Last week I forgot to mention an excellent website on publishing children’s books: http://www.underdown.org/. It’s the website of Harold Underdown who wrote the Idiots’ Guide that I’ve praised several times.
This week we’re taking another detour into the world of publishing. Next week we’ll be back to writing.
On October 10, 2010, Jill wrote ...I spotted you saying again about being able to become a full-time author. What exactly does it take to do that? Publishing a lot of books and having your name be well known? I guess I am just wondering because that has been my dream for a long time and I just don't know how to go about doing that!
I’ll tell you my story and then talk about how writers get paid. I hope that those of you who have publishing experience will weigh in with more information and clarification. I know how my income works, but I’m not an agent and there are ins and outs that I'm unaware of. This is a huge subject, and I’ll only graze the surface.
When I quit my job, I had just turned fifty and Ella Enchanted, my first published book, had been out for six months but had not yet won the Newbery Honor. I was working for New York State government and had been for twenty-seven years. I was due to collect a small pension in five years, a pension that would have grown bigger if I’d stayed on. My husband and I met with a financial planner to see if we could make it through the hiatus. The planner thought we could, and while we were meeting, the mail arrived with an offer from my editor for a three-book contract for what became The Princess Tales. I decided to make the leap. Still, I’m security-conscious, and I was scared. A beloved friend, a free-lance technical writer as well as a writer of young-adult novels, promised to teach me technical writing if things didn’t work out. That gave me an added comfort level.
Two months after I quit, Ella Enchanted won the Newbery Honor, and I felt even more at ease. No matter what happened, income from Ella would supplement my pension.
People have given up their jobs to write with a lot less in the way of resources than I had. Obviously the decision depends on your responsibilities and your tolerance for uncertain income. All worked out well for me. Sometimes I wish I hadn’t stuck so long with my government job, which I loved at the beginning but enjoyed less later on. Even before I began to write I might have had a more interesting career if I’d taken more chances. Still I am that security-conscious person and in spite of the advantage of hindsight, I might not have acted differently.
That’s how I did it. Now here’s an overview of a book writer’s income today. The industry is changing quickly, so some of what I say may be different in a few years.
When an agent takes you on, you usually sign an agreement that spells out your relationship, particularly how to terminate your association and her percentage of your writing earnings. If you do separate later on, she will continue to receive that percentage on those books for which she negotiated the contract. If royalties go on for decades after termination, she’ll keep getting paid for decades. That’s the deal, standard across publishing. Even if you don’t sign an agreement and just move forward on a handshake (as I did), the rules still apply.
When a publisher buys your book (Hooray!), it doesn’t buy your words in every circumstance forever, unless the deal is a “work for hire.” More about that later. The publisher buys specific rights, maybe the right to publish the book in English around the world or only in North America. Which rights it buys are part of the contract negotiation. The rights that you retain you can sell elsewhere. Which rights you reserve often depend on your agent and her agency. If the agency has a foreign-rights division or a film division, for example, you may retain those rights so the agency can market them and you will get a higher percentage of the earnings. This seems like a definite benefit - but the publisher may be better than the agent at selling foreign rights, for instance, and more sales means more money. You never know; you just have to choose.
If the deal is a work for hire, the publisher does buy your words forever in all situations. You don’t own the copyright; the publisher does. Usually you get paid and that’s it. This is perfectly legal. It’s all spelled out in the contract.
That’s all I’m going to say about work-for-hire contracts because I have limited experience with them. My Never Land fairy books are a hybrid form of work for hire.
In other contracts, not work for hire, the first money you get is the advance, which may come in stages, a portion when you sign the contract, another when the editor accepts your revision, and the last on publication. The size of the advance varies widely. For a first book it may be only a few thousand dollars. In some circumstances there may be no advance, only royalties.
There may be a clause that says that if the book wins an award like the Newbery or the National Book Award you will get an additional advance.
The advance, alas, is not a gift. You have to earn it back out of your royalties, so onto royalties, which are the percentages you receive for the sale of each book. For Ella Enchanted my royalty for hardcover books sold “through ordinary channels of trade,” which means bookstores and online retailers, was 10% of the retail price on the first 20,000 copies sold and 12.5% on copies after that. For paperbacks it was 6% on the first 250,000 copies and 8% after that. There are other royalty rates for other situations, but the ones I just named are the biggies. Your percentages will improve as your career grows, but the publisher will always receive the lion's share. (A mega writing star may be an exception. I have no idea what percentage J.K. Rowling commands.)
(I'm omitting e-books, because they're in flux at the present.)
If you have an agent, the publisher sends your royalty check to her. She takes her cut and then passes the balance on to you. I believe standard agent rates are 15%, but some agents' rates may be higher or lower.
Royalties are paid twice a year, usually in October and April, which means no weekly paycheck, and you won’t get anything until the publisher recovers your advance. Plus, you can’t anticipate how much the royalty check will be because you don’t know how sales are doing. Your editor may be willing to give you an idea of how your book is faring, but you won’t know numbers until the royalty statement arrives. Sales are affected by factors way out of an author’s control, like the economy or school and library budgets or demographics (there’s a population boom or bust in the age range your book is meant for).
Your U.S. book sale may not be your only source of income, however. There may be sales of subsidiary rights. If, for example, a book club wants to publish an edition of your book, you’ll split the revenue from that with your hardcover publisher. I don’t know how it works if your publisher has its own book club. If your agent sells an audio version, you’ll get an advance for it (probably smaller than the book advance) and royalties. Likewise for foreign sales.
If your book is optioned for a movie, you’ll be paid for the option, usually a small sum. If the movie is made, you’ll be paid a lot more, and you’ll probably have a very good year financially.
Your head is swimming. Your eyes are rolling back in their sockets. Basically, your book revenue comes twice a year plus advances, which aren’t tied to the calendar.
If your book does well online and in the book stores, those other sales (audio, foreign, book club, and more) are likely to follow. If not, generally not. It can be scary. But an editor who loves your writing will fight for your future books. A publisher that believes in you will stay with you for a few books even if sales are disappointing in hopes that your work will catch on.
Two more sources of income for kids’ book writers are speaking at conferences and visiting schools, both of which will pay you an honorarium. These are worth pursuing not only for the money, but also because they’ll boost your sales and build your readership. I haven't done this, but I believe you can make proposals to some teacher-and-librarian conferences and to writers’ conferences for sessions on subjects you’re qualified to lecture about (topics concerning writing, books, teaching, literacy). When you start doing school visits you won’t be able to charge much, but as you gain experience you can raise your rate. For some authors speaking engagements, especially school visits, are the biggest source of their income. You have to be on the road a great deal, but, boy, you learn geography!
You don’t have to pay your literary agent any part of the honorarium, but if you use a booking agent, you’ll have to pay him a percentage. I don’t use one, so I don’t know what the going rate is. For beginners, I’d guess that a booking agent may be worthwhile, because he’ll know about speaking engagements that you won’t and he’ll send some your way. Your publisher will also have a school and library person who may be able to offer you some opportunities, and you don’t have to pay this person. If you’d like to visit schools and speak at conferences, be sure to let your editor know. Publishers are happy if you’re willing to get out to promote your books.
If your writing career goes very well, you’ll be able to tell when you’re ready to shift over to full-time writing. Many writers never can, and there’s no shame in writing part-time and supplementing other earnings with writing income. Luck plays a big part in success, and some terrific writers never get to write full time.
