Posted on - 5 Comments on Still more on contest entries: the ins and outs of category selection

Still more on contest entries: the ins and outs of category selection

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After yesterday’s epic post on the various means contest entries tend to annoy the average judge, I’m going to try to limit myself to merely waxing mildly poetic today. It’s going to be hard, though, because I’m continuing the seldom-discussed but vitriol-stained topic of finding the right category in which to enter your work.

I hear some snickering out there already. “Vitriol-stained?” some head-shakers out there are murmuring. “Just a tad melodramatic, isn’t it?”

Actually, it isn’t — at least, not from the perspective of a conscientious contest judge, the kind who volunteers because gosh darn it, s/he wants to be there when the next Great American Novel is first discovered.

Wipe that smirk off your face. Being a contest judge, particularly for the first round, is typically a great big time commitment, and the stalwart souls who embrace it often do it for the love of literature, community, and humanity. Or an unvarnished affection for jumping upon those who mangle the English language.

Either way, there’s usually a passion for the written word smoldering under those judges’ robes. Which is precisely why it’s so darned disappointing when a beautifully-written entry knocks itself out of finalist consideration by being submitted to the wrong category.

Now, I’m the first to admit that it’s not unheard-of for judges to harbor some kind of squirrelly ideas of what does and doesn’t belong in a particular contest category. This is not altogether surprising, particularly for fiction, as it’s far from unusual for even the pros to disagree upon what book category would most comfortable house a particular book.

If you doubt this, you probably haven’t tried to establish a book category for your opus. For those of you who don’t know, book categories are how the industry thinks of potentially publishable work, the conceptual containers into which it is sorted — or, to put it another way, the shelf where the book would rest in a local bookstore. (For how to tell which is which, as well as where this information is likely to be found on a published book, please see the BOOK CATEGORIES listing at right.)

Due to this pervasive mindset, a writer needs to be able to say up front into what category her book would logically fall in order to query, pitch, or submit successfully in the U.S. market.

Why? Well, since generalist agents are very rare — it would be flatly too time-consuming to establish connections for more than a few types of book — book categories enable them to avoid wasting time upon submissions they do not already have the connections to place successfully.

If an agent represents only mysteries and SF/Fantasy, it would be a waste of good stationary to send him a query for literary fiction, wouldn’t it?

While contest categories tend to be far broader than the industry’s, lumping a handful together, that doesn’t mean that they don’t have the publishing world’s standards in mind. There’s an awfully good reason for this: final-round contest judges (the ones who read only the finalists’ entries) are often agents, editors, or authors who work on a daily basis with a particular category. The early-round judges, aware of this, tend to weed out entries that don’t fit neatly into the applicable book categories long before the finalist round.

That way, the logic goes, the final-round judges will be presented only with works that stand a fighting chance of getting published as sterling representatives of the best current writing in their respective categories.

If the contest of your choice does not actually list the book categories that belong within each of its contest categories, contact the organization and ask for such a list. Or — if you have already firmly categorized your work in industry terms, give your category and ask which part of the contest would best fit for it.

(Hint: you’ll probably get a substantially friendlier response to this question if you DON’T give a three-minute summary of your book — and DON’T ask it four days before the entry deadline. This is research best done well in advance, and armed in advance with a one- or two-word category description.)

It may seem pushy to ask for this information, but if a contest-throwing organization is serious about seeing its winners get published, this is an important question. After all, from the entrant’s point of view, a contest win is only as valuable as the connections it can bring.

What do I mean by that, you ask? Ideally, you want to win a contest that is recognized in the industry as a stellar judge of writing in your chosen book category. If, for instance, the organization’s definition of genre fiction doesn’t include Action/Adventure, not only is even the best Action/Adventure entry unlikely to win — agents and editors who sell that book category are not likely to be aware of the contest, either.

Think about it: which credential is going to do your book more good on your query letter, being a semifinalist in a contest that any agent in your book’s category would have known about for years, or in a contest of which the agent of your dreams has never even heard?

Trust me, if a contest has a good track record for identifying wonderful work within a particular book category, the agents and editors who handle that kind of book WILL have heard of it.

“But Anne,” I hear some of you with complex books offer timidly, “I thought you said just a couple of minutes ago that there’s often disagreement amongst the pros about the right category for a particular book. If a contest category is nebulous, isn’t there likely to be even greater disagreement?”

In a word, yes. In five words: it happens all the time. Let’s face it, category standards along the lines of we accept good fiction of every type aren’t that helpful to the writer trying to determine which contest to enter, are they?

Most contests are more specific than this, thank goodness — but it does pay to be aware that when a description refers to a particular book category, it’s seldom doing it idly. Don’t be mislead by a general category heading like Genre Fiction into thinking that any genre is welcome; this is seldom the case.

Again, read the description underneath that heading very carefully: it will probably mention the book categories that the contest organizers are expecting to see.

Because, frankly, in most cases of poor category fits, it’s not a near miss so much as trying to cram a size 14 foot into a size 6 shoe. You would be astonished — at least, I hope you would — at how often writers send work in apparently willy-nilly, trying to force their pages into a category where, by definition, their chances of winning are close to zero.

This is just an inefficient use of an entry fee.

To put it another way, this is not a situation where playing rules lawyer — “But Category 5 was entitled FICTION! How was I to know that didn’t include haiku? Both came out of my imagination!” — is at all likely to help you. As I mentioned a few days ago, there isn’t a court of appeal here: if a judge thinks that your entry doesn’t fit into the category where you entered it, you’re just out of luck.

So, once again: read every syllable of a contest’s literature very, very carefully. Particularly those category definitions.

I’m not just talking about those ultra-brief definitions that tend to grace entry forms, either. Take the time to read EVERYTHING that a contest’s website or literature says about your chosen category, to make sure that your book is, in fact, admissible.

Fair warning: what I am about to say next is extremely likely to drive literal-minded readers completely nuts, but why not consider the possibility that the category you had envisioned for your work after publication — i.e., where YOU had envisioned its being shelved in a bookstore or library after you are famous — might not be the best category in any given contest for you?

Did I just hear a collective gasp out there? “Who are you?” I hear the hyper-literal cry, “and what have you done with Anne? Haven’t you been the long-time advocate of labeling your work as accurately as possible AND in the industry’s favorite terms? Should we check your basement for pods?”

Well, yes — and defining your book with precision still the best strategy when you’re approaching an agent or editor.

However, as I mentioned above, contests often divide the literary world differently than publishing professionals do. Frequently, they use categories that have not been current since Edith Wharton won the Pulitzer. (Quick, tell me: if it were being marketed now, would THE AGE OF INNOCENCE be mainstream fiction, literary fiction, or women’s fiction?)

Here’s a radical idea: pick the CONTEST category that makes the most strategic sense, regardless of your book’s MARKETING category.

Honestly, this prospect should not make you hyperventilate; agents do this to their clients’ work all the time. Remember, the label you give the entry today is not necessarily going to stick with the book for the rest of its life, and there’s absolutely no reason that you should send agents precisely the same pages that you enter in a contest.

Take a little time, and be imaginative about it. The line between memoir and first-person narrative, for instance, can be notoriously thin. Heck, even the fine folks at Random House didn’t seem to be able to tell the difference with A MILLION LITTLE PIECES, did they? (A book that was, as I understand it, originally marketed as a novel, not a memoir.)

And there can be a very good reason to consider other categories for your work. Not to tell tales out of school, but in most contests that accept book-length works, the fiction categories tend to get more entries than the nonfiction ones.

As in SUBTANTIALLY more entries. Sometimes as in five or ten times as many, which obviously has a direct bearing on any individual entry’s chances of making the finalist round.

But mum’s the word, okay?

So why not take a good, hard look at your first chapter of your novel or memoir and ask yourself: how much would I have to change this to enter it in the other category as well? What about the nonfiction short piece category?

Is your novel really mainstream, or is it actually romance? Could it be entered as both?

If the contest offers a novel-in-progress category (as the Wisdom/Faulkner competition does, incidentally; they also have a novella category, in case you’re interested), would your barely-finished book do better there, or against the fully polished novels?

And so forth. The goal here is to gain a win to put on your writing resume and in your query letters, not to force your work into the category you have pre-selected for it.

Yes, there is usually more prestige attached to book-length categories, but, frankly, in major contests, that’s where the competition tends to be the fiercest. If a shorter-length category seems to offer you a better conceptual fit or better odds, it’s sometimes worth switching. Or multiply submitting.

In a word, be flexible. Get the win on your résumé however you can.

One of the best memoirs I have ever read, Barbara Robinette Moss’ astonishing CHANGE ME INTO ZEUS’ DAUGHTER, found its publisher because its downright lyrical first chapter won in the personal essay category in the Faulkner competition.

That was smart contest selection — and a well-deserved win. (Seriously, this is one of the books that made me long to write memoir in the first place. I certainly did not fully appreciate the art form until I read it. It’s gorgeous and painful and brilliant in a way few books manage to be.)

This is not to say that you should rush out and enter exactly the same piece in, say, both the mainstream novel and novel-in-progress categories of the same competition, or in both the genre novel and mystery short story categories.

Again, READ THE RULES. Most contests will not allow you to enter the same work in multiple categories, but some will, so check the contest rules carefully before you spend the extra entrance fee.

You didn’t hear it from me, of course, but it is not unheard-of for authors to get away with this sort of double-dipping even when it’s forbidden, if the pieces have different titles. Of course, this is terribly, terribly immoral even to consider, but often, it works.

Why? Well, most of the time, the bureaucratic part of accepting an entry entails merely noting the author’s name and title, assigning numbers so the judges don’t know who wrote what, sending the entry to the appropriate category chair, and cashing the check. So until the pieces land on the various category judges’ desks, it’s possible that no one will have read them. And it’s not as though the judges in one category discuss the entries they are reading with the judges in another.

The utterly despicable result: when an unscrupulous author is bright enough to give different titles to remarkably similar entries and perhaps mail them in separate envelopes, it is highly unlikely that anyone in the front office will have the opportunity to notice that the two distinct entries are, in fact, the same work.

Totally unethical, of course; I would have to scold anyone who did that. Or anyone clever enough to revise the work just enough between entries that, say, there weren’t more than 50 consecutive words in a row that were identical. That’s maybe one word per paragraph.

Ooh, I would have to wag my finger over anyone who went that route, boy oh boy. Really, I would. That would be just a shade too professional to be merely clever.

Well, darn: it doesn’t look as though I could manage to be brief on the subject today, either. Keep up the good work!

Posted on - No Comments on Picking the right literary contest for you, part V: just walk on by

Picking the right literary contest for you, part V: just walk on by

For reasons best known to himself, my SO has taken to playing the music of Dionne Warwick, she of the Psychic Friends Network, repetitively in our shared abode this evening. It’s not that I have anything against Ms. Warwick’s oeuvre, but the music of Burt Bacharach has always made me just a trifle, well, sleepy. It’s a tad hypnotic.

Which is perhaps why I suddenly feel compelled to share this with you:

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The way to San Jose.

That established (phew!), let’s get back to the topic du semaine: maximizing your contest entry dollar. Ideally, I’d like to convince you to look upon each potential contest entry as not merely a fresh roll of the dice to try to win the jackpot of recognition (and, the common writerly fantasy goes, an agent and major book deal immediately thereafter), but as an exercise to learn how to improve your writing.

There are basketfuls of good reasons to enter contests in general — or, to be precise, to win them: the undoubted ECQLC (eye-catching query letter candy), the writing résumé boost, the opportunities to promote yourself to conference-attending agents, to name but a few.

As I’ve been pointing out for the last few days, however, not all contests are created equal. Entering some will help you more than entering others, so it is very much to your advantage to choose your contests wisely.

This is particularly true for novelists and nonfiction writers who enter contests; poets, essayists, and short story writers have exponentially more contest venues, and entry fees tend to be correspondingly lower.

Proof: if you write in any of these shorter formats, you have only to open any issue of Poets & Writers to find dozens of contests just crying out for your work — contests that often include publication as part of the prize. So just a couple of wins in these categories, even in tiny contests, can add up to a serious upgrade in query letter decoration.

On the down side, the greater scope of opportunity renders these contest wins less valuable in the eyes of agents and editors than winning for a longer piece. In general, in fact, the adulation tends to be substantially greater for winners of categories rewarding entire books.

Which is kind of ironic, as there are comparatively few contests devoted to unpublished book-length manuscripts — and with very few exceptions, the ones that exist ask entrants to submit only a tiny fraction of the book being judged.

On average, 15-25 pages, inclusive of synopsis. And contest judges tend not to reward entries with super-short synopses, either.

A cynic might conclude from this that what these contests are actually rewarding is the ability to write a stellar first chapter and synopsis, rather than the talent to maintain interest in a story or argument for an entire book.

A purist might huff that while there are plenty of people who can write a pretty opening, these contests owe it to the literary world to guard readers from mid-book slump.

A pragmatist, on the other hand, would just look at this phenomenon and say, “Where on earth would they find volunteers to read 700 book-length entries?”

The fact is, the vast majority of contests ask for short pieces, for the simple reason that it requires much, much less effort on the sponsoring organization’s part to process them. The result, as those of you who have gone contest-searching have probably already noticed, is that book-length writers have many fewer contest fora at their disposal.

Causing novelists the world over to cry: what’s it all about, Alfie?

Don’t feel too sorry for them, poets, essayists, and short story writers — writers of book-length pieces enjoy the considerable comparative advantage of being paid astronomically more for their work than writers of shorter pieces. You’d have to place a tremendous number of poems in paying venues to make ends meet without a day job, after all.

If you want to pity them, base it on the fact that the contest universe is hugely biased toward producers of shorter pieces, making it significantly harder for novelists and such to chalk up a contest win at all.

If you write in the longer formats, yet are comfortable in the shorter, you might want to consider polishing a single short story, poem, or essay to a high luster and sending it on the contest circuit, to try to rake in a win you can add to your credentials list. Trust me, in ten years, no one is going to hold it against you that the credential you used to catch an agent’s attention was for a gorgeously terse poem, while the book you were pitching at the time was a three-volume work of science fiction.

It may not make as stunning an ECQLC impression as a win for an entire book, but hey, those of us with small rubies look good in our jewelry, too.

There is an unfortunately pervasive rumor on the writers’ conference circuit that every agency screener in the land has been instructed to toss ANY book-pushing query letter that contains reference to poetry — however slight, and even if it refers to a major contest win — directly into the trash.

This is not true, and as nearly as I can tell, has never been widely true: it’s an exaggerated way of saying that poetry contest wins are not an automatic entrée into the publishing world. Which makes some sense, actually: being able to write a good poem does not necessarily translate into being able to write a good book.

Personally, I feel that the short story and the novel are also quite different art forms, as different as painting in oils and sketching in charcoal. Witness the number of writers who publish several short stories in venues like THE NEW YORKER, and publish them in collections, only to find after they have signed a novel contract that they don’t have a novel in them.

Why? Well, often, good short pieces are about the surprise of instant revelation; novels (and book-length memoirs, and nonfiction books) are about character and argument development.

I know a lot of writers disagree with me on this subject, though — including, I should mention, virtually everyone who has ever taught or been a student in an M.F.A. program — so you should feel free to ignore my opinion entirely on this point. Try your hand in more than one format, if you like so you may enter lots of different contests.

However, if shorter work is not your forté, it probably is not worth the expenditure of energy and angst to stop writing on your longer work in order to pull something short together for a contest.

But no matter where you fall on the length spectrum, adhere to the following little axiom with the tenacity of a starving leech: make sure that every page you enter in a contest represents your best writing.

Not just writing that’s pretty good, or prose that you think might catch an agent’s eye. Or the first 20 pages of a novel that starts to sing by page 62.

If the writing you’re planning to submit doesn’t bring a tear to your eye, cover you in goosebumps, and make you murmur fervent gratitude to the deity of your choice that you were privileged to write it, it does not belong in an entry.

Seriously — you’d be amazed at how many entries judges see that consist of perfectly adequate prose, but not writing that jumps off the page. If there isn’t an arresting image, great twist, or lovely sentence on page 1, even for a book-length entry, it’s probably not going to end up in the finalist pile.

I was going to insert a joke here about looking at your potential entry and crying, I know I’ll never love this way again, but really, do you need that kind of reference rattling around in your brainpan?

There’s another criterion you might want to consider in deciding whether it’s in your best interest to enter a particular piece of writing in a contest: how closely does it conform to the demands of the current literary market?

Artistically, that may seem like a secondary consideration, but in practice — and I’m letting you in on a literary judge secret here, because that’s what friends are for — most of the time, at least initially, contest judges are not so much judging the quality of the writing in an entry as assessing its marketability.

And THEN they worry about the writing.

Yes, you read that correctly. A great idea with huge market potential, presented in a clear and professional manner, will often edge out a beautifully-written piece aimed at a tiny market niche.

I know; I was disappointed when I first learned that, too. Wow, I thought, I’ll never fall in love again.

Naturally, marketability is not the primary orientation of every contest that accepts book-length work (or portions thereof), but it weighs heavily in the scoring more often than not. There’s a pretty good reason for that, too: it’s not unusual for the final judges of a contest to be the exact same agents and editors who appear at the attached conference.

And if there is anything that THEY’re looking for, it’s marketability. Great writing is always a plus, but to win a contest, it isn’t always enough.

Knowing this BEFORE you enter a contest can save you a LOT of grief — and a lot of wasted entry fees. If your work is not particularly mainstream, select contests that cater to your niche, rather than hoping your work will fly in a more general category.

Alternatively, if your work is an absolute dead-on fit for its genre, you might not want to waste your time, energy, and resources on a contest that has traditionally rewarded very literary writing.

If you are unsure where your work falls on the spectrum, select a contest where the judges give written feedback on entries — it’s some of the least sentimental, least punch-pulling marketing advice you will ever receive. Believe me, if you’ve mislabeled your work, they’re going to let you know about it.

If you approach a feedback-generating contest in that spirit, you can learn a great deal — especially if you are new to querying and aren’t sure why your work keeps getting rejected.

Which brings me, at long last (phew again!), to the final question to ask yourself before entering a contest: does it offer advantages for non-winning entrants?

I hate to be the one to break it to you, but almost no one wins the first contest she enters.

Why? Well, most contest entrants experience a fairly sharp learning curve, for reasons I shall be covering later in this series; there are many, many simple mistakes that can, if not actually disqualify inexperienced entrants outright, at least minimize the probability of their making the finals.

Yes, even in otherwise well-written entries. And that’s over and above problems any given entry might encounter by not being written in the contest’s preferred style.

