Author: Admin147

Hello, readers —

Happy Valentine’s Day, writers! I was going to devote today to going through the various subgenres of romance, but then it struck me: for most of us, our love affair with the printed word outlasts most of our person-to-person relationships. Bears consideration, I think. I may live with the person I love, but in my house, it’s the books that have their own room.

When I made my will a few years ago (the natural outcome of having bought a house in which to store my mountains of books), I walked into the lawyer’s office with a list of who would get what books in the event of my untimely demise. The lawyer stared at the list blankly for a few beats, then looked up and asked, “Um, do you care who ends up with your bank account?”

Compared to whose grubby mitts will be fondling my first editions of MUSIC FOR CHAMELEONS, BEING THERE, and POSSESSING THE SECRET OF JOY while I’m wrapped in eternal slumber? Was he mad?

This is not, I am told, the way normal people’s priorities work. (I was told this, as a matter of fact, by the lawyer. At some length.)

I was thinking about this over the weekend, because I finally went and saw CAPOTE, part of my lifetime habit of rushing out and seeing the first movie that grabs me when I just don’t want to think about a real-life situation anymore. This is how, in high school, immediately after going to the hospital to visit a good friend who had tried to slash his wrists, I found myself inadvertently sitting through ORDINARY PEOPLE, a story about a boy who tried to slash his wrists; I once cajoled a friend depressed from a break-up with her womanizing boyfriend into just walking into the movie with the nearest starting time — and subjected her to MRS. PARKER AND THE VICIOUS CIRCLE, which features about four womanizers per square inch of celluloid.

So, naturally, when I was frustrated with a glitch in the publication of my memoir, I rushed right out and saw a film about a writer who gets himself embroiled in hugely emotionally-trying dynamics while writing a book. My guardian angel must be writing her doctoral dissertation on irony.

Truman Capote is one of my all-time favorite writers – as if his sentence structure hadn’t been dreamy enough to catch the eye of a book-loving teenager, he and I share a birthday — so I had rather avoided the movie. I don’t like biopics much in the first place, and biopics about writers tend to gloss lightly over the fact that any good writer spends inordinate amounts of time hunched over a typewriter or keyboard. Hunt, peck; sit motionless, thinking; wiggle fingers furiously while spouse tries to instill some recognition of the passage of time. Not exactly the stuff of high drama.

Before you dismiss this, think about it: did anyone on the planet who saw HENRY AND JUNE walk out of it remembering any scenes of either Henry Miller or Anaïs Nin WRITING? I rest my case.

CAPOTE does in fact show the writer writing from time to time, so it gets brownie points in my book (although I don’t believe for a second that our Truman really had a phone sitting on the corner of his writing desk — and stopped writing the second it rang, every time. I once kept writing through a minor earthquake, because I was too embroiled in a scene to notice.) As the film went on, I found myself feeling very defensive on Capote’s behalf, not so much toward the moviemakers as toward the other characters in the movie. Here was arguably the greatest constructor of sentences in the English language living at the time, and all anyone around him seemed to be able to manage to do was whine at him alternately about not writing fast enough or wanting to see how a story turned out before he finished writing about it.

So, actually, it was a really good movie to see while steaming over editorial suggestions. I highly recommend it.

Now, it may not throw a very flattering light upon my character, but honestly, I don’t think I would have gotten as steamed up by a judgmental biopic about my high school boyfriend as I did by this film about my other great teenage love, a brilliant writer I knew only from the printed page. And that’s the miracle of talent, my friends: its products are adhesive to our souls, and its effects are lasting.

So as part of my long-overdue valentine to Mr. Capote, I am going to talk about literary fiction now — because his is invariably one of the first names mentioned in any definition of it. And deservedly so.

I have yet to meet an agent or editor who can give a definition of literary fiction less than a paragraph long. Like art, they know literary when they see it. Yet ask any three agents whether THE WORLD ACCORDING TO GARP, THE SHIPPING NEWS, and THE COLOR PURPLE are mainstream or literary, and you will probably get at least two different answers.

Frankly, many of us fiction writers find something very compelling in the label. Let’s face it, most of us like to think our writing has some literary value, and critical opinion about what is High Literature changes with alarming frequency. Time and time again, I meet writers at conferences who tell me, “Well, my book walks that thin line between mainstream and literary.” Without reading all of their work — which is really the only way to categorize it — it’s impossible to tell whether these writers honestly are experimenting with new directions in style and construction (which is not a bad definition of literary fiction), or if they merely want to convey that they believe their work is well-written.

Lest you think, as many aspiring writers do, that all good fiction is literary, let me remind you that these are marketing categories, not value judgments, and mislabeling your work will most likely result in its ending up on the wrong desk. In purely practical terms, literary fiction is quite a small percentage of the fiction market (and one whose buyers are overwhelmingly women, in North America), so do be aware that if you pick that category, you may be limiting your book’s perceived market appeal when you pitch it to professionals.

When in doubt, mainstream fiction is usually safe, because it is the broadest — and most marketable — category. And it’s a fairly all-inclusive category in the PNWA contest, too, one that has historically covered literary fiction, too.

If you are in serious doubt whether your book is sufficiently literary to count as literary fiction, apply one of two tests. First, take a good, hard look at your book: under what circumstances can you envision it being assigned in a college English class? If the subject matter or plot is the primary factor, chances are the book is not literary. If you can honestly envision an upper-division undergraduate seminar discussing your symbolism and word choices, it probably is.

The other test — and I swear I am not suggesting this merely to be flippant; industry professionals do this — is to open your manuscript randomly at five different points and count the number of semicolons, colons, and dashes per page. If there are more than a couple per page, chances are your work is geared for the literary market.

If you don’t believe me, I implore you to spend an hour in any reasonably well-stocked bookstore, going from section to section, pulling books off the shelf randomly, and applying the punctuation test. Mainstream fiction tends to assume a tenth-grade reading level: literary fiction assumes an audience educated enough to use a semicolon correctly, without having to look up the ground rules. If you are writing for most genre audiences (science fiction and fantasy being the major exception), most agents and editors prefer to see simpler sentence structure.

Do be careful, however, when applying this second test, because writers tend to LOVE fancy punctuation. Oh, I know this is going to break some tender hearts out there, but if you want to write fiction professionally, you need to come to terms with an ugly fact: no one but writers particularly LIKE semicolons. If you are writing for a mainstream audience, you should consider minimizing their use; if you are writing most genre fiction, you should consider getting rid of them entirely.

Again, I don’t make the rules: I merely pass them along to you.

Okay, now I’ve depressed myself with the image of hundreds of you out there doing a search-and-replace on your collective thousands of semicolons. I’m going to launch into the Romance genre subcategories, to cheer myself up again.

You can, of course, simply label your romance novel as ROMANCE — but if it falls into any of the subgenres, it would behoove you to label it accordingly, as there are both agents and editors who specialize that tightly. In whichever category you pick, however, you might want to go light on the semicolons. In alphabetical order:

CATEGORY ROMANCE: This is actually what many people think of automatically as a romance novel — the Harlequin type, super-short novels written according to a very rigid structure.

CONTEMPORARY: Having a current-affairs issue at its core OR a protagonist who is a woman deeply devoted to her career.

EROTICA is not just a euphemism for pornography aimed at women; it’s sexually-explicit writing where arousal is the point, yet is not specifically pornographic. Basically, erotica has to have some plot and character development, as opposed to the um, more clinical characterization of intercourse one finds in pornography. But, realistically, your grandmother would have considered almost all erotica pornographic. (Well, maybe not, depending upon what your grandmother was into.)

FANTASY and CHICK LIT are hyphenates within the genre: basically, the conventions of these categories are grafted onto the ROMANCE genre. Natural choices, I think.

HISTORICAL ROMANCE has a zillion subcategories, primarily because its subcategories are specific to period and locale. A few of the biggies: REGENCY, SCOTTISH, MEDIEVAL, TEXAS, WESTERN, MIDDLE EASTERN, and ELIZABETHAN ENGLAND.

INSPIRATIONAL: If your romance novel is informed by spirituality, it belongs here. If you have romance-writing gifts, you might want to consider the Christian romance market: it’s been growing by leaps and bounds in recent years. And if you feel inclined to write Christian romances for teens… well, let’s just say that if you’re good at it, you may not need to worry about whether Social Security will still exist by the time you retire.

MULTICULTURAL: Not all of the people falling in love are white. Seriously, that’s what this means. I don’t quite understand this euphemism, since generally books labeled MULTICULTURAL are about a single culture, but again, I don’t make the rules.

PARANORMAL and GHOST ROMANCE are divided by a distinction I do not understand, because silly me, I always assumed that ghosts were paranormal. Sorry. Check with Romance Writers of America.

ROMANTIC SUSPENSE: this used to be called Women in Jeopardy or, more colloquially, Bodice Rippers. No comment, except to remark that both Lewis “Scooter” Libby and Newt Gingrich have published works in this subgenre.

TIME TRAVEL: Your protagonist has given up on the opposite sex in her own timeframe and goes wandering. I’ve always thought that a steamed-up reworking of THE TIME MACHINE would make a great time travel romance — so please, if you have talents in that direction, take this idea and run with it. Just remember to thank me in your acknowledgments, as a cryptic reference for my biographers to find in years to come.

So have a lovely Valentine’s day, everyone, whether you are curled up in chaste enchantment with your favorite author’s work or road-testing something truly unusual for your erotic novel, to see if it is even physically possible. I’m going to steal an hour from writing this afternoon to re-read BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY’S, because what’s better on a day like this than a bittersweet visit from one’s long-ago love?

Keep up the good work!

– Anne Mini

Hello, readers —

Devoted reader Dave has written in with another question (which I encourage all of you to do with your writing-related questions; it I don’t know the answer myself, I shall track down someone who does), and in thinking how to answer it, I realized that I had not grappled with the issue of how to categorize your work in awhile. Since the PNWA contest rules dictate that entrants must label their work to a marketing certainty (YA Romance, etc.), I thought this would be a good time to revisit the issue of publishing categories.

Contest-running bureaucrats are not the only ones who will insist that you declare up front (as in on the title page and in your query letters) into which publishing category your book fits. Labels, like standard formatting rules, are very important to agents and editors: if they can’t place your work within a conceptual box, chances are they will reject your work as weird. (And remember, in industry-speak, weird is bad; fresh is good.) Thus, before you submit your work to any agent, editor, or contest, you will need to decide which box is the most comfortable fit for your book.

Please don’t roll your eyes, as so many aspiring writers do, at the idea of squashing your complex rubric of ideas into a two-word phrase like HISTORICAL THRILLER. No one is asking you to summarize your entire book in a single phrase; this is straightforward marketing information. If you want your work to sit on a bookshelf in a bookstore, someone is going to have to pick a shelf. If you want Amazon to sell it, its patrons need to be able to find it under general search parameters. Librarians will want to know where it fits into the Dewey Decimal System.

Don’t make it hard for all of these fine institutions to get your book into the hands of readers by insisting that your book cannot be categorized. (Do anything you can to avoid irritating librarians. As the daughter of one, I can tell you: the most glowing reviews from THE NEW YORK TIMES cannot sell your book as enthusiastically as a librarian who really loves an author’s work.)

And you don’t get to wait until the book is about to come out to pick a category. You will need to mention your book’s genre in your query letter, on the title page of your manuscript (upper right corner is standard), and anytime you pitch. Hard as it may be to believe, to professional eyes, the category is actually more important than the title or the premise. To an agent, the category determines which editors on her contact list she can approach with your book; to an editor, it determines which market niche it will fill. If your work is difficult to categorize, or straddles two categories, their brains go into a tailspin: on which shelf in Barnes & Noble can it rest?

If you shilly-shally about the category to which your book belongs, or even hesitate when you are asked at a conference, you run the risk of appearing uninformed about the industry. I hate to be the one to tell you this, but there do exist agents so category-minded that they will automatically disregard any query that does not specify the book’s category clearly within the first paragraph.

This is serious business.

Okay, let’s tackle fiction first. Genre fiction has subcategories, just as general fiction does, so these lists will be quite extensive. (Hey, don’t blame me: I’m just the messenger here.) In general fiction, the categories are:

FICTION: also known as MAINSTREAM FICTION. This is the bulk of the market, so do not be afraid of the plain-Jane moniker — it sells like the proverbial hotcakes.

A contest-related caveat: if you are entering the PNWA’s mainstream fiction category, most adult fiction can be categorized here. Even romance, which has its own category, has in the past won the mainstream fiction category. Go figure.

LITERARY FICTION: fiction where the writing style is the major selling point of the book. (Yes, I know — most writers feel this is true of their fiction, regardless of the category.) Generally, it is character-driven, rather than plot-driven, and assumes a college-educated audience.

HISTORICAL FICTION: You’d think this would be pretty self-explanatory, no? However, quite a bit of historical fiction falls into either the ADVENTURE or ROMANCE category. The dividing lines are wavy enough, though, that no one will blame you much if you guess wrong. Was COLD MOUNTAIN historical fiction or historical romance? Here’s a hint: until it hit the big time, agents went around telling writers at conference that historical fiction was dead. They don’t anymore.)

WOMEN’S FICTION: not to be confused with romance; WF is mainstream fiction specifically geared for a female readership. Since women buy the vast majority of fiction sold in North America, however, this category’s edges can get somewhat nebulous. (Think of the YA-YA SISTERHOOD or THE COLOR PURPLE.)

CONTEMPORARY WOMEN’S FICTION: Novels about what used to be called “career women.” If your protagonist is a doctor or lawyer who takes her work seriously, chances are that this is the category for you.

CHICK LIT: Assumes a female readership under the age of 40; always has a protagonist who is good in bed. In fact, some agents and editors refer to this category as GOOD IN BED. (I swear I’m not making this up.) The sole example that anyone ever uses is BRIDGET JONES’ DIARY.

LAD LIT: Similar to CHICK LIT, except the good-in-bed protagonist is a troubled young man; all of us have female co-workers who have dated the prototypes for these characters. The only example I have ever heard anyone use for this category is HIGH FIDELITY.

LADY LIT: Similar to CONTEMPORARY WOMEN’S FICTION, but the protagonist is often independently wealthy, or regards her relationships as more important than her work; the protagonist is always older than a CHICK LIT heroine. (Again, I swear I’m not making this stuff up; this is really how folks in the industry talk about it.)

