Judith Post's Blog, page 133

Endings

I've often heard writers say that the beginning of a novel–the opening hook and first few pages–is what sells a book.  The end of the novel sells the next one.  I have to agree.   The book cover can catch a reader's eye, the back blurb can make them open the pages, but then there's a quick scan of the first few paragraphs to see if the writer's voice and premise is worth paying for.  It's a "deal or no deal" type of thing.  The words either catch the reader right away, or he/she moves on to the next book that attracts his fancy.  If a writer's lucky, and the first pages pull the reader in, he'll buy the book.  And hopefully, it lives up to expectations.  The reader takes it home and can't stop turning the pages to see how the story plays out.  If the ending satisfies him, he'll be tempted to look for the next book the author wrote.

I just finished a book.  The title isn't important.  What matters is that the story line was unusual enough that I couldn't wait to see what happened next.  The characters were unique and varied and pulled me in.  They were flawed.  Sometimes, I was happy with them.  Sometimes, they disappointed me.  Occasionally, I wanted to throttle them, but they felt real.  It's been a while since I've read a book with a better villain.  But the author kept hinting that there was more going on than the characters were willing to tell me, so there was an air of mystery–a surprise twist that I didn't know.  The thing is, when the big, black moment ended and the dust settled, the book's surprise just plain irritated me.  A few more hints so that I'd wonder, but wasn't sure, would have added a lot more tension to the entire story, and I wouldn't have had to endure an entire, LONG chapter of the author explaining how each thing that happened could have been interpreted differently if only I'd known.

The author played fair.  For me, she just didn't pull it off.  I like twist endings.  I like surprises.  The movie The Sixth Sense mastered the kind of duality this author was trying for.  At the end of the movie, no one had to sit down and explain in detail how the clues added up.  Everything culminated in an "Aha!" moment.  I'd have STILL liked the book except that the author added one more twist that annoyed me even more.  She made a character that I liked into one that I didn't.  The result?  I'd loved the entire book, was involved in the characters, and would have gladly looked for another book by the author.  But the ending not only didn't satisfy me.  It irritated me.  So…. no next book for me.

Which made me remember the old lesson.  The first few pages of your book is what sells it.  The end of your book is what sells your next one.  So work as hard on that ending as you do on your opening chapter.

Food for thought

Food creeps into my stories.  Enough so, that people comment on it.  But for me, most good things in life revolve around food.  I love restaurants.  I love to cook, and I love to eat.  If there are people together for any length of time, there should be a group meal.  So if I have characters hanging out together for a day, I want to know what to feed them.  Which character would be the one who cooks?  What would he make?  Is he gourmet or does he open a can?  Which character would just order pizza?  A person's relationship with food tells me a lot about him.

I loved the movie Julie and Julia.  The story was fun.  The acting was great.  The food made me drool.  By the time my husband and I left the theater, I couldn't wait to get home to fry slices of French bread to make bruschetta.  Then I went out and bought Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking.  Not that it's my most used cookbook.  Even flipping through its pages is sort of intimidating.  But it looks solid and serious sitting beside my grimy, well-used cookbooks.  It's sort of like seeing my Complete PELICAN SHAKESPEARE jostled alongside my favorite mysteries and urban fantasies.  It lends a heaviness and substance to my reading material.  It adds more purpose to my writing endeavors.

Just as social gatherings of any kind involve food, for me, my protagonists often feel the same way.   A somber scene in a novel should involve serious food–like coq au vin or Sunday roasts.  A jazzy scene might serve etouffee or po' boys.  A nonchalant evening would veer to chicken wings or spaghetti.  Food conveys mood and mindset.

I was enjoying comments on GoodReads a few days ago, and one of the reviewers was talking about a book she absolutely loved, then she said she couldn't wait for supper because she was going to have toad in a hole.  Guess which I looked up first?  The review or a recipe.  What can I say?  My protagonists are usually hungry.