“Huh?” I hear those new to the game cry.

Even if your entry is a monument of precision and contest-rule adhesion, you may have to enter a few times to learn the rhythms and preferences of a particular contest before you win. I wish this weren’t the case; life would be easier for virtually every contest entrant on the planet if stylistic preferences were simply expressed openly, rather than the usual contest rhetoric about rewarding the best new writing out there.

Best is subjective, after all.

Yet it’s rare to the point of jaw-dropping for a contest to state up front in its rules, look, you may be a brilliant writer destined to wow millions, but if you don’t use adverbs exactly the way Annie Proulx does, don’t bother entering. Or we’re POV Nazis; sending us anything with multiple perspectives will only end in tears. Or even in case you haven’t noticed, we have never given a major award to a writer who wasn’t already a member of our organization. Other people’s entry fees may be regarded as a donation to our group; thanks very much.

I say a little prayer for you nightly, in the hope that this will change.

For these reasons, it is very much in your interest to make your first contest entries ones that will help teach you something even if you don’t land in the winners’ circle.

For instance, if you are new to the game, it is a better use of your contest-entering buck to go for contests that recognize semi-finalists, as well as finalists. That way, you maximize your probability of garnering ECQLC boasting rights from those entries.

Contests that offer significant feedback to contest entrants are very, very useful when you are first starting out, too, as you may use them to learn how to polish up future entries. In contests for novel-length work that don’t provide feedback, an entrant would need to engage in serious bribery to obtain that type of information.

To sum up: there is a whole range of benefits that can accrue from contest entry beyond winning the grand prize. By selecting the contests that meet your current needs, rather than entering blindly or with an all-or-nothing attitude, you can greatly increase the probability that entering will do you good.

And, of course, you might win! But will you still love me tomorrow?

Keep up the good work!

Posted on - No Comments on Book marketing 101: the pitch proper, part VII: the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the… wait, why is that agent’s knee jerking like that?

Book marketing 101: the pitch proper, part VII: the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the… wait, why is that agent’s knee jerking like that?

Yesterday, I tackled a reader’s question about pitching a novel that features multiple protagonists. Since I had a lot to say on the subject, I didn’t quite finish — but conveniently enough, the part I left for today dovetails nicely with a few other readers’ concerns about what should and shouldn’t make its way into the formal 2-minute pitch.

Last time, I went over a few reasons that it’s a better idea to pitch the overall story of a multiple perspective book, rather than try to replicate the various protagonists’ personal story arcs. Yes, it tends to be less confusing for the hearer this way, but there’s another very good reason not to overload the pitch with too much in-depth discussion of HOW the story is told, rather than what the story IS.

A writer has chosen the multiple POV narrative style because it fits the story she is telling, presumably, not the other way around, right? That’s the writer’s job, figuring out the most effective means of telling the tale. That doesn’t change the fact that in order for an agent to sell the book to an editor, or the editor to take the book to committee, he’s going to have to be able to summarize the story.

Writers very, very frequently forget this, but the writer is not the only one who is going to have to pitch any given book. If the story comes across as too complex to be able to boil down into terms that the agent or editor will be able to use to convince others that this book is great, your pitch may raise some red flags.

So it really does behoove you not to include every twist and turn of the storyline — or every point of view. If you really get stuck about how to tell the overarching story, you could conceivably pick one or two of the protagonists and present it as their story for pitching purposes.

“But Anne,” I hear some of you upright souls cry, “isn’t that misleading?”

Not really. Remember, the point of the pitch is NOT to distill the essence of the book: it is to get the agent or editor to ask to READ it. No one on the other side of the pitching table seriously expects to learn everything about a book in a 2-minute speech.

If they could, how much of a storyline could there possibly be? Why, in fact, would it take a whole book to tell it?

Believe me, this strategy is not going to come back and bite you later, at least not enough to fret over. After an agent or editor has heard a hundred pitches at a conference this weekend, and two hundred the weekend after that, he’s not going to say when he receives your submission, “Hey! This has 4 more characters than the author told me it did!”

I’ll get back to the desirability of telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth a little later in this post, but for now, let’s move on to the next reader question.

Insightful long-term reader Janet asks: “What do you do when you realize that you might have to change the structure of the novel? Pitch the old way?”

I hear this question all the time during conference season, Janet, and the answer really goes back to the pervasive writerly belief I touched upon briefly above, the notion that an agent or editor is going to remember any given pitch in enough detail a month or two down the road to catch discrepancies between the pitch and the book.

Remember the concept of pitch fatigue? At a conference, the average agent or editor might be hearing as many as hundred pitches a day. Multiply that by the number of days of the conference — and multiply THAT by the number of conferences a particular agent or editor attends in a season. Not to mention the queries and submissions she sees on a daily basis.

I hate to bruise anyone’s ego, but now that you’ve done the math, how likely is it that she’s going to retain the specifics of, say, pitch #472?

The upside: you don’t really need to worry if your story changes between the time you pitch or query it and when you submit the manuscript pages. Writers rewrite and restructure their books all the time; it’s not considered particularly sinister.

That being said, your best bet in the case of a book in the throes of change is to tell the story that you feel is the most compelling. If you haven’t yet begun restructuring, it will probably be the old one, as it’s the one with which you are presumably most familiar, but if you can make a good yarn out of the changes you envision, it’s perfectly legitimate to pitch that instead. It really is up to you.

As long as the story is a grabber.

The final questions du jour, which the various askers have requested be presented anonymously, concern the ethics of not mentioning those aspects of the book one is afraid might negatively influence a pitch-hearer’s view of the book.

I refer, of course, to the book’s length and whether it is actually finished.

Let me take the second one first. There is a tacit expectation, occasionally seen in print in conference guides, that a writer will not market a novel until it is completed. This is most often heard as prevailing wisdom that you should have a full draft before you pitch, in case an agent or editor asks for the entire thing on the spot.

But as I have mentioned earlier in this series, that doesn’t happen all that often anymore. 99.9% of the time, even an agent who is extremely excited about a project will prefer that you mail it — and as those of you who have submitted before already know, it can often be months before an agent reads a requested manuscript.

Which means, in practical terms, that you need not send it right away — and that, potentially, means some time that could conceivably be used for writing. After all, if you’re going to mail it anyway…

And everyone in the industry is gone on vacation between the second week of August and after Labor Day…

And if you could really get away with sending requested materials anytime between now and Christmas…

And if they’ve asked for the first three chapters only…

Or, to put it in terms of querying: if the agencies are going to take a month to respond to my letter… and then ask for the first 50 pages…

Starting to get the picture? Naturally, I would never advise anyone to pitch a book that isn’t essentially done, but the fact is, it may well be months before the person sitting across the table from you in a pitch meeting asks to see the entire manuscript.

And you know what? You’re under no obligation to send it out instantly, even then.

Although I would not encourage any of you to join the 40% of writers who are asked to submit requested materials but never do, anyone who has ever written a novel can tell you that where writing is concerned, there is finished — as in when you’ve made it all the way through the story and typed the words THE END on the last page — and then there is done — as in when you stop tinkering with it.

Then there’s REALLY done, the point at which you have revised it so often that you have calculated the exact trajectory of the pen you will need to lob toward Manhattan to knock your agent in the head hard enough to get him to stop asking for additional changes.

And then there’s REALLY, REALLY done, when your editor has changed your title for the last time and has stopped lobbying for you to transform the liberal lesbian sister into a neo-conservative professional squash player who wrote speeches for Ronald Reagan in his spare time.

But frankly, from the point of view of the industry, no manuscript is truly finished until it is sitting on a shelf in Barnes & Noble. Until the cover is attached to the book, it is an inherently malleable thing.

The fact that everyone concerned is aware of this, I think, renders a bit of sophistry on the writer’s part over the question of whether a manuscript is completed somewhat pardonable.

This does NOT mean, however, that it is in your best interests to waltz into a pitch meeting and ANNOUNCE that the book isn’t finished yet — and because agents and editors are, as a group, perfectly aware that writers are prone to levels of tinkering that would make Dante’s inferno appear uncomplex, it’s actually not a question that gets asked much.

If you are asked? Sophistry, my dears, sophistry: “I’m not quite happy with it yet, but I’m very close.”

You are close to finishing it, aren’t you?

The question of length is a bit more tortured, as it tends to generate a stronger knee-jerk response in pitches and query letters than the question of time. At every writers’ conference I have ever attended, some stalwart soul stands up and asks how long a book is too long.

And then half the room gasps at the response.

I hesitate to give limits, for fear of triggering precisely the type of literalist angst I deplored a few days ago, but here are a few ballpark estimates. First novels tend to run in the 65,000 – 100,000 word range — or, to put it another way, roughly 250 – 400 pages. (That’s estimated word count, by the way, 250 x # of pages in Times New Roman, standard format.)

Standards do vary a bit by genre, though — check the recent offerings in yours to get a general sense.

And remember, these are general guidelines, not absolute prohibitions. Few agency screeners will toss out a book if it contains a page 401,

Do be aware, though, that after a book inches over the 125,000 word mark (500 pages, more or less), it does become substantially more expensive to bind and print. So if at all possible, you will want to stay under that benchmark.

And not just for marketing reasons, or at any rate not just to preclude the possibility of a knee-jerk response to a book’s length. If a manuscript is too long (or too short, but that is rarer since the advent of the computer), folks in the industry often have the same response as they do to a manuscript that’s not in standard format: they assume that the writer isn’t familiar with the prevailing norms.

And that, unfortunately, usually translates into the submission’s being taken less seriously.

Before any of you go running off madly to chop or extend your opus, do be aware that neither a pitcher nor a querier is under any actual obligation to state the length of the manuscript up front. I’m not recommending that you actually lie, of course — but if the question is not asked, it will not behoove you to offer the information.

Remember, part of the art of the pitch involves knowing when to shut your trap. You will not, after all, be hooked up to a lie detector throughout the course of your pitch.

(Although that would be an interesting intimidation strategy, one I have not yet seen tried on the conference circuit.)

Yes, I know, many experts will tell you that you MUST include word count in your query, but if your book is longer than expected, this is not advice that will help you, is it? Although many agents say they like to see it — for the simple reason that it makes it easier to weed out the longest and the shortest manuscripts — I’ve never yet seen a good query rejected simply because it didn’t include length information.

Whew! We covered a lot of ground today, didn’t we? Since you’ve all been so virtuous throughout this long and demanding master class on marketing, I have a great big treat for you tomorrow, my friends. Call it a reward for all of that effort over the past few weeks.

Speaking of which, keep up the good work!

Posted on - No Comments on Writing compelling memoir: enough about you; what about me?

Writing compelling memoir: enough about you; what about me?

Yes, I promise: I WILL begin my long-anticipated series on pitching your work very soon. Tomorrow, in fact, if all goes according to plan. But before I wrapped up perspective for the nonce, I wanted to address a couple of questions reader Susan asked a couple of weeks back:

I know the current series re passivity pertains to fiction, but I wonder if you might offer some observations about memoir… I understand the reflective narrator is an important part of memoir, but I’m worried she may be too prominent in my MS. Any thoughts about how to reign her in? Must every scene be an action scene? Obviously, the reality of what happened shapes what is possible.

Another memoir question — with apologies for going off-topic: how critical is a well-defined narrative arc? Do all memoirs require this?

Actually, glancing back over my masses of posts, I’m rather surprised at just how few of them deal with memoir directly. So while these questions really would take a week to answer properly, instead of pushing them back until after the pitching series, I’m going to take a day to deal with them at least in passing now.

Why is it surprising that I haven’t written more on memoir, you ask? Almost all writers write about their lives at one time or another, and I’m no exception: I won a major award for IS THAT YOU, PUMPKIN?, the first draft of my memoir-still-in-publishing-limbo, A FAMILY DARKLY: LOVE, LOSS, AND THE FINAL PASSIONS OF PHILIP K. DICK. (The limbo part is a long story, with its own category at right, if you’re interested. If not, the short-short version: publishers fear the unsubstantiated opinions of people with gobs and gobs of money.) And my agent is currently circulating the proposal for a memoir I’m co-writing with an environmental and civil rights whistleblower.

Oh, and I edit memoirs all the time. I am, in short, up to my eyeballs in memoir.

So why do I so seldom write about it here? Well, at first, to be quite frank, I was trying valiantly not to whine about what was going on with A FAMILY DARKLY; I started blogging within a week of the first lawsuit threat, and my publisher told me to keep quiet about the details.

(Of the juicy and vitriol-stained variety. But I’m not supposed to talk about that.)

But beyond that, I think it’s more dangerous to generalize about memoir than about most types of writing. Writers tend to be touchier about their autobiographical efforts, for one thing, even at the sentence level. But beyond that, so much of what one might say about memoir seems at first blush self-evident: it’s a first-person narrative, and most definitely an application of the time-honored axiom to Write What You Know.

Which leads to the single biggest problem memoir manuscripts typically have: anecdotalism.

All too often, the author will have apparently told the story on the page so often that the print version carries the vagueness of a verbal telling, as if the reader were a friend who has heard the story ten or twelve times before and might interrupt this particular rendition. Or assumes, incorrectly, that the reader will already be familiar enough with the circumstances of the author’s life for only a brief sketch to be necessary.

But for a memoir to be a success, it’s not enough that the events on the page really happened, or even that the writing is beautiful, right? It must above all things be a good STORY well told, and its actors great CHARACTERS well developed.

Which means — to take Susan’s second question first — that the story arc is quite important. And, as she so rightly points out, that can be genuinely difficult to pull off, at least if you happen to believe that time runs in a linear direction: in real life, stories seldom have a clear beginning, middle, and end. Often, too, actual events crawl precisely where a reader would most like them to speed.

From a reader’s perspective, both phenomena are problematic: even if the writing is gorgeous, most readers want to be able to try to second-guess where a plot is going to go. The reader wants to be entertained, and frankly, given a choice between hearing the precise truth and a more entertaining spin, he’ll usually punk down the dosh for the more exciting version. Human nature, I’m afraid.

That doesn’t mean that the memoirist should lie to create excitement on the page — but it does mean that it pays to be selective about what should and should not be included. There’s a big difference, after all, between a diary, a journal, and a memoir: a diary chronicles quotidian happenings, a journal analyzes them — and a memoir transforms them into a great yarn.

In this very tight memoir market, you really do want to be telling a great yarn — and it’s awfully hard to construct a gripping tale without ongoing incident. Put another way, if a narrative rambles on for too long without dramatically-satisfying crises and resolutions throughout, how is the reader supposed to cheer for the protagonist? “Go, Betty! Keep on surviving!”

Frankly, unless Betty’s life was pretty vivid — as in Anne Frank-level trauma or Augustin Burroughs-level weirdness — it’s unlikely that a mere selection of episodes is automatically going to elicit the “I’m rooting for you!” response in the reader. But if Betty is an interesting character in an interesting situation, learning and growing throughout the course of the book, it’s easier to identify with her story. Particularly if she’s constantly struggling in small ways; rather than being passive.

And that, my friends, is a workable story arc, one that does not involve lying about actual events. The protagonist does not need to revolutionize the world around her in order to keep surprising the reader by how she interacts with it. Resistance can come in some pretty microscopic forms; the only completely passive person in real life is one who never questions the status quo at all.

For a brilliant example of this difficult challenge pulled off with grace, run, don’t walk to your nearest bookstore and pick up a copy of Barbara Robinette Moss’ CHANGE ME INTO ZEUS’ DAUGHTER. This is the book that made me want to write memoir in the first place: the writing is breathtaking, and she welds a soaring dramatic arc out of a collection of recollections that could very easily been simply depressing. She draws her own personality against genuinely overwhelming situations so well that it left me gasping.

Bear in mind, though, that the most compelling way to tell your own story may well not be the way you are accustomed to telling it. In constructing a memoir’s narrative, I find it very helpful to think about the memoir from our pal Millicent the agency screener’s perspective: how would I market this story to someone wandering through a bookstore? What is unique about it? What makes this story fascinating?

A surprisingly high percentage of memoir-writers don’t seem to regard themselves as very interesting; even more seem to be afraid of presenting themselves as fully-rounded characters, proverbial warts and all. Often, this seems to stem from a fear of reader reaction: am I coming across as likeable?

This can be a pretty loaded question, particularly for that large majority of memoirists who imagine their nearest and dearest as their target audiences. Or, if not their kith and kin, then the good people who will take their side AGAINST their kith and kin, which is another way of concentrating upon the reactions of the people already in one’s life.

This is perfectly understandable — after all, writing memoir means exposing one’s innermost thoughts and feelings. Most of us long for the day that our beloveds read our beautiful prose, strike tears from their eyes, and say, “Wow, babe, touché. I had no idea you felt like that. You are much deeper/more wonderful/in desperate need of help than I had ever dreamt.”

However, if you’re going to make a living as a writer, your buddies/lovers/relatives are not your sole audience, or even your primary one. Total strangers are going to need to find your story fascinating — and for it to sell to an agent or editor, that story had better start being interesting on page 1. Actually, it needs to be interesting before page one, as memoirs are generally sold in proposal form, not as entire books. This means that, generally speaking, the memoirist has only a chapter, or at most two, to grab the professional reader.

So what would make the story fascinating from Millicent’s point of view? A great story well-told, of course, with well-drawn characters — and a compelling protagonist who engages with the world around her, rather than just observing it.

Which brings me back to Susan’s first question, how to get the narrative out of the protagonist’s head: when a section gets too think-y, experiment with telling the story as though it were a novel. Concentrating on the story in which the memoirist is a character, rather than primarily upon the narrator’s reactions, can often make a real-life scene spring to life.

Step back and envision the scene as though you were not an actor in it. Who are these characters? What are the ambient conflicts? Where is this story going, and how does what is happening in the moment help get the protagonist/narrator there?

If none of these questions yield interesting answers on any given page, chances are good that the narrative is telling the story, rather than showing it, an extremely common pitfall for memoirs. Remember, the reader doesn’t know ANYTHING about the life you’re describing unless you illustrate it, and it’s the writer’s job in any kind of book to make the characters live and breathe.

So paint as full a picture as possible. Is there a way that you could flesh out a particular incident, or a character within that incident, to make it better-rounded? Are you streamlining the story to make the protagonist look better — or worse — and if so, is it flattening out the drama?

If you can honestly look at a page of text and say that it is neither telling part of the ongoing story nor developing character, I would ask you to be very brave. Gird your loins, take up the manuscript, and bracket the text that does not advance the story. Then go back a page or two and read, skipping the bracketed part.

Did the narrative make sense without it? If so, could the bracketed section be cut?

