Jennifer Crusie's Blog, page 77

Writing Blurbs

So let’s talk about blurbs, those short pithy book descriptions that are supposed to make you want to buy the book.

But before I do that, I need a favor: Look at the fourth rough draft of the Lavender’s Blue blurb below and tell me what you think. Then I’ll tell you what I think about blurbs in general and show you the four drafts of this one. Because I need a blog entry, that’s why. Also I need feedback on the blurb because it’s not right yet.

###

The last thing Liz Danger wants to do is go home to the place where she grew up, Burney, Ohio, a town full of gossip and snobbery, not to mention the mother who makes her feel guilty, the ex-boyfriend who dumped her three times, and the police chief who hates her. Too bad her car breaks down there.

The last thing Vince Cooper needs is a former juvenile delinquent who makes his boss surly and the peaceful town he polices start to stir. Even worse, she makes him start to stir.

But over the next week Liz and Vince will deal with rumor, politics, an endangered dog, adultery, great diner food, murder, and . . . well not love, neither Liz nor Vince has time for love, but something. Good thing it’s temporary.

Probably.

Lavender’s Blue
Would it kill you to go home and see your mother?

###

So what does a blurb have to do?

In 150 to 200 words or less,
• Introduce the protagonist and characterize them so the reader wants to read the book.
• Foreshadow the conflict as something interesting and complicated enough that the reader wants to read the book.
• Give enough information about setting, genre, mood, and tone that the reader knows if it’s the kind of book she wants to read.

The basic story of Lavender’s Blue is about a woman who goes back to her home town, meets a great guy, and changes her life. Yeah, it’s been done. So this blurb has to undercut that expectation, making sure that anybody reading it knows that Burney is not a charming seaside resort and Liz will not be opening a bakery. The tone has to be in my voice (sorry, Bob, who’s not sorry because he didn’t want to write the blurb) to communicate the tone of the book, but the words have to do everything else. This is not easy, people. It took me four drafts to get the above blurb and its not right yet (which is why I want to know what you think).

You can stop reading here, but if you want to see all the drafts so far, here they are, starting with the first one.

DRAFT ONE
The last thing Liz Danger wants to do is go home to the place where she grew up, Burney, Ohio, a town full of gossip, snobbery, betrayal, the ex-boyfriend who dumped her three time, and the police chief that hates her.  But she hasn’t been home in fifteen years, and it’s her mother’s birthday, and it’s on the way to Chicago where she will be joining the celebrity whose autobiography she’s ghostwriting, so what could it hurt to stop by for an hour, eat some cake, hand over the five foot bear she bought, be a good daughter for once?  Then she sees the Burney town sign and floors it, running away from her past, which gets her picked up for speeding by a fairly attractive cop and then proceeds to kill her car.  Fine, she’ll go see her mother and stay for one night to get her car fixed.  After all, it’s her mother’s birthday.  And that cop is actually very attractive.

The last thing Vince Cooper needs in town is a former juvenile delinquent that makes his boss surly and the town start to stir.  It’s a peaceful little place and he likes it that way and he makes damn sure it stays that way.  But there’s something stirring under that peace, and it stirs even more when Liz Danger comes to down.  The town’s not the only thing stirring below.  He can see why Liz stirs up trouble, she’s definitely stirring it up in him.

Over the next week all that turmoil comes to the surface in gossip, politics, dogs, adultery, great diner food, murder, and, well not love, neither Vince or Liz is interested in love, and they’ve got too much on their hands dealing with all the insanity of others to think about how much their hands on on each other.  But when everything blows up at the end, they’re going to have to make some decisions about their lives, about their futures and about each other.

Lavender’s Blue
Would it kill you to go home and see your mother?

346 words

DRAFT TWO
The last thing Liz Danger wants to do is go home to the place where she grew up, Burney, Ohio, a town full of gossip, snobbery, betrayal, the ex-boyfriend who dumped her three time, and the police chief that hates her. Too bad her car breaks down there and she’s stuck.

