Stay True to Your Reader or Sell Out?

In the writing business, we often get conflicting advice from our readers, other writers, and industry professionals like agents and editors. Agents advise us to write what’s in our hearts, but they can only sell what the editors want. The editors want more of what is already selling, limiting their risk in this fast-changing business. I’ve overheard readers in bookstores scoff at yet another new vampire novel. Other writers have told me that vampires are overdone; prophecies, tired. Yet this is exactly the opposite of the advice from New York. Vampires sell, so they want more vampires. Steampunk is popular, so they want more Steampunk.

They are the ones writing the checks.

 

Careful, You’ll End Up in my Novel

Writers write what they know. Even if your story is set in a fictional, futuristic dystopian society, the characters’ behaviors and traits reflect what the writer knows. What the writer has experienced or witnessed.

This past Christmas, my mother gifted me with a tea towel that reads “Careful, You’ll End Up In My Novel,” and I loved it. Likely my favorite gift because it is so true. My agent, Louise Fury of the L. Perkins Agency, gave this advice to writers:

1) Be nice. Be gracious. Keep your cool and try not to get involved in the cattiness of online bickering.

2) You cannot write in a vacuum, so get out into the world and work, meet people and interact with other writers.

3) Sometimes the best writing can originate from an overheard conversation. But you have to experience the world in order to write about it. I believe that you have to live in order to write. You have to live. Period!”

 

What Joss Whedon Taught Me About Storytelling

In 2009, Colleen Lindsay wrote a blog about what Joss Whedon’s Dollhouse could teach novelists about hooking readers.

Good article. Really true, too.

The art of storytelling has changed over the years. Our attention spans, as a collective audience, have shortened.

Colleen’s post is mostly about how Dollhouse took a few episodes (like seven, according to viewers) to really get going. People generally won’t wait through 7 hours of a show to get interested, unless they’re die hard Whedon fans like I am. (I actually liked it from episode 1).

It’s just a fact of entertainment reality. Audiences want to be hooked immediately. First page. First 5 minutes.