This may have been too much information. Here are two prompts:
• Your main character gets a big bump in her allowance. At first she thinks this is all good, but she doesn’t handle the new status quo well. Maybe she has a brother who hasn’t gotten any more. Maybe she now receives more than her friends. Maybe she suspects her parents’ motive for the increase. Or anything else. Make trouble. Write the scene.
• Two characters have gone trick or treating, separately or together, doesn’t matter. Doesn’t matter if they know each other. They each go home after collecting more goodies than ever before. Write a scene for each, showing how they deal with their candy wealth. Create internal and external conflict, different for each.
Have fun, and save what you write!
Wednesday, December 29, 2010
Wednesday, December 22, 2010
Aw, rejection dejection
On September 18, 2010, F wrote, Could you share a couple of rejection letters that you received for Ella Enchanted? It would be great to see, and serve as great encouragement, too.
And on the same day Andi wrote, I second F's idea with the rejection letters. Or perhaps just a blog post on how to deal with getting them/how to fix the problems in queries?
I can’t answer the query question because mostly I sent out entire manuscripts - this was long ago, and you still could. I did send queries for Ella Enchanted, but in my recollection they were very basic, not much more than “Here are x number (I don’t remember how many) of chapters of my fantasy novel. Please let me know if you’d like to see the whole book.”
Ella Enchanted was rejected only once, and I’m not sure there was a letter. I think the rejecting editor just called my agent and passed on the book. However, as many of you know, before Ella Enchanted there were nine years of rejection.
The worst rejection letter I ever got was for a picture book called Sweet Fanopps, a fantasy about a land that forgot how to sleep and when they rediscovered sleep they had no word for it or for dreaming or any sleep-related terms, hence the title. The rejection letter said that my plot wasn’t interesting, my characters not engaging, and the story lacking emotional charge. The editor doubted that a child would be drawn in enough to sit through a reading. In her last sentence she misspelled the title of my story.
Ouch! I was weeks getting over that one.
But possibly worse were the scores of form rejection letters. They were awful because they were opaque. I had no clue about what the reader didn’t like or what I could do to improve - if he thought my manuscript was the worst junk he’d ever read or if he liked it but just not enough. Years ago my husband found the perfect cartoon. The image is of a sad-looking dinosaur holding a letter. Under the picture are words something like: “Thank you for your submission. Unfortunately it doesn’t meet the needs of our list. Good luck placing the book elsewhere.” As I recall, above the picture it says, "Why the dinosaur perished."
That cartoon was such a comfort! It acknowledged my pain and recognized that rejection was serious - serious enough to cause the extinction of an entire class of creatures!
There were other frustrations around trying to get published. I went to conferences and met editors. If one was interested in seeing my work, I’d send something. Six months later I’d follow up and be told that the manuscript had been lost. Or, based an encouraging response to a manuscript, I’d revise and resend, and then my second submission would be lost or I’d get a form rejection.
But my experience wasn’t all bad. A particular editor kept sending me encouraging rejections and wrote to me out of the blue when she left her job to say that she’d told her successor to watch for my submissions. Another editor asked me to expand my picture book called Dave at Night into a chapter book, which he later rejected. However, I’m still grateful because I owe him the discovery that I’m mostly a novelist.
Still, nine years add up to a lot of discouragement. I’m not sure how much longer I would have kept going. Near the end it dawned on me that if I’d set out to become a brain surgeon I would already have been cutting into gray matter.
From what I hear it’s even harder now. I understand that few publishers accept unagented submissions. You can still meet an editor at a conference and be asked to submit directly, but that’s about it.
Prospects of publication aside, the really really really bad part of rejection is that it can damage your self-confidence. When a manuscript came back it wouldn’t look as pretty and shiny as when I sent it out, full of promise, into the world. I might love it again after a few days or weeks, but my immediate reaction would be, Maybe it’s not worthy.
And yet. The nine years of rejection were among the happiest in my life - because of steps I took, which you can take too, some or all of them. I signed up for classes in writing for children in the Adult Ed departments of colleges in New York City. There may be classes near you in whatever genre interests you, or there will at least be general fiction-writing classes.
So I had the joy of becoming a better writer through practice and expert criticism. There was an added benefit, too: while the negative rejection messages were dripping into one ear, the encouragement of my teachers was pouring into the other.
I joined the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI). I attended conferences and meetings of my local chapter, which taught me approaches that might lead to publication. With classmates and with the help of SCBWI I joined or formed critique groups. Again, the criticism made me a better writer. Equally wonderful, I became part of a community of struggling writers. We cheered each other on and commiserated over every rejection. I remember riding the train home after a class or a critique-group meeting and feeling so happy.
I heard of a writing group that gave an annual award to the member who’d gotten the highest number of rejections in the previous year. The purpose wasn’t to encourage bad writing. The group had discovered that the writer with the most rejections would eventually be the writer with the most acceptances. She was putting her stories out there. She wasn’t letting the rejections get her down.
Just want to mention, although it’s off topic, that I read almost all the Newbery books in the collection at my local public library. These books gave me a standard of excellence to aim for. And I read book reviews. I kept an ear out, much more than I do now, for what was getting buzz, what was current, what was popular. I encourage you to do the same. Read widely, not just in your genre. If you’re into fantasy, read historical and contemporary fiction. Read literary fiction and mysteries. Read graphic novels. You may find a new niche or you may find approaches that you can adapt to your own uses.
You may not be able to do exactly what I did. You may be too young to join SCBWI (eighteen and up) or you may not live close to a college that offers classes in your genre. But I think you can do some of what I suggest. You can take some sort of writing class. Even if you’re just in elementary school you can whisper to your teacher, as long as he’s a sympathetic sort, that you’d like him to pay special attention to your creative writing. Tell him you’ll welcome as much feedback as he can offer. He may turn a cartwheel for joy. You can ask him to keep your arrangement secret, and you don’t have to tell your friends. You can tell your parents if you like and watch them also turn cartwheels (maybe). You can share your love of writing with your school librarian, if your school has one, and you can ask her if she’d be willing to read your stories and make suggestions. You might form a writing club with your friends if they’re interested. Put out a magazine together. If some of you like to draw, you can illustrate your stories and create cool covers.
If you’re in middle school or high school, it should be easier. You’ll be taking an English or Language Arts class, and your teacher is likely to love writing. He’ll be eager to encourage you. There may be a school newspaper or magazine, or you can start one, staffed by other writing kids.
If you’re an adult, besides writing classes, you can join a writers’ group. The members don’t have to be writing in your genre. After a few meetings you’ll see what they have to offer and whether continuing is worth your time. If not, work on forming your own group. Speak to a librarian at your public library. Put up a notice on its bulletin board. Ask your friends if they know other writers you can contact. It is so useful to be part of a writing community that I think you should go after it even if you are the shyest person on the planet.
I like to think that this blog is kind of a writing community. You may know of others online that help in lots of ways. There may be blogs that are devoted to getting published and others, like this one, that are about the writing process. I got my start in pre-internet days and I’m not knowledgeable, so please post your links.
A single prompt:
In case you’re not familiar with his story, Sisyphus is a character in Greek mythology, not a good guy. This is from Wikipedia: “As a punishment from the gods for his trickery, Sisyphus was made to roll a huge rock up a steep hill, but before he could reach the top of the hill, the rock would always roll back down, forcing him to begin again.” Sisyphus could have been a writer, struggling to finish, to revise, to be published, the task as heavy as a boulder.