FUTURISTIC FICTION: Not to be confused with science fiction, which is its own genre, these are literary or mainstream books set in the future; I gather the point of this category is to permit agents to say to editors, “No, no, it’s not genre.” Think THE HANDMAID’S TALE.

ADVENTURE FICTION: Not to be confused with ACTION/ADVENTURE, this category encompasses books where the protagonists engage in feats that serve no business purpose, yet are satisfyingly life-threatening. If your protagonist surfs, mountain-climbs, or wrestles wild animals, this may be the category for you.

Which brings me to Dave’s excellent question: “Would C. S. Forester’s Horatio Hornblower or Patrick O’Brian’s Jack Aubrey/Stephen Maturin books be considered mainstream fiction or genre fiction? Is “naval adventure,” a term I have seen applied to another similar series considered to be a specific genre or not?

The answer is: technically, ADVENTURE isn’t genre, Dave — mostly because it sells so VERY well. But so do mysteries, thrillers, and romances, and they’re all genre fiction. The difference is that ADVENTURE is usually shelved with FICTION, rather than in its own separate section. But like so much in the publishing industry, whether NAVAL ADVENTURE is its own subgenre — and whether it’s genre — depends upon when you ask. At the moment, when it’s popular, it is; ten years ago, it wasn’t.

I find it interesting that naval adventure is its own subgenre now, as I’ve never seen Bernard Cornwell’s immensely successful SHARPE series categorized as MILITARY ADVENTURE. (I’ve seen it categorized as both ADVENTURE and HISTORICAL FICTION — and it’s pretty much always shelved with the mainstream fiction.) Why is fighting at sea worthy of its own designation, and fighting on land isn’t?

SPORTS FICTION: Similar to ADVENTURE FICTION, but focused on conventional sports. BRIAN’S SONG leaps to mind here, or any of those many, many stories about feisty coaches bullying kids with problems into forming a cohesive sports team with heart.

POETRY: If you do not know what this is, go knock on your high school English teacher’s door at midnight and demand to repeat the 10th grade.

SHORT STORIES: a collection of them. Generally, authors who publish short story collections have had at least a few of them published in magazines first.

CHILDREN’S: another fairly self-explanatory one, no? Picture books and easy readers belong here.

YOUNG ADULT: books written for people too old for CHILDREN’S, yet too young for FICTION. YA, unlike other categories, may often be successfully combined with genres: YA FANTASY, YA WESTERN, etc.

COMICS: exactly what you think they are.

GRAPHIC NOVEL: A book with a COMICS format, but a specifically adult-oriented plot line. (Hint: BATMAN was COMICS; THE DARK KNIGHT was a GRAPHIC NOVEL.)

Whew! And that’s just the non-genre fiction categories; I shall go into the genre categories tomorrow.

Do allow me to reiterate: you only get to pick one for your book. However, as long as you pick something close, you probably won’t be penalized if you guess wrong, because there’s a lot of genuine disagreement amongst professionals about where to draw the lines.

If you are wavering between close categories — say, between CONTEMPORARY WOMEN’S FICTION and CHICK LIT, do not be afraid to guess; there is quite a bit of overlap between categories, whether agents and editors admit it or not. Take a good look at your manuscript, decide whether sex or job is more important to your protagonist (if you are writing about a call girl, this may be an impossible determination to make), and categorize accordingly. If you’re off by a little, an agent who likes your writing style will be happy to tell you how to fine-tune your choice.

Tomorrow, I shall go into some of the fine-tuning issues, as well as getting a start on the genre categories and subcategories.

Keep up the good work!

– Anne Mini

Hello, readers —

I’ve chosen a relatively light-hearted topic on this unseasonably sunny pseudo-spring day: today, I am going to introduce you to the Short Road Home’s glamorous first cousin, Hollywood Narration. I was stunned to realize that I had not yet written a whole post on this, because honestly, as far as I’m concerned, Hollywood Narration is one of the scourges of both the modern publishing industry AND the screenwriters’ guild. So dig out your dusty sunglasses from the bottom of your backpack, and we’ll get started.

Hollywood Narration is when information is conveyed by dialogue between persons who both already know the information perfectly well — and thus have absolutely no legitimate reason to be having this conversation at all. As in this little gem of human interaction:

“So, Bob, how was your work at the steel mill today?” Sally asked, drying her rough hands on the fraying dishtowel that served her as a makeshift apron. “Having worked there for fifteen years — one before we married, two more before the twins were born, and five years since our youngest girl, Sammy, fell off the handlebars of Bob Junior’s bike and sustained brain damage, forcing me to quit my beloved teaching job and stay home to help her re-learn basic life skills — I imagine you sometimes get sick of the daily grind. But you are my husband, my former high school sweetheart, so I try to be supportive of all you do, just like that time I went down to the police station in the middle of the night in my pink flannel nightgown to bail you and your lifetime best friend, Owen Filch, out after you two drank too much near-beer and stole us the biggest Sequoia in the local national park — renowned for its geysers — for our Christmas tree.”

Bob shook his graying head ruefully. “Ah, I remember; I had gotten you that nightgown for Valentine’s Day the year that little Betty, then aged six, played Anne Frank in the school play. As you know, Sally, I am committed to working hard to support you and the kids. But since our eldest daughter, the lovely and talented Selma, won that baton-twirling scholarship to State, I have felt that something was lacking in my life.”

“Why don’t you go downstairs to the workshop you built in the basement with the money from that car-crash settlement? You know how much you enjoy handcrafting animals of the African veldt in balsa wood.”

“What would I do without you, honey?” Bob put his arms around her ample form. “I’ve loved you since the moment I first saw you, clutching a test tube over a Bunsen burner in Mr. Jones’ chemistry class in the tenth grade. That was when the high school was housed in the old building, you recall, before they had to move us all out for retrofitting.”

“Oh, Bob, I’d had a crush on you for six months by then, even though I was going out with my next-door-neighbor, Tad Grimley, at the time! Isn’t it funny how he so suddenly moved back to town, after all those years working as an archeologist in the Sudan?” Bob did not respond; he was kissing her reddish neck. “But you always were an unobservant boy, as your mother Gladys, all sixty-four years of her, always points out when she drops by for her weekly cup of Sanka and leftover cookies from my Tuesday night Episcopalian Women’s Empowerment Group social.”

Okay, so this is a pretty extreme example — but honestly, anyone who has read manuscripts professionally for more than a few weeks has seen Hollywood Narration almost this bald.

Generally speaking, in real life, people do not recite their basic background information to kith and kin that they see on a daily basis. Unless someone is having serious memory problems, it is culturally accepted that when a person repeats his own anecdotes, people around him will stop him before he finishes. Yet time and again in print, writers depict characters wandering around, spouting their own résumés without any social repercussions.

I blame television and movies for this — and going back even farther, radio plays. As I pointed out a few days ago, TV and movies are technically constrained media: they can utilize only the senses of sight and sound to tell their stories. While a novelist can use scents, tastes, or physical sensations to evoke memories and reactions in her characters as well, a screenwriter can only use visual and auditory cues. A radio writer is even more limited, because ALL of the information has to be conveyed through sound.

As a result, TV, movie, and radio broadcasts are positively crammed with Hollywood Narration — thus the name. How many times have you spent the first twenty minutes of a film either listening to voice-over narration setting up the premise (do I hear a cheer for THE ROYAL TENENBAUMS, where an unseen but undoubtedly huge and Godlike Alec Baldwin in the Sky told us all we needed to know? Anybody?) or listening to the protagonist fill in the nearest total stranger on his background and goals? Here’s a very common gambit:

Pretty neighbor (noticing the fact that our hero is toting several boxes clearly marked ACME MOVING AND STORAGE): “So, are you just moving into the building?”

Hunky hero (leaning against the nearest doorjamb, which happens to be beautifully lit, as doorjambs so frequently are): “Yeah, I just drove in from Tulsa today. This is my first time living in the big city. When my girlfriend left me, I just tossed everything I owned into the car and drove as far as I could.”

Pretty neighbor (stepping into his good lighting as much as possible): “Well, I’m a New York native. Maybe I could show you around town.”

Hunky hero: “Well, since you’re the first kind face I’ve seen here, let me take you to dinner. I haven’t eaten anything but truck stop food in days.”

Now, this economical (if trite) little exchange conveyed a heck of a lot of information, didn’t it? It established that both Hunky and Pretty live in the same building in New York, that he is from the Midwest and she from the aforementioned big city (setting up an automatic source of conflict in ideas of how life should be lived, if they should get romantically involved), that he has a car (not a foregone conclusion in NYC), that they are attracted to each other, and that he, at least, is romantically available. (What will happen? Oh, WHAT will happen?) When the scene is actually filmed, call me nutty, but I suspect that this chunk of dialogue will establish that these two people are rather attractive as well; their clothing, hairstyles, and accents will give hints as to their respective professions, upbringings, socioeconomic status, and educational attainments.

Writers of books, having been steeped for so many years in the TV/movie/radio culture, tend to think such terse conveyance of information is nifty. They wish to emulate it, and where restraint is used, delivering information through dialogue is a legitimate technique.

The problem is, on film, it often isn’t used with restraint — and writers have caught that, too.

I’m not talking about when voice-overs are added to movies out of fear that the audience might not be able to follow the plot otherwise — although, having been angry since 1982 about that ridiculous voice-over tacked onto BLADE RUNNER, I’m certainly not about to forgive its producers now. (If you’ve never seen the director’s cut, knock over anybody you have to at the video store to grab it from the shelf, pronto. It’s immeasurably better.) No, I’m talking about where characters suddenly start talking about their background information, for no apparent reason other than that the plot or character development requires that the audience learn about the past.

If you have ever seen any of the many films of Steven Spielberg, you must know what I mean. Time and time again, his movies stop cold so some crusty old-timer, sympathetic matron, or Richard Dreyfus can do a little expository spouting of backstory.

You can always tell who the editors in the audience are at a screening of a Spielberg film, by the say; we’re the ones hunched over in our seats, muttering, “Show, don’t tell. Show, don’t tell!” like demented fiends.

I probably shouldn’t pick on Spielberg (but then, speaking of films based on my friend Philip’s work, have I ever forgiven him for changing the ending of MINORITY REPORT?), because this technique is so common in films and television that it’s downright hackneyed. Sometimes, there’s even a character whose sole function in the plot is to be a sort of dictionary of historical information.

For my nickel, the greatest example of this by far was the Arthur Dietrich character on the old BARNEY MILLER television show. Dietrich was a humanoid NEW YORK TIMES, PSYCHOLOGY TODAY, SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, and KNOW YOUR CONSTITUTION rolled up into one. (He also, several episodes suggested, had a passing familiarity with the KAMA SUTRA as well — but then, it was the ’70s.) Whenever anything needed explaining, up popped Dietrich, armed with the facts: the more obscure the better.

The best thing about the Dietrich device is that the show’s writers used it very self-consciously as a device. The other characters relied upon Dietrich’s knowledge to save them research time, but visibly resented it as well. After a season or so, the writers started using the pause where the other characters realize that they should ask Dietrich to regurgitate as a comic moment. (From a writer’s perspective, though, the best thing about the show in general was the Ron Harris character, an aspiring writer stuck in a day job he both hates and enjoys. Even when I was in junior high school, I identified with Harris.)

Unfortunately, human encyclopedia characters are seldom handled this well, nor is conveying information through dialogue. Still, we’ve all become accustomed to it, so people who point it out seem sort of like the kid in THE EMPEROR’S NEW CLOTHES:

“Why has Mr. Spielberg stopped the action to let that man talk, Mommy?”

“Hush, child. There’s nothing odd about that.”

Well, in a book, it IS odd, and professional readers are not slow to point it out. It may seem strange that prose stylists would be more responsible than screenwriters for reproducing conversations as they might plausibly be spoken, but as I keep pointing out, I don’t run the universe. I can’t make screenwriters do as I wish; I have accepted that, and have moved on.

However, as a writer and editor, I can make the emperor put some clothes on.

By and large, agents, editors, and contest judges share this preference for seeing their regents garbed. It pains me to tell you this, but I have actually heard professional readers quote Hollywood Narration found in a submitted manuscript aloud, much to the disgusted delight of their confreres. At minimum, it is not going to win your manuscript any friends if your characters tell one another things they already know.

The problem is, we’ve all heard so much Hollywood Narration in our lives that it is often hard for the author to realize she’s reproducing it. Here is where a writers’ group or editor can really come in handy: before you submit your manuscript, it might behoove you to have an eagle-eyed friend read through it, ready to scrawl in the margins, “Wait — doesn’t the other guy already know this?”

In self-editing, there is an infallible device for detecting Hollywood narration: any statement that any character makes that could logically be preceded by the phrase, “As you know…” should probably be cut, or at any rate reworked into more natural dialogue.

I’m off now to enjoy this beautiful day. I’m told that Seattlites lead the nation in sunglass sales, and are right at the bottom in terms of per capita umbrella ownership. (“Rain?” we ask puzzled visitors who timidly suggest that it might be prudent to shade one’s head from a downpour. “THIS isn’t rain. THIS is a thick mist.”) Which means that we are either as a group charmingly optimistic or totally deluded about our climate. Or perhaps merely that, like moles, our long, gray winter renders our eyes unaccustomed to bright light.

Keep up the good work!

– Anne Mini

Hello, readers —

I’m taking a little break from my series on manuscript mega-problems and how to solve them to address one of the great irritations of a writer’s life: having to wait, often for long periods, for someone else to make a decision that has a vital impact upon your life.

Every writer who has ever queried an agent or submitted to a small press knows what I’m talking about, I suspect. You pour your heart, soul, and hopes into that submission, send it off — and then find yourself in a seemingly endless limbo, waiting to hear back. You tell yourself that agencies and publishing houses get stacks of submissions daily, so you should not expect yours to be read right away, but still you hope.

Then, as the days stretch into weeks (and sometimes, into months), you start to fantasize scenarios that explain the long delay, a natural impulse for a creative mind to have. If you were asked to send the first 50 pages or the whole manuscript, you might convince yourself that the agent just can’t make up her mind, and thus needs to have everyone in the agency read the submission, too, or that the editor at the small publishing house has taken the book home, so he can read through it again slowly.

You go through agonies, trying to figure out whether to call or not. But because every writers’ publication you have ever seen and conference speaker you have ever heard has told you that agents and editors positively HATE it when writers make follow-up calls, you sit tight.

