Author: Jeffe Kennedy

Respecting the Tropes

Jeffe Kennedy / / Blog

I’ve been reading a lot of books lately that I wouldn’t normally pick up.

That’s because I’m judging for the Romance Writers of America (RWA) RITA awards. This is the romance genre’s version of the Hugo or the Oscar. Yeah, there might be some out there already snorting in disdain, but for our genre, this is one of the highest awards you can get. The first round is entirely peer-judged. As in, if you want to enter your book for the RITA, then you must judge. Thus, in mid-January, I received eight novels to read by the beginning of March.

We do get to pick categories, but otherwise I am reading books by authors I have never read before. All of them are a bit of a stretch from my normal pleasure reading. We’re asked to judge the book entirely on its quality and not whether or not we enjoy that particular kind of story, which is also a different lens.

It’s been interesting. And I’m over halfway through my pile, amazingly enough.

One of them is a new author discovery for me now. I gave her book a perfect score and look forward to reading more. Another, in a sub-genre I rarely read, I ranked very high. I don’t know that I’ll pick up her books again, for myself, but I could recognize how well she executed her craft.

One book, though written decently, failed as a romance, in my opinion. Oh, she had all the plot points in there. She faithfully followed the tropes, but they continued to feel empty to me. Contrived, even, which romance is so frequently accused of being.

So, here’s where I make a leap into a series of assumptions. I’m theorizing and obviously have no hard data to back up my ideas here. 

It’s no secret that the romance genre is making big bucks these days. A fact that seems to seriously annoy all those who consider romance not worthwhile. Latest stats from RWA: $1.36 billion in sales each year, the largest share of the consumer-book market, more than a quarter of all books sold are romance. What writer doesn’t want some of that pie?

More and more, I’m seeing writers of other genres coming over to the romance field, to pump up their sales. Or adding touches of romance, in order to sell it on that shelf. And sure, sometimes this is the work of the publisher or marketing department, trying to slide in under that umbrella.

The thing is, it’s difficult to wield a trope you don’t love. See, a trope is like a cliché or an archetype. They can be powerful devices or cardboard dummies. A good romance embraces the full emotionalism of people coming together, with all the silliness, hearts, flowers, flying cupids, spats, passion, grand gestures and breathless, intimate moments that implies. It’s not easy to write  clichés in a new, vivid and heartfelt way. But if a writer doesn’t tap into that deep store of energy that fuels the tropes in our hearts and minds, then all of that becomes cliché in the worst possible sense.

All of us romance readers love to giggle at the tropes. There are great blogs out there that encourage these discussions. We laugh at the impossibly virginal, feisty heroine and the alpha-male hero who also cooks and loves to brush her hair. And yet, when it’s done right, we also sigh in dreamy delight, and follow their story with fervent attention.

Why? Because the author takes the tropes and breathes life into them.

That doesn’t happen if the author, deep-down, doesn’t respect the tropes.

We might poke fun at the tropes like we roll our eyes at our husbands not being able to find anything without us, but if someone else makes out like our husbands are worthless? Oh no no no.

Use the power of the trope, young author.

But beware of taking it lightly.

Letting the Babies Stay Dead

Jeffe Kennedy / / Blog

There’s a long-used term in the writing and publishing world: Kill Your Babies.

This is, of course, a euphemism for being willing to recognize which parts of your work are, well, self-indulgent tripe that needs to be cut. For some reason, it’s often the bits we’re most emotionally attached to in our work that needs to be deleted. I suspect it has something to do with that very attachment that makes those parts not good enough. We’re too invested in the meaning to ourselves to have perspective on how it contributes to the story.

Regardless, we all learn at some point to kill our babies.

What this means for most of us, though, is that we delete the offending passage or section and paste it into a document we save. We call it “Outtakes” maybe, and we keeps it forever, Precious. No, the baby isn’t dead, it’s just…Sleeping. I’m sure there are some ruthless, emotionally balanced authors out there who really, truly delete and forever nuke their babies. But many of us have them, little shriveled corpses in the basements of our laptops, that – who knows? – could one day be reanimated! The baby could live again!

The other day I re-watched Notting Hill, one of my all-time favorite movies. (I know this is my second reference to a movie rewatch. I have this Cold Virus That Will Not Die, and so I’ve been spending a lot of time reclining on the couch, alas.) At any rate, I love this movie so much, that I own it. This time I noticed there are special features and, basking in the glow of the Notting Hill love, I watched those, too. They included Deleted Scenes.

Hot Damn! MOAR Notting Hill to love!

