Reading, 'Riting, and Ramblings

Last Saturday I sent out a half dozen queries to literary agents. Bright and early on Monday morning, I woke up to a rejection in my inbox.

I knew this was going to happen, and I know enough about the publishing world not to take rejection of a query as a judgement of my work. But even with many years of rejection notched into my writer's belt, it's still difficult to stay upbeat and confident when reading emails like, "After reading your letter I'm afraid I just wasn't hooked enough to want to ask for more."

A cold, hard fact of the publishing industry is that "hooks" drive sales, and quality of writing matters much less than we writers would like to believe. While a writer's number one concern is whether readers will enjoy a story, a publisher's number one concern is whether readers will buy the story.

When the acquisitions staff of a publishing house evaluate a manuscript, they don't ask themselves, "Is this a good story that will make readers happy?" They ask, "Does this premise sound sexy in a single sentence? Can we convince Target to put this book on the shelves in a five-minute sales call? Will people see this title at the checkout counter in Kroger and grab it impulsively?" In other words, "What's the hook?"

So what, exactly, does it mean when an agent says she "just wasn't hooked enough"? It could mean many different things.

1. The premise doesn't sound like a sexy high-concept bestseller in a single sentence.
2. The book doesn't fit into any of the specific slots publishers are looking to fill right now (e.g., "Realistic contemporary YA featuring diverse characters.")
3. The agent is already representing a client with a similar project.
4. The genre or subject matter was "hot" with publishers last year, but it's gone cold now.
5. Nothing at all. This is an auto-generated form letter the agency sends to everyone with the click of the Decline button.

What "wasn't hooked enough" seems to imply, but does not necessarily mean, is that the query isn't well-written or the book isn't interesting.

More cold, hard facts about the publishing industry: advances for debut and midlist authors are shrinking to nothing. Even bestselling authors are getting "eBook only" releases. A novel can be a thrilling page-turner, a poignant masterpiece, a memorable story that readers will want to relive over and over for many years...but still no publisher will buy it, because it doesn't fit into a free "slot" and the author isn't named Danielle Steele or James Patterson.

One literary agent wrote that, statistically, a new writer has a higher chance of getting struck by lightning than she does of getting published. If she does get published, she'll be lucky to get a $5,000 advance. Then she probably won't earn out that measly $5,000, publishers will label her a bad investment, and she'll never sell another book again.

Knowing all this, how do we stay positive? How do we keep writing, keep hoping, keep sending those query letters to their doom, instead of burning our lucky writing pencils in abject despair?

A lot of people do succumb to despair. They give up and stop writing or, even worse, turn into vengeful banshees who haunt the Internet, shrieking about gatekeepers. How can we avoid becoming those people?

1. Adjust your expectations.

When it comes to the arts, people have a bizarre expectation that the economy will work differently than it does for every other industry. They think quality and creativity will trump all else, when that's not the case for any other product in existence.

Does Old Navy stock thin, scratchy shirts made by kids in Indian sweatshops because those are the most comfortable and flattering shirts available? Does Lowes sell nine-foot-tall blow-up penguins because those are the classiest Christmas decorations they could find? Does Fred Meyer throw Hershey's Milk Chocolate Hearts in your face the second you walk through their doors because those are the most delicious candies ever made?

Businesses will sell what makes them the most profit, period. Publishers know they'll profit from any book with Danielle Steele's name printed on the cover, regardless of the words printed inside. They know it's very difficult to get people to buy a book with an unknown name on it. When consumers have a choice between cardboard-like, chemical-tasting Chips Ahoy they grew up eating, vs. gourmet cookies by some new brand they've never heard of, which do you think the majority will pick? Only adventurous cookie connoisseurs will take a chance on the new brand.

We writers want to believe that if we write good stories, we will be swiftly rewarded. Publishers will fight over our manuscripts. The New York Times will rave over us. Hollywood A-listers will Tweet about how desperately they want to star in the movie adaptations of our books.

This is a fun fantasy to imagine while drifting off to a peaceful sleep at night, but it's silly to be disappointed when it doesn't come true. When I go to work each morning, I don't expect the college president to suddenly rush at me and say I'm the best librarian she's ever seen, and she's promoting me to director right away. I expect to keep going to work every weekday for many years, slowly building my resume and earning the respect of my colleagues, until one day I'm lucky enough land the directorship of a tiny library in Nowhere, Oregon. Why would my writing career be any different?

