 6 she risks death in an avalanche.)
Establish suspense by making solution of the problems uncertain (How
will the heroine escape the avalanche and avoid freezing to death in
Chapter Seven?).
Make solutions of the problems appropriate to the characters (Good
thing she took Outward Bound training in Chapter One).
In the conclusion...
Present a final, crucial conflict when everything gained so far is in
danger and could be lost by a single word or deed: this is the climax,
which reveals something to your readers (and perhaps to your
characters) which has been implicit from the outset but not obvious or
predictable.
Throughout the story...
Remember that nothing in a story happens at random . Why is the
heroine's name Sophia? Why is she blind? Why is her dog a black Lab?
The easy answer is that you're the God of your novel and that's the
way you want things. But if you have a conscious reason for these
elements, the story gains in interest because it carries more meaning:
For example, ``Sophia'' means ``wisdom'' and the name can provide a cue to
the reader.
Use image, metaphor and simile with a conscious purpose, not just
because a phrase ``sounds good.''
Maintain consistent style, tone, and point of view.
Know the conventions of the form you're working in, and break them
only when you have a good reason to. For example, if it's conventional
for the private eye to be an aggressive, hard-drinking single man,
you're going to shake up the reader if your private eye is a
yogurt-loving, shy mother of three school-age children. You'll shake
up the reader even more if she goes around pistol-whipping people; as
a private eye, her behavior will still depend on her personality and
limitations.
As you begin to develop your outline, and then the actual text of your
novel, you can save time and energy by making sure that your writing
style requires virtually no copy editing. In the narrative:
- Do any sentences begin with the words ``There'' or ``It''? They can almost
certainly benefit from revision. (Compare: There were three gunmen who
had sworn to kill him. It was hard to believe. or: Three gunmen had
sworn to kill him. He couldn't believe it.)
- Are you using passive voice instead of active voice? (Compare: Is passive
voice being used?) Put it in active voice!
- Are you repeating what you've already told your readers? Are you
telegraphing your punches?
- Are you using trite phrases, cliches, or deliberately unusual words? You'd
better have a very good reason for doing so.
- Are you terse? Or, alternatively, are you on the other hand expressing and
communicating your thoughts and ideas with a perhaps excessive and
abundant plethora of gratuitous and surplus verbiage, whose
predictably foreseeable end results, needless to say, include as a
component part a somewhat repetitious redundancy?
- Are you grammatically correct? Are spelling and punctuation correct? (This
is not mere detail work, but basic craft. Learn standard English or
forget about writing novels.)
- Is the prose fluent, varied in rhythm, and suitable in tone to the type of
story you're telling?
- Are you as narrator intruding on the story through witticisms,
editorializing, or self-consciously, inappropriately ``fine'' writing?
In the dialogue:
- Are you punctuating dialogue correctly, so that you neither
confuse nor distract your readers?
- Are your characters speaking naturally, as they would in
reality, but more coherently?
- Does every speech advance the story, revealing something new
about the plot or the characters? If not, what is its justification?
- Are your characters so distinct in their speech--in diction,
rhythm, and mannerism--that you rarely need to add ``he said'' or
``she said''?
Once your book appears in print, your publisher will return your
manuscript as ``dead matter.'' At that point it's of interest only to
future Ph.D. candidates. But when it first arrives in the publisher's
office, it ought to look as inviting, clean and professional as you
can make it. You want to make sure it's as readable (and correctable)
as possible; don't give the editor an excuse to reject you because you
make her eyes hurt, and she can't even find room to insert proper
spelling.
Ideally, you'll submit your manuscript in laser-printed form. If you
can't afford that, then use an inkjet printer (used with good bond
paper, it's almost as good as laser), a good dot-matrix printer, or an
electric typewriter. If your dot-matrix printer has a pale ribbon and
you can't replace it, make a darker photocopy of the original
printout.
Consider your choice of font. A sans serif font is legible but not
readable--that is, you can recognize a word or phrase quickly, but
reading page after page would be exhausting. A boldface font is even
worse. A serif font is more readable, so by all means choose one for
the body of your manuscript text. Point size is also important. For
the Mac, 12-point Times isn't bad, and it lets you put a lot of text
on one page. But 14-point Times is more readable.
(This issue, by the way, recently kicked up a big fuss in this
newsgroup; some people argued that only a monospace font was
acceptable. I finally phoned Del Rey Books to see if they preferred a
monospace font like Courier, or a more flexible font. The editor I
talked to obviously thought I was bonkers; they don't much care as
long as they can read the manuscript.)
Paper should be standard 8.5x11, 20 lb. white bond. If you use fanfold
paper in a dot-matrix printer, make sure it's reasonably heavy. (You
will of course separate each page and remove the strips on
the sides.) Give yourself a margin of at least an inch top and bottom,
and an inch or an inch and a half on the sides. Double-space your
text. Do not put an extra double-space between paragraphs, unless you
want a similar gap on the printed page to indicate a change of scene
or passage of time. Indent each paragraph about half an inch. If you
are using a font with letters that take up variable amounts of space,
a single space after a period is enough. If you are using a typewriter
or a monospace font, two spaces are better. Either way, a single
space should follow every comma, semicolon, and colon. If you can, use
an ``em dash'' with no spaces between the dash and the surrounding
words. Two hyphens -- are an acceptable substitute. Underline text
only if you cannot italicize it.
Do not use a right-justified margin! It may look tidy, but it creates
gaps between words that make reading hard. Avoid hyphenations. Also
avoid ``widows and orphans''--that is, a paragraph that begins on
the last line of a page, or a paragraph that ends on the first line
the following page. Most word processors can kick such paragraphs onto
the next page. This may create huge lower margins, but it's better
than breaking a paragraph.
Be sure that each page displays a plain Arabic numeral in the upper
right-hand corner. Otherwise, don't bother with a header. They're not
going to scatter your ms. or lose the title page. And when you send it
in, don't bind it in a cute cover. Send it loose, in a typing-paper
box. Make sure you have at least two copies on disk (in separate
locations) or a photocopy. In 1979 I sent half a manuscript (240
pages, a year's work) to my editor in New York; he sent it back a
couple of months later, but I'm still waiting for it. Fortunately I
had a carbon copy.
The publisher may want you to send along a disk with the manuscript on
it, as well as the hard copy. When I did that recently, I found that
the editor just poured my files into a new font and layout and sent me
the page proofs for correction. That meant all the mistakes I found
were my own; I couldn't blame some clumsy typesetter. This is the
downside of the computer revolution, folks.
``Storyboarding'' usually means arranging a sequence of images for a
film or commercial. But you can storyboard a novel also, and it can be
a helpful way to organize the plot.
That's because we don't normally think plot. We have an idea for
a story (immigrant boy founds family dynasty in Nevada wilderness) and
a random assortment of mental images (encounter with a grizzly bear,
wild ride to rescue son from kidnappers, gorgeous blonde swimming nude
in icy stream, showdown with eastern gangsters wanting land for
casino). How do we get from these fragments to a coherent plot?
Writing a letter to yourself may help, but first try this: Take a
stack of 3x5 cards and jot down an image or scene on each one, just in
the order the ideas occur to you. It might look something like this:
Jesse rides into town, confronts Caleb Black about his fraudulent
mining-shares deal. Caleb denies everything, threatens to shoot Jesse
if he talks about it.
When you have five or ten or twenty such cards, lay them out in the
sequence you envisage for the story. You certainly don't have a card
for each scene in the novel, but you have the scenes that your
subconscious seems to want to deal with.
You also have numerous gaps. How do you get Jesse from his silver mine
in Nevada to the deck of the Titanic? How does Caleb get in touch with
the three hired killers from San Francisco? How does Jesse's grandson
respond to the first offer from the gangster syndicate that wants to
build a casino on the site of the old mine?
Now you turn your thoughts to just those gaps, and new ideas occur to
you. That means more cards. Maybe some of the new ideas are better
than the original ones, so some of the old cards go in the trash. New
characters emerge to fulfill functions in the story. Your research
into Nevada history suggests still more scenes which might go into
this or that part of the novel; still more cards go into your growing
deck.
The story may eventually end up as a series of flashbacks, but for now
stick to straight chronological order. Maybe the whole story occurs
during a three-hour siege of a secluded mansion; maybe it stretches
across a century and a continent. Whatever the ``real time'' of your
story, you may see that the cards clump naturally around certain
periods of the plot and you see no need for events to fill in the
gaps. That's fine; maybe you've found the natural divisions between
chapters or sections of the story.
Keep asking yourself why. Why Nevada, why mining, why a gorgeous
naked blonde? Don't keep a scene in your storyboard unless you can
justify it as a way to dramatize a character's personality, to move
the story ahead, to lend verisimilitude. If you absolutely must have a
scene in which Jesse's true love Sophia goes skinnydipping in an icy
creek and then nearly drowns, what good will the scene do for the
story?