Another useful means of getting the narrative out of the narrator’s head is to sharpen the focus upon important elements of the story OUTSIDE of the protagonist. What is your story about, other than you, and how can you make it fascinating to the reader?

Yes, yes, I know — memoirs are inherently about their authors, by definition. Yet realistically, only celebrities’ memoirs sell PURELY because they’re about a particular person’s life. Think like a marketer for a moment: other than the truth of the story, what is unique about this book?

Writers don’t ask this question very often before they start jotting down the stories of their lives, but almost without exception, memoirs are about something else as well. The dying mill town where the author grew up; the traveling circus that captured his imagination; the kind aunt who went into the hospital for a hip replacement and came out with a lobotomy. All of these are rich material for grabbing the reader.

Chances are, this secondary focus is already in the book; are there ways that you could bring it out? Specifically, are there parts of the narrative where playing up this other element would take the reader out of the narrator’s head and into the larger world of the book?

Just as every life is unique, so is every memoir. But a life story needs more than truth and bravery to make a good memoir; if that were all it took, there would be no artistry involved. A great memoirist picks through her memories, selecting the juiciest moments, most telling incidents, and most compelling characters. She spins a web of enchantment, as surely as any fictional storyteller does.

It’s your story: make it shine. And, as always, keep up the good work!

Posted on - 9 Comments on So you’ve decided to adopt multiple protagonists — or, I am NOT a camera

So you’ve decided to adopt multiple protagonists — or, I am NOT a camera

I’ve been delighted by all the discussion both the passive protagonist and Point-of-View Nazi posts have generated. I had already planned to address the perils of juggling multiple protagonists in response to a question from reader a few weeks back (I hadn’t forgotten you, Cerredwyn!) and as a segue out of the passive/active protagonist tug-of-war, but it’s come up so much over the last week that I feel that we are already in it. Turns out that more of you are apparently working with multiple protagonists than I had anticipated.

For those of you new to the term, multiple protagonists is more or less what it says on the box: instead of following one character, the narrative follows several, through either several distinctive first person voices, each giving her own perspective (à la THE POISONWOOD BIBLE), or through tight third person narration that sticks to the perspective of a chosen character for a particular period of the book, then switches.

What separates the third-person version from an omniscient narrator is the focus of perspective upon a single character, rather than the masses. When the reader is seeing through Character A’s lenses, he is privy to only the sensations, thoughts, insights, etc. of Character A. This is true even if the following chapter is going to be entirely from the point of view of Character B — and Character B is in the Character A scene.

In other words, taken individually, a POVN would theoretically be happy with each of these chapters, because they stick to a single perspective.

I say theoretically, because all too often, POVNs end up dissatisfied with how rigorously the perspective rules are maintained. In many manuscripts, Character B’s perspective will bleed into Character A’s scene, or Character A into Character B’s, as though the author has temporarily lost track of whose turn it is supposed to be.

Unfortunately, professional readers tend to have a very good eye for such perspective slips, rendering multiple protagonists a brave narrative choice: it’s genuinely difficult to pull off, especially in a present-tense narrative. Once the narrative rules are set in a manuscript, even non-POVN readers will expect the author to honor them.

We’ll talk a bit later about strategies for pulling off this delicate trick well, but for now, let’s stick to the conceptual lever: why attempt a dive from such a high board?

Well, as people have been pointing out in comments for the past few days, contrary to what the POVNs will tell you, there are plenty of stories that cannot be told plausibly from a single perspective. This is particularly true in first-person narratives, where a lone protagonist may not be physically present for (or emotionally open to) all of the important scenes. Following two or more characters can allow the reader to see all of the important action from a point of view that allows for close observation of the chosen character’s emotional and physical response.

For clarification of the difference it can make, please see yesterday’s excerpt from Aunt Jane.

For the purposes of avoiding protagonist passivity, too, the multiple-protagonist strategy has some definite advantages. Switching worldview automatically gives a narrative more texture, if done well, and ideally, the ability to switch allows the reader to follow the most active character during any given scene.

Interestingly, many, if not most, aspiring writers of multiple-protagonists texts apparently do not use activity of character as the criterion for perspective choice on the scene level. Indeed, I have seen many manuscripts where the author has taken quite the opposite path, following the character who is just sitting around and watching the others emote.

The effect is rather like watching a wedding video where the camera was passed around from guest to guest: the cameraman of the moment may in fact be a fascinating person, but while he is holding that camera, what we see are the other guests’ antics; the cameraman’s perspective is evident primarily through where he chooses to focus the lens at any given moment.

What other criteria might be used, you ask? Often, simple rotation: once a Chapter 1, Character A/Chapter 2, Character B rhythm is established, many writers seem to be reluctant to mess with the rotation. But from a storytelling perspective, sometimes it makes more sense to mix the order up more.

So if you are a multiple protagonist buff, and favor the chapter- (or scene-) alternation method, do me a favor: go back to that list where you noted the scenes in which your protagonist is currently passive. Read through each of those scenes and consider: would this scene be more active if it stuck to another character’s point of view?

The more common criterion, though, appears to be a belief that scenes are better observed by those who are NOT the primary actor in them. I’ve met plenty of writers who argue that such scenes are inherently more objective.

Again, I think this is a side effect of movies and television, where the camera itself is a passive observer of the action at hand, undistracted by its own agenda. But one of the charms of the novel as an art form, I think, is its unparalleled ability to get inside characters’ heads: I can think of plotting or characterization reasons to forego that opportunity every once in a while, but as a general rule?

Are you trotting back to that scene list yet, multiple protagonist-generators? (See, I told you it would come in handy as an editing tool later on.) As you look through the scenes where the protagonist is passive, ask yourself: is he acting like a camera here, an observing machine? If so, what is the narrative gaining by his remaining somewhat aloof? What could be gained in terms of plot complexity, insight, and/or character development if the perspective moved closer to the action?

Another great benefit to telling a story from multiple perspectives is a bit subtler — and often under-exploited by writers. Having access to different characters’ minds allows individual variation in rhythm, thought pattern, and observation to mark the text distinctively, permitting more latitude of worldview and sensation than is possible with a single focus. On the page, this means that the different sections can read differently, in almost as extreme a way as if Character A and Character B were telling their stories in the first person.

My, that was a very technical description, wasn’t it? Mind if I translate that into practical terms?

Everyone has an individual way of observing the world, responding to it, and moving within it, right? A great actor playing identical twins would not play them identically, after all; that would be boring. (If you’ve never seen Jeremy Irons’ brilliant double turn in DEAD RINGERS, you’re missing out. You’re also missing out on quite a bit of gore, admittedly, but I think it’s one of the great performances on film.) So naturally, a chapter (or scene, or paragraph) told from Character A’s perspective would differ from one told from Character B’s, right?

(Yes, that’s a tall order. Tomorrow, I’ll talk about ways to make the perspectives that distinct. Humor me for the moment; here comes the cool part.)

Once a truly gifted writer has established the various mindsets, tastes, areas of overreaction, etc. for each particular protagonist firmly in the reader’s mind, the perspective switches become obvious. Viewing the world through the various character’s eyes (and minds, and bodies) starts to feel very familiar, natural, the way that you can predict that your mother’s probable reaction to receiving a big bunch of roses would be different than your sister’s.

Admittedly, it’s hard to do. But when it works — oh, baby, it’s magical.

From that peak of enthusiasm, let me leap to another: broadening the sensual range of the piece. Or, to put it another way, you wouldn’t expect a Brownie to perceive a particular scene in exactly the same way as a professional fire-eater would, would you? (Assuming, of course, that the Brownie in question ISN’T a professional fire-eater.)

This advantage is a corollary of the last, really — since different people experience the world so differently, broadening the focus of a novel onto the sensations of several people automatically allows for the introduction of distinct sets of sensations. If Character A is a prude, there would be a great deal of room to contrast his perceptions of sex with polyamorous Character B’s. Or even ordinary high school sophomore Character C’s.

The mind positively reels with the possibilities, doesn’t it?

Again, I think that writers of multiple-perspective books could exploit this more — and not merely in sex scenes. (Although that does just leap to mind as one of the human events inherently experienced differently by the various participants in the same act.) Some people have more acute hearing than others; some noses’ perceptual abilities put others to shame.

And so forth. Have some fun with it.

I have a fun exercise for playing with perceptual variations: pick scenes from each of your protagonist’s perspectives and read through them, so they are firmly in your mind.

All done? Now pick up the first and re-imagine it with the protagonist’s sense of smell gone. Changes the scene, doesn’t it?

Move on to the next protagonist, but this time, make the protagonist color-blind. Or unable to distinguish sweet from sour. Or chronically cold, or seeing through filthy eyeglasses, or…

Well, you get my point. Multiple protagonists mean multiplied opportunities for wowing the reader with your ability to convey action, environment, and characterization.

See now why a multiple protagonist narrative is hard to do well? But well worth it. Tomorrow, I shall go into some more specific advice about how to do it beautifully.

In the meantime, keep up the good work!

Posted on - 8 Comments on The return of the Point-of-View Nazis, Part II: ve haf veys of making your POV singular

The return of the Point-of-View Nazis, Part II: ve haf veys of making your POV singular

Yesterday, I re-introduced the Point-of-View Nazi, that fine ilk of professional reader who positively insists that the ONLY way to conduct a third-person narrative is to focus upon a single protagonist for the entire duration of the book. Since — as insightful new reader Betsy commented on yesterday’s post — tight third-person is so very in at the moment, the POVN is always eager to tell aspiring writers that their work is going down in flames if they take the smallest step toward omniscience or multiple protagonists.

To sum up my feeling on the subject as expressed in my last post: piffle.

I’m eager to move through a few more craft topics before we move on to the Month of Marketing that will be June, but I can’t resist spending another day on the POVNs: they are such a beautiful example of writing advice-givers who apparently do not make the smallest distinction between Thou Shalt Do This dicta and style tips that I want to spend today giving you a concrete look at what a difference taking such advice as absolute can do. So if my long-time readers will forgive me, I’m going to take another look at what a difference taking their advice can make.

This may seem like an odd thing for a professional writing advice-giver to say, but I don’t think that it’s ever a good idea to take ANYONE else’s opinion on your book as gospel. Even mine; one of the reasons I go on at such length about the rationale behind industry norms and stylistic tips is so you have enough information to make up your own minds about your writing choices.

I was notorious for this attitude back when I was teaching at the university, incidentally. Professors would come fuming (or laughing) into the faculty lounge, exclaiming, “I’ve got another of your old students, Anne! She’s questioning EVERYTHING I say.”

“Good,” I would say. “You wouldn’t want it otherwise, would you?”

I gather that some would, the POVNs among them.

Philosophically, I find POVNs’ idea that there are only two ways to tell a story — the first person singular and a tight third person singular, where the narration remains rigidly from the point of view of a single actor in the drama, usually the protagonist — troubling, and not especially conducive to the production of good art. In my experience, there are few real-life dramatic situations where everyone in the room absolutely agrees upon what occurred, and even fewer conversations where all parties would report identically upon every nuance.

Watch a few randomly-chosen days’ worth of Court TV, if you doubt this. I think that interpretive disagreement is the norm amongst human beings, not the exception.

And the disagreement amongst writing experts on this point tends to support my argument, doesn’t it?

I also believe that there are very, very few people who appear to be exactly the same from the POV of everyone who knows them. Most people act, speak, and even think rather differently around their children than around their adult friends, just as they often have slightly (or even wildly) different personalities at home and at work.

If anyone can find me a real, live person who acts exactly the same in front of his three-year-old daughter, his boss’ boss, the President of the United States, and a stripper at a bachelor party, I shall happily eat my hat. Either the person in question has serious social adjustment problems (on the order of Forrest Gump’s), or that perhaps the person who THINKS this guy is always the same in every context is lacking in imagination. Or simply doesn’t know the guy very well. Almost nobody can be completely portrayed from only a single point of view — which is why sometimes narratives that permit the protagonist to be seen from the POV of other characters can be most illuminating.

But that’s just my opinion. Read a bunch of good novels and make up your own mind.

Regardless of your own POV preferences, it’s important that you know that there are people out there who will want to impose their stylistic preferences upon yours, because they turn up with some fair frequency in agencies, as contest judges, as editors, and as critics. They are statistically more likely to be Baby Boomers than Gen Xers or Gen Yers, however, so they are less likely to be agency screeners than in years past. (Being a manuscript screener is typically someone’s first job in the business, not one kept for decades.)

Nevertheless, they do turn up, sometimes in agents’ chairs and behind editorial desks, so it’s best to be prepared for them.

When your work is attacked with phrases like, “well, it’s more or less impossible to pull off an omniscient narrator in contemporary fiction,” resist the temptation to throw the entire Great Books fiction shelf at the speaker. Recognize that you are dealing with a POVN, and take everything he says with a gargantuan grain of salt. You can’t convince a true believer; you’ll only wear yourself out with trying. Cut your losses and move on.

But before you do, consider the possibility that the critique may be useful to apply to your manuscript of the moment.

You’re surprised I said that, aren’t you? But really, POVNs do occasionally have a point: too-frequent POV switches can be perplexing for the reader to follow. One of the more common first-novel megaproblems is POV switching in mid-paragraph, or even mid-sentence — and therein lies the POVN’s primary justification for dismissing all multiple POV narratives as poor writing.

But heck, that’s what the RETURN key is for, to clear up that sort of confusion, isn’t it? When in doubt, give each perspective its own paragraph. It won’t protect you from a POVN’s rage, of course, but it will make your scene easier for your reader to follow.

Let’s take a look at how the POVN works in practice, so you may recognize him in the wild, to decide whether you want to join forces with him or not. Suppose that Jane Austen took the following paragraph from PRIDE AND PREJUDICE to her writing group, which contained a cabal of POVNs:

Elizabeth, having rather expected to affront him, was amazed at his gallantry; but there was a mixture of sweetness and archness in her manner which made it difficult for her to affront anybody; and Darcy had never been so bewitched by a woman as he was by her. He really believed, were it not for the inferiority of her connections, he should be in some danger.

As an editor, I might quibble about Austen’s use of semicolons here, but it’s not too difficult to follow whose perspective is whose, right? Yet, as the POVNs in her group would be the first to point out, there are actually THREE perspectives rolling around promiscuously together in this single brief paragraph, although there are only two people involved:

Elizabeth, having rather expected to affront him, was amazed at his gallantry… (Elizabeth’s POV)

…but there was a mixture of sweetness and archness in her manner which made it difficult for her to affront anybody. (the POV of an external observer)

Darcy had never been so bewitched by a woman as he was by her… (Darcy’s POV)

Now, a POVN in our Jane’s writing group would undoubtedly urge her to pick a single perspective (Elizabeth’s would be the logical choice) and stick to it consistently throughout the book; a POVN agent would probably reject PRIDE AND PREJUDICE outright, and a POVN editor would pick a perspective and edit accordingly — or, more commonly, send out an editorial memo saying that he MIGHT consider buying the book, but only if Jane revised it so all of the action is seen from Elizabeth’s perspective only).

Let’s say that Jane was cowed by the vehemence of the POVNs and scuttled home to take their advice. The resultant passage would necessarily be significantly different from her original intention. It would probably ending up reading rather like this:

Elizabeth, having rather expected to affront him, was amazed at his gallantry; but there was a mixture of sweetness and archness in her manner which made it difficult for her to affront anybody. Darcy remained silent.

Legitimately, that is all that she could keep, if she were going to please the POVNs completely. Comparatively terse, isn’t it?

My gut feeling is that Jane would not be particularly satisfied with this revision, both because some characterization has been lost, as well as some long-term plot clues. At this rate, the reader is not going to know how Darcy feels until Elizabeth learns it herself, many chapters later. This would, of course, mean that his proposal would be a greater plot twist, coming out of the blue, but the reader would also end up with absolutely no idea how, beginning from initial indifference, Elizabeth charms began to steal over Darcy, over his own objections.

Which would mean, really, that the title of the book should be changed to just PREJUDICE. And since PRIDE AND PREJUDICE is a quote from another novel (Fanny Burney’s excellent-but-dark 1782 novel CECILIA), I’m inclined to think that Aunt Jane would have disliked that result.

Yet if I may pull up a chair in Jane’s writing group for a moment (oh, like this whole exercise wouldn’t require time travel), allow me to point out how easily a single stroke of a space bar clears up even the most remote possibility of confusion about who is thinking what:

Elizabeth, having rather expected to affront him, was amazed at his gallantry; but there was a mixture of sweetness and archness in her manner which made it difficult for her to affront anybody.

Darcy had never been so bewitched by a woman as he was by her. He really believed, were it not for the inferiority of her connections, he should be in some danger.

The moral here, my friends, is once again that you should examine writerly truisms very carefully before you accept them as invariably true in every case. Grab that gift horse and stare into its mouth for a good, long while.

You may well find, after serious consideration, that you want to embrace being a POVN, at least for the duration of a particular project; there are many scenes and books where the rigidity of this treatment works beautifully. But for the sake of your own growth as a writer, make sure that the choice is your own, and not imposed upon you by the beliefs of others.

Now that our collective loins are girded for possible knee-jerk objections to multiple perspective narratives, I feel I can move on to the topic of juggling them with a clear conscience. Tune in tomorrow, and keep up the good work!

Posted on - 12 Comments on The Point-of-View Nazis return, bigger and badder than ever

The Point-of-View Nazis return, bigger and badder than ever

I was thinking about all of you at a film festival earlier today, during a short film showcase. (Yes, it was kind of arty film fest where one sees experimental shorts. I like to keep up with a wide variety of artistic expression.) In a documentary called Absolute Zero, a man freezes to death in what he believes to be a refrigerated (it isn’t) railway car. Trapped, with no prospect of escape, he documented his sensations while yielding to apparently psychosomatic hypothermia by writing on the car’s walls at periodic intervals. After it finished, I leaned over to my date and whispered, “Now THAT’s an active protagonist!”

See? It can be done.

Actually, I’m posting significantly later tonight than usual, because I found I was too disturbed in the wake of one of the evening’s full-length films to be either funny or objective before the dead of night arrived. The culprit: quite the creepiest film about stalking EVER, a little flick called For Love and Stacie. Not my usual fare (or even my preferred narrative style), but cleverly done and very thought-provoking.

Let’s just say that the protagonist was very active indeed, and leave it at that.

I had planned to launch into the burning issue of juggling multiple protagonists today, but all of the control issues of that film must have seeped into my consciousness: I had written only a few paragraphs before I noticed that I had already used the term “Point-of-View Nazi” in passing twice. Rather than making those of you new to this site guess what this means, I thought I might go the wacky route of spending today’s post defining it, and THEN use it in later discussion.

