Marketing madness

I just saw James Patterson on a commercial. He said, "Buy my book, or I'll have to kill off Alex Cross." (That's his fictional detective.) It was kind of funny.

He seemed like a really mild man to write such gruesome mysteries!

Alicia

Brought to You By the Letters R and U

Today at Romance University, I'm talking about the concept of Ordinary World as it applies to genre romance novels. This one comes from the FAQ files because so many romance writers struggle to understand OW concepts in our context. With good reason, too. Maybe looking at some of the differences between quest structure and romance structure will help sort it out for us. Go read the post and let me know if this angle helps at all.

One commenter will be entered in a drawing to win a spot in the December workshop.

Opening-- what constitutes?

Anonymous asked-

I have what may be an odd question... Where does the 'opening' end?

What are the parameters which define the opening?

Anon, good question. What constitutes the opening? That makes me think that we might have one of two different openings. The first is in media res, in the middle of the action, so that the opening of the book is inside the first scene. This has the effect of plunging the reader into the action and getting the story going right away. Often an opening like this is "deep POV", right inside the character experiencing the action. That might increase reader identification with the character, as there's never a moment of being outside the character.

In that case, I'm not sure the "opening" is a true opening with an ending. It's just the start of the first scene, and it ends when the first scene ends. Does anyone have a good example of that sort of opening, where the reader is immediately plunged into the moment of the scene?

The more traditional opening is a true opening, that is, an opening to the whole book and not just the first scene. This type of opening might have a bit of context (who are we, where are we) and/or set up some question the story will answer or start the process of developing the scene.

This sort of opening might be a paragraph or two or three, but while it might kind of take place within the time of the scene (the action that is about to happen), it's more outside, more contextual. It might be omniscient, and it might be "overall" rather than specific to this moment.

In that case, I think of the opening "ending" when there's a transition into something else, like the starting of the action of the scene, or a descent into one character's mind. In that sense, the opening is a bit different, not just the start of the scene. It's -before- the start of the scene, and ends when the scene starts.

Examples? I'll look for some, but if anyone has examples of 1) in media res openings, and 2) context-setting openings, please post in comments! I think I've done both, and which I'd do would depend (of course) on the needs of the story. But I would say that a faster-paced book might start in the middle of the action, within the scene. What do you think?

Alicia

I don't have a Kindle, but...

I hear my new book is out in Kindle version now: The Year She Fell.

And no, I am not hinting to the family that a Kindle will be a great Xmas gift. :)

Hey, as long as I am not hinting, if you have a Kindle, tell me about it? Is the more expensive one with 3G worth the extra $? Can you surf the web with that or just get Amazon books? Also, are downloads restricted just to the Kindle store?

Alicia

Possessive Case

This has come up several times over the past week, so I thought I would post a few refresher rules on possessive case.

Possessive Case, Nouns

When the noun does not end in an s, add and apostrophe and an s.
Mike’s Corvette

When the noun ends in an s, add only an apostrophe.
Sailors’ delight

This rule does not distinguish between singular and plural nouns. This rule also applies to nouns used as possessive adjectives (five dollars’ worth of gas).


Possessive Case, Pronouns

Personal pronouns do not take an apostrophe. These nouns include his, hers, its, ours, yours, theirs and whose.
Indefinite pronouns take an apostrophe and an s.
Everybody’s favorite story


Possessive Case, Compounds

In hyphenated words, names of organizations consisting of more than one word, and words indicating joint possession, only the last word takes the possessive form. The form of the possessive follows the rules for nouns in the possessive case.

* Ex-husband’s habits (hyphenated)
* Smith and Wesson’s finest model (organization, singular)
* Parker Brothers’ product line (organization, plural)
* Romy and Michelle’s High School Reunion (joint possession)

Exception: In the case of joint possession, when the first part of the pair is a noun and the final part is a pronoun in the possessive case, then the noun follows the rule for nouns in the possessive case.

* Robert’s and my anniversary

But note: this only applies to joint possession, that is, things owned in common. When two or more people possess something individually, each of their names is possessive in form.

* Shaq’s and Kobe’s championship rings (Each player has his own ring. They do not share a single ring in joint possession.)


This is just one of those things you have to learn if you want to be one of the cool kids.

Theresa

How the Brain Processes Metaphor

Great article.