Once you have at least the main sequence of events clearly mapped out
on your cards, you can begin to transfer them to a more manageable
synopsis or outline. More about that in a later posting.
- Nothing should happen at random. Every element in a story should
have significance, whether for verisimilitude, symbolism, or the
intended climax. Names, places, actions and events should all be
purposeful. To test the significance of an element, ask: Why this
place and not another? Why this name and not another? Why this action,
this speech, and not others--or none at all? The answers should be: To
persuade the reader of the story's plausibility; to convey a message
about the theme of the story; to prepare the reader for the climax so
that it seems both plausible and in keeping with the theme.
- Plot stems from character under adversity. A mild-mannered person cannot
achieve his goals by an out-of-character action like a violent
assault, unless we have prepared the reader for it by revealing a
glimpse of some suppressed aspect of his personality that can be
plausibly released by stress. And the stress itself must also be
plausible, given the circumstances of the story.
- Each character has an urgent personal agenda. Too much is at stake to
abandon that agenda without good reason. We may not share the
character's urgency, but we should be able to see why he cares so much
about what he's doing. A character who acts without real motivation is
by definition melodramatic, doing outrageous things for the sake of
the thrill it gives the reader--not because it makes sense for the
character to do so.
- The plot of a story is the synthesis of the plots of its
individual characters. Each character has a personal agenda, modified
by conflict or concordance with the agendas of others. The villain
doesn't get everything his way, any more than the hero does; each
keeps thwarting the other, who must then improvise under pressure. If
the hero is moving northwest, and the villain is moving northeast, the
plot carries them both more or less due north--at least until one or
the other gains some advantage.
- The plot ``begins'' long before the story. The story itself
should begin at the latest possible moment before the climax, at a
point when events take a decisive and irreversible turn. We may learn
later, through flashbacks, exposition, or inference, about events
occurring before the beginning of the story.
- Foreshadow all important elements. The first part of a story is a
kind of prophecy; the second part fulfills the prophecy. Any important
character, location, object should be foreshadowed early in the story.
The deus ex machina is unacceptable; you can't pull a rabbit out of
your hat to rescue your hero. But you can't telegraph your punch
either--your readers don't want to see what's coming, especially if
your characters seem too dumb to see it. The trick is to put the plot
element into your story without making the reader excessively aware of
its importance. Chance and coincidence, in particular, require careful
preparation if they are going to influence the plot.
- Keep in mind the kind of story you're telling. Any story is about
the relationship of an individual to society. A comic story
describes an isolated individual achieving social integration either
by being accepted into an existing society or by forming his own. This
integration is often symbolized by a wedding or feast. A
tragic story describes an integrated individual who becomes
isolated; death is simply a symbol of this isolation. The plot should
keep us in some degree of suspense about what kind of story we're
reading. Even if we know it's a comedy, the precise nature of the
comic climax should come as a surprise. If we know the hero is doomed,
his downfall should stem from a factor we know about but have not
given sufficient weight to.
- Ironic plots subvert their surface meanings. Here, an ordinarily
desirable goal appears very unattractive to us: the hero marries, but
chooses the wrong girl and turns his story into a tragedy. Or the hero
may die, but gains some improvement in social acceptance as a
result--by becoming a martyr or social savior, for example.
- The hero must eventually take charge of events. In any plot the
hero is passive for a time, reacting to events. At some point he must
try to take charge. This is the counterthrust, when the story
goes into high gear. In some cases we may have a series of thrusts and
counterthrusts; in the opening stages of the plot, the counterthrust
helps define the hero's character and puts him in position for more
serious conflicts (and counterthrusts) later in the story. You could
even say that every scene presents the hero with a problem; his
response is his counterthrust. In the larger structure of the plot,
the counterthrust often comes after the hero's original plan of action
has failed; he has learned some hard lessons and now he will apply
them as he approaches the climax of the story.
- Plot dramatizes character. If all literature is the story of the quest
for identity, then plot is the roadmap of that quest. Every event,
every response, should reveal (to us if not to them) some aspect of
the characters' identities. Plot elements dramatize characters'
identities by providing opportunities to be brave or cowardly, stupid
or brilliant, generous or mean. These opportunities come in the form
of severe stress, appropriate to the kind of story you're telling. A
plot element used for its own sake--a fistfight, a sexual encounter,
an ominous warning--is a needless burden to the story if it does not
illuminate the characters involved. Conversely, the reader will not
believe any character trait that you have not dramatized through a
plot device.
The story synopsis or outline can take many forms; it has no rigid
format. But the synopsis, like the manuscript, should be
double-spaced and highly legible, with frequent paragraphing.
Some synopses cover the whole story, while others supplement a portion
of completed manuscript and presuppose the reader's familiarity with
that portion. If you have broken your novel into chapters, that's a
useful way to divide your synopsis also. You may find, however, that
what you thought would fit into one chapter will expand into two or
three.
The major element of the synopsis, and sometimes the only element, is
the narrative.
- Usually in present tense:
On a fine spring day in 1923, Lucy Williams applies for a job working
for a mysterious millionaire.
- Names and describes major characters:
Lucy's new boss is Donald Matthews, a handsome young businessman
scarcely older than Lucy, but with an unsavory reputation as a rumored
bootlegger.
- Summarizes major events in the story:
Hurrying home through the storm, Lucy bumps into Kenneth Holwood,
Donald's former partner. Holwood seems deranged, and hints at some
terrible secret in Donald's past.
- Indicates the story's point of view:
Lucy mails the package despite her qualms; she wonders what it might
contain. Meanwhile, in a shabby hotel room across town, Holwood
meticulously plans the death of Donald Matthews. (This shows us that
the story's point of view is third-person omniscient; we will skip
from one viewpoint to another as events require.)
- Contains virtually no dialogue:
Donald invites Lucy to dinner at a notorious speakeasy, saying she'll
enjoy herself more than she thinks she will.
A list of major characters' names (with brief descriptions) can
sometimes be helpful in keeping the story straight; if used, such a
list usually goes at the beginning of the synopsis.
A background section sometimes precedes the synopsis itself,
especially if the story's context requires some explanation. (This
seems especially true of science fiction, fantasy, and historical
novels, where the plot may hinge on unfamiliar story elements.)
Otherwise, such explanation simply crops up where required in the
synopsis.
How long should a synopsis be? I've sold some novels with just two or
three pages. Other writers may write forty or fifty pages of outline.
If your purpose is to interest an editor before the novel is
completed, and you expect the total ms. to run to 90,000 to 120,000
words, a synopsis of four to ten doublespaced pages should be
adequate. After all, you're trying to tempt the editor by showing her
a brief sample, giving her grounds for a decision without a long
investment in reading time.
Should you stick to your synopsis? Not necessarily. It's there to help
you and your editor, not to dictate the whole story. Like the
itinerary of a foreign tour, it should give you a sense of direction
and purpose while leaving you free to explore interesting byways; it
should also give you a quick return to the main road if the byway
turns into a dead end.
``Genre'' simply means a kind of literature (usually fiction) dealing
with a particular topic, setting, or issue. Even so-called
``mainstream'' fiction has its genres: the coming-of-age story, for
example. In the last few decades, genre in North America has come to
mean types of fiction that are commercially successful because they
are predictable treatments of familiar material: the Regency romance,
the hard-boiled detective novel, the space opera. Some readers,
writers and critics dismiss such fiction precisely because of its
predictability, and they're often right to do so. But even the
humblest hackwork requires a certain level of craft, and that means
you must understand your genre's conventions if you are going to
succeed--and especially if you are going to convey your message by
tinkering with those conventions. For our purposes, a ``convention''
is an understanding between writer and reader about certain details of
the story. For example, we don't need to know the history of the
Mexican-American War to understand why a youth from Ohio is punching
cattle in Texas in 1871. We don't need to understand the post-Einstein
physics that permits faster-than-light travel and the establishment of
interstellar empires. And we agree that the heroine of a Regency
romance should be heterosexual, unmarried, and unlikely to solve her
problems through learning karate.
As a novice writer, you should understand your genre's conventions
consciously, not just as things you take for granted that help make a
good yarn. In this, you're like an apprentice cook who can't just
uncritically love the taste of tomato soup; you have to know what
ingredients make it taste that way, and use them with some
calculation.
So it might be useful for you, in one of your letters to yourself
about your novel, to write out your own understanding and
appreciation of the form you're working in. I found this was
especially helpful with a couple of my early books, which fell into
the genre of the natural-disaster thriller. Your genre analysis
doesn't have to be in essay form; it just has to identify the key
elements of the genre as you understand them, and that in turn should
lead to ideas about how to tinker with the genre's conventions. And
that, in turn, should make your story more interesting than a
slavish imitation of your favorite author.
