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Researching the Right Literary Agents for You

Today’s post is by editor Christopher Hoffmann from Copy Write Consultants.

You’re all ready to go: Your manuscript is complete, edited and polished to perfection. Your query is a masterpiece of concise, articulate marketing that both encapsulates the heart of your work and gestures at its inexhaustible profundity. Your synopsis … Well, it clearly states what happens in the book, let’s not pretend they’re ever that sexy.

So the next step is simply submitting to agents, right? No big deal. There are agents, who are at agencies, and they, uh, want stuff, and you … have something …

You start researching literary agencies. Wow. There really are a lot of agents. Like a lot. Do that many books actually get published? When was the last time you’ve even seen a bookstore?

So how do you decide to whom you’re going to submit? Full-on shotgun approach, every single agent for whom you can find an email address? Or a targeted, absolutely surgical strike, approaching only those agents with whom you’d love to work and you just know would love to work with you?

The thing is, there isn’t a best or only way to go about deciding on a list of agents you’re going to query.

If you have mountains of spare time and a love (or at least a high tolerance) for tedious tasks, indiscriminately querying gobs of people has the advantage of putting your work in front of all sorts of agents, including agents who might not have been interested in books in your genre/category/subject until they came across yours. But given that most agencies ask that you query only one agent at the agency, you’ll still need to make some decisions.

On the other hand, if you’d rather spend time with your kids, catch up on your Netflix queue, drown your sorrows at the local boozemonger, or, I don’t know, do anything other than cut and paste agents’ names into 250 emails followed by a meticulous accounting for each and every “no response” on a spreadsheet, a little work toward identifying agents who might be a good fit for you is probably worth the effort. Sure, you might miss that one agent who has never repped a fiction book in her life, never even read a work of fiction, but certainly would have been dying to rep yours had she seen it—but hey, those Rusty Nails aren’t going to drink themselves.

Fortunately, there are some strategies you can employ, regardless of your approach, that can help you decide whom to query and whom to ignore.

One of the most important ones, one that we employ when generating agent lists for our clients, is to be careful to not overweight what agents claim they want and to rather pay close attention to what they actually sell.

Now, I’m not suggesting that you ignore an agent’s posted wishlist or send an agent who explicitly states NO WEREWOLF ROMANCES your lurid tale of forbidden lycanthropic love, but instead that, for a variety of reasons, what an agent asks for might not always be what they sell.

An agent may simply have not updated her preferences—in 2019, when she last edited her wishlist, she wanted a Kristin Hannahesque, great-outdoorsy, semiautobiographical potboiler, but these days she’s actually looking for a Where the Crawdads Sing-style, genre-crossing, creepy-real-life-elements page turner. Okay, so maybe that’s not that much of a stretch, but you know what I mean.

An agent might also be looking for a very particular take. If her wishlist states that she would really love to rep a “new spin on the courtroom thriller,” but she’s never repped a thriller of any type, and 90 percent of her sales are in nonfiction, it may just be that she’s looking for something very specific or unique and hasn’t come across it yet. Does that mean she’s a good candidate for your list? Maybe, if your legal thriller subverts, expands, or transcends the genre in some way. But maybe not, if it is an excellent but dutiful adherent to the tropes and requirements of the category. Having a realistic understanding of your work can help you narrow down your list.

There are a variety of ways to determine what/whom agents are selling. A rather clunky one is to look at an agency’s website and check their clients list. Another way is to check QueryTracker’s Who Reps Whom list. This can be most helpful if you’re trying to find out who reps a particular author, as the list is set by authors’ names. It’s not a particularly comprehensive list, though, and is not always up to date.

A more targeted method is to use the deal-tracking functions on Publishers Marketplace. PM has a searchable database of deals, reported by the agents and editors who made them, that goes back to the early aughts. Along with author, editor, and (when applicable) agent, each entry includes a blurb regarding the book’s contents. Coupled with the keyword search, this allows you to find deals (read: agents) that relate to anything you feel is relevant.

When searching for agents like this, you might want to consider how large the market is for your work and whether you’re adding to an agent’s list or competing with it. If you’ve identified the only agent out there who’s sold a book on the therapeutic power of dryer lint, which just so happens to be the subject of your own work, you might not bother querying her—“I’ve already got a dryer-lint guy, you think I want two?” On the other hand, if your work is aimed at a large market and you’ve focused on an agent who reps several authors in your genre, that’s probably a good sign.

You can also cross-reference agents and editors to discover who tends to work with whom; if the agent for one of your comp titles regularly sells to a particular editor or two, what other agents do those editors consistently buy from? Those agents might make good additions to your list.

On the downside, PM is a subscription site, so this method requires a financial outlay (at least $10 for a day pass). Additionally, not all agents report deals, and the ones who do might not report every deal; this means that while there is a lot of fantastic information available on PM, it is by no means a complete picture.

It’s also important to remember that while every deal on PM represents someone getting a contract with a publisher, not every deal goes on to get published. Much like some fully completed movies or second seasons of beloved television programming at the big streamers these days, some manuscripts are simply put out to pasture for reasons that are rarely clear. Checking to see that a deal was actually published is important if you want to use it as a comp title. It is a good idea, as well, to look a little deeper at titles you’ve located: blurbs can be misleading. Sometimes you discover that the what-sounded-like-a taut thriller you found in the Debut category is actually cozy mystery or a supernatural romance, and as such, maybe the agent who sold it is not such a good pick for your list.

So you’ll need to outlay a modest sum and do a little homework, but this method can save you a lot of time in the long run—there’s no need to waste energy and attention getting ignored or rejected by agents who never have and never will sell works like yours.

Putting wishlists in the back seat (but not ignoring them) and focusing on what agents actually sell can help narrow your query list, grounding it with a quantitative strategy that puts less weight on what agents may or may not be looking for and more on what they actually find and sell. The time you save can be spent ranting in fan forums about The Nevers being cancelled after only a single season or complaining to your bartender about his ratio of Drambuie to scotch. Or, you know, writing.

Need help compiling an agent list? Check out Copy Write Consultants.

Add a Luke Skywalker Moment: Give Your Main Character a Bitter Choice

Photo by Larm Rmah on Unsplash

Today’s post is by author and book coach Janet S Fox.

How can you create a truly memorable story? By giving your main character a righteous motive, a flaw, and a series of escalating decisions leading to the balance edge of an impossible choice.

Let’s replay a moment in the crisis scene in Star Wars Episode 6, “Return of the Jedi.”

The Emperor tells Luke Skywalker: “You want this, don’t you? The hate is swelling in you now. Take your Jedi weapon. Use it. I am unarmed. Strike me down with it. Give in to your anger. With each passing moment you make yourself more my servant.”

Luke has turned away, his back to the camera, his gaze focused on the rebel fleet that is facing ultimate destruction. We can almost feel his temptation. If he strikes down the Emperor, he will become powerful enough to save his friends. But he will lose his soul to the dark side of the Force. If he stands firm in his resolve to be good, his friends will die.

It’s a brilliant moment of moviemaking, heightened by the fact that we can’t see Luke’s face as he wrestles with a bitter choice.

Bitter choices make powerful characters.