2. Stop assigning blame.

The current situation in publishing is nobody's fault. It just is. Both writers and publishing professionals are just trying to survive in an insane world.

The shrieking banshees want to believe everything is somebody's fault. They grumble that literary agents are brainless twits who couldn't recognize a masterpiece if it bit them in the derrière. They opine that editors are greedy vultures who care more about soulless numbers than beautiful words. "Just take the gatekeepers out of the equation," they say, "and Great Stories will reign once more."

I wonder if there's an unpublished manuscript called Zen for Writers somewhere in the world, because we all need to read it and chill out. I imagine this manuscript would have calming lines like, "To rage against the publishing industry is to rage against the sea. One cannot control the market trends, as one cannot control the tide."

Blaming people for your publishing misfortunes might make you feel better temporarily, but the bitterness gnaws away at you. Soon you're spending all of your writing time crafting barbs about twenty-something interns in New York, instead of crafting new stories. If you want to remain sane, happy, and productive, you're going to have to forgive the universe for not playing fair.

3. Make contingency plans.

So you can't sell your books, it's not your fault, it's not anybody's fault, and there's nothing you can do about it.

Now what?

This is why no one should depend on writing to make money. Just like the visual arts, theatre, and music, writing is a career for a lucky handful and a mildly lucrative hobby for everyone else. I believe every aspiring writer should build a career in something other than writing, for many reasons. Here are the reasons pertinent to this post.

• Even if/when you don't win the publishing lottery, you can still pay the bills without worrying.
• Every weekday morning you must close your laptop, make yourself presentable, and leave your house. You will be forced to accomplish things for the next eight hours, instead of stalking agents on Twitter and obsessively refreshing your Gmail to check for more rejections.
• You'll build a network of colleagues with whom you can share your publishing woes in the breakroom. These colleagues will cheer you on and tell you how awesome you are for writing a whole book, and they can't imagine how you found the time.

When you finish a manuscript and send out a batch of queries, of course you'll hope to finally win the lottery this time. But you should formulate a contingency plan for what to do if you don't.

1. You can self-publish.
2. You can submit directly to small presses.
3. You can drop the project and move on to new ideas.

I personally suggest number three. If the project didn't work out, it didn't work out. Maybe the next one will. I'm not of the camp that endlessly revises and resubmits the same stories, hoping small tweaks will suddenly make the project more appealing to agents.

If no agents or editors are interested in Whacked in the Stacks, I'll probably skip the sequel. I'll send CreateSpace paperbacks of WITS to family and friends to enjoy, but I won't try to self-publish it for money. Too much headache, too little return. That time would be better spent diving in to the Xing Dynasty trilogy instead.

Yes, I'm dubbing my fantasy wuxia project the Xing Dynasty trilogy. Xing ("star") is a silly play on Qing ("clear") and Ming ("bright," with the radicals for "sun" and "moon"). Also, I can abbreviate it to XD.

Thinking about what you'll do if your book fails might be depressing, but then if the worst happens you won't be left adrift. When you receive that rejection from your very last hope, you won't feel like your whole world is falling apart. You'll be hurt, you'll be angry at the universe, you'll eat a ton of raspberry cheesecake gelato...but then you'll sigh and say, "Well, on to Plan B."

Last week I finished book one of the Rainie Day Mysteries, Whacked in the Stacks. This week I revised it based on feedback from a beta reader, a.k.a. Sweetie. Next week, I start on book two.

I've never written a sequel before, but I've read hundreds. I can count on one hand the number of standalone mysteries I've read—all of the others were installations in series. As I prepare to dive in to book two, tentatively titled Crushed by the Classics, I've been thinking about what works for me as a series reader, and what rubs me the wrong way.

What Rubs Me the Wrong Way: Recycling

Recycled Introductions

I don't need to re-read the heroine's life story in chapter one of every novel. I don't need to re-read the life stories of all her friends and relatives, either.

