GENREALITY

A short and sweet post today:  Next week, my first young adult novel is due out from Harper Teen.  It’s called Voices of Dragons, and it’s an alternate history with dragons, rock climbing, jet fighters, and boyfriend trouble.

(Ever since my first book came out, I’ve found it useful to try to condense the premise into a one-sentence soundbite.  i.e. “It’s about a werewolf named Kitty who starts a talk radio advice show.”  People will always ask, “What’s your book about?” and if you take more than one sentence to explain, their eyes inevitably start to glaze over.  So one punchy sentence to sell the book.)

I’ve posted the first chapter over on my website, if you’d care to take a gander.  Voices of Dragons, Chapter One.

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Here’s something I’ve had on my annual goal list for the last few years:  Stop comparing myself to others.

It starts early, out of necessity, because we look at other writers and their careers for clues about how the business works and how to break in.  We ask for advice from writers who’ve been there and follow their leads.  But that also gives us a way to gauge our progress.  And as the saying goes, there’s always someone doing better than you.

Comparing ourselves to others is so easy to do, especially when it’s so hard to judge your progress in the publishing business.  But we have numbers.  What’s your print run?  What are your sales numbers?  How does your advance stack up?  We’re trained from early on to compare ourselves to others:  Who gets picked first for the dodgeball team? (Although I hear schools avoid that sort of thing these days.)  Test scores are so easy to compare, and to use to arrange us into neat little grids and graphs.

Writers’ blogs make it way too easy to compare on a day-to-day basis.  Writers post daily word counts — and it seems like they’re always more than mine.  (I figure if anyone is writing less they’re too embarrassed to post.  I don’t post because I’m too embarrassed by my low numbers.  And I’ve found that the more I focus on daily word counts, the less productive I am.)

Publishing is an industry that has lots of awards, lots of bestseller lists, lots of rankings, everything from the number of stars on an Amazon review on up to the Nobel Prize for literature.  We all want those gold stars.

We have a “grass is always greener” mentality.  I have writer friends who get a ton of critical recognition and are constantly nominated for awards.  I celebrate their successes, and I’m secretly a little bit envious.  Which is tough, because I know they look at my career and the New York Times bestseller label and feel exactly the same way.  Interestingly enough, our problems — worrying about sales numbers, deadlines, self-promotion, publicity, etc. — are the same.  All those extraneous measurements of success are just that  — extra.  They ultimately don’t mean much.  But that’s what we focus on.

I haven’t figured out how to overcome this all-too-human impulse, which is why I’m still putting it on my goal list.  I try to focus on my own work and doing the best I can — writing the books I want to write, telling my own stories, and celebrating both my successes and those of my friends.  I remind myself:  This is not a race.  There’s no finish line and no big trophy.  And we’re all in this together.

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I’m about 18,000 words into writing a new novel (the ninth Kitty novel, for those keeping score).  After all the revising and copyediting and tedious post-production work I’ve been doing for the last two months, it’s so great to be delving into a new project.  This is about my favorite part of the whole process.  I can keep throwing ideas into the stew to see what happens to them.  I haven’t yet arrived at the “this book is kicking my ass” stage, when I have to start trying to tie those ideas together.  (That’ll come at about 35,000 words.)  I’m meeting new characters, setting a new stage, finding that new direction that will set this book apart from all the others.  I’m researching — not for details, but for ideas.  What would happen if I included this idea?  This bit of folklore?  Could I use that later?  Would it complicate the plot?  Yeah?  Awesome!  I’m making lists, drawing maps, writing my outline, trying out choice bits of dialog.  I don’t have to worry yet about where it’s all going — I’m gunning the engine, the car is picking up speed on a downhill slope, the wind is in my hair, and it’s exciting.

You know what’s really encouraging?  I’ve been writing full-time for three years.  Four, if you don’t count the year of sporadic temping I did as a transition.  The book I’m writing now will be my eleventh published novel, if all goes as planned.  The sixteenth novel I’ve written total.  And I’m still so excited.  I still love this.  I still wake up some days amazed that I get to do this.

Now, stay tuned until next month, when I write a post complaining about the “this book is kicking my ass” stage.  Or the month after that, when I write a post complaining about deadlines.

But until then:  Onward ho!

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We always talk about hard work and persistence.  Especially on this blog — we’re all working very hard, I think that’s clear.  Hard work breeds success.

So it seems a little odd to talk about luck.  But that’s what I’m going to do today.  Because I got lucky in two specific ways that I couldn’t have predicted or controlled.  This is also a good way to talk about how some parts of the publishing business work.

The first piece of luck:  I wrote the first Kitty short story in 1998 and the first novel in 2002-2003.  Urban fantasy in its current incarnation didn’t quite exist then.  In my query letter, I called the novel supernatural/dark fantasy.  In fact, one agent I queried told me he was turning it down because even though he liked it, he wouldn’t know how to sell a novel with a werewolf heroine.  This was December 2003.  Oh, what a difference a year or two makes.  Because within a couple of years, urban fantasy had become a bandwagon.  By the time Kitty and The Midnight Hour was released in late 2005, the urban fantasy bandwagon had turned into a nuclear-powered rocketship.  And the series was right there to take advantage of the trend.  I couldn’t have planned that if I tried.  I got really, really lucky.