Hey, if you’d seen these films, you would need a little distraction, too.

So who is the Point-of-View Nazi, and how can he harm those of you who favor, say, the use of multiple protagonists?

A Point-of-View Nazi (POVN) is a reader — most often a teacher, critic, agent, editor, or other person with authority over writers — who believes firmly that the ONLY way to write third-person-narrated fiction is to pick a single character in the book or scene (generally the protagonist) and report ONLY his or her (usually his) thoughts and sensations throughout the piece. Like first-person narration, this conveys only the internal experience of a single character, rather than several or all of the characters in the scene or book.

In other words, the POVN is the Millicent who automatically throws up her hands over multiple protagonist narration REGARDLESS OF HOW WELL IT IS DONE. And while this ilk of screener has been less prominent in recent years than formerly, those of you who play interesting experiments with narrative voice definitely need to know of her existence.

Now, of course, there is absolutely nothing wrong with tight third person narration focused upon a single character, inherently: it combines the advantages of a dispassionate narrator with the plotting and pacing plusses of a single perspective. It permits the author to sink deeply (or not) into the consciousness of a chosen character without losing the emotional distance of an omniscient narrator. Since no one else’s POV is depicted, it can render the later actions of other characters more surprising to the reader, which can in turn help build suspense and conflict on the page.

It is not, however, the only third-person narrative possibility — a fact that drives your garden-variety POVN positively mad with rage.

Okay, not I’m-gonna-cause-some-mayhem mad, but certainly I’m-gonna-reject-this-manuscript mad.

All of us have our own particular favorite narrative styles, naturally, and many of us have been known to lobby for their use. What distinguishes a POVN from a mere POV enthusiast is his active campaign to dissuade all other writers from EVER considering the inclusion of more than one POV in a third-person narrative.

Just ask one — trust me, he would be more than glad to tell you how to write your book. He would like multiple-consciousness narratives to be wiped from the face of the earth with all possible speed, please. He has been known to tell his students — or members of his writing group, or his clients, or the writers whom he edits or represents — that multiple POV narration in the third person is, to put it politely, terrible writing.

It should be stamped out, he feels — by statute, if necessary. And definitely by rejection letter.

So much for most of the fiction currently being published in the English-speaking world, I guess. And so much for Jane Austen and most of the illustrious third-person narrative-writers of the 18th and 19th centuries, who used multiple perspectives to great effect.

I bring up our forebears advisedly, because one of the reasons that POVNs are so common is that in the post-World War II era, the prose stylings of the 18th and 19th centuries tended to be rejected as old-fashioned (and therefore bad) by writing teachers. “Downright Dickensian,” many a POVN has cried, covering her students’ first forays into fiction with gallons of red ink. “How can we possibly follow the story, with so many characters’ perspectives?”

I should stop here and make a distinction between the POVN and a good professional reader who objects when a narrative that HAS been sticking to a single POV suddenly wanders into another character’s head. That can be genuinely confusing to any reader, regardless of preexisting belief systems.

Think about it: if a book has been looking out of the protagonist’s eyes for 147 pages, it is a little jarring for the reader to be abruptly introduced to another character’s thoughts. The implication is that the protagonist has magically become psychic, and should be benefiting, along with the reader, from hearing the thoughts of others.

No matter what perspective you have chosen for your book, it would behoove you to give it a once-over, checking for this species of slip; it drives those of us who read manuscripts for a living batty.

A POVN, however, is not merely the kind of well-meaning soul who will point out this type of slip to aspiring writers. No, a POVN will jump upon ANY instance of multiple perspective, castigating it as inherently unacceptable, even unpublishable writing — and will rather smugly inform the author that she has broken an ironclad writing rule by doing it.

They believe it, too. Many of today’s more adamant POVNs are merely transmitting the lessons they were taught in their first good writing classes: for years, many English professors set it down as a general rule that multiple POVs were inherently distracting in a third-person narrative.

Take that, CATCH-22!

Personally, I think the focus of the narrative voice is a legitimate stylistic choice, up to the writer, rather than something that can be imposed like the Code of Hammurabi on every novel wavering on human fingertips, waiting to be written. My primary criteria for judging voice is whether a writer’s individual writing choices serve her story well, rather than rejecting a manuscript outright because of a preconceived notion of what is and isn’t possible.

Again, call me zany.

To be fair, though, as an inveterate reader of literary fiction, I have a special affection for authors whose talent is so vast that they can pull off breaking a major writing commandment from time to time. Alice Walker’s use of punctuation alone in THE COLOR PURPLE would have caused many rigid rule-huggers to dismiss her writing on page 1, but the result is, I think, brilliant.

(Fortunately, and probably not entirely coincidentally, she already had an agent when she wrote it, so she did not have to subject that stylistic choice to the vagaries of Millicent and her ilk.)

I love to discover a writer so skilled at her craft that she can afford to bend a rule or two. Heaven forefend that every writer’s voice should start to sound alike — or that writing should all start to sound as though it dropped from a single pen. Which is precisely what hard-and-fast rules of narrative style tend to produce, across a writing population.

One effect of the reign of the POVNs — whose views go through periods of being very popular indeed, then fall into disuse, only to rise anew — has been the production of vast quantities of stories and novels where the protagonist’s POV and the narrator’s are astonishingly similar. (And, wouldn’t you know it, those POVs are overwhelmingly upper-middle class, college-educated thinkers rather than doers. The kind of people who might, say, have the time and resources to go through a low-residency MFA program. Astonishing coincidence, eh? Couldn’t possibly have anything to do with the fact that the POVN’s teachers were also the ones who kept barking, “Write what you know!” could it?)

The POVNs have also given us a whole slew of books where the other characters are EXACTLY as they appear to the protagonist: no more, no less. The rise of television and movies, where the camera is usually an impersonal narrator of the visibly obvious, has also contributed to this kind of “What you see is what you get” characterization (if you’ll forgive my quoting the late great Flip Wilson in this context).

The result is a whole lot of submissions that just beg the question, “Why wasn’t this book just written in the first person, if we’re not going to gain any significant insight into the other characters?”

I suspect that I am not the only reader who addresses such questions to an unhearing universe in the dead of night, but for a POVN, the answer is abundantly obvious. The piece in question focused upon a single POV because there is no other way to write a third-person scene.

Tomorrow, I shall, I suspect, take issue with this, after the effects of that disturbing film (which was, I now realize, very much a single-perspective view) have won off a little. Be safe, everybody, and keep up the good work!

Posted on - No Comments on Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the most trustworthy one of all?

Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the most trustworthy one of all?

For the last couple of days, I have been yammering on about the dangers of including too much physical description of your characters and/or backstory in your interview scenes, particularly in ones near the opening of the book. (If you have not given a physical description of your protagonist or some insight into her primary relationships by page 182, the manuscript has a different issue.) Within this context, I asserted — perhaps rashly — that conversation where Person A describes Person B’s physical attributes TO Person B are relatively rare.

It hit me in the wee hours, however, that I had neglected to mention the primary real-life situation where speakers ROUTINELY engage in this sort of banter: people in the first throes of being in love. Especially if one or both are in love for the first time, their vocal cords are likely to emit some otherwise pretty unlikely dialogue. As in:

*** “Wow, your eyes are SO blue, Snuggums!” (Giggle.)

“Your nose is adorable, Muffin. I love that little freckle right there especially.” (Smack.)

“Who’s a little snuggle bunny? Is it you? Is it?” ***

I have nothing against love, in principle — truly, I don’t. It has produced some fairly spectacular poetry, and most of the human race. But allow me to suggest that this particular species of conversation, even when spoken live, is properly only interesting to Snuggums and Muffin themselves. Such entirely self-referential dialogue becomes intensely boring to any third-party listener with a rapidity that makes the average roller coaster ride seem languid by comparison.

Don’t believe me? Tag along on a date with two people (or heck, three or four) deep in the grip of the early stages of infatuation with each other, before the quotidian problems of which way to hang the toilet paper roll and not being able to sleep for more than five consecutive minutes before being awakened by a snore that would put Godzilla to shame have reared their ugly heads.

I doubt the conversation will be scintillating.

It can be equally deadly in print — but naturally, as writers, when we write about the enamored, we want to capture that breathless feeling of discovery inherent in infatuation. Nothing wrong with that, if it’s done well. Yet in print, rhapsodies on eyes of blue all too often produce prose of purple:

*** “Tiffany, your eyes are the most astonishing color, blue like Lake Tahoe on a cloudless day. Not a cloudless day in midwinter, mind you, when you might drive by the lake on your way to a ski slope, but the blue of midsummer, of long, dreamy days on Grandfather’s boat. Or still later, when you and I were in junior high school, and our parents shipped us off to that Episcopalian summer camp — the one that used the 1929 prayer book, not the modern edition — when we swam beneath skies of azure…” ***

You’d have to be Charles Boyer to pull of a speech like this in real life without prompting gales of laughter in Tiffany and bystander alike. Generally speaking, extensive physical descriptions like this work far, far better in narration than as dialogue.

Most people already have some fair idea what they look like: while it’s always nice to be told that one is pretty, one seldom needs to be told that one is 5’6″, even if that is indeed the case. In fact, mentioning it in real life might actually engender some resentment. Height and weight are the two self-descriptors about which the average person is most likely to —

Well, let’s be generous and not call it lying; how about equivocating?

I find this kind of misrepresentation fascinating, as it so seldom fools anyone. Most people would never dream of perjuring themselves about their eye color on a driver’s license application — but don’t most people subtract a few pounds, or perhaps 30 or 40, on general principle, on the same form? Aren’t personal ads living proof that many people are, at best, rather optimistic about their height? Don’t we all get at least a vague sense that the average movie star’s date of birth is somewhat variable, when she admitted to being five years older than we are when her first movie came out, and yet asserts that she is three years younger now?

Can’t we all live with that? I mean, River Phoenix’s four years at nineteen were good years for all of us, weren’t they?

Ethically, I don’t have much of a problem with these harmless little pieces of self-aggrandizement; for the most part, they’re victimless crimes. (“That’s he, officer — he says he’s six feet tall, but he’s 5’9″ in his stocking feet!”) In fact, being aware of this tendency can add a certain piquancy to an interview scene.

Love scenes in particular. I hate to seem cynical, but is it entirely beyond the bounds of probability the Charles Boyer-wannabe above might have slightly exaggerated the blueness of Tiffany’s eyes?

In other words, what if instead of depicting your infatuated lovers commenting upon the REAL physical attributes of one another, the dialogue made it plain that a certain amount of hyperbole was going on? Or if one professed blindness to a physical defect in the other?

Such scene might not provide just-the-facts-ma’am physical descriptions of the characters, but it might conceivably be more character-revealing — and more interesting to the reader — than the transcripts of either sweet nothings or undiluted praise.

Actually, in any interview scene, it’s worth giving some serious thought to having the information-imparter lie, distort, or soften the facts he’s conveying. If the protagonist has to guess what is and is not true, the scene automatically becomes more dynamic than if she’s just nodding and saying, “Oh, that must be so hard for you” or “What do you mean, Uncle George has left me his sheep ranch in Bolivia?”

And after all, logically speaking, in scenes where the protagonist is extracting information from a stranger, why SHOULD the imparter tell the absolute and complete truth? Would you tell your deepest, darkest secret to a complete stranger who showed up on YOUR doorstep demanding answers?

I ask this rhetorically, coming from a family where total strangers regularly show up on our respective doorsteps and demand answers about what a certain well-known deceased writer was REALLY like.

But even among those not used to being trapped into impromptu interviews, I would suspect that compulsive truth-telling to strangers is not the norm. People have been known to equivocate a bit when someone they’ve never seen before abruptly appears and demands to be told intimate life details. Even very nice people.

I know; shocking.

But such a possibility amazingly seldom seems to trouble the daydreams of your garden-variety protagonist. A good 90%, interviewers in novel submissions just accept that they are being told the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

Yet in an interview scene — again, especially one that opens a book — certainty is almost always less interesting than doubt, just as reading about complete amity is less gripping than interpersonal friction. And in the real world, complete understanding, let alone agreement, between two people is rare enough that I think it should be regarded as remarkable.

There’s a reason that most professional readers will advise against writing much in the first person plural, after all, the success of the Greek chorus narration in Jeffrey Eugenides’ THE VIRGIN SUICIDES aside. Let your characters disagree; let them quibble.

And let them lie to one another occasionally. Both your plot and your characters will thank you for allowing them to be more complex.

Keep up the good work!

Posted on - 2 Comments on Get your characters into the game!

Get your characters into the game!

My, how conducive having one’s computer out of the house is to intensive reading:  even during the last few days’ power outages, I have been spending much of my time huddled by a window or endangering my eyebrows by bending over a sputtering candle, in an effort to throw enough light upon my book.  I’ve been feeling like Abraham Lincoln, studying in his log cabin.

Windstorms, the source of the recent, lengthy power outages in my neck of the woods, were very common in the small vineyard town where I grew up.  (A child’s living a mile and a half from the nearest potential non-sibling playmate is also very conducive to intensive reading, as it turns out.)  Wind-toppled live oaks took out fences, garages, etc, all the time.  Consequently, I always know where my candles are, and how to find the matches in the dark.

When I was a senior in high school, one especially salutary windstorm brought a tree branch down upon the object I hated most in the world:  the 20-foot-high sign that I, as the luckless Commisioner of Publicity and Assemblies (the things we’ll do for college application candy, eh?) was doomed to mount with a ladder every week to post notices of upcoming football games, musicals, spelling bees, and other events not likely to be of interest to the tourists driving along Highway 29, searching for wineries with offering free tastings.  The morning after the storm, the sign was such a mangled mess that I could not even wrest most of the hand-high metal letters off it.

Gravity is sometimes a very lovely thing.  It took weeks for the school to erect a replacement sign.

That was not the only miracle that occured during that particular windstorm.  Another occured at the religious retreat center just outside of town. (Or, to be accurate, at ONE of the religious retreat centers, the establishment owned by the same church that until fairly recently owned a monk-administered winery in town, not the Moonie encampment or the former commune inhabited by a guru who, a few short years later, would abscond to Tahiti with most of the ashram’s money and one of his youngest devotees.) A charming clearing in the midst of a thicket of oak and eucalyptus trees housed a marble statue of — well, let’s just say Somebody’s Mother.  The morning after the sign-destroying windstorm, the tidying groundsman walked into the clearing to discover that four trees had fallen into it.

Somebody up there must be awfully fond of statuary, or at least like it a whole lot better than garages, for all four missed Good Ol’ Mom by a matter of inches.

I’ve thinking of that pale little statue over the last couple of days, just standing there, pensively witnessing the carnage around her, helpless to do anything to save herself from falling timber — and not just because of the windstorms.  No, she popped to mind as an exemplar of a common companion issue submissions with my last post’s Manuscript Megaproblem (show, don’t tell) often have as well:  the protagonist who remains passive in the midst of plot-moving action and/or character-revealing conflict, merely observing it.

Or, to put it in the language of the Idol rejection reasons (see October 31rst’s post, if that reference means nothing to you), that little statue was afraid to speak; she opened his mouth, but nothing came out; she didn’t trust herself enough to reply; she sat there, waiting for the information to sink in. All of these phrases are common enough signposts of a passive protagonist that, as we saw on the Idol rejection, they are now regarded as cliches in their own right.

This is not to say that passivity does not frequently occur in real life — it undoubtedly does.  TV, sports, and movies have certainly encouraged us all to be mere observers of life around us. But that doesn’t mean that it will work on the printed page.

In fact, it usually doesn’t.  A protagonist who is more of an observer than a doer can slow a novel’s pace down to a crawl — and in the early pages of a submission, a plot’s not maintaining at least a walking pace can be fatal.

And the sad thing is, writers seldom make their protagonists passive on purpose, any more than they tend to wake up in the morning, stretch, and say, “You know, I think that I should be telling rather than showing in my writing today!”

Here’s how it usually happens in otherwise solid, well-writen submissions.  The writer has established the protagonist as an interesting character in an interesting situation — well done.  The protagonist encounters a thorny problem that requires thought or discussion to solve.  (Writers LOVE working through logical possibilities in their heads, so their protagonists seldom lack for mulling material.) So the protagonist dons her proverbial thinking cap…

…and two pages later, she’s still running through the possibilities, which are often very interesting.  Interesting enough, in fact, that they would have made perfectly dandy scenes, had the author chosen to present them as live-action scenes that actually occurred.  Instead, they are summarized in a few lines, told, rather than shown.

Uh-oh.

Or the protagonist encounters another character, one with whom there is genuine, organic conflict — again, well done.  But instead of speaking up, the protagonist just THINKS about how annoying/wrong/murderous the other character is, effectively deferring the conflict to another scene.  So instead of the protagonist’s anger/rightness/suspicions fueling the scene in a way that moves the plot along, the protagonist watches as the plot moves past him.

Um, shouldn’t the protagonist have caught that bus?

In both cases, action happens TO these characters, rather than the characters’ passions influencing the action, driving the plot along.

Agents, editors, contest judges, and even members of book groups complain frequently and vociferously about passive protagonists —  and as an editor, it’s a pet peeve of mine, too, I must admit.  I suspect this feeling is shared is shared by many bloggers:  for every thousand readers of a post, perhaps 4 or 5 post comments — and of those, at least two are commercial links to other websites. As a result (and if you visit many writers’ sites on the web, you’ve probably already noticed this), bloggers tend over time to gear their content to the responders more than to the more passive members of their readerships.

If a blogger posts in the middle of the woods, and nobody responds, did the post make any noise?

But I digress. Protagonists who feel sorry for themselves are particularly prone to being mere observers: life happens to them, and they react to it.  Oh, how lucidly they resent the forces that act upon them, while they wait around for those forces to strike back at them again!  How redolent of feeling do the juices in which they are stewing become!

This is fine for a scene or two, but remember, agents, editors, and contest screeners are not noted for being fond of reading for pages and pages to find out where the plot is taking them.  Try to avoid toying with their impatience for too long.  Remember, professional readers measure their waiting time in lines of text, not pages.

To say that they bore easily is like saying that you might get a touch chilly if you visited the North Pole without a coat:  true, yes, but something of an understatement, and one that might get you hurt if you relied upon it too literally.

When in doubt about how long is too long, ask yourself this:  is there something my protagonist could DO here, however small or misguided, that would affect the status quo?  If I had him do it, would the part where he thinks/talks/worries about the situation for X lines/pages/paragraphs be necessary, or could I cut it?