The last thing Vince Cooper needs in town is a former juvenile delinquent that makes his boss surly and the town start to stir. Good thing it’s a peaceful little place that he makes damn sure stays that way.

But there’s are secrets stirring under that peace, and they stir even more when Liz Danger shows up. And the town’s not the only thing stirring below. Vince can see why Liz makes people come alive, she’s definitely doing it to him.

Over the next week all that turmoil comes to the surface in gossip, politics, dogs, adultery, great diner food, murder, and, well not love, neither Liz nor Vince is interested in love, and they’ve got too much on their hands dealing with all the insanity of others to think about how much they like their hands on on each other. But when everything blows up at the end, they’re going to have to make some decisions about their lives, about their futures and about each other.

Lavender’s Blue
Would it kill you to go home and see your mother?

232 words

DRAFT THREE
The last thing Liz Danger wants to do is go home to the place where she grew up, Burney, Ohio, a town full of gossip and snobbery, not to mention the mother who makes her feel guilty, the ex-boyfriend who dumped her three time, and the police chief that hates her. Too bad some cop picks her up for speeding past her memories, her car breaks down, and she’s stuck for the night.

The last thing Vince Cooper needs in the town he polices is a former juvenile delinquent that makes his boss surly and the town start to stir. Good thing it’s a peaceful little place, and he’s going to make damn sure stays that way.

But there are things roiling under the surface in Burney and thanks to Liz Danger, they come to light. Over the next week Liz and Vince deal with rumor, politics, dogs, adultery, great diner food, murder, and, well not love, neither Liz nor Vince is interested in love, and they’ve got too much on their hands dealing with all the insanity of others to think about how much they like their hands on on each other, but it’s something. Good thing it’s temporary.

Probably.

Lavender’s Blue
Would it kill you to go home and see your mother?

215 words

DRAFT FOUR
The last thing Liz Danger wants to do is go home to the place where she grew up, Burney, Ohio, a town full of gossip and snobbery, not to mention the mother who makes her feel guilty, the ex-boyfriend who dumped her three times, and the police chief who hates her. Too bad her car breaks down there. The last thing Vince Cooper needs is a former juvenile delinquent who makes his boss surly and the peaceful town he polices start to stir. Even worse, she makes him start to stir. But over the next week Liz and Vince will deal with rumor, politics, an endangered dog, adultery, great diner food, murder, and . . . well not love, neither Liz nor Vince has time for love, but something. Good thing it’s temporary.

Probably.

Lavender’s Blue
Would it kill you to go home and see your mother?

147 words

The ABC Structure: The Day My Sister Shot the Mailman and Got Away With It, Of Course

The ABC Story

This is how Crazy For You got started. In 1996, Ron Carlson gave my graduate class a writing exercise based on a Joyce Carol Oates story that was structured by using 26 sentences, the first one beginning with A, the second with B, and so on. When I sat down to write the story, I thought Carlson was giving us busy work. When I finished it, I knew he was a genius teacher because writing that exercise showed me that any structure will work as long as it is a structure. So here it is from the Carlson Workshop, my Alphabet Exercise:

After my sister, Zoë, shot the mailman, Mama grounded her for twenty-four hours and made her miss the big dance over at the Grange Hall in Xenia, but Zoë said it was worth it just to hear old Buster scream, and she didn’t care anyway because her boyfriend, Nick, is away at boot camp so there’s not much fun in Zoë’s life except for taking out the occasional public servant with a beebee gun.

Buster Turnbull was a truly terrible mail carrier, Mama told Zoë when she grounded her, but shooting him was just un-neighborly and not the kind of activity she wanted her daughters to be associated with. Certainly Buster needed to be taken in hand and reminded that neither snow nor rain was supposed to keep him from handing over the stuff people sent us, and his unfortunate habit of reading postcards out loud as he went on his rounds had annoyed all of us, and not one of us was amused when he got tired of postcards and started flat-out opening our mail and shouting it to the world, but Zoë was amused the least because he liked reading her stuff the best.