The thing is? Those deleted scenes really sucked. They deserved to be deleted. I don’t know what went wrong with them, but they weren’t in line with the crispness of the rest of the movie. Whoever made the decision to cut those scenes exercised excellent judgment. Afterwards, I was kind of sorry I’d watched them. They diluted my glow ever so slightly with their badness.

And it made me think of all the babies I’ve been saving, just in case I can reanimate them. I’ve noticed a blog trend lately where writers are posting deleted sections of their novels or manuscripts. Kind of a fun thing – like the deleted scenes in the special features – and everyone is always looking for blog topics. Still, I’m wondering if it’s a good idea. If something isn’t good enough to stay in the story, it probably shouldn’t be read by anyone besides your CPs and your editor – who are likely the ones who told you to get rid of it in the first place.

After all, none of us really wants anyone to know about all those zombie babies in the basement. It might look bad.

I’m thinking mine might deserve a decent burial.

Sand, Sun and the Erotic Story Arc

Jeffe Kennedy / / Blog

I’m starting to think beach.

Not this particular beach, but the one I’ll be visiting in Pensacola, Florida for the Silken Sands Conference March 16-18. I’m so looking forward to this conference, not just for the warm and the beach, but because it’s a small conference packed with a lot of really great people. Two of my favorite editors, Angela James (Carina Press) and Grace Bradley (Ellora’s Cave) will be there, along with Holly Blanck (St. Martin’s) who I’d like to be one of my favorite editors. 😀 There will also be fabulous author friends there and I’m looking forward to hanging with them.

So, I’m working up my presentation in my head. Brewing it up so I can start making some slides. My workshop? The Erotic Story Arc: Not a Contradiction in Terms.

Yeah – you know what I mean.

A lot of people think an erotic story is simply porn and nothing more. And – hey, let’s face it – some can be. Over on Word Whores this week, we’ve been having an interesting debate on action scenes and whether we skim them as readers. The consensus has been that both action scenes and sex scenes suffer by being all stage direction without real story. So, in the erotic story, the sexual interaction takes center stage, but it still must serve to move the character from one place to another. That’s the core of a story: how the characters change.

Often the change in the characters in an erotic story is the simple coming together. They start out strangers and end up together – classic romantic story arc. There’s also the sexual journey, which usually involves some kind of self-discovery. I like the stories about breaking taboos or old beliefs, liberating the characters to embrace more of the world than they did before.

Any that I’m missing? I’m also looking for suggestions, of really well-done erotic stories that were also moving and meaningful.

And, if you want to see my workshop or just come hang at the beach with some fab writing and publishing people, you can still register!

Medium vs. Message

Jeffe Kennedy / / Blog

I love when the fog is in the valley. It seems so metaphorical. Doesn’t hurt that I’m above it all and still have a clear view.

I wish.

Last night I watched Practical Magic. For maybe the one-billionth time. Yeah, it’s one of my all-time favorites, for so many reasons. Some of them are definable and some aren’t. I love it for the LOOKS the women exchange, which seem to be impossible to capture in writing. A glance full of meaning in a movie becomes a cliche of crossed arms and raised eyebrows in a book. Sometimes I envy the filmmakers. I can see the scene between my characters play out in my head, but how to describe it so someone else can see it?

One of the great challenges of writing, I suppose.

Ironically, however, if there are two versions of a story, both a book and a movie, it’s rare for anyone to say the movie was better. In most of these cases, the book came first. I think the last time I read a book that came after a movie was back in the late 70s, after the first Star Wars movie (Episode IV, for the purists) came out. I read one of those tie-in books that they generated to keep the story going. I was getting big into sci fi then and loved the movie. SO disappointing. I was bewildered by the liberties taken with the story and characters. The book itself was poorly written. And gross. Seems like a light saber got jabbed in someone’s eyeball with associated flying goop. At any rate, I never read another. This might explain why I never got into fanfic of any kind. Traumatized at an early age.

Still, the point is that both books and movies tell a story, just in different ways. And books – well they pretty much read like books, no matter how the words are displayed. Jonathan Franzen, who I’m starting to think is worried no one will pay attention to his writing if he’s not being an ass waffle (thank you DYAC!), has now famously declared ebooks a threat to society. He also claims that “serious readers” – whoever those people may be – will continue to read on paper because that has a permanence that ebooks lack.

His justification is beyond bizarre. He says he can spill water on a book and it still works, which you can’t do with an ereader. Yeah, but enough water does ruin a paper book and oh, say, setting it on fire kinda ruins that permanence. But this is the kind of nut job you can’t really reason with.