I hear some grumbling out there (we bloggers have to develop superhuman hearing in order to hear those of you who don’t post comments, you know):  yes, there are plenty of good books where the protagonists sit around and think about things for chapters at a time.

But before you start quoting 19th-century novelists who habitually had their leads agonize for a hundred pages or so before doing anything whatsoever, ask yourself this:  how many novels of this ilk can you name that were published within the last five years?  Written by first-time novelists?  Okay, how about ones NOT first published in the British Isles?

Come up with many?  If you did, could you pass their agents’ names along to the rest of us with all possible speed?

Because, honestly, in the current very tight fiction market, there aren’t many North American agents who express this preference — and still fewer who act upon it in establishing their client lists.  They see beautiful writing where not much happens more than you might think.

That’s not to say that there isn’t an agent out there who would be fascinated by a well-written, first-person narrative from the point of view of that little marble statue in the middle of that wooded retreat.  Her thoughts as she stood there, motionless, as hundred-year-old oaks crashed down around her might well be priceless.  However, at some point, even the most patient agent — or editor, or contest judge, or screener — is going to want her to get the heck off her static pedestal and DO something.

Tomorrow (or whenever the local windstorms allow me the necessary electricity to post again), I shall talk about how to tell if your protagonist needs to get a more on.  In the meantime, watch out for falling trees, everybody, and keep up the good work!

Posted on - 2 Comments on Conference-gleaned wisdom, Part IX: why so tense?

Conference-gleaned wisdom, Part IX: why so tense?

No time for small talk today — I’m still plowing through the list of Idol first-page rejection reasons (please see my post of October 31, if you do not know what that means), and I have a lot of ground to cover today. Because this is the day, my friends, that we get into the real nitty-gritty: the technical authorial choices. First up on the roster: tense.

So fasten your seatbelts, campers; it’s going to be a bumpy night.

Only two of the Idol rejection reasons concerned authorial tense choices: #53, the writing switching tenses for no apparent reason, and #71, “Why is this written in the present tense?” The first, as any agency screener will tell you, is surprisingly common in submissions, for reasons unfathomable to them.

I have a pretty good guess, however, so let me take a crack at it: many, many books begin their sojourns on this terrestrial sphere written in the present tense, only to be changed to the past tense later on, when the author realizes some of the practical difficulties of perpetually speaking in the present. And visa versa. Sometimes, writers just do not remember to go back and change every single verb. Thus, unintentionally, quite a lot of submissions appear to be written in two tenses, rather than one.

Which means, ultimately, that unexplained tense switches are very frequently not deliberate choices, but proofreading problems — and ones that your word processor’s spelling and grammar checker is unlikely to catch, since it concentrates at the word and sentence level. Even — and I tremble to tell you this, but it’s often true — if two of the tenses fall within a single sentence.

“Wait!” I hear a bevy of suddenly pale souls out there crying. “What do you mean, my grammar checker won’t catch tense problems? Isn’t that what it’s there to do?”

Counterintuitive, isn’t it? But long experience has led me to conclude that on the whole, the Microsoft Corporation just does not care very much about whether the first and fourteenth sentences of your novel are consistently tensed, or even the first and the second. Yet another reason, in case you needed still more, that computerized spell- and grammar-checkers alone are not adequate replacements for good old human proofreaders.

Don’t believe me? Okay, I’m writing this in Word; let’s see what happens when I start to write a story with severe tense problems. I have to say, I’m not sanguine about this experiment, since my grammar checker routinely begs me to use the wrong form of there, their, and they’re and frowns upon every single use of a semicolon, apparently on general principle, but hey, I’m open to being mistaken about this. Here goes:

Jane threw up on her date, Stan, who backs away in horror. It was a cold, clear, moonlit night, ideal for dating. Yet Jane is sad, not because she is drinking so much, per se, but because Stan soon will be so plying her with alcohol that she will no longer have been able to tell the difference between the past, present, and future. The realization made her weep all the harder. Stan weeps as well.

Okay, now I’m running this paragon of purple prose through my very up-to-date Word grammar checker… which, you will no doubt be thrilled to hear, did not raise a single objection to the preceding paragraph. It did, however, raise all kinds of red flags about my correct use of the word “which” in my last sentence.

I rest my case. Proofread VERY carefully for unintentional tense switches, particularly if you are writing in the present tense.

Tense lapses are a problem very difficult to catch when proofreading on a small computer screen, too, or indeed, any computer screen at all, since backlit screens tend to make all of us skim. Long-term visitors to this site, shout along with me now: there is just no substitute for reading your work IN HARD COPY and OUT LOUD before you send it out. Yes, it is a touch wasteful of paper (you can always use the back side to print future drafts, right?), but no other method is as likely to catch rhythmic, continuity, and yes, tense problems.

Do I hear a bit of disgruntled murmuring out there at the idea that first-page tense switches could happen only inadvertently? Come on, speak up. No? Too shy after the Idol barrage?

Okay, then, I’ll suggest a logical possibility: the narrative could be switching between the present and the past deliberately, perhaps because the protagonist is having a flashback, or because she is not very well grounded in present reality for reasons that do not bode well for her future mental health. Maybe she is sitting in a time machine, hopping around between the era of the dinosaurs and the reign of Charles I. Or perhaps — and this is one I have seen quite often — the book concerns a traumatic event, recalled in the present tense (and usually the first person as well), so the reader will get a brief flash of it before launching into the past-tense narrative…

All right, I can feel in my bones that there are dozens of you jumping up and down at this point, hands in the air, begging to say why any of these tactics is likely to get a writer in trouble on the first page of a submission. Go ahead, shout out the answer.

Yes, you’re right: they all COULD be construed as tricking the reader, a practice we established a few days back as something the average agent admires about as much as the bubonic plague. So while this is a technique that we’ve all seen used, and used well, by successfully published authors, using it within the first couple of pages of your submission is inherently risky.

Because this is such a common authorial choice for page one, allow me emphasize just how many of the Idol rules such an opening would break, so you will get a clear sense of HOW big a risk it is. To be precise, it would run directly afoul of rejection reasons #27 (the book opened with a flashback, rather than what was going on now) and #54 (the action is told out of temporal order). Often, such openings also stumble over #10 (the opening contained the phrase or implication, “This can’t be happening.”) and #11 (the opening contained the phrase or implication, “And then I woke up.”) as well. Then, too, unexplained switching back and forth could be construed as #20 (non-organic suspense, created by some salient fact being kept from the reader for a long time), or dismissed quickly as #34 (confusing).

In other words: you can certainly do it, if you are up for attempting a stylistic high-wire act, but the chances of tumbling are awfully high. On the plus side, if you can pull off a standing triple back flip from 30 feet in the air, it is going to be a heck of a lot more impressive than doing it while both your feet begin and end on solid ground, isn’t it?

#71, “Why is this written in the present tense?”, comes as a surprise to a lot of writers. “But the present tense makes the action more immediate!” they cry. “It makes emotion pop off the page in the now! The reader gets to experience what is happening right along with the protagonist!”

Actually, there’s not a whole lot of evidence that readers DO necessarily find a well-written present-tense scene any more immediate than a well-written one in the past tense. Honestly — ask anyone in the industry. It’s the quality and tension of the writing that keeps a reader involved, they will assure you, not the tense. And I hate to be the one to tell you this, but there are plenty of industry readers who believe, rightly or wrongly, that use of the present tense is a sneaky writerly subterfuge intended to cover up pacing and plotting problems in the text.

Now, obviously, this is not particularly fair; as we all know, many writers select the present tense for perfectly valid stylistic reasons, not the least important of which is that they just think their prose sounds better that way. However, occasionally, the agents and editors who dislike the present tense have a point: writing in the present tense is inherently prone to some rather perplexing timing problems, especially if flashbacks are also told in the present tense. (Actually, it’s not all that uncommon for a story to be told in the past tense, with the flashbacks in the present, to emphasize them as thought. Three guesses how well any of the agents on the Idol panel would have liked THAT.)

How do you deal with memory, for instance, or sensations in the present that remind the protagonist or narrator of something in the past? How do you differentiate between what happened five minutes ago and what happened five years ago? And what about ongoing feelings — true yesterday, true today, and probably true tomorrow, but subject to fluctuations throughout — for which French, say, has a perfectly useable tense, but in English requires a bit more finagling?

Human beings are complex creatures, I think; in a sense, we think of ourselves in the past, present, and future fairly continuously. In practical terms, this means that conditionals, quite frankly, can become a nightmare of verbiage in the present tense, even when the same sentiment is fairly straightforward when expressed in the past.

For example, in the past, it is easy enough to say that Lauren might have done X, had not event Y occurred while ongoing condition Z was going on. Nothing too convoluted about that, right? But look how much harder it is to explain poor Lauren’s state of mind in the present: Right now, Lauren is inclined to do X. However, between the time she initially felt that way (which is, technically, already the past by this point, right?) and when she could actually put thought into action to do X, event Y occurred, making her think twice about doing thing X. It was not just Y occurring, though, that influenced her in that split second: it was also the fact that condition Z was in play at the same time, having presumably started prior to either the moment when Lauren thought X was a good idea AND the moment when Y’s intrusion convinced her that it was not, and continued into the future after both Y’s occurrence and Lauren’s response to it.

Kind of exhausting, isn’t it? After you’ve read a few thousand manuscripts, you might well start anticipating running into those problems as soon as you read a first sentence in the present tense. You might, in fact, fall into the unfair habit of automatically regarding present-tense manuscripts as needing more editing on the way to publication. And if you were the type of person who broke out in hives at the prospect of having even 32 consecutive seconds of your life taken up by an extra line or two in a query letter, you might, unfortunately, decide to save yourself some trouble by regarding being written in the present tense as a strike against a book.

This is not to say that you should not write in the present tense, if you feel it serves your story and your style best. Most emphatically not. It does, however, mean that it would be prudent to make sure that the first few pages of a present tense submission are ultra-clean, ultra-logical — and that they demonstrate some very tangible payoff for the work’s being written in the present tense, rather than the past. A payoff, ideally, that will make even a prejudiced anti-present-tenser sit up straight and cry, “Why, have I been wrong for all these years? Here is a perfectly marvelous outcome of using the present tense!”

Remember what I said earlier about high wire acts?

So if you favor writing in the present tense, it might be a good idea to read your opening over and ask yourself: “Okay, absent reasons of immediacy, is it clear here what purpose is being served by this tense choice, just in case my submission falls under the eyes of a present tense-hater?”

And remember, that answer should be pretty apparent on the page, if it is going to help your work get past the screener. No matter how fine your off-page justification is, it will not help if your submission gets rejected before you get a chance to talk with the agent about your work.

I had hoped to get to dialogue today, but I seem to have gotten carried away by the tense issue. More tomorrow, and in the meantime, keep up the good work!

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Conference-gleaned wisdom, Part V: the usual saws

Were you surprised that I took the weekend off? It’s part of a new plan of mine, called GETTING A LIFE, over and above my writing. Having just finished a major revision — and composing a list of what I had and had not revised at the editor’s suggestion — I felt the need to, well, not work my usual 7-day week this week. Call me wacky.

“Wait just a second,” I hear some of you cry. “A list of changes in the manuscript? Why? And why on earth would any sane person ask a writer to produce such a list immediately after completing a revision, when the writer is likely both to be exhausted and a trifle touchy about her choices?”

The list of revisions is not all that unusual a request, once an editor at a major house is involved with a book. Essentially, it’s a time-saving technique. (Remember last week, when I was telling you about how busy such people are? Well…) Since manuscript changes are often quite subtle, and the editor is not going to sit down and read the old version and the new side-by-side (sorry to be the one to break that to you), many agents like to have the author provide a list, to forestall the objection that not enough of the requested changes were made.

Also, in the unlikely (a-hem) event that the editor does not have time to read the whole thing again, with such a list in hand, it would technically be possible for an editor to flip through and see what changed very quickly. Essentially, the list is the equivalent of having the author produce the kind of 1- or 2-page report that editorial assistants routinely provide on a project being considered.

I’m giving you a heads-up about it now, because very frequently, such a request comes as the proverbial ball out of left field to the writer, who is then left scrambling. If you know it’s a possible future request, you can just keep a list while you are revising. Clever, no?

And no, Virginia: no one in the industry will ever ask you for such a list for revisions performed BEFORE they saw the manuscript in the first place. So unless you want to get in practice maintaining such a list (not a bad idea, actually), there’s really no reason to keep track of your changes in such a concrete way until after you sign with an agent. But thereafter, it can be very, very helpful to be able to say, “What do you mean, I didn’t take your advice? Here’s a list of what I changed at your behest!” and be able to back it up.

Okay, back to demystifying the Idol list. (If that sounds as though I have suddenly begun speaking in tongues, please see my post for October 31.) I know I’ve been harping on it at some length now, but my theory is that conference advice is not all that useful as long as it remains, well, general. I think it’s important to take the overarching principles and show how they might be applied to a specific manuscript.

That being said, today’s group is the most literal, and thus the easiest to remove from a manuscript. These are the rejection reasons that are based upon sheer repetition: any agent in the biz has not only seen these phenomena before at least 147 times — and thus will automatically assume that a submission that contains them on the first page is not fresh — but has, in all probability, seen any particular one at least once already on that same DAY of screening.

So best to avoid ’em, eh?

I know, I know: a great deal of the advice out there, including mine, is about standardizing your manuscript prior to submission. But standard format and avoiding certain common mistakes is, perhaps counterintuitively, a way to make the individuality of your writing shine more. To put it the way my grandmother would: fashion can make almost anyone look good, but if a woman is truly beautiful, wearing conventional clothing will only make it more obvious that it is the woman, and not the clothes, who caught the eye of the observer. (Need I add that my grandmother was VERY pretty, and that a great many of her metaphors were style-related?)

The rejection reasons listed below are something different: they are common shortcuts that writers use, and thus, not particularly good ways to make your writing stand out from the crowd. Using the numbering from the original list, they are:

9. The opening contained the phrases, “My name is…” and/or “My age is…”
10. The opening contained the phrase, “This can’t be happening.”
11. The opening contained the phrase or implication, “And then I woke up.”
12. The opening paragraph contained too much jargon.
13. The opening contained one or more clichéd phrases.
14. The opening contained one or more clichéd pieces of material. Specifically singled out: our old pal, a character’s long red or blonde hair, his flashing green eyes, his well-muscled frame.
21. The character spots him/herself in a mirror, in order to provide an excuse to describe her long red or blonde hair, his flashing green eyes, his well-muscled frame.

Why do I identify them as shortcuts, and not clichés? Well, obviously, the clichés are clichés, but the rest are the kind of logical shorthand most of us learned in our early creative writing classes. Introduce the character (which manifests as “My name is…” and/or “My age is…”). Show perspective (“This can’t be happening.”). Add a twist (“And then I woke up.”).

The result is that agents and their screeners see these particular tropes so often that they might as well be clichés. They definitely don’t scream from the page, “This is a writer who is doing fresh new things with the English language” or “This story is likely to have a twist you’ve never seen before,” at any rate, and when a screener is looking to thin the reading pile, those are not the messages you want to be sending.

Another early English-class lesson has shown up with remarkable frequency on this list. Guesses, anyone? (Hint: the applicable rejection reasons are #9, the opening contained the phrases, “My name is…” and/or “My age is…”, #14, a character’s long red or blonde hair, and #21, the character spots him/herself in a mirror.)

Congratulations, all of you graduates of Creative Writing 101: they all stem from the oft-repeated admonition to provide physical descriptions of the character right away. As in within the first nanosecond of their appearing in a scene.

Also, I suspect, a lot of us read short stories and books in our formative years that used the age, sex, and/or gender (yes, they’re different things: sex is biological, gender is learned) as THE twist. I, personally, have never gotten over my disappointment that Stanley Kubrick’s film of Anthony Burgess’ book A CLOCKWORK ORANGE glossed over the single most shocking line in the book, when we learn that the thief, rapist, and murderer who has been narrating the story is only 15 years old. (Hey, that was still shocking, back in the 1960s.)

Basically, all of these rejection reasons share the same underlying objection: there’s nothing wrong with providing some physical description of your characters right off the bat, of course, but by all means, be subtle about it. And need a full description come on page 1?

Yes, I know that movies and TV have accustomed us to knowing what a character looks like from the instant he’s introduced, but is there a particular reason that a READER’S first experience of a character need be visual?

We are left to wonder: why are characters so seldom introduced by smell? Or touch?

But no: day in, day out, screeners are routinely introduced to characters by front-loaded visual images, a good third of them bouncing off reflective vases, glasses of water, and over-large silver pendants. We’ve all seen it: the first-person narrator who catches sight of his own reflection in a nearby mirror in order to have a reason to describe himself. Or the close third-person narration that, limited to a POV Nazi-pleasing single-character perspective, requires that the character be reflected in passing sunglasses, a handy lake, a GAP window, etc., so that he may see himself and have a reason to note his own doubtless quite familiar physical attributes.

Just once, could a passerby gag on a hero’s cloud of cologne?

Setting aside for a moment just how common the reflective surface device is — in the just over two hours of the Idol session, it happened often enough to generate laughs from the audience, so multiply that by weeks, months, and years of reading submissions, and you’ll get a fair idea — think about this from the screener’s perspective. (Did your tongue automatically start to feel burned by that latte?) That screener is in a hurry to find out what the novel’s story is, right?

So ask yourself: is that harried reader likely to regard superadded physical description of the protagonist as a welcome addition, or as a way to slow the process of finding out what the story is about? And how is she likely to feel about that, 5 minutes into her ostensible lunch break?

I know; it’s disillusioning. But as I keep reminding you, no one in the industry regards the submitted version of a manuscript as the final version. Nor should you. If you’re absolutely married to an upfront physical description, you can always add it back in to a subsequent draft.

The last remaining reason — #12, the opening paragraph rife with jargon — is, too, a shortcut, usually a means to establish quickly that the character presented as a doctor, lawyer, police officer, soil engineer, President of the United States, etc., is in fact a doctor, lawyer, police officer, soil engineer, or President of the United States. However, how often do you think a screener — or any other reader, for that matter — gets a couple of lines into a novel, then throws it down in disgust, exclaiming, “There’s just not enough esoteric technical talk here! I just do not believe that this character actually is a doctor/lawyer/police officer/soil engineer/President of the United States!”

Doesn’t happen. The opposite, however, does: when there’s too much profession-specific word usage, it can be very off-putting for the reader. And for the screener. With predictable results.

