Later in the day at the RWNZ conference, Stephanie Laurens gave a workshop on writing historical romances.
First, the good news is that the bad news isn’t so bad. When you ask a publisher how historicals are doing, he will say, “Sales are flat.” That DOESN’T mean historicals aren’t selling. In fact, they are. What he means is that the percentage of historicals being sold, compared to the whole spectrum of romance subgenres is the same as it has been. But, the whole romance market is getting bigger. In other words, if this year the publisher sells 100 romances and 30 of them are historicals, and next year he sells 200 romances, 60 of them will be historicals. The market is actually growing.
One of the big changes over the past five years, though, there’s been developing a bigger gap between the authors at the top and the rest of the crowd. This has to do with mass market distributors like Wal-Mart, etc.) They have a limited number of slots for romances, and only one goes for historicals. Naturally, that one slot is going to go to a top author “guaranteed” to sell. Now, Stephanie said that the other authors are doing well – because there are still lots of other outlets with more slots (in other words, book stores). But it’s the mass market distributors that push an author’s numbers over the top and determine whether or not a book is going to be a best seller.
On the other hand, it’s not harder to break in for a new author. In fact, with the advent of e-printing, it’s getting easier. Furthermore, (and surprising to me) the most voracious e-book readers aren’t the young kids, but the older reader. The average e-book reader’s age is 56.
OK, what is selling in historical romance? Stephanie said that medievals are not selling (Alex Logan of Grand Central Publishing, who also spoke at the conference confirmed this), unless you can put a kilt on it. What is selling right now is Regency – though that can be expanded to Georgian and Victorian as well. The boundaries are blurred. Editors are looking for story elements that stand out. Right now that’s families and groups (in other words, series), because readers love to return to familiar worlds. Stephanie suggests that you read widely; read bestsellers whose work is closest to yours. Read the best-selling lines.
One of the trends is historical romances are getting hotter. Audiences today are looking for a higher level of sensuality.
Stephanie also shared with us some information on structuring a book around word count that I’d never heard before. Mass market and commercial fiction plots are structured around blocks of 40,000 words with a block of 5000 at the beginning and end. This is why publishers come up with the word counts you see printed in their submission guidelines.
For example a novella of 50,000 words looks like this:
5000 word intro (includes inciting incident )
40k development to climax
5k denouement
An 85,000 to 90,000 mass market looks like this:
5 k intro (with inciting incident)
40k development to central turning point/black moment
40k development to climax
5k denouement
At the end of every block, you have a major turning point. Stephanie said that in terms of structure, 100,000 words is a bad length. You have either a short book written too long, or a long book written too short.
What settings are selling? Right now, because of the economy, it’s almost impossible to get book publishers to take a risk. Stephanie says everyone loves Scotland and England, but editors are shy of exotic settings right now. She said if you want to use an exotic setting, ground your story in England, then move it offshore.
Stephanie was quick to point out, though, that historical fiction and historical romance are two different beasties. Historical romance, the romance is first and foremost and history is just the backdrop. In historical fiction, history is an essential part of the story. What this means is that historical accuracy for a romance isn’t particularly important. You can bend it a bit. A popular device is to put what you changed into an author’s note at the end. But for historical fiction historical accuracy is crucial.
The question about historical accuracy led to one about the "not nice" parts of the time period. Tacky things like what women did when they had their menses. Stephanie said that with a historical romance, you're creating an escape. So leave those ugly things out.
Showing posts with label fiction. Show all posts
Showing posts with label fiction. Show all posts
Monday, September 27, 2010
Monday, September 20, 2010
Stephanie Laurens and How to Be Successful as a Writer
When I stepped out of the elevator and turned the corner to the Friday evening cocktail party at the RWNZ conference, I didn’t need to be told the party’s theme – “Romantic in Red”. For a second, I thought I’d entered the dark room to a photo lab (for those of you who remember pre-digital technology.) Red upon red.
With a “This is Stephanie,” of my friends introduced me to a tiny, vivacious, dark-haired woman and left us on our own. As we chatted, my new acquaintance finally said, “You really don’t know who I am, do you?”
“Oh, my god,” I said. “You’re THAT Stephanie.” Stephanie Laurens. The best selling author and our keynote speaker. My mind flashed back to a rodeo in Florida where Phil and I had spent the first half talking with a friendly older couple who seemed to enjoy rodeo as much as we did. Until they realized we didn’t have the foggiest idea they were the stars of a very popular country/western TV show, and then turned us off entirely.
