Writers in the Storm

by Darynda Jones

Have you ever sat and listened to a panel of editors and agents go over their wish lists, the manuscripts they’d most like to see at that moment? And have you ever thought to yourself, “Hmmm, a space opera about a zombie captain who is commissioned to take an elemental princess across the universe to a peace conference where only she can stop a war that is destined to destroy an entire race of people while fighting evil star demons bent on killing said princess? I can do that.”

Yeah, me too.

I used to listen with bated breath to those editors and agents, my mind spinning a mile a minute on what I could write next. What would most appeal to an agent and editor? What would get their attention? And guess what. There’s nothing wrong with doing that.

I’m not saying follow trends. That endeavor is almost hopeless from the get-go. More often than not, by the time you finish your manuscript, the trend will have passed and the market will already be flooded with the latest and greatest concept since sliced bread.

What I’m talking about is writing to sell. And sell big.

Put yourself in an editor or agent’s shoes and look at writing from their perspective. Just like you, they want to make a living at what they do. They want to make money from the projects they take on. If they think they can’t turn a profit from your project, they will reject you. As hard as that is to swallow, it’s ridiculously understandable. Writing is a business. Sometimes we forget that. And just like all businesses, it needs to turn a profit or someone—possibly many someones—is out of a job.

When we think of writing in those terms, it is easier to step back and look at what we are writing from a marketing perspective. Every once in a while, I get flack for this. I hear everything from, “Writing is an art,” to “If you try to write for the market, you are selling out.”

Make no mistake, writing is my job. It is how I make money. It is how I pay my bills. So, yes, I look at it as a business, and luckily for me, it paid off. Romance writers are some of the savviest businesspeople I’ve ever met. They write for the love of writing, for the love of telling that great story that is burning within them, but they do it while being very conscious of the market, of what is out there, of what will sell and what probably won’t. That is good business. That is getting paid (emphasis on the word PAID) for what we love to do.

So, with all of that in mind, the trick to selling, to getting an editor or agent’s attention, involves the old standbys: Fresh, crisp writing; a solid concept; a tight story; etcetera, etcetera. But what you might not hear as often is ‘a fresh twist.’

Let’s face it. There are no new stories, but there are always, always, always fresh twists to old ones. It’s that fresh twist that will get you noticed, that will catapult your story out of the slush pile and into an editor’s eager hands.

This can also be thought of as high concept story writing.

Sadly, high concept has gotten a bad rep in recent years, and that’s too bad. There is absolutely nothing wrong with it. In fact, if your story is not high concept, the odds of it selling are astronomically lower in comparison. In the simplest terms, high concept is merely an old story, one that is universally understood, but with a fresh, unexpected twist that evokes an instant emotional response. It is not, as many people believe, comparing two stories to create one. For example, it is not merely stating, “My story is Buffy the Vampire Slayer meets Glee.” Though that is a rather intriguing concept.

Nathan Bransford says if high concept were a person it would be a teenager, because it's often totally misunderstood. If high concept were a tool it would be a sledgehammer.

And that about sums it up. High concept is often misunderstood and misused, but knowing exactly what it is and how it can help propel your manuscript out of the slush pile is crucial to success in the world of publishing.

Look at these examples and tell me what you think.

EXAMPLE #1

Option A: Terrorist gang takes hostages in an office high-rise after dark, seeking millions from the company’s vault.

Not bad, but what if we add a fresh (at the time) twist?

Option B: Terrorist gang takes hostages in an office high-rise after dark, seeking millions from the company’s vault. What the criminals don’t know is that one resourceful cop (whose estranged wife is one of the hostages) is in the building, aiming to stop them (and save his wife.)

Better, yes?

EXAMPLE #2

Option A: An orphan boy is raised by his resentful aunt and uncle.

Okay.

Option B: An orphan boy is raised by his resentful aunt and uncle only to find out he has magical powers and is the target of the evil wizard who killed his parents.

Much better!