The writing exercise that changed everything for me

When I went to my first workshop with agent and teacher Donald Maass, I was working on what ended up becoming my most popular middle grade novel—but I wasn’t there with it yet. Donald helped me take it to the next level.

One of the exercises he gave us was critical to that evolution.

Donald asked us to choose a big scene—one of our turning point scenes. Brainstorm ideas for different responses, actions, reactions with our main characters. Try something utterly different with the scene. Make a list of no fewer than ten ideas.

Not knowing where he was going with this, but wanting something big to play with, I chose my crisis scene, near to the end of the book. A big, dramatic moment.

After we’d made our list, he said, “Now rewrite the scene using the last idea you created.”

(I love this technique, that forces us to brainstorm until our internal defenses drop and we come up with an out-of-the-box option.)

My tenth idea was to turn my main character, for a brief moment, toward the dark side. To give her a way to step back and think, “If I make this choice, I will become powerful enough to save my friends.”

And then, “But I will also become pure evil.”

This is now my very favorite scene in the book, one that showed my character’s nuance and depth, a point at which she could have gone over to the dark side and become a mirror to the truly terrible antagonist. And this was due to her character flaw. Her stubborn nature was crucial to finding herself trapped by this choice.

As I revised, I expanded this nuance to enrich her character with every choice she made up to that moment. My revisions made all her choices, throughout the story, difficult and contingent upon her stubbornness, though not as bad as that one final and pivotal choice.

Luke Skywalker makes choices earlier in Star Wars that suggest he’s vulnerable. He starts wearing black. He modifies his light saber. He fights with Yoda, ignores warnings, insists he must save his friends no matter the consequences. He’s imperfect. He’s his father’s son. He could be persuaded to turn, and the Emperor knows it.

His character flaw: he’s impetuous. He could choose the wrong path because although his motives are righteous, he’s impetuous, and that makes all the difference.

Deepening character through bitter choices

Let’s look at what you can do in your current story, to deepen your character through bitter choices.

First, make sure your main character has a righteous motive. Her righteous motive should be large enough to be impactful, and true to the mission of all heroes: saving of others, saving the world.Next, define her character flaw, one that will trap her in bad choices. Her flaw, whatever it is, must be revealed by little steps in early scenes—her impetuousness, her ability to lie just a little, her tendency to be just a teeny bit cruel, her stubborn attitude—and that flaw will create a potential trap, as every decision she makes will show the reader how precarious her position could become.Then find a scene late in your story, maybe the crisis or the climax scene. What impossible choice can you force on your main character? Go left, and save yourself/your friends, but lose your soul. Go right, and they all die, but you remain good. Can you make your main character go really dark, even for a moment? For a few sentences or half a page? Can you make her motives righteous, but dangerous? Make her flaw the trap she just might fall into?Moving backward through your manuscript, find all the places where your character has to choose something, even something trivial. Can you force her to wrestle with this choice? Show herself to be slightly untrustworthy, or moderately ambitious, or just a little bit biting? Don’t go as far as you did in the big scene; but hint that maybe she could be persuaded to fall into the trap because, after all, though her motives are righteous, her flaw is potentially deadly.

Your main character wants to do the right thing. She loves her friends. She wants to be happy. But like all people, she has a flaw, and in the course of the story you’re creating, she’ll show herself through her choices. Both her righteous nature and her flaw will become apparent.

You will prime your audience to believe that she could accept the dark side.

Create the balance edge of a bitter choice

Readers expect a story might “show them the way” to behave. There must be a moment where a story’s main character understands the righteous path, even if the ending is tragic because the character chooses wrong. A bitter choice creates a balance edge, tipping the character and audience one way or the other.

Luke Skywalker, confronted by the Emperor in a scene like the one above, but earlier in his maturation, would have responded impetuously. He would have made a really bad choice. We believe that he still could, and that makes this moment in the movie so tense, emotional, and memorable. That he chooses to be good is the catharsis we need, with an uplifting ending.

Great tragedies (if that’s what you’re writing) tip the other way, toward the darkness, but with equal power and memorable quality.

Give your main character a righteous motive, a flaw, and a series of escalating choices leading to that balance edge of bitter choice, and you’ll create a memorable story, too.

Why Do Publishers Close Imprints?

Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash

This article first appeared in Jane’s paid newsletter, The Hot Sheet.

Imprints have long been getting closed, merged, reorganized, and reborn over publishing’s history, but this summer raised new frustrations and fears among authors about how and why it’s happening. In June, Penguin Random House (PRH) announced they would merge the long-respected Razorbill into Putnam Children’s (retaining the full team in doing so); in July, HarperCollins announced the closure of Inkyard and the layoff of Inkyard’s staff. Harlequin Teen (started in 2009) was relaunched as Inkyard in 2019, publishing both YA and middle-grade fiction.

We talked to three industry experts about what prompts imprint closures and what authors should expect if they find their imprint on the chopping block.

The most straightforward explanation for imprint closures: lack of sufficient sales. It’s only logical: Publishing is a business, and if the imprint doesn’t earn its keep, there’s only so long it can continue. “Publishing companies today look at imprints through the cold calculus of earnings,” says Paul Bogaards, a longtime Knopf exec who now runs Bogaards Public Relations. “The consolidation that is taking place across the industry—and the closure of imprints—is principally tied to economics.” He says that business managers across the publishing industry review yearly profit & loss statements, and if an imprint is consistently in the red, watch out.

Publicist Kathleen Schmidt, who has had a long career in traditional publishing, agrees. “If the acquiring editors of the imprint are bringing in projects that aren’t selling well enough as frontlist titles, chances are they will not backlist well. While there isn’t a specific frontlist sales number associated with being a profitable backlist title, publishers often know, based on similar books, which ones have the ability to sell steadily over time. If an imprint isn’t producing titles that will add to a publisher’s backlist, it becomes a liability. Additionally, if an imprint’s frontlist titles continue declining sales rather than remain steady or become profitable, it makes more fiscal sense to fold the imprint into an existing one. Often, when this occurs, the staff at the imprint being shuttered is let go.”

In the case of Razorbill and Inkyard, it helps to consider current sales trends: The children’s market has been declining. In 2022, children’s hardcover sales were down 12.5% versus the prior year and below their levels from 2020 and 2019. Circana BookScan reports that frontlist children’s hardcover sales fell more than 20% last year. Additionally, Barnes & Noble has been reluctant to stock children’s middle-grade hardcovers because they are often returned unsold to publishers.

Schmidt says, “Over the past two to three years, B&N has skipped buying many titles because they are no longer willing to take as many chances on debut authors and are being conservative with numbers on previously published authors with mediocre sell-through. Further, B&N store managers aren’t overstocking categories. The cuts in children’s titles are a good example of this. In the YA category, BookTok plays a big part in what B&N carries. Independent bookstores only account for a small percentage of book sales. Amazon is truly where sales are concentrated right now, and though they stock pretty much everything, it doesn’t mean it sells. Discoverability is a major issue there.”