As an example, here are my Own views about the thriller:
- The thriller portrays persons confronting problems they can't
solve by recourse to established institutions and agencies; calling
911, or a psychiatrist, won't help matters in the slightest.
- The problems not only threaten the characters' physical and
mental safety, they threaten to bring down the society they live in:
their families, their communities, their nations. This is what is at
stake in the story, and should appear as soon as possible.
- The solution to the characters' problems usually involves some
degree of violence, illegality, technical expertise, and dramatic
action, but not more than we can plausibly expect from people of the
kind we have chosen to portray.
- The political thriller portrays characters who must go
outside their society if they are to save it, and the characters
therefore acquire a certain ironic quality. They must be at least as
skilled and ruthless as their adversaries, yet motivated by values we
can understand and admire even if we don't share them.
- The disaster thriller portrays characters who are either
isolated from their society or who risk such isolation if they
fail. That is, either they will die or their society will fall (or
both) if they do not accomplish their goals. In the novel of
natural disaster, the disaster comes early and the issue is
who will survive and how. In the novel of man-made disaster,
the issue is how (or whether) the characters will prevent the
disaster.
- The characters must be highly plausible and complex; where they
seem grotesque or two-dimensional, we must give some valid reason for
these qualities. They must have adequate motives for the extreme and
risky actions they take, and they must respond to events with
plausible human reactions. Those reactions should spring from what we
know of the characters' personalities, and should throw new light on
those personalities.
- The protagonist's goal is to save or restore a threatened
society; it is rarely to create a whole new society. In this sense,
the thriller is usually politically conservative, though irony may
subvert that conservatism.
- At the outset the protagonist only reacts to events; at some
point, however, he or she embarks on the counterthrust, an attempt to
take charge and overcome circumstances.
- The progress of the protagonist is from ignorance to knowledge,
accomplished through a series of increasingly intense and important
conflicts. These lead to a climactic conflict and the resolution of
the story.
- With the climax the protagonist attains self-knowledge as well as
understanding of his or her circumstances (or at least we
attain such knowledge). This knowledge may well create a whole new
perspective on the story's events and the characters' values: A murder
may turn out to have been futile, or loyalty may have been betrayed.
We should prepare for these insights early in the novel, so that the
protagonist's change and development are logical and believable.
Maybe you never got anything out of your literature courses except a
strong dislike for ``analyzing a story to death.'' Sometimes the
symbolic interpretation of a story or poem can seem pretty
far-fetched.
Nevertheless, as soon as you start writing, you start writing on some
kind of symbolic level. Maybe you're not conscious of it, but it's
there: in your characters, their actions, the setting, and the images.
(Some writers are very powerful symbolists, but don't realize it;
that's why authors are often poor critics of their own work.)
You may argue that your writing simply comes out of your own life and
experience, and has nothing to do with ``literary'' writing. Well, no
doubt you'll include elements of your own life, but whether you like
it or not you'll find yourself treating that experience like
gingerbread dough: You'll shape it into a mold to create a gingerbread
man, or you'll have a shapeless mess on your hands.
What you write is really a kind of commentary on everything you've
read so far in your life. If you get a kick out of romance novels, and
you write one based on your own torrid love life which is quite
different from most romances, your novel is still a comment on what
you've read.
This is not the place for a long discussion of the theory of fiction.
You should learn at least the basics of that theory, however, and no
better source exists than Anatomy of Criticism, by Northrop Frye. You
may find parts of it heavy going, but it will repay your efforts by
letting you look at your own work more perceptively, and by enabling
you to develop structure and symbol more consciously.
To paraphrase Frye very crudely, every story is about a search for
identity. That identity depends largely on the protagonist's position
(or lack of position) in society. A tragic story shows a person who
moves from a socially integrated position (the Prince of Denmark, the
King of Thebes) to a socially isolated one (a dead prince, a blind
beggar). A comic story shows a person moving from social isolation
(symbolized by poverty, lack of recognition, and single status) to
social integration (wealth, status, and marriage to one's beloved).
Fiction in the western tradition draws on two major sources: ancient
Greek literature, and the Judaeo-Christian Bible. Both sources are
concerned with preservation or restoration of society, and with the
individual hero as savior or social redeemer. Hamlet wants to redeem
Denmark from his uncle's usurpation; Oedipus wants to save Thebes from
the curse that he himself unintentionally placed on it.
In precisely the same way, the private eye redeems his society by
identifying who is guilty (and therefore who is innocent); the
frontier gunman risks his life to preserve the honest pioneers; the
mutant telepath faces danger to search for fellow-mutants.
Now, you can play this straight or you can twist it. The private eye
may find that everyone is guilty. The gunman may be in the pay of
crooked land speculators. The mutant may find he is sterile, that his
talents will die surface meaning. Winston Smith, in Nineteen
Eighty-Four, is happily integrated at the end of the story, but we
don't share his happiness.
How you use symbols can also undercut or change your apparent meaning.
Let's take a look at some common symbols and patterns, and how they
can comment on your story.
The Natural Cycle
Day to night, spring to winter, youth to old age. These suggest all
kinds of imagery: light=goodness, darkness=evil
spring=hope, winter=despair
girl=innocence, crone=evil knowledge, impending death
Northrop Frye argues that we associate images of spring with comedy;
images of summer with romance; images of autumn with tragedy; images
of winter with satire and irony. Note, however, that here ``comedy''
means a story of social unification; ``tragedy'' means a story of social
isolation; and ``romance'' means a story in which the characters are
larger than life and encounter wonders usually not seen in reality.
Bear in mind that images associated with these cycles are usually all
you need: at the end of Nineteen Eighty-Four, a cold April wind kills
the crocuses that ought to promise hope and renewal. Similarly, autumn
leaves can symbolize an aging person, a dying society, or the onset of
evil.
The Natural Versus the Human World
Desert versus garden
Sinister forest versus park
Pastoral world versus city
In western literature, the journey from innocence to experience is
often symbolized by the protagonist's journey from an idyllic world
close to nature, to an urban world that has closed itself against
nature. (In Biblical terms, this is the journey from Eden through the
desert of the fallen world, to the Heavenly City.) Returns to the
natural world are sometimes successful; sometimes the protagonist
manages to bring the urban world into a new harmony with nature. In
other cases, an urban hero finds meaning and value through some kind
of contact with nature.
The Hero's Quest: Mysterious or unusual birth
Prophecy that he will overthrow the present order, restore a vanished
order
Secluded childhood among humble people in a pastoral setting
Signs of the hero's unusual nature
Journey-quest -- a series of adventures and ordeals that test the hero,
culminating in a climactic confrontation
Death -- real or symbolic
Rebirth
Recognition as savior-king; formation of new society around him
Symbolic Images
A symbol may be good or evil, depending on its context, and the author
is quite free to develop the context to convey a particular symbolism.
For example, the tree is usually a symbol of life--but not if you use
it as the venue for a lynching, or you turn its wood into a crucifix
or a gibbet. Here are some images and their most common symbolic
meanings:
- Garden: nature ordered to serve human needs (paradis
is a Persian word for garden)
- Wilderness: nature hostile to human needs
- River: life, often seen as ending in death as the river
ends in the sea
- Sea: chaos, death, source of life
- Flower: youth, sexuality; red flowers symbolize death of
young men
- Pastoral animals: Ordered human society
- Predatory animals: Evil; threats to human order
- Fire: light, life or hell and lust
- Sky: heaven, fate or necessity
- Bridge: Link between worlds, between life and death
Symbolic Characters
Different types of characters recur so often that they've acquired
their own names. Here are some of the most common:
- Eiron: One who deprecates himself and appears less than
he really is; includes most types of hero (Ulysses, Frodo, Huck Finn).
The term ``irony'' derives from eiron.
- Alazon: An imposter, one who boasts and presents himself
as more than he really is; subtypes include the braggart soldier
(General Buck Turgidson in Dr. Strangelove) and obsessed
philosopher-mad scientist (Saruman, Dr. Strangelove). In my novel
Tsunami, I named my villain Allison; although he starts as a movie
director, he ends up as a braggart soldier.
- Tricky slave: Hero's helper (Jim in Huckleberry Finn;
Gollum in The Lord of the Rings).
- Helpful giant: Hero's helper; in tune with nature (Ents in
TLOR; Chewbacca in Star Wars).
- Wise old man: Hero's helper; possessor of knowledge
(Gandalf, Obi-Wan Kenobi).
- Buffoon: Creates a festive mood, relieves tension (Sam
Gamgee, Mercutio).
- Churl: Straight man, killjoy or bumpkin (Uriah Heep).
- Fair maiden: Symbol of purity and redemption (Rowena) or
of repressed sexuality (any number of Ice Maidens).
- Dark woman: Symbol of lust and temptation (or of natural
sexuality).
- Hero's double: Represents the dark side of the hero's
character (Ged's shadow in Wizard of Earthsea).
