Author: Jeffe Kennedy

Why Writers Shouldn’t Pay Attention to Pet Peeves and Cranky Lists

Jeffe Kennedy / / Blog

003The last week was so warm, everything is leafing out and the lilacs are budding. Today we’re wrestling with a storm that slid down from Alaska (gee, thanks, Alaska) and we’re to get a hard freeze tonight. Yeah, I’ll be out there this afternoon, making free with the blankets.

I feel like lately I’ve been seeing lots of pet peeves in social media. Editors and agents like to tweet their peeves, often with the hashtag #pubtip. Sometimes a literary agency will start a conversation on the topic – “Hey readers, what are your literary pet peeves?” Bloggers will make lists of cliches to avoid.

All of these are great conversation starters on social media. After all, people love to air their gripes with each other, especially in a humorous context. It’s even better if those gripes derive from your work – the things you deal with all day, every day, week after week. They make for great riffs and people one-up each other and add gifs. It can be terrific entertainment.

I’ve even heard it said that you should follow agents and editors you’d like to work with, so you know what their peeves are.

No, no, no.

Seriously. Don’t do it. Don’t pay attention to these gripes and lists.

Why? Because they’re not really real.

Let me give you an example. A few weeks back I saw an agent tweet something along these lines:

“Pet peeve: books that open on dialogue. Voices shouldn’t come before we know who the bodies are. #pubtip”

This struck me because I’ve done this with published works. More than once. I bet we can all think of books that have done this and done it really well. This agent is right to call it a pet peeve – it’s nothing more than something that personally irritates her. So, should you change your book opening to please her?

Let’s consider that. Maybe you’re saying, sure Jeffe, if I’m querying her, I want my best odds, so for her I’ll open on description instead. Okay, fine, but she’s one of hundreds of agents you might query, with no guarantee that, just because you avoided that particular gripe of hers, she’ll want to represent you. So do you change your opening for every agent you query? Do you scour the internet and make a spreadsheet of every complaint every agent or editor makes, maybe categorized by type – openings, endings, characters, plot devices – and then check them off to groom them for that person?

Please tell me you wouldn’t do this.

There’s a fable for this, which everyone should recall, about the man who tried to please everyone. This is kind of a cutesy version, but the message  remains – when you try to please everybody, you end up pleasing nobody. Least of all yourself.

The thing to keep in mind is when these fine people – and I’ve seen my agent and editors, who I like and admire, do this – give advice, they’re seeing the world from their perspective. I know that seems self-evident, but stick with me. I think of this like the teacher with 30 students. They learn her name immediately. It takes her much longer to learn 30 names. An editor wants a manuscript that’s tailored to him. He’s not seeing the writer’s perspective of trying to assimilate the likes and dislikes of 30 editors. And really, it’s not his problem.

So, what’s the solution?

Three things: Be true to yourself, learn your craft and protect yourself from negativity.

Being true to yourself

See, even if you change your opening so cranky agent who doesn’t like disembodied dialogue openings will keep reading, she might also hate your second line. Or the fact that your main character is gay. Or that she isn’t gay. Reading is subjective. Either the agent will resonate with your work or she won’t. It’s tempting to try to control this, but you can’t. The sooner you accept that, the happier you’ll be. And I’ll let you in on a little secret – even if she hates that you started on dialogue, if she loves the rest of the story, she’ll still take it. She might call, gush about your wonderful story, offer representation and then say “oh, but I think you should open with this line.”

The one thing that will surely kill a story, however, is if it’s been worked to death to please everyone but yourself. It’s like the old saw that no one will love you until you love yourself first. If you don’t love your story, how do you expect someone else will?

Do what’s right for the story, first and foremost.

Learn your craft

Most of the cranky lists – things like “cliches writers should avoid” or “10 signs of bad writing” – are responses to poor craft. I saw one yesterday, that both my agent and one of my editors were all over with glee, that listed cliches. They each listed which ones they particularly hate. The thing is, I figured I’d probably done all of those things. For example, one was don’t have your character describe themselves in a mirror. I use mirror a lot. I’m really interested in the idea of self-perception and that the mirror is an archetype of being able to see your true self.  I know perfectly well if I pointed this out to my editor or agent, where in my books I’ve done this, they’d say “oh, but you avoided the cliche – you handled it differently.”

