Writing secrets…
[Second post leading up to Tom Pope and my Socratic to-and-fro about writing the thriller. In “The Eightfold Way” I listed eight things a writer should NOT do. Here I take the tack of analyzing what he or she can do.]
Given my sales and/or my number of readers (easy to measure the first, hard the second), any secrets I might reveal about the writing business are probably suspect. Caveat emptor: The word “secrets” implies that there are magical actions you can take to become a successful writer—in other words, that there exist sufficient conditions for success. (Let’s agree to measure “success” as a book that has had N readers since its release, where you pick N > 1000 to fit your own criteria.) I hate to say it. There are NO SECRETS—there are no sufficient conditions. There seem to be necessary ones, but some outliers often don’t satisfy many of those either.
Take the Fifty Shades trilogy. It doesn’t meet any of the necessary conditions I outline below, yet you can’t argue that it wasn’t successful. Call it prurient interest among readers; a rebirth of sloppily written, commercial erotica; a naïve, 19th century portrayal of S&M; or something else—but the books fail to satisfy so many necessary conditions that they leave me shaking my head in wonder. If you ever needed proof that having a successful book is akin to winning the lottery, this is it. While many authors including me are turned off by this badly written drivel, readers read it—maybe not you, but plenty of others. Each book in that trilogy is what I call an outlier. Authors in general shouldn’t worry about them—they’re statistically improbable events. You should worry about the necessary conditions, unlike the author of that trilogy, who didn’t, but still won the lottery. She won the big prize. Writers in general should be content to go after the smaller prizes in the lottery—as many times as possible.
I’m writing about fiction here, although some of what I say will apply to non-fiction (biographies, autobiographies, memoirs, etc) where some story, true or not, is told. That’s the first necessary condition. Your novel has to tell an interesting story. I don’t care how good you are at the other stuff, I won’t read your book if you don’t have an interesting story—and I don’t think I’m the exception. Plotting is how you tell that story and that can be genre dependent—what works for a romance novel might not for a thriller. Learn the tricks of plotting in your genre and use them well in telling your story.
Your story also has to be about interesting characters I really care about—some I’ll love, some I’ll hate, but they’d better be complex and interesting enough. No stereotypes, please. Here’s a no-no: “John was the stereotypical cop.” Any author that says that will probably lose my interest. At least say something like “stereotypical New York City Irish cop.” That at least sharpens the description—I’ll give you that many stereotypes have some truth to them. (Where else would they come from?) That doesn’t mean they’re 100% correct (as opposed to politically correct, which is an arbitrary although sometimes hurtful and/or bullying characteristic). Or, correct once, but no longer. John might be an exception. Bottom line: don’t take shortcuts. Let the reader make his own conclusions.
That leads me to minimalist writing. You can be fancy and verbose, especially with character and setting description, but I probably won’t like it. One reviewer complained about my short sentences. To be fair (to myself, rather than the reviewer), it was in the review of my YA novel, The Secret Lab (the reviewer wanted tweens to speak half-page soliloquies?), but my general rebuttal to such a comment is “Tough!” I’m into short, pithy sentences. You’ll see this in the first-person words uttered by Detective Castilblanco, for example. This hard-boiled fellow isn’t going to leave you dazzled with his flowery prose—it’s not in his character. Bottom line: say what you have to say and move on. Don’t bore your readers. They want to hear your story—don’t let the words pile up and get in the way. Readers don’t care if you impressed your ursine MFA professor with your verbal pyrotechnics. He probably doesn’t know squat about entertaining readers anyway! (A recently released book, MFA v. NYC, treats the subject of MFAs in more detail. I think a journalism degree is better than a MFA, if only because you can minimize the things you have to unlearn!)
Maybe you’re saying that I should distinguish between genre fiction (what I write) and “literary fiction”? The latter is a catch-all garbage bin (similar to that icon on your computer) authors think they have to aim for if they want any respect. Please! First of all, writers have no respect, especially from legacy publishing (aka agents and Big Five publishers and editors). And writers that write for other writers (the halls of academia are full of them) don’t earn my respect either. One thing I’ll give the Fifty Shades trilogy: it has entertained thousands of readers. Maybe that says something about the reading public. Dunno. The Harry Potter series was hugely successful too, but go back and read a few of Rowling’s books. She’s not a minimalist writer, by any means. I was able to get through them only by skipping over pages and pages of boring verbosity, including settings, characterization, and inane dialog. (Another lottery winner and outlier, of course!)
Other necessary conditions? You can debate all you want about the relative importance of them, but they’re ALL important—the beginning (the proverbial “hook”), the plotting that carries the reader from page to page without boring him to tears, the climax, the denouement, background and flashbacks, and dialogue. The necessary condition here? It’s the Goldilocks principle. Not too much of one thing, but just enough—and make sure it’s all good, succinct, and, above all, entertaining. How do you do all that? Write, write, write! After fourteen books (number fifteen, Aristocrats and Assassins, to be released soon), I’ll confess that each new release is different (it’d better be!) and I learn many new things writing it. The bottom line: as in Olympic sports, practice makes perfect…and there are no writing secrets!
In libris libertas….