Since these images are much older than what is now politically
correct, they can cause problems; readers may see them as affirmations
of old, oppressive social values. However, many modern writers now use
them ironically to criticize, not endorse, the values the images
originally expressed. Nevertheless, be aware that if your heroines
are always blonde virgins and your villainesses are always seductive
brunettes, you may be sending a message you don't consciously
intend.
Be aware also that you're perfectly free to develop your own symbolic
system. Just as the ``Rosebud'' sled in Citizen Kane symbolizes
Kane's lost childhood innocence, you can make a symbol out of a hat
rack, a catcher's mitt, or an old bus schedule. You're also free to
make your symbols understandable to your readers, or to keep them part
of your private mythology. If you associate a catcher's mitt with your
the death of your hero's father, the reader will understand--on some
level--what you're trying to say. If the catcher's mitt seems
important to your hero, but you don't tell us why, we can only guess
at the symbolic meaning.
Don't try too self-consciously to be ``symbolic.'' But if certain
images, objects or events seem to dominate your thinking about your
novel, write yourself a letter about them. See whether they might
indeed carry some symbolic level of meaning, and if that level is in
harmony with your conscious intent.
Someone in your story has to tell us that Jeff pulled out his gun,
that Samantha smiled at the tall stranger, that daylight was breaking
over the valley. That someone is the narrator or ``author's
persona.''
The author's persona of a fictional narrative can help or hinder the
success of the story. Which persona you adopt depends on what kind of
story you are trying to tell, and what kind of emotional atmosphere
works best for the story.
The persona develops from the personality and attitude of the
narrator, which are expressed by the narrator's choice of words and
incidents. These in turn depend on the point of view of the story.
First-person point of view is usually subjective: we learn the
narrator's thoughts, feelings, and reactions to events. In
first-person objective, however, the narrator tells us only what
people said and did, without comment.
Other first-person modes include:
- the observer-narrator, outside the main story (examples: Mr. Lockwood in
Wuthering Heights, Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby)
- detached autobiography (narrator looking back on long-past events)
- multiple narrators (first-person accounts by several characters)
- interior monologue (narrator recounts the story as a memory; stream of
consciousness is an extreme form of this narrative)
- dramatic monologue (narrator tells story out loud without major
interruption)
- letters or diary (narrator writes down events as they happen)
If the point of view is first-person, questions about the persona are
simple: the character narrating the story has a particular personality
and attitude, which is plausibly expressed by the way he or she
describes events.
The second-person mode is rare: You knocked on the door. You went
inside. Very few writers feel the need for it, and still fewer use it
effectively.
If the point of view is third-person limited, persona again depends on
the single character through whose eyes we witness the story. You may
go inside the character's mind and tell us how that character thinks
and feels, or you may describe outside events in terms the character
would use. Readers like this point of view because they know whom to
``invest'' in or identify with.
In third-person objective, we have no entry to anyone's thoughts or
feelings. The author simply describes, without emotion or
editorializing, what the characters say and do. The author's persona
here is almost non-existent. Readers may be unsure whose fate they
should care about, but it can be very powerful precisely because it
invites the reader to supply the emotion that the persona does not.
This is the persona of Icelandic sagas, which inspired not only Ernest
Hemingway but a whole generation of ``hard-boiled'' writers.
If the point of view is third-person omniscient, however, the author's
persona can develop in any of several directions.
- ``Episodically limited.'' Whoever is the point of view for a particular
scene determines the persona. An archbishop sees and describes events
from his particular point of view, while a pickpocket does so quite
differently. So the narrator, in a scene from the archbishop's point
of view, has a persona quite different from that of the pickpocket: a
different vocabulary, a different set of values, a different set of
priorities. (As a general rule, point of view should not change during
a scene. So if an archbishop is the point of view in a scene involving
him and a pickpocket, we shouldn't suddenly switch to the pickpocket's
point of view until we've resolved the scene and moved on to another
scene.)
- ``Occasional interruptor.'' The author intervenes from time to time to
supply necessary information, but otherwise stays in the background.
The dialogue, thoughts and behavior of the characters supply all other
information the reader needs.
- ``Editorial commentator.'' The author's persona has a distinct attitude
toward the story's characters and events, and frequently comments on
them. The editorial commentator may be a character in the story,
often with a name, but is usually at some distance from the main
events; in some cases, we may even have an editorial commentator
reporting the narrative of someone else about events involving still
other people. The editorial commentator is not always reliable; he or
she may lie to us, or misunderstand the true significance of events.
Third-person omniscient gives you the most freedom to develop the
story, and it works especially well in stories with complex plots or
large settings where we must use multiple viewpoints to tell the
story. It can, however, cause the reader to feel uncertain about whom
to identify with in the story. If you are going to skip from one
point of view to another, start doing so early in the story, before
the reader has fully identified with the original point of view.
The author's persona can influence the reader's reaction by helping
the reader to feel close to or distant from the characters. Three
major hazards arise from careless use of the persona:
- Sentimentality. The author's editorial rhetoric tries to
evoke an emotional response that the story's events cannot evoke by
themselves--something like a cheerleader trying to win applause for
a team that doesn't deserve it. A particular problem for the
``editorial commentator.''
- Mannerism. The author's persona seems more important than
the story itself, and the author keeps reminding us of his or her
presence through stylistic flamboyance, quirks of diction, or outright
editorializing about the characters and events of the story. Also a
problem for the editorial commentator. However, if the point of view
is first person, and the narrator is a person given to stylistic
flamboyance, quirks of diction, and so on, then the problem
disappears; the persona is simply that of a rather egotistical
individual who likes to show off.
- Frigidity. The persona's excessive objectivity trivializes
the events of the story, suggesting that the characters' problems need
not be taken seriously: a particular hazard for ``hardboiled'' fiction
in the objective mode, whether first person or third person.
Verb tense can also affect the narrative style of the story. Most
stories use the past tense:
I knocked on the door. She pulled out
her gun. This is usually quite adequate although flashbacks can cause
awkwardness:
I had knocked on the door. She had pulled out her
gun. A little of that goes a long way.
Be careful to stay consistently in one verb tense unless your narrator
is a person who might switch tenses: So I went to see my
probation officer, and she tells me I can't hang out with my old
buddies no more.
Some writers achieve a kind of immediacy through use of the present
tense: I knock on the door. She pulls out her gun. We don't feel
anyone knows the outcome of events because they are occurring as we
read, in ``real time.'' Some writers also enjoy the present tense
because it seems ``arty'' or experimental. But most readers of genre
fiction don't enjoy the present tense, so editors are often reluctant
to let their authors use it. I learned that the hard way by using
present tense in my first novel, The Empire of Time; it was enough to
keep the manuscript in editorial limbo for months, and the final offer
to publish was contingent on changing to past tense. Guess how long I
agonized over that artistic decision!
The basic unit of fiction is not the sentence or the paragraph, but
the scene. Every scene in a story has both a verbal and a nonverbal
content. The verbal content may be a young man fervently courting a
girl, or the President of the United States deciding whether to go
ahead with a nuclear attack on a biological-warfare research center.
The nonverbal content appears in the way you present the scene: You
want your reader to think that the young man is touchingly awkward, or
obnoxiously crude; that the president is a shallow twerp or a deeply
sensitive man facing a terrible decision.
In effect, you are like an attorney presenting a case to the jury: You
supply the evidence, and the jury supplies the verdict. If you
tell us that the young man is touchingly awkward, we may well
disbelieve you. But if you show us his awkward behavior, and we
say, ``Aw, the poor lunk!''--then your scene has succeeded.
Every scene presents a problem of some kind for one or more
characters, and shows us how the characters deal with that problem.
That, in turn, shows us something about the characters and moves the
story ahead.
Here's an exercise I've found useful with my fiction-writing students.
I give them about 30 minutes to take the following elements to
construct a scene that dramatizes the elements and leads to a decisive
resolution:
- A taxi and public-transit strike that's completely tied up
downtown traffic
- Donald Benson, a 35-year-old businessman: male chauvinist,
aggressive personality, with business troubles
- Helene Williams, his 22-year-old secretary: insecure in her new
job, able to make friends easily, knows the city well
- The need to get Donald to a hotel out at the airport to make a
crucial presentation to a potential investor from Los Angeles; the
investor will be flying out in four hours.
Give yourself half an hour to write such a scene, so that the reader
will finish it knowing all this information. I predict you'll be
amazed at how quickly you can produce the scene, and at how it leads
logically to another scene. The key is *knowing what you want to show
your reader about your characters and their problems.* Once you know
that, everything else follows pretty easily. So consider what's going
on in your own story. What do you want your reader to think about your
heroine? That she's shy but determined? That she thinks no man could
ever love her? That she's perceptive about other women but baffled by
men? Whatever those traits may be, you should be able to think of
logical, plausible events that could force her to show them to us.