Writing to Sell has three ultimate requirements:

1. Your premise should be original and unique.
2. Your story must have mass audience appeal.
3. Your story must evoke an instant emotional response.

Look at Buffy the Vampire Slayer: High school girl destined to fight vampires while trying to pass algebra. How much fun is that?

And that is exactly what I’m talking about. Write your vampire story, but give it a twist that other vampire stories don’t have. Same goes for your murder mystery or your small-town contemporary romance. Give an agent or editor something to sink her teeth into, something that will set her afire and give her the ammunition she needs to fight for you in a sales meeting.

So, this is what I was thinking when I came up with the idea for the Charley Davidson series. Basically, I wanted a snarky girl living in an urban area, just trying to get by on mocha lattes and sarcasm. Nothing new there. But what if I gave her world a paranormal underbelly? And what if she was supernatural herself? Still, I wanted something different. Something that hadn’t been done often, something fresh and untapped on a mass scale, so I made her the grim reaper.

Here is the first line of the pitch that garnered 8 offers of representations from some of the top agents in the biz in one week: (It was a stressful week.)

Female private investigator Charley Davidson was born with three things: a smoking hot ass, a healthy respect for the male anatomy, and the rather odd job title of grim reaper.

What is different about your story? What sets it apart? If you can answer that, you are halfway there. I hope this helps you on your way to career bliss!

Thank you for coming!

About Darynda

NYTimes and USA Today Bestselling Author Darynda Jones has won numerous awards for her work, including a prestigious Golden Heart®, a Rebecca, two Holt Medallions, a RITA ®, and a Daphne du Maurier, and she has received stellar reviews from dozens of publications including starred reviews from Publisher’s Weekly, Booklist, and the Library Journal.

As a born storyteller, Darynda grew up spinning tales of dashing damsels and heroes in distress for any unfortunate soul who happened by, annoying man and beast alike, and she is ever so grateful for the opportunity to carry on that tradition. She currently has two series with St. Martin’s Press: The Charley Davidson Series and the Darklight Trilogy. She lives in the Land of Enchantment, also known as New Mexico, with her husband of almost 30 years and two beautiful sons, the Mighty, Mighty Jones Boys. She can be found at www.daryndajones.com.

by Shannon Donnelly

Emotion. It’s what we read for in fiction. We want the thrill, the sorrow, the laughter, and the tears. Unfortunately, words are abstracts. Emotions are visceral—they’re in our bodies. That means the illusion to bring about emotion has to be studied and learned. And it’s the same challenge with every book—how to do you get more feeling. Here are some tips:

1 - Show the character’s emotions. This is where show don’t tell really does have power. He was angry, she was sad, he was upset, she wanted to laugh. All of these are telling the reader an emotion. You want to show emotion on the page.

To do this, you must know your characters. How does your character express anger? Does he get quiet, or hit something? Is he a yeller, or someone who bottles things up, or is he a bully who takes his anger out on the weak? What about sadness? Does it show up in her stomach, or her chest, or in a headache? Does she cry easily over anything or does she cover up her feelings with lame jokes? Put your character into actions that show that character expressing emotion—let the reader connect with the characters physically.

2 – Go past cliché. It’s too easy to have anger expressed as someone who yells. It’s too much the cliché to have tears appear at anything sad. It’s been done, so look for a fresh angle for your characters. Maybe anger shows up in a man’s shaking hand, or in a woman who actually cries when she gets furious. Look for fresh ways to layer together actions that better express someone’s feeling.

3 – Develop habits (for your characters). We all have mannerisms, physical habits that betray what we really feel. Your characters need these, too. Does your hero have a habit of smiling when he lies, or does your heroine fuss with her hair when she’s nervous? Gamblers know how to look for these “tells” that really show what someone is feeling.

4 – Let your characters lie. We all use white lies to get along better with others—and sometimes the lies aren’t so white. Let your characters talk about everything except what’s really going on—use subtext (talking about one thing while meaning something else). Have them change topics, not answer questions, and have them use their words to try to get what they want.