Well, Stephanie wasn’t at all like that. She just ignored my embarrassment and went on chatting about romances and writing – the stuff we both loved. Naturally, I had to pick her brain with the one question that’s been on the top of my mind lately, “How do you stay so productive?”
She has a routine, writes daily, but the thing that stuck with me most is that all her books are planned. She knows where’s she’s going before she starts. She said it takes time to plan out the work, but the efficiency is worth it in the end. In fact, she told me she can’t afford not to plan.
End of my days of sitting down at a blank sheet of paper with an idea… At least I was headed in that direction anyway.
Stephanie’s keynote speech the next day was one of those “aha!” moments for me. Actually a bunch of aha’s. She talked about the publishing industry and the place of romance writers in it. She said that “fiction is a vehicle for the confirmation of the fundamental verities that underpin our society”. All stories, no matter what genre, are about a major theme that is important to humanity: love, justice, revenge, good against evil, etc. Underneath it all, whether “commercial” or “literary”, we’re all writing the same kind of story.
Popular fiction takes these themes and gives us affirmations that make us feel good. It moves readers at a visceral level, working under the audience’s radar.
Stephanie then gave us the history of publishing in a nutshell. What was interesting is that what we consider “mass market” publications go way back to the 18th century, with the production of cheap editions of books aimed at the general public. Charles Dickens wrote for a mass market audience. He wrote to entertain his contemporaries, not to be taught as literature in high school English classes a hundred years later.
And here’s where the light went on for me. We write books to entertain. Stephanie said, “If you want to succeed in genre fiction, engrave the word ‘entertain’ on your mind.”
“Most outsiders”, said Stephanie, “don’t get it.” They don’t understand that there are different types of fiction. The purpose defines how the author writes.
So where’s the difference?
Literary fiction is concerned with the arrangement of letters on the page and words in a sentence.
Genre fiction is about the subject. The author controls the story to best and most effectively convey what she wants to say about her subject.
Mass market (commercial) fiction is about the story. The story drives what the author writes and how she writes it. Language is important because language is the vehicle, but it's not the goal.
What’s good writing? Stephanie says there is a simple test: “Does the work achieve what it was intended to achieve?” If your goal is to entertain, you write for the mass market and you must NEVER forget that. If you keep your mind on entertaining, you are less likely to torpedo your own work.
Audiences of commercial fiction want a satisfying ending. That’s the author’s contract with them. They also have other expectations – a heroine they can identify with (one of the reasons very close third person POV works so well), a hero they can fall in love with, etc. Entertainment is all about experience. You want to express and heighten your audience’s experience. Stephanie said if you want to know what works, study the best sellers. “We are entertainers and the rules that govern entertainment are the only rules that apply.”
With a “This is Stephanie,” of my friends introduced me to a tiny, vivacious, dark-haired woman and left us on our own. As we chatted, my new acquaintance finally said, “You really don’t know who I am, do you?”
“Oh, my god,” I said. “You’re THAT Stephanie.” Stephanie Laurens. The best selling author and our keynote speaker. My mind flashed back to a rodeo in Florida where Phil and I had spent the first half talking with a friendly older couple who seemed to enjoy rodeo as much as we did. Until they realized we didn’t have the foggiest idea they were the stars of a very popular country/western TV show, and then turned us off entirely.
Well, Stephanie wasn’t at all like that. She just ignored my embarrassment and went on chatting about romances and writing – the stuff we both loved. Naturally, I had to pick her brain with the one question that’s been on the top of my mind lately, “How do you stay so productive?”
She has a routine, writes daily, but the thing that stuck with me most is that all her books are planned. She knows where’s she’s going before she starts. She said it takes time to plan out the work, but the efficiency is worth it in the end. In fact, she told me she can’t afford not to plan.
End of my days of sitting down at a blank sheet of paper with an idea… At least I was headed in that direction anyway.
Stephanie’s keynote speech the next day was one of those “aha!” moments for me. Actually a bunch of aha’s. She talked about the publishing industry and the place of romance writers in it. She said that “fiction is a vehicle for the confirmation of the fundamental verities that underpin our society”. All stories, no matter what genre, are about a major theme that is important to humanity: love, justice, revenge, good against evil, etc. Underneath it all, whether “commercial” or “literary”, we’re all writing the same kind of story.