In some cases, your plot will give you some automatic scenes. If your
heroine is flying from New York to Frankfurt, maybe her seatmate is an
attractive man who studiously ignores her; maybe the German customs
people give her a hard time but she insists on her rights; maybe the
heroine sees the attractive man greeted by a woman he seems to dote on
even though the perceptive heroine can see the woman despises him. And
so on.
How long should a scene be? Long enough to make its point. A scene may
run to just a sentence or two, or it may take up 20 pages. When it
ends, we should know more about the characters involved, and their
problems should have increased. This doesn't mean endlessly increasing
gloom, but it means that even a success only clears the way for a more
stressful scene to come. The hero may disarm the terrorist bomb in the
daycare center, but the resulting publicity will make him a marked
man; now the terrorists will try to kill him or his loved ones.
How many characters should take part in a scene? As few as possible.
Even a debate in Congress isn't going to involve every last
representative. Here's a tip in this connection: If your plot demands
a fairly large cast--for example, your protagonist is the commanding
officer of an infantry platoon, or the headmistress of a girls'
school--don't introduce a whole mob of characters at once. Bring in
your protagonist first, in a scene that demonstrates the character's
key traits (courage, leadership, self-hatred, whatever). Then bring in
each of the supporting characters in a scene that lets him or her
display key traits as well, while deepening our understanding of the
protagonist and moving the plot along.
This way we build up interest in the story by building up interest in
the varied and complex characters. Tolkien does it in The Lord of the
Rings; Kurosawa does it in Seven Samurai. Learn from the old masters!
Novice writers (and some professionals) often fall into the trap of
``expositing'' information instead of presenting it dramatically.
Sometimes exposition is inevitable, or even desirable. Lloyd Abbey, in
his brilliant SF novel The Last Whales, gives us exactly one line of
human dialogue; his characters, all being whales, can't speak to one
another, so the narrator must tell us what they think and do. Gabriel
Garca Marquez can also write superb exposition for page after page.
Most of us ordinary mortals, however, need to dramatize our characters
and their feelings. Otherwise our readers will tire of our editorials.
Consider the following expository and dramatic passages. Which more
adequately conveys what the author is trying to show to the reader?
Vanessa was a tall woman of 34 with shoulder-length red hair and a pale
complexion. She often lost her temper; when she did, her fair skin turned a
deep pink, and she often swore. She was full of energy, and became impatient
at even the slightest delay or impediment to her plans. Marshall, her chief
assistant, was a balding, mild-mannered, nervous man of 54 who was often
afraid of her. He was also annoyed with himself for letting her boss him
around.
------------------------------
Vanessa abruptly got up from her desk. A shaft of sunlight from the
window behind her seemed to strike fire from her long red hair as she
shook her head violently.
``No, Marshall! God damn it, this won't do! Didn't I make myself
clear?''
``Yes, Vanessa, b-but--''
``And you understood what I told you, didn't you?'' Her pale skin was
flushing pink, and Marshall saw the signs of a classic outburst on the
way. She took a step toward him, forcing him to look up to meet her
gaze; she must be a good three inches taller. He raised his hands in
supplication, then caught himself and tried to make the gesture look
like the smoothing of hair he no longer had. He felt sweat on his bald
scalp.
``Vanessa, it was a--''
``It was another one of your screw-ups, Marshall! We're committed to a
Thursday deadline. I'm going to make that damn deadline, whether or
not you're here to help me. Now, am I going to get some cooperation
from you, or not?''
Marshall nodded, cursing himself for his slavish obedience. Fifty-four
years old, and taking orders from a bitch twenty years younger. Why
didn't he just tell her to shove it?
``All the way, Vanessa. We'll get right on it.''
``Damn well better.'' Her voice softened; the pink faded from her
cheeks. ``Okay, let's get going.''
Comment: A paragraph of exposition has turned into a scene: the
portrayal of a conflict and its resolution. The scene has also
prepared us for further scenes. Maybe Marshall's going to destroy
himself for Vanessa, or poison her; maybe Vanessa's going to learn how
to behave better. Most importantly, the authorial judgments in the
exposition are now happening in the minds of the characters and the
mind of the reader--who may well agree with Marshall, or side with
Vanessa.
Here's another example:
Jerry was 19. Since leaving high school a year before, he had done
almost nothing. He had held a series of part-time jobs, none of them
lasting more than a few weeks. His girl friend Judy, meanwhile, was
holding down two summer jobs to help pay for her second year of
college. Jerry controlled her with a combination of extroverted charm
and bullying sulkiness. Secretly he envied her ambition and feared
that she would leave him if he ever relaxed his grip on her.
------------------------------
``Hey, good-lookin','' Jerry said as he ambled into the coffee shop and took
his usual booth by the window.
``Hi,'' said Judy. She took out her order pad.
``Hey, I'm real sorry about what I said last night. I was way outa
line.''
``Would you like to order?''
``Hey, I said I was sorry, all right? Gimme a break.''
``That's fine. But Murray says not to let my social life get in the
way of my job. So you've got to order something for a change.''
He snorted incredulously. ``Hey, I'm broke, babe.''
She stared out the window at the traffic. ``You can't hang out here
all day for the price of a cup of coffee, Jerry. Not any more. Murray
says he'll have to let me go if you do.''
``Well, tell him to get stuffed.''
``Jerry, be reasonable. I can't. I need this job.''
``Christ, you already got the job at the movie theatre.''
``That's nights, and it hardly pays anything. I've got my whole second
year at college to pay for this summer. Jerry, maybe we can talk about
this after I get off work, okay?''
``Yeah, right. See you Labor Day, then.''
``Jerry, don't be a smartass. See you at four, okay?''
He got up, shrugging. ``Yeah, sure. Guess I'll go over to the bus
station and read comic books until then.'' He glared at her. ``Don't be
too nice to the guys who come in here. I find out you been fooling
around with anybody, you know you're in trouble, right?''
``Right, Jerry. I'm really sorry. See you later.''
Comment: Again we have a conflict that promises to lead to
further conflicts and their resolution. We want to know if Judy will
ditch Jerry, or Jerry will smarten up. Their relationship reveals
itself through their dialogue, not through the author's
editorializing.
Note that both these examples involve a power struggle. Someone is
determined to be the boss, to get his or her way. Most scenes present
such a struggle: someone decides on pizza or hamburgers for dinner,
someone chooses the date for D-Day, someone comes up with the winning
strategy to defeat the alien invaders or elect the first woman
president. We as readers want to see the resources thrown into the
struggle: raw masculinity, cynical intelligence, subtle sexual
manipulation, political courage, suicidal desperation.
Depending on which resources win, we endorse one myth or another about
the way the world operates: that raw masculinity always triumphs, that
political courage leads nowhere, and so on. Of course, if we are
writing ironically, we are rejecting the very myths we seem to
support. By using raw macho bullying mixed with a little self-pity,
Jerry seems to win his power struggle with Judy. But few readers would
admire him for the way he does it, or expect him to succeed in the
long term with such tactics.
Think carefully about this as you develop your scenes. If your hero
always wins arguments in a blaze of gunfire, he may become awfully
tiresome awfully fast. If your heroine keeps bursting into tears, your
readers may want to hand her a hankie (better yet, a towel) and tell
her to get lost. Ideally, the power struggle in each scene should both
tell us something new and surprising about the characters, and hint at
something still hiding beneath the surface--like the insecurity that
underlies Jerry's and Vanessa's bullying.
Plausible, complex characters are crucial to successful storytelling.
You can develop them in several ways.
- Concreteness. They have specific homes, possessions,
medical histories, tastes in furniture, political opinions. Apart from
creating verisimilitude, these concrete aspects of the characters
should convey information about the story: does the hero smoke
Marlboros because he's a rugged outdoorsman, or because that's the
brand smoked by men of his social background, or just because you do?
- Symbolic association. You can express a character's nature
metaphorically through objects or settings (a rusty sword, an apple
orchard in bloom, a violent thunderstorm). These may not be perfectly
understandable to the reader at first (or to the writer!), but they
seem subconsciously right. Symbolic associations can be consciously
``archetypal'' (see Northrop Frye), linking the character to similar
characters in literature. Or you may use symbols in some private
system which the reader may or may not consciously grasp. Characters'
names can form symbolic associations, though this practice has become
less popular in modern fiction except in comic or ironic writing.
- Speech. The character's speech (both content and manner)
helps to evoke personality: shy and reticent, aggressive and frank,
coy, humorous. Both content and manner of speech should accurately
reflect the character's social and ethnic background without
stereotyping. If a character ``speaks prose,'' his or her background
should justify that rather artificial manner. If a character is
inarticulate, that in itself should convey something.
- Behavior. From table manners to performance in
hand-to-hand combat, each new example of behavior should be consistent
with what we already know of the character, yet it should reveal some
new aspect of personality. Behavior under different forms of stress
should be especially revealing.