Speaking of cliches-

Here's a fun one, and another indication that Dickens really did some extremely modern stuff. Here his omniscient narrator actually comments on his own voice, and tendentiously connects his lazy use of a cliche to the nation's wellbeing (and the narrator or implied author here isn't actually Dickens, of course, but Dickens's invention):

A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens

Marley was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner. Scrooge signed it: and Scrooge's name was good upon 'Change, for anything he chose to put his hand to. Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail.

Mind! I don't mean to say that I know, of my own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about a door-nail. I might have been inclined, myself, to regard a coffin-nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade. But the wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile; and my unhallowed hands shall not disturb it, or the Country's done for. You will therefore permit me to repeat, emphatically, that Marley was as dead as a door-nail.

This so connects to "the medium is the message"-- he's saying that the "the simile" or cliche (the medium) is itself significant, "the wisdom of our ancestors." And all to justify using a "dead" image!

Dickens shows us that we can have fun. The opening of a book doesn't have to be just about getting the information in the right order. (The first paragraph kind of does that, by identifying the main characters-- Scrooge and Marley-- and the setting: the 'Change would be recognized by his contemporary readers as the City of London, as we'd know "Wall Street" was New York). But the second paragraph goes off and is just fun. Oh, considering that Marley's ghost appears in the next page and casts doubt on how dead "dead as a doornail" is, the discussion of the cliche sets up a comic motif. But mostly it's just for fun, laughing at our tendency to use somewhat incomprehensible cliches which don't bear close examination. Dickens shows he's still entertained by the language, a very good thing in a writer. And of course, by use of the term "as a doornail," he forces the questions-- what is "dead"? What is "living"?

There's no reason not to make that opening fun, in a fun way that complements the type of book. I don't mean a comic opening to a tragic novel, but an opening that perhaps sets up the ordinary world as interesting and lively before the tragedy occurs, or an opening description of some transcendent beauty or thoughtfulness, or a puzzle about some serious issue, like "am I me if I have no memory of my life?" or "when does psychic pain become insupportable?"

(And, interestingly, the character themes this sets up-- Scrooge's meticulous care for his reputation, his inability to truly feel anything, even sorrow, and of course the motif of record-keeping-- are all finished and contradicted by the close of the story... Dickens was an elegantly classical writer.)

But notice the economy there too-- we learn only as much as we absolutely need to. Marley was dead. Scrooge was connected to him enough that he was the chief mourner at the funeral. Do we need more than that? Obviously not, as Dickens "wastes" the second paragraph on some writerly joke. Keep that in mind when you think about what you have to insert into the opening paragraph: Probably a lot less than you think. If you're putting a lot more in there than a Victorian novelist does, for goodness sake, you're probably putting in too much.

So something to take away from this is that "information" isn't the most important attribute of an opening, is it? What else might be more important? I think Dickens is doing too more important things: First, he's setting up that "meticulous" motif of recordkeeping and specificity that will help unite the story. And second, he's setting up an ironic tone that starts us out as skeptics-- is Scrooge really mourning? Is Marley really dead? If he is, why do they keep saying it and having to prove it with signatures?

Again, I'm not sure most of us could write an opening with this kind of fractal quality when we start the story. I think this probably was created after the draft was finished and the writer know what themes and questions and tone were developed in the story.

Alicia

More publishing follies

James Frey resurfaces.

The Medium Is the Message

I was recently teaching a class in voice in fiction, which is one of the amorphous topics that even I doubt can be taught. But something I meant to say and forgot is (quoting McLuhan): The medium is the message. He meant, most likely (I skipped that class :), that the technology and/or the genre embeds meaning into whatever is being broadcast, so that a story will have a different message when it's told on Dateline NBC as a sort of docudrama than it would in a novel, that the mode of broadcast will in itself become the message (the Dateline message might be, We want you to believe this, even though we pretty much made it up; while the novel might say, I made this up, but it's got a truth truer than fact, for example). This becomes even more important now when we have so many forms of media, and "truth" depends a lot on the medium and much less on the intrinsic originating "message".

Okay, that's what he meant. That's not what I mean. I mean that the mode of expression, the voice, if you will, is the message, or at least should be the message, or by complicating or denying the perceived message becomes an alternate message. That is, how you choose to present the information is part of what the reader will absorb in accepting (or creating) the meaning of something you present.