Thus, the answer is not truly to avoid cliches. That’s the simplistic approach. After all, cliches become cliches for a reason (also a cliche, right there). They get overused. The point is to use those memes or archetypes well enough that they transcend cliche instead of being a crutch.

That’s craft.

Protect yourself from negativity

To me, this is the hugest part. When I saw my agent and editor climb all over that list of cliches, my brain started churning and obsessing. How many of those have I done? Oh my god, isn’t that one in the story I just sent her? I started thinking about the story I’m writing now and wondering if I need to rework this or that. I worried. I felt like a Bad Writer. Even that one about not opening with disembodied dialogue niggled at me, even though the story I know I did it in has been used in workshops with that opening as a good example. That’s a lot of emotional impact on me, for something she likely Tweeted in a moment of irritation and promptly forgot.

See, when people post this stuff, they’re thinking about engagement. They’re enjoying sharing gripes with fellow professionals. They’re not thinking about the creator of the art who might be derailed by what is essentially, to them, cocktail party conversation. It’s not that its bad advice, necessarily, but they’re not thinking about how they’re saying it.

All of this is why I think writers shouldn’t pay attention to this kind of thing. I’m not saying don’t follow agents and editors you’re interested in. I absolutely think you should. But don’t treat everything they say as gospel. Who knows? By the next day they may have forgotten they even said it.

Now go write.

How Important Is Likability in Characters?

Jeffe Kennedy / / Blog

009Borrrrnnnn Freeeeee!

Yes, Jackson has discovered the Great Outdoors. And it is Good.

We watched an interesting movie last night, Tanner Hall. It’s a mediocre movie from 2009 with nobody particularly compelling in it. The ending however, is very nearly incandescent. And yes – you really have to watch the whole movie to get the ending. It truly arises out of the story in a way I didn’t expect.

It explored a theme I don’t see treated directly in stories very often. About forgiveness and likability. It’s about knowing someone has behaved badly and… letting it go.

There’s this old saw that we dislike in other people those things that we dislike in ourselves. I don’t know how true this is – or if there are any psychological studies to support it. I’ve experienced bosses who suspected me of cheating on things like time-reporting in the ways that I *knew* they did. I also know that I dislike in other people qualities that I’ve worked hard to eradicate in myself, such as narrow-mindedness, intolerance, lack of compassion.

I suspect that, in real life, our reasons for not liking some people are usually not well-examined and probably don’t have good foundations. A lot of the time jealousy plays in. Or that the person doesn’t do things the way we want them to. Or just plain irritation. The cases where we don’t like a person because they’ve actually done us an injury are probably in the minority.

But this is not true in fiction, right?

In the world of fiction, we feel very free not to like characters. In fact, we’re encouraged to outright hate the “villains” in a way that we’re simply not socially allowed to in real life. We also get to dislike the heroes and heroines of the stories.

This is something that comes up in romance All The Time. Whether or not the heroine is “likable” can be the key to whether or not the reader enjoys the whole story. I see debates all the time about whether heroines are likable for this or that reason. Now, typically the readers are female and the heroine functions as an avatar of sorts for them in the story. So, if the heroine behaves in a way that they judge to be wrong, it annoys them.

One romance writer who gets this reaction a lot is Victoria Dahl. I enjoy her books because her heroines feel so real – like a contemporary woman who might be my friend. And, like real women, they have flaws. They annoy their families. They have sexual histories. In one of my favorites, Talk Me Down (you might have to scroll down the page to find it – I have SPOKEN to Ms. Dahl about this), the heroine acted out sexually when she was younger.

And, boy, how the readers judged her for that.

It’s a funny thing about romance – somehow we all still see ourselves as these virtuous virgin feminine ideals. Even though, in real life, we’d never agree to that ideal.

Watching that movie last night made me think of my grandfather. He was an admirable man in many ways – raised himself up out of nothing, educated himself, became a wealthy man, then lost it all again. Alcoholism played a role in that. And hubris. He was unfaithful to my grandmother – a woman who’d first been his mistress – and ultimately left her for another long-time mistress. My mother and my aunts carry a lot of bitterness and anger for how he affected their lives. I remember him for giving me my copy of Omar Khayyam, teaching me to draw and for long walks after dinner when we talked about Interesting Things.

Is he likable? Probably not. In some ways, maybe, but if we reduced his life to a scorecard, he’d probably end up in the negative column. At the end of his story, though, I find that none of that matters to me.