This is also from Wikipedia, about interpretations of the myth: “According to the solar theory, Sisyphus is the disk of the sun that rises every day in the east and then sinks into the west... Other scholars regard him as a personification of waves rising and falling, or of the treacherous sea... The 1st-century BC Epicurean philosopher Lucretius interprets the myth of Sisyphus as personifying politicians aspiring for political office who are constantly defeated, with the quest for power, in itself an ‘empty thing’, being likened to rolling the boulder up the hill... Friedrich Welcker suggested that he symbolises the vain struggle of man in the pursuit of knowledge... Albert Camus, in his 1942 essay The Myth of Sisyphus, saw Sisyphus as personifying the absurdity of human life, but Camus concludes ‘one must imagine Sisyphus happy’ as ‘The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man's heart.’” I love Camus’ conclusion.
Invent a character to stand for Sisyphus. Your Sisyphus can be good, and can be any kind of creature. Write one to three pages (or more) at the start of his challenge. Skip to the middle, when he’s at a low ebb and write about that. Then jump to the end and write. The purpose of this prompt is more than just to write; it’s also to address the hardships of writing, so you can use it as you like. When you need your Sisyphus character to win, you can end the story with triumph. When you’re in the mood to wallow in misery, you can defeat him and make him as unhappy as can be. If you’re angry, you can give him success and his enemies defeat in the most dreadful ways you can think of. You can hold onto this exercise and rewrite the ending as many ways as you need.
Have fun and save what you write!
And on the same day Andi wrote, I second F's idea with the rejection letters. Or perhaps just a blog post on how to deal with getting them/how to fix the problems in queries?
I can’t answer the query question because mostly I sent out entire manuscripts - this was long ago, and you still could. I did send queries for Ella Enchanted, but in my recollection they were very basic, not much more than “Here are x number (I don’t remember how many) of chapters of my fantasy novel. Please let me know if you’d like to see the whole book.”
Ella Enchanted was rejected only once, and I’m not sure there was a letter. I think the rejecting editor just called my agent and passed on the book. However, as many of you know, before Ella Enchanted there were nine years of rejection.
The worst rejection letter I ever got was for a picture book called Sweet Fanopps, a fantasy about a land that forgot how to sleep and when they rediscovered sleep they had no word for it or for dreaming or any sleep-related terms, hence the title. The rejection letter said that my plot wasn’t interesting, my characters not engaging, and the story lacking emotional charge. The editor doubted that a child would be drawn in enough to sit through a reading. In her last sentence she misspelled the title of my story.
Ouch! I was weeks getting over that one.
But possibly worse were the scores of form rejection letters. They were awful because they were opaque. I had no clue about what the reader didn’t like or what I could do to improve - if he thought my manuscript was the worst junk he’d ever read or if he liked it but just not enough. Years ago my husband found the perfect cartoon. The image is of a sad-looking dinosaur holding a letter. Under the picture are words something like: “Thank you for your submission. Unfortunately it doesn’t meet the needs of our list. Good luck placing the book elsewhere.” As I recall, above the picture it says, "Why the dinosaur perished."
That cartoon was such a comfort! It acknowledged my pain and recognized that rejection was serious - serious enough to cause the extinction of an entire class of creatures!
There were other frustrations around trying to get published. I went to conferences and met editors. If one was interested in seeing my work, I’d send something. Six months later I’d follow up and be told that the manuscript had been lost. Or, based an encouraging response to a manuscript, I’d revise and resend, and then my second submission would be lost or I’d get a form rejection.
But my experience wasn’t all bad. A particular editor kept sending me encouraging rejections and wrote to me out of the blue when she left her job to say that she’d told her successor to watch for my submissions. Another editor asked me to expand my picture book called Dave at Night into a chapter book, which he later rejected. However, I’m still grateful because I owe him the discovery that I’m mostly a novelist.
Still, nine years add up to a lot of discouragement. I’m not sure how much longer I would have kept going. Near the end it dawned on me that if I’d set out to become a brain surgeon I would already have been cutting into gray matter.
From what I hear it’s even harder now. I understand that few publishers accept unagented submissions. You can still meet an editor at a conference and be asked to submit directly, but that’s about it.
Prospects of publication aside, the really really really bad part of rejection is that it can damage your self-confidence. When a manuscript came back it wouldn’t look as pretty and shiny as when I sent it out, full of promise, into the world. I might love it again after a few days or weeks, but my immediate reaction would be, Maybe it’s not worthy.
And yet. The nine years of rejection were among the happiest in my life - because of steps I took, which you can take too, some or all of them. I signed up for classes in writing for children in the Adult Ed departments of colleges in New York City. There may be classes near you in whatever genre interests you, or there will at least be general fiction-writing classes.
So I had the joy of becoming a better writer through practice and expert criticism. There was an added benefit, too: while the negative rejection messages were dripping into one ear, the encouragement of my teachers was pouring into the other.
I joined the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI). I attended conferences and meetings of my local chapter, which taught me approaches that might lead to publication. With classmates and with the help of SCBWI I joined or formed critique groups. Again, the criticism made me a better writer. Equally wonderful, I became part of a community of struggling writers. We cheered each other on and commiserated over every rejection. I remember riding the train home after a class or a critique-group meeting and feeling so happy.
I heard of a writing group that gave an annual award to the member who’d gotten the highest number of rejections in the previous year. The purpose wasn’t to encourage bad writing. The group had discovered that the writer with the most rejections would eventually be the writer with the most acceptances. She was putting her stories out there. She wasn’t letting the rejections get her down.
Just want to mention, although it’s off topic, that I read almost all the Newbery books in the collection at my local public library. These books gave me a standard of excellence to aim for. And I read book reviews. I kept an ear out, much more than I do now, for what was getting buzz, what was current, what was popular. I encourage you to do the same. Read widely, not just in your genre. If you’re into fantasy, read historical and contemporary fiction. Read literary fiction and mysteries. Read graphic novels. You may find a new niche or you may find approaches that you can adapt to your own uses.
You may not be able to do exactly what I did. You may be too young to join SCBWI (eighteen and up) or you may not live close to a college that offers classes in your genre. But I think you can do some of what I suggest. You can take some sort of writing class. Even if you’re just in elementary school you can whisper to your teacher, as long as he’s a sympathetic sort, that you’d like him to pay special attention to your creative writing. Tell him you’ll welcome as much feedback as he can offer. He may turn a cartwheel for joy. You can ask him to keep your arrangement secret, and you don’t have to tell your friends. You can tell your parents if you like and watch them also turn cartwheels (maybe). You can share your love of writing with your school librarian, if your school has one, and you can ask her if she’d be willing to read your stories and make suggestions. You might form a writing club with your friends if they’re interested. Put out a magazine together. If some of you like to draw, you can illustrate your stories and create cool covers.
If you’re in middle school or high school, it should be easier. You’ll be taking an English or Language Arts class, and your teacher is likely to love writing. He’ll be eager to encourage you. There may be a school newspaper or magazine, or you can start one, staffed by other writing kids.
If you’re an adult, besides writing classes, you can join a writers’ group. The members don’t have to be writing in your genre. After a few meetings you’ll see what they have to offer and whether continuing is worth your time. If not, work on forming your own group. Speak to a librarian at your public library. Put up a notice on its bulletin board. Ask your friends if they know other writers you can contact. It is so useful to be part of a writing community that I think you should go after it even if you are the shyest person on the planet.
I like to think that this blog is kind of a writing community. You may know of others online that help in lots of ways. There may be blogs that are devoted to getting published and others, like this one, that are about the writing process. I got my start in pre-internet days and I’m not knowledgeable, so please post your links.
