Why Are You Writing That?

I love to ask authors why they decided to write the story they just pitched to me. Many times, the answer they give to me tells me why it is destined to fail. Let me explain.

In many cases, writers are simply chasing trends, or what they perceive as a trend. They see that a story concept is hot, or a genre is hot, so they go out and attempt to write it. The problem, however, is that they have no idea how to write it. They also don't understand the market and seem to believe if there are ton of books out there now, then it must be time for them to write it. 

What they are missing is a concept they are told (or should have been told) early in their writing career. Write what you know. For many, they seem to think that this means write stories that come from your own personal background, but that is far from the truth. What we mean is write concepts, genres, themes, etc, that you have a clear understanding of.

Here is another way of thinking about it. For me, I am a literature major. If I am asked to teach a literature class, I will always request teaching something such as Shakespeare or American Literature pre-Civil War. Why? It is what I studied the most and what I understand. I would never teach modern American Lit or even some of the modern literature that we see coming out today that would be up for awards such as the Booker, Pulitzer or other big accolades. Why? It is not my cup of tea!

When the larger scale YA romance market kicked in around the early 2000's there were a lot of authors thinking they could write this stuff. They couldn't. They were simply writing adult novels and trying to age down the characters. The simple fact is that they had not been around YA readers, were not YA readers and did not understand them. 

When you choose to write something. Start with what you read. That includes not only the genre, but even the specific publishers. You will find that you often gravitate to one publisher more than another. That is the voice you understand. 

Once you do that, make it your own. Find your own voice in that line. 

You will be shocked how successful you might be.

November's #MSWL from Scott

 

If you know me, you also know I love my Disney. And yes, Once Halloween is over, the parks make a huge transition to the holiday season. And yes, they do this overnight. Yesterday, I even got up and had holiday music on. No Mariah Carey has not been defrosted but it was background music. It also got me thinking that it was time for my All I Want For Christmas #MSWL here at Greyhaus.

I will say, not much has changed, but it is always a good reminder every now and then of the things I am looking for and the things I am not a big fan of.

So, let's dive right in.

CONTEMPORARY - For the romances, I do see us moving away from the Rom Cons and into stories that have more of a "real" feel to them. NO, I DO NOT WANT STORIES THAT YOU HAVE FICTIONALIZED FROM REAL STORIES! When I say real, I want realistic romances. Dump the cliches but give us something that readers will want to dive into. Think characters like Jamie and Claire from Outlander, where the readers really love to see the passion between these two and also feel the emotion when things are not going well between them. Don't throw drama at us. Make us see that having a true romance takes effort on the part of the two characters and not cliche and more baggage that someone on a cruise.

HISTORICAL Yes, I still believe these are things people want to read. The problem is that all of you are just throwing us the same old stories. For me, I would still love to see Victorian through WWII. I would love to see stories where we are drawn into the history of the time and yet, the romance is still front and center. I know I might be dating myself here, but if I were to think stories even during the Vietnam Conflict, I would think of Characters from the TV series China Beach. Give me a great romance set in early Newport. Give me a romance between an American and a French character where the war is getting in the way of the romance. Too often, I am seeing people kill us with too many backstories and subplots. Let the romance carry it and use the history as a vehicle.

MYSTERY/ROMANTIC SUSPENSE First of all, these need to be romance forward. Secondly, do not kill me with cliche. Finally, the scenarios have to be realistic. I would love to see cyber crimes, mysteries where the deeper they dive into solving the crime, the stakes get larger and the potential for someone dying is bigger. We don't need serial killers here but certainly the villains are there to do whatever they can to not get caught. 

PARANORMAL Please just give me something new. I am honestly stick and tired of the following:

• Trying to bring back vampires, werewolves, demons etc.
• Don't just bring in dragons and claim romantasy as a paranormal.
• Give us something supernatural that could potentially be out there. 

And while we are on the subject, time travel just to make it a historical is not going to work. If, however, you want to have people who can actually do this intentionally (just a thought) then let's go there. We have to bring in something new and not just repeating what is already out there.