“Dear Zoë,” he’d read at the top of his lungs when my sister would get a letter from Nick. “Every night I sit here and think about all the things we did to each other naked on your back porch and I get hot all over again.”

“Fine goings on,” Buster would call out before he’d read on, sounding like some hell-fire Baptist preacher looking to stir up trouble and stop pleasure. “Good girls wouldn’t get letters like this, and Miss Zoë McKenzie shouldn’t be either and I am just shocked that she is even though she goes around looking so sweet and pretty and all.” He didn’t get around women much since he looked like a peeled egg and had a personality to match, so he had no clue what kind of letters good girls got or didn’t get, but that didn’t stop Buster from making Zoë’s life particular hell.

I could remember when Buster had been sort of fun, announcing what we were getting as he came up our steps, like previews of coming attractions at the movies. “Just in time for your birthday, Quinn,” he’d holler to me. “Kindly old Aunt Betsy has sent you a letter and I bet there’s a check in it.” Later on, he started holding the envelopes up to the sun so he could see how much the check was for, but of course that didn’t work because people always send checks in cards so it doesn’t look so cold and heartless sending money instead of a present, and I’m sure that must have been frustrating for him, trying to see into people’s lives and getting shut out by Hallmark. Maybe that’s why he started opening the mail; it just got too frustrating trying to see through the envelopes. Never getting any mail of his own, Buster probably just figured that he had the right to see ours since he was delivering it.

Opening other people’s mail is a federal crime, of course, but it probably didn’t seem like one to Buster. People never think what they’re doing is a crime because crime is always what other people are doing, but Zoë knew right off that Buster was breaking the law. “Quinn, we have to turn him in,” she told me after Buster had read the hot-sex-on-the-porch letter out loud while Mrs. Armbruster down the street stood on her steps with her mouth open, soaking up every word, ready to repeat it to Mrs. Mueller and Mrs. Papacjik and Mrs. Jerome, and we both knew that from there the news would percolate to Mama and there would go Zoë’s chances of ever finding heaven on the back porch with Nick again, assuming Mama would ever let her out of the house at all as long as she lived. Really, I’d have been seriously pissed off at him, too, so I was behind her all the way when she reported him. Somebody down at the post office promised to look into it, but my big sister knew a run-around when she heard one. The only thing left for her to do was to take matters into her own hands.

Unfortunately for Buster, he chose the next day to open a package from Nick which was full of old movies that Nick wanted Zoë to watch instead of going out with other guys and doing god knows what. “Videos for adult viewing,” Buster bellowed without reading the titles so he could make the worst possible call; “porn through the postal service.” Whereupon Zoë picked up the beebee gun she’d loaded with salt pellets, and went out on the front porch, and aimed just below the mail bag, and said, “Buster, you have just violated your last piece of U.S. mail,” and opened fire, yelling, “Dance, gringo,” just like she’d seen in the Western Nick had sent her. Xenia heard Buster’s screams, they were that loud, but then you can imagine what that salt felt like going through Buster’s pants. You can’t imagine the sound he made, though; it was like a pig being pulled through a meat grinder backwards.

Zoë says she’s not sorry, and Mama grounded her because of it, but Buster’s not reading our mail anymore, so things are a lot better here.

I really liked Quinn and Zoe, so I turned this into a real short story, not an exercise, and then I started thinking about what would happen when they grew up, and that’s how Crazy For You came to be.

Structure: It’s a good thing.

Note: Since Elizabeth asked in the comments, I went and checked on Amazon, and I think you can get to the finished story if you go to Amazon, look up Crazy People by Jennifer Crusie, hit the “Look Inside” button, find the table of contents. It should be the last thing you can click on.

Or just try this link and see if it takes you right there:

Happiness is Great T-Shirts

In Lavender’s Blue, Liz wears a lot of t-shirt, in fact, she collects them. I’m obsessive about the details in my books, so all of the T-shirts have to be real, preferably something I own. There are many fine ones, but this might be my fave:

It’s because I’m a word freak, but I’m good with that.

What covered you with happiness this week?

