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I love doing small things to recognize holidays—even St. Patrick’s Day.

But I went too far when my daughter was in kindergarten.

Remembering the tradition that involved the leprechaun playing harmless pranks on children, I put different things in unusual places in our house while the kids slept. So my daughter’s toys went into the bathroom, her backpack was moved into my son’s room, several chairs were moved upside down, and my high heels were placed prominently in my daughter’s room.

It backfired.

My 5 year old daughter came into my room, shaking and crying, in the middle of the night. The leprechaun had been in her room! She felt positively threatened, invaded, and scared. She thought my (very large) high heels belonged to the leprechaun. It boggled my mind that she’d envisioned a malevolent, cross-dressing, giant leprechaun in her room.

My son? Snorted when he saw the leprechaun mischief and rolled his eyes a little at his mom’s nonsense.

Where I went wrong with my St. Patrick’s Day fun was that I didn’t take my audience into account. This was the SAME daughter who’d wanted strong assurance the year before that the Easter bunny limited his activities to the downstairs. She wanted no large rabbits skipping around her room. Having a mischievous leprechaun invade her space was terrifying. I could have done this trick with my son, but not my daughter.

I hate the rules that seem to crop up from editors, agents, and other writers—we all are creative people who need to do our own thing…and want to do our own thing.

But I think it’s incredibly important for us to know our audience…especially if we’re writing genre fiction.

If we don’t there are definitely risks involved. The biggest are that we won’t get our book published at all and that we’ll alienate readers who might skip buying our next book, if we do get the book published.

Let’s say I write a cozy mystery that involves graphic depiction of a child’s murder. Then I ship it off to my editor, Emily, at Penguin’s Berkley Prime Crime.

First of all, she’d think I’d lost my mind. She’d tell me to take it all out. It’s not a cozy mystery at all—it could possibly work for a police procedural or a thriller, but not a cozy. And I’d have missed my deadline and messed up their production schedule because I’d have to do a major rewrite. And I’ve labeled myself “difficult to work with” because I’ve cost my publisher a lot of wasted time.

Let’s say that somehow Emily has lost her mind, too and the book gets published (leaving out the whole editorial board at Penguin…they’d have to be crazy, too.) But let’s say it does happen and it hits the shelf.

Berkley Prime Crime is associated with cozy mysteries. The book would be shelved with cozies. It would have my name on it (my Riley name) and I’m associated with cozies. And my readers, who I’m starting to build a relationship with, buy my books—expecting a book without graphic depictions of violence.

The readers? They’re furious. They’ve been tricked into buying a book that isn’t what they want or were promised. It was specifically sold as a cozy and it’s not a cozy and they’re mad. They take our their disappointment and their anger at wasting money out on me with negative reviews at Amazon, GoodReads, LibraryThing, and DorothyL. It might not be career-ending, but boy, it doesn’t help.

I saw it happen to another cozy writer on the DorothyL list—the readers were absolutely livid with the writer’s departure from cozy standards.

So what have I accomplished? I haven’t done anything to enhance my industry reputation or readership.

It’s important to write what you want to write—but be careful where you send it. If it’s edgy, it needs to be sent to editors and publishers who publish the type of content you’ve written. Don’t think you’ve written a rule-breaking exception to the genre you’re targeting if the publisher doesn’t print stories like yours. If you’ve written horror, don’t send it to a thriller editor. If you’ve written erotica, don’t send it to Harlequin Presents and think that they’re just going to ignore the fact their guidelines weren’t followed.

Finding the right publisher for your manuscript:

Know your genre. What are you writing? Is it horror, fantasy, sci fi, thriller, lit fiction?

Read the genre. Enough to be familiar with it.

Go to the bookstore and spend some time there. Get a bunch of recently published books in your genre. It’s usually fairly easy to tell the gist of the story by flipping through.