Don't worry. I'll keep writing until this makes some sense!

1. Well, first I think that if we have little to say about this whatever, we tend to choose vapid or empty ways to say it, and the reader senses our lack of engagement. It will show in our lazy presentation, in our simplistic sentences, in the cliches we use to express what we haven't actually examined deeply. We are alienated from our own meaning, and that's the message the reader will get, that this isn't worth any effort. So a lack of "medium," that is, a prose passage that shows a writer just settling for ease of delivery, will result in a lack of message, for not a lot of importance is likely to be expressed without originality.

Interestingly, I see this often in scene openings, and I think what has happened is that the writer is trying to just get into the scene, trusting that at some point it will catch fire, that he will channel this character (talk about the medium :) or find the voice or realize what this is all about... and maybe at some point, the writer does achieve that union of medium and message, and the passage really gets going.

But if that's so, the writer should go back and rewrite the damned opening. And no one lecture me about voice and how whatever pearls flow from your fingers onto the keyboard are "natural". Sometimes "natural" prose is bored and uninspired. And that's bad at any point in the scene, but it's particularly bad at the beginning, when the reader needs more meaning to understand what is to come-- not necessarily more information, but more something. Take a boring passage, a vapid delivery, cliches, unimaginative sentences as a sign that you haven't challenged yourself enough to find the true medium or voice here. Think about what you want to convey. Consider who this character is. Think about what this situation is.

2. Sometimes the passage is workable deep point of view, faithfully replicating the POV character's thoughts. But characters can have boring thoughts! Characters can sit down on the couch and think about what they had at dinner and feel their stomachs protest and think in commercials: "I can't believe I ate the whole thing." Characters can notice that it's raining and think, "Rain, rain go away. Come again some other day." There's nothing particularly magical about deep POV; if the POV character is being boring, the passage will probably be boring.

The solution there is to make something happen. You never have to narrate every blasted moment. Skip over the moments where nothing is happening and go to the moment when something is going to happen. Or make something happen. He's gotten up groaning from the dinner table and is about to open his mouth to say something boring, and his wife breaks a glass and cuts her hand. Or he opens his mouth to say something boring and belches-- in front of his son's elegant prospective in-laws.

Another solution is to change the setting or situation to force more conflict. Yes, it's dinner, but it's at a restaurant far fancier than he's used to. Or it's the first dinner he has made for a new girlfriend, and he realizes as he gets up that she didn't eat anything and probably didn't like it.

3. What's thought can usually be said. And anything said aloud can be heard, and cause reaction and change. This is particularly important in relationship books, where the relationship changes because of the character interaction. Intemperate speech, threats, ultimatums, provocation, casual revelations, inadvertent utterances-- anything that can cause trouble will cause trouble. But it has to be spoken so it can't be taken back. Put the conflict out there, on the page. If the character is careful and never says anything without thinking, well, put him in a situation where he speaks out without restraint. You're in charge, don't forget. You can set it up that even the most close-mouthed character can be led to speak.

4. Okay, so there's conflict in the scene! Good! Go for it! But remember that HOW you express is as important as what you express. The medium is part of that message. So experiment. If you're in deep POV, think about how this person might mentally express this. An example is in Freedom, by Jonathan Franzen, where one character uses legalisms to explain why she cheated on her husband, as if she's making a case in a court of law.

A character who is into "accounting," both the professional and the personal kind, might add up all the evidence and arrive at "the bottom line". Another character might list the pros and cons of a decision-- and yes, you can even express this as a chart the character jots down, with pro on one side and con on the other. Experiment, for goodness sake. It's not like you have much to lose.

Challenge yourself to express this in a vigorous, vivid way. Yes, most of the story will (should) probably be pretty standard narrative. But whenever you find that you've got a boring passage,
when your medium has no message, think about enlivening it by finding the conflict, or forcing the conflict, or creating some conflict, and then by using the situation or character to express this in an intriguing way.

Don't listen to those people who say, "Plot is all that matters." No. SCENE matters, and that involves more than some eventual event-- it involves interaction and action and presentation and conflict. Challenge yourself to go beyond your first draft. Rethink. Reinvent. Experiment. Put it on the page.

Alicia