- Motivation. The characters should have good and sufficient
reasons for their actions, and should carry those actions out with
plausible skills. If we don't believe characters would do what the
author tells us they do, the story fails.
- Change. Characters should respond to their experiences by
changing--or by working hard to avoid changing. As they seek
to carry out their agendas, run into conflicts, fail or succeed, and
confront new problems, they will not stay the same people. If a
character seems the same at the end of a story as at the beginning,
the reader at least should be changed and be aware of whatever factors
kept the character from growing and developing.
The Character Resume
One useful way to learn more about your characters is to fill out a
``resume'' for them--at least for the more important ones. Such a
resume might include the following information:
Name:
Address & Phone Number:
Date & Place of Birth:
Height/Weight/Physical Description:
Citizenship/Ethnic Origin:
Parents' Names & Occupations:
Other Family Members:
Spouse or Lover:
Friends' Names & Occupations:
Social Class:
Education:
Occupation/Employer:
Social Class:
Salary:
Community Status:
Job-Related Skills:
Political Beliefs/Affiliations:
Hobbies/Recreations:
Personal Qualities (imagination, taste, etc.):
Ambitions:
Fears/Anxieties/Hangups:
Intelligence:
Sense of Humor:
Most Painful Setback/Disappointment:
Most Instructive/Meaningful Experience:
Health/Physical Condition/Distinguishing Marks/Disabilities:
Sexual Orientation/Experience/Values:
Tastes in food, drink, art, music, literature, decor, clothing:
Attitude toward Life:
Attitude toward Death:
Philosophy of Life (in a phrase):
You may not use all this information, and you may want to add
categories of your own, but a resume certainly helps make your
character come alive in your own mind. The resume can also give you
helpful ideas on everything from explaining the character's motivation
to conceiving dramatic incidents that demonstrates the character's
personal traits. The resume serves a useful purpose in your project
bible, reminding you of the countless details you need to keep
straight.
Dialogue has to sound like speech, but it can't be a mere transcript;
most people don't speak precisely or concisely enough to serve the
writer's needs. Good dialogue has several functions:
- To convey exposition: to tell us, through the conversations of
the characters, what we need to know to make sense of the story.
- To convey character: to show us what kinds of people we're
dealing with.
- To convey a sense of place and time: to evoke the speech
patterns, vocabulary and rhythms of specific kinds of people.
- To develop conflict: to show how some people use language to
dominate others, or fail to do so.
Each of these functions has its hazards. Expository dialogue can be
dreadful:
``We'll be in Vancouver in thirty minutes,'' the flight attendant said.
``It's Canada's biggest west coast city, with a population of over a
million in the metropolitan area.''
Dialogue can convey character, but the writer may bog down in chatter
that doesn't advance the story.
``When I was a kid,'' said Julie, ``I had a stuffed bear named Julius. He
was a sweet old thing, and whenever I was upset I'd howl for him.''
(Unless Julie is going to howl for Julius when her husband leaves her,
this kind of remark is pointless.)
Dialogue that conveys a specific place and time can become exaggerated
and stereotyped:
``Pretty hot ootside, eh?'' remarked Sergeant Renfrew of the Royal
Canadian Mounted Police. ``Good day to get oot of the hoose and oot on
the saltchuck, eh? Catch us a couple of skookum salmon, eh?''
Dialogue that develops conflict has to do so while also conveying
exposition, portraying character, and staying true to the time and
place:
``Gadzooks,'' said Sergeant Renfrew as he dismounted from his
motorcycle. ``Wouldst please present thy driver's licence and
registration, madam?''
``Eat hot lead, copper!'' snarled Sister Mary Agnes as she drew the .45
from within her habit.
Some Dialogue Hazards to Avoid:
- Too much faithfulness to speech: ``Um, uh, y'know, geez,
well, like, well.''
- Unusual spellings: ``Yeah,'' not ``Yeh'' or ``Yea'' or ``Ya.''
- Too much use of ``he said,'' ``she said.''
- Too much variation: ``he averred,'' ``she riposted''
- Dialect exaggeration: ``Lawsy, Miz Scahlut, us's wuhkin' jes' as
fas' as us kin.''
- Excessive direct address: ``Tell me, Marshall, your opinion of
Vanessa.'' ``I hate her, Roger.'' ``Why is that, Marshall?'' ``She
bullies everyone, Roger.''
Some Dialogue Conventions to Consider:
Each new speaker requires a new paragraph, properly indented and set
off by quotation marks.
``Use double quotations,'' the novelist ordered, ``and remember to place
commas and periods inside those quotation marks.''
``If a speaker goes on for more than one paragraph,'' the count
responded in his heavy Transylvanian accent, ``do not close off the
quotation marks at the end of the first paragraph.
``Simply place quotation marks at the beginning of the next paragraph, and
carry on to the end of the quotation.''
Use ``he said'' expressions only when you must, to avoid confusion
about who's speaking. You can signal increasing tension by moving from
``he said'' to ``he snapped,'' to ``he snarled,'' to ``he bellowed
furiously.'' But the dialogue itself should convey that changing
mood, and make such comments needless.
Action as well as speech is a part of dialogue. We expect to know when
the speakers pause, where they're looking, what they're doing with
their hands, how they respond to one another. The characters' speech
becomes just one aspect of their interactions; sometimes their words
are all we need, but sometimes we definitely need more. This is
especially true when you're trying to convey a conflict between what
your characters say and what they feel: their nonverbal messages are
going to be far more reliable than their spoken words.
Speak your dialogue out loud; if it doesn't sound natural, or contains
unexpected rhymes and rhythms, revise it.
Rely on rhythm and vocabulary, not phonetic spelling, to convey accent
or dialect.
If you are giving us your characters' exact unspoken thoughts, use
italics. If you are paraphrasing those thoughts, use regular Roman
type):
Now what does she want? he asked himself. Isn't she ever
satisfied? Marshall wondered what she wanted now. She was never
satisfied.
If you plan to give us a long passage of inner monologue, however,
consider the discomfort of having to read line after line of italic
print. If you wish to emphasize a word in a line of italics, use
Roman:
Isn't she ever
satisfied?
The query can be a quick way to tell whether your novel might be of
interest to a particular publisher--without having to wait until
some editor finds your manuscript deep within her slush pile. The
query should give the editor an idea of your story (and a sense of the
way you're handling it) that's clear enough to help her decide if it's
worth considering. If the idea sounds good, you know the complete
manuscript (or sample chapters) will enjoy a prompt and careful
reading. If the idea doesn't sound right for her, she may tell you
why, and perhaps suggest either a new approach or another publisher.
Some queries are very short, and others are long indeed--novel
outlines masquerading as letters. Consider the following suggestions
as guidelines, not ironclad laws:
- Supply a short, pungent description of what the book is about: a
desperate attempt to escape a narcotics bust, an unexpected journey
that leads to romance and danger in 1930s China, an aging gunfighter's
attempt to prove himself again in the Mexican Revolution.
- If not obvious from your plot outline, identify the audience
your book is aimed at: hardcore space-opera fans, teenage girls,
Regency-romance readers.
- Be able to tell the editor what makes this novel different from others in
the genre: a twist in the plot, a new angle on the hero, an unusual
setting.
- Your credentials may be helpful, if only as a dedicated and
knowledgeable reader in the genre, or as an observant resident of the
city you've set your novel in. These are not trivial qualifications:
If you don't know and love the genre you're writing in, it will show.
And if you don't know the history and folklore of your setting, the
story will lack depth.
- Display in your query some of the excitement and energy you want
to bring to your story--show how and why this story matters to you,
and it'll matter to your editor.
The Letter Itself
Ideally, your query letter ought to run to a page or a little more,
organized something like this:
First paragraph: Tell us what kind of novel you've written, or are now
writing. How long is it, when and where is it set? Describe the hero
and heroine, and perhaps one or two other major characters. What's
their predicament? How are they proposing to get out of it? And why
should we care--that is, what's at stake?
Second paragraph: Describe what happens in the middle of the
novel--how your characters interact, what conflicts arise among them.
Third paragraph: The resolution of the novel--the climax and its
outcome, and tying up loose ends.
Fourth paragraph: Why this story interests you, what your
qualifications are for writing it, and some questions for the editor:
If this story interests you, would you like the whole ms., or an
outline and sample chapters? Do you have any specific ms. requirements
I should be aware of?
Obviously this pattern will vary depending on the nature of the query:
If you've included an outline and sample chapters, the plot summary
will be very brief or nonexistent, and the query will focus on your
background and your questions for the editor. If the book is
completed, the plot summary will be easier to supply than if you have
only a rough idea of where the book is going.
The query letter is a blurb for your novel, and like any blurb it
needs to pique the reader's interest and make the reader wonder: ``How
is that going to turn out?" The quality of writing in the query
had better be first-rate, especially if you haven't included an
elegantly written chapter or two. If your query is clumsy or riddled
with English errors, the editor will be less than eager to see more of
your prose.