5 – Make sure every character wants something in every scene. This is great advice from Kurt Vonnegut—and this can be as simple as wanting a glass of water. That “want” will give you stronger conflict and is automatically an emotion to help improve the tension in the scene, particularly if you add in conflicting desires.

6 - Do remember to get the emotion onto the page. If you’ve got action, that’s great, but the reader still needs to know what the character feels about all that action. Is it fear, worry, anxiety, fury? When you edit, do an edit just to make certain you have your character reacting to things that happen. For example, maybe you’ve got an exciting moment where the heroine of the story has jumped out to save a small boy from being hit by a car. She jumps out, grabs the boy. Great stuff. But…what’s she feeling? Is she frightened? Amped up on adrenaline? Is she angry, furious because this is her son and she’s told him five times not to go into the street after his baseball? Is she shaking? Is she covering up her feelings by acting tough because she’s a cop and she thinks cops shouldn't show emotion?

7 – Let your character surprise you. Yes, you want your characters to make sense, but they can also act out of character. This needs strong motivation—we all have to be pushed out of our habits. But this is where you have a chance to show a new side of your characters—this is where the young timid girl can become a lioness if pushed too far (or if she has to protect someone she loves), or where the strong guy can shed more than a few tears if he’s lost the thing he values more than his own life.

Push your characters—and push yourself. And put emotion ahead of everything, even those pretty “writerly” phrases.

About Shannon

Shannon Donnelly’s writing has won numerous awards, including a RITA nomination for Best Regency, the Grand Prize in the "Minute Maid Sensational Romance Writer" contest, judged by Nora Roberts, RWA's Golden Heart, and others. Her writing has repeatedly earned 4½ Star Top Pick reviews from Romantic Times magazine, as well as praise from Booklist and other reviewers, who note: "simply superb"..."wonderfully uplifting"....and "beautifully written."

Riding in on a Burning Tire, the second book in the Mackenzie Solomon, Demon/Warders Urban Fantasy series is just out from Cool Gus Publishing. And her latest Regency romance, The Cardros Ruby, a RWA Golden Heart finalist, came out this May.

by Pamela Morsi

As a writer without a plan, I don’t get invited to comment often on my writing process. Telling people, “oh, I just make it up as I go along” tends to annoy my colleagues and confuse newcomers. I’m an organic writer. Or at least that what Donald Maass calls it. Pardon the name dropping, but it’s Donald that got me into this gig.

Orly was reading his new book, 21^st Century Fiction and there I was on page whatever as an example of “layering” to create a big book feel. So Orly asked me to write a blog on how I do this.

See my quote above.

This organic business is something I liken to a musician who plays by ear. The inability to read sheet music or to know the difference between a bass clef and a bullhorn, has never limited those individuals who hear the music clearly and can translate that from their brains to their fingers.

I see those of us who are organic writers behaving much the same.

Believe me, I don’t typically encourage this style. Every book, every chapter, every line is like stepping forward in complete darkness. You don’t know where you’re going, what it might lead to, or if any sense of completion will be waiting for you when you get there. I tell people, if you can write any other way, do it.

However, when I was thinking about this layering thing I surprised myself. The way I’m looking at it, layering may actually come more easily with an organic method. Not knowing where you’re going or why, invariably leads to a lot of unexpected roadside attractions. And maybe a little field trip into the organic may help the more sane and structured writer seeking more strata in a storyline.

Let me start with a kind of definition of layering. It is the stuff that surrounds the stage. It’s the adjective to the novel as noun. It may or may not effect the direction of the plot, but even when it doesn’t, it still adds depth to the action and the characters. The story can exist without layers. And layers themselves won’t make a story. But when you put the two together, you can come up with something very special.

So how can I plan to do that?

Actually, the plan is the enemy of layering.

There is a lot of good advice in writers’ mags and blogs about coming up with a plan and sticking with it. Good advice like: stay on message. Good advice like: every action should move the plot along. Good advice like: if you don’t know the purpose of a scene, delete it.