Imagine if every episode of Castle began with Richard Castle rambling for ten minutes about who he is, what he does, where he grew up and where he lives now. Every time his mother Martha sashays into the kitchen, a voice-over explains that she's a glamorous Broadway actress who lives with Castle because her ex-husband absconded with her life savings. Every time his daughter Alexis pops in to say, "Hi, Dad," another voice-over informs us that she's eighteen and a student at Columbia University, and her mother Meredith is off her rocker but Alexis is a sweet kid who's wise beyond her years.

Though novels aren't TV shows, info-dumps like these are just as boring on the page as they are on the screen. There are certain mystery series that I adore...from about chapter three on. First I have to get past the recaps in chapters one and two. The authors might be afraid that new readers won't know what's going on without brief bios to introduce every character, but readers aren't stupid. They can figure out who characters are and how they relate to one another from their dialogue and behavior.

Recycled Jokes

I'm reading Laura Levine's Jaine Austen mysteries right now. Levine wrote scripts for classic Hollywood sitcoms like Laverne and Shirley and Three's Company, so all of her books are amusing...but her wit is a lot less impressive after reading four books than it was after reading one.

Levine recycles the same comedic material in every novel. Jaine lives in the slums of Beverly Hills. Jaine is a struggling writer whose most noteworthy project to date is a motto for Toiletmasters Plumbing. While all of the size-two fashionistas in SoCal eat a lettuce leaf and call it lunch, Jaine wears elastic-waist pants and her best friends are named Ben and Jerry. Jaine's love life is a disaster, and her most persistent admirer is a lecherous octogenarian from the Shalom Center. Jaine's cat Prozac is a terror who pees on Jaine's pillow when she doesn't get her daily serving of Fancy Fish Guts.

I have now read each of these jokes at least a half dozen times across four books. The count for variations on "fish guts" and "In a rush to flush?" has probably topped a full dozen. Levine is whip-smart, but I wish she'd do something new with that intelligence.

Recycled Conflicts

Mystery authors often leave one or two loose threads untied at the ends of their novels, in order to entice fans to read the next one. The most common class of loose thread is the romantic subplot.

I don't mind "open endings" in early installments of a series, but I get tired and annoyed when the same loose thread drags on book after book. The heroine and her love interest recycle the same conflicts in every novel: he says he loves her but he won't commit, she knows he's bad husband material but she can't resist his charms, she saw him with another woman and she's not sure where they stand anymore. Over and over. There's only so much "will they or won't they?" a reader can take.

I also get tired when a heroine knocks heads with the same archenemies over the same petty issues. I put a series down immediately at the first whiff of a Never-Ending Love Triangle. (Just pick one already!) And it's exasperating to see a heroine make the same dumb mistakes and land in the same tubs of hot water in every novel. (Why does Jaine never learn to close the door when she's dressing for a big event, so Prozac won't sneak in and destroy her new clothes?)

What Works for Me: Fresh Ideas

Maybe writers who recycle the same material for every book think they're giving their fans what they want. They think readers liked the characters in the first book and want them to return exactly as they were, with no growth whatsoever. They think readers liked the "will they or won't they?" tension, and the series will go the way of Moonlighting if the heroine and her love interest actually work out their problems.

But fans of a series don't keep coming back because they want the exact same story retold in future books. They want new books with new stories that make them feel the same way the first one did. Recycled jokes and conflicts will not make them feel the same way a second time around.

A sequel needs fresh ideas to be as interesting as its predecessor. The tricky part is incorporating these new ideas into the story world you've already created, so fans will feel like they're returning to a favorite place and meeting old friends, while at the same time getting a fun new reading experience.

Introduce New Settings

Cozy mystery writers often blog that their readers want to return to the same settings in every book, because these places feel like home. This is partially true, but these "same settings" are much bigger arenas than you might think.

For example, in Rhys Bowen's Royal Spyness mysteries, the setting fans like me look forward to visiting is "Glamorous Interwar Europe." That can include the heroine's childhood fortress in Scotland, the family townhouse in London, a spooky castle in Transylvania, or sunny mansions along the French Rivieria. I would have bored of the series long ago if every novel took place in the same handful of buildings in London.

On a smaller scale, Miranda James sets each of her Cat in the Stacks murders in different locales within Athena, Mississippi. One book might center around the local college, where the hero works, another at the public library, and another at the home of an eccentric book collector. He spends a lot of time at cozy old haunts, sure, but we also get to go to costume galas at Antebellum mansions.