Because the query requires little time to read and respond to, it can
help you quickly identify potential markets and definite non-markets.
But it can't pre-sell your novel; at best, it can only create a
cautiously welcoming attitude in an editor who knows how tough it is
to sell a first novel during a recession.
Will your query reveal such a knockout story idea that the publisher
will steal it--turn you down, pass on your idea to one of their
hack writers, and publish it for their own profit? This may be the
single most common anxiety of novices, but the sad truth is that your
idea probably isn't worth stealing. In fact, the editor may
wearily see it as the umpteenth standard variation on some ancient
plot, one she's seen a dozen times just this week. This is not to say
your idea should be positively weird; most story ideas in genre
fiction are indeed variations on ancient plots. The trick is to make
the variations appear to be fresh, surprising, and full of potential
storytelling power. A query is a direct approach to an editor. But you
may well be aware that many, many publishing houses no longer even
consider queries or submissions that do not come through an agent. In
my next posting I'll consider what that implies in the selling of your
novel.
Too many people submit manuscripts to publishers.
Simply to read enough of those manuscripts to judge them unworthy
would take the full-time services of several salaried editors. Most
publishers simply can't afford to plow through the slush pile in hopes
of someday finding a Great Novelist.
So they indicate in Writer's Market that they will consider only
``agented submissions''--work that a professional literary agent,
who knows the market, thinks has some sales potential.
That simply draws fire onto the agents, who now find that they too
have huge slush piles. And, like the publishers, the agents can't make
money reading unsalable junk.
Where does that leave you?
In better shape than you think. If you've hammered out a credible but
surprising plot about interesting people in a hell of a jam, and
you're showing them in action instead of telling us what they're like,
and your grammar, spelling and punctuation are first-rate--you're
already ahead of 80 per cent of your competition.
Now the problem is finding the right market. Too many novice writers
simply fire off their work to a publisher they've vaguely heard of, or
one that's supposed to be prestigious, or even one that happens to be
conveniently located right in town. (Those were precisely my three
motives in submitting my first children's book to Parnassus Press.
They bought it, which shows that sometimes even ignoramuses can get
lucky. By rights I should have had to send the ms. to a couple of
dozen houses before hitting the right one--if I ever did.)
Publishers tend to carve out special markets for themselves. A couple
of sharp editors can dominate a genre; because they know how to reach
a certain kind of reader, they attract a certain kind of writer. Or a
publisher may be passionately devoted to supporting a certain kind of
fiction, but is deeply uninterested in any other kind. A feminist
publisher wouldn't have the faintest idea how to market a men's
action-adventure novel, and wouldn't care to learn. A children's
publisher won't care how well-crafted your murder mystery is. And so
on.
So step one is almost embarrassingly obvious: Notice which houses
publish the kind of story you're working on. Look carefully at the
story elements in the titles they publish; Del Rey fantasy novels, for
example, require magic as a major component, not just frosting or a
gimmick to get the hero somewhere interesting. Out of all the
publishers in North America, only a few are potentially yours.
Then consult those potential publishers' entries in Writer's Market
and see what they have to say about their own needs and who their
editors are in specific genres. You may learn that your work in
progress is too long, or too short, or needs some particular quality
like a heroine aged over 35. You may also learn how long it takes them
to respond to queries and submissions. Don't take those statements as
legally binding promises; responses almost always take far longer,
especially for unagented submissions.
Writer's Market also lists publishers by the genres they publish. This
list can lead you to houses you're not familiar with, but don't just
rush your ms. off to some publisher in Podunk. Check out the entries
of these houses also, and also track down some of their recent titles
in your genre. If they strike you as dreadful garbage, avoid them.
Better to stay unpublished than to be trapped with a bad publisher.
Another useful source of research information is the publishing trade
press. Quill and Quire in Canada, and Publisher's Weekly in the US,
are much more up-to-date than any annual can be. So if the top horror
editor in New York has just moved to a new publisher, or a publisher
is starting a new line of romance novels aimed at Asian women, you may
adjust your marketing strategy accordingly. Magazines like The Writer
and Writer's Digest supply similar market news.
If every possible publisher warns you off with "No unagented
submissions," you then have to go through a similar process with
literary agents. You should be able to find an annually updated list
of agents in your local library or the reference section of a good
bookstore. Some agents, like Scott Meredith and Richard Curtis, have
even written books themselves about the publishing business; these are
worth reading.
As a general rule, you probably need an agent in the city where most
of your publishers are. That, as a general rule, means New York City.
You also need an agent who knows the market for your particular genre,
so your work will go as promptly as possible to the most likely
markets. (Some agents may submit a work in multiple copies to all
potential publishers; this can really speed up the process.)
But also bear in mind that the phone and fax can put almost anyone in
close touch with the New York market, so an agent in Chicago or Los
Angeles or Miami may be quite as effective as somebody in
Manhattan--and may also be familiar with regional publishers.
Consider whether you want a big agent with scores or hundreds of
clients, or a small outfit. The big agent may have clout but little
stake in promoting you; the small agent may work hard for you, but
lack entree to some editors. Talk to published writers, if possible,
about their experiences with agents; sometimes a sympathetic author
can suggest a good one.
No agent, however good, can sell your work to an editor who doesn't
want to buy it. What the agent offers the editor is a reasonably
trustworthy opinion about the marketability of a particular
manuscript. It's in the agent's interest to deal only in work with
serious sales potential, and to get it quickly into the hands of its
most likely buyers.
You may therefore have to query a number of agents before you find one
who's willing to take you on. And you may find that some highly
reputable agents won't look at your stuff unless you pay them to.
This is not a racket. If you agree to the agent's terms, the reading
may give you a very frank response. Sometimes you'll get a detailed
critique that may devastate your ego but teach you just what you need
to learn. In many cases the agent will waive the reading fee if he
feels you're a commercial possibility and you're willing to sign on as
one of his clients. That should be an encouraging offer indeed.
Sometimes an agent will take you on but strongly suggest certain kinds
of revisions, or even that you tackle a completely different kind of
story. Listen carefully; you're getting advice from someone who knows
the market and wants to share in your prosperity. At least one of my
novels greatly profited from the advice of an agent who thought my
originally proposed ending was a disaster.
Your agreement with an agent may take the form of a detailed contract,
or a simple agreement over the phone, or something in between. Be sure
you understand and accept the terms your agent requires: Ten per cent
of what he makes you, or 15? Deductions for photocopying, postage and
phone bills? Control over all your writing, or just your fiction
output?
Once you have an agent, don't be a pest. When he's got something to
report, he'll let you know. If you've got something to report, like
the completion of the manuscript or an idea for turning it into a
series, let the agent know. Otherwise, stay off the phone and stick
to your writing.
In some cases, of course, you may find you've sold a novel on your own
hook and then decide to go looking for an agent. Under these happy
circumstances you should find it fairly easy to get an agent's
interest. If the publisher's already offered you a contract (and you
haven't signed yet), the agent may be willing to take you on and then
bargain a better deal for you. But you'll probably do all right even
if you negotiate that first contract on your own. Most publishers are
honorable and decent people; sometimes their integrity is positively
intimidating. Even if they weren't honorable, your first book is
likely to make so little money that it wouldn't be worth it to screw
you out of spare change.
When you do finally receive a publisher's contract, you may feel your
heart sink. It runs to several pages of single-spaced text, highly
flavored with legalese and organized in a daunting sequence of
numbered paragraphs and subparagraphs. Who knows what thorns lurk in
such a thicket?
Actually, not too many. Most of your contract is standard
``boilerplate'' text that protects you as much as the publisher. It is
often possible, even for a novice, to negotiate specific aspects of
the contract.
Still, it helps to know what you're getting yourself into, so let us
take a look at some of the key passages you're likely to find in your
contract.
Delivery Of Satisfactory Copy
If you're selling your novel on the strength of sample chapters and an
outline, the publisher wants assurance that you'll submit the full
manuscript (often with a second copy), at an agreed-upon length, by an
agreed-upon date. If your full ms. doesn't measure up, or arrives too
late, the publisher has the right to demand return of any money you've
received.
In practice the publisher is usually much more flexible. He may bounce
your ms. back to you with a reminder that you don't get the rest of
your advance until the ms. is ``satisfactory.'' He (or more likely the
editor) will tell you in exquisite detail what you still need to do to
achieve ``satisfactory"''status. A late ms. also means you won't
collect the balance of your advance until it arrives, and it may also
cause delays in final publication--as I learned to my sorrow with
Greenmagic.
Permission for Copyrighted Material
If you want to include the lyrics of a pop song in your novel, or
quote something as an epigraph, it's up to you to obtain the rights to
such material, and to pay for them if necessary. If you leave it to
the publisher, he'll charge you; if he can't get permission, and the
novel doesn't work without such material, the deal is off and you have
to repay any advance you've received. Obviously, this is an extreme
case; normally you just drop the lines from the song or poem, and
carry on.