A single prompt:
In case you’re not familiar with his story, Sisyphus is a character in Greek mythology, not a good guy. This is from Wikipedia: “As a punishment from the gods for his trickery, Sisyphus was made to roll a huge rock up a steep hill, but before he could reach the top of the hill, the rock would always roll back down, forcing him to begin again.” Sisyphus could have been a writer, struggling to finish, to revise, to be published, the task as heavy as a boulder.
This is also from Wikipedia, about interpretations of the myth: “According to the solar theory, Sisyphus is the disk of the sun that rises every day in the east and then sinks into the west... Other scholars regard him as a personification of waves rising and falling, or of the treacherous sea... The 1st-century BC Epicurean philosopher Lucretius interprets the myth of Sisyphus as personifying politicians aspiring for political office who are constantly defeated, with the quest for power, in itself an ‘empty thing’, being likened to rolling the boulder up the hill... Friedrich Welcker suggested that he symbolises the vain struggle of man in the pursuit of knowledge... Albert Camus, in his 1942 essay The Myth of Sisyphus, saw Sisyphus as personifying the absurdity of human life, but Camus concludes ‘one must imagine Sisyphus happy’ as ‘The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man's heart.’” I love Camus’ conclusion.
Invent a character to stand for Sisyphus. Your Sisyphus can be good, and can be any kind of creature. Write one to three pages (or more) at the start of his challenge. Skip to the middle, when he’s at a low ebb and write about that. Then jump to the end and write. The purpose of this prompt is more than just to write; it’s also to address the hardships of writing, so you can use it as you like. When you need your Sisyphus character to win, you can end the story with triumph. When you’re in the mood to wallow in misery, you can defeat him and make him as unhappy as can be. If you’re angry, you can give him success and his enemies defeat in the most dreadful ways you can think of. You can hold onto this exercise and rewrite the ending as many ways as you need.
Have fun and save what you write!
Wednesday, December 15, 2010
Serial Writing
On August 19, 2010, Yvonne wrote, Ms. Levine, do you have any advice on writing sequels, prequels, or writing books set in the same world as a previous one? I know you did this with Fairest, and I was wondering how you did it and kept the same characteristics of the kingdom that you had in the first book.
Actually, in Fairest, in one important regard, I failed. In Ella Enchanted, Char describes the people of Ayortha as taciturn. But when I wrote Fairest I couldn’t stay with that. I couldn’t write a semi-serious novel about people who barely speak. If Fairest had been one of my Princess Tales, which were mostly comic, I could have pulled it off. In an early draft of the book, I put in a sentence explaining how Ayorthaians were terse with strangers, but I think even that got cut. A reader once called me on this, and probably many other readers have noticed. It’s a fine example of an imperfection.
Maybe one rule of sequel and prequel writing would be not to put anything in the starter book that you can’t live with in future volumes. But I’m not sure. I don’t want to encourage timid writing, which would be worse than my Fairest mistake.
Seems to me there are two kinds of series. In one kind each book tells a complete story and the end is a full stop. Books can be read out of sequence and it doesn’t matter. In the other kind, the Harry Potter kind, each book has its own conflicts, but they’re part of a larger story that isn’t over until the final page of the last book, and the books should be read in order. I haven’t written this second kind of series, although my Fairy Haven and the Quest for the Wand is easier to get into if you’ve read Fairy Dust and the Quest for the Egg. I assume that writers who write a continuous series know the entire arc of the plot and where each book fits into it.
At the moment I’m writing a second mystery in the world of my heroine, Elodie. If I can, I’d like to stay with her and her dragon employer, Masteress Meenore, and her friend the ogre Count Jonty Um for a bunch of books. Each novel will be its own separate story (the first sort of series), but some life events for the main characters may evolve over time. Elodie and Jonty Um will get older. One or both of them may find love. There may be loss. Dragons age more slowly, and there’s something immutable about Meenore, so he’s unlikely to change much. Or maybe he will. I don’t know.
Some series have a villain who provides story continuity. I’ve read only the first Harry Potter book, but I figure Voldemort is that villain. In the Sherlock Holmes series Moriarty is the villain, but those books can be read in any order.
I’ve mentioned before that for each novel I keep a document called “Remember.” In it go the details, which vary somewhat from book to book. For the mystery series I’ve continued the same “Remember” from one book to the next. These are some of my categories: geography, monetary system, apprenticeship system, Elodie’s mother’s rules for her, character descriptions, the attributes of an acting troupe, the dragon diet. I could continue, but you get the idea. A “Remember” document will help you be consistent and will save time, because you won’t have to hunt through your earlier books for the particulars you need.
Before I wrote Fairest I reread Ella Enchanted. I’d like to say I took notes, but I don’t remember whether I did or not. I should have. So read and take notes. Originally I’d thought Ella’s best friend Areida could be the heroine of Fairest, but I was reminded that Areida is dark-skinned and the Snow White character, obviously, needed to be pale.
You may want a similar tone from book to book. If you’re writing an adventure series, you probably wouldn’t make one book a brooding character study with little action. My Princess Tales are humorous. Fun is the point. I couldn’t have written a tragic Princess Tale and made it fit. However, you might change point of view from book to book. You could have a series about a group of friends. If a different character told each book, the voice and tone would have to vary or each narrator would seem like the same person. But you still probably wouldn’t want one book to be completely lighthearted when the others were utterly serious.
I tied my Princess Tales loosely together with humor and with features that readers would recognize from one book to the next. All of them take place in the kingdom of Biddle and most in the town of Snettering-on-Snoakes. The king’s name is always Humphrey, and the queen is always Hermione, Humphrey I and Hermione I in the first book, higher numbers in each succeeding volume. The fairies are always seven feet tall with huge, fleshy wings. In this kind of series you may not need much more than a few recognizable features like these and a relatively consistent tone to unify the books.
You probably need to think about whether or not you want character growth from book to book. Since I haven’t read more than one but I don’t live in a cave, I gather that Harry and Hermione and the others change as the series progresses. In contrast, Sherlock Holmes doesn’t evolve. He’s the same brilliant, easily bored, self-destructive fellow all the way through. His failure to grow gives the series poignancy. The reader sympathizes with Holmes and worries about him. Both are valid choices.
Here are some questions you can ask yourself as you decide whether or not you want to attempt a series:
Do these characters interest you enough to want to be with them for more than one book? There is no dishonor in a no answer. The characters in my Princess Tales, because the stories are so light, are paper thin. They were invented for a single situation, and they wouldn’t know what to do with themselves outside their original tales.
Do you have a big and complicated enough idea to carry a bunch of books? At one point while I was writing Ever I thought I had a series on my hands, but I didn’t. My concept sewed itself together in a single volume.
Do you know what themes you’d like to explore from book to book? I’m optimistic about the mysteries as a series because I plan to rely on fairytales, and it’s always been the mysteries that have fascinated me about them. For example, one of my favorite blog postings along with your responses was about the puzzling “Twelve Dancing Princesses.”
Three prompts:
• It’s a cloud, composition unknown, threatening the world of your story. It can begin small or full-blown. Write a paragraph or two about each book in a four-book series that starts with the cloud. The cloud can be the problem for the entire series, or not.
• Describe (in writing) the most fascinating person you know. Now add interesting - not necessarily good - qualities of other people in your life. Imagine this amalgamated being as the main character of a series. What would challenge her? What kinds of conflicts would she get involved in? Write notes about a series with this main character.
• Write a page of back story for your current project. Make up new material for this, not what you already know. Consider whether you have a potential prequel. Write about what it might be.