[If you’re not a word freak, the joke is that, like a lot of seagulls is called a flock, a lot of crows is called a murder, but there are only two crows here so it’s . . . . Well, I love it.]

Questionable: What Do You Do If Somebody Guesses Your Twist?

Emily wrote:
The question of plotting and twists is something that comes up a lot in the realm of fanfiction, because as a writer you’re getting feedback and comments and speculation on each chapter about where things are going, and the question is, do you alter your plans for the overall story because someone has correctly predicted the ‘twist’ that you had coming up (some writers do change course), just to surprise your readers, or do you hold to what you originally intended?

It depends.

There are really two different things you’re looking at here–twists/reversals and expectation–and their placement in the narrative as either surprises or turning points.

Twist: The protagonist opens the door and sees the detective trying to murder the suspect, surprising the reader.

Expectation: The reader figures out early on that the detective is the murderer and he’s framing the suspect, so she reads on to find out how and when the protagonist finds out and the repercussions.

Put another way, a twist is a surprise, expectation is a need satisfied. The key to both is how they impact the reader and how they move the story.

First, look at impact on the reader.

A twist by itself is a surprise, a shock, but it’s just a moment in the narrative.
Somebody climbs the stairs to bed and a serial killer leaps out and stabs them.
The reader didn’t see it coming and is shocked and surprised for that moment.

Expectation is the feeling that something is going to happen that runs through a narrative.
A serial killer has been. hiding in people’s homes and stabbing them at bedtime. Somebody who’s had tricks played on them and had some narrow escapes goes home to bed. He finds the door standing open when he gets there. He goes up to bed and a serial killer leaps out and stabs him.
The reader saw it coming and keeps reading to find out how it happens and what happens to the story after that, the expectation pulling her through the narrative.

Another way to look at this is that it’s the difference between surprise (twist) and suspense (expectation). Suspense if generally better because it drives the narrative, but surprise can work, too, if it’s also an integral part of the narrative, a turning point.

Examples of effective twists:

Example from movies: The shower scene in Psycho, which happens very early on, kills the protagonist (Janet Leigh). Huge surprise with huge impact on the narrative because now another protagonist must show up, which makes it a turning point in the narrative: now we have a new story. You can’t cut it.

Example from movies: Scream when Drew Barrymore is killed right off the bat even though she was the biggest name in the movie. Huge surprise but very meta; it only works if you know that Drew Barrymore is a huge star. The scene would not be necessary because there are plenty of other victims, but because the movie is a parody of horror movies, it becomes an important part of the parody: Barrymore should have been the Final Girl, but this movie doesn’t care and offs her; the surprise is necessary to let the viewer know that this movie is going to violate tropes.You can’t cut it.

Example from movies: The end of The Sixth Sense, one of the greatest twists ever because of the huge impact on the narrative; you have to go back and watch the whole thing again because it becomes a different movie thanks to the one piece of information that’s presented to the audience all the way through, fair play through misdirection. That’s a classic example of a turning point at the climax. You can’t cut it.

Example from books: The end of Interview with the Vampire, in the frame story, the journalist and the vampire end their conversation, and the journalist says something that’s a surprise that flips the meaning of the frame story. The frame story contains the theme of the book, and the surprise in the last scene drives the theme home. You can’t cut that twist even if a reader sees it coming because it’s place that the theme becomes clear.

Expectation is the long game in fiction. Genre uses expectation heavily.

First Scene: The protagonist picks up a guy for a one-night stand.
Romance Expectation: These are the two lovers and they’ll be together happily at the end.
Mystery Expectation: One of them will end up dead and the other will be suspected and have to fight to clear themselves.
Paranormal Expectation: One of them has supernatural powers, maybe both. Maybe one is a witch who will do something to the other person who is a vampire.
Romantic Paranormal Suspense Expectation: The witch will be suspected of killing the vampire who is already dead and therefore knows she’s innocent and the two will fight to prove her innocence and end up in a committed relationship at the end of the book. (I kinda want to write that one.)

So to get back to your question, you had that twist planned when you began, but now you’re farther into the story and people have guessed it. What do you do?

