Author! Author!:: Anne Mini's Blog

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