Do I hear some disgruntled murmuring out there? Are some of you saying, “But people talk like that in real life!”

Yes, they do. There are also plenty of people who say, “Um…” at the end of every other sentence, and mobs of nice folks who interlard every conversation with, “like” and “y’know.” Heck, there are millions of people in the world who speak Estonian — yet you would not even consider submitting a manuscript to an English-speaking agent or editor where every third word was in that fine language, would you? Even if your story were actually set in Estonia?

Save it — if not entirely, then at least until after page 5. Or after you have successfully cleared the submission hurdle.

We’re just whipping through this list, aren’t we? Soon, all of our first pages will be so snazzy that none of us will get rejected until page 2. In that happy hope, keep up the good work!

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Conference-gleaned wisdom, Part III: will someone hold this massive grain of salt for me?

The last couple of days’ posts have been kind of in-your-face, haven’t they? Sorry about that — it’s the nature of the beast, when the ruling out of submissions is the subject. It makes us all feel as if we’ve been mauled by wildebeests.

Still, there’s no need to despair: to succeed in this business, all you need to do is make your initial pages technically perfect, fresh without being weird, and not hit either any of the pet peeves listed on the Idol list (see Halloween post) or personal ones that the agent in question might have. Your characters need to be original, your premise interesting, and your plot riveting, beginning from Paragraph 1. Oh, and you need to be lucky enough not to submit your brilliant novel about an airline pilot on the day after the agent/screener/editorial assistant/editor has had his/her heart broken by one.

Piece o’ proverbial cake, right? Well, my work is done here. Let me know how it all turns out!

Okay, so it’s not such a piece of cake: it’s a genuinely tall order, and a long list of don’t can be very, very intimidating. Before you throw up your hands in despair, let’s break down the Idol list of rejection reasons into bite-sized chunks.

The first thing to realize about this list of agents’ pet peeves is that some of them are, in fact, personal pet peeves, not necessarily industry-wide red flags. The trick is recognizing which ones. Right off the bat, a cursory glance at the list identified these as probably personal, rather than endemic:

15. The opening had a character do something that characters only do in books, not real life.
25. The first lines were dialogue.
33. Agent can’t identify with the conflict shown.
37. The story is corny.
42. The opening scene is too violent (in the example that generated this response, a baby’s brains were bashed out against a tree).
43. Too gross.
44. There is too much violence to children and/or pets.
46. The story is written in the second person.
47. The story is written in the first person plural.
48. The narrator speaks directly to the reader (“I should warn you…”), making the story hyper-aware of itself qua story.

How do I know these are not widely-shared rejection criteria? Well, experience, but also, critical analysis. Allow me to explain.

Before I start dissecting them, however, one caveat: just because these particular pet peeves are agent-specific does not mean that you should simply disregard them. If you are planning to submit to any of the agents on that particular panel, it would behoove you to take them very seriously indeed: one of the reasons that savvy writers go to conferences, after all, is to pick up information about the specific likes and dislikes of particular agents, right? Use this information strategically, to help target your queries and submissions to the agents most likely to enjoy your work.

When you’re listening to such a panel, there are a couple of signals that will alert you to something being an individual’s pet peeve, rather than a general rule. First — and this happens surprisingly frequently — the person uttering it will actually say, “Maybe it’s just my pet peeve, but…” or “It really bugs me when…” It’s a pretty safe bet that what is said next is a personal preference.

I know: it’s subtle.

Also — and this happened on the Idol panel — sometimes an agent will express an opinion, and the other agents will guffaw at him, fall over backwards in surprise, slap him across the face and tell him he’s an idiot, etc. Again, all of these are pretty good indicators that we’re not talking about a widely-recognized agency norm here.

Take, for instance, #25, when agent Daniel Lazar’s having flagged a submission because the first lines were dialogue. Now, this is a pretty sweeping criticism, isn’t it? A lot of very good books open with dialogue. So how did the people in the Idol audience know it was his pet peeve? Well, he began his critique with, “Maybe it’s just me, but…” And after he said it, the agent sitting next to him turned to him and said, “Really?”

Starting to get the hang of this?

I know I’ve been saying it a lot lately, but it bears repeating: no matter how much talk there is about how agents all want to represent the same kinds of books, it’s just not the case — they are individuals, with individual tastes. And thus, logically, if your submission is rejected by one, you have most emphatically NOT been rejected by the entire industry: you’ve been rejected by one individual within it. Learn what you can from the experience, then move on.

This can be very, very tough for writers who have just spent a small fortune on a conference, pitched to five agents, and had requested materials rejected to do. Yet at even the best conference, no group of agents small enough to fit in the same room, much less on the same panel, are a representative sample of how the entire industry will react to your work. I know it’s discouraging, but it just doesn’t make statistical sense to throw up one’s hands after a single round of rejections.

To put this in perspective, it’s not uncommon for an agent to submit a client’s work to as many as 50 different editors. If #48 says yes, that’s a win, just as surely as if #1 did. Should you really be any less tenacious in marketing your book to agents than you would expect your agent to be in marketing it to editors?

Now that you know why it is so important to differentiate between what you absolutely must change on your first page and what you should change for a particular agent’s eyes, let’s go back to our list of rejection reasons. When in doubt, ask yourself, “Why is that particular one problematic?” Often, the most obvious answer will be that it’s the agent’s personal opinion.

Let’s apply this test to #15, the opening had a character do something that characters only do in books, not real life. On the panel, Rachel Vater cited this reason quite often, but neither of the other agents mentioned it. (Did that make your personal-preference antennae perk up, campers?) She gave those who were listening another clue: a couple of times, she cast this objection as,
“Well, I’VE never done what the character does here…” Ding ding ding!

Even if she had not been kind enough to flag this as a personal preference, we probably could have figured it out. In this context, she specifically singled out a character who shook his head to clear an image or bring himself back to reality, as in, “he shook his head to clear the cobwebs.” Now, as an editor, I do have to admit, this is an action that one sees occur with GREAT frequency in manuscripts; in fact, I suspect one could make a pretty good case without trying very hard for labeling it as a cliché.

However, this is not how the rejection reason was phrased, was it? No, it was cast as “this is something a normal person would not do.” Unless we’re talking about psychopathic behavior, a statement like this is almost certainly based upon personal experience. Everyone’s opinion of normal is different.

So what this critique is really saying is, “People in my circles and from my background don’t do such things.” Fine; good to know: now we can target the submission away from the agent who cannot imagine doing such a thing and toward an agent who can.

Getting the hang of this yet?

The same logic test can be applied, with the same result, to #33 (agent can’t identify with the conflict shown, which is obviously based upon personal taste) and #37 (the story is corny, which must be based upon the observer’s background and worldview). Note the preference, and move on to the next agent.

If you get the same response from a few different agents, it might be worth a second look at your opening pages for plausibility. For the sake of your future success, it is probably worth bearing in mind that an awfully high percentage of agents and editors are from upper-middle clad backgrounds, and thus graduated from rather similar English departments at rather similar liberal arts colleges, mostly in the northeastern part of the country. Their brothers (and sisters) dated one another’s sisters (and brothers). If you can’t imagine reading from such a point of view, it might behoove you to find a first reader who can, to subject your manuscript to the Minor Ivy Plausibility Test.

The personal preference test, believe it or not, can also be applied to reasons associated with voice choice. Yes, I know: since it’s a technical matter, it seems as though rules should govern whether it’s acceptable, right? Not really. There are plenty of agents and editors who don’t like the first person voice much, and, as we saw on the list, other voices may raise hackles: 46. The story is written in the second person; 47. The story is written in the first person plural. What could such statements be OTHER than personal preferences?

#48 (the narrator speaks directly to the reader, making the story hyper-aware of itself qua story) is also a personal preference about narrative voice, albeit a more subtle one: for some readers, including the agent who cited this rejection reason, a first-person narration that breaks the third wall is jarring, a distraction from the story. However, there are plenty examples of published books that have used this device to great comic or dramatic effect: I would not send the agent that expressed this preference THE DIARY OF ANNE FRANK, for instance.

Now, I suspect that those of you intrepid souls out there devoted enough to literary experimentation to write a narrative in the first person plural (like THE VIRGIN SUICIDES) or second person (like BRIGHT LIGHTS, BIG CITY) are probably already aware that your work will not be to everyone’s taste, any more than excellent fantasy writing will be to the taste of an agent who prefers hard-bitten realism. But this doesn’t mean that the experiment isn’t worth trying, is it? Just choose your querying targets accordingly.

I should wrap up for today, but before I do, I want to take a quick run at another group of reasons, #42 (the opening scene is too violent), #43 (the opening scene is too gross), and #44 (there is too much violence to children and/or pets). The first two are obviously in the eye of the beholder: a quick look at any bookstore will tell you that there is no shortage of violent material. So it can’t possibly be an industry-wide rule, right?

However, pay close attention when an agent draws a line about this: this is not an agent to query with a violent piece, and he’s doing the people who write violent pieces a favor by being up front about it. (For instance, an agent who asks that I do not mention him here — see post of May 10, 2006 for explanation — routinely tells conference attendees not to send him children-in-peril stories; he doesn’t like them.) Do be aware that although most of us have had writing teachers beat into our brains that a story needs an opening hook, to draw the reader in, it is possible to go too far.

And because 99% of the writers out there have had this advice beaten into their brains, too, agents see a LOT of shocking things on first pages. A super-violent opening scene, then, will not necessarily make your submission unique.

Which is why I slipped in #44 (there is too much violence to children and/or pets). Yes, this is a matter of personal preference — how much violence is too much and how much is just right is in the eye of the beholder, just as much as ideal porridge temperatures were on the tongues of the Three Bears — but this one happens to be a preference that at LOT of editors share, and for good reason: it can be very hard to market a book that features a lot of violence against wee ones. And don’t even get me started about how hard it would be to sell a cozy mystery with a dead cat in it…

My overall point has, I hope, become clear. Everyone chant together now: “Never kill off the detective’s pet kitty.”

Well, yes, that’s a pretty good rule of thumb, but I was really thinking of a broader point about submission and conference lore: not everything that pops out of an expert’s mouth should be regarded as a hard-and-fast rule. Use your judgment, or you might end up staggering under the weight of such a heap of pronouncements that you’ll be terrified of breaking a rule every time you sit down at your keyboard.

I’ll try to demystify more of the Idol rejection reasons tomorrow. In the meantime, keep up the good work!

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The return of the Point-of-View Nazis, part II: let’s see you try that with Jane Austen, buddy

As a follow-up to my series on differentiating between absolute rules of the trade (e.g., double-spaced, single-sided manuscript submissions) and stylistic advice (e.g., ideally, dialogue should be revealing enough that littering the text with adverb-heavy tag lines should be unnecessary), I was discussing Point-of-View Nazis yesterday. I’m eager to move along to my much-anticipated series on what new wisdom I gleaned at the two conferences I attended this month, but POVNs are such a beautiful example of writing advice-givers who apparently do not make the smallest distinction between Thou Shalt Do This dicta and style tips that I wanted to spend today giving you a concrete look at what a difference taking such advice as absolute can do.

For those of you coming to the discussion late, POVNs are those fine folks who go around telling other writers that there are, in effect, only two possibilities for narrative voice: the first person singular and a tight third person singular, where the narration remains rigidly from the point of view of a single actor in the drama, usually the protagonist. Philosophically, I have to admit, I find the idea that these are the only ways to tell a story troubling. In my experience, there are few real-life dramatic situations where everyone in the room absolutely agrees upon what occurred, and even fewer conversations where all parties would report identically upon every nuance. (Watch a few randomly-chosen days’ worth of Court TV, if you doubt this.) I think that interpretive disagreement is the norm amongst human beings, not the exception.

And the disagreement amongst writing experts on this point tends to support my argument, doesn’t it?

I also believe that there are very, very few people who appear to be exactly the same from the POV of everyone who knows them. Most people act, speak, and even think rather differently around their children than around their adult friends, just as they often have slightly (or even wildly) different personalities at home and at work. If anyone can find me a real, live person who acts exactly the same in front of his three-year-old daughter, his boss’ boss, the President of the United States, and a stripper at a bachelor party, I would be quite surprised.

I would also suggest that either the person in question has serious social adjustment problems (on the order of Forrest Gump’s), or that perhaps the person who THINKS this guy is always the same in every context is lacking in imagination. Or simply doesn’t know the guy very well. My point is, almost nobody can be completely portrayed from only a single point of view — which is why sometimes narratives that permit the protagonist to be seen from the POV of other characters can be most illuminating.

Admittedly, my own experience trying to get a truthful memoir onto shelves near you has undoubtedly sharpened my sense that points of view vary. As some of you know, my memoir has been in press for the last year and a half, held hostage by a (the last I heard) $2 million lawsuit threat. At no point has anyone concerned suggested I was lying about the events in my book: the threatened lawsuit has been purely about whether I have the right to present the story of my family from my point of view, rather than someone else’s – like, say, the people who want the $2 million.

So I have seriously been forced to spend the last year and a half defending the notion that a rather well-known neurotic might have acted differently around his long-term friends than he did around, say, his own seldom-seen children or interviewers he barely knew. Why, the next thing you know, the POVNs huff, writers like me might start implying that people act differently when they’re on drugs than when they’re sober! Or that perhaps celebrities and their press agents do not always tell the absolute truth when promoting their work!

I can only refer you to your own experience interacting with other human beings for the most probable answers to these troubling questions. I only ask — and it’s a little request; it won’t hurt anybody — that those who believe that there is only a single way of looking at any person, situation, or institution occasionally admit the possibility that the whole complex, wonderful world is not reducible to a single point of view, that they would not try to silence those who do not see the world as merely a reflection of their own minds. Or at least that they would not insist that anyone who sees something from a different perspective should be hounded.

Enough about me and my books, however — let’s get back to how POVNs can affect you and yours.

Regardless of your own POV preferences, it’s important that you know that there are people out there who will want to impose their stylistic preferences upon yours, because they turn up with some fair frequency in agencies, as contest judges, as editors, and as critics. They are statistically more likely to be Baby Boomers than Gen Xers or Gen Yers, however, so they are less likely to be agency screeners than in years past. (Being a manuscript screener is generally someone’s first job in the business, not one kept for decades.) Nevertheless, they do turn up, sometimes in agents’ chairs and behind editorial desks, so it’s best to be prepared for them.

To make it clear what the stakes are, I would guess that roughly 2/3rds of fiction submissions are written in the third person, so obviously, the question of POV choice in third person narrative is thrust upon agents and editors on a practically hourly basis. Of those 2/3rds, a hefty majority will include more than one POV in the narration. So, really, a POVN reader has a significant advantage in rejecting the day’s submissions speedily: if you were willing to stop reading the moment a second character’s impressions show up, you could reject most manuscripts before the middle of page 2.

This is not to say that you should abandon multiple perspectives if you love them, or that you should systematically strip your submissions of any insights but the protagonist’s, out of fear of rejection by a POVN. Again, personally, I don’t believe that a single POV does most characters or situations justice, so I tend toward a broader narrative view, particularly for comedy.

Call me wacky, but if I want to hear a single POV, I reach for a first-person narrative.

These are merely my personal preferences, however; I am perfectly willing to listen to those who disagree with me. And there I differ from the POVN, who wishes to impose his views upon everyone within the sound of his voice, or reach of his editorial pen. To put it in terms of my posts of the last few days, the POVN wants all of us to regard his preferences as hard-and-fast rules.

When your work is attacked with phrases like, “well, it’s more or less impossible to pull off an omniscient narrator,” resist the temptation to throw the entire Great Books fiction shelf at the speaker. Recognize that you are dealing with a POVN, and take everything he says with a gargantuan grain of salt. You can’t convince a true believer; you’ll only wear yourself out with trying. Cut your losses and move on.

But before you do, consider the possibility that the critique may be useful to apply to your manuscript of the moment.

You’re surprised I said that, aren’t you? But really, POVNs do occasionally have a point: too-frequent POV switches can be perplexing for the reader to follow. One of the more common first-novel megaproblems is POV switching in mid-paragraph, or even mid-sentence — and therein lies the POVN’s primary justification for dismissing all multiple POV narratives as poor writing.

But heck, that’s what the RETURN key is for, to clear up that sort of confusion, isn’t it? When in doubt, give each perspective its own paragraph. It won’t protect you from a POVN’s rage, of course, but it will make your scene easier for your reader to follow.

Let’s take a look at how the POVN works in practice, so you may recognize him in the wild, to decide whether you want to join forces with him or not. Suppose that Jane Austen took the following paragraph from PRIDE AND PREJUDICE to her writing group, which contained a cabal of POVNs:

“Elizabeth, having rather expected to affront him, was amazed at his gallantry; but there was a mixture of sweetness and archness in her manner which made it difficult for her to affront anybody; and Darcy had never been so bewitched by a woman as he was by her. He really believed, were it not for the inferiority of her connections, he should be in some danger.”

As an editor, I might quibble about Austen’s use of semicolons here, but it’s not too difficult to follow whose perspective is whose, right? Yet, as the POVNs in her group would be the first to point out, there are actually THREE perspectives rolling around promiscuously together in this single brief paragraph, although there are only two people involved:

“Elizabeth, having rather expected to affront him, was amazed at his gallantry…” (Elizabeth’s POV)

“but there was a mixture of sweetness and archness in her manner which made it difficult for her to affront anybody” (the POV of an external observer)

“Darcy had never been so bewitched by a woman as he was by her…” (Darcy’s POV)

Now, a POVN in our Jane’s writing group would undoubtedly urge her to pick a single perspective (Elizabeth’s would be the logical choice) and stick to it consistently throughout the book; a POVN agent would probably reject PRIDE AND PREJUDICE outright, and a POVN editor would pick a perspective and edit accordingly — or, more commonly, send out an editorial memo saying that he MIGHT consider buying the book, but only if Jane revised it so all of the action is seen from Elizabeth’s perspective only).

Let’s say that Jane was cowed by the vehemence of the POVNs and scuttled home to take their advice. The resultant passage would necessarily be significantly different from her original intention. It would probably ending up reading rather like this:

“Elizabeth, having rather expected to affront him, was amazed at his gallantry; but there was a mixture of sweetness and archness in her manner which made it difficult for her to affront anybody. Darcy remained silent.”

My gut feeling is that Jane would not be particularly satisfied with this revision, both because some characterization has been lost and for plotting reasons. At this rate, the reader is not going to know how Darcy feels until Elizabeth learns it herself, many chapters later. This would, of course, mean that his proposal would be a greater plot twist, coming out of the blue, but the reader would also end up with absolutely no idea how, beginning from initial indifference, Elizabeth charms began to steal over Darcy, over his own objections. Which would mean, really, that the title of the book should be changed to just PREJUDICE.