Stop! Stop! You’re killing me.

Those of us who write without a plan clearly don’t know what the message is. Whether the action moves the plot along or if the scene we’ve just written has a purpose. Honestly, we can’t know until the book is done. Therefore we spend a good deal of our time wandering around in the wilderness, trying to ascertain our plot, understand our characters and visualize our setting.

The advantage of this is that these tangents, these rabbit trails cause us to include so much more in our stories. Layer after layer of unexpected sideshow. This can be such fresh insight and so unique that it single-handedly lifts the story out of the standard into the exceptional.

For those of us who are plan-free, we count on this. For those of you who know how to get your ducks lined up in a row, it can be a new and exciting exercise. And it doesn’t have to mean giving up the control that works for you. It’s simply learning to give your subconscious the benefit of the doubt on a regular basis.

I always tell people that my subconscious is a better writer than I am. It pulls my line of thinking this way and that. I never know why…until suddenly things start tying up. The wordy, off-topic space waster from chapter four frequently becomes the perfect analogy for the character’s growth in chapter 22. But I could not have seen it, if I hadn’t gone off message when I did.

So allow yourself the freedom to wander away from the plan. When you write something that intrigues you, allow yourself to scurry off in that direction. You will still be able to find your way back. And your subconscious may see bigger possibilities than you can.

Don’t allow expediency to be the enemy of depth.

All of us feel tremendous pressure to get the work out quickly. Readers are waiting. Hurry up! The direct route from point A to point B is always going to be fastest. Allowing yourself to wander through the maze of rabbit trails is not fast at all. You can spend a day writing 3,000 words and, in fact, make no forward progress.

To quote the great Carrie Fisher, “Do you want it good or do you want it tomorrow?”

This is a cliché, of course. Lots of fabulous writing is done very quickly. But sometimes, for some things, we may need to take it slow.

Is this one of those times?

Going down rabbit trails is only worth it if depth is important to the audience you’re writing for, or it’s important to you. There is definitely a readership out there that finds any deviation from the plotline a nuisance. And if your writing production method is working just fine as it is, please do not let anyone pressure you into fixing something that isn’t broken.

But if you and your readers want more layering than you are currently coming up with, you could give an organic field trip a shot. To do that, however, you will have to stop being a slave to daily word count. This muddled method is slow. And it takes the time that it takes.

For those who simply must stick to a schedule, maybe you could dedicate two hours a week to deliberately running off on tangents and down rabbit holes. Don’t take the two from your current work plan. Peel off a couple of hours from non-writing activities. That way you won’t feel so bad about wishy-washy results. Most of what you write may ultimately be worthless and highly delete-able, that is to be expected. Organic layering is a trial and error business. Don’t be discouraged. Even if you don’t use one word of what you’ve come up with, it still serves to feed the subconscious writer in you in the same way that many find journaling or blogging useful. And you may turn a blind corner around a high hedge to discover that one analogy, that one symbol, that one succinct phrase that lifts your story to the heights that it has always deserved.

Appreciate the complexity of the world. As writers, we frequently try to narrow down the universe to fit between the book covers. Whether you’re looking through a telescope or a microscope, a lot is happening in that little circle of vision. There is no way that you can portray all of that in a single book or even in an endless series. But you can remind your readers of all that is there.

Are you an organic writer? What is YOUR process? Do you have any questions for Pamela?

About Pamela

RWA Hall of Fame member, national bestseller and two-time RITA winner, Pamela Morsi was duly warned. Lots of people mistakenly think they are writers, her mother told her. She’d be smart to give it up before she embarrassed herself. Fortunately, she rarely took her mother’s advice. Her 26^th novel, LOVE OVERDUE, will be coming out in September from Mira Books. You can find her on -

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/pages/PamelaMorsi/52601768362?fref=ts

Twitter: https://twitter.com/PamelaMorsi

and on her website https://pamelamorsi.com