As time passes, your fantasies start to take on a more sinister aspect. Maybe a fire broke out, and they’ve lost your address, along with half of your manuscript. (If only you’d put your e-mail address in the slug line, so the charred remains of every page would contain your contact information!) Maybe a first reader at the agency, an aspiring writer himself, was overcome with jealousy at your matchless prose and threw your manuscript away. (The jerk probably did not even recycle it. That type never does.) Maybe your protagonist reminded the agent so forcibly of her late husband, tragically lost a month ago in a freak ballooning accident, that she has not been able to make it through more than five consecutive pages without bursting into tears and needing to be carried bodily to her therapist’s office. Or, still worse, did you forget to send a SASE?

By now, you have bite marks on your hand from forcibly restraining yourself from picking up the phone to ask what’s going on with your manuscript.

In your heart (and from reading this blog), you know that it is far more probable that the delay is not a vacillation problem, but a lack of time: queries, excerpts, and entire manuscripts often languish on the corners of desks for months before the right people have an opportunity to read it. And if they like the first few pages, it is not uncommon for them to take it home, intending to read it in their spare time — where it has to compete with spouses, children, exercise, and all of the other manuscripts that made their way home.

All of this spells delay, and bless your heart, you try to be reasonable about it. Even when the pressure of waiting is migraine-inducing (for some reason that medical science has yet to pin down, writers seem more susceptible to migraines than other people; on the bright side, we seem to be far less susceptible to Alzheimer’s), you keep your little chin up.

And, if you’ve been at it awhile, you bitch to your writer friends about it — because, frankly, after years living with this kind of anxiety, your non-writing kith and kin have gotten a trifle impatient with your delay-induced stress. (If you have not yet discovered the balm of talking through your anxiety with someone who’s been through it herself, run, don’t walk, to your nearest writers’ conference to make some friends.) People at work start to ask, annoyingly, “Why do you put yourself through this?” Your partner suggests tentatively that if you took a third mortgage on the house, perhaps you could self-publish. Anything to end the stress.

But this is how the publishing industry works.

No matter how good your writing is, you must live through these long periods of nail-shredding anxiety. Actually, good writers have to put up with it more than bad ones, and professional writers more than unprofessional ones, because poor writing and poor presentation tends to get rejected at the speed of light. Literally: as soon as the first few sentences of a rejectable piece hit the retina of a screener, that manuscript is toast.

At the risk of depressing you into a stupor, these waiting periods do not go away once you have landed a terrific agent. Nor do they become substantially shorter or less stressful, a fact that has come as a surprise to every successfully published writer I know.

Think about it. Once you sign with your dream agent and whip your manuscript or proposal into fighting trim, the agent will send it out to editors — frequently waiting to hear from one before moving on to the next. Cast your mind back a few paragraphs ago, to all of the things that can distract an editor from reading a manuscript, and it may not surprise you to hear that even great writers with magnificent agents end up waiting for months to hear back from a single editor.

Then, once the editor decides she likes the book enough to acquire it, she has to pitch it to the rest of the publishing house. More delays.

And, as I can tell you from personal experience, great potential for stalling abounds after the publishing contract is signed. Many, many people need to approve each step, from the editor to the publisher to the copyeditor, proofreader, and marketing department. At any stage, the process could stall.

I am telling you this, not to discourage you, but so that you will not feel singled out. Long delays are not a reflection upon the quality of your writing, or even necessarily of its marketability, but rather a function of how the industry works.

Please, please, don’t beat yourself up about it — but do provide yourself with a support group of people who will understand and sympathize with your frustration. Because, like it or not, well-meaning folks who don’t know how the business works will keep peppering you with unintentionally cruel questions like, “So, when is your novel coming out?” They will be astonished when their friendly concern causes you to burst into tears, because some agent has been sitting on your first three chapters for the past nine weeks; other writers will be neither surprised nor blame you for it.

It’s a good idea to start building your support system long before you finish your first book, for otherwise, most of the people around you will have a hard time understanding that difficulty in attracting an agent, or your agent’s having trouble placing the book, is not necessarily a reflection of your talent as a writer. Once you do hook up with an agent, the friendly questions come even thicker and faster. In the popular mind, landing an agent or winning a contest automatically equals instant publication; I’m quite certain that people don’t mean to be nasty when they act as though the writer has done something wrong when the book does not sell right away, but that doesn’t mean their unspoken dismay does not hurt.

The important thing to remember is that while your work is about who you are, the way the industry treats writers isn’t.

When I was a kid, my older brother’s favorite joke was a shaggy dog story about an old man leading his heavily-laden burro from village to village across a long stretch of desert. Every time they near anything that looks remotely like a water source, the burro asks, “May I have a drink now?” Each time, the heartless old man replies, “Patience, jackass, patience.” My brother could keep the patter up for half an hour, weaving it through a lengthy and ever-changing tale about the old man’s adventures: at each stop, no matter where, the same question, the same response: “Patience, jackass, patience.”

What made the joke so appealing to a prepubescent boy bent upon tormenting his little sister, of course, was the ultimate pay-off: after so much repetition, the listener would eventually either express some wonder whether the story was ever going to reach its point, and then the teller could say, “Patience, jackass, patience.” Knowing the point, I tried my best to stay still, to say nothing, to pretend I didn’t even hear him, but eventually, I couldn’t take it anymore. Even running away as fast as possible the moment he uttered the first line of the joke gave him the excuse to shout it after me: “Patience, jackass, patience!”

If only I had known that he was preparing me for a life as a writer. In the face of such relentless taunting, it honestly does take practice to sail through it all with one’s sense of humor intact. Although now, when editors or publishers or marketing people trap me in the same Catch-22 that my brother did, expecting me to wait wordlessly until they decide that the joke has ended, I have a professional advantage: I can sic my agent on ’em. Yet another reason to hook up with an agent you can trust.

Oh, and if an agency’s had your first 50 pages or entire manuscript for a month, it’s perfectly okay to call or e-mail; the rule of thumb is that you SHOULD call if you haven’t heard back in double the time that they specified. Mum’s the word when you’re querying, though, or if you sent an unsolicited manuscript.

Keep up the good work!

– Anne Mini

Hello, readers —

As promised, today I am bringing you some practical examples of the subtle form of Short Road Home, so you may see this common mega-problem in action and learn how to fix it. I want to be as clear as possible about this, because there is a reason that most professional readers will dismiss a manuscript that has more than one Short Road Home in the first couple of chapters: it is one of the single most frequently-seen mega-problems in fiction.

Long-time readers of this blog, did a light bulb just appear above your heads? Did it occur to you that, as with nonstandard formats, an ultra-frequent mega-problem in a manuscript might actually be a WELCOME sight to an agent, editor, or contest judge, because it means that the work can be rejected without further ado — or further reading time? Yes, they are always on the lookout for that great undiscovered new talent, but the faster they can sift through the rest, the better they like it.

Or so I’m told.

My point is, you can’t assume that when you submit your work in any professional context, it will meet with readers eager to give it the benefit of the doubt. Seldom does one hear a professional reader say, “Well, there are problems with this manuscript, but I think it’s going to be worth my while to expend my energy on helping the author fix them.” And never does one hear, “This author seems to have trouble moving the plot along, but that’s nothing that a good writing class couldn’t fix. Let’s sign this writer now, and help her grow as an artist.”

Just doesn’t happen, alas, to writers who don’t already have a solid platform — i.e., a special expertise or celebrity status to lend credibility to the book. I suspect that, say, the first readers of Barbara Boxer’s recent novel or Ethan Hawke’s granted them quite a bit of latitude (not to say editorial help), because, in the industry’s eyes, what is being sold when a celebrity writes a book is the celebrity’s name, rather than the manuscript.

As a non-celebrity writer, on the other hand, you can generally assume that the first reader at an agency, publishing house, or contest is looking for reasons to weed your work out. They don’t worry too much about too quickly rejecting the next great American novel — since writers are resilient creatures who improve their skills on their own time (and dime), the publishing industry is fairly confident that the great ones will keep coming back.

For some reason, people in the writing community — especially those who write for writers’ publications and teach seminars — don’t like to talk about that much, I notice. Maybe it’s so they can put a positive spin on the process, to concentrate on the aspects of this honestly hugely difficult climb to publication that are within the writer’s control.

As far as I’m concerned, mega-problems are very much within the writer’s control, as are other rejection triggers — but only if the writer knows about them in advance of submission. So let’s get down to the proverbial brass tacks and see about clearing up this mega-problem.

The subtle flavor of Short Road Home seems to appear most frequently in the work of authors who have themselves spent quite a bit of time in therapy, 12 Step programs, or watching Oprah: the second an interpersonal conflict pops up, some well-informed watchdog of a character (or, even more often, the protagonist’s internal Jiminy Cricket) will deftly analyze the underlying motivations of the players at length. Even when these characters are not therapists by trade (although I’ve seen a LOT of manuscripts where they are), they are so full of insight that they basically perform instant, on-the-spot relationship diagnosis.

Ta da! Situation understood! Conflict eliminated!

No messy loose ends left to complicate the plot here — or to keep the reader guessing. In many instances, this examination is so intense (or lengthy) as to convince the reader that there is absolutely no point in trying to second-guess the protagonist (which is, after all, one of the great joys of reading, isn’t it?), if the author is going to tell her right away what to conclude from what has just passed.

It also creates a problem internal to the book. This kind of instant analysis often relieves the conflicting characters of any urgency they might have felt in resolving their interpersonal issues. Since Jiminy Cricket hops on in and spells out everyone’s underlying motivations, the hard work of figuring one’s own way out of a jam is rendered unnecessary.

If this seems like an exaggeration to you, take a good look at your manuscript — or, indeed, any book where the protagonist and/or another character habitually analyzes what is going on WHILE it is going on, or immediately thereafter. Does the protagonist leap into action immediately after the analysis is through, or wait for new developments? In the vast majority of manuscripts, it is the latter — which means that the analytical sections tend to put the plot on hold for their duration. Where analysis replaces action, momentum lulls are practically inevitable.

Memoirs are particularly susceptible to this type of stalling. Memoirists LOVE foreshadowing, because, obviously, they are telling about their past through the lens of the present. In the course of foreshadowing (often identifiable by the historical future tense: “It was not to turn out as I hoped…”), the narrator will all too often analyze a scene for the reader before showing it, thus killing any significant suspense the reader might have felt about how the scene will be resolved.

Yes, you know the story you are telling very well, but remember, your reader doesn’t. Just because something really occurred does not relieve the writer of the obligation to make its telling vibrant and dynamic. You may be excited to share insights gleaned over the course of a lifetime, but if they are not presented AS the stories unfold in the memoir, the reader may have a hard time tying the lessons to the anecdotes.

In other words: show first, conclude later.

Sometimes, foreshadowing tension-killers are apparently inadvertent in a manuscript, mere matters of transition: “On the day my brother shocked us all by running away from home, I woke with a stomach ache…” Think about this from the reader’s perspective — yes, there would be a certain curiosity as to why your brother ran away from home, perhaps, but why not let the reader experience the shock along with the family? Start off with a description of a normal day, and let the events unfold dramatically, rather than giving away the ending.

The subtle flavor turns up especially often in memoirs and novels where the protagonist has a troubled child, particularly if it’s a teenager. With the fictional child, the protagonist (or his wise second wife, or her experienced mother) will frequently give (at least in his or her own head) the pat psychological explanation for the child’s attitude, thus diffusing what might have been an interesting scene that either showed the conflict (instead of telling the reader about it), provided interesting character development, or moved the plot along. Effectively, it stops the story cold while the analysis is going on.

For example, Tom’s teenage daughter Tanya refuses to speak to her father when he comes home late from work; she rushes into her room and slams the door. Instead of following her into her room, Tom just hangs out in the kitchen with his wife, Mary, who obligingly relieves him of his anxiety by explaining what has just happened: “Well, Tom, Tanya’s felt abandoned since her mother, your ex-wife, ran off with that bullfighter three months ago. She doesn’t have any safe outlet for her anger, so she is focusing it on you, the parent she barely knew until you gained custody. All you can do is be patient and consistent, earning her trust over time.” End of scene.

Now, this story has all of the elements of a good character-driven novel, right? There’s a wealth of raw material here: a new custody situation; a teenager dealing with her mother’s madness; a father suddenly thrust into being the primary caretaker for a child who had been living with his ex; a stepmother torn between her loyalty to her husband and her resentment about abruptly being asked to parent a child in trouble full-time.

But when instant therapy intervenes, all of that juicy conflict just becomes another case study, rather than gas to fuel the rest of the book. Had Tom and Mary just gone ahead and BEEN patient and consistent, earning Tanya’s trust over the next 200 pages, the reader would have figured out, I think, that being patient and consistent is a good way to deal with a troubled teenager. But no, the subtle Short Road Home demands that the reader be told what to conclude early and often.

Whenever you notice one of your characters rationalizing in order to sidestep a conflict, ask yourself: am I cheating my readers of an interesting scene here? And if you find you have a Jiminy Cricket character, for heaven’s sake, write a second version of every important scene, a draft where he DOESN’T show up and explain everything in a trice, and see if it isn’t more dynamic. Do this even if your book’s Jiminy Cricket is the protagonist;s therapist.

Perhaps ESPECIALLY if it’s the therapist.

If you are writing a book where the protagonist spends a significant amount of time in therapy, make sure that you are balancing two-people-sitting-in-a-room-talking scenes with scenes of realization outside the office. And make sure to do some solid character development for the therapist as well, to keep these scenes tense and vibrant.

If you are in doubt about how to structure this, take a gander at Judith Guest’s ORDINARY PEOPLE, where most of the protagonist’s breakthroughs occur outside of the therapist’s office. The therapist appears from time to time, punctuating young Conrad’s progress toward rebuilding his life after a particularly grisly suicide attempt with pithy questions, not sum-it-all-up answers.

Which brings me to a final prescription for subtle Short Road Home plotting and pacing: make sure that your protagonist learns his lessons primarily through direct personal experience — or through learning about someone else’s direct personal experience told in vivid, tension-filled flashbacks.

At least in your first book, where you really need to wow the professionals to break in. After you make it big, I give you permission to construct a plot entirely about a couple of characters sitting around talking, motionless.

Keep up the good work!

– Anne Mini

Hello, readers —

For those of you just tuning in, I have been writing a lot lately about mega-problems in writing, the kind of troubles that only become apparent when a manuscript is read front to back. It’s not entirely coincidental that I have been bringing up these seldom-discussed topics in the weeks leading up to the deadline for PNWA literary contest entries: while many aspiring writers develop strong enough self-editing skills to rid their entries of micro-problems — grammatical errors, clarity snafus, and other gaffes on the sentence and paragraph level — when they’re skidding toward a deadline, they often do not make time to catch the mega-problems.