Make Characters Grow

In the Jaine Austen mysteries, Jaine's friends and relatives never change. For example, in every book her neighbor Lance and her best friend Kandi find new loves of their lives. By every epilogue, they find out these loves are cheating finks. All relationships between the characters conveniently reset, and Lance and Kandi are ready to chase new loves of their lives in the next book. Neither of them ever mature, settle down, move up the corporate ladder, have kids, or change subtly over time like real people.

In the Cat in the Stacks books, many of the characters do change over time. The hero's son comes back to town an angry, disillusioned young lawyer, but then he picks himself up and studies for the Mississippi bar, gets married, and becomes a father himself. The hero's recurring nemesis/ally, the deputy sheriff, starts out hostile and ambitious, but then she assumes more responsibility at her job and mellows out. Boarders move in and out of the hero's house, find partners and get on with their lives.

The great thing about change is that it introduces new conflicts. Characters don't just spin their wheels, rehashing the same old issues. When the hero's son meets his future wife, he has to deal with personal traumas that make him push away attractive women. When they get serious, he has to deal with his meddling future father-in-law, who also happens to be his boss. Then his meddling future FIL wants him to take over the law practice, but he's not ready yet. And so on.

Use New Story Structures

This one is the most obvious, and the hardest to pull off. Readers of sequels want new stories, not the same old story with cosmetic differences.

The basic story structure of a cozy mystery is this:

• Sleuth finds dead body.
• Sleuth snoops for clues.
• Sleuth solves murder.

Within that simple structure are infinite possibilities for variation. Yet as writers, we tend to fall back on a few comfortable tropes, instead of exploring those possibilities.

I'm not sure I'll continue with the Jaine Austen series, because Levine seems to have gotten stuck in a Murder She Wrote rut. The heroine simply goes around interviewing a string of suspects until she figures out the culprit. Then she exposes said culprit in a thrilling confrontation. Roll credits.

When mystery lovers pick up a novel, they look forward to twists, turns, and surprise curveballs. Real curveballs, not ones they've seen a dozen times before. The victim's husband was having an affair with the hot housewife next door? I'm shocked. The victim was blackmailing a coworker for embezzling from the company? Gosh, never seen that one before. The culprit is actually her sweet, long-suffering assistant who seemed like she couldn't hurt a fly? Well, blow me over with a feather.

Shocking subject material doesn't necessarily make for a shocking twist. A twist is shocking when the author manipulates readers into seeing the story world a certain way, and then the revelation of the truth turns that world on its head. The last author to successfully shock me was Dorothy L. Sayers, in Murder Must Advertise. She tricked me into believing a certain event was just a humorous anecdote, when it was actually the key to figuring out the entire nefarious plot. The nefarious plot itself wasn't all that shocking, but the fact that I had been completely bamboozled was a delicious surprise.

Over the three-day weekend, I read Stephanie Meyer's Twilight for the first time.

Yes, I know I'm twelve years late to the party. But I never read the book when it was popular for a few reasons.

1. It was popular, and I was at that stage of late adolescence in which one is obligated to sneer at everything popular.
2. The movies came out when I was in college. I watched the first one and found it boring, so I wasn't eager to try the book that inspired it.
3. Over the years I've read countless articles about how the Twilight trilogy promotes traditional gender roles, portrays sex as something dangerous and shameful, and romanticizes stalking and abusive relationships. Who would want to read something like that?

But as a writer, I need to understand readers. And it's an undeniable fact that Twilight whipped a significant number of readers into a frenzy of fandom for many years. So I checked out the eBook from my local library and went in with an open mind, determined to read it without being influenced by any preconceptions or prejudices.

And you know what? The book really does promote traditional gender roles, portray sex as a dangerous sin, and romanticize worrisome behavior. But the book also has its charms, and I understand why teenagers in the 2000s were so drawn to this story.

Twilight is clearly Stephanie Meyer's first novel. The chapters ramble and often go nowhere (e.g., Bella lies in the grass to think about Edward...and that's it). Redundant dialogue tags clutter every page (e.g., Bella makes many sarcastic remarks followed by "I said sarcastically"). No real conflicts pop up until the book is nearly over.