I love and forgive him, anyway.

Maybe that’s what we mean, when we talk about redeeming a character. Good characters, like real people, have flaws. There’s no story if they don’t have something to overcome.

I suppose that’s true for us all.

Nourishing Creativity – an Ode to Polton Elementary School and My Mother

Jeffe Kennedy / / Blog

BGtv6rUCUAEdv_PWith the Phantom book finished, I spent time in the garden this weekend. Most restorative to work with my hands and body, to clear away the old detritus, coax the perennials into shape and plant new flowers. And clean up the gargoyle. She’s watching over the pansies for me.

And, as of yesterday, I started in on developmental edits for Rogue’s Possession. For those who aren’t familiar with the lingo, those are the first round of edits. My editor just sends me an email describing some global changes she’s looking for. Add tension to the beginning, tighten the ending. Here are some suggestions. That sort of thing. Some of you may recall she’d originally asked for April 3 on those (dies laughing), but now we’re trying for April 15. I think I can do that.

My mom complains that I make my childhood sound awful when I reflect on my growing up. I suspect this is because our painful experiences are the ones that really spur us to change – or, at least, that’s how we remember it.

Yesterday one of my crit partners sent me the TED talk by Elizabeth Gilbert on the creative spark. You might remember it from early 2009, when it was really making the rounds on the internet. My friend, however, must have been under a rock at the time and missed it. The talk really resonated with her – as it did for many of us – and I watched it again, to be able to discuss some of the finer points. Surprising to me: I heard very different things in it this time, after dedicating so much of the last four years to my own writing.

My friend had come across the talk because I’d sent her this one, by Ken Robinson on how schools kill creativity. One story he tells is about Gillian Lynne, who was failing out of school at age 8 – until her principal recognized that she was a natural dancer. Her mother sent her to dance school instead, and Gillian became a success instead of an academic failure. My friend asked me if I thought my schooling had killed or nurtured my creativity.

Something I’d never once thought about.

I mean, I’ve mentioned my early schooling from time to time. How I went to an experimental school in the early 70s, with team teaching, no desks and open space classrooms. Mostly I have made fun of it (Magic Circle where we shared our feelings) or criticized it (the famous ordeal of my stepfather having to teach me the multiplication tables because I’d been pulled out into a special program and then plunged back into long division without knowing how to multiply). My stepfather was a vice-principal in a neighboring school district that was not experimental and he often complained about the gaps in my traditional education. 

But thinking back now… wow.

That special program that caused me to miss multiplication? (Which, by the way, took less than a week for me to make up.) I spent that third grade year with fourth, fifth and sixth graders, traveling around Colorado and learning about western history. Now I realize how much that year opened my mind to the range of human experience. Women like Baby Doe Tabor and Molly Brown became larger than life to me. That time instilled in me an appreciation for the concept of the frontier, of struggle, of the desire for wealth and success and the crushing effects of defeat.

My teachers were good to me at that school. They let me read in class when I was bored with the assignment. They gave me special projects to work on. Instead of smacking me down for being a smart ass (because, oh yes, I was one even then), they encouraged me to channel that energy. I found it funny, often, that they were always concerned that I not get bored, but now I see – I was never bored. My teachers found ways to challenge, stimulate and open my mind.

And my creativity.

I sometimes joke that I have such an eclectic approach to life. In college I double-majored in biology and religious studies, with enough credits to minor in theater. I ended up in grad school for neurophysiology, work as an environmental consultant and now write fantasy and romance novels.

I’m realizing now that this is their gift to me. That my early schooling did nourish my creativity. My mom bought a house near this school so I could go there and it made an amazing difference for me.

What a wonderful gift this was.

On Being Done – In So Many Ways

Jeffe Kennedy / / Blog

3_27 2Jackson has figured out how to get up inside the TV cabinet. He’s still not sure why we stare at that screen, however.

So, the Good News? I finished the book!!!!

(Cue screams of joy from fans and various expressions of relief and eyerolling from family and friends.)

The Bad News?

Wow, am I tired!

Not really physically tired, just emptied out. It’s really amazing, this writing-a-novel thing – it really does feel like running a marathon. (Or so I presume, not being the kind of gal who has EVER run a marathon.) Even working at a measured and even pace, by the end it feels like I’m creating an enormous soap bubble. Every day I add a bit more air, expanding it, steadying it, letting it grow larger and larger. And in the final days, I detach it from my wand and it floats away, leaving me hollow.

