Tag: writing advice

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.

Addicted to Advice

Jeffe Kennedy / / Blog

Sunrise through my office window. I’m a lucky girl.

I have a confession to make and I’m hoping you all won’t think less of me for this.

I am addicted to advice columns.

I know, I know. It’s rubber-necking entertainment. Probably feeds my lowest voyeuristic cravings. But I love it.

The letters from the people seeking advice give such fascinating glimpses into the lives of others. It interests the same part of me that likes to go walking late on summer evenings so I can catch glimpses through people’s windows. (Yeah – watch out for me. A friend of mine calls it Caveat-Non-Drape-Puller.) I think this is the same part of me that writes from characters, first and foremost. I love seeing how people think, feel and struggle. How their lives are shaped by their decisions.

I call it research.

😀

So, I’m sharing today my favorite advice columnists. This topic is on my mind because today is Wednesday, which means I get a new Dan Savage! He might be my favorite of the lot. I actually learn from his perspective. Most of them, I’m less interested in the advice than I am the question. Dan Savage once pointed out (graphic sexual advice to follow – skip if you’re delicate about such things) that giving oral sex to a man is much more difficult and strenuous than giving it to a woman. That one remark opened my eyes to so many things.

So he leads my list:

Dan Savage http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/SavageLove

Carolyn Hax http://www.seattlepi.com/lifestyle/advice/

Dear Prudence http://www.slate.com/articles/life/dear_prudence.html

Cary Tennis http://www.salon.com/topic/since_you_asked/

Ask Amy http://www.chicagotribune.com/features/tribu/askamy/

Dear Abby http://www.uexpress.com/dearabby/

Lately, however, I’ve been disappointed in Abby’s extremely conservative advice. I sometimes wonder if, by sticking to her mother’s schtick, she got stuck in the 1950’s. I might drop her soon.

Any good ones I missed? Oh, and feel free to hit me up to discuss particular letters or advice. One of my favorite things to do.

How Do You Know When You’re “There”?

Jeffe Kennedy / / Blog

Yesterday, I ran across some promo for the Clarion program, which teaches Science Fiction and Fantasy Writing. I read through the requirements, the FAQs. And I seriously considered doing it for a few minutes.

An intensive course in SFF writing that has turned out people like Octavia Butler, Marjorie Liu and Vonda McIntyre? Oh yes, yes, yes. I started contemplating how I could take six weeks of leave from my job – and, not incidentally, my salary – and from the man and fur family. After all, the blog I read talking about how fab the program is, said it required sacrifices. Uh yeah – that pricey tuition and the non-refundable $50 application fee.

And then I realized, erf, that the workshop would interfere with me attending RomCon and RWA National. Not to mention the release of my own fantasy novel the first week of July.

Then it hit me – what the hell was I thinking?

It reminds me of when I was a brand-new grad student. I’d graduated from college in May and showed up at my new school in August, to start my PhD in physiology. With great excitement, I’d pored over the course offerings and had picked out (way too many) classes I figured I should start with. I met with the department head, to discuss this class schedule, my research plan and my Teaching Assistant assignment. He told me, that, given my excellent background, they wanted to put me in charge of the entire physiology lab program. Stunned, I looked at my list of proposed courses and told him I’d been planning to take the physiology course and lab. He laughed at me and said I was way past that.

And they put me in charge.

Now, I won’t say that I didn’t learn a lot as I went along. The old saying about the teacher being one step ahead of the student is not far off the truth. Still, it turned out that I knew more than I thought I did.

The rest I learned by doing.

It’s tempting to think that the fab writing workshop will hand us the keys and open the doors. I’m an absolute believer in ongoing education, too. The workshops also have a vested interest in convincing you that you need them if you want to succeed. Still, there comes a time when you have to simply plunge in and learn by doing.

And doing.

And doing.

Accept no substitute.

The “No One Edits Me” Syndrome

Jeffe Kennedy / / Blog

This isn’t a great photo, but I wanted to show you all what a pretty blue this pinon jay is. He doesn’t much like me pointing the camera at him, though.

For today’s installment on the How My Day Job Has Made Me a Better Writer series, I want to talk about Quality Assurance (QA).

