Max Out Your Book's Potential Audience

El Conquistador Resort. Where the Tire-Pros play!

I had lots of time to think last week on our little trip to Puerto Rico, what with the plane, the beach chair, the snorkeling, especially since Nathan had meetings about tires almost every day. (And to force myself to be creative, I didn't bring any books, though I did end up reading the one my hubby brought, a pirate/spy thriller.) And a quick tip if you get the chance to go snorkeling- when you reapply sunscreen, don't forget the backs of your legs!

My hotel desk. The sound of the waves, the aquamarine water (the water in this picture is really disappointing),
the island (it's up in the palm fronds)4 8 15 16 23 42 ...we have to go back to The Island!

Last year at Dave Farland's writers camp, I was given some advice that I haven't been able to ignore, hard as I tried. My fellow workshoppers read the opening to "Book of Breathings" and the outline (a pregnant teenage girl participates in an Egyptian ceremony for a school project and is possessed by the spirit of an Egyptian queen, who wants the girl's baby to replace the child she lost.) They had some very nice things to say about the voice and the archeology bits, but several people wished aloud that the outline had more Indiana Jones to it, more action. Which brings Braveheart to my mind.

I don't watch rated R movies any more, but I have seen Braveheart. The first half features stolen kisses and a thistle-embroidered handkerchief and a secret wedding. The second half, which begins with the new bride being slaughtered and ends with William Wallace calling out "Freedom" as he is tortured to death. Guess which part I favored? (Hint- my husband was happy once the broadswords and blue paint came out.)

Both parts of the story are good, but they're more effective storytelling together. How powerful would their love be if her death wasn't so traumatic for him that he started a war and laid down his life to try to change things? How sympathetic would we be to the warriors if they weren't fighting (and dying) for a darn good reason? Not very.

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that it always makes a story better to have this kind of layering.

Movies like Avatar (Blue people, not the Last Airbender), which have equal doses of romance and adventure, humor and depth, are rare, but it's doable, and that's what I want to do. If you haven't thought much about what your audience is looking for emotionally in a book, I suggest you sign up for Dave Farland's Daily Writing Kick. Here's a link to one on movie marketing, and there are other links at the bottom of that that.) Very good stuff, and it hasn't hurt the many writers he's taught.

I had too much depth, not enough adventure, so I tweeked the story. Now the Queen doesn't just want to have Rhys' baby to house the spirit of her own lost child, but she also wants to take over the world and establish ma'at, the traditional peace and order that the pharoahs claimed as their responsibility and right, and the justification for making war and subduing their enemies. It gives Rhys' friends and society a conflict to engage in as well, so it's not just Rhys agonizing over what to do and people thinking she's crazy, but her friends are right there with her, fighting to save their world.

The bonus is that it's expanding the story, not rerouting it, so I can keep most of the 60k I've written.

I love time to think. Happy writing!
Glutton for Punishment?

Again! With Focus.

Or what I've learned from writing a query

Some authors write the book blurb or their elevator pitch first, before they even start their book, but not a pantser like me. My planning stages involved several false starts, a first draft that that has almost entirely been written over, and some early attempts at an outline. Currently, I've outlined up to Ch.11 (out of 30), but I did finish my 3 pg. synopsis, so I'm congradulating myself, even if noone else is.

As for my query, I started working on it maybe eight months ago and have gone through 10+ revisions, and still haven't got it right. I highly recommend writing your query as you write your book for three reasons.

Reasons to work on your query now instead of waiting until you finish your manuscript:

1. You will have something to say when someone asks what your book is about.

2. Your query needs time to develop through rewriting just as your book does.

3. It helps you to focus on the main points as you revise. 

In trying to pull out the major conflict that causes my MC to leave her perfect world and come to our fallen world, I realized that my opening chapters are diffuse. (Anybody watch that Medium episode? I was writing, but my husband told me about it. Joe gets asked by his boss to read the  boss's epic Sci-fi novel and keeps hounding Joe to give his impressions. So Joe finally says 'It was diffuse.' Which is not a word that I'd like applied to my writing, and this guy didn't like it either. So in Joe's performance review, everything was 'diffuse'. Communication skills? Diffuse. Organization skills? Diffuse. The moral- do not EVER tell your boss what you think of their writing. Just say you can't wait to buy it when it gets published and leave the heavy hitting for agents. Is this how people get delusional? Absolutely. Do it anyway. Save yourself!)

In real life, Allison Dubois is a psychic medium who works with the police and husband Joe is an aerospace engineer, which makes their viewpoints very different. This clip was posted by CBS, so there's a 0.5 second commercial (really, it's that short, so don't give up), but I thought it was worth the wait. And it is interesting that the producer says here that it was the husband/wife relationship that made him want to do the show. Not the cool cases she solves, not the pyschic dreams. But their unique relationship. That's what I'm trying to show in my query!