It’s a peculiar feeling. It’s like I have no thoughts at all.

If I could – and maybe one day when I get organized about this writer gig, I will – I’d plan for a week-long vacation post-deadline. I’d love to just go hang by a pool somewhere, order drinks from cabana boys and let myself gradually refill.

At any rate, that’s all I’ve got in me for a blog post today. I looked at my long list of very interesting potential topics and my writing brain did that thing like when your car battery is nearly dead. It kind of started to turn over, sputtered and went quiet.

Somebody send cabana boys. Stat.

Being Careful with Back Cover Copy – Especially Sequels!

Jeffe Kennedy / / Blog

003I have this sentimental love for Easter lilies. Especially at this time of year. Though I don’t really do anything else Easter, I always buy an Easter lily.

Back cover copy for books is a funny realm. Referred to casually as the “BCC” in the publishing biz, those are the (usually) two paragraphs on the back of paper books, or accompanying the description with the eBook. If you’re much of a reader, you’ve probably read hundreds of these in your life. You spot the book on the shelf and pick it up. Maybe you like the author or the title intrigues you or the cover catches your eye. What’s the next thing you do? That’s right – flip it over and read the BCC. Then you might read the inside jacket copy, which is longer. Then maybe the first page. Same essential process with an eBook.

So the BCC is considered crucial in the buying decision – a position that’s hard to argue with. And, like with covers, authors only get so much input into what the BCC says. The marketing people keep a firm grip on this and it can be fascinating to see how they phrase concepts to entice readers. For example, this is my final BCC for Platinum.

Althea Grant is doing fine. Sure, her Charleston gallery is suffering from the bad economy, and her artistic aspirations have gone nowhere. But she’s happy enough. When rugged metal sculptor Steel rides up on his motorcycle looking to rent studio space, his infusion of cash is more than welcome. But his art is raw, visceral, sexual-and completely inappropriate for her pastel world of watercolor landscapes.

Steel, fascinated by Althea’s rare albino coloring, sees in her the key to his next piece: a metal satyr that can be used for bondage games. Moving into her gallery basement is the first step; seducing the coolly polite lady into modeling for him is the second.

As Steel peels away her careful manners and tasteful outfits, Althea begins to realize her life isn’t just fine at all-it’s as pale and washed-out as the watercolor paintings she’s failing to sell. Can she transform her life and accept her most secret desires?

What happens is, a person who works for Carina writes the BCC and sends it to me and my editor for input. We come up with all sorts of changes, most of which they refuse. For example, we suggested “cool Southern Belle” instead of “coolly polite lady.” Nope. I wanted to call Steel a bad boy. No dice. But the thing we really fought for was to change the final line. The one you see now is one of three possibilities we suggested.

Because what they had originally was a TOTAL SPOILER.

Really.

I won’t tell you what it was because, um, it was a total spoiler. But it essentially went “Can she do the thing she does at the end to solve her problems?”

No no no.

Surprisingly, this happens A LOT with BCC. It’s funny because writers really have to learn to say how their stories end, in dealing with the publication process. When you write a synopsis, you *have* to say how it ends. Because it’s crucial to the decision-making process for agents and editors. It’s hard to get over, this “giving-away” of the ending. Like learning to get over standing there naked while a tailor measures you for clothes. But this is how publishing works – and the people in publishing get so inured to this, that they forget not to give the ending away.

So, as the author (or editor), it’s something to really stay on top of.

I saw a new permutation of this the other day. A book had been on my Kindle for quite a while. Along with Carien at Pearls Cast Before a McPig, I’ve bee engaged in the TBR Orphan Project – where each month we read a book that’s been in our To Be Read pile for longer than three months. I saw that the book’s sequel was coming out soon, so I thought, ooh! good timing to read the first book.

I started it, got about 20% in and was liking it fine, not love love love, but just fine. Then I happened to see the BCC for the second book.

And it totally ruined it for me.

No lie.

The BCC for book 2 totally gave away the ending of book 1. Blatantly. Along the lines of “now that these terrible things happened to the heroine and now that the hero hates her and is struggle to recover from these terrible things…” I stopped reading book 1 immediately. Deleted it from my Kindle. I couldn’t keep reading, knowing how it turned out.