Andrea DeWerd, who runs The Future of Agency and has worked in marketing and publicity at three of the Big Five publishers, says that sometimes imprints spend too much on acquiring books, and “the sales simply aren’t there” to back up big advances. She sees that as more of a risk with personality-driven publishing, where an important editor is given their own imprint due to connections or relationships that bring in high-profile projects (and often high expenses). While imprint closures can appear sudden, she says once you look back, you can often see the signs that it wasn’t working.

Some imprint launches are opportunistic, meant to take advantage of current events or a growing market. Because of the socio-political situation today, you can see this as clearly as ever: Since 2016, new publishers and imprints have appeared to serve the conservative and far-right political audience. Alongside those are an increased number of imprints focused on BIPOC authors and historically underrepresented voices. One publishing industry veteran wondered why publishers start so many imprints in the first place (see imprint map below for a visual), and suggested that it’s partly about sending a signal to certain buying or marketing communities. Obviously sending a signal doesn’t always come with a viable business model, and when the market opportunity passes—or when the economic environment gets challenging, as it is right now, with everyone in cost-cutting mode—such efforts are the first to go.

A visual map of the sprawling imprints at Penguin Random House.  See all of the Big Five imprints.

Are publishers being patient enough to see new imprints pay off? It depends on who you ask, of course. Bogaards says publishing used to be a more patient business, which was a saving grace for both editors and imprints alike. Despite that, he says, “[Publishers] still believe in the acquisitions they are making. They are, however, being thrifty with post-acquisition spend, and writers need to understand this. Writers need to be thinking about what critical investments they should be making in their work. In the old days, you could leave it all to the publishing house. And for a select subset of authors, this may still be true. But many writers will benefit from learning about, and then making, publication investments/spends.”

And a warning for authors who unfortunately signed with an imprint that’s been closed: DeWerd says it can be very challenging to continue to sell through or publish through the imprint’s schedule of titles when it no longer exists, because even though marketing and publicity staff still work on those titles, they don’t necessarily have a clear point person to go to for important decisions or budget approval. And that can be to the serious detriment of those books. She says authors shouldn’t take at face value a publisher’s claim that nothing is going to change when an imprint shutters.

When imprints close or merge, sometimes it’s about personalities and power in addition to efficiencies. PRH recently laid off legendary editors at legendary imprints, which has led to a great deal of pessimism about the state of book publishing. While Bogaards believes that “emotional ties to imprints are relics of a bygone era,” sometimes these moves are about “clipping wings,” because corporate leadership doesn’t want to deal with a power base that lives outside of it. “Sonny Mehta [at Knopf] was a headache for years!” Bogaards says. “He ran a profitable imprint, and when the corporation wanted to rein him in, he told them to ‘f— off,’ and they did. The numbers kept the corporate tinkerers at bay. When he died, all that changed. Profits were down, so they were waiting in the wings. They got in there with their scalpels and started taking imprint jobs and amortizing them into divisional jobs and then into corporate jobs—because it was cost-efficient to do so. Does a publishing company need a head of production for every imprint? A managing editor? An art director? A marketing director? The answer, as it turns out, is no.” (And indeed, a day after Bogaards made this point, mid-size publisher Abrams announced structural changes that impose such efficiencies.)

DeWerd says that the people in leadership or finance always have their eye on potential and immediate solutions to make budget, and sometimes imprint closures may come down to cutting very senior people making high-level salaries. (Typically, these are people who hold titles such as editorial director or publisher.)

Ultimately, neither how well an imprint once did nor its long-standing reputation offers indefinite protection. Schmidt says, “If an imprint has a robust backlist but the editors who acquired those titles haven’t acquired anything profitable in a long time, it is easy for a new CEO to eliminate those salaries. You don’t need the editors to continue backlist sales, because there is a department dedicated to doing so (sales/marketing).” Case in point: This year, McGraw-Hill stopped acquiring new business titles but has held onto its backlist.

Bottom line: Bogaards says, “The majority of readers have no idea who published their book. Many media outlets have given up identifying imprints in their coverage of books.” And DeWerd said that the imprint’s name or reputation doesn’t necessarily affect how the sales and marketing team positions or talks about forthcoming books. Most often the imprint is a neutral factor, whereas the sales rep’s relationship with their account can matter much more, she says.

In the end, it may not matter which imprints stay or go as far as the fortunes of authors or the future of book sales. And for a slight bit of encouragement: “The focus on data and the need for books to be profitable has not winnowed what is being published in an appreciable way,” Bogaards says. “The opportunities for writers are still there. That’s not to say it won’t thin down the road. It may well.”

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Agents and Editors Aren’t Always Right About Market Potential

Whenever I teach on nonfiction book proposals, I open up the conversation by talking about market potential ($) and how to convince agents or editors that your project has it.

Some of the things that don’t indicate market potential:

The opinion of your family or friends (unless they’ve done the market research themselves)The opinion of the freelance editor you hiredThe opinion of your beta readers or critique partnersThe opinion of your colleagues

And finally, the one that frustrates everyone:

The opinion of literary agents and editors in traditional publishing—people who probably know something about market potential

But I think we all realize (let’s hope) that agents and editors are not all-knowing gods, and can’t necessarily know about market demand in every book category.

And that’s exactly why book proposals exist: to make the business case that persuades agents and editors that there is in fact a market for your work.

Unfortunately, authors can be susceptible to taking feedback from agents/editors as gospel or the final word on the market potential for their work. That is a mistake. Their feedback can be useful, of course, to the extent it demonstrates where you might have failed to make your business case, or it might reveal something you didn’t know about the market. (For example: if you’re a white woman pitching a book full of recipes all about grain bowls, you’ve got an uphill battle because that market is saturated.)

On Oct. 15, 2020 (I keep very good records), I had a consultation with established author Bella DePaulo. She had an agent who was not at all enthusiastic about her next project-in-progress about the power and freedom of living single. Instead, this agent convinced DePaulo to write a different book, one the agent thought would be “big.” Unfortunately, even though that book was published, it was not successful.

So, by the time of our conversation, DePaulo was actively deciding whether to find another agent, or if it would be smarter to simply self-publish her book on singlehood.

It’s pretty rare that I outright dissuade clients from self-publishing if they seem well-suited for it, and DePaulo certainly was. But after I evaluated her materials and her platform, I believed a traditional publisher could be found if she wanted to invest time into securing another agent. Here’s why:

DePaulo had done a TEDx talk, “What No One Ever Told You About People Who Are Single,” viewed more than 1 million times.DePaulo’s work on single people has been featured in the New York Times, Atlantic, Wall Street Journal, and more. DePaulo was referred to in an Atlantic article about single ladies as “America’s foremost thinker and writer on the single experience.”DePaulo herself has written for the Washington Post, New York Times, Atlantic, etc.DePaulo had been writing the Living Single blog for Psychology Today since 2008. Some of her individual blog posts had views in the six figures each month.DePaulo started a Facebook group, the Community of Single People, with about 5,000 people from around the world.A Pew survey conducted in 2019 found that half of solo single people do not want a romantic relationship or even a date.

DePaulo is an expert on the topic of single people, has a solid platform, and plenty of connections and opportunities to spread the word about the book. Plus she has evidence there is interest in the topic. Given that she preferred a traditional publisher for the project, I advised her to stick with the querying process.