Have fun and save what you write!
Actually, in Fairest, in one important regard, I failed. In Ella Enchanted, Char describes the people of Ayortha as taciturn. But when I wrote Fairest I couldn’t stay with that. I couldn’t write a semi-serious novel about people who barely speak. If Fairest had been one of my Princess Tales, which were mostly comic, I could have pulled it off. In an early draft of the book, I put in a sentence explaining how Ayorthaians were terse with strangers, but I think even that got cut. A reader once called me on this, and probably many other readers have noticed. It’s a fine example of an imperfection.
Maybe one rule of sequel and prequel writing would be not to put anything in the starter book that you can’t live with in future volumes. But I’m not sure. I don’t want to encourage timid writing, which would be worse than my Fairest mistake.
Seems to me there are two kinds of series. In one kind each book tells a complete story and the end is a full stop. Books can be read out of sequence and it doesn’t matter. In the other kind, the Harry Potter kind, each book has its own conflicts, but they’re part of a larger story that isn’t over until the final page of the last book, and the books should be read in order. I haven’t written this second kind of series, although my Fairy Haven and the Quest for the Wand is easier to get into if you’ve read Fairy Dust and the Quest for the Egg. I assume that writers who write a continuous series know the entire arc of the plot and where each book fits into it.
At the moment I’m writing a second mystery in the world of my heroine, Elodie. If I can, I’d like to stay with her and her dragon employer, Masteress Meenore, and her friend the ogre Count Jonty Um for a bunch of books. Each novel will be its own separate story (the first sort of series), but some life events for the main characters may evolve over time. Elodie and Jonty Um will get older. One or both of them may find love. There may be loss. Dragons age more slowly, and there’s something immutable about Meenore, so he’s unlikely to change much. Or maybe he will. I don’t know.
Some series have a villain who provides story continuity. I’ve read only the first Harry Potter book, but I figure Voldemort is that villain. In the Sherlock Holmes series Moriarty is the villain, but those books can be read in any order.
I’ve mentioned before that for each novel I keep a document called “Remember.” In it go the details, which vary somewhat from book to book. For the mystery series I’ve continued the same “Remember” from one book to the next. These are some of my categories: geography, monetary system, apprenticeship system, Elodie’s mother’s rules for her, character descriptions, the attributes of an acting troupe, the dragon diet. I could continue, but you get the idea. A “Remember” document will help you be consistent and will save time, because you won’t have to hunt through your earlier books for the particulars you need.
Before I wrote Fairest I reread Ella Enchanted. I’d like to say I took notes, but I don’t remember whether I did or not. I should have. So read and take notes. Originally I’d thought Ella’s best friend Areida could be the heroine of Fairest, but I was reminded that Areida is dark-skinned and the Snow White character, obviously, needed to be pale.
You may want a similar tone from book to book. If you’re writing an adventure series, you probably wouldn’t make one book a brooding character study with little action. My Princess Tales are humorous. Fun is the point. I couldn’t have written a tragic Princess Tale and made it fit. However, you might change point of view from book to book. You could have a series about a group of friends. If a different character told each book, the voice and tone would have to vary or each narrator would seem like the same person. But you still probably wouldn’t want one book to be completely lighthearted when the others were utterly serious.
I tied my Princess Tales loosely together with humor and with features that readers would recognize from one book to the next. All of them take place in the kingdom of Biddle and most in the town of Snettering-on-Snoakes. The king’s name is always Humphrey, and the queen is always Hermione, Humphrey I and Hermione I in the first book, higher numbers in each succeeding volume. The fairies are always seven feet tall with huge, fleshy wings. In this kind of series you may not need much more than a few recognizable features like these and a relatively consistent tone to unify the books.
You probably need to think about whether or not you want character growth from book to book. Since I haven’t read more than one but I don’t live in a cave, I gather that Harry and Hermione and the others change as the series progresses. In contrast, Sherlock Holmes doesn’t evolve. He’s the same brilliant, easily bored, self-destructive fellow all the way through. His failure to grow gives the series poignancy. The reader sympathizes with Holmes and worries about him. Both are valid choices.
Here are some questions you can ask yourself as you decide whether or not you want to attempt a series:
Do these characters interest you enough to want to be with them for more than one book? There is no dishonor in a no answer. The characters in my Princess Tales, because the stories are so light, are paper thin. They were invented for a single situation, and they wouldn’t know what to do with themselves outside their original tales.
Do you have a big and complicated enough idea to carry a bunch of books? At one point while I was writing Ever I thought I had a series on my hands, but I didn’t. My concept sewed itself together in a single volume.
Do you know what themes you’d like to explore from book to book? I’m optimistic about the mysteries as a series because I plan to rely on fairytales, and it’s always been the mysteries that have fascinated me about them. For example, one of my favorite blog postings along with your responses was about the puzzling “Twelve Dancing Princesses.”
Three prompts:
• It’s a cloud, composition unknown, threatening the world of your story. It can begin small or full-blown. Write a paragraph or two about each book in a four-book series that starts with the cloud. The cloud can be the problem for the entire series, or not.
• Describe (in writing) the most fascinating person you know. Now add interesting - not necessarily good - qualities of other people in your life. Imagine this amalgamated being as the main character of a series. What would challenge her? What kinds of conflicts would she get involved in? Write notes about a series with this main character.
• Write a page of back story for your current project. Make up new material for this, not what you already know. Consider whether you have a potential prequel. Write about what it might be.
Have fun and save what you write!
Wednesday, December 8, 2010
Tick Tock, the Publishing Clock
On August 18, 2010, Charlotte wrote, I was wondering if you could give us a breakdown on how long it takes you to write an average novel, from the inklings of an idea to the first draft to the printing to promotion, etc. What takes the longest? Do different books take significantly different amounts of time? Do you have deadlines? Have you ever tried NaNoWriMo?
I’ve never tried NaNoWriMo. I don’t think I could win, because I’m not focused enough in a first draft. If there were a NaNoRevMo for revision, I could do it. I can sit still for hours to revise.
How long it takes me to write a book depends on the book. Some are a lot easier than others. The longest (about eight years) was Dave at Night, but I didn’t work on it regularly (I wrote Ella Enchanted in the middle). The longest book that I worked on steadily was Fairest, because I couldn’t get the point of view right. Fairy Dust and the Quest for the Egg took about nine months, quick for me. Most of my Princess Tales took only a few months, the longest six, and the shortest, The Fairy’s Mistake, an amazing eight days! I was so happy! That one started life as a picture book, which was rejected by a zillion publishers. My editor for Ella liked it and asked me to turn it into a short novel and write two more - the beginning of the series. When I expanded it I already had the story and knew exactly what I was doing.
I don’t think the books that took the longest to write are the best, just the hardest. Some authors are much speedier than I am, and some are much slower. They’re not better or worse writers; their methods are just different.
My books germinate, naturally, in notes. I start by speculating about what I might like my next novel to be. Often I reread some fairy tales. I keep a running list of ideas for future books, and I revisit that. I write more notes about the ideas that interest me - where I could take each one, what might happen. I continue with notes and trying out ideas until something clamors to be written. Even then I’m not sure, though, and I write more notes, until a beginning emerges plus a vague notion of the direction of the story and some of the characters. Usually I have a sense of how the story should end, nothing specific, and nothing that can’t change.
I start writing. When I’ve written three pages, I always think, “I’ve written one percent;” at thirty pages, I think, “ten percent,” which is ridiculous because the book may wind up longer or shorter than three hundred pages and because I know I’m going to cut lots along the way and fill lots in. But the percentage thought encourages me.