Now, you could argue that if I’d known it would have a happy ending, I might have kept going. Maybe? It depends on how how it was described. But this BCC was so explicit that it removed too much mystery from the story.

I don’t know if the author realized, or if she and her editor fought to change it and couldn’t. But wow.

Definitely something to keep in mind.

Why I Needed a Mission Statement

Jeffe Kennedy / / Blog

BFqnq3dCQAArYBoOlder kitty and newer kitty are getting to be quite good companions for each other – very pleased to see it!

Recently I’ve been thinking about Mission Statements.

What – you don’t?

No, really. See, a fellow author asked me for a favor. It wasn’t a big favor, but I was feeling cranky about being asked. I was annoyed with this person for other reasons, for an online gaffe that the other person probably never even thought of as being rude. I never said anything about it, just fumed a little and tried to let it go. You all know how it is – you can’t get all worked up about every little thing. And I do think intention matters. It’s one thing for someone to accidentally step on your foot and another for them to deliberately grind their heel in your instep.

So, I *thought* I let it go. Until this person asked me to do something for them and I didn’t want to. And I wasn’t sure of my reasons.

There’s another side of this “helping fellow authors” thing. Julia Quinn recently said at a conference that “No one ever ruined their career helping another author.” Brenda Novak says “A high tide floats all boats.” I believe in both of these things. I think it’s important to help people and, more, I enjoy it. But I think we all know that this can go bad. There are bad apples that will take your help and then abuse you for it. There are vampires who will drain you of everything you have to give. It’s the ugly face of what is supposed to be a good and lovely enterprise. We’ve all been stung by it, I think.

Sure, we have ways of dealing. Most of us know to never give a gift with the expectation of reciprocation or even gratitude. That way the gift is given freely and it’s easier to ignore any less-than-pleasant results.

Still, after this happens a few times, when someone asks you for a favor, you can’t help but weigh it. Especially if that same person recently stepped on your foot.

This is an emotional reaction and I wanted to separate out my emotional reaction.

Thus: a Mission Statement.

When I tweeted about this, someone suggested I pick “Eat Chocolate. Drink Coffee. Write a Lot of Words.”

Which was funny – and largely accurate – but not what I was getting at.

A few years back I did this retreat weekend with some other facilitators and a bunch of sorority and fraternity members from the local campus. They were primarily the presidents and vice-presidents of their chapters. The program proved to be a fascinating one, that worked to move these leaders into focusing on their sorority’s and fraternity’s open and secret mottoes – their Mission Statements, as it were. See, every fraternity and sorority has both. For my sorority, Gamma Phi Beta, our open motto is “Founded Upon a Rock.” The letters of the sorority are an acronym for our secret motto, known only to Gamma Phi initiates.

Despite the sometimes unsavory reputation of the Greek system, these organizations were all founded with bold ideals of integrity, learning, and honor. To help guide these chapter leaders to make decisions in sync with these ideals, the program helped them think about their founding ideals.

One thing we did was work through “hypothetical issues” in small groups, as if we were on the boards of the companies involved. For example, we were the board of a pharmaceutical company and someone dies taking one of our medications. What do we do?

What was cool – all of these turned out to have been actual events. The example above was taken directly from the Tylenol poisonings in the 1980s. Those of you old enough might remember that as one of the first massive product recalls in history. It set a firm precedent. The Johnson & Johnson board members said that, at the time, the decision was easy. They looked at their Credo, which guides them to “do the right thing and act honorably” and knew exactly what to do. You can read all about it here.

The goal of this program with fraternities and sororities was to help them use their founding principles to do the same. Thus the have a compass for making decisions. It’s timely to point out that the kids who participated in/witnessed the Steubenville rape could have used similar guiding principles.

At any rate, this has been a roundabout way of describing how I came to make my own Mission Statement. So, that I would have a compass besides my bruised feelings to guide me.

As I thought about what’s important to me, I recalled a conversation I had recently about an upcoming conference. Some first-timers were nervous and I was reassuring them on details and that they could always hang with me. I remember my very first RWA conference and how I knew not one person – and how lonely I felt eating by myself next to tables full of laughing people. So I declared “Anyone can sit at my lunch table!”

After all, high school is over and in the Cafeteria of Life, we’ve all had our share of eating alone.

Once that gelled, I replied to the author asking me for a favor that amounted to no more than sitting at my table – and said yes.

It was the right thing to do.