Shades of Gray

I think we, as writers, want writing to be black and white.  If we do this, we have a chance of getting published.  If we do that, it reduces our chance of getting published. 

Granted, some things are in black and white.  Like getting the grammar reasonably right.  There’s so much competition for publication that an agent is likely not to get past the first paragraph before passing on it.  Or like manuscript format.  Don’t follow the standard format, and it’s a form rejection.  Or it’s not something the agent takes at all.  No matter how “good” the book is, if the agent doesn’t like books in that genre, he’s not going to rep it.

The black and white areas are easy to work with, though.  If the agent doesn’t take mystery, don’t send him mystery.  It’s the gray areas that are much more difficult to work with, much less understand.

The biggest one is The Story. 

The Story is not only a shade of gray, but it is lost in a murky cloud with undefinable and everchanging boundaries.  The concept of story looks easy to understand, but it’s difficult to grasp.   I’m not even sure it can be explained in terms that people would understand.  I think it’s something that the individual has to learn for herself through reading, writing, and submitting a book project to agents.

But it drives writers crazy because they are looking for the right piece, the right element, the right rule that will get their story published.  So much so that every year a writer or reporter sends a manuscript published thirty years ago to a publisher.  When it gets rejected, the writer points a finger and says, “See?  Publishing is broken!  You rejected a book that was published.” 

 They’re trying to find a concrete reason for something that is incredibly murky and can change from year to year.   Think about it.  You go into the bookstore to buy a couple of books.  Let’s say you like to read urban fantasies about vampires, and there are five books sitting on the new shelf.  You look at the back of each book and decide that only one interests you.  Why didn’t you decide on the other four?  By black and white logic, you should be buying them all.  After all, they were all abouty vampires.  But by the murky shade of gray, Books 1-4 just didn’t do anything for you.  You may not even explain the reason why other than an “Eh.”

That murkiness is what makes it so hard to understand what The Story is.

I’ve Got This Idea …

Someone recently found out I was a writer and tried to pitch an idea to me.  He thought it was a great idea and a sure best seller, but guess who he wanted to do all the work?

Anyone can come up with an idea.

But not everyone can turn a good idea into a fantastic story.

Nor can everyone turn that fantastic story into a finished novel. 

That’s the hard part.  Even some of the famous writers you’ve read have had trouble finding a home for the books they’ve written.  Steve Berry wrote ten books before he hooked a publisher with one.  So did J.A. Konrath. 

Ideas = easy.

Writing = hard.

Otherwise everyone who came up with a great idea would be published.

The Amnesia Storyline

I just finished Destiny Kills by Keri Arthur, an urban fantasy that starts out as an amnesia storyline.  It got me thinking about amnesia storylines.

I used one in my very first attempt at a novel.  I thought it would be a great idea to have this character have amnesia and then learn all these things about herself.  Now, after reading so many books over the years, I’ve come to realize that amnesia isn’t a common storyline in novels.  In fact, I’ve only read one book, Kay Hooper’s Sleeping With Fear, and that character only had partial amnesia.  She knew who she was; she just couldn’t remember the last two weeks.

But why isn’t it common?  It is a very common one on TV series (probably where I got the idea).  Sooner or later, every detective series hits the storyline.  Main character hits his head, gets amnesia, and wanders around while bad guys chase him and the producers use stock footage of past episodes as flashbacks.

A TV series has one thing a book doesn’t have.  The viewer watches the series every week, so when they check out the amnesia story, they’re already familiar with the characters.  They come into the amnesia episode with the back story from the previous episodes.

A book, on the other, starts from scratch.  The reader doesn’t know anything about this character, and the writer is starting from a blank slate.  It sounds like it would be easy to have the reader follow along as the character tries to figure out who they are and that there would be natural curiosity to answer the puzzle.  But a bigger question–if the reader doesn’t know anything about the character, why should they care?

This can come at the expense of the story, and story always needs to come first.  It has to move forward, and it’s very hard keeping an amnesiac character amnesiac and making good story progress.  There’s only so many times you can do a flashback before the character really needs to remember more for the story to happen.   Obviously, an amnesia storyline can be done, but it has to be exceptional to get an agent interested.

True Story.  I knew someone who had amnesia.  It was when I was in the army.  The sergeant had been road marching in Korea when he was hit by a passing car.  When the sergeant woke up in the hospital, he didn’t remember anything.  Not the incident, not his name, not who he was.  It took three months for his memory to come back, but he never remembered what happened when he was injured. 

Idea vs. Story

The first inkling of writing a book is The Idea.  It’s the thing that inspires us and makes us excited.  It might be an exciting battle scene that will come at the end of the book; maybe it’s an interesting setting; or even a special type of magic (well, I am doing Urban Fantasy).

This was the idea we started with when I was co-writing: A battle on a mountain in an ice storm.

Problem was that we didn’t take it to the next stage in the development process and turn it into The Story.  So we spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to get the characters onto the mountain.  The result was that when it came to write a query and synopsis, it was extremely difficult because there wasn’t anything that tied the whole book together.  The Story wasn’t there.  We ended up doing many, many, many rewrites to find the story, and each time we adjusted something to direct it better to the The Story, it rippled through the book as another rewrite.

The Story is the next step after the idea.  I came to an understanding of what it was by critiquing many first chapters.  After a while, I started seeing a pattern.  Sometimes I’d get to the end of the first chapter and think: “But nothing happened.  Or worse: “What was this about?”  The chapter didn’t feel like it had a direction or even a reason for existing.  Is that why the agents ask for the first fifty pages?  Or the first five?

I think of The Story as the overarching element that ties to whole book together.  Hints of it are in the first sentence, and it’s connected all the way to the last sentence (remember my last post on how hard writing a novel is?).

With The Idea of the ice storm, our next step should have probably been to think about why the characters would be up there or what events would drive them up there.  And what about the obstacles the characters would face?  Bad guys?  What were their reasons for coming after these characters?  What would happen if the bad guys won? 

Instead, we ended up with a lot of false directions and probably did more writing than we probably needed to.  I’ll admit that the idea was exciting, and when I first get one, I want to jump right in.  That’s where I have to stop and remind myself that I need to take the extra steps first to work out what The Story is first.   The book will still be there if I wait a little longer.