Again, it depends.

1. Look at it and see if it still works in the narrative even if people see it coming or if something else would work better. If it’s essential, like a turning point, keep it; it’s just become an expectation. Remember, a good book does not rely on twists or nobody would ever reread anything. If it’s not essential to the narrative, cut it. You should cut anything that’s not essential to the narrative anyway.

2. Look at the rest of the feedback. Is everybody guessing it, or just one or two? If it’s one guess among twenty, ignore it. It’s a guess. If there are twenty people saying, “It’s the butler,” then you’ve telegraphed it into an expectation, and you’ll have to decide if there’s enough pleasure/play-off in the expectation to keep it. If not, twist the twist: it still happens thus fulfilling the expectation, but not the way readers expect, and the new way sheds new light on the story (good old turning point).

3. See how much pleasure the twist gives the reader. If the heroine has been putting up with her abusive stepsisters, and the twist is that they go too far and she turns on them and burns all their underwear, even though the reader is anticipating she’ll finally stand up to them, if the way she does it is really pleasurable, readers won’t care that they saw it coming, in fact, they’ll be pleased that their expectation paid off so spectacularly.

In general, twists that are there just to be twists are weak writing. (That’s why “it was all a dream” twists are so bad.). Twists that open up a new part of the story, twists that transform the story, twists that are turning points and have meaning beyond the SURPRISE! are still good even if people see them coming because they’ve just turned into expectations and are an integral part of the story.

[Thinking of yesterday’s post on structure and plot: Twists and expectations are content/plot; how do they work in the structure of your story? If they’re not part of the structure, or they’re an easily replaced part of the structure, they can go. If they’re an integral part of the structure, discovered twists are just expectations now.)

PLEASE NOTE: There are many roads to Oz. I always present my opinions as if they’re obviously the correct answer (obviously) but there are many approaches to writing fiction and this one may not be for you.

Argh Demands an ABC Exercise

Cathy
MAY 20, 2022 AT 10:12 AM EDIT
So… if we, your readers, were to work on your alphabetic exercise… it would start something like this:

As dawn was breaking over the burning river, the last Viking zombies returned to their aluminum boat en masse.

(Guantlet dropped. Someone pick up w B)

Lakshmi
MAY 20, 2022 AT 10:33 AM EDIT
But they were oblivious to the shapeshifting dragon lying in wait.

Office Wench Cherry
MAY 20, 2022 AT 10:41 AM EDIT
Before Bob could even say anything, Jenny picked up the automatic rifle she kept with her for just such occasions and opened fire.

“Cherries” she muttered.

“Damn Cherries.”

Deborah Blake
MAY 20, 2022 AT 11:44 AM EDIT
Cherries tend to be crack shots, however, at least with sarcasm and book recommendations, so Jenny was able to hit the shapeshifting dragon right where she was aiming, taking out the medallion that caused it to be able to shapeshift in the first place.

Questionable: What’s the Difference Between Plot and Structure?

Lakshmi asked:
“Are plot and story structure the same? Is plot mostly driven by goals? Are twists necessary? How do you define plot?”

So I’m going to reorder your questions from simple to complicated.

“How do you define plot?”

Plot is the events of the story.

“”Are plot and story structure the same?”

No. Story structure is the framework, plot is the content.

One linear cause and effect story structure (there are others) is

• TP 1: There’s an inciting event,

• Act One: which prompts the actions of the characters in the story,

• TP 2: and those actions cause a huge turning point

• Act Two: that propels the characters to do more action with greater intent

• TP 3: so that at the midpoint, they have changed so much they can’t go back to who they were at the beginning

• Act Three: and must try even harder in their actions

• TP 4: which brings them to a crisis point where it seems that everything is lost

• Act Four: and which forces them to throw themselves into a mad scramble to the climax,

• TO 5: where they win or lose.”

The plot you build from that structure can be about a kindergartner trying to convince her parents to get a kitten, or about two people who are all wrong for each other falling in love and building a relationship anyway, or about a lone wolf sniper saving the world.