What we soon discovered is that DePaulo’s sales record was making her a pariah—namely, the poor performance of the very book she’d been convinced to write by the agent who didn’t want her any longer. She was able to find at least one agent who agreed to help, but without any enthusiasm. DePaulo passed on that offer.

Then, a law professor who knows about DePaulo’s work offered to make a referral to Bridget Matzie of Aevitas. It seemed like a long shot, since Matzie represents some high-profile authors and has sold many books at auction. Much to DePaulo’s surprise, Matzie was enthusiastic and (after working on the proposal together at length), Single at Heart was sent to 30 editors at the very top publishers.

A few publishers responded with 1-sentence “not for us” rejections, and a few more never responded, but the others seemed to take the proposal quite seriously, and many described what they liked in some detail. One said it was the best proposal he had seen in a long time, but he just couldn’t take a chance because of the sales of DePaulo’s last book. There was even a Zoom meeting with one editor who was very enthusiastic and who already had buy-in from several colleagues. But her boss said absolutely not, because of of the sales track record. (If it were DePaulo’s first book, the answer would probably be different.)

After more revisions to the proposal, it was sent to another 29 editors. DePaulo got two Zoom meetings out of that group, including one with an editor who was herself single at heart. She loved the proposal and had all sorts of ideas for the book, including an idea for a follow-up. But she got shot down by others at the imprint, again because of the sales track record.

In the end, DePaulo ended up with only one offer, from a new-ish independent publisher, Apollo. It wasn’t much of an offer. No advance, just profit sharing. She took it.

Single at Heart releases today (Dec. 5, 2023), and DePaulo sent me this update:

I am so happy to let you know that your optimism was warranted. Bridget encouraged me to hire an independent publicist. I had the same sort of experience at first—some of the publicists I contacted could not be bothered to respond. But I signed on with Leah Paulos at The Press Shop and she and her associates have been great. Here are some of the media that have come through:

I will be doing an event at Busboys & Poets, in DC, on Dec. 10I’ll be doing an event at Book Passage in San Francisco on Feb. 13I had a pre-recorded interview for the PBS show, “To the Contrary,” on Nov. 16I’ve written an essay for HuffPost that will be published on Dec. 4I will do a live show, “Central Time,” for NPR-Wisconsin on my pub date, Dec. 5Time magazine will publish an excerptNumerous podcasts have been scheduled

As this post was being prepared for publication, DePaulo alerted me that AARP mentioned her book in a book news roundup. (For anyone unaware: the AARP readership is massive.)

Additionally, Single at Heart will be translated into Spanish, Portuguese, and Korean. And I bet there will be more.

It’s obviously frustrating to see publishers so resolutely focused on an author’s past sales, especially in the nonfiction realm where I consider it an unreliable predictor of future success. It also feels increasingly irrelevant, mostly reminiscent of the heyday of Barnes & Noble, when their New York buyers would base their buy-in on the author’s previous sales in store.

Amazon • Bookshop

These days, consider:

Barnes & Noble’s ordering is no longer centralized and publishers can’t pay for merchandising.More than 60 percent of books today are bought online.An author’s ability to reach their readership directly can greatly transform and advance over time—as it did with DePaulo.

But sure, if publishers assume from the start they will not support a book adequately and rely on the author’s name alone to drive sales, by all means use Bookscan sales figures from many years ago as the guiding light for what to publish.

I guess, at the very least, I appreciate that publishers were honest about the reason for the rejection. But it does not speak well or bode well for their future, assuming it’s indicative of the direction of their decision making today. It’s possible to make meaningful, data-informed decisions in publishing that support strong acquisitions. To focus on an author’s past sales alone leaves out most of the picture.

Journals and Dreams: The Unsung Heroes of Literature

Photo by cottonbro studio

Today’s post is by Tzivia Gover, author of Dreaming on the Page.

Journals, like dreams, are the unsung heroes of the literary world. Countless works have been inspired by both and represent great repositories of raw material for books, poems, movies, plays, songs, and more. Each of my published books was birthed from the pages of my notebooks and is peppered with snippets of dreams and morsels of dream wisdom.

Not all authors remember or rely on their dreams, but dreamers and journal-keepers are uniquely blessed as writers. We never have to contend with the blank page, because we can use our dreams as texts and lines from our journals as prompts. Like a pot of broth simmering on the stove, the contents of our journals nourish us and provide the basis for countless delicious creations.

But first: a case against journaling your dreams

Some days, recording dreams can feel as unnatural as saving nail clippings or strands of hair caught in your comb. Wouldn’t it be healthier to rinse dream residue away in the shower each morning rather than gather each one to preserve in notebooks that fill your already overstuffed closets or drawers?

I tend to revisit this question when packing to move, or when I need extra storage space for winter clothes and I’m confronted by the accretion of nearly a half century’s worth of journals. That’s when I begin to question the conventional wisdom about the importance of writing dreams down, and instead I begin compiling evidence against it:

Dreams don’t need writing. Dreams were around long before the relatively recent technology of writing was even developed. So, clearly you don’t need to write down dreams to reap their benefits.Dreams resist writing. If you’ve ever opened a book within a dream, you’ve probably experienced the frustration of seeing words swim and squirm so you can’t make them out.Statistically speaking, the written word is rare in dreams. (Although writers’ dreams are often the exception to that rule.) In this way, at least, it seems dreams and writing don’t mix.Dreams seem to recoil at being preserved on the page; they flicker into consciousness, then dissolve swiftly into forgetfulness. Is stitching them to the page with pen and ink as misguided as trying to sew our shadow to the soles of our feet?

But there’s no use arguing, or trying to build a case, as to how this question will be decided. Each time I present this argument to myself or others, it is resolved in favor of journaling dreams. After all, it’s not writing dreams down that’s the problem. The problem as I see it is this: We’re told to keep notebooks, but we rarely learn how to use them to mine meaning from our dreams or to glean literary gems for our writing. To make our notebooks earn their place on our shelves, we can use them to convert our dreams and musings into poems and stories, and as places where we can reflect on our literary process.

Also, our journals, including the entries that slosh over the shoreline dividing day and night, are central to a way of life that can serve us well. They represent and facilitate our commitment to doing the inner work that allows us to show up more fully for life each day.

10 really good reasons to write down your dreams

1. Know thyself. Journaling dreams helps you better understand yourself from the inside out, which in turn helps you understand your characters better, brings deeper empathy to your work, and makes you an all-around more interesting writer.

2. Write regularly—and better. Building the habit of writing dreams each morning is a great way to build writing into your everyday routine and improve your skills in the process.

3. Gain a wealth of material. As you record dreams in your journal, you are creating an encyclopedia of plots, landscapes, characters, themes, and ideas you can return to any time you need material for your poetry and prose.

4. Build a better relationship. Writing dreams regularly helps you become acquainted with the Scheherazade within who spins tales while you sleep. Becoming conscious of your nighttime narrator can make you a more confident storyteller and prime you to dream up new material by day, too.

5. Play with words. Freud memorably pointed out that dreams are masters of wordplay, including unpredictable puns, clever homonyms and homophones, and layers of meaning hidden just beneath the surface of words. Paying attention to dreams plugs you into these amusing and profound aspects of words that you can celebrate on the page as well.