Popular fiction takes these themes and gives us affirmations that make us feel good. It moves readers at a visceral level, working under the audience’s radar.
Stephanie then gave us the history of publishing in a nutshell. What was interesting is that what we consider “mass market” publications go way back to the 18th century, with the production of cheap editions of books aimed at the general public. Charles Dickens wrote for a mass market audience. He wrote to entertain his contemporaries, not to be taught as literature in high school English classes a hundred years later.
And here’s where the light went on for me. We write books to entertain. Stephanie said, “If you want to succeed in genre fiction, engrave the word ‘entertain’ on your mind.”
“Most outsiders”, said Stephanie, “don’t get it.” They don’t understand that there are different types of fiction. The purpose defines how the author writes.
So where’s the difference?
Literary fiction is concerned with the arrangement of letters on the page and words in a sentence.
Genre fiction is about the subject. The author controls the story to best and most effectively convey what she wants to say about her subject.
Mass market (commercial) fiction is about the story. The story drives what the author writes and how she writes it. Language is important because language is the vehicle, but it's not the goal.
What’s good writing? Stephanie says there is a simple test: “Does the work achieve what it was intended to achieve?” If your goal is to entertain, you write for the mass market and you must NEVER forget that. If you keep your mind on entertaining, you are less likely to torpedo your own work.
Audiences of commercial fiction want a satisfying ending. That’s the author’s contract with them. They also have other expectations – a heroine they can identify with (one of the reasons very close third person POV works so well), a hero they can fall in love with, etc. Entertainment is all about experience. You want to express and heighten your audience’s experience. Stephanie said if you want to know what works, study the best sellers. “We are entertainers and the rules that govern entertainment are the only rules that apply.”
Monday, August 23, 2010
Christopher Vogler, author of The Writer's Journey, at the RWNZ conference
It’s 9 o’clock on Friday night. The Harlequin/Mills & Boon “Romance in Red” cocktail party at the Romance Writers of New Zealand conference has just ended. Despite the theme, I was ill prepared for the brilliant blast of scarlet that assailed my eyes as I stepped off the elevator. One hundred women in red make quite a statement, even if, like me, you don’t drink. I grabbed my signature Coke Zero and schmoozed.
We’d all just spent the whole day at a workshop with Christopher Vogler, the author of The Writer’s Journey, so everyone had something to talk about. Thinking, hah, this could be material for at least one blog, I took copious notes.
The neat thing about Vogler was that in addition to being a delightful speaker --piercingly honest, often self-deprecating and always humorous – he also presented lots of material that wasn’t in his book. He grew up on a farm, but ended up one of the top story gurus in Hollywood – a job known as a Story Analyst, the person studio relies on to tell them whether a movie script will fly.
I’ll talk a little in later blogs about how Vogler adapted Joseph Campbell’s analysis of mythical structure to constructing fiction. For now I’ll share some of the ideas and principles of storytelling that Vogler is passionate about.
Vogler strongly believes in the power of stories. “Stories have healing properties,” he said. He emphasized that he thinks stories take on a life of their own. What happens in a story needs to follow “what the story needs”.
“It’s better to be clear than pretty.” Vogler said that in this applies to the tendency to be so poetic the audience can’t really figure out what’s going on. For me, this brought back memories of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001. Sure it’s a movie landmark, but I could never make heads nor tails of it.
He talked about reading as an altered state of consciousness and used the example (with slides) of how molecules of unmagnetized iron fresh out of the forge look (randomly distributed) and how they look after they’ve been magnetized (all lined up in neat lines positive charge to negative charge.) He said the unmagnetized condition is like the reader’s mind when they open a book. The magnetized condition is what the writer wants to happen after the reader’s mind is exposed to the results of the writer’s craft.
Later, as Vogler talked, it became clear to me why we want to “magnetize” the reader. First, successful stories resonate with the reader. One of the ways they do that is by touching on universal truths we all share, no matter what our culture. Another is through the emotions the story evokes. As writers, we magnetize our readers through the themes we choose (those universal truths) and through making our readers experience the same emotions our characters feel.