Then there are the bad relationship lessons. If Bella were my daughter, I would sit her down and say, "Sweetheart, a boy who sneaks into your house to spy on you in the dark is not romantic. A boy who physically drags you around while you're shouting at him to let go is not cool. A boy who secretly follows you when you go out of town with girlfriends, who gets angry when other boys talk to you, and who eavesdrops on your classmates to find out every word you say, is not in love with you. He's pathologically obsessed with you."

However, I don't think any of that would have bothered me if I were fifteen years younger. I would have adored Bella Swan, because she's the very definition of adolescent wish fulfillment.

• She's a martyr from page one, sacrificing her life in sunny Phoenix to move to depressing Forks, WA because she wants her mom to be happy with her new husband. She hates stupid Forks and its stupid clouds, but she hides her pain behind a cool facade. (Edward: "You put on a good show, but I'd be willing to bet that you're suffering more than you let anyone see.")
• She's so mature for her age, a vampire who's lived for more than a hundred years comments that she seems much older than seventeen. She had to grow up fast because her bumbling parents couldn't feed or dress themselves without her. (Bella: "My mom always says I was born thirty-five years old and that I get more middle-aged every year....Well, someone has to be the adult.")
• She's so gorgeous, every boy she meets instantly falls in love with her. Bella's admirers include three popular classmates who follow her around like "golden retrievers," one super cute werewolf, and one glittery vampire who finds her petulant temper so adorable, he's willing to endanger his entire family by using his powers to rescue her from certain death. Repeatedly.

And yet, Bella's voice has charmed millions of readers since 2005. I believe there are two qualities to this character that lure people into the story of Twilight.

The first is relateability. All seventeen-year-olds think they're different from the other seventeen-year-olds, and they're suffering more than anyone could ever understand, and they're way smarter than the clueless adults around them. Bella is what teenagers believe they are, so they can put themselves in her place and feel what she feels.

The second quality is sincerity. Not once did I feel like Bella's character was disingenuous. Self-centered and immature, yes. Fake, no. Meyer didn't create Bella Swan thinking, "This is what teenage girls like in a heroine, so I'm going to give them what they want and sell gazillions of books." She wrote this story because she loved it. I might not personally find the hero's domineering behavior romantic, but it's clear Meyer's own heart was thumping as she wrote those scenes.

It makes no sense that an invincible 105-year-old vampire would move to small-town Washington and enroll in high school, when he could live happily in the wilderness of Eurasia hunting bears. It makes even less sense that he would fall head over heels for a sulky teenager who smells, to him, like the world's most delicious cheeseburger. (Can you imagine falling in love with a wise-cracking cheeseburger?) The romance in Twilight is unbelievable and cliché in the extreme.

Yet legions of Meyer fans don't care, because the improbable Bella Swan and the impossible Edward Cullen bare their souls on the page without apology or embarrassment.

Twilight, Harry Potter, The Hunger Games, The Fault in Our Stars, A Song of Ice and Fire, the Millennium trilogy...every mega-hit series in the book world, regardless of genre, shares this one common quality, sincerity. A writer can come up with the tightest plot, the wittiest dialogue, and the keenest observations of the human condition, but if she doesn't write with sincerity, her readers won't connect with the story.

What Sincerity Is and Isn't

Sincerity does not mean "brutal honesty." It does not mean pouring out your raw feelings in a feverish confessional, heedless of your audience. It means respecting your readers and making an honest effort to touch their hearts.

In the seventh grade, my drama teacher listened to me read a scene from a play and told me, "Stop acting." He said to be a good actress, I had to stop acting the way I thought actors were supposed to act and be myself.

It wasn't until my twenties that I understood what that drama teacher really meant. The "myself" he wanted to see wasn't my raw self, but an artificial self that would come across as artless to an audience. He didn't want me to stop acting; he wanted me to act like I wasn't acting.

Like actors have to work hard to look like they're not acting, writers need to work hard to make their stories seem effortless. An effective writing voice is not a "natural" voice. It's a lucid voice that appears to be natural. To put it baldly, we need to manipulate people into thinking they're not being manipulated.

Readers don't mind being manipulated. In fact, they enjoy it. They want authors to create stories that will make them feel wonderful and terrible things. They don't want to waste their time and money on books that bore them. They just don't like it when it's obvious they're being manipulated, when they can see the author behind the curtain pulling the strings.