6. Magnify the magic. Tracking dreams can reveal moments of magic (meaningful coincidences, precognition, and clairvoyance—to name a few) in what can otherwise be a writer’s relatively staid existence.

7. Stay calm and moodle on. Moodling is a word that’s so much fun to say that I’d love it no matter what it means. As it turns out, moodling is a term used by Brenda Ueland, author of If You Want to Write, to describe an activity that allows your mind to go slack and dissolve into the present-tense timeless moment. Gardening, doodling, rearranging the figurines on your shelves, listening to music, doing puzzles, and collaging are all ways to moodle. You can also add dream journaling to the list. This seemingly nonproductive time is essential to a productive writing practice.

8. Show what’s too beautiful to hide. In a letter to his brother, Vincent van Gogh described one reason he painted: “It is so beautiful, I must show you how it looks.” With just about anything else we do or witness during the day, others may have seen or overheard it, too. But the dream is ours and ours alone. Writing the dream is how we preserve it so we can learn from it, express it, or share the otherwise ephemeral experience.

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9. Warm up. Starting your day with your dream journal and a mug of something delicious to drink is a wonderful way to check in with yourself and warm up to the page, too.

10. Keep your friends. When you gush to a friend, “I had the most amazing dream last night!” you may find that most people back up a few paces or suddenly remember an important appointment they need to rush off to. In addition to all of the above benefits of keeping a dream journal for writers, an added benefit is that the page is an eternally patient, listening ear. Tell your dreams to your journal—and save the highlights reel to share (sparingly) with your loved ones.

What Sleeping With Jane Eyre Taught Me About Pacing

Photo by Nareeta Martin on Unsplash

Today’s post is by Brevity blog editor Heidi Croot.

I’ve been sleeping with Jane Eyre, lately—courtesy of The Sleepy Bookshelf, a podcast designed to help me snooze.

Except it’s been keeping me awake.

I’ve loved this classic since childhood, every reread captivating me as if for the first time.

But it soon became clear that I was sharing my bed not so much with Jane, as with Charlotte Brontë herself. Listening to the novel has been showing me things I had missed on the page—the first-person narrative drawing me in so close I could almost believe it was memoir—and night after night I’ve been reveling in a writing-craft class led by the venerated author.

One such class addresses a storytelling weakness that shows up a lot in my writing and editing practice: high-tension scenes that rush to their finish with the speed of a bullet train.

Brontë’s talent for keeping readers on tenterhooks reminds me of Matthew Dicks and his hourglass technique, which he shares in Storyworthy (entire book, so good!).

Going too fast is one of the biggest mistakes storytellers make, Dicks says. When you arrive at the moment readers have been waiting for, “It’s time to slow things down. Grind them to a halt when possible.”

Consider the properties of an hourglass: the upper chamber containing story still to be told. No grain of sand before its time. All flowing inexorably to the same destination.

In one of my favorite scenes (spoilers ahead), Jane Eyre returns to Thornfield Hall after a year of yearning, desperate to clap eyes on her great love, Mr. Rochester, whom she fled upon learning at the altar that he was already married.

As she approaches the Hall, I itch to press fast-forward. Would he be there? Would they helplessly reunite, or would her moral restraint prevail? Had I been turning pages, I’d be reading very fast indeed—which is what readers do when narrative tension flames through the roof. How else to defend against an author’s merciless manipulation?

But because I was forced to listen and wait, I caught Brontë in the act of tipping the hourglass—again and again.

She sends Jane on four separate journeys to find Mr. Rochester, starting with a 36-hour coach ride from her home to Rochester Inn—ample time for reader anxiety to flare. Rather than simply asking the innkeeper for news of her lost love, Jane prolongs hope by walking the remaining two miles to the Hall.

It is a walk designed to drive the reader to the edge of endurance.

Fields, stiles, woods, trees, rookery.

We suffer through Jane’s inner debate on which vantage she should approach the Hall for maximum delight.

Will she glimpse her beloved standing at his window? Will she be so mad as to run to him?

We watch her principles waver as she asks herself, “Who would be hurt by my once more tasting the life his glance can give me?”

The orchard, the gate opening into the meadow, what the crows are thinking as they sail overhead.

“I looked with timorous joy towards a stately house,” she tells us at last. “I saw a blackened ruin.”

She asks the questions tormenting every reader: What has become of Mr. Rochester? Did he burn alive?

In horror, she hurries back to the Inn to question the innkeeper—an insufferable man who takes his sweet time getting to the point—and we sigh with relief when Jane commissions a chaise to take her 30 miles to Ferndean Manor, Rochester’s second home.

After all these interminable delays, we’re approaching the end of this torture. She’ll be there before nightfall!

And she is, but vexatiously disembarks a mile from the manor so Brontë can arrange for her to lose her way in the woods.

The gloomy wood, the close-ranked trees, the grass-grown track, the sylvan dusk.

A thousand grains of sand fall, possibly a million.

When we finally see the blind man outside his front door, groping for equilibrium in the rain, and then witness him with Jane in an ecstatic embrace, I’m a veritable wreck—and also a happy reader, replete and reverential.

Here’s what particularly interests me about the art of pacing, and it is basic mathematics. When we combine a writer’s misstep in hurtling through high-tension scenes, with a reader’s tendency to devour such scenes in frantic gulps—fast plus fast adds up to reader letdown and disengagement.

Writers need to go slow to go fast.

In her guest post First Pages Critique: Getting a Handle on Pace, book coach and editor Hattie Fletcher tells a true crime writer that her story needs to slow down.

What? True crime—a genre prized for its high-stakes tension and aerodynamic speed—should slow down?

But a more relaxed pace is precisely what this book doctor prescribed. “Get a head of narrative steam going,” Fletcher advises. “Stretch out a little into the storytelling and trust that if you keep doling out details, readers will stick with you for the bigger story you want to tell and the questions you want to explore.” 

Matthew Dicks would offer Hattie Fletcher a knuckle bump. A 36-time Moth StorySLAM champion, Dicks knows how to tell a tale. As he illustrates so enticingly in Storyworthy, choosing an hourglass tempo when the stakes are high—via journeys (physical and emotional), details, reflection, one step forward and two back—can quicken our readers’ pulse while keeping them emotionally invested. Literary tools as essential to writers of creative nonfiction as to those who spin fiction.

Savouring Jane Eyre on audio continues to feed my love of craft. Wide awake and smiling in the dark, I listen to Brontë flaunt her formidable delay tactics. Such a master class on how to control a story’s pace. Such a sorceress’s skill in dispensing sand.

And now I must go. It’s time to get some sleep.

Writing a Really Short Book Description Is Harder Than It Looks

Photo by Etienne Girardet on Unsplash

Today’s post is by author Amy L. Bernstein.

Benjamin Franklin once wrote to the Royal Society of London: “I have already made this paper too long, for which I must crave pardon, not having now time to make it shorter.”

Yes, writing short can be far more difficult than letting the pen rip. And writing a short description of your novel — like the three tight paragraphs you need in a query letter — is one of the hardest tasks of all.