Lately I’ve been trying to write straight through, but in the book I’m working on now, a second mystery (how I did this is itself a mystery), I wrote 150 pages without introducing any suspects. Naturally I had to go back.
Eventually I’ve got a first draft. Revising is usually quicker than writing the draft, a few months tops. Then I email the manuscript to my agent and my editor. That part is different for me than for writers who are just starting out or for writers who don’t have a book under contract (meaning that a publisher has committed to publishing the book). In that case, assuming you have an agent, you’d send the book to her, and she’d send it to editors she thinks would be right for it. But I’m not going to get into that unless you want me to in a future post.
A novel takes about a year from submission to publication. Now we get into publishing. I’m involved in some of what happens and have a rough idea of the rest, but I’m not an expert. For an expert, you might like to read Harold Underdown’s The Complete Idiot's Guide to Publishing Children’s Books. There may be other great books on the subject, but this is the one I know. April, I think you know all about this, and you may want to add some remarks too.
So I submit the manuscript and start biting my nails immediately. After a day or two of no more nails without any word (a ridiculously short span of time), I’m sure my editor hates the book. But I’m not going to go into this either unless you ask me to, and then I will.
After a few weeks, Rosemary, my editor, sends me an editorial letter by snail mail along with the manuscript on which she’s written her initial edits. That’s how she and I work together. Some editors do a lot of the initial book discussion in a phone call or a meeting. An editor may not mark up the manuscript at all at this point; she may just suggest the direction the writer should take in the revision. I prefer to see edits. If Rosemary says my main character needs to be more likeable, I want to see the places where my main isn’t or I won’t get it.
When I’m finished with the revision I email it back. After she goes over it she sends me a blessedly shorter letter and her second edits. If things are looking pretty good after that round, she gives the manuscript to the copy editor. If it’s not yet in shape, there’s another cycle of revision between us before the book goes to the copy editor.
While all this is happening, internal publishing stuff has begun, and the internal side continues until publication. First of all is the decision about when the book will come out. Publishers have seasonal lists, meaning the cohort of books that will be released in summer, fall, and winter. There used to be a spring list, but now it’s called summer, at least at HarperCollins.
Deadlines are attached to the list decision, and this is unknown territory for me, except that if I were very late with a revision the book might have to be pushed back to the next list. I assume the deadlines have to do with when the manuscript goes to the copy editor and is returned, when the cover art is commissioned and finished, when the design decisions are made.
Back to me. The copy editor sends me the manuscript by email with e-edits in the margins and in the copy. I think the edits are in a Word program, but I don’t know. I print out the manuscript and write my responses in ink and mail them back the old-fashioned way. This is not because I’m a technology-challenged dinosaur - it’s just what I’m told to do. The copy editor and I go back and forth twice, I think, before the book emerges as galleys.
It becomes galleys after the decisions are made about type and the design of the page. Is the book typeset at that point? I don’t know. Once the book is in galley form, electronic editing is over. Changes are made on the physical page again.
The first iteration of the galleys is called first pass, which my editor sends to me, and I make my changes, and they’re incorporated into second-pass galleys. The book is in good shape by now, and many writers don’t look at second-pass galleys. But I do, because I’m a chronic fiddler. I don’t look at third pass, and I don’t know if there is a forth pass.
First-pass galleys are bound into the Advanced Reading Copy, the ARC. The ARC is a paperback book even though the real book will be released in hard cover. HarperCollins’s ARCs have the cover art, although not all publishers do this, I think. For A Tale of Two Castles, which will be out in May, the ARC has just been produced, and I got a copy in the mail last week. The cover art is also not the final version, but it’s close. I celebrate when the ARC arrives, because it's the first time I've seen my manuscript in book form.
The ARC is a big marketing tool. It’s sent to reviewers and to important people in the world of children’s literature who can help the book. It’s sent out even though it still has mistakes, and readers are warned that some of the copy may change.
Other things happen behind the scenes. There’s a decision about the size of the print run (the number of books to be printed initially). A publicity and marketing plan are developed. The book is integrated into the programs that the publisher uses to market and promote every book. Editors present their books to the in-house sales force, the people who will sell it to independent and chain bookstores. Sometimes a book tour is organized.
Oh, and the book is printed! Then it's sent to distributors, who receive the orders and fill them.
After all this - and I’ve probably left out a ton - it’s a wonder that the process takes only a year.
There isn’t really a prompt that goes with this, but I hate to end without one, so here are two:
• You all know that Ella Enchanted was my first published book after nine years of rejection for everything else I’d written. What you may not know is that Ella was the first book my editor ever acquired, which made it special for both of us. Write a first-person account of a fairly new editor meeting his or her first writer and taking him or her to lunch. My editor and I did get along, but make these two fail to. Make the lunch a disaster.
• Now indulge in a little fantasy. Write from the point of view of a newbie author meeting his or her editor for the first time. Make it go marvelously well. If you haven’t been published yet, make it a dream come true. This is one time you can indulge your Mary Sue and let her shine.
Have fun and save what you write!
I’ve never tried NaNoWriMo. I don’t think I could win, because I’m not focused enough in a first draft. If there were a NaNoRevMo for revision, I could do it. I can sit still for hours to revise.
How long it takes me to write a book depends on the book. Some are a lot easier than others. The longest (about eight years) was Dave at Night, but I didn’t work on it regularly (I wrote Ella Enchanted in the middle). The longest book that I worked on steadily was Fairest, because I couldn’t get the point of view right. Fairy Dust and the Quest for the Egg took about nine months, quick for me. Most of my Princess Tales took only a few months, the longest six, and the shortest, The Fairy’s Mistake, an amazing eight days! I was so happy! That one started life as a picture book, which was rejected by a zillion publishers. My editor for Ella liked it and asked me to turn it into a short novel and write two more - the beginning of the series. When I expanded it I already had the story and knew exactly what I was doing.
I don’t think the books that took the longest to write are the best, just the hardest. Some authors are much speedier than I am, and some are much slower. They’re not better or worse writers; their methods are just different.
My books germinate, naturally, in notes. I start by speculating about what I might like my next novel to be. Often I reread some fairy tales. I keep a running list of ideas for future books, and I revisit that. I write more notes about the ideas that interest me - where I could take each one, what might happen. I continue with notes and trying out ideas until something clamors to be written. Even then I’m not sure, though, and I write more notes, until a beginning emerges plus a vague notion of the direction of the story and some of the characters. Usually I have a sense of how the story should end, nothing specific, and nothing that can’t change.
I start writing. When I’ve written three pages, I always think, “I’ve written one percent;” at thirty pages, I think, “ten percent,” which is ridiculous because the book may wind up longer or shorter than three hundred pages and because I know I’m going to cut lots along the way and fill lots in. But the percentage thought encourages me.
Lately I’ve been trying to write straight through, but in the book I’m working on now, a second mystery (how I did this is itself a mystery), I wrote 150 pages without introducing any suspects. Naturally I had to go back.
Eventually I’ve got a first draft. Revising is usually quicker than writing the draft, a few months tops. Then I email the manuscript to my agent and my editor. That part is different for me than for writers who are just starting out or for writers who don’t have a book under contract (meaning that a publisher has committed to publishing the book). In that case, assuming you have an agent, you’d send the book to her, and she’d send it to editors she thinks would be right for it. But I’m not going to get into that unless you want me to in a future post.