Let’s all chant the mantra together: Before you send it in, read it OUT LOUD and IN HARD COPY.

Okay, it has too many syllables to be a proper mantra. Chant it anyway, so you don’t forget the night before the deadline. Although, if you want to leave time to fix mega-problems, waiting until the night before the entry needs to be postmarked probably isn’t prudent.

Before that last read-through, however, I hope you will take time now to consider whether your manuscript has any mega-problems. Any one of them can be enough to knock you out of finalist consideration in a contest or turn an enthusiastic “Yes — send us the first 50 pages!” into “Your manuscript does not meet our needs at this time.”

So let’s roll up our sleeves and weed ’em out.

Today’s mega-problem is the Short Road Home, and it comes in two flavors, full-bodied and subtle. Today, I shall focus on the full-bodied version.

The Short Road Home is when a problem in a plot is solved too easily for either its continuance or its resolution to provide significant dramatic tension. In its full-bodied form, characters may worry about a problem for a hundred pages — and then resolve it in three. A character conflict seems insurmountable —and then it turns out that all one character needed to do all along was admit that he was wrong, and everything is fine. A decade-old mystery is solved by the first outsider who walks into town and asks a few questions.

Ta da! Crisis resolved.

The fine film critic Roger Ebert calls films with such easily-resolved conflicts Idiot Plots: if the fundamental problem of a story could have been solved if just one character had asked just one obvious question early in the plot (“Wait — HOW will our wandering unarmed into the murder’s lair lay a trap for him?”), it’s an Idiot Plot. Sitcom episodes very, very frequently have Idiot Plots, presumably so any given issue can be resolved within 22 minutes.

Bear in mind that a story does not have to be inherently stupid to feature an Idiot Plot — or a Short Road Home, for that matter. Remember in TOM JONES, where the heroine spends half the book angry with Tom because she heard a single rumor that he had spoken of her freely in public — and so, although she has braved considerable dangers to follow him on his journey, she stomps off without bothering to ask him if the rumor were true?

Generally speaking, Idiot Plots are light on character development, but Short Roads Home tend to be a matter of the author’s not dealing with actions necessary to resolve a conflict and/or the action’s messy and page-consuming results. They are shortcuts.

“Wait a darned minute,” I can hear some of you say, “The very fact that Mssr. Ebert has a pet name for it means that Idiot Plots are widely accepted in the moviemaking industry. I have seen the Short Road Home used countless times in books. How can a trait knock my manuscript out of consideration when so many prominent authors do it routinely?”

True, you have probably seen the Short Road Home a million times in published books, and a million and twelve times in movies, so you may not have identified it as a manuscript problem. I would suggest that the main producers of Idiot Plots and Short Roads Home are NOT first-time screenwriters and novelists, though, but ones with an already-established track record. Generally speaking, the longer ago the writer broke in and/or the more successful he has been, the greater latitude he enjoys.

In other words, I know you’re better than that.

As good is not necessarily good enough. Writers who have already broken into the business can get away with many things that a brand-new writer cannot. There’s even an industry truism about it: to break into the business, a first book has to be significantly BETTER than what is already on the market.

Often, Short Roads Home are small shortcuts, rather than extensive plot detours, which renders them more difficult for the author to catch. I ran into such a Short Road Home just the other day in my writers group: one of my colleagues, a genuinely fine writer of many published books, showed us a chapter where her protagonist escapes from a choking situation by kneeing her attacker in the groin. The attacker slinks off almost immediately; conflict resolved.

Now, three aspects of this scene set off Short Road Home alarm bells for me. First, my self-defense teacher taught me that a man will instinctively move to protect what she liked to call “his delicates,” so it was not a good first-strike target when you were defending yourself. So why didn’t the chapter’s attacker automatically block the blow? Second, the attacker is able to walk out of the room right away, with no recovery time — which simple playground observation tells us is seldom true in these instances. Third, this scene ended a relationship that had been going on for two-thirds of the book; one swift jab, and both sides spontaneously agree to call it a day.

Now, to be absolutely honest, because my colleague is an established writer, she would probably be able to get this Short Road Home past her agent and editor if I hadn’t flagged it. However, it’s the kind of logical problem reviewers do tend to catch, even in the work of well-known writers — and thus, it should be avoided.

I brought up this example so you would have a vivid image in your mind the next time you are reading through your own manuscript or contest entry: if your villain doesn’t need recovery time after being kneed in the groin or the equivalent, perhaps you need to reexamine just how quickly you’re backing your protagonist out of the scene. One true test of a Short Road Home is if a reader is left wondering, “Gee, wouldn’t there have been consequences for what just happened? Wasn’t that resolved awfully easily?” If you are rushing your protagonist away from conflict — which, after all, is the stuff of dramatic writing — you might want to sit down and think about why.

Another good test: does the problem get solved by the FIRST effort the protagonist makes? If your heroine is seeking answers to a deep, dark secret buried in her past, does the very first person she asks in her hometown know the whole story — and tell her immediately? Or, still better, does each minor character volunteer his piece of her puzzle BEFORE she asks?

You think I’m kidding about that, don’t you?

It may surprise you to hear that editors (and presumably agents as well) see this kind of Short Road Home on an almost daily basis. All too often, mystery-solving protagonists come across as pretty lousy detectives, because evidence has to fall right into their laps, clearly labeled, before they recognize it. A simply astoundingly high percentage of novels feature seekers who apparently give off some sort of pheromone that causes:

a) People who are hiding tremendous secrets to blurt them out spontaneously;

b) Local historians (disguised as shop keepers, grandmothers, and other old folks) to appear as if by magic to fill the protagonist in on necessary backstory;

c) Crucial characters who have suffered in silence for years suddenly to feel the need to share their pain with total strangers, and

d) Diaries and photographs that have been scrupulously hidden for years, decades, or even centuries to leap out of their hiding places at precisely the right moment for the protagonist to find them.

Here’s a good rule of thumb for whether your story is taking the Short Road Home: at every revelation, ask yourself, “Why did that just happen?” If your answer is, “So the story could move from Point A to Point B,” and you can’t give any solid character-driven reason beyond that, then chances are close to 100% that you have a Short Road Home on your hands.

If you get stuck, try having your protagonist track down a false lead or two. Trial and error can be a great plotting device, as well as giving you room for character development.

Have you ever seen an old-fashioned Chinese action movie, something, say, from the beginning of Jackie Chan’s career? In such films, the hero is almost always beaten to a pulp by the villain in the first half of the film — often more or less simultaneously with the murderer’s gloating over having killed the hero’s father/mother/teacher/best friend. (In Western action films, the same array of emotions tends to be evoked by killing the hero’s beautiful wife, who not infrequently is clutching their adorable toddler at the time.) This establishes the motivation for the hero to acquire the skills, allies, and/or resources he needs in order to defeat the villain at the end of the film.

The point of the story is not to get your protagonist from the beginning to the end of the plot as fast as possible, but to take your readers through an enjoyable, twisted journey en route. Short Roads Home are the superhighways of the literary world: a byway might not get you there as fast, but I guarantee you, the scenery is going to be better.

Take your characters down the side roads every once in awhile. And keep up the good work!

– Anne Mini

Hello, readers –

Yesterday, I told you about another manuscript mega-problem — i.e., a writing problem that is difficult to catch unless you sit down and read the work straight through, as a reader would, rather than on a computer screen, as most writers do — that I like to call the Short Road Home, too-quick major problem resolution. I brewed it for you in its full-bodied version, where it directly affects the plot in a notable way: “What’s that, Lassie? Timmy’s fallen into the well?”

Today, I am going to deal with the subtle flavor of Short Road Home, scenes where character development or conflict is curtailed by too-quick analysis. Like the full-bodied version, this mega-problem is not limited to works of fiction, but runs rampant through narrative nonfiction and memoir as well. I see it in my freelance editing practice all the time, and literally every time I have been a judge in a literary contest, I have seen otherwise excellent manuscripts infected with it — and, inevitably, penalized for it.

(Not that the other judges have called it that when they see it. Just so you know, the names I have been bestowing upon mega-problems — and the terms mega-problem and micro-problem themselves — are of my own making. If you use them with an agent or editor, you will probably be rewarded with a blank look. I am used to this.)

The subtle flavor of the Short Road Home is easy for the author to overlook, particularly in a first novel. First-time novelists tend to be so pleased when they develop the skill to pin down an emotional moment with precision that they go wild with it for a little while. The instant a solidly conflictual moment peeps its poor little head above ground, these eager beavers stop the plot cold to devote themselves to analyzing it. With the vim of medics rushing into a disaster area, they staunch the flow of speculation practically before it seeps from the body of the work.

I’m sure that I could come up with many more colorful mixed metaphors for what is going on, but I suspect you get the picture.

Why is this a problem? Well, when situations and motivations are over-explained, the reader does not have to do any thinking; it’s like a murder mystery where the murderer is identified and we are told how he will be caught on page one. Where’s the suspense? Why keep turning pages?

And that’s just the problem from a reader’s POV; from an agent, editor, or contest judge’s POV, it is still more serious. Professional readers’ first experience any given writer’s work is in sizeable chunks — the first 50 pages, say, or a chapter submitted to a contest. If a subtle Short Road Home appears once in that brief a portion of a book, the agent, editor, or contest judge is left to speculate whether this is a writing habit, or a one-time fluke. The agent or editor may choose to take a chance that it is a one-time gaffe, and ask to see the rest of the book — although, more frequently, they pass with thanks.

A contest judge, on the other hand, does not have the option of asking to see the rest of the work. Generally, she will conclude that this is a recurring writing problem, and score the piece accordingly. And, naturally, if more than one subtle Short Road Home occurs in either a submission or an entry, chances are that the professional reader will not read beyond the second one. The writer is labeled as promising, but needing more experience in moving the plot along.

Vague, isn’t it, given that what is occurring is a very specific mega-problem? Subtle Short Roads Home often trigger the feedback, “Show — don’t tell!” But frankly, I think that admonition does not give the writer enough guidance. There are a lot of ways that a writer could be telling the reader what is going on; a subtle Slow Road Home is only one of many, and I don’t think it’s fair to leave an aspiring writer to guess which rule she has transgressed.

But then, as I believe I have pointed out before, I don’t rule the universe. If I did, though, every writer who was told “Show — don’t tell!” would also receive specific feedback on where and how. Because, frankly, subtle Short Roads Home bug me. As anyone who has ever been in a writers’ group with me can tell you.

For me, seeing a subtle Short Road Home stop the flow of a wonderful story reminds me of the fate of the migratory birds that used to visit my house when I was a child. Each spring, lovely, swooping swallows would return to their permanent nests, firmly affixed under the eaves of the house where I grew up, invariably arriving four days after their much-publicized return to Mission San Juan Capistrano, much farther south. For me, it was an annual festival, watching the happy birds frolic over the vineyard, evidently delighted to be home.

Then, one dark year, the nasty little boy who lived half a mile from us took a great big stick and knocked their nests down. The swallows never returned again.

Unfortunately, once the underlying emotional rubric of a relationship has been laid too bare by in-text analysis, the rhythm of a story generally has a hard time recovering momentum. Readers of good writing don’t want to be passive; they want to get emotionally involved with the characters, so they can inhabit, for a time, the world of the book. They want to care about the characters — that’s one big reason for turning page after page, to find out what happens to them. And when a writer over-analyzes, the reader is left with nothing to do.

Essentially, subtle Short Roads Home are about not trusting the reader to draw the right conclusions about a scene, a character, or a plot twist. They’re about being afraid that the reader might stop liking a character who has ugly thoughts, or who seems not to be handling a situation well. They’re about, I think, a writer’s being afraid that he may not have presented his story well enough to prove the point of his book.

And, sometimes, they’re just about following the lead of television and movies, which show us over and over emotions analyzed to the nth degree. But TV and movie scripts are technically limited to the sensations of sight and sound: they cannot tell their stories any other way. A writer can draw upon the full range of sensations — and show thoughts. A book writer who restricts herself to using only the tools of TV and movies is like a pianist who insists upon playing only the black keys.

Live a little. You have a lot of ways to show character development and motivation; use them.

Consider your manuscript for a moment: does it contain scenes where, instead of interaction between characters showing the reader what the conflicts are and how the protagonist works through them, the protagonist sits around (often in a car) and thinks through the problem to its logical conclusion? Or sits around drinking coffee with her friends while THEY come up with analysis and solution? Or — and this one often surprises writers when I bring it up — sits around with her therapist, dissecting the problem and coming up with a solution?

If you can answer yes to any of these questions, sit down right away and read your book straight through. Afterward, consider: would the plot have suffered tremendously if those scenes were omitted entirely? Are there other ways you could convey the same points, through action rather than thought or discussion?

A very powerful agent who specializes in genre fiction once told me that he stops reading a submitted novel as soon as he encounters a scene where characters are drinking coffee, tea, or any other non-alcoholic beverage, because he has found over the years that those scenes almost always involve the characters sitting around and talking about what’s going on. To him, such scenes are the kiss of death: they indicated, he said, that the author did not know how to maintain tension consistently throughout a book.

I would not go so far — since I edit primarily for Seattle-based writers, if I advised them to skip every possible coffee-drinking opportunity in their works, I would essentially be telling them to ignore a fairly significant part of local community culture. However, I do suggest that authors flag any lengthy let’s-talk-it-over scenes — then go back and read the entire manuscript with those scenes omitted. Nine times out of ten, the pacing of the book will be substantially improved, with little significant loss of vital information.

The moral: pacing is HUGELY important to professional readers. If it slows the book down, consider cutting it out.

Lest you think I am asking too much, or that massive cutting is an easy suggestion to make about someone ELSE’s manuscript, let me share an early debacle of my own: in my first novel, I wrote 300 pages of therapy for my protagonist; ultimately, I threw out all but three scenes. Writing the therapy scenes was a great writing exercise, necessary for me to understand what my protagonist was going through, but once I understood her emotions, I was able to show (not tell about) them throughout the book. And, you know, while it was pretty spectacularly painful to throw out 300 pages of quite good writing, the book was better for it.

Please do think about it. Tomorrow, I shall load you with practical examples of subtle Short Roads Home, and discuss how to work with them.

Keep up the good work!