Anyhow, diffuse. As in, there are too many motivations for my MC to leave her world and come to ours, but none of them stands out. There's no moment of decison, no leading the reader to see that OF COURSE she has to make this terrible decision. It's hard, and scary, but she has to do it. I realized this when I was trying to explain her motivations succintly in the query plus I have some crit partners who have made some comments that led me to start thinking about it.

I've stopped believing that there is only one way to write this story. There will be versions that feel more mysterious, versions that feel more grounded and explain the world more quickly, and it's up to me to judge which serves the story best. Because the story is there. I just have to let it out. So thank you, query. I'm working on it.

Has your query/synopsis/blurb writing helped you?
Glutton for Punishment?

Rinse. Repeat.

Isn't it lovely to have someone who believes in you? My very good friend and alpha reader Aleta came to visit. She ASKED (can you imagine a better friend?) to read it out loud to me so we could discuss it as we went. So, between taking the kids to the circus and going to the YMCA, we sat on the couch and I listened.

It was really strange to hear my words read aloud. It was almost like they were a real story and made it so easy to spot problems. As we worked through the first hundred pages I realized I have a lot of good things on the paper and some things that aren't there yet.

This photo is from last year.

Yes, we have arranged marriages planned.

 I won't embarrass the kids by naming names.

I've been listening to each chapter on 'narrator' (In case you've missed other mentions, this program comes with microsft windows. You can't use it in office, but if you paste into wordpad, then you can listen as the computer reads text.) Unfortunately, a computer can't inflect or answer questions, so you miss where the meaning or emphasis is ambiguous. And you can't ask a computer if the humor is too much, if the dialogue sounds stilted, or if it's okay to use the word 'discombobulated'. Not that I would try to pull that off. 'Discombobulated' is incontravertably unweildy. See how much I need a reader?

It was like a book club about my very favorite book in the whole world and it went on and on. I cannot say how much I appreciated the time that was given to me. I hope that you find people that expect you to succeed like this, whatever the area of your life it occurs in.

Aleta returned to her home in Arizona but left behind a few hundred items to fix. I'm thinking about reading and recording the other 300 pages so I can listen to it. Truly, this was one of the best writing exercises I've ever done. There is no other way to get such thorough feedback. So, goodbye for now readers. I have a lot of work to do!

Glutton for Punishment?

Writing is rewriting. No kidding.

I have an imaginary world, separate from the world in my novel. The world of writing my novel. It's a place where I read through my stack of pages, make a few notes, then click my pen and put it away. It's fine. All these changes are cosmetic. The bones are in place, the description is relevant to the story, the characters are deep and consistent...but it's not real.

I'm finishing my hard-copy edit- my third pass at the whole manuscript. I THOUGHT that the end was in decent shape, but it is not. The last hundred pages are over-complicated, confused and convoluted. The good news is I thought of a way to streamline the whole thing, but it involves cutting that chunk and rewriting.

I remember thinking "I'll have to come back to this," and just wanting to get my characters to the end. That was fine, then. I needed a frame to start with, and that's what a first draft is for me. An ugly, chipped-paint, rusty, teetering scaffold.

My second pass was mainly to learn more about the craft of writing- a really long writing exercise about believable dialogue, fresh description, a weaving together of story elements to form a cohesive whole. I did a lot of workshop critiquing and read a lot of agent tips and writing articles in this pass.

So, now I'm in the third edit. Streamlining plot, refining characterization and motivations, and checking details. Cutting passive voice, deleting/adding commas, checking commonly overused words (just, that). I also have a habit of  using multiple verbs when one will do- ie- I thought I saw, I turned to see, etc. I'm not sure what that's called, but I recognize it.

I've also started a fourth edit using Microsoft Narrator (mainly so that any submissions I make to my crit group will have an extra pass of editing), where I listen to the computer read me the text. Narrator is a bit of a pain because it won't read from Microsoft Office, so I copy the chapter I'm working on into Notepad. The narrator goes as fast or slow as you want, but it feels safer to me to take notes fast, and then make the changes in Office slowly. The really nice thing about Narrator is it came with Windows. So maybe you already have it.

My next step after the Narrator edit is to hand out the full manuscript to some Beta readers. After responding to their comments, I think I'll be ready to query. In my dreams:)

I critiqued a friend's first chapter a few months ago. He hasn't read it, nor will he until he finishes his first draft. I think that's fine- that's what I did, too. Not because I didn't want feedback, but I wasn't sure I could do it. I needed to get the boost from concluding the story and believe that I was a writer before I had people tell me what was wrong with my writing. So, join a crit group if you can, but not if you're not ready to learn. Because humility and learning like to hold hands. They're going steady.

One day I'll read my MS and feel satisfied. Or at least tolerably pleased. But we're not there yet. And that's okay.
Glutton for Punishment?