WOMEN'S FICTION - I am honestly in the mood for a story where we can really learn something about people and great interpersonal relationships. No, we don't need travel stories, deaths in the family and divorces. What we need are stories where people are finally figuring things out and we get to learn with them. Examples (off the top of my head with only one cup of coffee):

• First year teacher figuring out that what they thought school would be like really isn't the norm.
• Mother/son or Mother/daughter relationship finally figuring out what they have missed for sometime.
• Sisters getting to know each other again after being away from each other.
• New Adult version of young woman in a foreign country

MULTICULTURAL - I want stories where the cultures are clashing with the characters. I want stories where the culture IS a character, but not taking over. For me, give me stories like Amy Tan and Isabelle Allende. Immerse us in the culture. These are great places where we can bring in New Adult stories.

NOTE... NEW ADULT would be characters who are seniors in college, grad school level and just trying to figure out life.

Now on to the things I am not a fan of:

• Road trip stories
• Stories where the heroine is following guys in bands
• DUEL POV
• 1st person (you can try it but it is harder than you think to write)
• LGBTQ stories just to make a statement of being LGBTQ
• Time travels that are really historial

Hope this helps. If you do submit, tell me what it was off of this blog that drew you in AND why your story truly fits.

How are you editing?

 

I have been talking to a lot of authors lately about their editing and sure enough, many are simply missing the mark when it comes to how they are "fixing" their manuscripts. I do believe that this is part of the reason that so many are also getting the rejections from editors and agents. 

We have to remember that there are different levels of editing. Each step of the editing process serves a different role in making your manuscript better. Unfortunately, many authors are spending their time editing the later stages of the editing process instead of the earlier phases. Let me explain by going backwards.

The last step in editing is really the COPY EDITING step. This is where the your manuscript is really examined for all of those small details. Punctuation in the right place, use of proper pronouns, and all of those great grammar issues. You need to understand that by this point, your story has already been looked at by A LOT of people and the story should be in really good shape.

The step before that is LINE EDITING. This is where you would be doing what we call word smithing. I like to call this "making the story pretty." At this point, you are really looking at paragraphs and scenes. For so many authors, this is really the fun part of editing. You spend the time reading the passages out loud and just enjoying the "sound of the words." 

Line editing is also where you might be looking at accuracy of small details. 

Now, the biggest part of editing, and the one where so many people do not spend enough time on is DEVELOPMENTAL EDITING. This is the MASSIVE EDITING time. This is where you should be looking at the entire story. 

You should be focusing on how the entire story works together. If you have done this properly, you may have caught the fact that you have just piled on too many plot lines, or your characters are just doing too many things. If you have done this right, you would have seen that you have characters just being unnatural.

If all you were doing was line editing, you would have just loved those great smaller scenes but not seen how each of those pieces fit together. 

The key is you have to do it all to make your story work!

Why Agents and Editors Are Simply Not Responding You You Anymore

As you know, this is a pet peeve of mine, not only in the publishing world but in the world of communication in general. I am a firm believer that if you email someone, that person deserves a response back. I also believe that response should be a timely response and not a "Oh, my bad, I just missed it" response. 

However, I do want to address this and talk about one of the biggest reasons why so many editors and agents are simply not responding to authors anymore. I want to deal with the ugly reason first.

It is due to the authors out there who simply cannot read submission guidelines, cannot keep track of their own submissions, believe if they bombard the system with submissions something will stick, or just argue with us. In other words, the bad seeds of the group.

Yes, there are those people out there. 

This weekend, I answered countless emails just like that. For example, as you know, my submission guidelines clearly stated that I accept only traditional romance and women's fiction, AND YET, I was getting memoirs, science fiction novels (and novellas), self-help books, cookbooks and... Good lord people, can't you read? So, I send my response of telling them this is not what I represent, and sure enough I will get one of the three responses:

1) My bad, I didn't read your guidelines. 

2) I just thought you would be more open to accepting things that were well written

3) Getting slammed on the internet for sending a form response stating that their "form query letter" was not a genre I represent. 

We also get people who think that if they just submit the same project, change the name and "pretend" it is something different, things will change. I get if you revise the book, but tell us that. But come on...sending the same query and project? We aren't idiots!

So, what is the easiest approach to this? Editors and agents simply use the statement, "Due to the high volume of submissions we receive, we will respond to authors if we believe your project is something we would like to move forward with." In other words, "we are going to ignore some of you. 

Now, it is that part that personally I am not a big fan of. If you want to skip on the project, then send that darn form letter at least acknowledging receipt of the project and a decision to pass. Authors at least know. 

But for now, please know that your lack of hearing from so many of us (not necessarily me) is due to your fellow writers who cannot seem to do the right thing.