– Anne Mini

Hello, readers —

Yes, I skipped a day of posting yesterday, but no, I was not playing hooky; I was filling out the author and book questionnaire for my memoir, A FAMILY DARKLY: LOVE, LOSS, AND THE FINAL PASSIONS OF PHILIP K. DICK, due out in May. Since the book was originally due out in March, you would think that the marketing folks would have wanted some information about the book before now, but no: if you have been paying attention to all of my months of railing about how conceptions of time are different in the publishing world (whose heartbeat runs “I NEED IT NOW!” —wait — “I NEED IT NOW!” — wait—), you may perhaps understand why.

The author questionnaire is an in-depth analysis prepared by a book’s author for the sales and marketing departments of a publishing house so they have some idea how to sell the book to booksellers and consumers, respectively. Although we writers tend to focus on the big sale moment, where the agent (or the author herself, in the case of small publishing houses) sells the book to the editor, any book needs to be sold many, many times before it reaches the shelves at your local bookstore. If you go through an agent, first the author has to sell the book to the agent; the agent or author sells it to the editor; the editor sells it to the higher-ups in the publishing house, often department by department; the sales department goes out and sells it to buyers for bookstore chains; the marketing department sells it to consumers, and finally, the bookseller sells it to the customer.

The next time you hear a writer at a conference complain about how much time and energy authors now have to spend on marketing, recall that necessary chain of sales.

The argument the sales department will make to booksellers is all about the book’s selling points and target market. Even in the case of literary fiction, it is seldom sufficient for the sales crew to say merely, “Hey, we’ve found this great new author — her writing is wonderful,” because there are so many great new authors out there who write well. The sales crew needs to be able to talk about who will buy this book and why — specifically, why THIS book as opposed to any of the others on the shelves at the same time.

The marketing department, on the other hand, will need to sell both you and the book to potential readers, so they need to know about your every quirk. What makes you different from any other author? Are you personable? What about your life story is unusual? With so many other books on the market, what drove you to write another? What makes your book special, unique, the only book on the subject anyone should buy?

In the author’s questionnaire, the writer is expected to provide all of that information, at least in embryonic form. This comes as a surprise to many fiction writers, who are often laboring under the charming impression that all that a book has to be is a good read in order to sell; it’s the nonfiction writers who have to come up with target market demographics and selling points in their book proposals, isn’t it?

In a word, no. In the author questionnaire, you will be asked to answer questions like this:

What are the main points about you and/or the book should be emphasized to the media?

If you could stress only one or two points about your book, what would they be?

Whom do you think will buy your book (i.e., your market)?

What other books similar to yours are on the market? How does your book differ from them?

Hard to imagine more direct appeals to your marketing sense than these, isn’t it? And often, the writer is not given a tremendous amount of time to answer such pointed questions. Not to frighten you, but I was given only a week to fill out my author questionnaire (“I NEED IT NOW!” — wait — “I NEED IT NOW!” — wait—). If I had not given serious thought to the market prospects of my book, I doubt I would have been able to complete it in time.

As it was, it was difficult to prevent my written answers to such broad-ranging questions from extending to the length of the Bible. These are difficult, soul-searching questions for a writer — because, admit it, deep down, each of us wants to believe that readers will buy our books simply because WE have written them. The author questionnaire forces you to confront that embarrassing belief, and quickly, so you can sound like a professional-minded adult in response.

How difficult were the questions, you ask? Well, for one of them, I was asked to conduct an interview with myself, where I provided both the questions and the answers. Instead of copping out with Barbara Walters-style softball questions (“Have you always wanted to be a writer? Was this a fulfilling book to write?”), I was asked to be a hard-bitten, unsympathetic interviewer. So I spent several hours last night engaged in a fight with myself.

This kind of thing doesn’t happen much to people in other lines of work.

And if you thought that all of that tedious synopsis-writing would end once you got an agent and sold a book, think again. How’s this for a doozy of a writing assignment?

“Please give a brief (200 words) description of your book. If fiction, please provide us with a brief plot summary and, if appropriate, your intention in writing the story. If nonfiction, discuss your basic approach to the subject, emphasizing how your book differs from the competition.”

200 words is not a lot of space: in case you are curious, the first paragraph of this post plus the first two sentences of the second paragraph add up to 201 words. Brevity is tough. I’ve known writers who have worked for years to get their synopses down to 3-5 pages!

Oh, and they asked me to give the name, address, and phone number of every bookstore where I had ever spent a significant amount of time. I swear, I am not making this up. As anyone who has ever visited my house can tell you, there is hardly a wall in it that isn’t lined with books, so this list was bound to be lengthy.

I am passing these questions along, so you can start to think about them now, early in your writing process, rather than having them sprung upon you a few months before your first book comes out. I know, I know, practically every writing guide on the planet will tell you not to concentrate too much on your eventual success, expending energy daydreaming about what you’ll wear to eventual book signings, but honestly, coming up with ways to package yourself and your books is part of the work of being a professional writer.

This is work, not self-indulgence.

Thinking about marketing issues now can also help you produce more effective query letters and synopses. Does the query letter you’ve been sending out give any indication of who is in your target market — or how big that market is? (I have written the phrase “47 million Gen Xers” so many times in the last week that I can see it imprinted on the inside of my eyelids when I try to sleep.) If you don’t know, doesn’t it make sense to do some research now, so you can sell your book to an agent or small publisher more effectively?

Even if you write fiction, you should be thinking now about your target market and how to reach it — and conveying that information in your query letters. If your protagonist is a mountaineer, you might want to find out how many North Americans habitually go hiking. If your story takes place in some vacation hotspot, you might want to find out how many tourists visit every year. (Hey, tourists have been known to buy books while on vacation. It’s a proven fact.) If your plot concerns an agoraphobic, you might want to find out how many of them there are in the country these days. Basically, if any part of your pitch is dismissible with the response, “Well, how many people can there possibly be interested in that sort of thing?” it would behoove you to provide precisely that information up front.

If you can’t find the information on the Internet, call your local library and ask for research help. If you live in the greater Seattle metropolitan area, it couldn’t be easier — the Seattle Public Library runs a free Quick Information Line; since so many of the questions they get are mundane (“What’s the capital of Paraguay?”), a genuinely interesting research question will often generate a flood of helpful information. Longtime readers of this blog may remember my account of the time I called Quick Information to ask where I would find out what kind of grammatical mistakes a native English speaker fluent in Russian might make while learning to speak Lithuanian — and ended up having a half-hour discussion with a Baltic language expert who hadn’t been asked a question by a lay person for years. All for free.

And when you find this information, work it into your query letters, pitches, and synopses. That is your marketing material; the more lucid you are about the target market for your book, the more professional you will sound to agents and editor — and the better prepared you will be when the time comes to fill out your own author questionnaire.

May that happy (but LONG) day come soon.

Keep up the good work!

– Anne Mini

Hello, readers —

As you may have noticed, I’ve been on a kick lately of gabbling here about common writing problems — not the micro-problems, the sentence- or paragraph-level blunders we tend to hear about in writing classes, but mega-problems, the chapter- and book-level gaffes that most writers hear nothing about until their manuscripts have been rejected by an editor at a major publishing house. The Frankenstein phenomenon is a ubiquitous mega-problem, and so is self-plagiarization.

Mega-problems are unlikely to be caught by the author, or indeed by anyone who isn’t reading the manuscript the way agents and editors do: starting at the beginning, straight through, in hard copy. If you are not entrusting your work first to a really tough-minded writing group (and one that keeps reading consistently and critically all the way through your book) or a professional editor, the only way to catch mega-problems on your own is to make a serious, sustained commitment to reading EVERY draft of your manuscript as the agents and editors do.

When in Rome, etc., etc.

I don’t mean that you need to perform a dramatic reading of your entire text every time you change so much as a comma, of course. Once per revision is fine, as long as you do not succumb to the insidious temptation to skip over parts of the text where you know you have not changed much. To keep the work consistent (and to avoid the Frankenstein nightmare), you need to read the whole thing, every time.

Also, once you are at the stage when your agent is shopping your book or proposal around (or you are submitting it to small publishers yourself), bite the bullet and ask for specific rejection criteria, so you can spot mega-problems that may be scuttling your work and revise accordingly before it is sent out again. Surprisingly few authors ask for feedback from rejecters; I think this is a mistake. Here you have an editor at an honest-to-goodness publishing house, taking the time to sit down and read your work — and you DON’T want to know what he thought of it?

Yes, in one sense, an editor’s reaction to a book or proposal is binary: either he buys it or he doesn’t. Your agent will probably report it to you that way. However, if you are in the writing biz for the long haul, the submission process is not just about how the publishing world responds to this particular book; if you are clever, it can also be about teaching you what you need to know in order to sell your next book, and the book after that. Start to think of your writing as a lifetime endeavor, and not asking for feedback begins to seem downright silly.

The easiest way to solicit feedback you can use is to request it in advance; if you wait until after the book is rejected, you will probably not be able to get it. Tell your agent that you will want to hear any specific criticisms editors might have. (Trust me, if your agent believes in your work, the first words out of her mouth will be, “But WHY?”)

If you are going it alone, submitting to small publishers (most of the majors as a matter of policy will no longer read an unagented author’s manuscript, alas), state in your “Gee, thanks for agreeing to read this” cover letter that you would appreciate getting feedback, regardless of the ultimate decision. Deep down, most editors like writers; if you are polite and straightforward, they will generally grant this request.

Inherent in this request is the understanding that you will NOT take this feedback as an invitation to debate the merits of your book after it has been rejected. If you have been dealing with the editor directly, a simple thank-you note is a nice touch, but otherwise, leave the advice-giving editor alone. He passed on your book; he told you why; end of transaction, because he has another 25 books to read this week.

And while naturally it is tempting to horde all of the negative feedback you ever get, so you can throw it in your critiquers’ faces when you eventually make it big, don’t. It’s a waste of energy, and in any case, it’s unlikely that the targets of your wrath will remember you or your work well enough to say three years from now, “Wow — touché. I wish I’d given that author a chance, boy oh boy.”

Sad but true: the book so close to your heart is, after it is rejected, just another stack of paper that needs to be stuffed in a SASE, from the publishing house’s perspective. Most editors at major houses read so many manuscripts in a given year that expecting them to be able to connect your name with it years down the line is like asking most of us who sat in the second desk on the left-hand side of the classroom when we were in the third grade. (Maryann Olguin, in my case. But then, I have an unusually good memory for manuscripts, too.)

So what should you do with the feedback when you get it? Mostly, look for patterns. Chances are, your agent will have picked editors with similar tastes (who thus might all be interested in your book), so it is very likely that they will object to similar patterns in the book. If two or more editors expressed the same quibble, it is probably worth your while to fix it.

Talk the results over with your agent before you do anything radical, though; remember that editors are just people, and thus could be wrong. If one editor says she loved X but hated Y, and another as confidently asserts that she could never get X through an editorial meeting, but would be willing to fight to the death for a work that concentrated on Y, you probably should not revise X or Y at all.

Ditto with feedback from contest judges. I like that the PNWA contest gives entrants two sets of feedback, rather than one, because while there are indeed literary rules that must be followed, sometimes a work is rejected simply because a single reader did not like it. Again, sad but true. Hearing from two helps the author tell the difference between a book that just happened to have a character who reminded a judge of someone she could not stand in high school (or, still worse, an ex) and a character that is incompletely realized.

However, regardless if the feedback is from a contest judge or an editor, if even one of them points out a significant structural problem, take it seriously. Go back and take a look at the manuscript — but don’t do it right away. Even when criticism is dead-on accurate, it tends to sting. Perhaps even more so than when it is off-base.

Give yourself some time to sit with it, to figure out if making the suggested change feels right to you. After all, it’s your book, not the editor’s — if he had bought it, then you would have needed to make the change he recommended immediately; since he did not, it’s up to you.

If I seem as though I’m being wishy-washy about whether you should follow the feedback you receive or not, it’s because I’ve seen too many good writers take editorial advice — yes, and advice from prospective agents, too — as if it were the revealed word of an omniscient god. (I’ve done it, too: in my naïve days, I once turned a perfectly fine novel into a trilogy, just because my agent-at-the-time blithely suggested it. Which left me with three unsold books on my hands when I broke off my relationship with her, instead of one. It’s one book again now, because she was WRONG.)

In a way, the instinct to please is a sign of understanding the market: a writer unwilling to revise her work in accordance with editorial guidance tends to get a bad reputation very fast. We know this, so we tie ourselves up in knots to be accommodating. But if we do not stop to reflect before we scramble to put every last recommendation into effect, we run the risk of mistaking well-meant, off-the-record advice to an up-and-coming writer for a tacit promise to sign the author once the changes were made, creating a false hope likely to end in devastating disappointment.

And that, incidentally, is a major reason why agents and editors do not automatically give substantive feedback unless they are asked for it. They’re aware that their opinions carry more weight with writers than other readers’; the next time you see an agent or an editor avoiding contact with writers at a conference (yes, it does happen), consider the possibility that this person is not drunk with the power she holds over aspiring writers, but instead trying not to utter a syllable that might be construed as a promise.

If you can treat editorial feedback for what it is, noncommittal commentary from someone presumably well-informed about what kind of writing is selling these days, it can be extremely useful, especially for catching mega-problems. Just take a deep breath first, remember whose book it actually is, and treat it as an opinion.

Keep up the good work!

– Anne Mini

Continuing my series of responses to terrific questions posted by readers (and don’t worry, Colleen: I have not forgotten your excellent query. I am in the midst of trying to blandish one of several award-winning poets I know into answering it.), apparently I was not as clear about the slug line as I wanted to be. So today, I am going to clarify.

In case you don’t know, a slug line is the repetition of the author’s last name, title, and page number in the upper-left hand corner of each page of a manuscript. In general, it looks like this:

AUTHOR’S LAST NAME/TITLE/#

Usually, it is all in caps, but not everyone does it that way. I notice, for instance, that in my memoir manuscript, mine is in title case, for some reason that no doubt seemed good to me at the time that I first formatted the work. Thus, page 15 contains:

Mini/A Family Darkly/15

If your title is especially long (technically, mine is A Family Darkly: Love, Loss, and the Final Passions of Philip K. Dick), you may use a condensed version, but avoid actual abbreviations. FRIED GREEN TOMATOES AT THE WHISTLE STOP CAFE, for instance, could be listed in the slug line as

FLAGG/ FRIED GREEN TOMATOES/#

but not as

FLAGG/ FGT@WSC/#

For a contest that insists, as most do, that the author’s name appear nowhere in the manuscript, the slug line should be modified thus:

TITLE/#

Pretty much any word processing program will allow you to insert a changing page number, of course. In my version of Word, it’s just a matter of clicking on the # icon on the HEADER/FOOTER ruler.