When I read insincere books, I can see the authors pulling the strings. I can sense them attempting to manipulate me into giving them royalties and glowing reviews. The scenes seem too glossy, like they were assembled by machine. The characters give me the same impression I get from politicians whose smiling lips spout whatever they think the voters want to hear.

Sincere books, on the other hand, make me feel like the authors and I are kindred spirits. The scenes seem to be written for me personally, lovingly crafted for emotional punch. The protagonists seem like real people. I'm right there in the story with them, feeling the same excitement and terror and sorrow they do.

How to Write with Sincerity

Conquer your fear of "sap."

There's a certain lie I hear surprisingly often, nearly word-for-word, from the mouths of unrelated strangers: "I couldn't care less what other people think of me."

Many people are terrified that "caring" will be seen as "weakness." This is an understandable fear, because kids are awful. To hide their own insecurities, children and immature adults try to humiliate others for having feelings. Kids who get upset when they're teased are "crybabies." Boys who openly express affection are "gross." In middle school, my friends pestered me to tell them the name of the boy I liked. When I worked up the courage to trust them with this precious secret, they laughed in my face. "That guy? He's a total loser!"

When people are afraid of derision, they create personas that are too cool for emotions and stuff. They roll their eyes at "sappy" love stories and scoff at "cheesy" happy endings. This kind of bravado is mildly exasperating in real life, and it's downright fatal in creative writing.

A sad number of novels, especially ones by and for men, feature characters who act like they're emulating Sam Spade. Macho posturing infuses every sentence. The heroes respond to danger by making snarky quips, and to tragedy by shrugging. They feel nothing, sympathize with no one, and describe members of the opposite sex in the language of frat boys trying to impress their bros in the locker room. (Why, pray tell, must every private eye catalog the breast size and leg length of every female he meets? Do men actually see women this way? Sweetie claims not.)

This problem is less common in fiction by and for women, but we're certainly not immune. In my own writing and in real life, I tend to hide embarrassing emotions under humor. Romance is especially squicky to me. (My middle school traumas might or might not have something to do with it.) I physically blushed at some of the outrageously suave lines Edward Cullen delivers in Twilight. Just the thought of writing anything like that myself makes me squirm in my office chair.

But to write with sincerity, I need to be willing to make myself vulnerable. I know I can't bluster my way through a novel, shying away from any sentiments the snarky porcupines might call "sappy." The sappiness of Twilight is exactly what makes fans of the books and movies swoon. If Stephanie Meyer had worried about whether people would think Bella and Edward are "squicky," she wouldn't be a wealthy woman today.

Think outside the formula.

I've read some cozy mysteries so formulaic, the authors seem to have used a Betty Crocker baking mix for instant novels.

1. Pour mix into a large bowl.
2. Add one love interest, one crafting theme, and one dash of small-town setting. Stir until large lumps dissolve.
3. Pour batter into a prepared 75,000-word pan. Bake until an editorial toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean.
4. Cool completely. Top with a picture of a cat.

Then there are other cozy mysteries like that gourmet cake my boss brought in for a coworker's birthday: a decadent gateau with a creamy white chocolate filling and a dark chocolate ganache. Just like I still remember the taste of that cake and want to try others from that bakery, I vividly remember the experience of reading those novels and want to find other titles by those authors. Nobody remembers the taste of a Betty Crocker cake with canned frosting.

Twilight isn't gourmet, but at least it didn't come out of a box. It's like a birthday cake your aunt baked for you from scratch. Your aunt isn't a professional pâtissier, so the layers are uneven, the texture is a little dry, and the cream cheese frosting came out gooey. But the homemade cake still tastes ten times better than a Duncan Hines, because she baked it with love.

Most authors who write formulaic books probably aren't being lazy or greedy for sales. Maybe they think the formulas are better than anything they could come up with. Maybe they're afraid if they tweak the usual recipe, their fans will get upset.

But writing like that doesn't come across as sincere, because there's nothing of the author's heart in them. Readers might close the covers thinking, "That was a well-written book. I acknowledge this author's skills." But they won't think, "Nooo it's already over! I didn't want it to end! I want more books and I want them now!"