Another way is how we orient our readers to the story. Readers have an instinctive feel for story patterns. They know, at the very least, there’s going to be a beginning, a middle and an end, as Aristotle put it. Today we use more sophisticated words, such as introduction or set-up, development, crisis, climax, turning points, black moments. Vogler’s Writer’s Journey introduces a parallel way to structure your work based on the stages of a quest. But no matter which structure you use to label the parts or stages of your story, readers have an instinctive feel for “this is where we are”. A story that lacks or hides that structure throws the reader, one of the reason, I guess, why films like Pulp Fiction are so disorienting until you take the time to figure them out. Structure guides our readers through the story, giving them clues as to what to expect next. The successful story teller takes what they expect and turns it on its head in a way that the reader says, “Oh, wow, I should have seen that coming.” (One of the reasons why in a really successful work, readers go back and read it again.)
Chris Vogler also gave some advice about the successful pitch: “Make the person you’re pitching to think it’s about them.” He gave the example of pitching to a top level Hollywood woman producer: “It’s a story about a woman who’s the most powerful person in the world.” The story sold.
His advice makes me realize how important it is with a query to know as much as you can about the person you’re querying and really tailor your query to them.
OK. I’m up at 6:00 am tomorrow for a special session in which you submit the first page of your manuscript in an open session, someone reads it out loud, and the editor/agent critiques it before the whole group (a little scarey, but it’s a good way to learn). So that’s it for tonight.
We’d all just spent the whole day at a workshop with Christopher Vogler, the author of The Writer’s Journey, so everyone had something to talk about. Thinking, hah, this could be material for at least one blog, I took copious notes.
The neat thing about Vogler was that in addition to being a delightful speaker --piercingly honest, often self-deprecating and always humorous – he also presented lots of material that wasn’t in his book. He grew up on a farm, but ended up one of the top story gurus in Hollywood – a job known as a Story Analyst, the person studio relies on to tell them whether a movie script will fly.
I’ll talk a little in later blogs about how Vogler adapted Joseph Campbell’s analysis of mythical structure to constructing fiction. For now I’ll share some of the ideas and principles of storytelling that Vogler is passionate about.
Vogler strongly believes in the power of stories. “Stories have healing properties,” he said. He emphasized that he thinks stories take on a life of their own. What happens in a story needs to follow “what the story needs”.
“It’s better to be clear than pretty.” Vogler said that in this applies to the tendency to be so poetic the audience can’t really figure out what’s going on. For me, this brought back memories of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001. Sure it’s a movie landmark, but I could never make heads nor tails of it.
He talked about reading as an altered state of consciousness and used the example (with slides) of how molecules of unmagnetized iron fresh out of the forge look (randomly distributed) and how they look after they’ve been magnetized (all lined up in neat lines positive charge to negative charge.) He said the unmagnetized condition is like the reader’s mind when they open a book. The magnetized condition is what the writer wants to happen after the reader’s mind is exposed to the results of the writer’s craft.
Later, as Vogler talked, it became clear to me why we want to “magnetize” the reader. First, successful stories resonate with the reader. One of the ways they do that is by touching on universal truths we all share, no matter what our culture. Another is through the emotions the story evokes. As writers, we magnetize our readers through the themes we choose (those universal truths) and through making our readers experience the same emotions our characters feel.
Another way is how we orient our readers to the story. Readers have an instinctive feel for story patterns. They know, at the very least, there’s going to be a beginning, a middle and an end, as Aristotle put it. Today we use more sophisticated words, such as introduction or set-up, development, crisis, climax, turning points, black moments. Vogler’s Writer’s Journey introduces a parallel way to structure your work based on the stages of a quest. But no matter which structure you use to label the parts or stages of your story, readers have an instinctive feel for “this is where we are”. A story that lacks or hides that structure throws the reader, one of the reason, I guess, why films like Pulp Fiction are so disorienting until you take the time to figure them out. Structure guides our readers through the story, giving them clues as to what to expect next. The successful story teller takes what they expect and turns it on its head in a way that the reader says, “Oh, wow, I should have seen that coming.” (One of the reasons why in a really successful work, readers go back and read it again.)
Chris Vogler also gave some advice about the successful pitch: “Make the person you’re pitching to think it’s about them.” He gave the example of pitching to a top level Hollywood woman producer: “It’s a story about a woman who’s the most powerful person in the world.” The story sold.
His advice makes me realize how important it is with a query to know as much as you can about the person you’re querying and really tailor your query to them.
OK. I’m up at 6:00 am tomorrow for a special session in which you submit the first page of your manuscript in an open session, someone reads it out loud, and the editor/agent critiques it before the whole group (a little scarey, but it’s a good way to learn). So that’s it for tonight.
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