The slug line is not merely another of those cosmetic touches that tells a professional reader whether a writer is industry-savvy or not — although leaving out the slug line does advertise that the writer has never worked with an agent. It is there for a very practical reason: a LOT of paper passes through the average agency or publishing house.

Manuscripts often get passed from hand to hand within agencies AND within publishing houses. Since manuscripts are never bound (unless a contest asks it to be), it is not unheard-of for pages to go astray. (This is also true of book proposals, incidentally, where the marketing department might get one section and the editor another, so it’s a good idea to include a slug line on every page of a book proposal, too.) Having every page labeled minimizes the possibility of pages remaining missing for long — or getting thrown away because no one knows where they belong.

(To answer the question your mind just howled: yes, it happens; stray papers get tossed all the time.)

Some authors I know like to make themselves hyper-contactable, so they include contact information in the slug line, too:

Author/Title/e-mail address or phone #/page #

I don’t do this, personally, because I think it encourages engaging in paranoid fantasies about what could possibly happen to my manuscripts when they are out of my hands. It’s easy to get carried away, once you admit the possibility: an agent’s picks up a single page of a submissions, walks around with it for awhile, realizes it is brilliant, runs back to her assistant’s desk to grab the rest of that sterling manuscript — only to find that the assistant has already sent it back to the author. Since, contrary to writers’ conference gossip, agencies do NOT keep very good logs about who has submitted what when (they get FAR too many to do that anymore), it would not, in this fantasy, be possible for the agent to contact the author of the single brilliant page — alas…

If you go the additional information route, please do not get carried away. There is no need to include your entire mailing address, middle initial, subtitle of the book, or any other tidbits you might want your readers to know. Remember, contact information in a slug line is for use in a case of last resort, when an agent has lost your title page AND cover letter.

Whatever you do, keep it to a single line. I once knew a very good writer who made the unfortunate choice to produce slug lines like this (names and titles changed to protect the guilty):

Widbey/The Coming Storm

Page 3

He thought it looked elegant, and after all, when it was single-spaced, there was more than enough room for it in the header. Actually, it did look kind of cool. And when he did finally land an agent (after two years when I, at least, wondered if his manuscripts were getting rejected because they looked unprofessional), she lectured him for fifteen minutes about how stupid his slug lines were. He reverted to standard slug lines thereafter.

Yes, people in the industry really do care that much about standardization.

What confuses some aspiring writers about the slug line is the fact that it is located IN the upper left margin of the manuscript — that’s right, floating in that inviolate one-inch space running all around the page, that part that’s supposed to remain white. So the first time that you put a slug line there, it can feel a trifle naughty, as though you are violating the rules.

Actually, even in contests, manuscript readers expect the slug line to be there — so much so, that contest rules very seldom even mention it as an exception to the top margin measurements. So you don’t need to worry about your entries being disqualified for margin violations.

Since most of us now use computers to produce our manuscripts, inserting the slug line could not be easier, but just in case some of you out there are reading this via your local library’s net browser, let me tell you how to do it on a typewriter. Go down one double-spaced line from the top of the page (which logically makes it two lines down, doesn’t it), then type the slug line. Then hit the carriage return to get yourself down the required inch, and start your text.

While, as I demonstrated yesterday, advancing technological choices have not always been the author’s friend (what’s the point of HAVING all of those other fonts if we can’t use them?), most word processing programs are already set up so you do not have to worry about WHERE to locate your slug line within the header. If you are set up for a one-inch top margin, the program will automatically start your header at half an inch from the top of the page, unless you specify otherwise. Nifty, eh?

There are different schools of thought about the type size for the slug line. Most professionals just use the same type size as the rest of the text (e.g., 12-point Times). However, if you are going to include your contact information in the slug line, you may reduce it to 10 point, so you don’t end up with a slug line that stretches all the way across the top of the page.

And that, my friends, is the story of the slug line. It’s an excellent idea to get into the habit of inserting your slug line in the margin IMMEDIATELY, before you even begin to write a chapter — just make it part of your initial formatting. That way, you won’t accidentally forget to insert it later on.

Many thanks to the readers who wrote in asking me to clarify this issue — because, as I mentioned yesterday, there are many, many little professional touches that become second nature after one has worked with agents and editors for awhile, and it’s easy to forget that no one is born knowing about them. (Actually, since I grew up in a family of writers, I honestly can’t remember when I didn’t know what a slug line was. I have, in fact, been known to insert slug lines absentmindedly in personal letters from time to time, so used am I to seeing them at the top of the page.) That’s my excuse, and I’m sticking to it.

Keep up the good work!

– Anne Mini

News travels fast! I have already been contacted by a couple of readers who found yesterday’s posting about standard typefaces rather upsetting. “Are you seriously suggesting,” one of them demanded, “that any submission that ISN’T in Times or Courier is automatically rejected by agents and disqualified from contests?”

No, that was not what I was suggesting. Contests seldom actually specify typefaces, and naturally, there are agents out there who are open-minded enough (or train their query screeners to be so) that they will consider submissions that are in alternate fonts. Actually, I would be quite surprised to hear any agent or editor ADMITTING IN PUBLIC that initial decisions are made primarily upon cosmetic criteria, however willing they may be to say it in private.

However — and this is an important thing for an aspiring writer to know — just as in a contest, the writer who is submitting to an agency or small publishing house does not know who will be reading her work. If you happen to hit a manuscript screener’s pet peeve — or the pet peeve of the screener’s boss, or of his favorite high school English teacher — the chances of your work progressing further through the contest, agency, or publishing house are basically nil.

Long-time readers of this blog will recognize this as a derivative of the grapefruit rule: an agent’s reaction to your submission may be dictated by what she ate for breakfast and whether it agreed with her or not. Certain factors affecting the judgment of any given reader — be it contest judge, agent, or editor — will always be beyond your control. If a contest judge has received bad news just before reading your entry, or an agent’s screener has just burned her lip on an over-hot latte, or an editor has just had a fight with his boyfriend, they’re not going to be in the best frame of mind to be open to your talent. This you must just accept, or you will drive yourself crazy trying to second-guess the personal likes and dislikes of those you must impress to promote your work.

However, by being industry-savvy, you CAN make your work less likely to fall prey to an already annoyed reader’s rejection response. If you use standard format in both contest and submission situations, you will substantially reduce the probability that your work will rub a touchy screener the wrong way.

And since there are SUCH strong typeface preferences amongst people who work in the industry, you can’t ever go wrong if you use the typefaces they prefer. To my mind, using Times or Courier instead of, say, Helvetica or Georgia (perfectly dandy fonts, from an aesthetic perspective) is the equivalent of wearing a conservative dark-blue suit to an interview with a bigwig you have never met, rather than a striking designer creation. The designer gown may well be more memorable, but you run the twin risks of (a) your interviewer’s disliking it, and thus you and/or (b) the gown’s being what your interviewer remembers, rather than you.

Stick with standard format and a frankly dull typeface, and let your writing speak for itself.

It is only fair to tell you that not all professional writers would agree with this advice. Because I hold such strong views on the subject, I was gearing up to ask a few of the best writers I know to weigh in, when one of them spontaneously (honest!) posted a comment on the blog, so I am including them here. What follows next are the words of the spectacularly talented Cindy Willis, whose brilliant literary novel, THE LONG THIRST, will stick in your brain forever. You could SING her first chapter — seriously, it’s one of the most beautiful pieces of prose I have ever read, and let me tell you, my eyes have covered a lot of pages in their time. Given how VERY gifted a prose stylist she is, I had rather expected her to come down on the opposite side of the formatting issue, but here is what she posted:

“Bravo! Heed these words well, oh writers! I was awarded the 2004 Zola award for fiction, opposite Anne, and signed with an agent shortly after (though my book has yet to land a publisher.) So many times I have offered similar advice to other writers, to pay attention to the physical details of their submissions. I remember their eyes glassing over–Yeah, yeah, whatever. MY writing will shine through.

“Sadly, they may have a hard lesson to learn. An agent once told me she does her initial weeding of submissions on a purely surface level: clean, neatly printed, white envelope; proper margins; crisp, quality white paper; requested format and materials; absolutely no mistakes – misspellings, etc. – on the first page or into the round file it goes. Since she receives in excess of 20,000 submissions a year, she doesn’t worry too much about letting a “potentially” brilliant writer slip past.

“The message? If you make your submission (whatever kind of submission it may be) a perfect vision of professionalism, you have already vastly increased your chances. This is one area of the process you CAN control. Make sure they get the opportunity to see that brilliant writing!”

Back to me again, so I can say I told you so. (As I just did.) Proper format is king — or at any rate, the key that opens the front door in literary circles.

Before I got too into patting myself on the back, I thought I should ask a screenwriter about formatting as well. I don’t write screenplays myself, so my information on the subject comes from people who do, their agents, directors, and producers.

So I asked the genuinely gifted Kathy Dunnehoff, also a former winner of top novel honors in the PNWA contest, who has recently turned her substantial talents to screenwriting. Kathy has an impeccable eye, a seemingly effortless but tightly-crafted narrative voice, and an absolutely peerless sense of comic timing. Even more importantly for our purposes here, she is a veteran of both the cut-throat mainstream novel market and the notoriously mercurial screenplay market. She has been to the wars, and can give us the skinny on them. Quoth Kathy:

“With screenplays the easy answer is you don’t have to worry about font
because your screenwriting software takes care of it. And you must possess
software or your life will be an indent nightmare!

The software everyone uses is Final Draft. I don’t, though. I’m a frugal writer, and for a mere $39 I bought Hollywood Screenwriter. I managed to write two screenplays, sign with an agent in L.A. and get really great rejections from several production companies and a director I’d actually heard of. No one
apparently cares how much you spend on your writer’s gear.

“That leads me to the hard answer about font. It’s not the font. It’s never
the font. It’s the story. In screenwriting I think this plays out in
writers struggling with the structure of the screenplay. We worry that our
story couldn’t possibly fit into 120 pages because it really needs to be a
four-hour movie. We fight in cutting dialogue because we want to tell
things instead of show them.

“But really we don’t trust our own story to not only find its way in the structure given to us but bloom because of it. For example, in my garden (the actual one. I know how writers assume metaphor) I grow sweet peas. They will start out just fine snaking out along the ground, but you’ll get no flowers. They need a trellis. If you train them to a structure of some kind, they’ll bloom like crazy. Sure, they are in ways limited by what they have to grow on, but what they gain is far greater.

“Trust your trellis, trust your font, trust your cheap
software, and really, truly, deeply trust your story.”

Anne here again: great advice, Kathy, and I think you bring up a HUGELY important issue that writers tend not to discuss much: as a group, we’re not big fans of restrictions. We’re all about expressing ourselves, right? So who the hell are contest judges and agents and editors to tell us that we can only express ourselves within certain rigid confines?

It’s a valid question — but ultimately, Kathy is absolutely right. You can quibble until you’re blue in the face about the need to conform to the strictures of standard formatting; if you are very brave (and have lots of time to devote to the experiment), you can spend years submitting work in wild typefaces, challenging the very notion of a standard format. Be my guest, if that is the way you want to expend your energy. Just be aware that you have made a choice to fight the system, and appreciate your own efforts accordingly.

However, what is important to most writers is talent and story. If you accept from the first minute that you sit down to write a book that it needs to comply with certain cosmetic restrictions, you can free yourself from the necessity of fighting. You can free yourself from worrying about that grapefruit your dream agent’s screener may or may not have had for breakfast on the morning that your work falls upon her desk. You can free yourself from wondering about whether your work has gotten rejected, as even the best writers’ work does, for superficial reasons, rather than because of your writing itself. You can worry instead about how best to express your talent, convey your voice, and tell your story.

You can, in short, place the bulk of your attention where it belongs, on the writing, not on the format. And that, for a good writer, is a much more comfortable way to live a rich, full creative life.

Keep up the good work!

– Anne Mini

Okay, time for the final installment of my holiday gift to my readers: an extended series on how to increase your chances in literary competitions. Today’s installment deals with the fun stuff, the last-minute touches that can give your entry an edge. (Incidentally, many of these presentation tips work beautifully with query letters and manuscript submission, too.)

When you first read through contest rules, it may not seem as though they allow a great deal of leeway in how you package your work, but often, there is some wiggle room. If so, proportion can make a difference in how your work is received.

Take a look at your entry: does the synopsis seem disproportionately long? Is there good writing that you would be able to squeeze into the chapter if it were shorter?

If your synopsis runneth over its assigned page limit, try this trick: minimize the amount of space you devote to the book’s premise and the actions that occur in Chapter 1. Yes, you will need this information to appear prominently in a synopsis you would show an editor or agent, but you have different goals here. If you are submitting Chapter 1 (or even beyond) as part of your contest entry, and if you place the chapter BEFORE the synopsis in your entry packet, the judges will already be familiar with both the initial premise AND the basic characters AND what occurs at the beginning in the book. So why be repetitious?

In the average novel synopsis, over a quarter of the text deals with premise and character introduction. Trim this down to just a few sentences and move on to the rest of the plot.

Allow me to use a practical example. Let’s say that you were Jane Austen, and you were submitting the first 25 pages of SENSE AND SENSIBILITY to a literary contest. (You should be so lucky!) For submission to an agent, your query synopsis might look something like this:

ELINOR (19) and MARIANNE DASHWOOD (17) are in a pitiable position: due to the whimsical will of their great-uncle, the family estate passes at the death of their wealthy father into the hands of their greedy half-brother, JOHN DASHWOOD (early 30s). Their affectionate but impractical mother (MRS. DASHWOOD, 40), soon offended at John’s wife’s (FANNY FERRARS DASHWOOD, late 20s) domineering ways and lack of true hospitality, wishes to move her daughters from Norland, the only home they have ever known, but comparative poverty and the fact that Elinor is rapidly falling in love with her sister-in-law’s brother, EDWARD FERRARS (mid-20s), render any decision on where to go beyond the reach of her highly romantic speculations. Yet when John and his wife talk themselves out of providing any financial assistance to the female Dashwoods at all, Mrs. Dashwood accepts the offer of her cousin, SIR JOHN MIDDLETON (middle aged) to move her family to Barton Park, hundreds of miles away. Once settled there, the Dashwoods find themselves rushed into an almost daily intimacy with Sir John and his wife, LADY MIDDLETON (late 20s) at the great house. There, they meet COLONEL BRANDON (early 40s), Sir John’s melancholy friend, who seems struck by Marianne’s musical ability — and beauty. But does his sad face conceal a secret?