 

Genre Fine Tuning

Someone recently asked me, "What are the variations of genres?"  We were talking fiction.  Still, I had to stop to think.  I could list the basics:  romance, mystery, fantasy, horror, and sci/fi.  Book stores separate those out for you.  I had to think harder to come up with children's, erotica, historical fiction, literary fiction, young adult, women's fiction, and westerns.  But these terms are so broad, there are lots of smaller, specialty niches within each.  I don't pretend to know what all of these niches are.  I usually wander up and down shelves to find them, but book covers give you a clue.    Cozy novels have cozy covers.  Noir tends to go dark.  But there are finer intricacies to look for.  You'd have to study particular markets to get those right.  But it's worth making the effort to know what the subgenres are in your favorite.

Certain expectations go along with each genre.  Readers expect particular ingredients to be in each mix.  If you write a romance, you have to deliver a boy meets girl, things get bumpy, boy almost loses girl, and then boy wins girl type of plot.  Harlequin does a great job at this, and it's no easy thing.    I went to a workshop with Shirley Jump, and she creates character wheels for her heroes and heroines so that their needs and wants bump against each other in the storyline, increasing tension, before attraction finally pulls them together.  But Harlequins are only one type of romance.  There are plenty more.

If you promise a paranormal romance, you'd be wise to have something paranormal in your story, along with one heck of a romance plot.  I read Katie MacAlister's Zen and the Art of Vampires, and she mixed a regular, mortal heroine (a little on the overweight side) with a hot, sexy vampire, and tossed in a dash of humor.   Readers get exactly what they're looking for–a taste of the unordinary in our ordinary world, mixed with a steamy love/hate relationship that veers toward disaster before romance conquers all.

A friend of mine is working on a historical, Christian romance, so I read A Hope Undaunted, by Julie Lessman–one of her favorite authors–to see what the ingredients are for that type of novel.  Set at the end of the 1920′s, the book captures the flavor and feel of the era.  The heroine wants to be liberated and to have an important career, but then the Depression wipes out her hopes for an expensive education, and she meets a lawyer who cares little for money, but is determined to rescue as many street orphans as he can.  Faith plays a big part in each of the character's lives.   The time period influences culture and attitudes.  Both elements are necessary for this type of novel.

I could  go on, but suffice it to say that there are many different types of romance–contemporary, Western, Gothic, Regency, historical, the old "bodice rippers," etc.   The thing is, there are plenty of subgenres for every genre, and for readers to find what they like in a book, that's a good thing.

I love Georgette Heyer.   I love Touch Not the Cat, by Mary Stewart.   But their moods and tones aren't the same.  When I want to read a Regency, I want dukes and ladies, not Gothic atmosphere.  That's where knowing what type of novel you like and where to find it helps.  That's the purpose of genres and subgenres.  I might grump about them sometimes and long for more crossover books, but the truth is, genres serve a purpose.  And when I pick up a book and think it's one thing…but it's not…I'm not happy.  Along with good writing, I want books to deliver the elements I'm in the mood for.

But I had Natty Bumppo

My grandsons grew up with Harry Potter.  I bought them The Sorcerer's Stone and read them a chapter a night.  During summer vacations, with no school, they'd beg for an extra chapter in the afternoon.  We went to each midnight book party and read the series together until Harry finally defeated Voldemort.  Somewhere in there, we went to see each movie.  It was bittersweet for me when the Harry phenomenon ended, because it pretty much parallelled my grandsons' childhood reading years.  They're teenagers now.  Too cool to go to a movie with me.  They're on to other books and lots of assigned reading.  It made me think.  What did I read when I was a kid?

There have always been good authors who wrote for children and YA, but I really think that today's readers have lots more to choose from.  And that's good.  There are so many other options for them to spend time on–like X-Box, Playstation, and computers that they can easily bypass books.  But there's nothing like losing yourself in a good novel.  My grandsons went from Harry Potter to Suzanne Collins' Gregor series and from those to her YA novels, starting with The Hunger Games.  They read a fair amount of Rick Riordan's The Lightning Thief series, too.