What gets to me with the ensuing conversations is all the people saying things like the author of this article says:

Franzen doesn’t even take into consideration the countless self-published authors who wouldn’t have a chance of seeing their books actualized because of the old guards at the gates of publishing companies. Most of them won’t win a Pulitzer Prize, but they’ve achieved a dream of sharing their stories with the world.

I’d say it’s more to the point that Franzen would think those people shouldn’t be published if the can’t get through the gates. (Not my opinion – speculating on his.) But that’s neither here nor there. People continue to conflate self-publishing with digital publishing. It’s bizarre to me, because this is demonstrably not the case. I can purchase Franzen’s Freedom from Amazon as a hardcover ($14.44 as of this posting), paperback ($10.88), ebook ($9.99) or audiobook ($37.79). If I read it on paper, will my experience be more serious than on my Kindle?

It’s absurd to think so.

As for permanence, if I leave my hardcover or paperback out in the rain, I’d have to buy a new copy. If I leave my Kindle in the rain, I still have my entire library of books backed up in the data cloud. Which is more permanent?

And what about the audiobooks? Are they evil, bad and a threat to society, too? I can’t recall seeing attacks on audiobooks like we’ve seen on ebooks.

It’s all the same hysteria over change. Which is fine. I understand. We all hit a point where we simply can’t adapt to yet more more technology. But don’t dress up your mental inflexibility as wisdom.

And leave my ebooks alone.

The Dreaded Synopsis: More than a Query Tool

Jeffe Kennedy / / Blog

I had to write a synopsis the other day for the new novel I’m shopping around.

It will come as no shock to any of you writers out there that I avoided doing it As Long As Possible. In fact, I had a list of ten agents I wanted to query and I managed to send to eight of them without writing a synopsis. (Which shocked one of my CPs, but it’s true.) Part of this was because a couple of them had asked to see the very next thing I wrote. One of them I’d talked to via email just recently, so I just emailed her with a “here it is” note. Another I tweeted, asking her if she wanted to see it, which she did.

Love those easy ones!

Now, I should say that I did have a pitch paragraph for the book, that I included with these messages. My CPs who’d read the book helped me put that together. Then, there were several more agents I’d had previous positive contact with, that I sent more formal queries to. None of those blessed souls, however, required a synopsis for submission.

When I’d knocked out eight queries/submissions, then I hit the big white wall.

You know the one I mean: the empty screen. The blank page taunting you with the certainty that you can never ever condense your long, lovely, intertwined story into a one-page plot summation. The thing I like to say – which ALL the publishing people hate to hear – is, if I could have told the story in one page, I would have.

Yes, I see you people out there, making faces at the screen.

And I know I’m wrong.

I know you need the synopsis and, if I can’t explain what my story is about in a short space, then either there’s a problem with my story or with me. Possibly both.

At any rate, though I knew that a synopsis is a necessary evil, I didn’t really see the light until I read Malle Vallik’s post this morning about all the things Harlequin and Carina use a synopsis for.

I tell you: I have drunk the Koolaid.

I bookmarked this post for the next time I write a synopsis. Or, for rewriting my Middle Princess synopsis, as I’m now seriously considering.

Now, go get you some Koolaid.

Ideas as Commodities

Jeffe Kennedy / / Blog

I love how it looks like the ladder-backed woodpecker and the finch are having a conversation over breakfast.

The common wisdom these days is that ideas are cheap and everything is in the execution. Young writers – and by this I mean, new to the game – are frequently advised not to worry about someone stealing their ideas because 1) there are no new ideas, 2) writing is about how you tell the story and 3) you can’t stop them anyway.

This is all true.

It’s also true that ideas are easy to come by. The aforementioned young writers often ask established writers – never Old Writers, please – where they get their ideas. Inevitably the established writers will reply that getting ideas is not a problem. It’s having the time and energy to write them all that’s the problem. Also, I think it’s a flow thing – the more you write, the more stories come to you. In some ways, it’s like the young writers and the established writers are speaking different languages. Which is why the established writers will eventually say, sometimes in frustration, just keep writing and you’ll have ideas.

So, if this is true, that ideas are easily come by, then there’s nothing wrong with giving them away.

Indeed, I see people operating as if this is true. They ask on Twitter for ideas for blog posts. And clearly people suggest those ideas. A common lament among writers is that people will offer them story ideas – often of the person’s incredibly interesting (self-perceived) personal history. Of course, in those cases, the incredibly interesting person will think there’s an intrinsic value in their story idea and will try to negotiate a deal. The writer, knowing ideas are a dime a dozen, will decline.

But – are they really?