Now, all of this does in fact occur in the first 25 pages of SENSE AND SENSIBILITY, as the contest entry would clearly show. So, being a wise Aunt Jane, you would streamline the contest synopsis so it looked a bit more like this:

At the death of their wealthy father, ELINOR (19) and MARIANNE DASHWOOD (17) and their affectionate but impractical mother (MRS. DASHWOOD, 40) are forced to leave their life-long home and move halfway across England, to live near relatives they have never seen, far away from Elinor’s beloved EDWARD FERRARS (mid-20s). At the home of their cousins SIR JOHN (middle aged) and LADY MIDDLETON (late 20s), melancholy COLONEL BRANDON (early 40s), seems struck by Marianne’s musical ability — and beauty. But does his sad face conceal a secret?

Less than half the length, but enough of the point to show the judges how the submitted chapters feed into the rest of the book. Well done, Jane!

Placing character names in capital letters and indicating ages (as I have done above), is no longer standard for querying synopses — but not all contest judges seem to be aware of that. To old-fashioned eyes, a synopsis simply isn’t professional unless the first time each major character is named, HIS NAME APPEARS IN ALL CAPS (age). Here again, you would be perfectly within your rights not to adhere to this quaint practice, but if your work happens to fall into the hands of a judge who thinks it’s mandatory, you’ll be far better off if you stuck to old-fashioned structure.

And naturally, you should read the ENTIRETY of your entry IN HARD COPY, ALOUD, before you send it anywhere. As regular readers of this blog are already aware, my professional editor hat gets all in a twist at the notion of any writer’s proofreading solely on a computer screen.

And don’t even get me started on the chronic inadequacies of most word processing programs’ grammar checkers! Mine disapproves of gerunds, apparently on general principle, strips accent marks off French words, and regularly advises me to use the wrong form of THERE. (If anybody out there does not know the ABSOLUTELY IMMUTABLE rules governing when to use THERE, THEIR, AND THEY’RE, drop me a comment, and I shall make everything clear.) Like a bad therapist, a poor grammar checker cannot be sufficiently disregarded, but even in the unlikely event that your grammar checker was put together by someone remotely familiar with the English language as she is spoke, you should NEVER rely solely upon what it tells you to do. If you’re in doubt, look it up.

There is another excellent reason to read the synopsis out loud: to make sure it stands alone as a story. Since part of the point of the synopsis is to demonstrate what a good storyteller you are, flow is obviously important. If you have even the tiniest reservations about whether you have achieved this goal, read your synopsis out loud to someone unfamiliar with your project — and then ask your listener to tell the basis story back to you. If there are holes in your account, this method will make them leap out at you. (Insofar as a hole can leap.)

Once you have perfected your entry, print it on nice paper. This may seem silly, but it sometimes does make a difference, believe it or not.

By nice paper, I’m not talking about hot pink sheets or pages that you have hand-calligraphed with gold leaf and Celtic designs. Either of those would get your entry disqualified on sight. No, I mean high-quality white paper, the kind of stuff you might print your resume on if you REALLY wanted the job.

If this seems extravagant to you, ask yourself: have I ever walked into an interview wanting the job as much as I want to have my book published?

Using good paper will make your entry stand out amongst the others. Nice paper is a pleasure to hold, but frankly, there’s more to this strategy than giving your judges visceral pleasure. The vast majority of contest entries are printed on very low-quality paper; when multiple copies are required for submission, they generally show up on the flimsy paper so often found in copy shop photocopiers. It tears easily. It wrinkles as it travels through the mail. It’s dingy-looking.

Spring for something nicer, and your entry will automatically come across as more professional to the judges.

It may not be fair, but it’s true, so it’s very worth your while to invest a few extra bucks in a decent ream. 20-pound paper or heavier (I use 24-pound) will not wrinkle in transit unless the envelope is actually folded, and bright white paper gives the impression of being crisper. (Avoid anything in the cream range — this is the time for brilliant white.)

For what it’s worth, I have observed over time that agents and editors, too, seem to treat manuscripts printed in Times New Roman on bright, heavy white paper with more respect than other manuscripts. The only drawback — and it was a significant one — was that when I printed up a draft of my memoir for my editor on lovely cotton 24-pound paper, it came back to me smelling like an ashtray. Turns out cotton paper soaks up ambient smoke like a sponge. My cats shied away from my desk for weeks afterward.

And before you seal the envelope, GO BACK AND REREAD THE CONTEST RULES. Have you met each and every requirement? Have you included every needed element? Are your margins precisely what the contest specified?

It may seem anal-retentive to re-check this often, but as I kept telling you last week, judges are often looking for reasons to disqualify you. It is absolutely imperative, then, that you follow every rule to the letter. And in the average contest, a good 5% of entries show up with something really basic missing, like the check or a second title page.
Good luck with your entries.

Hey, one of my readers suggested to me that it might be a good idea for me to hold a brief seminar on putting the contest entry packet together a week or so before PNWA contest entries are due, to help my Seattle-area readers catch last-minute problems. If you might be interested in such a class, or if you just think it would be a dandy thing to have offered, vote for it by dropping me a line via the COMMENTS function, below, sometime before the end of January. (If you want a personalized notice when it happens, include your e-mail.) If there’s enough interest, I’d be happy to teach it.

Keep up the good work!

– Anne Mini

It may seem odd that I hammered so hard yesterday about the importance of a finely-crafted synopsis to a contest entry’s overall chances of winning, but you would be astonished at how often a well-written chapter is accompanied by a synopsis obviously dashed off at the last minute, as though the writing quality, clarity, and organization of it weren’t actually being evaluated at all.

I suspect that this is a fairly accurate reading of what commonly occurs. All too often, writers (most of whom, after all, have full-time jobs and families and, well, lives to lead) push preparing their entries to the very last minute. Frustrated at this crucial moment by what appears to be an arbitrary requirement — it’s the writing in the chapter that counts, right? — it’s tempting to just throw together a synopsis in a fatal rush and shove it into an envelope, hoping that no one will pay much attention to it.

Trust me on this one: judges WILL pay attention to it.

Many a fine chapter has been scuttled by a slipshod synopsis. I won’t go so far as to say that if you do not expend careful consideration over the crafting of the synopsis for a book-length category, you might as well not enter at all. It is entirely fair to say, however, that if you have a well-written, well thought-out synopsis tucked into your entry packet, your work will automatically have an edge toward winning.

Effectively, in a contest situation, the synopsis is the substitute for the rest of the book. The synopsis is where you demonstrate to judges that you are not merely a writer who can hold them in thrall for a few isolated pages: the synopsis is where you show that you have the vision and tenacity to take the compelling characters you have begun to reveal in your first chapter through an interesting story to a satisfying conclusion. The synopsis is where you show that you can plot out a BOOK.

For this reason, it is imperative that your synopsis makes it very, very clear how the chapter or excerpt you are submitting fits into the overall arc of the book, regardless of whether you are submitting fiction or nonfiction. Quite a few contests allow writers to submit chapters other than the first, and if you elect to take them up on this offer, your synopsis had better make it absolutely plain where the excerpts will fall in the finished work.

Truth be told, I think it is seldom wise to submit either non-consecutive excerpts from a book or chapters other than the initial ones, even if later chapters contain writing that is truly wonderful. Non-consecutive excerpts require the judge to make the logical connections between them — which the judge may not be inclined to do in a way that is in your best interest.

An uncharitable judge might, for instance, draw the unkind inference that you had submitted the excerpts you chose because they were the only parts of the book you had written — a poor message to send in a category devoted to book-length works. Or that you simply can’t stand your introductory chapter. Or, a judge may reason, no agent or editor in the world, is going to accept random excerpts from a book for which she’s been queried: she is going to expect to see the first chapter, or first three chapters. Thus, a judge might conclude, the author who submitted this patchwork entry isn’t anywhere near ready to submit work to professionals. Next.

This is not, in short, a situation where it pays to rely upon the kindness of strangers.

If you DO decide to use non-contiguous excerpts, place your synopsis at the BEGINNING of your entry, unless the rules absolutely forbid you to do so, and make sure that the synopsis makes it QUITE clear that these excerpts are far and away the most important part of the book. Basically, the role of the synopsis here is to make the judges EAGER to read these particular excerpts. Obviously, this means that your storytelling skills had better be at their most polished, to meet the challenge.

As for selecting a chapter other than the first for submission, effectively starting midway through the book, I would advise against it, too, even if when contest rules explicitly permit the possibility. In the first place, the judge may well draw the same set of uncharitable inferences as with the non-continuous excerpts, and dismiss your submission as not ready for the big time. (As I have mentioned repeatedly over the last couple of weeks, contest organizers LOVE it when their winners move on quickly to publication. If your work looks like it needs a couple of years’ worth of polishing to become market-ready, it is unlikely to win a contest, even if you are extremely talented.)

In the second place, while your best writing may well lie later in your book, the advantage of starting at the beginning of the book is that the judge and the reader will have an equal amount of information going in. I’ve known a lot of contest judges who resent having to go back and forth between the synopsis and the chapters to figure out what is going on.

There is a sneaky way to get around this — but again, I would have to scold you if you did it. There is no contest in the world that is going to make you sign an affidavit swearing that your entry is identical to what you are submitting to agents and editors; if you win, no one is later going to come after you and say, “Hey, your book doesn’t start with the scene you entered in the contest!”

So? Professional writers change the running orders of their books all the time.

A clever entrant who feels her best writing occurs fifty pages into her novel might, for the purposes of competition, place her strongest scene first by starting the entry on page 50 (presenting it as page 1, of course). The synopsis would have to be revised, naturally, to make it appear that this is indeed the usual running order of the book, and our heroine would have to edit carefully, to make sure that there is nothing in the skipped-over pages that is vital to understanding what happens in the chapters presented in the entry. The job of the synopsis, then, in the hands of this tricky writer, would be to cover up the fact that the entry starts in the middle of the book. It would be just our little secret.

To put it in a less clever way: go ahead and submit your strongest chapter — but for heaven’s sake, do NOT label it as Chapter 8. Label it as Chapter 1, and write a new synopsis for a book where Chapter 8 IS Chapter 1. Just make sure that your synopsis is compelling and lucid enough that it all makes sense as a story.

As a general rule, anything you can do to place your best writing within the first few pages of your entry, you should do. Judges’ impressions tend to be formed very fast, and if you can wow ’em before page 3, you absolutely should.

Actually, just as with work you submit to agents, the first page of your entry is far and away the most important thing the judges see. Unless there is a strong reason to place your synopsis first, put it at the end of your entry, so your first page can jump out at the judges. And if you can include some very memorable incident or imagery within the first few paragraphs of your chapter, that much the better.

And whatever you do, try not to save writing your synopsis for a contest for the very last moments before you stuff the entry into an envelope. Synopsis-writing is hard; budget adequate time for it. And make absolutely sure that the synopsis you submit supports the image of the book you want your submitted chapter to send.

Tomorrow, I shall delve into the little niceties that make your entry look truly polished. In the meantime, keep up the good work!

– Anne Mini

As promised, I am continuing my three-week (give or take a day or two) holiday present to my readers, and continuing to yammer on about tips on how to improve your contest entries. Allow me to reiterate a point I made last week: a single book may benefit from having one version of the synopsis that goes out to agents, and another, more streamlined one that gets tucked into contest entries. The reason is simple: in each context, the synopsis is intended to perform different functions.

Let me back up for a moment and define synopsis, for those of you new to the term:

SYNOPSIS, n.: A brief exposition in the present tense of the plot of a novel or the argument of a book. Typically, synopses run from 2-5 pages (double-spaced), depending upon the requirements of the requesting agent or editor. (See my blogs of Sept. 9 and shortly thereafter for tips how to write a stellar synopsis for querying agents.)

If you are entering a category that covers book-length material, you will pretty much always be asked to submit a synopsis. In general, contests will specify the length of the synopses they would like to accompany your entry; sometimes, the rules merely set a maximum page limit for the entry, and allow the writer to decide how much of it to devote to the synopsis.

Even if the contest rules specify an absurdly short synopsis (or make it sound shorter by calling it a plot outline), DO NOT single-space it or fudge with the margins to make it fit within the specified limits, unless the contest rules say you may. Trust me, if the rest of your entry is in 12-point Times New Roman with 1-inch margins, double-spaced, almost any judge is going to be able to tell right away if your synopsis is presented differently.

NEVER allow a contest synopsis to run over 5 pages or under 2. Since 3-4 pages is industry standard, a synopsis that is much shorter will make you look as if you are unable to sustain a longer exposition; if it is much longer, you will look as though you aren’t aware of the standard.

Also, for fiction entries, avoid the temptation to turn the synopsis into either a back-jacket blurb (“My writing teacher says this is the best novel since THE SUN ALSO RISES!”) or an exposition on why you chose to write the book (“It isn’t autobiographical, but…) For nonfiction, you will want to do some gentle blurbing, to give an indication of why your book is uniquely marketable (see yesterday’s posting), but again, try not to get sidetracked on WHY you chose to write it. A LOT of contest synopses go off on these tangents, to the detriment of the entry.

Just so you know, in the eyes of the industry, there are only three contexts where a lengthy discussion of why you chose to write a book is appropriate. First, within a nonfiction book proposal, where it is a necessary component to making the argument that you are uniquely qualified to write the book you are proposing. Second, within the context of an interview AFTER the book is released. Interviewers LOVE hearing about writers’ motivations — which, I suspect is why aspiring writers so often want to tell everyone they see what is and is not autobiographical in their novels. So you can go to town after the book comes out. Third — and here is where talking about it will help you most — when you are chatting with other writers.

All too often, writers become frustrated at this crucial moment, and just throw together a query letter, a pitch, and a synopsis in a fatal rush, unsure of what they are doing, and dash their work off to agents.

The only exception to this is if you have some very specific expertise that renders your take on a subject particularly valid. If so, make sure that information is stated within the first paragraph of your NF synopsis; if you are writing a novel, and you feel that you have an inside perspective that simply must be mentioned to the judges, stick it at the end of the synopsis, where it won’t be too intrusive.