When I was in grade school, I read Laura Ingall Wilder's Little House in the Big Woods, along with the other novels in her series.  I missed the appeal of Nancy Drew and had to content myself with single titles until I hit middle school.  And then I discovered James Fenimore Cooper.  I fell in love with Natty Bumppo and read every book in Cooper's Leatherstocking series.  His The Last of the Mohicans took my breath away.  No kid would read those today.  Cooper could easily take three pages to describe a forest.  But I loved those stories.  I loved how unassuming Natty Bumppo was as a hero.  Or at least, that's  how I remember him.  When I finished those, I discovered Grace Livingston Hill and then Agatha Christie.  She began my love affair with mysteries.  But there was no series that I can recall that had a young adult as a hero or heroine.

When I started college, I took lots of English lit. classes, and there was no time for fun reading.  Don't get me wrong.  I loved (most) of the books I was assigned to read.  But they were part of the curriculum, and I was tested over them.  Not the same thing as browsing through shelves at a bookstore and choosing something that piques your fancy.

The thing is, if you're lucky enough, reading is a wonderful part of growing up.  If you love it then, it could become a wonderful experience you can continue through life.  Today's kids have an abundance of writers and books to choose from.  My grandsons grew up with Harry Potter.  Hopefully, that experience will encourage them to read for the rest of their lives.  Me?  I had Natty Bumppo.  And he was great!

Which Genre Are You?

My patrician friends read weighty, literary tomes.  Or edgy, witty novels.  Or sophisticated skewers of society.  Years, maybe centuries ago, a friend and I went to a writers' conference at a university.  We signed up for different panels and classes, but both of us had the same experience.  The guest writer started his lecture, asked the participants what they were working on, and informed each of us that writing for a genre was equivalent to writing trash.  Three years later, we returned to the same university for a conference, and genres had come up in the world.  One of the guest speakers wrote and sold lots of horror novels.  Another wrote mysteries.  A third wrote YA.  The publishing world had changed.  Really good writers, with masterful language skills, chose to write genre fiction.

Still, to this day, when I banter books with someone and that person is an afficiondo of literary novels while I'm discussing the latest urban fantasy, I feel outclassed.  I feel like the plebeian of the reading and writing world.   Literary might have fewer sales, but it has more clout.  It's sort of like being a Woody Allen fan.  I love his movies, but I know better than to admit it to most of my friends.  They just shake their heads.  Even though I think anyone and everyone would fall in love with his latest, Midnight in Paris.

Anyway, the thing is, I read lots of classics in high school and college.  I still read the odd literary now and then.  But the truth is, I'm a genre junkie.  I asked for and read two anthologies of short stories by Flannery O'Connor and Eudora Welty one Christmas, and I read every single story in each book.  I loved the word choices, the rich imagery, the luscious language that just rolled off the tongue.  But give me one of Ellen Datlow's anthologies any day, and I'd whiz through it faster.  I like plot.  I like tension.  Character studies are fine and all, but I want something to happen in my stories.  Both southern writers are brilliant, but I like genre better.

The nice thing about genre is that when I pick it up, I know what I'm going to get.  If I'm in the mood to add up clues and wrestle with the question "why?"– I buy a mystery.  If I want a kick-ass heroine, I'll spring for urban fantasy.  If I'm into world building, I'll crack open a fantasy.  It's not that these can't be written with strong characters and wondrous phrases, those are the authors I keep buying.  But there's a meeting of expectations when I buy genre.  And I like that.

So what about you?  What's your favorite genre and why?

Take A Number

My husband, bless his heart, takes my writing seriously.  Whether he thinks someday I might actually make decent money at it, or whether it's because it keeps me occupied and out of trouble doesn't matter.  When my old computer died, he bought me a new one with more bells and whistles than I know how to use.  Actually, it has so much memory and pizzaz that I ended up having the best computer in the house.  That has advantages and disadvantages.

My computer knows more things than I do.  I'm a simple person.  I use Word for my writing, and I like to surf the net and do research.  I've joined a few chatrooms and even look at facebook now and then.  I don't venture too far into the unknown.  But my grandsons zip from one thing on computers to another, unafraid.  And they love gaming.  They have an X Box and a Playstation 3 in our basement, and there's an old computer down there, too, but it doesn't have the speed they need for League of Legends or Runescape.  When their friends come over, boys divide up–some on systems in the basement and others taking turns on the computer in my office.  My computer.