There are a zillion kinds of story structure and they all do the same thing: give your story form. Without structure, you story is a boneless mess. The most common structure is linear cause and effect (see above for one variation of that), but you can do patterned, picaro, alternating time lines, damn near anything. One writing exercise I like is to do a twenty-six line story, the first line beginning with a word that starts with A, the second with a word that starts with B, etc. The teaching benefit there is in how easy the story is to write; it shows students that structure isn’t stifling, it actually helps creativity.

Is plot mostly driven by goals?

It depends on the kind of plotter you are, character-driven or plot-driven. I think plot should always start with character, but there are some who beg to differ. They are wrong.

So let’s start with plot-driven plots.

Somebody gets a great idea for a plot. There’s this woman and she agrees to be a fake date for a billionaire (because dating is so hard for billionaires) and she doesn’t like him and he’s kind of an asshole, but they’re both really hot so they have sex and the sex is great so they fall in love and have a baby.

Why did she agree to the fake date? Because that’s the plot.
Why do they have to be hot? Because that’s the plot.
Why do they have sex? Because that’s the plot.
Why do they fall in love? Because that’s the plot.
Why do they have a baby? Because they’re too stupid to use birth control. Because that’s the plot.

The events in a plot-driven story happen because that’s the plot.

The events in a character-driven story happen because the character do things because of who they are and what they want.

There’s this woman who is in a bar in a furious mood because her boyfriend just dumped her.
Because her boyfriend just dumped her, she decides to go pick up a very handsome guy .
Because she decided to pick up the handsome guy, she overhears her ex-boyfriend make a date that the handsome guy can get her into bed, but she doesn’t hear Handsome turn down the bet.
Because she overheard the bet, when the handsome guy comes to pick her up, she gives him a hard time .

[Full disclosure: I think plot-driven plots are killing modern romance. They’re the reason fake-date-billionaire stories all sound alike, even though that trope is pretty powerful, it’s the marriage of convenience with the added excitement of a lot of money, the rescue fantasy. But too often it’s the same thing over and over, just swapping out names and occupations. The key to doing a great trope story is to change the damn story, work against the plot. A nerdy girl picks up a guy in a casino and has a one night stand, and the next week she goes to her job to meet the new boss and the new boss is not the guy she slept with. If you do that kind of thing, you’re working with reader expectation which, as long as the reader isn’t invested in the expectation is a lot of fun. That is, in that story, the reader expectation is that the nerdy girl will meet up with one-night stand again so you have to fulfill that expectation. But the one-night-stand-will-be-her-new-boss is a horrible idea to begin with plus it’s a cliche now, so when she goes in to meet the guy and it’s not her one-night-stand, the switch-up is fun, the reader is tired of that trope anyway, and now the question is, How are they going to meet again? Where was I? Oh yeah, full disclosure, I am a character based writer and I hate plot-driven stories, so if you’re interested in plot-driven, you should go talk to somebody who likes writing them. Probably a guy.]

“Are twists necessary?”

Well, let’s define “twist.”

If just at the end, when the protagonist is about to be eaten by a tiger, she wakes up and realizes it was a dream, no.

If the reader is reading a first person mystery story, following the clues with an eagle eye, and at the end realizes that the first person narrator in that story has been the murderer all along, yes. Even though decades of mystery readers have frothed at the mouth about that, that twist was necessary because it was the point of the whole damn thing. The guy was a sociopath and fooled the reader the same way he fooled everybody but the detective (a small Belgian) because he was a sociopath. It’s brilliant, and it’s all contained in that twist.

The best twists are reversals of expectation that on a second look are inevitable. That is, they’re not just thrown in there so the plot has a twist, they’re an intrinsic part of the plot so that the reader doesn’t say, “Where the hell did that come from?” she says, “OH MY GOD OF COURSE.” Those kind of twists are difficult but pay off big. Think The Sixth Sense.