A novel takes about a year from submission to publication. Now we get into publishing. I’m involved in some of what happens and have a rough idea of the rest, but I’m not an expert. For an expert, you might like to read Harold Underdown’s The Complete Idiot's Guide to Publishing Children’s Books. There may be other great books on the subject, but this is the one I know. April, I think you know all about this, and you may want to add some remarks too.
So I submit the manuscript and start biting my nails immediately. After a day or two of no more nails without any word (a ridiculously short span of time), I’m sure my editor hates the book. But I’m not going to go into this either unless you ask me to, and then I will.
After a few weeks, Rosemary, my editor, sends me an editorial letter by snail mail along with the manuscript on which she’s written her initial edits. That’s how she and I work together. Some editors do a lot of the initial book discussion in a phone call or a meeting. An editor may not mark up the manuscript at all at this point; she may just suggest the direction the writer should take in the revision. I prefer to see edits. If Rosemary says my main character needs to be more likeable, I want to see the places where my main isn’t or I won’t get it.
When I’m finished with the revision I email it back. After she goes over it she sends me a blessedly shorter letter and her second edits. If things are looking pretty good after that round, she gives the manuscript to the copy editor. If it’s not yet in shape, there’s another cycle of revision between us before the book goes to the copy editor.
While all this is happening, internal publishing stuff has begun, and the internal side continues until publication. First of all is the decision about when the book will come out. Publishers have seasonal lists, meaning the cohort of books that will be released in summer, fall, and winter. There used to be a spring list, but now it’s called summer, at least at HarperCollins.
Deadlines are attached to the list decision, and this is unknown territory for me, except that if I were very late with a revision the book might have to be pushed back to the next list. I assume the deadlines have to do with when the manuscript goes to the copy editor and is returned, when the cover art is commissioned and finished, when the design decisions are made.
Back to me. The copy editor sends me the manuscript by email with e-edits in the margins and in the copy. I think the edits are in a Word program, but I don’t know. I print out the manuscript and write my responses in ink and mail them back the old-fashioned way. This is not because I’m a technology-challenged dinosaur - it’s just what I’m told to do. The copy editor and I go back and forth twice, I think, before the book emerges as galleys.
It becomes galleys after the decisions are made about type and the design of the page. Is the book typeset at that point? I don’t know. Once the book is in galley form, electronic editing is over. Changes are made on the physical page again.
The first iteration of the galleys is called first pass, which my editor sends to me, and I make my changes, and they’re incorporated into second-pass galleys. The book is in good shape by now, and many writers don’t look at second-pass galleys. But I do, because I’m a chronic fiddler. I don’t look at third pass, and I don’t know if there is a forth pass.
First-pass galleys are bound into the Advanced Reading Copy, the ARC. The ARC is a paperback book even though the real book will be released in hard cover. HarperCollins’s ARCs have the cover art, although not all publishers do this, I think. For A Tale of Two Castles, which will be out in May, the ARC has just been produced, and I got a copy in the mail last week. The cover art is also not the final version, but it’s close. I celebrate when the ARC arrives, because it's the first time I've seen my manuscript in book form.
The ARC is a big marketing tool. It’s sent to reviewers and to important people in the world of children’s literature who can help the book. It’s sent out even though it still has mistakes, and readers are warned that some of the copy may change.
Other things happen behind the scenes. There’s a decision about the size of the print run (the number of books to be printed initially). A publicity and marketing plan are developed. The book is integrated into the programs that the publisher uses to market and promote every book. Editors present their books to the in-house sales force, the people who will sell it to independent and chain bookstores. Sometimes a book tour is organized.
Oh, and the book is printed! Then it's sent to distributors, who receive the orders and fill them.
After all this - and I’ve probably left out a ton - it’s a wonder that the process takes only a year.
There isn’t really a prompt that goes with this, but I hate to end without one, so here are two:
• You all know that Ella Enchanted was my first published book after nine years of rejection for everything else I’d written. What you may not know is that Ella was the first book my editor ever acquired, which made it special for both of us. Write a first-person account of a fairly new editor meeting his or her first writer and taking him or her to lunch. My editor and I did get along, but make these two fail to. Make the lunch a disaster.
• Now indulge in a little fantasy. Write from the point of view of a newbie author meeting his or her editor for the first time. Make it go marvelously well. If you haven’t been published yet, make it a dream come true. This is one time you can indulge your Mary Sue and let her shine.
Have fun and save what you write!
Wednesday, December 1, 2010
To Be Or Not To Be Funny
First: CONGRATULATIONS to all you NaNoWriMo’s! Double kudos to those who met your goal. But whether you made it or not, the effort is a big deal. A lot of back patting is called for.
And I bet you're relieved it’s over--and maybe feeling a little let-down, too . But, hey, there’s still all that revising to do. In recent posts I’ve gotten questions about revision, and I’ve referred people to my post on the topic from 11/18/09. If you have questions that I didn’t cover there, please ask.
Second: A reminder about my signings in Connecticut on Saturday, details on the website. If you’re in the area, I hope you come.
Third: With the glow of poetry school still hanging over me, I want to say something about how poetry affects my prose. Chiefly, it makes me more aware of the sound of my words as I write. For example, in the last sentence I happened to write the alliterative makes me more. (Alliteration: identical initial consonant sounds or double consonant sounds, like stay still. Write well isn’t alliterative, even though both words start with w’s, and cautious king is, even though one word starts with a c and the other with a k. It's the sound that counts.) In the example, makes me more, I didn’t alliterate intentionally; it just came out that way, but I could have changed the wording to increased my awareness. Same meaning but not as appealing to me (in a very minor way).
Same thing with assonance, similar vowel sounds, like keep and sweet. Also words that happen to rhyme. I notice them more nowadays. Sometimes I add in alliteration or assonance, and sometimes I take it out. In prose, I often find it annoying when I accidentally rhyme, so I revise and remove.
Here’s a prompt: Pick a paragraph of your current story, any long paragraph, not dialogue. Underline the alliterations, the assonances, the rhymes. See if you can create more of each by changing words. Do you like the result better or less well? There’s no right or wrong answer. You decide. The advantage is just more consciousness as you write.
I also recommend reading poetry, because poetry is wonderful, and you can learn a lot about language from it. I get a daily poetry fix from Writers Almanac, http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/. As a subscriber, a poem arrives in my email every morning, along with a short narrative of major historical events of the day. I click listen and read the poem along with Garrison Keillor’s resonant voice.
Now for today’s topic. On July 25, 2010, Rose wrote... How does a writer decide whether to make a story mainly funny or mainly serious? I've been writing a story that I saw as humorous, but it's been getting very serious already, and I'm not sure if this is a bad thing. If so, can someone help? My tastes naturally tend towards the dramatic, though, so it's probably just that. . .
Often the decision is made for the writer, who is either a writer of humor or of serious fiction. One or the other usually comes naturally, no decision involved.
Not that it’s necessarily so cut and dried as that. Serious drama can have funny moments, hysterical ones, even, and funny stories can turn temporarily dark or be uniformly dark and funny. Serious writers can pull off comedy occasionally, and humorists can write tragedy once in a while. But I think most writers know which camp they find themselves in.
I generally prefer funny. I’d rather read funny and write funny, and I think humor isn’t taken, er, seriously enough as literature. It’s just as hard, maybe harder, to write good light as to write good heavy. I frequently look for a bit of levity to add to my stories. Doing so just makes me happy.