So much can and often does go wrong. By “wrong,” I mean that authors often set out to do the opposite of what they ought to do.

The default position usually involves stringing together as many plot points as possible. As in: This happens, then this happens, and then this happens.

While a chronological narrative describing how your story unfolds may be the backbone of a full-blooded synopsis, it’s virtually the opposite of what you want in your short description, especially for a query.

For one thing, you can’t possibly squeeze in all the plot or action in three short paragraphs. For another, too much plot results in a lack of focus—at the expense of a clear concept and a clear window onto the protagonist’s wants, needs, obstacles, and how her story ends.

The sooner you stop trying to tell the whole darn story as if you were writing CliffsNotes, the sooner you can focus on writing a description that captures the reader’s attention.

Consider this precious real estate. Every square inch—i.e., every word—needs to be packed with meaning, and every sentence needs to lead us onto the next, not by jumping from scene to scene, but from one vital turning point in the story to the next.

The connective tissue of a short book description is a potent blend of emotion and meaning. You must leave out most of the incidents and characters to achieve the clarity that reveals the feeling your story engenders as well as what it all adds up to—what it means to the reader.

Three short paragraphs are enough, believe it or not, to create this connective tissue built upon high stakes, tensions and obstacles, and a satisfying resolution (or at least, a hint about how the story ends).

But this is not enough space to jam in backstory about your protagonist’s early childhood, the name of the street he lives on, or the names of his three best friends. What do such details tell us about where the story is headed and why that matters? Nothing.

The truth is, it’s much easier to write a very short book description badly than to write it well. As Franklin surmised, writing short is devilishly difficult.

Here are some specific pitfalls to avoid:

1. Forget the phrase “my story is about.”

That word, about, will trick you into stringing together a series of plot points or individual scenes that may not actually tell us (in an interesting way) what the story is about, only some stuff that happens. The reader (an agent, editor, or publisher) wants to grab hold of the concept—the book’s big idea and the emotions it evokes.

Suppose you were pitching the fairytale, Cinderella. Instead of setting out to tell the reader how she ends up an orphan forced to wait on her evil stepmother, give us the bigger picture.

In Cinderella, a lonely orphaned girl meets and falls in love with a prince and lives happily ever after—with a little help from a magical fairy godmother and her own open and forgiving heart.  

Notice how that brief summary doesn’t offer a blow-by-blow account of what happens. It doesn’t even mention the evil stepmother! Actually, Cinderella’s stepmother and stepsisters may cause her misery, but they are not the direct catalysts of her growth and change: the fairy godmother plays that role, as does the prince when he chases after her. And note the nod to the protagonist’s inner character—her essential goodness. It’s hard to get that (quickly) from story alone.

2. Don’t report your story as it unfolds chronologically. 

Instead, gather up the three or four most important things that happen (mainly to the protagonist) even if these events skip across time. Choose the turning points that bring us inevitably to the climax. This approach is like stringing beads on a necklace, but instead of including every bead in the box, you only pick the biggest, brightest, and shiniest. This necklace must sparkle!

3. Don’t start with or include unnecessary backstory.

This includes where the protagonist lives or went to school, unless that’s essential to the action or critical to the setting. Ask yourself: Does the reader need this detail to feel the story’s beating heart and gather its larger meaning? Eye color won’t do that.

Also, you might be tempted to kick off with a perceived inciting incident that’s actually nonessential backstory. For instance, don’t start with: “When Susie left Cleveland for college in San Francisco…” if in fact every important scene, and the point of the book as a whole, takes place after Susie has moved to San Francisco, and perhaps beyond that.

4. Don’t name multiple characters and try to explain all the relationships. 

Focus on the protagonist and, say, his love interest or nemesis. That’s usually enough. Naming six characters in three paragraphs distracts the reader from the book’s key concepts—and indeed, makes it impossible to lay out an overarching concept.

5. Keep the description focused mainly on the protagonist, not on secondary characters. 

That should help you focus on the critical actions that matter and help us see how the main character grows and changes. In genre fiction, such as romance, you’ll want to focus on the pair of lovers, which means following two characters—but primarily in relation to one another, like moons orbiting the same planet.

The secret to writing a very short book description—apart from having endless patience and drafting and revising countless times—is to remember its purpose. This is the text that sells the book’s sizzle. It’s not intended to familiarize the reader with the entire story and everyone in it. Give us just enough to care, to empathize with the protagonist’s plight, and then leave us wanting just a bit more.

By the way: I could have written a much longer article on this topic, but I took extra time to write only as much as I needed to drive the key points home.

One Well-Chosen Detail: Write Juicy Descriptions Without Overwhelming Your Reader

Photo by Tommes Frites

Today’s post is by author and writing coach April Dávila (@aprildavila).

Have you ever read a description in a book and actually stopped to say to yourself, “Dang, that’s good.” And then maybe read it again?

If so, you’ve probably also read a book where you found yourself mumbling, “I really don’t need to know every detail about this guy’s library/tools/muffin recipe” as you flip a few pages to find where the story picks up again.

It takes practice to write immersive descriptions that draw readers in, without going overboard so that we bore them and lose their attention. It’s one of the more delicate elements of craft.

Let’s start with how to write lush prose.

Writing engaging descriptions

I was reading Moonglow, by Michael Chabon, recently and came across this description of an ominous figure:

His close-cropped skull was indented on one side as by the corner of a two-by-four. In the crevice formed by his brow and cheekbones, his eyes glinted like dimes lost between sofa cushions.

The specificity of the description just floored me. I can absolutely see this guy in my head and I wouldn’t want to bump into him in a parking lot staircase. It got me thinking about great descriptions, and their opposite: clichés.

The dreaded cliché

A cliché is any turn of phrase that you’ve ever heard before: fire-engine red, soft as a pillow, robin’s egg blue, fast as a speeding train. You get the idea.

Basically, a cliché is a symbol. It’s the literary equivalent of clipart. If you write that someone sat down beneath a tree, you basically just painted a cartoon tree in the mind of your reader—two vertical lines with a squiggly circle on top.

But if your character nestles their butt between the swollen roots of a craggy oak, feels the rough bark, sees the dappled light fall through the canopy of tiny, waxed leaves, now you’re onto something. Now the reader can really see (and feel) that specific tree.

Characters can be cliché too. If you’re writing an elderly lady and you tell us she has gray hair and wrinkles around her eyes, an image will form in the mind of the reader, sure, but an opportunity has been missed to create a specific character, one unlike any other.

As an example, consider this description from Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping:

… in the last years she continued to settle and began to shrink. Her mouth bowed forward and her brow sloped back, and her skull shone pink and speckled within a mere haze of hair, which hovered about her head like the remembered shape of an altered thing. She looked as if the nimbus of humanity were fading away and she were turning monkey. Tendrils grew from her eyebrows and coarse white hairs sprouted on her lip and chin. When she put on an old dress the bosom hung empty and the hem swept the floor. Old hats fell down over her eyes. Sometimes she put her hand over her mouth and laughed, her eyes closed and her shoulder shaking.

The difference is in the details. Specific details are what lift descriptions out of cliché. But digging deep for details is difficult because our brains are inherently lazy. We see something pale blue. We check our mental files for ways of describing it and come up with “sky blue.” Accurate, yes, but you’ve missed the chance to describe the object as only you can.