(I’m assuming for the purposes of my argument here that every single one of you has read PRIDE AND PREJUDICE, which is perhaps not a warranted assumption. However, if you are even vaguely interested in writing humorous scenes in the English language, you really should do yourself a favor and check Aunt Jane’s work out of the library.)

Yet if I may pull up a chair in Jane’s writing group for a moment (oh, like this whole exercise wouldn’t require time travel), allow me to point out how easily a single stroke of a space bar clears up even the most remote possibility of confusion about who is thinking what:

“Elizabeth, having rather expected to affront him, was amazed at his gallantry; but there was a mixture of sweetness and archness in her manner which made it difficult for her to affront anybody.

“Darcy had never been so bewitched by a woman as he was by her. He really believed, were it not for the inferiority of her connections, he should be in some danger.”

The moral here, my friends, is once again that you should examine writerly truisms very carefully before you accept them as invariably true in every case. Grab that gift horse and stare into its mouth for a good, long while. You may find, after serious consideration, that you want to embrace being a POVN, at least for the duration of a particular project; there are many scenes and books where the rigidity of this treatment works beautifully. But for the sake of your own growth as a writer, make sure that the choice is your own, and not imposed upon you by the beliefs of others.

To paraphrase the late Mae West, if you copy other people’s style, you’re one of a crowd, but if you are an honest-to-goodness original, no one will ever mistake you for a copy.

Keep up the good work!

Posted on - 2 Comments on Characters who think, part III

Characters who think, part III

For the last couple of days, I have been addressing the issue of how to integrate your characters’ thoughts into the narrative. As usual when there’s not a hard-and-fast rule, I found I had a lot to say on the subject. Yesterday, I discussed several different common methods of indicating thought, means both more and less graceful than just saying that a character is thinking:

I want to go to the prom more than I want to live to be twenty-five, Janie thought.

Today, I want to talk about playing with these methods to reflect both your personal writing rhythms and your writing goals in particular instances. How you choose to present thought in a given scene should be reflective of the action and tone of the scene, as well as your personal writing preferences. Sometimes, the extra beat allowed by saying “he thought” works better in the scene than a more direct method; some methods allow you to show different sorts of characterization than others.

To help you decide, let me show you the same scenelet done several ways. (Please bear in mind that I haven’t figured out how to make the blog show italics, so italicized phrases are indicated by asterisks at the *beginning and end* of the phrase.) First, let’s look at a fairly traditional way to handle thoughts in a group scene in a third person narrative, maintaining narrative perspective while choosing one person’s thoughts to highlight:

Dr. Butler tucked his stethoscope into his Tattersall vest. “I’m afraid there will be no prom for you tonight, Gertie.”

Gertrude was furious. Chicken pox, smicken pox, she thought, seething. It was perfectly obvious to her that her sly little sister had been at her while she slept with a permanent red marking pen. *Little vixen. I’ll boil your guts for soup.* “But I’m feeling fine!”

Wilma pushed her back down on the bed with a firm motherly hand. “Now, sweetie, don’t jump around while you’re feverish. I’ll dig your old mittens out of the attic, so you can’t scratch yourself into a bloody mess.”

This works fine with a variety of styles, doesn’t it? Not even the most virulent of point-of-view Nazis would have a problem with this. But what about in a tighter third-person narrative, one where the narrative voice is more closely aligned with the protagonist? Let’s look at this scene again, with the perspective tightened onto Gertrude:

Boring old Dr. Butler tucked his stethoscope into that stupid Tattersall vest his wife never seemed to be able to pry off his decrepit corpse. What, were those stripes painted onto his torso? “I’m afraid there will be no prom for you tonight, Gertie.”

Chicken pox, smicken pox. That little beast Janie must have been at me with a permanent red marking pen while I napped. Yeah, right, Mom: I needed that extra fifteen minutes of beauty sleep. “But I’m feeling fine!”

Wilma shoved her back down on the bed with a hand that must have been soaking in an ice bucket for an hour. Predictably, she came down on the side of caution. Big surprise. “Now, sweetie, don’t jump around while you’re feverish. I’ll dig your old mittens out of the attic, so you can’t scratch yourself into a bloody mess.”

Allows for a bit more character development, doesn’t it? If you have a very opinionated protagonist, this method can give you a lot of freedom to bring out character richness through perceptual details, without the tedium of identifying the protagonist as the instigator of these ideas each and every time.

Do be aware, though, that this method can get a bit confusing if you have chosen to write a scene from an omniscient narrator’s perspective, showing the reader several different characters’ thoughts within the same scene. In that case, you will need to label who is thinking what, for clarity:

Oh, no, Dr. Butler thought, time to bring on another spoiled pretty girl tantrum. “I’m afraid there will be no prom for you tonight, Gertie.”

Get your hands off me, you filthy old trout, Gertrude seethed. Chicken pox, smicken pox. “But I’m feeling fine!”

Wilma pushed her back down onto the bed: Mother of God, the girl’s flesh was burning up. “Now, sweetie, don’t jump around while you’re feverish.” She frowned the livid scratch welts on Gertrude’s arms. *I would have killed for skin as smooth as hers at that age, and all she can think to do is hack at it?* I’ll dig your old mittens out of the attic, so you can’t scratch yourself into a bloody mess.”

Janie clutched Gertrude’s taffeta dress against her body, watching herself surreptitiously in the full-length mirror on her sister’s closet door. How like Mom not to notice the hot water bottle under Gertie’s pillow. How like Gertie not to notice that her wake-up coffee had been loaded with ipecac. It was amazing, how little grown-ups paid attention. “Seems a shame to waste such a beautiful dress. Shall I go downstairs and tell Tad you’re not going?”

As you may see, a number of different methods of identifying character thought can be made to work well. Here, without overuse of the verb to think, the reader can enjoy the humor inherent in the unspoken battle of perspectives. However, it requires constant vigilance on the part of the writer to make sure that we always know who is thinking what. Even a single thought left floating in the air can throw off the rhythm of the whole scene.

That’s a long answer to your question, Cathryn, but I hope it helps. It’s less a issue of finding a rule to apply in every instance, I think, than figuring out what will serve your character and scene — as well your narrative — best in the moment.

Thanks for the thought-provoking question. And everybody, please: when you are puzzled by a technical issue, or curious about the business side of the industry, or anything in between, feel free to post a comment or question about it, and I’ll take a swing at addressing it. Chances are, you’re not the only reader who wants to know.

Keep up the good work!

Posted on - 1 Comment on Characters who think, part II

Characters who think, part II

Yesterday, I was talking about the spirited debate amongst givers of writing advice regarding how to designate characters’ thoughts — other than simply saying,

Is this what monkey brain casserole is supposed to taste like? Sharon wondered.

Today, as promised, I shall give you an overview of the different schools of thought on the subject. To set the ground rules firmly in advance: for the purposes of this discussion, I am assuming that we are talking about a third-person narrative with a strongly defined protagonist. Why? Well, in other flavors of narrative choice, the strictures of the narrative point of view tend to dictate how and when the reader is shown a character’s thoughts.

Too technical? Allow me to clarify. In a first-person narrative, the only thoughts we could possibly be hearing are the protagonist’s, right? So there is no reason to present them in any special way: they are simply a part of the narrative point of view.

Ditto with a multiple first-person perspective, or a multiple protagonist tight third person. In these cases, there are structural signposts for the reader about whose perspective is whose — the most popular, of course, being the simple act of devoting one chapter to each perspective à la THE POISONWOOD BIBLE — so again, the form dictates whose thoughts will appear when. The thoughts are presented in exactly the same way as the rest of the facts retailed by the narrative.

However, most fiction is written in the third person, so let’s concentrate on that. When the narrative voice is distinct from that of the protagonist’s mind, it is necessary to differentiate on the page between what the character is thinking and what is the author’s commentary on the situation at hand. Often, the problem is that the writer wants to keep the thoughts in the first person, to be literal about them, but it’s not the only option the writer has. Here are a few ways it can be done.

First, there is the italicization method. With this stylistic choice, all of the protagonist’s thoughts are italicized, to differentiate them from speech. The thoughts, of course, are all in the first person and present tense. In practice, Method #1 will look something like this — or, wait a minute, I can’t do italics in blog format. So you’re going to have to use your imagination: the bits within asterisks are italicized.

*I shouldn’t be doing this.* With shaking hands, Brenda reached for the glass in front of her. *What would my mother say? Or Aunt Grizelda?*

Basically, these italicized thoughts operate as asides to the overall narrative. Sometimes, these asides are thrown into the middle of narrative sentences — *Oh, God, are my readers going to like this format?* — to heighten dramatic tension.

The primary advantage of this method is obvious: there is never any question about what is thought and what is speech. (In case you were not aware of it, placing a reader’s thoughts within quotation marks is fairly universally frowned upon. Just because Jane Austen does it doesn’t mean you should.) This can be a big plus, if your protagonist is given to thoughts that are diametrically opposed to what she is saying:

*That muumuu’s pattern is giving me a migraine.* “I love your dress,” Tanya said.

However, as I mentioned yesterday, there is a sizable contingent of the editorial community — that’s the fine folks working at publishing houses, in addition to freelancers like me — that believes this is sort of a cheap writing trick. This view is especially common amongst editors who frown on typeface tricks in general. They like the text, only the text, and all of the text, please.

A second popular method is to reserve the italics for the especially vehement thoughts, simply stating that the other, more pedestrian things floating around your protagonist’s head are indeed thoughts:

What a lucky break, Janie thought dreamily as Tad drove them down the boulevard in his red Astin-Martin roadster. Who’d have thought that her sister’s getting chicken pox would mean that Janie would get to go to the prom as a freshman? Here she was, sitting next to the most popular boy in school, a spray of green gladioli firmly pinned to where the strap would have been on a less formal dress, and — *watch out for that horse in the road!*

Now, I was a little tricky here, because this example contains Methods #3 and #4 as well. In the first sentence, I have used Method #3, taking the very direct route of just telling the what Janie is thinking and that she is thinking it. This is useful when the actual phraseology of the thought deserves emphasis. However, a lot of professional readers consider it a bit clumsy if used too often, just as using a tag line (he said, she cried out) every time a character utters a sound is considered a bit ham-handed by the pros. Method #3 is best used sparingly, for this reason.

In Method #4, later in the paragraph, I have moved the content of Janie’s thoughts into third-person narration, providing a little analytical distance from her daydreaming mood. (Because, really, who would be able to describe her own situation accurately while being driven to the prom by a dreambarge like Tad?) This can be very effective when the narrative voice is very distinct from the character’s; it’s a great choice for displaying irony to its utmost advantage, for instance.

Method #5 is my personal favorite, because it allows such tight pacing: in an ultra-tight third-person narrative, where the narration is letting the reader in on the protagonist’s thoughts, bodily sensations, and perceptions as the primary lens through which the story is told, the protagonist’s thoughts are integrated seamlessly into the text. In this method, whenever it is apparent whose perspective the reader is seeing, there is no need to identify the thoughts as such:

There’s no such thing as a ghost. Repeat it a hundred times, and it might start to feel true. Stacey’s skin rippled slightly over the back of her neck: a passing breeze from that window behind her that was definitely closed the last time she checked, certainly. It would be stupid to turn around and double-check it. Yes, the window must just be in sore need of refreshed weatherstripping. There is no such thing as a ghost, silly. There’s no such thing as a ghost.

Perfectly clear that Stacey is thinking, isn’t it? Yet not once does the narrative either say so or have to use typeface or punctuation tricks to show it.

Tomorrow, I shall discuss the various ways that each of these methods can help you establish the mood and point of view of a scene. In the meantime, keep up the good work!

Posted on - No Comments on The myth of objectivity

The myth of objectivity

Hello, readers –

I have received some interesting responses to Monday’s post about the relative weight public and private history should bear within the context of a memoir or novel (Getting the Balance Right, April 17). A couple of people have asked: what about objectivity? Aren’t there times when an objective statement of what is going on in a situation is appropriate?

A good question, and one that certainly deserves discussion.

Obviously, there are writing situations where a certain narrative distance from the subject matter is helpful to telling the story, but I’m not convinced that narrative distance, even far narrative distance drained of personal commentary, is inherently the best way to describe anything. Nor is it actually objectivity. Objectivity, it seems to me, does not lie in discounting the personal experiences of the individuals actually affected by the larger phenomenon being described, or in stripping a story of emotional content; these, too, are reflective of the storyteller, conscious choices in selecting a style of narrative. True objectivity, I think, consists of showing a complex story in all of its emotional roundness without judging the characters.

Or, as Mme. de Staël put it, “Philosophy is not insensitivity.”

I know, I know: this is most emphatically not how we generally hear the term objectivity bandied about. Most often, we hear it when the news media praises itself: they like to plume itself on presenting stories objectively. However, as anyone who reads a newspaper regularly can tell you, how journalistic objectivity tends to be more about balance than distance.

The imperative to balance, as if there were two – and only two – sides to any issue, often results in articles that are only superficially objective, or in presenting only the extreme ends of the opinion spectrum. In an effort to be fair to both sides, both of the sides presented are depicted as equally reasonable, and often as though humanity itself were split absolutely 50-50 on the point. Which in turn often gives the impression that every group involved is equally large. (I’m not giving the obvious example here, just in case any future president should want to appoint me to the Supreme Court.) And while the journalists who write such articles seem to be adhering strictly to the rules of objectivity they were taught in journalism school, the necessity of selecting which two POVs to highlight as the only two relevant arguments, and which to relegate to obscurity, is in itself a subjective choice.

We’ve all seen such articles, right? The structure is invariable: begin with personal anecdote about Person A on Side 1; move to description of overarching phenomenon; state what the government/institution/neighborhood proposes to do about the phenomenon; bring in the opinion of Person B on Side 2; discuss what that side would like to see done; project future. Then end with an emotion-tugging paragraph on the lines of, “But for now, Person A must suffer, because of all of the events mentioned in Paragraph 1.”

Now, is that truly objective? It is balanced, sure, insofar as Side 1 and Side 2 are both presented, but since the structure dictates that the reader gets more personal insight into Person A’s plight, doesn’t the choice of which side to highlight first dictate where most readers’ sympathies will tend?

How a journalist or any other writer – or a researcher, or a pollster, for that matter — chooses to frame a question is necessarily subjective. Heck, how we decide what is important enough to write about is a subjective decision. If you doubt this, I suggest an experiment: the next time a telephone pollster calls, pay attention to how the questions are worded. Are they encouraging certain answers over others? How many questions does it take you to figure out who commissioned the poll?

I’m not saying that writers should throw objectivity out the window; far from it. However, I think we are all better writers when we recognize that how we choose to define an objective stance is in itself a subjective decision. Once a writer acknowledges that, taking authorial responsibility for those choices rather than assuming that distance equals objectivity, and that objectivity is good, all kinds of possibilities for nuance pop up in a manuscript.

Which bring me back to my original point: from the reader’s POV, the objective facts of a story are only important insofar as they affect the characters the reader cares about – and that can be liberating for the writer.

Movies and television have encouraged the point of view of the outside observer in writing, because no matter how close a close-up is, the camera is always separate from the action it is filming to some extent. But not every story is best told from the perspective of a complete stranger standing across the room from the action; even in an impersonal third person narrative, the author can choose, for instance, to take into account the observations of the crying toddler being held in the arms of the protagonist. It is not better or worse, inherently, than the detached, across-the-room perspective; it is merely different. Considering it as a possibility, along with a wealth of other perspectives, gives the writer much more control in producing the desired emotional impact of the scene.

Not all editors, writing teachers, or readers would agree with me, of course, but as there were so many writers trained in the early-to-mid 20th century that a Graham Greene-like narrative detachment was the best way to tell most stories, resulting in a generation and a half of schoolchildren being taught that the third person SHOULD mean complete narrative detachment, I’m not too worried that all of you out there won’t hear the other side’s arguments.

I’m not a journalist, after all; I am under no obligation to show you Side 2.

One final word on objectivity for those of you who write about true events: many, if not most, members of the general public confuse their individual points of views with objectivity, as if we all went through life testifying in an endless series of depositions. They insist that their individual, subjective POVs are the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, and therefore the only possible version of events.

I bring this up, because literally every author I have ever met who has published a book about real events that took place within living memory (myself included) has been accosted at some point by someone whose life was touched by the events depicted in the book. These accosters then summarily inform the author that she is WRONG; the events certainly did not take place that way, and no reasonable person could possibly think that the author’s POV on the subject was accurate. Obviously, then, the author must have maliciously twisted the facts on purpose, to create a false impression. Because facts are objective, by gum: in a well-ordered universe, everyone would tell every story exactly the same way. And the author is left standing there, open-mouthed.

I just wanted you to be prepared.

Sadly, there is little the author can do in response to this sort of attack. It’s been my experience, and my true story-writing friends’, that it does not aid matters to try to explain the basic principles of subjectivity vs. objectivity or point of view to people who insist there can be only one POV. It’s easiest to treat such vehement amateur readers as you would a professional POV Nazi: thank them warmly for their input and get out of the room as fast as you can. If you see them in future, run the other way. (For further tips on handling the POV-insistent, see my posting, Help! It’s the Point-of-View Nazis!, April 4 and 5.)

I honestly do wish that I could give all of you who write about real events a talisman that would protect you, but this is one of those areas where writers tend to view the world very differently than others. If you doubt this, just try explaining to someone who has never tried to write what it’s like to be so grabbed by a story that you feel compelled to lock yourself up for months on end to get it on paper, without anyone paying you to do it. By non-artistic standards, the creative drive just doesn’t make sense.

I say that we should just embrace the fact that we think differently from other people. Let’s revel in our subjectivity, because insightful subjectivity is the cradle of original authorial voice. Let’s not be afraid to tell stories from various subjective POVs, where that’s appropriate. And above all, let’s not fall into the trap of believing that there is only one way to look at any given event. Or even two. Because that kind of attitude robs writers of the power to choose how best to tell the story at hand.

As Flaubert tells us, ”One does not choose one’s subject matter; one submits to it.” Let the story’s complexities dictate how it needs to be told.

Keep up the good work!

– Anne Mini

Posted on - No Comments on When good perspectives go bad

When good perspectives go bad

Hi, readers –

The PNWA website is about to undergo a major overhaul! Even as I write this, dedicated volunteers are scurrying like mad to make it even more fabulous, user-friendly, and stuffed to the brim with useful info for all of you than it already is. Really, I think you’re going to like the results.