I don't mind sharing.  The boys know what they can and cannot do.  When they started middle school and had new friends over, I had one, small incident–and everyone swears it was an accident that they ended up at a racy site and my machine ended up with a virus–but it's never happened again.  The fun now is watching the computer dance where kids sashay and side step from X Box to League of Legends to Runescape and back again.

During the day, the computer is mine.  I write on it until three, most week days.  After three, it's fair game.  If I want to check my e-mail or look at my horoscope, I wait my turn.  They keep their part of the bargain, so I keep mine.  If I say they can use it, I try not to pull rank.  But I still get a turn, like everyone else–as long as I make it fast.  After all, there's a line.  Boys are waiting.  Someday, when my pockets are fuller, I'll buy them a whiz bang computer for the basement.  Or better yet, laptops that can tap dance and do homework at the same time.  Until then, we share.  And we've learned to tango and cha cha from one machine to another pretty well.

 

Writing and Food

I love to write.  I really do.  I need to sit at my computer and hit keys every day.

I also love to read.  I think most writers do.  There's little better than entering an unknown world and living in it for a while until you turn the last page.

I also really, really love food.  My friends tease me that I'm hooked on the foodnetwork.  All those luscious ingredients, those picture perfect meals.  I can easily lose myself flipping through cookbooks and cooking magazines.  I can live in glossy pages filled with recipes as easily as I spend an evening with Mercy Thompson or Thomas Lynley.  I love Diane Mott Davidson's culinary mysteries and Shirley Jump's The Bachelor Preferred Pastry.  I can get hooked on a list of ingredients as quickly as I get hooked on a cliffhanger.

Bookshelves line two walls of my writing room.  Most shelves are filled with novels.  Four are crammed with cookbooks.  Just as when I meet someone who loves the same author I do, I get giddy when someone likes the same cookbooks.  I went to a chocolate party at Shirley Jump's house once, and my heart beat faster when she raved about The Barefoot Contessa's cake recipe.   My friend, Paula, not only shares my obsession with mysteries written by Elizabeth George, but she shares my passion for recipes by Pam Anderson.  Whereas I'm a sucker for French and Italian, my friend Joyce excels at flavors from Spain.  When we get together, there's always a recipe exchange.

My husband and I remember vacations by the places we ate and the food that we tried.  My trip to New Orleans with Dawn will always be highlighted by a trip to Mother's for its shrimp po' boys.  Trips to Hilton Head will conjure images of buying steamed shrimp at a Piggly Wiggly to share with Joyce and Abe.  San Francisco is Crab Louis, a lunch with my brother-in-law by a window overlooking the bay.  Food, for me, is an impression of a city.

I enjoy cooking as much as eating.  I'm no fly by the seat of your pants type person.  Just as with my writing, I tend to like structure.  When I start a novel, I don't just wade in and see where it takes me.  I need character wheels.  I need plot points.  To cook, I need recipes.  I follow directions.  I might tweak here and there, but I want a solid foundation.  I like cooking in mass.  I like filling a huge skillet, putting a meal on the table, and watching the food disappear.  I like soup pots and crockpots.  I like casual, informal, a table scattered with side dishes and a big salad.  Sometimes, plates match.  Sometimes silverware doesn't.

When my grandson was little, we watched the cartoon Little Bear every day.  In one episode, the family has a feast for the winter solstice, and Tyler thought that a table, laden from one end to the other with all sorts of food was the most wonderful thing he'd ever seen.  I wanted that for him, so my daughter and I worked together and invited people over and filled our table with Tyler and Nathan's favorite foods.  Nate–Ty's younger brother–was really little then, but he still enjoyed the feeling of abundance.  I like that feeling to a lesser extent.  But I know, someday, my table won't be as crowded as it is now, most nights.  Eventually, it will be just John and I who share a meal.  And I'll have to adjust.  And I'll learn to like that, too.