Choose your details wisely

Whenever I teach students about writing lush descriptions, I inevitably get someone who raises their hand and says they would rather their work be an easy-to-read page turner than a long-winded, overwritten bore. I wholeheartedly agree.

Master film editor Walter Murch, once said  “…trust one, well-chosen detail to do the work of ten.” Part of digging deep for unique and interesting details is removing any excess wording that would weigh your story down.

Now, to be clear, I don’t advise worrying about this while you’re writing your first draft. When you’re in the process of getting a story on the page, go ahead and drop in all the hyperbolic, cliché language that comes to mind. It doesn’t matter on the first draft. Those tired images can work just fine as place holders. But when you go back to edit, consider the possibilities that exist if you can whittle down to just one perfect adjective and cut the rest.

Think outside the normal descriptions you already have in your head. Light doesn’t just shine. It can smooth, dance, and scrape. Consider the awkward pine tree or the lank marsupial. One of the more fun parts of writing is putting words together in unusual ways, then editing, editing, editing.

An exercise to practice

If you’d like to sharpen your skills at writing descriptions, pick a place, any place, and describe it every day for a month without ever repeating yourself. It’s difficult, and by day three you will have to dig a little deeper for your descriptions. By day 30 you will no doubt surprise yourself. This is a great way to exercise your writing muscles.

At the end of the month, go through what you’ve written and choose your favorite description. Odds are, it’s something no one else could have written. It is uniquely yours and your readers will love you for it.

Embrace Your True Subject: A Writer’s Case Study in Running from (and Returning to) Herself

Today’s post is by author Heather Lanier.

The problem was Jesus. He kept appearing in my poems. And not even in the way typical fans of Jesus would like. He was peculiar: silently doodling in sand, or teetering with endearing doubt, or kind-of sexy in chiseled statue-form, suspended on a human-sized cross. Christians would not dig some of this. Nor (I assumed) would the literary poetry world, whose faith tolerance is limited.

As I tried to assemble a decade of my published poems into a book-length manuscript, I found other issues: Eve, remembering how much she loved going naked. Mary, of all people, pregnant and worrying about carting God-in-human-form above her pelvis. And sweet Lord, I even sometimes used the word God—that abyss-deep noun we pretend we all agree on the definition of.

This was why, when I first spread the dozens of poems across my office floor and tried to assemble them into a book, I thought: I need to bury the Jesus poems. And the overtly religious poems. I need to hide them behind the poems about misogyny and motherhood and pandemic politics and grief.

It was a classic move: Believe what you have to say isn’t worthwhile. Hide it. Try to turn yourself into another kind of writer.

I’m a professor in a graduate writing program at a state university in New Jersey. By year’s end, my students must write a 30,000-word manuscript. For many, it’s the longest project they’ve ever attempted. Almost none of them are writing about religion, and yet many still fall into this same trap as I did—thinking they should become a different kind of writer. They’re poets, but they suspect nobody reads poetry, so they try a novel instead. That’s what real writers do, right? They think. Or they’ve got an important personal story to tell, but they fear the earthquake their words could cause in the tectonic plates of their lives, so they decide to write … a fantasy sci-fi novel instead. Or they want to write a fantasy sci-fi novel, but someone in their family dismisses the entire genre, so they embark on some heady nonfiction project about narrative theory.

There are as many variations on this theme as there are writers. About a month into the fall semester, each usually returns to their callings, however scary. The poet realizes she has no interest in plot. The sci-fi-attempter discovers that, even on an invented planet, he can’t escape himself. The person longing to write sci-fi can’t say no to the strange world in her mind.

At the end of the year, I read reflection after reflection about writers trying to run away from their true subjects. About how much time they wasted doing this. About how scared they were of what they had to say. And about how, eventually, they came home to themselves.

You’d think, as a professor of writing, I would have caught myself immediately. You’d think I would have been able to identify the trapdoor before stepping into it. Instead, I thought I was being savvy. Bury the poems about faith!

Alas, I suspect every writer is prone, at one time or another, to the new shapes this trapdoor takes, the surprising ways it can appear in the house of our psyches.

And so, I tried to bury the Jesus poems. This wasn’t particularly hard. Motherhood is another heavy theme of mine. (Ah yes, another subject the literary world has a history of heralding without caveats or condescension—and yes, if we agreed on a sarcasm font, I’d be using it right now.) So, pregnancy kicked off the collection—so much pregnancy poetry, in fact, that the manuscript felt like it would keel over from the weight of a disproportionately ginormous belly.

Then came the babies, along with a second section on motherhood. Section three is where I stuck Christ and Mary, et. al. But then I tied it all up with a globally impactful fourth section on political issues—you know, important public stuff. “Masculine” stuff.

Do you see the other trapdoor here? It’s a particularly gendered one, architected from a woman having to contend with misogynistic readings of her work as drivel because it finds revelation in the domestic, in the private. (Memory: a male chair of a hiring committee tells me in an interview that all the good nonfiction is not memoir but researched writing, about things like war. I was writing a memoir. I did not get the job.) By ending the collection on this “public” material, I was attempting another kind of running from the self.

The problem, of course, is that the book didn’t work. It turns out that it never works to run from ourselves—not in regular life, and not in art-making, either. (I don’t know whether to be relieved about this or dismayed.) You know how I knew I was in trouble? The manuscript couldn’t find its title. This meant I didn’t know what was binding the thing together. Which meant a reader wouldn’t either.

I like to think all our good ideas come from our inner wisdom—that faithful compass inside each of us. Weirdly, the way I got out of my rut came, of all places, from Facebook. It came when I saw a call from an editor seeking literary manuscripts specifically about spirituality. Poetry, novels, essay collections—Anne McGrath at Monkfish Publishing was open to any genre. And any religion. She just wanted work that was both literary and spiritually curious.

I finally asked a question every artist probably needs to consider at some point in their lives: What if the thing I’m trying to bury is the thing that needs to come forward?

I spread the poems out across the office floor again. I thought about what a book would look like if the collection began with religious wrestling. What if my shaky faith and ongoing doubt and incessant yearning for the Divine appeared as a thread, stitched throughout, rather than a hard-to-digest middle chunk?

Something weird happened. The collection started to cohere. Poems about the wildness of being pregnant got bigger beside my speculation about Mary’s pregnancy. My grief over a family member’s murder was more powerful next to my floundering attempts at prayer. My rage about the absence of women in images got more interesting when placed near a poem about Jesus stopping an angry mob from stoning a woman. I still created four sections, and the poems are unmistakably from a feminist mother’s perspective. But the whole collection begins—and ends—with spiritual seeking.

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We sometimes think of poetry as dismissing of audience, as privileging the writer’s intentions over the reader’s presence. It was the presence of an actual audience, this time in the form of an independent publisher, that helped me conceive of my collection. I arranged and rearranged it. I called it Psalms of Unknowing. I sent it to Monkfish. One month later, they accepted it.

Maybe it will always be our plight, as writers, to try to turn ourselves into other kinds of writers. The versions of this trapdoor are numerous, as newly constructed as any piece of art we try to make. But our ways of getting out of them are equally varied: an intuitive voice, a smart response from a friend, even a post on Facebook.

