GENREALITY

Somebody once told me–apologies for forgetting who–that the longest-running series are the ones with the least character development. I thought about this recently, as I remembered back a meeting with my publisher to discuss plans for my second book, THE GUILTY, as well as long-term plans for future books in my Henry Parker series. One of the things we discussed was “World Building.” Specifically the importance of creating a universe that is constantly evolving, while staying true to the rules the authors has established. While world building is most commonly associated with fantasy and science fiction, it’s an incredibly important aspect for any series, especially a budding one, where the hope is to both entice new readers while sating fans who’ve been there from the beginning. As an author, it goes against creative impulse to begin every book with a “previously on…” in order to let new readers (or forgetful old ones) catch up, yet you have to approach almost every book with the hopes of drawing from both wells.

My fifth novel, THE DARKNESS, is complete, and the fourth, THE FURY, has been in the can for a few months. In these two books I continued the stories of several main and supporting characters from my first three, while adding a few new characters and major subplots into the fray. I’m about to start work on THE INVITED, the sith in the series, and am trying to accomplish the same thing while continuing to make Henry’s story different yet familiar enough to draw in new fans while satisfying long time reader. Only now I have five books worth of characters and stories to draw from. It opens up my characters’ worlds to more possibilities, but also narrows what I can do with them. I’ve set certain rules, established behavioral patterns, and these must be adhered to.

Several years ago I attended the Romantic Times Booklovers convention, and I recall Jim Butcher stating on a panel that when sitting down to write STORM FRONT, he had the Harry Dresden series plotted out through twenty books. Right now I have my series plotted through six, with ideas for seven percolating. I don’t know, at this point, how many books the series will encompass. Part of it depends on readers. I have seven under contract, and if readers are still hungry for more beyond that and my sales figures support it, chances are there will be more. Certainly at some point I’d like to write something non-series, but as long as there are stories to tell with these characters I’m all for keeping them going. But for how long?

Many authors have written crime series that have gone on for well over ten years, sometimes more and, if anything, are more popular than ever (Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch, Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Milhone and Janet Evanovich’s Stephanie Plum come to mind). These authors still receive strong reviews for their work, regularly top the bestseller lists, and the books stay fresh. But with so many books in a series, how much character development can there be?

The characters in THE FURY an THE DARKNESS wear their scars, both mental and physical, from the first three books in the series. Yet at some point, in a crime series, if the characters wear their scars on their sleeves to a wholly realistic degree, they’d either be dead or going insane, maybe both. Perhaps Lee Child’s Jack Reacher can get away with this, partly because he’s a badass mofo, but he’s a badass to such a degree that scars (physical, at least) are expected. For characters who are cops, reporters, bounty hunters, or hold any one of numerous other dangerous professions, at some point the odds would catch up to them. If the author establishes that a forensic anthropologist or sports agent can be in fatal danger in every book, the reader accepts that as part of the universe. But that means they accept there is something slightly implausible about that universe as a whole, since I doubt many FAs get their degrees with the expectations of being menaced by murderous psychopaths. For the most part readers are willing to accept these credulity strains, provided the author is conistent within the universe they’ve created.

So as an author, how much development do you need to stay true to the character? And how much can you ignore certain implausibilities to create a consistent universe?

P.S. remember to enter the giveaway contest!!!

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One of the ladies in my neighborhood has recently started selling Avon, and dropped off a couple of catalogs for me to look through. I haven’t used Avon products in years, but while we were talking my neighbor must have noticed how chapped my face and hands are, because she gave me some samples of skin cream.

The stuff I always use hasn’t been working very well this winter, so I tried them out. Both were so great I promptly put in an order for full-size versions, plus a couple of things I found while browsing through the catalog to see what else was in the product line.

Would I have ordered the products if I hadn’t tried them first? Probably not. For one thing, I’m cheap, and I don’t like spending money on something that may or may not work for me. The pictures in the catalog are pretty, but I can’t rub them on my dry skin to see what they’ll do.

I also liked the samples of the cologne from the Mark catalog (Avon’s line of products for youngsters) my neighbor gave me for my daughter to test. My girl is a young teen, and while I don’t mind her wearing a little makeup or cologne, I don’t want her walking around looking like a hooker or smelling like an opium den. Having access to the samples allowed her to see if she liked them and me a little parental preview (and we also ordered a bottle of one of the sample colognes we both liked.)

I’ve been an advocate of giving free books and stories to readers for a long time, and it really works the same way the Avon lady’s free samples do. If a reader gets a free read and loves it, they’re going to buy more by that author. If they don’t, there’s no sale, but no resentment, either. Now that we’re all tightening up our budgets and trying not to overspend, the opportunity to try out something for free before we buy is more important than ever.