The best twists are also turning points that are integral to the story, they’re not just there for shock value, they actually move the plot. Turning points are events in the story that turn the story into something new. Or if you prefer, twist it into something new. It’s not just that something happens, it’s that something that is inevitable given the previous events of the plot but still unexpected happens to the protagonist in such a way that it gives her and the reader an entirely new viewpoint on the story. She thought it was this but now it’s THIS.

Another name for twist is “reversal,” an event that reverses previous expectations. The reader thinks the new boss will be the love interest but he’s a stranger, the viewer thinks the superhero team will defeat the bad guy but he wins and wipes out half the world, that kind of thing. Turning points that are reversals are very powerful because they upend expectation, forcing the reader to reconsider the story.

Look, you ask me about craft, you’re gonna get a book-length post back. I’m a wonk. Thanks for reading.

This is a Good Book Thursday, May 19, 2022

I’ve been reading this book about a woman who goes back to her small hometown after fifteen years, but strangely, she does not open a bakery and there are no zombies. Tragically, there is also no ending. So far.

What are you reading?

Working Wednesday, May 18, 2022

I am working on a book, which has led me to face the fact that I cannot plot. Onward and upward.

What did you work on this week?

Questionable: What’s Your Collaboration Process?

I used to get asked about collaborating all the time, mainly, “How do you do that?” My answer was, “It’s complicated.” It’s still complicated, but since people are going to ask . . .

(1) The first thing I recommend is that each collaborator pick a character and write that. That approach has never failed me in any of my collaborations. It emphasizes the power of voice to make a character come alive and since writers have different voices, it’s a no-brainer for variety in the narrative. It also cuts down on collaborator conflict since you’ve got your own character and subplots to explore. It’s not so much “you stay in your lane and I’ll stay in mine,” as it is “this is your part of the story and this is mine, and we’ll visit each other.” Think of it as writers with benefits, the benefit being that you don’t have to write the whole damn book. Also, it’s really a lot of fun seeing what the other writer comes up with, reading new stuff in a story you’re writing. Writing is a lonely business, collaborating is not.

One of my creative writing profs at OSU (Hi, Michelle!) gave us a writing exercise to take a character from the short story of the student next to us and write a scene with that character and one of our characters. I thought it was odd, but it was the most illuminating exercise I ever did because the character from somebody else’s story pulled my character into situations and settings and conflicts that were completely new to me. I had to stretch, and I found out more about my character doing that than I had by writing the character in my own story. Bob and I just did a good hour’s worth of talking about character change, what it meant, how Liz and Vince echoed each other, acted as foils for each other, how the ten million subplots played out the dynamics, and I realized things about Liz I hadn’t thought about, and I think he saw things in Vince, too. The idea of two writers (or more, I’ve done three) in a narrative each with their own character seems like it would be counter-productive, but if you’re both interested in the story, if you both care about what the story means on the surface and in the subtext and you explore that not only within your characters but without, in the relationships between the characters and how that subtext plays out, you get a narrative that’s really rich, probably richer than you’d get controlling all the characters yourself. Collaboration pushes you out of your ruts, and redesigns the ruts you keep.

(2) The second thing is to work out together plots and subplots that serve your characters, picking one to be the main plot. My plan for this trilogy was three mysteries that taken together would make one huge romance novel. Bob’s character Vince is a cop, so he got the mystery plots, which is just his cup of tea bottle of beer. My character, Liz, is a ghostwriter who gets roped into writing a romance novel in the second book, and the romance plot is what I’m happiest writing. He likes plot, I like character. Of course Liz is also involved in the mystery plot and of course Vince is part of the romance, he’s the love interest, but this way Bob gets control of the mystery plot (he loves control) and I get my say on the romance, aka the YEC (Yucky Emotional Crap, which he would prefer not to touch with a ten-foot burning zombie).

And then when the first draft is done, you look at all your plots and subplots and talk about the parallels, how they’re showing the character arcs (not telling), how they’re all in one way or another, connected to the same spine that your character arcs created. If they all interlock, your story is tight, which is what rewrites are about. Not creating new content, but pulling all the narrative as close as possible to those Big Ideas. I think one of things that defines a good storyteller is that feeling a reader gets that there’s an authority in the text, that they’re in good hands, they can relax and lean into the story, that it will all make sense in a satisfying ending. (Note, not necessarily a happy ending, but a satisfying ending.). And two people hashing out how the events of the story support the central idea pretty much guarantees a tight, authoritative story.