How High Stakes Keep Readers (and Viewers) Invested

Today’s post is by author and book coach Susanne Dunlap (@susanne_dunlap).

I’ve lately been on a kick of re-reading and re-watching my favorite books, movies, and TV series. This has enabled me to really dig into not just what drew me to them initially, but why I love them and how the writer achieved a result that pulled me in and kept me glued to the page or the screen.

Most recently I’ve been rewatching Bridgerton on Netflix. Wonderful acting, swoon-worthy costumes and sets, and pure romance in an idyllically integrated fake Regency setting—a recipe for escapism.

Until you get to the prequel, Queen Charlotte, that is. While it’s based on Julia Quinn’s Bridgerton books (and Quinn collaborated), it’s written by Shonda Rhimes, who served as producer on the first two series. In a departure from the escapist romance characteristics, Rhimes takes a rather preposterous (but imaginative) premise in a direction that—to me—feels more weighty and important, as well as more compelling and dramatic. How does she do it?

The answer comes down to one key element. Stakes.

First, a little about the series

Queen Charlotte is still at heart a romance, with all the usual tropes. The meet cute, two protagonists starting out at odds, coming together, then being wrenched apart along the way to achieving their ultimate understanding. It’s an unequal partnership at first: the lofty king and the lesser foreign noble, forced into an arranged marriage.

But there’s much more to this story than the romance. Like the original Bridgerton stories, it’s rather a delicious and clever mixture of genuine history and sheer fantasy, taking as its “what if” the story of the mad King George III of England’s marriage to Charlotte of Mecklinburg Strelitz—a marriage that resulted in thirteen offspring—and making Charlotte not only someone on a lower social rung than the king, but also Black.

It’s the origin story, as it were, for the integrated world of Bridgerton. What the Regency Bridgerton universe presents as a fait accompli—a completely racially integrated society—Queen Charlotte exposes as an experiment that the dowager Princess Augusta found herself backed into out of necessity. It could have gone terribly wrong.

How does that affect the stakes?

In a romance, the internal and external stakes are often personal—which doesn’t make them any less real or compelling. But in Queen Charlotte, the personal stakes are amplified first by the historical reality, then by the fictional premise on a societal level.

The historical fact of George III’s madness in reality created perilous power vacuums in the stratified world of eighteenth-century Britain. The fate of an entire dynasty rested on the ability for the king to be suitably married and produce viable heirs who did not inherit his tendency to mental illness.

In the Bridgerton ecosystem, the foreign spouse-to-be, as I said, is not only more lowly, but also Black. This catches the court by surprise, and they solve the problem of public perception (admittedly stretching credulity) by pretending it was their intention all along, ennobling all the wealthy Black subjects in Great Britain (“the other side”) and inviting them to the wedding. An “experiment.”

This is a welcome change, but it’s also fraught with peril: If things go wrong in any way, the experiment will have failed and “the other side” risks losing everything.

Those two plot elements—the king’s madness and the society-level experiment—establish one stratum of stakes. They are interesting enough and complex enough to power a simpler story. But Rhimes is not content to stop there. Instead, she piles up and accelerates the stakes on multiple levels: personal, political, dynastic, romantic, and financial. Even better, all these high-stakes plotlines are timed to resolve, to traverse their different arcs, in concert.

With multi-layered plots, timing is everything

While the origin story itself could have been the sole basis of the series, instead Rhimes gives us two parallel timelines. Queen Charlotte appears in the early timeline as her younger self, the reluctant queen to be. In the other timeline, she is a mature monarch, holding together a realm with a puppet king who is unable to rule—and has no grandchildren to continue the line, despite their brood of thirteen.

Charlotte’s character in the first two Bridgerton series is that of a frosty, demanding queen whose main purpose in life seems to be to reign over “the ton.” The king is a shadowy presence, only appearing in cameos that serve to humanize her a bit.

The subplot related to the external stakes of “the other side” also echoes across both timelines. That is the journey of Lady Danbury, confidante to the queen and close friend of Violet Bridgerton in the more recent timeline.

In the earlier timeline, Lady Danbury becomes the conduit for the permanent changes that will result in the continuation of “the experiment.” She has the most to gain or lose depending on the outcome. In the later timeline, she has a less important role, but nonetheless bears a secret that has a direct connection to her friendship with Violet Bridgerton.

A ballet of partners and plots

Perhaps the most important element of the origin-story timeline resides in the character of King George. While he played only a minor role in the original series, in Queen Charlotte, he is co-protagonist. He literally embodies the personal, political, and dynastic stakes as a self-aware character who knows his condition renders him unfit to rule—and possibly dangerous to his unsuspecting queen.

Rhimes cleverly keeps the viewer in the dark at first about exactly why George behaves as he does toward his bride: avoiding her, keeping himself separate, making her excruciatingly lonely as a stranger in a land where she’s not allowed to forge her own friendships. We have an inkling—we know he’s got a mental illness, after all—but still, his actions seem excessive.

At precisely the point when his behavior becomes inexplicable to the viewer, Rhimes gives us an episode entirely from his POV. She peels back the curtain on what he’s been struggling with while Charlotte is feeling abandoned. A brilliant structural choice.

And what a struggle. George submits to torturous treatments in the hopes that he can be cured. Why? Not just for the sake of his realm, but for the sake of his relationship. It’s clear at this point that he is in love with Charlotte and cares for her enough to endure physical pain to keep her safe.

From this moment, the stakes just keep getting higher:

Charlotte is pregnant. Will the infant inherit his father’s disorder?Lady Danbury’s husband dies. Are the newly bestowed titles to be hereditary, or will everyone on their side lose everything in a single generation?Parliament is looking for proof that the king is fit to reign. But George’s inability to address them threatens to have him deposed, leaving the matter of succession dangerously unresolved. Without George, the “experiment” dies too.

And if that isn’t complex enough, there is another subplot involving the Queen’s man and the King’s man that foregrounds an additional sticky contradiction: duty and passion.

A romance, with muscle

The coup de grace at the end of Queen Charlotte is the way Rhimes not only resolves the individual plot lines, but how she brings the two timelines together. The deep understanding Charlotte and George reach in the earlier timeline bleeds into the later timeline in an unexpected—and intensely poignant—way. And in the later timeline, Lady Danbury reveals her secret to Violet Bridgerton without saying a word about it.

Rhimes uses complication not just to keep the viewer guessing, but to continually amp up the stakes and make us more and more invested in the outcomes for the characters. Once you care about Charlotte and George, it’s impossible not to follow them to the end.

Those who dismiss the romance genre as formulaic and predictable miss the real artistry that those tropes and conventions can enable. In Queen Charlotte, the combination of Julia Quinn’s glittering fictional world and Shonda Rhimes’s instinct for stories that keep you glued to the screen episode after episode results in something worthy of admiration by a storyteller in any genre.

The bottom line: Don’t settle for the obvious and simple level of stakes for your characters, historical or otherwise. Challenge them, push them, give them meaningful—and high—stakes that are believable in the context of their world.

Your readers will be enthralled.