See, the other reason that this never works – the, hey, why don’t you write my incredibly interesting story scenario – is because it’s not the idea itself, but the fire behind it. That’s what the writer needs. That burning image. The seed of creativity. The story that’s begging to be told, that unwinds itself in loops in the writer’s brain, crowding out everything else. Those ideas? Those are beyond worth.

It puts me in mind of a quote from Robert Bly: “Be careful how quickly you give away your fire.”

Most people interpret this as, don’t yammer too much about your story idea, or you can lose all the oompf behind it, which is also good advice. But it’s come back to me lately because a writing friend asked me for help. She wanted to incorporate certain things into her new book, dynamics that I happen to write well.

Now, I’m big on giving help. I’m a believer in being generous, in the bounty of the universe, and normally I wouldn’t hesitate. In fact, I help friends all the time with brainstorming or plot difficulties or sorting out these kinds of dynamics. I enjoy it and find it feeds me, too.

But, in this case, she asked for more than I was willing to give. At first I wasn’t sure why – just that I balked internally. Then I realized that she was asking for a big piece of my fire. She wanted me to give her, not just an idea, but a whole story, with all the seeds of magic ready to grow.

I tried to find a way to give her only guidance. Then she needed to move on and I was off the hook.

The whole thing, though, made me think.

In fact, I had to create a whole new batch of tags for this post – which, you know, is something I’m trying not to do – because it’s not something I’ve really mulled over before.

I’m still mulling, coiled like a dragon over my treasure.

Not my usual place to be.

Can “That” Really Change Your Voice?

Jeffe Kennedy / / Blog

Seems like everyone is dealing with edits lately. I know that’s likely a false observation, based on only a few data points. But one of my CPs was wresting with copy edits she didn’t totally agree with and another received kind of on odd batch of late-breaking line edits after copy edits, mostly eliminating word repetition. Another is coping with pretty deep first round developmental revisions.

For those not in the trenches, there are various rounds of edits we receive from our publishers. They are:

Revise and Resubmit

This is before you get a contract. Usually you’ll get a letter from the acquisitions editor saying what they like about the book, along with what you’d have to change for them to acquire it. A surprising (to me) number of authors won’t do them, saying they won’t “work on spec.” Of course, there’s no guarantee that they’ll accept if you revise. Still, as my fab editor Deb Nemeth points out, it takes a substantial amount of time and effort for her to write an R&R letter. It’s much easier to say no. With an R&R, they’re already invested.

Developmental Edits

The first step after you sign your contract. There are one to two rounds of these, usually depending on how well you revise on the first round. These can be overarching changes like “firm up the heroine’s motivation” or “write this chapter in real time, not as a memory.” Sometimes writers react to developmental edits like they’re an insult or as if the author screwed up. No, it happens to established authors all the time and can have a lot more to do with how the publishing house wants to target the book. One friend of mine had grandparents in her YA novel who were way too supportive and helpful. Her editor asked her to go through and make them unsupportive, to add more tension.

Line Edits

This is what it sounds like – the editor goes through the whole book, line by line and scrutinizes every word, phrase, sentence and paragraph. Usually there are two rounds of these. Hopefully the second is far less painful than the first.

Copy Edits

The final round! (Or two.) The Copy Editor is a different person, very specialized who has the job of Quibbling. They fact-check. They fix everything according to House Style (the established rules of the publishing house – for example, Carina has a no colons or semi-colons rule). Copy Editors tend to be very literal. They hate metaphorical language and they love Perfect Grammar above all else.

So, my friend who was angsting over her Copy Edits was upset at having a lot of “thats” inserted. It’s the difference between, for example, “The hammer that she used every day” and “The hammer she used every day.” A lot of writers hate “thats” and work to eliminate them. Copy Editors tend to insert them, for perfect sentence structure. The writer felt that (heh) this changed her voice.

There’s lots to be said about voice – volumes, really. Amusingly, as I was deciding how I could wind this up succinctly, I was discussing on Twitter this book I finished reading  last night, how much I loved it and how, this morning, I’m missing it. And my editor, the aforementioned fabulous Deb, replied: “That feeling of wanting to be back in a story after you finish reading the book? That’s the quality I look for in a submission.”

And that, my friends, will never be affected by a few more that’s.

Heh – at least I amuse myself.

Inspiring Quote

Jeffe Kennedy / / News

This seemed the best way to post this for @alwayscoffee, who posted this link today. I told her it reminded me of this, from William Faulkner’s speech upon accepting the Nobel Prize for Literature.

I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last dingdong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking.

I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet’s, the writer’s, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet’s voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.