So don’t panic if you don’t hear from me for a few days – the blog will be in limbo during the reconstruction period, but it will emerge from its cocoon soon. My section will now be called GUEST WRITER, which makes me feel sort of like The Man Who Came to Dinner, but I promise you, even under the new aegis, I shall keep up my patented barrage of friendly advice, inside insights, and unsolicited gratuitous opinions. If you have writing- or publishing-related questions you would like to see me tackle, send ‘em in; if I don’t know the answer, I’ll find someone who does.

So to prepare you for the Grand Silence, I’m writing you an extra-long installment today.

Yesterday, I wrote about what a good idea it is to avoid incorporating stereotypes into your submissions, lest you offend someone on the reading end of your query. (Hint: not everyone in New York is straight, for instance.) In glancing over the post, I realized that I left a rather important piece out of the argument: even amongst agents, editors, and judges who are not easily affronted, stereotypes tend not to engender positive reactions.

Why? Well, in a new writer, what they’re really looking to see is originality of worldview and strength of voice, in addition to serious writing talent. When you speak in stereotypes, it’s extremely difficult to see where your authorial voice differs markedly from, say, the average episodic TV writer’s. It’s just not all that impressive.

Occasionally, though, marked personal prejudices may actually lend verve to a voice – which, incidentally, is nowhere more true than in the world of blogs. We bloggers are SUPPOSED to be absolutely open about our pet peeves and quirky interpretations of the world around us: the whole point is to be as subjective and stream-of-consciousness as possible. Think about it: wouldn’t Andrew Sullivan’s blog about politics (well worth reading, if you haven’t) be far less interesting if he didn’t make his personal views so VERY apparent? Or, for that matter, wouldn’t this very blog be rather uninteresting without my pronounced (albeit charming, I hope) personal slant? That’s why the mainstream news’ attempts at establishing themselves as legitimate blog voices tend to fall so flat: they are the products of PR research; the individual bizarreness has been utterly ironed out.

Minor vitriol, however, or personal anger masked as fiction, usually does not work so well in print. I cannot even begin to count the number of novels I have edited that contained scenes where the reader is clearly supposed to be incensed at one of the characters, yet it is not at all apparent from the action of the scene why.

Invariably, when I have asked the authors about these scenes, they turn out to be lifted directly from real life. The author is always quite astonished that his own take on the real-life scene did not translate into instantaneous sympathy in every conceivable reader. (These scenes are pretty easy for professionals to spot, because the protagonist is ALWAYS presented as in the right for every instant of the scene, a state of grace quite unusual in real life. It doesn’t ring true.) Ultimately, this is a point-of-view problem — the author is just too close to the material to be able to tell that the scene doesn’t read the way he anticipated.

Many writers assume (wrongly) that if someone is annoying in real life, and they reproduce the guy down to the last whisker follicle, he will be annoying on the page as well, but that is not necessarily true. Often, the author’s anger so spills into the account that the villain starts to appear maligned. If his presentation is too obviously biased, the reader may start to identify with him, and in the worst cases, actually take the villain’s side against the hero. I have read scenes where the case against the villain is so marked that most readers will decide that the hero is the impossible one, not the villain.

This revenge has clearly not gone as planned.

Yes, I called it revenge, because revenge it usually is. Most writers are very aware of the retributive powers of their work. As my beloved old mentor, the science fiction writer Philip K. Dick, was fond of saying, “Never screw over a living writer. They can always get back at you on the page.”

Oh, stop blushing. You didn’t honestly think that when you included that horrible co-worker in three scenes of your novel that you were doing her a FAVOR, did you?

My most vivid personal experience of this species of writerly vitriol was not as the author, thank goodness, but as the intended victim. And at the risk of having this story backfire on me, I’m going to tell you about it as nonfiction. Call it a memoir excerpt.

A few years ago, I was in residence at an artists’ colony. Now, artistic retreats vary a great deal; mine have ranged from a fragrant month-long stay in a cedar cabin in far-northern Minnesota, where all of the writers were asked to remain silent until 4 p.m. each day (ah, the recently departed Norcroft! I shall always think of you fondly, my dear – which is saying something, as I had a close personal encounter with an absolutely mammoth wolf there, and a poet-in-residence rode her bicycle straight into a sleepy brown bear. And both of us would still return in an instant.) to a let’s-revisit-the-early-1970s meat market, complete with hot tub, in the Sierra foothills. They’re sort of a crap shoot.

This particular colony had more or less taken over a small, rural New England town, so almost everyone I saw for a month was a painter, a sculptor, or a writer. The writers were a tiny minority; you could see the resentment flash in their eyes when they visited the painters’ massive, light-drenched studios, and compared them to the dark caves to which they themselves had been assigned. I elected to write in my room, in order to catch some occasional sunlight, and for the first couple of weeks, was most happy and productive there.

When I go on a writing retreat, I like to leave the trappings of my quotidian life behind, but not everyone feels that way. In fact, several artists had brought their significant others to the colony, or, to be more accurate, these pairs had applied together: writer and photographer, painter and writer, etc. One of these pairs was a very talented young couple, she a writer brimming with potential, he a sculptor of great promise.

Although every fiber of my being strains to use their real names, I shall not. Let’s call them Hansel and Gretel, to remove all temptation.

Hansel was an extremely friendly guy, always eager to have a spirited conversation on topics artistic or social. No one in the dining hall was really surprised that he often brought the conversation around to sex; honestly, once you’d sat through his slide show of breast, leg, pudenda, buttocks, breast, you’d have to be kind of dense not to notice where his mind liked to wander. He and I talked in a friendly manner whenever we happened to sit at the same table. I loaned him a book or two. We had coffee a couple of times. Never occurred to me to think anything of it.

Until Gretel started fuming at me like a dragon.

Now, I don’t know anything about the internal workings of their marriage; perhaps they liked jealousy scenes. I don’t, but there’s just no polite way of saying, “HIM? Please; I DO have standards” to an angry lover, is there? So I started sitting at a different table in the dining hall. A little junior high schoolish, true, but better that than Gretel’s being miserable.

The fellowship that each writer received included a requirement that each of us do a public reading while we were in residence. Being a “Hey – I’ve got a barn, and you’ve got costumes!” sort of person, I organized other, informal readings as well, so we writers could benefit from feedback and hearing one another’s work. I invited Gretel to each of these shindigs; she never came. Eventually, my only contact with her was being on the receiving end of homicidal stares in the dining hall, as if I’d poisoned her cat or something.

It was almost enough to make me wish that I HAD flirted with her mostly unattractive husband.

But I was writing twelve hours a day (yes, Virginia, there IS a good reason to go on a retreat!), so I didn’t think about it much. I had made friends at the colony, my work was going well, and if Gretel didn’t like me, well, we wouldn’t do our laundry at the same time. My friends teased me a little about being such a femme fatale that I didn’t even need to do anything but eat a sandwich near the couple to spark a fight, but that was it.

At the end of the third week of our residency, it was Gretel’s turn to give her formal reading to the entire population of the colony, a few local residents who wandered in because there was nothing else to do in town, and the very important, repeated National Book Award nominee who had dropped by (in exchange for an honorarium) to shed the effulgence of her decades of success upon the resident writers. Since it was such a critical audience, most of the writers elected to read highly polished work, short stories they had already published, excerpts from novels long on the shelves. Unlike my more congenial, small reading groups, it wasn’t an atmosphere conducive to experimentation.

Two writers read: beautifully varnished work, safe stuff. Then Gretel stood up and announced that she was going to read two short pieces she had written here at the colony. She glanced over at me, and my guts told me there was going to be trouble.

The first piece was a lengthy interior monologue, describing Hansel and Gretel having sex in vivid detail. Just sex, without any emotional content to the scene, a straightforward account of a mechanical act which included – I kid you not – a literal countdown to the final climax. It was so like a late-1960’s journalistic account of a rocket launching that I kept expecting her to say, “Houston, we’ve got a problem.” I have no objection to writers who turn their diaries into works for public consumption, but this was graphic without being either arousing or instructive. Also, I’d read some of Gretel’s work before: she was a better writer than this.

However, the painters in the back row hooted and hollered, so maybe I just wasn’t the right audience for her piece. Still, looking around the auditorium, I didn’t seem to be the only auditor relieved when it ended. (“Three…two…one.) Call me judgmental, but I tend to think that when half the participants are pleased the act is over, it’s not the best sex imaginable.

Gretel’s second piece took place at a wedding reception. Again in the first person, again with herself and her husband identified by name, again an interior monologue, this had some legitimately comic moments in the course of the first page. As I said, Gretel could write.

Somewhere in the middle of page 2, a new character entered the scene, sat down at a table, picked up a sandwich – and suddenly, the interior monologue shifted, from a gently amused description of a social event to a jealously-inflamed tirade that included the immortal lines, “Keep away from my husband, bitch!” and “Are those real?”

She read it extremely well; her voice, her entire demeanor altered, like a hissing cat, arching her back in preparation for a fight. Fury looked great on her. And to her credit, the character that everyone in the room knew perfectly well was me – her physical description would have enabled any police department in North America to pick me up right away – never actually said or did anything seductive at all; her mere presence was enough to spark almost incoherent rage in the narrator. And Hansel sat there, purple-faced, avoiding the eyes of his sculptor friends, until she finished.

There was no ending to the story. She just stopped, worn out from passion.

I was very nice to her; what else could I do? I laughed at her in-text jokes whenever it was remotely possible, congratulated her warmly on her vibrant dialogue in front of the National Book Award nominee, and made a point of passing along a book of Dorothy Parker short stories to her the next day.

Others were not so kind, either to her or to Hansel. The more considerate ones merely laughed at them behind their backs. Others depicted her in cartoon form, or acted out her performance; someone even wrote a parody of her piece and passed it around. True, I did have to live for the next week with the nickname Mata Hari, but compared to being known as the writer whose act of fictional revenge had so badly failed, I wouldn’t have cared if everyone had called me Lizzie Borden. And, of course, it became quite apparent that every time I was nice to Gretel after that, every time I smiled at her in a hallway when others wouldn’t, it was only pouring salt on her wounded ego.

Is there anything more stinging than someone you hate feeling sorry for you?

So do think twice about what you’re putting on the page, particularly for work you are submitting to contests, agencies, or small presses – or, heaven forbid, reading to a group of people you want to like you, or at any rate your narrator. Revenge fantasies tend to announce themselves screamingly from the page. If you’re still angry, maybe it’s not the right time to write about it for publication. Your journal, fine. But until you have gained some perspective – at least enough to perform some legitimate character development for that person you hate – give it a rest. Otherwise, your readers’ sympathies may ricochet, and move in directions that you may not like.

It’s always a good idea to get objective feedback on anything you write before you loose it on the world, but if you incorporate painful real-life scenes into your fiction, sharing before promotion becomes ABSOLUTELY IMPERATIVE. If you work out your aggressions at your computer – and, let’s face it, a lot of us do – please, please join a writing group. Find good readers you can trust to save you from looking like a junior high schooler on a rampage.

And Gretel, honey, in the unlikely event that you ever read this, you might want to remember: revenge is a dish best served cold. Or, as Philip used to say, never screw over a living writer. You never know who might end up writing a blog.

Hey, I’m only human.

Keep up the good work!

— Anne Mini

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Help! It’s the point-of-view Nazis!

A couple of postings ago, I used the term “point-of-view Nazi” in passing. Several readers have asked me since what it means, if I made it up, and what was I doing making light of Nazism, anyway? For the benefit of those unfamiliar with the phrase, I shall write about this phenomenon at length today.

 

No, I did not invent the term: it’s fairly widely-known industry jargon. A point-of-view Nazi (POVN) is a reader — often a teacher, critic, agent, editor, or other person with authority over writers — who believes firmly that the ONLY way to write third-person-narrated fiction is to pick a single character in the book or scene (generally the protagonist) and report ONLY his or her thoughts and sensations throughout the piece. Like first-person narration, this conveys only the internal experience of a single character, rather than several or all of the characters in the scene or book.

 

Now, there is absolutely nothing wrong with this kind of narration: it combines the advantages of a dispassionate narrator with the plotting and pacing plusses of a single perspective. It permits the author to sink deeply (or not) into the consciousness of a chosen character without losing the emotional distance of an omniscient narrator. It renders the later actions of other characters more surprising to the reader. It is not, however, the only third-person narrative possibility — a fact that drives your garden-variety POVN wild.

 

All of us have our own particular favorite narrative styles, and many of us have been known to lobby for their use. What distinguishes a POVN from a mere POV enthusiast is his active campaign to dissuade all other writers from EVER considering the inclusion of more than one POV in a third-person narrative. He would like multiple-consciousness narratives to be wiped from the face of the earth, if you please. He has been known to tell his students — or members of his writing group, or his clients, or the writers whom he edits or represents — that multiple POV narration in the third person is, to put it politely, bad writing. It should be stamped out, by statute, if necessary.

 

So much for Jane Austen and most of the illustrious third-person narrative-writers of the 18th and 19th centuries, who used multiple perspectives to great effect.

 

I bring up our forebears advisedly, because one of the reasons that POVNs are so common is that in the post-World War II era, the prose stylings of the 18th and 19th centuries tended to be rejected as old-fashioned by writing teachers. Many of today’s more adamant POVNs are merely transmitting the lessons they were taught in their first good writing classes: for years, many English professors set it down as a general rule that multiple POVs were inherently distracting in a third-person narrative.

 

Now, I have to admit something: I am not a big fan of this species of sweeping rule. I like to read an author’s work and consider whether her individual writing choices serve her story well, rather than rejecting it outright because of a preconceived notion of what is possible.

 

In fact, I have a special affection for authors whose talent is so vast that they can pull off breaking a major writing commandment from time to time. Alice Walker’s use of punctuation alone in THE COLOR PURPLE would have caused many rigid rule-huggers to dismiss her writing utterly, but the result is, I think, brilliant. I had always been told that it is a serious mistake to let a protagonist feel sorry for himself for very long, as self-pity quickly becomes boring, but Annie Proulx showed us both a protagonist AND a love interest who feel sorry for themselves for virtually the entirety of THE SHIPPING NEWS, with great success. And so on.

 

One effect of the reign of the POVNs — whose views go through periods of being very popular — has been the production of vast quantities of stories and novels where the protagonist’s POV and the narrator’s are astonishingly similar — and where the other characters are exactly as they appear to the protagonist, no more, no less. (The rise of television and movies, where the camera is usually an impersonal narrator of the visibly obvious, has also contributed to this kind of “What you see is what you get” characterization, if you’ll forgive my quoting the late great Flip Wilson in this context.) Often, I find myself asking, “Why wasn’t this book just written in the first person, if we’re not going to gain any significant insight into the other characters?”

 

I suspect that I am not the only reader who addresses such questions to an unhearing universe in the dead of night, but for a POVN, the answer is very simple. The piece in question focused upon a single POV because there is no other way to write a third-person scene.

 

Philosophically, I find this troubling. In my experience, there are few real-life dramatic situations where everyone in the room absolutely agrees upon what occurred, and even fewer conversations where all parties would report identically upon every nuance. I think that interpretive disagreement is the norm amongst human beings, not the exception.

 

So do I like to hear the thoughts of multiple players in a scene, to capture the various subtleties of interpretation? You bet. If I want to hear a single POV, I reach for a first-person narrative. Call me wacky.

 

These are merely my personal preferences, however; I am perfectly willing to listen to those who disagree with me. And there I differ from the POVN, who wishes to impose his views upon everyone within the sound of his voice, or reach of his editorial pen.

 

To be fair, too-frequent POV switches can be perplexing for the reader to follow — and therein lies the POVN’s primary justification for dismissing all multiple POV narratives as poor writing. One of the more common first-novel problems is POV switching in mid-paragraph, or even mid-sentence. But heck, that’s what the RETURN key is for, to clear up that sort of confusion.

 

If you are involved with a writing teacher, writing group compatriot, agent, or editor who is a POVN, you need to recognize his preference as early in your relationship as possible, in order to protect your own POV choices. Otherwise, you may end up radically edited, and some characterization may be lost. Take, for example, this paragraph from PRIDE AND PREJUDICE :

 

“Elizabeth, having rather expected to affront him, was amazed at his gallantry; but there was a mixture of sweetness and archness in her manner which made it difficult for her to affront anybody; and Darcy had never been so bewitched by a woman as he was by her. He really believed, were it not for the inferiority of her connections, he should be in some danger.”

 

I might quibble about Austen’s use of semicolons, but it’s not too difficult to follow whose perspective is whose here, right? Yet, as a POVN would be the first to point out, there are actually THREE perspectives in this single brief paragraph, although there are only two people involved:

 

“Elizabeth, having rather expected to affront him, was amazed at his gallantry…” (Elizabeth’s POV)

 

“but there was a mixture of sweetness and archness in her manner which made it difficult for her to affront anybody” (the POV of an external observer)

 

“Darcy had never been so bewitched by a woman as he was by her…” (Darcy’s POV)

 

A POVN in Jane’s writing group would undoubtedly urge her to pick a perspective and stick to it consistently throughout the book; a POVN agent would probably reject PRIDE AND PREJUDICE outright, and a POVN editor would pick a perspective and edit accordingly. The resultant passage would necessarily be significantly different from Jane’s original intention:

 

“Elizabeth, having rather expected to affront him, was amazed at his gallantry; but there was a mixture of sweetness and archness in her manner which made it difficult for her to affront anybody. Darcy remained silent.”

 

At this rate, the reader is not going to know how Darcy feels until Elizabeth learns it herself, many chapters later. Yet observe how easily a single stroke of a space bar clears up even the most remote possibility of confusion about who is thinking what:

 

“Elizabeth, having rather expected to affront him, was amazed at his gallantry; but there was a mixture of sweetness and archness in her manner which made it difficult for her to affront anybody.

 

Darcy had never been so bewitched by a woman as he was by her. He really believed, were it not for the inferiority of her connections, he should be in some danger.”

 

The moral here, my friends, is that you should examine writerly truisms very carefully before you accept them as invariably true. Grab that gift horse and stare into its mouth for awhile. You may find, after serious consideration, that you want to embrace being a POVN, at least for the duration of a particular project; there are many scenes and books where the rigidity of this treatment works beautifully. But for the sake of your own growth as a writer, make sure that the choice is your own, and not imposed upon you by the beliefs of others.

 

To paraphrase the late Mae West, if you copy other people’s style, you’re one of a crowd, but if you are an honest-to-goodness original, no one will ever mistake you for a copy.

 

Keep up the good work!

 

– Anne Mini