(3) The third thing is practical: you have to work out a strategy for exchanging chunks of the story. This time was awkward because I had about 65,000 words of the story done when I got stuck and yelled for help. Plus, like all my other mss, it’s old, so there were different versions. So I dumped the whole thing in Bob’s lap and said, “You do Vince, we can change whatever you want” (I was desperate) and all of a sudden my dead story was alive (not a zombie reference).

So we started off with the first two acts (which are now over 70,000 words again, so we’ll be cutting that later), but swapping huge files is a lousy way to write, so with Act 3, we went to labeling scenes. I did a scene list chart, always tentative but a starting place. I wrote in all the Liz scenes I knew about, leaving room for Bob’s stuff. It’s easy to edit a table, so we can keep a fluid list with notes, passing it back and forth.

We labeled scenes “L 3-1 Liz vs Vince May 9.” The L is for “Lavender’s Blue,” followed by Act 3, Scene 1, followed by the conflict, followed by the date it was last changed. It’s clunky, but it works most of the time, although sometimes we need to add something following the conflict like “Red Box Blow-up.

(4) The fourth thing is really the key to the collaborative relationship: Respect your collaborator and keep your mitts off the other guy’s scenes with one exception: you can fix your character’s dialogue and actions. If the fix is big, you have to talk about it, but that’s mostly tweaking. Otherwise, they get to write their person the way they want. In the final rewrites, we probably tweak each other’s stuff, but by then it’s pretty easy not to overstep. Track Changes is the best way to do this so the other person can accept or reject. And now I must learn to do Track Changes in Pages (I’m liking working in Pages a lot, plus it comes free with the Mac).

I think this is the hardest thing about collaboration, understanding that this book is not just yours, its theirs, too. You’re going to have to accept some things you wouldn’t have put in the book, and the key is to see how you can use those things, too. If whatever it is goes against something important, you have to explain that, and if you’re not on the same wavelength in the book, that can lead to some major conflicts (only happened to me once) but at the end of the day, unless it goes completely against your grain as a human being, let it go. Bob has objected politely to things I’ve done in books and explained why (and so have my other collaborators) and the explanations were reasonable and made sense, so I deleted those things. He’s done the same for me. We save our powder for the big battles, and there have been remarkably few of those (and one I won he should have won, so that made me more careful in the future).

(5) The fifth thing is probably the most essential to the collaboration’s overall success: Talk to each other often and listen to each other. Collaboration is just that, two people working together, not one person in charge, dictating to the other, or two people writing separately and then shuffling scenes together, collaboration is an active partnership, and communication is the key to any partnership. My collabs have always been online with brief in-person meetings to hash things out, and the great thing about online is that you have a record of what you’ve said.

(6) The sixth thing is to be respectful when you talk to each other:

And that’s how I collaborate.

Happiness is a Good Brother

I got an e-mail from my brother this week that said, “Call me,” and it turned out he just wanted to talk. We hadn’t for awhile, so we caught up, and then I caught up with my sister-in-law and then talked some more with my brother, and we all laughed a lot. Jack confessed he’d never read one of my books. He said, “I don’t want to read my sister talking about sex.” I laughed and told him that I’d never named a hero Jack and I never would (both my brother and my dad were named Jack) for a similar reason. We talked about things that happened during our childhood and we both remembered different things that the other had no recollection of, and we laughed about that, too. I told him the new book had the tagline, “Would it kill you to go see your mother?” and he laughed hard at that, and then I told him the mother in the book collected bears and he laughed even harder (our mother was nuts for teddy bears and Christmas tree pins and also just nuts in general).

What made me really happy this week is that I love my brother and he loves me and we say it. And also he married a darling woman who’s more like my sister than my sister-in-law, and I love her, too.

What made you happy this week?