For a synopsis to accompany a fiction entry, your goal is very, very simple: make it a terrific story. All too often, writers just state the premise of the novel, rather than taking the reader through the plot, blow by blow. If the plot has twists and surprises, so should the synopsis. Show the story arc, and make it compelling enough that the judge will scrawl on the evaluation sheet, “Wow, I want to read this book when it comes out.”

The easiest way to get the judges involved is not merely to summarize the plot as quickly as possible, but to give the feel of a number of specific scenes. Don’t be afraid to use forceful imagery and strong sensual detail, and try to have the tone of the synopsis echo the tone of the book.

Yes, I know: it’s a tall order. But don’t forget that the synopsis is every bit as much an indication of your writing skill as the actual chapters that you are submitting.

For nonfiction, your goal is threefold: to show the argument of the book in some detail, along with some indication of how you intend to prove your case; to show that the book will appeal to a large enough market niche to make publishing it worthwhile, and to demonstrate that you are the best-qualified person in the universe to write the book. In 3-5 pages, no less.

For the first, it is helpful to have an outline of your proposed chapters in front of you, so you can use the synopsis to demonstrate how each chapter will build upon the next to make your overall case. Even if you are writing a self-help book, history book, or memoir, you are always making a case when you write nonfiction, if only to argue that your take on the world around you is interesting, unique, and valid. Be certain that by the time a judge finishes reading your synopsis, s/he will understand very clearly what this argument is — and what evidence you will be bringing in to demonstrate it. (Statistics? Extensive background research? Field experience? Interviews? A wealth of personal anecdotes? Etc.)

If you are pinched for space, you need only devote the first paragraph to marketing information. Say why the world needs your book. If you are writing on a subject that is already quite full of authorial opinion, make it plain why your book is different and better. (“Have you ever wondered what goes on underneath the snow while you are skiing on top of it? Although there are many books currently on the market for snowboarding enthusiasts, MOUNTAINS MY WAY is the first to be written by a geologist.”) If you have statistics on your prospective market, this is the place to mention them. (“There are currently 2 million Americans diagnosed with agoraphobia, yet there are few self-help books out there for them — and only one that is actually written by an agoraphobic, someone who truly understands what it feels like to be shut in.”)

The third desiratum is what is known in the industry as your platform, and admittedly, it is a trifle hard to explain why you are THE expert best qualified to write this book without saying something about yourself. Go ahead and state your qualifications — just don’t slip up and mention yourself by name. (“A well-respected Seattle area caterer for twenty years, the author has extensive experience in crafting meals for the pickiest of eaters.”) No one is going to disqualify you for mentioning that you have a Ph.D. or went to a specific culinary school. (“SHELLFISH AND YOU is the fruit of many years of postdoctoral research. The author, a graduate of the prestigious Scripps School of Oceanography, is recognized worldwide as an up-and-coming authority on mollusk behavior.”)

If your head is whirling from all of this, don’t worry. I’ll go into some tips on how to simplify the synopsis process tomorrow. In the meantime, keep up the good work!

– Anne Mini

I thought about it over the weekend, and yes, Virginia, I DO have enough left to say on the subject of contests to carry us all the way through Greek Christmas, January 6. Which, as it happens, is the extended deadline for the Holiday Tables contest, sponsored by yours truly. (Entry details in the blog of December 8.) The winner will receive undying glory and the opportunity to post writing both here and on a well-respected literary fiction website. That’s two legitimate publication credits and a boastable contest win, my friends.

You can’t win if you don’t enter.

Having won the PNWA’s Zola Award in the nonfiction book/memoir category last year, I feel that I should add a few category-specific hints for my own kind today. (And have I mentioned recently that THE VERY MEMOIR THAT WON is currently available for presale on Amazon? It’s called A FAMILY DARKLY: LOVE, LOSS, AND THE FINAL PASSIONS OF PHILIP K. DICK now, although when it won, it was titled IS THAT YOU, PUMPKIN? Unfortunately, it will not actually be available to READ the first chapter, which the nonfiction book/memoir judges liked so much, before the upcoming PNWA contest deadline, but hey, think of all the good contest karma you’ll be racking up by checking out the Amazon blurb.)

I have judged in this category before in several contests, and please, I implore you, if you are submitting a memoir entry, FOLLOW THE RULE ABOUT NOT HAVING YOUR OWN NAME APPEAR ANYWHERE IN THE MANUSCRIPT. Yes, I know, it’s very difficult not to refer to yourself by name in the story of your own life, but seriously, I’ve seen entries get disqualified for this.

And for good reason. For a contest to be worth its salt, it must be able to claim that its judging procedures are not biased; the first step to assuring lack of personal bias is to institute blind judging, where no judge knows the name of any given author. Now, as I explained in my first blogs on contests, some competitions are only apparently unbiased, but for the most part, contest organizers take authorial anonymity very seriously indeed.

I went to college with Danny, a very clever, very ambitious writer who periodically contributed pieces to the on-campus humor magazine. Now, it was the practice of the magazine to publish most of its pieces without bylines, to encourage collaboration amongst members of the writing club. But as I said, Danny was ambitious: he, like many of the other writers in the club, was anxious to graduate with clippings he could use to promote his work later on. So Danny did something exceptionally crafty: he inserted his own name into every ostensibly anonymous piece he wrote, much as Jerry Lee Lewis used to refer to himself in his own lyrics, so radio listeners would know who sang the song. Danny’s favorite way of doing this was to have an imaginary conversation with himself, so an alter ego could address him by name.

Danny did in fact land a pretty good writing job after graduation, I am told, but he was relying upon his club’s editorial indulgence to let him get away with breaking the rules. In a contest, this practice would have gotten him disqualified immediately.

Because there are legions of rule-breakers out there, you need to be ultra-careful about not doing inadvertently what Danny did on purpose. Unfortunately, within the first-person narrative common to memoirs, narrators tend to talk to themselves all the time,  à la Hamlet: Danny, you get ahold of yourself, now.

Keep a sharp eye out for that in preparing your contest entries.

Usually, though, the author’s name comes up as an inadvertent slip, where it’s pretty obvious that the author thought she had expunged all relevant references to herself. Even these innocent mistakes can knock your entry out of competition.

Let’s say the author is named Tammy Postlethwaite. Here are the most frequent ways that her name is likely to appear in a memoir. Check for these:

When another character directly addresses the narrator: “Tammy, have you seen the rice pudding?”

When another character is talking about the narrator behind her back: “Ward, I’m worried about the Beaver. He’s paying too much attention to that Tammy next door.”

And, in the VAST MAJORITY of childhood memoirs, when the narrator gets in trouble, some adult says: “Tammy Marie Postlethwaite, you come in this house this instant!”

Remember, in order to violate the rule, even if a character OTHER than the author appears with the author’s last name, it can cost you:

When a family member is addressed by a third party: “Mrs. Postlethwaite, your daughter is under arrest.”

When the narrator refers to her family collectively, or to a possession as theirs: In the Postlethwaite residence, Christmas decorations abounded.

Remember, too, that self-references to EITHER your first or last name, not just to both together, count as rule violations. By all means, do a search-and-replace for BOTH your first AND last names in your entry before you print it up.

Why might this be necessary, you ask, since in most contests, the judges never see your name attached to the manuscript, and thus would not know that the Tammy mentioned is the author? Well, two reasons. First, such is the seriousness with which blindness is taken that if a judge even SUSPECTS that an entry contains the author’s name, the entry may be toast. Second, it is not unheard-of for contests to have initial screeners, whose SOLE function is to check the entries for rule violations before the non-rule breaking entries are passed along. These screeners sometimes do have your entire entry packet — and thus your name.

The easiest way to avoid this problem is to use a pseudonym, of course, within the context of the entry. However, it is well worth your while to add a note to the title page of your entry, STATING that you have changed the names, because, as I mentioned above, the mere suspicion of rule-breaking can harm your chances of winning. How is the judge to know whether you have substituted the names or not, if you do not say so? “For the purposes of this entry,” you could write, “I have changed my family name to Parrothead.”

Yes, it’s kind of silly, but that way, you make it pellucidly clear that you’re not referring to yourself.

Other good tip for memoirists entering their work in contests is to do a bit of market research. (Actually, this is a good idea for anyone writing a book, and everyone who has to write a synopsis for a contest.) Is your memoir in fact unique, or does it fit into a well-defined market niche?

It is a question well worth asking before entering a memoir into a contest. All of us tend to think of our own experiences as unique, which of course they are. Every point of view is to a very great extent original. However, certain life experiences tend to recur, and tender, well-written memoirs about a Baby Boomer daughter nursing her mother through her final illness, for instance, or a former drug addict/alcoholic/workaholic rediscovering the beauty of day-to-day life, or a former hippie/swinger/disco queen recounting his or her glory days are not altogether uncommon. Nor are spiritual awakenings, discoveries that institutions are corrupt, or personal battles against major illnesses. If you check a well-stocked bookstore, or even run your subject matter through an Amazon search, you will get a pretty firm idea of how many other accounts there are that resemble your own, at least superficially.

This is not to say that your personal take is not worth telling — if you’re a good writer with a truly individual take on the world around you, it undoubtedly is. Remember, though, that judges tend to be reading for marketability, and if they perceive that you are writing in an already glutted submarket, your entry may not do as well as an entry on a less well-trodden topic.

Unfortunately, if you are writing about a common experience, you cannot get away with assuming that the writing alone will differentiate it from the other submissions. If there’s recently been a bestseller along similar lines as your topic, you can bet your boots that yours will not be the only entry that resembles it. Think about how many people suddenly started writing accounts of growing up poor immediately after ANGELA’S ASHES hit the big time, or about over-medicated, over-sexed teenagerhoods in the wake of PROZAC NATION.

If you are writing on a common topic, the bar automatically goes higher, alas, for making YOUR story stand out amongst the rest. If there are a whole lot of entries with similar stories, it is just human nature for the judges to get a trifle bored after the second or third one. You really have to knock their socks off, to an extent that you might not if your topic were not popular that year.

The best way to make your work stand out from the crowd is to use the synopsis to show how YOUR memoir is QUITE different than the other memoirs on the subject — and knowing the existing memoir market will be most helpful in figuring out what aspects to stress. What made your experience special, unique, unforgettable from the point of view of a third party? Why couldn’t anyone else on earth have written it, and why will readers want to buy it?

No need to turn your synopsis into a back jacket blurb (of which, more over the next few postings), but do show how your work is UNLIKE anything else the judge is going to read. Yes, each judge will have your chapter, or few pages, or however much the contest allows you to show him, but sometimes, the difference between a “Thank you for entering” letter and one that says, “Congratulations — you’re a finalist!” is a synopsis that makes the case that THIS entry, out of the half-dozen entries on the same general topic, is the one that is going to hit the big time.

But to discuss that, I shall have to get into the issue of how contest synopses differ from query synopses, and that is a project for another day. Tomorrow, to be precise, and perhaps the day after that.

In the meantime, keep up the good work!

– Anne Mini

Okay, I wrote through last-minute shopping days; I wrote through Christmas, and I’ve been writing through Hanukkah, and we’re right on top of New Year’s Eve, so it’s time to wrap up my holiday present to my readers, a lengthy series on how to improve your chances of winning or placing in a literary contest. Time to tie up the loose ends and offer those last few droplets of wisdom.

(Unless, of course, I happen to think of more good contest-related advice in the weeks between now and the end of February, when entries are due in the PNWA contest, or next week, when entries are due for the Holiday Tables contest. If I come up with anything juicy, I shall pass it along toute de suite. Or maybe I’ll decide over the weekend that I have so much more to say that I’ll keep writing through Epiphany.)

You will notice, in reading back over my advice on steering clear of crooked contests and avoiding technical mistakes likely to knock your entry out of consideration, I have spoken very little on the subject of content — other than to recommend not offending the judges. Frankly, I don’t think an honest literary contest has any business dictating content, but a surprising number of them do, either overtly (in defining the categories) or covertly (in defining winning criteria for the judges). This is yet another reason to read contest rules VERY carefully: skim a little too quickly, and you may not catch that contest organizers have limited what kinds of short story they want.

This is particularly true in short-short story competitions. It’s not uncommon for those to specify the topic outright. Read with care before you submit.

Few writers in the heftier categories (e.g., ones that accept book excerpts) write new entirely new pieces for every contest they enter, with good reason. If you are trying to fit prewritten work into specified categories, make sure to read the category’s definition FIRST, before you enter. This is not a time merely to skim the titles of the categories: get into the details of the description. Read it several times. Have a writer friend read it, then read your entry, to double-check that your work is in fact appropriate to the category as the rules have defined it.

I would LOVE to report that entries never come in labeled for the wrong category, but, alas, sometimes they do. And most contests have far too many entries for the initial screeners to recategorize the work for the careless entrant. Be careful.

Also, consider the possibility that the category you had envisioned for your work — in other words, where you had envisioned its being shelved in a bookstore or library — may not be the best category in any given contest for you. Would the first chapter of your memoir work best in the nonfiction book category or the nonfiction short piece category? Is your novel really mainstream, or is it actually romance? If the contest offers a novel-in-progress category, 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 preselected 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 most fierce. If a shorter-length category seems to offer you a better conceptual fit or better odds, it’s sometimes worth switching.

Be flexible. One of the best memoirs I have ever read, Barbara Robinette Moss’ astonishing CHANGE ME INTO ZEUS’ DAUGHTER (if you’ve never read it, and you have even the vaguest interest in the art of autobiography, you simply cannot fully appreciate the art form until you have read this book. It’s gorgeous and painful and brilliant in a way few books manage to be.), 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.

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. 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.

Truth does compel me to say, however, that it is not unheard of for authors to get away with this sort of double-dipping even when it’s forbidden, as often 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 when an unscrupulous author, say, 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.

I would have to scold you if you did that, of course. Or if you were 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 you if you went that route. Really, I would. That would be just a shade too professional to be merely clever.

Oh, wait — I’ve just realized that I’ve forgotten to deal with an AMAZINGLY important part of any book category’s entry: the synopsis. Oh, and while a good synopsis for a query is usually a good synopsis for a contest entry, it is not necessarily always the case. And there are ways in which a GREAT contest synopsis can differ significantly from a great query synopsis…

Well, that does it. I’ll just have to come back to more contest advice next week. Come to think of it, I have enough to say to carry us through to Greek Christmas, January 6, which as you know is the deadline for entering this blog’s Holiday Tables contest (check out post of December 9 for details.)

Happy New Year, and keep up the good work!

– Anne Mini