On Mash Ups, High Concepts, and Writing to the Trends

A Google Alert landed in my inbox the other day, pointing me to a blog that was talking about GRAVE MERCY in conjunction with a recent Publisher’s Weekly article that had mentioned it (which I had totally missed, so YAY!) The PW article was about current trends and the increasing number of mash ups being published. The blogger was (rightfully!) trying to keep from being disheartened by the whole push for bigger, greater, more KAPOW!

But here’s the thing: When I first started writing GRAVE MERCY over seven years ago, I absolutely NEVER set out intending to write a high concept mash up that would set the publishing world on its ear. (Not that my book has done that—but it was also never even a glimmer of a thought of mine…) The truth was, I had no idea that the concept of assassin nuns in medieval France—for teens!—would be met with anything other than blank stares and mocking smiles. It was a complete and total gamble on my part. In fact, I was fully aware of the fact that if I ever did show it to anyone, it could easily be the sort of query or pitch that was mocked at conferences or on blogs for years to come.

It was a book I set out to write just for myself—a trick I use to be able to shut out industry voices and reader voices and thoughts of whether it’s good enough to get published or find an audience or whatever.  It’s a technique that allows me to just write the damn story in the purest form my writing skills are capable of.

Grave Mercy was absolutely born of me writing what I wanted desperately to read. It was a mash up, yes, but not of industry trends or genres, but simply a mash up of all the things I personally found fascinating—old religions, the Church, the tumult of the medieval period, but also the romance of the medieval period. The high stakes of every day life, the codes of honor and loyalty and fealty. And I wanted it to be a story of empowerment—because all my stories end up being about empowerment in one way or another, but in this story I wanted empowerment to take front and center.

I worked on the book between other contracted books and it was my creative sandbox, my play time. And the more I researched the more cool things I found to throw into the mix and the story ultimately took the shape it did.

Honestly? I think if I had set out to write something trendy and high concept, the book would have failed miserably, because it was my own passion for the subject that fueled me, and it was my desire to do justice to the story I envisioned in my head that pushed me to take risks and stretch my wings craft-wise.

Which is, I guess, a very long way of saying to write what you love to write. Write what feeds you. Concentrate on achieving mastery of craft and telling the most compelling story that you can, but make sure it is YOUR story.

I really can’t emphasize enough how that happened by accident. How it sprang out of my own need and desire to learn more about those things and read a story about them. It wasn’t until I’d been working on it for about four or five years that I even mentioned it to my agent, and I only mentioned it as something that was diverting my attention from other stuff I should probably be writing.  She asked to see some of it and so I showed her, and she got really really excited.

But then I had to shut the door—HARD—on her excitement and my excitement over her excitement and just hunker down with the writing and the story and the characters.

It’s really, REALLY hard to do that. In fact, I was recently talking with a Super Star Mega Debut YA Author who’s had phenomenal success with her first book and is now trying to write the second book amidst all that exciting and distracting success. And we talked about how we have to create this bubble for our writerly selves in order to protect the story and shut out the ‘author’ part of the job.

And the reason I thought I’d bring this up now is because I know a lot of you are going to be doing NaNoWriMo and were going to be starting books of your own, so I just wanted to address that whole idea of writing to trends or putting together a calculated mash up hoping to be the next big thing.

In fact, a lot of you have asked if I am going to be doing NaNo this year, and sadly I am not. For a couple of reasons. 1) I have already started Mortal Heart (the third His Fair Assassin book) and so I don’t have a new project I can start fresh for NaNo. And 2) for me and my process, the race to achieve 50,000 words doesn’t work. I get so obsessed with the word count that I don’t pay enough attention to if they’re the RIGHT words, or if they are moving the story in the right direction.  For me, if I start the story in the wrong place or take a drastically wrong turn somewhere, I quickly find that I am telling the WRONG story, and that defeats the whole purpose.

I know that Sarah J. Maass, Jessica Khoury, and Beth Revis are doing NaNo and even better, they have a very cool NaNoYA forum set up for other YA writers participating, so I highly encourage you all to check it out.

However, in celebration of NaNo (and because I have just begun a new book and it is all very fresh in my mind) I will be posting a series of craft posts over the next few weeks to help give ideas, tips, and inspiration to any of you who are looking for it. I’ll start with putting up posts about all the pre-writing steps I take so that when I do sit down to write, I have some idea of where to go and am sure I am writing the RIGHT story.

Also? I have DARK TRIUMPH ARCs and will be hosting a series of contests (at least three) with chances to win one, so stay tuned!