Grant Of Rights
You are giving the publisher the right to make copies of what you've
written. These copies may be in hardcover, softcover, audio cassette,
filmstrip, comic book, or whatever. You are also specifying in which
parts of the world the publisher may sell such copies. For example, a
sale to a British publisher may specifically exclude North America,
leaving you free to sell North American rights separately.
You may also be giving the publisher rights to sell foreign
translations, to print excerpts in other books or periodicals as a
form of advertising, or to sell copies to book clubs. Normally such
sales require your informed, written consent.
Proofreading and Author's Corrections
You agree that you will proofread the galleys or page proofs of your
novel and return the corrected pages promptly. If your corrections
amount to actual revision of the original manuscript, and will require
re-typesetting more than 10 per cent of the book, the publisher will
charge you for such costs. This can very easily destroy any income
you might have earned from the book.
Advances and Royalties
This spells out how much the publisher will pay you, and when. The
most common agreement is payment of one-third of the advance on
signing the contract; one-third on delivery of a satisfactory complete
ms.; and one-third on publication date. You may be able to negotiate
half on signing and half on delivery; otherwise, you are in effect
lending the publisher some of your advance until a publication date
that may be over a year away.
Royalties are generally a percentage of the list price of the book.
For hardcover books, the usual royalties is ten per cent of list
price. So a novel retailing for $24.95 will earn its author $2.50
per copy. For mass-market paperbacks, royalty rates can range from
four per cent to eight per cent, usually with a proviso that the rate
will go up after sale of some huge number of copies--150,000 seems
to be a popular target. A paperback selling at $5.95, with an eight
per cent royalty, will therefore earn you about 47 cents. A ``trade''
paperback, intended for sale in regular bookstores rather than
supermarkets and other mass outlets, will probably earn a comparable
rate; the list price, however, will likely be higher and the number of
copies sold will be lower.
Whatever the royalty rates, you're likely to get only half as much for
sales to book clubs or overseas markets. (This is especially painful
for Canadian authors with American publishers: sales in your own
country, as ``foreign'' sales, earn only half the U.S. royalty rate.)
You will also agree to split the take from certain kinds of licensing
sales. For example, if your novel is a hardback and some other house
wants to bring out a paperback edition, you can normally expect a 50
per cent share of what the paperback house pays. Sometimes a paperback
house will license a hardback edition (in hopes of getting more
critical attention for your book and hence selling more copies in
paperback eventually); in such a case you should expect 75 per cent of
the deal.
If you can possibly avoid it, do not agree to give your
publisher a share of any sale to movies or TV. A film or TV show based
on your novel will boost the publisher's sales quite nicely; he
doesn't need a slice off the top of a deal that will surely pay you
more than the publisher did. But if the book seems highly unlikely to
interest Hollywood, you might offer a slice of film rights in exchange
for a richer advance, with a proviso that an actual film or TV sale
will also produce an additional chunk of money from the publisher.
The publisher will normally not charge for the production of versions
of your novel in Braille or other formats for the handicapped. So you
will get no money from this source.
The publisher should agree to supply you with two royalty statements a
year. Each will cover a six-month reporting period, and each should
arrive about 90 days after the close of that period. So a statement
for January-June should reach you at the end of September. This will
probably be a computer printout, and may be confusing. But it will
indicate the number of copies shipped, the number returned unsold by
booksellers, and the number presumably sold. The publisher will hold
back on some of the royalty ``against further returns.'' Whatever
remains is the actual number on which the publisher owes you money.
Chances are that your advance will have consumed any potential
royalties for the first reporting period, and perhaps for the second
as well. Once you have ``earned out'' your advance, however, you
should expect a check with each royalty statement.
Do not sign a contract that does not explicitly promise you at
least two royalty statements a year. Some publishers promise a
statement only after the novel has earned out its advance. This means
you may go for years--or forever--without knowing what your
sales have been.
Author's Warranties and Indemnities
Here you are promising that this is indeed your work, that it isn't
obscene, a breach of privacy, libelous, or otherwise illegal. If you
do get into trouble, you agree to cooperate with the publisher's legal
defense, and you agree to pay your share of the costs instead of
asking the publisher, booksellers, or others to do so. If the
publisher's lawyer thinks the manuscript poses legal problems, you
agree to make the changes required to solve those problems--or to
allow the publisher to do so.
You may find an insurance rider as part of your contract; this is
intended to protect both you and the publisher from suffering total
financial disaster if you get caught in a losing lawsuit.
Copies to Author
You will get a certain number of free copies, and will pay a reduced
rate for more copies. That means you will still pay for those copies,
and you should.
Option Clause
Pay attention to this one! This says you are giving the publisher
right of first refusal on your next book (or at least your next book
of this particular genre). The option clause means the publisher will
give the next book a close, prompt reading. You should expect a
response within 90 days, but some contracts specify 90 days after
publication of your current book. That means you might have to wait
for months, maybe over a year, until the publisher sees the initial
reaction to your first book.
In practice, though, you probably will get a quicker response than
that. If the publisher does make you an offer, you have the right to
refuse it; you can then take your second book to any other publisher
you like. However, you can't sell it to anyone else unless you get
better terms for it than your original publisher offered.
You may well find yourself trapped as a result. If you need money in a
hurry, you may feel you've got to accept a bad offer rather than spend
months or years shopping your ms. around the market until you find a
more generous publisher. And then, of course, your second contract
will include an option clause for the third novel!
Your best hope in this case is that sales of the first book will
warrant a heftier advance on the second or third book. And if the
publisher still won't cooperate, you can then go to another publisher
with at least some respectable sales figures that show you deserve a
better deal.
Going Out of Print
Request for it to be reprinted; if he doesn't want to, you can then
demand that all rights revert to you. You are then free to sell the
book to another publisher. (I have done this a couple of times. You
don't make as much money on the resale, but at least the book stays
out on the market longer.) You may be able to acquire the plates or
film from which copies of your novel were made, making it possible for
a new publisher to bring your book out quite cheaply.
You will probably not make any money from ``remaindered'' copies that
the publisher may sell to a book jobber at a deep discount. In some
contracts, however, the author may indeed receive some percentage of
such sales. It's also possible to buy copies of your book at a similar
low price.
A Word of Advice
If at all possible, go over the contract with the editor or publisher,
asking whatever questions arise. Then take your contract to an agent,
lawyer, or professional writer. Chances are that it's perfectly okay.
But even if you don't find something sneaky in the fine print, you'll
have a clearer understanding of what you and your publisher have
committed yourselves to. If something arises later on, like a problem
over the option clause or the frequency of royalty statements, it
won't come as a total shock.
Finally, bear in mind that if you have read this far, you are
seriously interested in mastering an art and craft that rewards very
few practitioners--novices or experts. Fiction in print is still
relatively popular, but only relatively. For every reader you might
attract, TV or films or recordings attract hundreds of consumers. You
will work for months or years to create a product that is
theoretically eternal, but in practice has a shelf-life of a few
weeks. Most of your readers will, two months after reading your work,
be unable to recall anything about the story (including your
name)--maybe not even whether they liked it or not. And you will reach
more readers with a punchy, witty letter to the editor of a
metropolitan daily than you're likely to reach with your novel.
Is it worth it? Only you can answer that question. My answer has been
yes, and I don't regret it. Writing ten novels has been not only fun
but an education; I can hardly wait to find out what the eleventh
novel will teach me.
Good heavens--17 files in 15 minutes! Ain't technology grand!
Slight correction: the files total about 100K; I miscounted.
Doubtless some postings have typos or noise... but I hope enough got
through to do you some good and encourage you to take a shot at
writing fiction--or another shot at that damn novel you've been
chipping away at for the last few years.
I hope my comments draw some responses, criticism, rebuttals,
anecdotal evidence, aspersions on my ancestry, and anything else that
may come to mind. But unless you want to share painful intimacies via
e-mail, why not put your comments in the newsgroup where everyone can
benefit from them! Thanks for your interest and your patience.
Cheers, CK
Also See:
- A Writer's Guide to Speculative Fiction: Science Fiction and Fantasy
- Writing Science Fiction and Fantasy
HTML-conversion by Olivia Salter
Crawford
Kilian was born in New York City in 1941. He moved to Canada in 1967
and now resides in Vancouver B.C. Crawford has had twelve science
fiction and fantasy novels published. He has been nominated for an
Aurora Award 3 times for his novels Eyas, Lifter and Rogue Emperor- A
Novel of the Chronoplane Wars. His latest contribution to SF is a
non-fiction book for would-be SF writers called Writing Science Fiction
and Fantasy. Crawford has two more novels in the works.
To learn more about him at Wikipedia.
Crawford Kilian Books at Amazon