The second piece of luck:  The publisher got behind the book in a big way.  Here’s some behind-the-scenes publisher neepery.  General-interest mass market book publishers have a monthly schedule.  Each month has slots to fill:  a lead title (usually the paperback release of last year’s big hardcover blockbuster), a second lead title (this might be a big paperback original), and then new titles in various categories:  a couple of titles in nonfiction, and a couple of titles each in mystery, romance, and science fiction and fantasy.  Kitty and The Midnight Hour was acquired to fill one of the science fiction and fantasy slots.  It was going to be a basic, normal book, and I got a basic, normal advance ($7500, for those keeping score).  Books in these slots will get print runs of something like 20,000, unless they’re a big title with a big name author.  Then something weird happened.  I got word that ARC’s of the book were given away at BookExpo, the American Booksellers Association’s big annual conference and trade show.  The publisher had decided to promote the book and give it a huge push.  (I’m sure this has something to do with my first point, and signs that this genre was about to get big.)  In the end, Kitty and The Midnight Hour appeared in the catalog as the second lead title for that month, and got an initial print run of something like 50,000 copies.  This meant that the book didn’t just go to a lot of stores — it got stacks in the new release racks up front.  Under normal circumstances that never would have happened.  Again, I got really, really lucky.  (More neepery:  If you look on the spine of one of those ARC’s of the first Kitty book, it has the logo for Aspect, Warner Books’ SF&F imprint.  But the actual published book has the logo for Warner Books — now Grand Central.  That goes along with how the book was bumped from one section of the catalog to the other.)

Other ways people get lucky:  We’ve all heard stories about the writers who landed a big, prestige publisher or agent right out of the gate, on a query or an elevator pitch.  They had exactly the right project on the right day to get attention.  The first Oprah Book Club book was a first novel by an unknown author — The Deep End of the Ocean by Jacquelyn Mitchard.  That selection made the book hugely successful, and no one could have predicted that.

So how do we get lightning to strike?

There’s a saying, that luck is the intersection of preparation and opportunity.  Preparation is what you have control over, and the reason preparation is so important is that you never know when those moments of opportunity are going to arrive.  Be prepared.  Write the best book you can.  Meet your deadlines and continue writing the best books you can.  Behave professionally.  Have more pitches ready to go when the publisher makes another offer.  Have a plan.

It’s now five years after my first novel release, and I’m trying to keep these things in mind.  I have no idea what’s going to happen next, but I want to be prepared for anything.

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I sometimes think that after publishing seven novels, with three more on the way over the next year, I ought to know what I’m doing, right?  I should have it all figured out by now.  Nope.

Over the last couple of months, I’ve revised two novels and two short stories.  (I’ve been busy.  Really busy.)  Three of them  had pretty much the exact same problem.  Wow, was that ever eye-opening.  So, I’ve learned something about pacing.

What was the problem?  Withholding information unnecessarily to create a false sense of tension.

We want to build a sense of mystery and suspense so our readers will keep turning the pages to find out the answers to the questions we raise.  But sometimes this backfires.  Instead of creating mystery, we create vagueness, confusion.  We obfuscate parts of the plot that should be clarified.

Here’s what happened in the short story.  My main character has a traumatic incident in her past that affects her standing in the community, making her almost an outcast.  Most of the other characters in the story know what the incident is.  In my first draft, however, I didn’t reveal what trauma actual was until about two thirds of the way through.  Then I had a nice long talk about the story with my first reader.  Now, my intention was to create a sense of mystery about this character’s past.  How did my reader react?  He was confused.  Instead of paying attention to the story, he kept wondering what the secret was, and he was frustrated that I wouldn’t tell him.  And when the secret was revealed, it didn’t justify that confusion.  Especially when every other character already knew it.  Instead of letting the reader into the world, I had kept the reader out.  My very wise first reader suggested putting the secret in the first paragraph.  Lay it out right from the start.  Then, we understand exactly why everyone else treats the main character the way they do, and exactly where the main character’s stress is coming from.  Now, the tension in the story isn’t about what her past is — it’s about how she’s going to overcome her past and succeed in her goals.  Which is a much, much more interesting story.

Here’s how it worked in the YA novel I revised:  in the first draft, I kept the identity of the antagonist secret until the second half.  I was trying to make the mystery, “Who is the bad guy here?”  It turns out, that wasn’t as interesting as identifying the bad guy early on, making it clear just how powerful he is and what his bad intentions are, and drawing suspense from figuring out how the heroes are going to defeat him.

In a nutshell:

First Draft:  Something’s wrong.  I wonder what?  We need to figure out what’s wrong!

Revised Draft:  Here’s the problem.  Here’s why it’s bad.  Now what are we going to do about it?

I’ve actually used the “we don’t know who the bad guy is” plot structure successfully before.  But then, the problem was clearly defined — the heroes just didn’t know who was behind it.  (A classic mystery plot structure.)  In the stories I’d been working on recently, I think the problems weren’t well enough defined in my own mind to be able to create that suspense.  I needed to define them.  And that meant not holding back information that I was originally holding back.

It seems so basic now, I want to kick myself.  I would have figured it out eventually.  But working on this problem three different ways on three different stories really solidified this concept for me.  I hope I can use what I learned on my next novel draft!

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