I once saw an interview with Anne Rice, who has long been one of my very favorite authors. This was right around the peak of her career. After The Witching Hour, when the Lestat books were oh-so-good. She was riding high, confiding to the televised audience that she’d been given a phenomenal amount of money for her next six books. She even said how much it was, as her contract forbade her to do, so that we would all know we could do it, too. At one point, she gave the interviewer a look and said, “Oh, believe me – No One edits ME.”

I’ve never forgotten it.

Especially as I slogged through her next books, each worse than the last, chock full of rambling and irrelevant information. I wondered what the hell she was thinking. Now I understand what her problem was.

She didn’t spend years in a corporate day job.

I think a lot of us have this idea about our work, whatever work it might be, that there’s something holy and perfect about it. And, if someone finds a flaw, this is somehow a personal indictment. When we’re young, especially, it’s almost unbearable to receive criticism of our work. Each point feels like a little flesh wound and we’re terrified of bleeding out.

In a work environment, you grow out of this really damn fast. Or you don’t succeed.

My firm does environmental consulting. I usually say I’m a data-jockey, but a seat-mate on an airplane recently corrected me and said, “No, you’re much more, because you understand policy. You look at the numbers, but then you bring the understanding of how to apply them in real-world situations.” That’s likely apropos of nothing, but I thought it was an interesting insight.

But that is what we do. I work with a lot of really smart people and we’re paid to give good advice. Our CEO often remarks that we have practically no inventory – the value of the company rests entirely in the brains of the staff. If our numbers aren’t spot-on or our reasoning isn’t sound, then we have no product.

QA is king.

We have levels upon levels of QA. People read, they spot check, they read again. If a client questions anything, we go over it again. Exhaustively. Believe me, if you ever had any ego tied up with being edited, you lose it. They’re not flesh wounds. This is people telling you when you have spinach in your teeth before the big photo shoot. Edit me – please!

On one of my writers’ loops lately, someone commented that an editor had asked for a revise and resubmit. She said she didn’t agree with the editor’s take and so she planned to self-publish it. I thought of my current client, who asks for all kinds of revisions I don’t agree with and how I do them anyway. Now, granted, this is my client’s report and not “the book of my heart,” but it is also my job. That’s what they pay me to do.

It occurs to me that, if I want them to pay me to write, then it becomes my editor’s book, too. And my publisher’s book. If I want them to invest in me and my book, then we all work together to make it a great product. As a writer, I have no real inventory. All the value is in my head. Without careful polishing, I have no product.

That’s just good business.

How My Day Job Has Made Me a Better Writer

Jeffe Kennedy / / Blog

Writing is a funny business.

We all know this. It’s a funky combination of emo artistry, social climbing, and snake-oil salesmanship. Now with the internet, we all get a ringside seat to the various shenanigans. The word “professionalism” gets bandied about a lot. Unfortunately, the people who seem to use it the most, often wielding it like a club to silence detractors, are the least professional at all.

From time to time I’ve bemoaned my corporate day job. For a number of years now I’ve been working towards supporting myself as a full-time writer. I’m lucky to work for a company whose mission I believe in and who treats me well. I’ve been with them coming up on 15 years. I’ve learned a great deal over the years, about dealing with colleagues, with clients and all the delicate balances of the corporate world.

I’ve realized recently that, as much as I’ve wished I’d spent the last 15 years writing instead of in this career, what I’ve learned will make me a better writer overall. So, I’m going to spend the next week or so exploring some of these lessons. Things like:

1) Understanding billable hours and being good at knowing how long something will take to do.

2) Taking advantage of leave time, because you need it.

3) Accountability and working with other people.

4) Working when you don’t want to.

5) Professional relationships – remembering the boundaries

6) Teamwork – dealing with edits and QA/QC

Let me know if you all have other topic ideas. I might even host some guest bloggers, if you have a particular tale to tell along these lines.

Should be fun!

Expertitis

Jeffe Kennedy / / Blog

My family jokes that David and I spend a lot of time at Christmas offering “tech support.” We help everyone set up their new devices and work on their lists of things that haven’t been working right. They like to say that every question brings them one step closer to us booting them out the door, but we don’t mind. It’s good to be helpful.