Giving people something to read for free is one of the greatest pleasures I have as a professional writer. To me every book is someone’s gift to the world, so each time I have a giveaway, it’s like holding my own holiday and playing Publishing Santa.

Today I have a book tote filled with six books to give away; one unsigned novel from every member of Genreality plus a signed copy of my latest release:

A Long, Hard Ride by Alison Kent
Heretic: The Templar Chronicles by Joe Nassise
The Stolen by Jason Pinter
Kitty and the Dead Man’s Hand by Carrie Vaughn
Stay the Night by Lynn Viehl
Primal Male by Sasha White

If you’d like the chance to win this bag of Genreality free samples, in comments to this post name the last free story or novel that you enjoyed (or if you can’t think of one, just toss your name in the hat) by midnight EST on Saturday, February 28, 2009. I’ll draw one name at random from everyone who participates, and send the winner the bag, the books, and a surprise. Btw, this giveaway is open to everyone on the planet, so our friends overseas, please join in.

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Almost every interview I’ve done has asked about my inspiration in some way. Where do your ideas come from? What inspires you? I usally sneak by with a glib answer like “I’d tell you, but then I’d have to kill you.” “My imagination.” or “Everywhere.”

The honest answer is I Don’t Know – usually.

Sometimes a song, will inspire me, or a person I meet, or even another book. Yeah, I know, authors aren’t really supposed to admit that reading other books can inspire them, not in the way I’m about too. Carrie touched on it briefly yesterday when she said she’s watched the second Pirates of the Carribean, and thought, “I can do it better.” Well, I read a lot, and when I’m done, sometimes I think, “I can do it better.” That’s not to say everyone agrees with me, or even that I can do it better. But that story I just read sparked something inside me, and that’s one of the ways I can get inspired.

It’s important to realize that inspiration and ideas are different things too. It may sound silly to say that, but I think many people think they are interchangeable terms. For me, inspiration is what gives birth to the ideas. Eighty-five percent of the time, my inspiration comes from within. I can’t say exactly where though. It’s just there. A spark buried deep within me, waiting to float to the surface and be molded into an idea, and a story. Inspiration can be ellusive, and it’s not something an author can always rely on. This is where the creative aspects of being an author meet the business aspects. Any professional writer will agree that you can’t always wait around for inspiration to strike. You have to find ways to create, even when uninspired, because it is your job.

Inspiration is great when it happens, but you can’t depend on it.

This is where ideas can come in handy. They are everywhere! Read the newspaper, people watch at the mall, use something that happened to you as a springboard. The idea of a blind date gone awry got me started on my novella THE DEVIL INSIDE, and inspiration didn’t strike until around the third chapter. When it did hit though, the rest of the story flowed like magic for me.

The idea for Wicked came about because the main character, Karl, who was a throw away character in Bound, also showed up in Trouble. He was a ‘lifestyle’ Dom, and I’d never writen a true BDSM story before that, so I figured why not? Sometimes my story ideas come to me from the idea of a character, and sometimes it’s a plot. And sometimes, since I write erotic, it’s from a type of sexual fantasy.

Because when I first started to write fiction, I wrote short stories, I often started with the sexual aspect. What type of story did I want to write? Vanilla, Male domination, Female Domination, voyuerism, threesome…the options are many. Then I’d either decide on a character from who’s POV I wanted to tell the story, and that woud set the tone. Or sometimes I’d start with tone (soft and sensual, kinky and edgy, or raw and raunchy) and then build character and setting around that.

Being inspired can feel magical. The ideas are plentiful, floating around in your head just waiting for you to grab one and run with it. I give glib answers to the question of what inspires me, and where do my story ideas come from because for me, there is no easy answer – and because part of me is afraid that if I disect it too much, if I dig too deep, the magic will disappear.

Silly? Who knows, but not analyzing it too much works well for me. What works well for you?

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I’m reading lots of books on pirates right now, because I’m writing a novel with pirates in it.  How cool is that?  Did I mention I love my job?  I think I was watching the second Pirates of the Caribbean movie when I thought, I could do this so much better.  It’s amazing how many of my stories start that way.  One of the ways of making it better is actually reading some books about eighteenth century pirates.

Research is another one of those things that everyone does differently, I think.  I’ve encountered two main theories:  do lots and lots of research, read everything you can, talk to people, learn a subject inside and out, then write the book.  Or, write the book, figure out what you need to know, then look up that specific information. (This method helps you avoid the pitfall of inserting a lecture on the origins of gunpowder into your otherwise fast-paced genetically engineered dinosaur thriller.  I’m looking at you, Crichton.)  Both methods have drawbacks — if you try to learn everything about a subject before you start writing, you may never start writing.  But if you don’t do enough research before you start writing, you may miss out on the information that takes your story in amazing new directions.  Or you may start working on an idea that couldn’t actually happen.