Some of my books are more serious than others. Ever is the most somber book I’ve written, but even it has funny moments. And after I finished it I had to escape to something lighter. A Tale of Two Castles is lighthearted. The sequel I'm working on now is more serious, so I may cycle back and forth.
Of course subject matter helps determine whether or not a story is serious. I challenge the funniest person on earth to write a comedy about the abuse of dogs. If this is your subject, you probably have to be serious.
But even dire topics can be spoofed. Think of disaster movies. And, while dog abuse may be off limits, pet abuse probably isn’t. For example, you might write about a character who keeps pet cockroaches and isn't nice to them. The reader wouldn’t know which side to sympathize with.
There are also topics that most lend themselves to comedy. One of my students once wrote a story about toe jam. Tragedy and toe jam do not mix, or do not mix easily.
And there are many topics that can go either way. Romance, friendship, coming of age all leap to mind.
Whichever you’ve chosen, you can nudge it temporarily in one direction or the other. Imagine even a hospital scene. Your main character’s mother has something terminal. A clueless doctor comes in and says all the wrong things, maybe putting a weird spin on a conversation that was just taking place. The dying continues, but the characters have laughed and the reader has smiled. Or you can make the scene funny by going overboard with the sadness, intense lugubriousness, so over the top that the characters notice and the tragedy lifts for a moment.
Comedy can tip into drama too. Suppose Essie has given her best friend Riva a joke gift of hand puppets. They’re in Riva’s bedroom, acting out the behavior of a tyrannical teacher, having a fine time, being clever and funny until Riva has the teacher puppet say something hurtful to Essie that Riva has wanted to say. The remark goes back to an old incident that’s been festering. In a single line of dialogue the story's mood shifts. It may shift back just as quickly in a page or two, but for the moment the reader has stopped laughing.
Even when stories stay funny they can have serious meaning. Think of Mark Twain, one of my favorites. His Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, for instance, is wonderfully humorous and touching at the same time. Think of Jane Austen, one of the funniest writers ever, in my opinion, who was writing not only about finding love, but also about finding a life. Think of your own examples.
Here’s a prompt: Write about a camping trip. Can be a family trip, a scout troupe, a gathering of elves, whatever. In as many pages as you need, take it from humor to drama, back to humor, back to drama. End on whichever you like. Do the same for a bank robbery. Now do it - aaa! - for an airplane crash. Don’t worry about being ridiculous. Go for it!
Have fun and save what you write!
And I bet you're relieved it’s over--and maybe feeling a little let-down, too . But, hey, there’s still all that revising to do. In recent posts I’ve gotten questions about revision, and I’ve referred people to my post on the topic from 11/18/09. If you have questions that I didn’t cover there, please ask.
Second: A reminder about my signings in Connecticut on Saturday, details on the website. If you’re in the area, I hope you come.
Third: With the glow of poetry school still hanging over me, I want to say something about how poetry affects my prose. Chiefly, it makes me more aware of the sound of my words as I write. For example, in the last sentence I happened to write the alliterative makes me more. (Alliteration: identical initial consonant sounds or double consonant sounds, like stay still. Write well isn’t alliterative, even though both words start with w’s, and cautious king is, even though one word starts with a c and the other with a k. It's the sound that counts.) In the example, makes me more, I didn’t alliterate intentionally; it just came out that way, but I could have changed the wording to increased my awareness. Same meaning but not as appealing to me (in a very minor way).
Same thing with assonance, similar vowel sounds, like keep and sweet. Also words that happen to rhyme. I notice them more nowadays. Sometimes I add in alliteration or assonance, and sometimes I take it out. In prose, I often find it annoying when I accidentally rhyme, so I revise and remove.
Here’s a prompt: Pick a paragraph of your current story, any long paragraph, not dialogue. Underline the alliterations, the assonances, the rhymes. See if you can create more of each by changing words. Do you like the result better or less well? There’s no right or wrong answer. You decide. The advantage is just more consciousness as you write.
I also recommend reading poetry, because poetry is wonderful, and you can learn a lot about language from it. I get a daily poetry fix from Writers Almanac, http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/. As a subscriber, a poem arrives in my email every morning, along with a short narrative of major historical events of the day. I click listen and read the poem along with Garrison Keillor’s resonant voice.
Now for today’s topic. On July 25, 2010, Rose wrote... How does a writer decide whether to make a story mainly funny or mainly serious? I've been writing a story that I saw as humorous, but it's been getting very serious already, and I'm not sure if this is a bad thing. If so, can someone help? My tastes naturally tend towards the dramatic, though, so it's probably just that. . .
Often the decision is made for the writer, who is either a writer of humor or of serious fiction. One or the other usually comes naturally, no decision involved.
Not that it’s necessarily so cut and dried as that. Serious drama can have funny moments, hysterical ones, even, and funny stories can turn temporarily dark or be uniformly dark and funny. Serious writers can pull off comedy occasionally, and humorists can write tragedy once in a while. But I think most writers know which camp they find themselves in.
I generally prefer funny. I’d rather read funny and write funny, and I think humor isn’t taken, er, seriously enough as literature. It’s just as hard, maybe harder, to write good light as to write good heavy. I frequently look for a bit of levity to add to my stories. Doing so just makes me happy.
Some of my books are more serious than others. Ever is the most somber book I’ve written, but even it has funny moments. And after I finished it I had to escape to something lighter. A Tale of Two Castles is lighthearted. The sequel I'm working on now is more serious, so I may cycle back and forth.
Of course subject matter helps determine whether or not a story is serious. I challenge the funniest person on earth to write a comedy about the abuse of dogs. If this is your subject, you probably have to be serious.
But even dire topics can be spoofed. Think of disaster movies. And, while dog abuse may be off limits, pet abuse probably isn’t. For example, you might write about a character who keeps pet cockroaches and isn't nice to them. The reader wouldn’t know which side to sympathize with.
There are also topics that most lend themselves to comedy. One of my students once wrote a story about toe jam. Tragedy and toe jam do not mix, or do not mix easily.
And there are many topics that can go either way. Romance, friendship, coming of age all leap to mind.
Whichever you’ve chosen, you can nudge it temporarily in one direction or the other. Imagine even a hospital scene. Your main character’s mother has something terminal. A clueless doctor comes in and says all the wrong things, maybe putting a weird spin on a conversation that was just taking place. The dying continues, but the characters have laughed and the reader has smiled. Or you can make the scene funny by going overboard with the sadness, intense lugubriousness, so over the top that the characters notice and the tragedy lifts for a moment.
Comedy can tip into drama too. Suppose Essie has given her best friend Riva a joke gift of hand puppets. They’re in Riva’s bedroom, acting out the behavior of a tyrannical teacher, having a fine time, being clever and funny until Riva has the teacher puppet say something hurtful to Essie that Riva has wanted to say. The remark goes back to an old incident that’s been festering. In a single line of dialogue the story's mood shifts. It may shift back just as quickly in a page or two, but for the moment the reader has stopped laughing.
Even when stories stay funny they can have serious meaning. Think of Mark Twain, one of my favorites. His Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, for instance, is wonderfully humorous and touching at the same time. Think of Jane Austen, one of the funniest writers ever, in my opinion, who was writing not only about finding love, but also about finding a life. Think of your own examples.
Here’s a prompt: Write about a camping trip. Can be a family trip, a scout troupe, a gathering of elves, whatever. In as many pages as you need, take it from humor to drama, back to humor, back to drama. End on whichever you like. Do the same for a bank robbery. Now do it - aaa! - for an airplane crash. Don’t worry about being ridiculous. Go for it!
Have fun and save what you write!
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