One rule I hope to keep permanent, though.  I don't cook on Friday nights.  That's for enjoying other peoples' talents.  And donuts from the bakery on Saturday mornings while I watch new segments on the Cooking Channel is nothing to sneeze at either.

my writing group

I've belonged to a writers' group–The Summit City Scribes–for more years than I like to think about.  We meet the second and fourth Wednesday of each month–often enough to keep us serious, not so often it becomes a chore.  We're an eclectic brew of scribblers with no rules, no dues, no officers.  The only things expected of us is to show up as often as possible, to respect each writer and his/her work, and to offer the best critiques that we know how to.  We say what we like about the person's writing and what we think he/she could have done better.  If we can think of a market that would work for the piece, we mention it.

We have a little of everything in our group.  Neil is a naturalist who writes newspaper columns.  When he reads, we know we're going to learn about birds or migration paths, his experience at a state park, or a story about an adventure in his RV.  Paula writes mysteries, and we try to remember each clue and red herring as she spreads chapters over several months.  Ann writes romance, and we watch for hints that we know will bring the couple together before her last page.  We have fantasy writers, people working on children and YA novels, someone who writes nostalgia, and the occasional article or two.  But it all works.  We zero in on what makes for good writing.

The thing I love best is that each person comes at writing from such different angles.  Paula nails us on characters.  She looks for depth and multi-levels in our stories.  Mary Lou is a stickler on POV and using the senses to bring scenes alive.  She zeroes in on hooks at a chapter's beginning and again at its end.  Linda cares about language and symbolism, about being real.  Ann won't let lazy verbs slide.  She listens for word choice.  And together, everyone's strengths become one powerful dynamic.

Our meeting goes from 12:30 to 2:30 in the afternoon, which makes it hard for people with day jobs to attend, but it's what works for us.  A lot of us started attending the group when our kids were in school.  We could drop off our darlings or wave them onto their yellow bus, get a few things done, then scurry to our meeting.  And we'd be done and home before they walked through the door again, their book bags on their backs.

My kids are grown now, but I still like 12:30 to 2:30 for our meetings.  Evenings get busy.  Husbands come home.  Supper needs to be on the table.  There are other meetings to attend.  So twice a month, afternoons still prove a private time that I can call my own.  Many of us no longer need to race home.  I can dawdle.  So can some of the others, so we slip out to some nearby restaurant after the meeting to yak more.

I like both parts of my Scribes' day.   The official part is a time to concentrate.  Three people volunteer to read at each meeting.  The first person reads for twenty minutes max, then we go around the table and critique the work.  Then the second person gets twenty minutes, etc.  Usually, we get to each person.  Sometimes, we don't, but that means we got into some heated discussion about a story point or character's motivation.  We don't always agree, and that's a good thing.  At the end of the day, it's the writer's story.  He/she has to decide what works for him/her.

I've listened to people who despise writers' groups and say they're a waste of time.   Or worse, that they do more harm than good.  Before I found Scribes, I might have agreed.  But Scribes has been invaluable to me.  Still is.  After all these years of writing–even after I've had things published–I crave my writer friends' feedback.  They catch things I don't see.  I'm too close to the characters, to the story.  I think I've made something clear that isn't.  There's a hole that a plot could fall into and never find its way out.  But Scribes is more to me than just the nuts of bolts of good writing.  It's the company of writers.  When I'm wrestling with plot points or I need Atlas to hold the story up on broad shoulders, they reenergize me, recharge my battery.  Just being around them, talking shop, gets me enthused me again.

The second part of our meeting is just as valuable to me.  Sitting at a restaurant, rambling about our work or our lives, lets us become more than a group.  We become friends.  And writers make intelligent, interesting friends.  I consider myself lucky to hang with them.

I love books

I envy people who are fast readers.  They start a book, whiz through it, and are ready for the next one.  I joined GoodReads, and part of me wanted to hang my head in shame and shout, "I am not worthy," because these people read books at an alarming rate.  Most read several books a week.  One guy said that on nights he's not busy, he can read two books in one night.  If someone locked me in my house and tied me in a chair, I still couldn't read that fast.  I tend to slow down at parts I like and go back to reread them.  I savor word choices.  I underline or highlight passages that take my breath away.  (Yes, if I buy a book, I write in it.  It makes it mine).