As with so many things, a middle road is usually best.  I read a couple of books before I started, which gave me lots of ideas that have worked their way into the plot.  For example, before modern shipbuilding methods hit the scene, crews had to careen their ships a few times a year — run them aground and tip them over so they could clean all the barnacles, worms, and slime off the hulls.  Otherwise, the hulls would rot out.  What a great scene!  I had no idea!  But after reading a couple of books, I was so excited to get started I just did, even though I had so much more to learn.  (Like how would they have treated a broken leg?  How did they carry water on the ships?  What kind of ship are they sailing?  I had no idea there were so many different kinds of ships plying the waters of the Caribbean in the eighteenth century!  Sloops, pinks, brigantines, schooners, galleons…)

Like Lynn, I tend to put a bunch of bracketed notes in my first drafts, like what famous pirates were at the Bahamas and when, what a ship’s surgeon’s training would have been, what the captain’s quarters would have looked like, how the prisoners on a slave ship were chained, and so on.  It’s not worth stopping the flow of writing to look up that information when it doesn’t change the story.  That’s not research so much as fact checking.

I never think I do enough research.  I’m sure I don’t.  But see, I don’t have to know a topic inside and out in order to write a book.  I only have to convince the reader that I do.

We’re told to write what we know.  So why is it worth it trying to become an instant expert in a subject we don’t know?  Because not every expert can write a rip-roaring novel about their subject.  Some can (giving rise to whole shelves full of medical mysteries, lawyer mysteries, military-based techno thrillers, and so on).  But a historian specializing in eighteenth century piracy is probably going to spend most of his or her time writing nonfiction about pirates.  Which leaves it to writers like me to absorb all that nonfiction and make an adventure of it.

Obligatory plagiarism notice.  It should go without saying, but there’ve been too many instances where it needed to be said:  research does not mean inserting your source material word for word into your novel.  It should go without saying because interrupting the narrative flow to deliver a lecture on sailing techniques would be dead boring.  Unless you’re Herman Melville, who got away with a lot of exposition because he really did sail on nineteenth century whaling ships.  The thing to do is read lots of books.  Then put the books away and write what you know.

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I’m going to cue off Lynn’s post about editors last week to talk a little bit about one of mine.

You see, I’ve been working on a book for the last year entitled EYES TO SEE.  It’s the story of Jeremiah Hunt, a man who gives up his sight in order to see through the eyes of the ghosts who surround us all in an effort to find the daughter who disappeared from his home months before.

I’ve really enjoyed working on this book, but it has been a long haul.  The initial writing effort wasn’t too bad; a few months or so.  But then came the hard part.

Revisions.

You see, my editor at Droemer-Knaur read the completed manuscript and sent me his usual editorial letter.  I greatly enjoy working with him – he is one of those rare individuals that can inspire you to push for greater heights even when you don’t believe it’s possible and usual, that’s what he did with this one.

I think it was his third sentence that stopped me short – “This is good, Joe, quite good.  But that’s not what I want from you at this point in your career.  EYES is your fourth book for us and it deserves to be great.”

Tim was right – EYES did deserve to be great.  After coming out strongly in Germany with my first three titles (Der Ketzer, Der Engel, and Die Schatten) it was time to push the envelope a little.  So with a short sigh of resignation, and an understanding that I had a fair degree of work ahead of me, I kept reading.

And reading.

And reading.

Tim editorial letter took up some ten pages and it was one of the best editorial letters I had ever received.  He went through my manuscript with a fine tooth comb, showing me both where I had risen to brilliance and where I had tripped over my own two feet.  He made suggestions, but not orders, and left it to me to figure out how I could take what was a strong B to B+ effort and turn it into an A.  The fact that he did it all so completely when English is his second language still amazes me.

As you can guess, several months of work followed.  I tore that manuscript apart, striving to be worthy of the trust he had in my effort and abilities.  I cut almost 45% of the original book, shored up the main plot and rewrote it back to its original length, and then added another 33,000 words on top of that.   Just before Christmas I turned it in a second time.

Only to be hit with another round of revisions in late January.

Thankfully, these were much shorter – just minor details that needed to be checked and a few short changes here and there.  I’m putting the finishing touches on those this week, in fact.  But what has really struck me in thinking about it all this week is the simple truth that EYES is now a far stronger book than it was when I turned it in the first time.  In fact, I wouldn’t hesitate to say that it is likely the best thing I’ve written since I started doing so eight years ago.

And there is absolutely no doubt that I couldn’t have gotten there without the help of my editor.

As writers we often grumble and groan when it comes to editors – after all, they hold the keys to getting our stuff published.  But I think it is only fair to give praise where praise is due.

My hat’s off to Tim and all the other editors out there who care as much about their work as he does.

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