And, at least we can filter out the easy stuff from what needs to be advanced to the experts.

Back when I was in graduate school, lo these many moons ago, one of my professors had a sign on his office door that read something like “Experts don’t really know more than anyone else. They’re just better prepared and have slides.”

I tried to Google this for a source, but had little luck. The quip has been scrambled about many times. And, of course, this version is obviously quite dates. Slides?? Do you all remember making slides for presentations – where you’d photograph pages, develop the film (special slide film), cut the square you wanted from long strips and glue them into the little slide frames? It took DAYS to prepare for a presentation. And then you had to cart those slide carousels around… Now we fiddle with our Power Point presentations up until the last minute and simply plug in the laptop. Technology is such a wonderful thing.

ANYWAY.

My point is, I’ve always remembered this sign. And the wisdom of it.

This particular professor was very good at giving advice in a very new field at the time, of environmental toxicology. There wasn’t a lot of data yet. Most environmental toxicology works through chronic exposure. It’s difficult to draw a line from a few childhood years spent paddling beneath the paper mill to the cancer death 40 years later. In another hundred years, we might have some really good data. But I digress, yet again. What this professor could do was bring a wealth of experience in science and explain concepts in a way that people understood and could get excited about.

He also had a team of grad students to make really good slides.

So, though he had the critical thinking and clarity of self to recognize that as an “expert” he wasn’t really all that special, that very perspective made him really good at knowing what he didn’t know and gave him the drive to fill those gaps.

The flip side of this is the people who consider themselves experts without this wealth of experience.

I see this a lot in social media. Writers with no publication credits, or paltry ones, offering writing advice. Writers who get hired as editors with digital publishing houses who then start offering editing tips. People starting up digital publishing houses from their living rooms and weighing in on the state of publishing.

In a way, the interwebs are the great leveler. Quality of content is all. So, arguably, good advice is good advice and will win out. However, a lot of stuff out there floats to the top and it’s not exactly cream.

It’s a disease, really. Expertitis. Born of our longing to be vindicated, to be legitimate in a business that rarely offers these rewards. How do you quantify a successful writer, editor, agent or publisher? The recognition of our peers is a fickle thing. Money follows the trends, not necessarily the quality. In many ways, I suppose we have to crown ourselves, because no one else will.

But that takes some clarity and critical thinking.

It’s really not about the slides.

Dreck and Melodrama

Jeffe Kennedy / / Blog

A photo of me at Bandelier National Monument this last weekend. The cliff dwellings are particularly fun to see, since you can climb up into them.

It’s interesting to sit in these caves and imagine being the person who lived and loved there. The life expectancy of the Ancient Peublo People (we are not to say “Anasazi” anymore, for those who know that term, because it’s not PC. Who knew??) who lived in this canyon was an average of 35 years. Being a good ten years older than that gave me a bit of pause.

We have such a luxury of time in our lives today.

Yesterday I posted about becoming a better writer and Ann Patchett’s analogy of cleaning the pipes. A corollary to this way of thinking, that only occurred to me later in the day, is that those early works just may never be any good. Those “searing works of unendurable melodrama” that we have to clear out of our systems may have to stay in the sludge heap of hazardous waste. Some stuff is so toxic, or just plain irredeemable, that it can’ t be purified, even by dint of repeated revisions.

I’ve worked with wastewater treatment plants – believe me, I know.

Not everything makes it into the effluent. A whole lot of stuff has to be picked out and discarded.

None of us really wants to face this possibility, that the novel we slaved over might, well, stink. Because we devoted so much time to it we believe on a fundamental level that the time invested automatically gives the thing value. It does, but not in the readers-are-going-to-gobble-this-up way. Instead it might be in the Okay-good-thing-that’s-out-of-my-system way. Sometimes the value is all in learning to be able t set something aside.

We hate this because it’s tempting to view the time as wasted. If we can’t sell the product, then we squandered the effort. This kind of thinking is never accurate. Knowing what not to do can be more informative than accidentally hitting gold.

And as for time? We have such a bounty of it.