B.C. (Before Children), I read a lot.  Something's happened since then.  Reading is the last thing I get to, and by the time I settle down with a book, I'm usually tired.

I'm lucky if I read one book every three weeks.  For one thing, our house is busy.  Kids come and go.  I spend most of my day writing.  I love to cook, so there's supper to make every night.  Our living room is just that–for living.  After supper, the TV set is usually on.  A kid's usually on the computer in my office.  Another one has friends in the basement, playing X-box or working out with weights.  Before I know it, my favorite shows come on.  I lose from eight to ten o'clock most week nights, I'm ashamed to say.  I wish it were for intellectual pursuits.  It's not.  I'm hooked on Dancing with the Stars and So You Think You Can Dance.  I watch American Idol.  What can I say?  My husband and I used to drive two to three hours to see Bob Fosse shows.  I'm a sucker for song and dance.

But GoodReads is going to be a motivator for me, I can tell.  I want to up my ante, raise the stakes.  No huge count, for me, but if I finish one book a week, I'll be happy with myself.  I don't want to rush through the pages, but I'd like to turn them, from beginning to end.  And I intend to.

Edith Hamilton Hooked Me

I took four years of Latin in high school.  I loved the teacher.  I still remember him, but I don't remember the vocabulary or language anymore.  I have inklings of Greek and Roman history, but it's the love of myths that's stayed with me.  Fickle gods and goddesses bickered among themselves and interfered in the lives of mortals.  Heroes fought against staggering odds and overcame them.  And then I plunged into the book Mythology, by Edith Hamilton.  The stories were better than the fairytales I read when I was a kid.

My youngest sister is twelves years younger than I am.  A real shock for my mom at the time, but one of the best things that happened to our family, and when she came to pester me at the end of the night, I'd tell her Greek myths for bedtime stories.  Being a romantic, her favorite was the tale of Pygmalion and Galatea–the story of a young sculptor who fell in love with the perfect woman he'd chiseled, and how Venus brought her to life.  My favorite heroes were Odysseus and Hector–on opposing sides of the Trojan War, but both bestowed with admirable qualities in my mind.  And for a reason I still can't fully explain, my favorite goddess was Artemis, known as Diana by the Romans.  As goddess of the hunt, her virtues were murky to me at the time, but I connected her with Nature and the moon and witches.  All intriguing possibilites for my imagination.  As Hecate, she was goddess of the crossroads and commanded hellhounds.  She wasn't always nice, and I didn't always like her.  But she fascinated me.  Still does.  That's why she crept into my writing.

I don't claim to be an expert on mythology.  I don't want to be.  I simply enjoy myths.  And when I wandered upon Norse gods and goddesses, their doomsday predictions for many of their major gods was so different from the fickle gods and goddesses I knew and enjoyed that their stories caught my attention.  Thor, the thunder god, was strong and brave, but he was destined to die at Ragnarok.  So were Odin, Tyr, Heimdall, and Freyr.  Again, for no real reason, Tyr–the sky god–called to me.  Some myths say that he was once the supreme ruler of the gods, but he gave up his power willingly to Odin.  Most myths agree that he, and he alone, was the only god brave enough to place  his right hand in the wolf Fenrir's mouth and let the beast chew it off while his fellow gods placed magic bonds on the monster so that it could do no more harm.  He was a god with contradictions.  God of justice and lawyers, but god of war, too.  Of course, to Vikings and Norsemen, war was justice.  And it can be, at times.   But the value Vikings placed on vengeance is probably a little out of my comfort zone.  At any rate, Tyr stuck with me.  As did Diana.  So, when I thought of ideas for a new book, Tyr and Diana rattled around in my head and wanted to be heard.  They wanted a new story–one where they meet, and against their better judgment, have to work together.

I haven't sold this book yet, but I'm happy I wrote it.  It immersed me in witches, giants, and shapeshifters.  What a way to spend my afternoons!