Check online. Look at the publisher’s guidelines. See what kinds of things they’re looking for. Now they even have lists of what they’re not looking for.

If you’re already a published writer, making a big genre change, consider a pen name. You can always cross-promote under your real name–mentioning each time that the new book is a departure from your others.

Happy St. Patrick’s Day everyone! :)

My husband and I had a rare night with no kids last weekend…our son was camping and our daughter was spending the night with a friend. We didn’t exactly know what to do with ourselves with no kids, so we decided to go to the movies and see Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland.

The 7:00 movie was full, so we bought tickets online for the 9:40 show. It was in 3-D (and it was a Saturday night), so we wanted to go early and get a good seat.

I encouraged my husband to take a book with him so he could read while he waited and I’d take a notebook.

“We’ll look like geeks,” he said.

I completely acknowledged that fact. But then, I’ve always been a nerd.

We arrived at the theater and found some seats. My husband said, “We’re the oldest people here.”

I said, “No way!” Then I looked around and saw that, yes, we were—by FAR—the oldest people there.

I owned the fact that I was a geek. Being the oldest person in a room? That hadn’t happened very often to me. I was so sensitive to it that when my husband asked (about 5 or 6 times during the movie), “What did she/he say?” and I was hollering in his ear, “She said…” I thought about our age. And the fact that my husband had gone to way too many hearing-damaging live concerts as a teenager.

In my books, my characters are really not on a journey of self-awareness or realization. They do make discoveries about themselves and other characters, but the discoveries are not integral to the main plot—finding out the murderer is.

But I read many books where the protagonist is making self-discoveries that affect the course of his or her life. In fact, the internal conflict these characters face is frequently the major source of conflict in the book.

How does the character react to these self-realizations? And how are we, as readers, kept in the loop as they’re happening?

As a reader, I’ve noticed this self-discovery being revealed through:

Internal monologue—Maybe this is most noticeable in first person POV, but works fine in 3rd, too. I’ll admit to only being patient with internal monologue just so far. If it stretches over too many paragraphs, I usually lose interest until it’s really written well.

The character’s actions—Here the character’s shift in perspective is revealed through his actions and demonstrate his self-discovery. The protagonist finally stands up to his father. The protagonist quits the uninspiring day job. The character joins AA or attacks his problems head-on, or retreats from his problems altogether.

Sidekicks (reacting through dialogue)—Sidekicks can be useful for filling our reader in (in a natural way) on our character’s thoughts and feelings. If our protagonist has a close friend that they confide in, then we can relate our character’s progress of self-discovery to the reader, in the protagonist’s own words, through dialogue.

Do your stories concentrate on a character’s self-discovery? How do you reveal it to the readers?

For some reason, it took me a long time to figure out what worked for me and what didn’t with my writing.

I kept trying to use techniques that other writers I knew found useful.

Sometimes I thought up new approaches to writing a book and tried them out.

Finally, after failing miserably trying these different things, I discovered what worked. And now that I know, I’m not deviating too much off of that.

What works for me: (but not for everybody!)

Getting an idea—usually about the victim.
Mulling the idea over to see if it’s viable.
Writing a very short blurb about it—like back cover copy.
I look at the back cover copy to see if the story idea makes sense.
I come up with the characters that might want to murder this particular type of victim.
Why would my sleuth get involved with this? Is her involvement realistic?
I start shooting through the first draft. I plan for the next day before I stop (short plans…no outlines.)
If I get stuck at a point in the story, I skip it and jump forward to another section of the book (marking the point I defected with highlighter so I can return to it later.)
I don’t stop for anything—not research, not chapter breaks, not anything.
Finish the first draft.

What I’ve tried before that hasn’t worked so well:

Outlines. And outlines seem to work really well for half the writers I know and seem to mess up the other half. I get messed up. I overthink the text, try to stay the course, and end up with very academic-sounding prose that isn’t my natural voice.

Working through a block. I’ve wrestled with points in the story where I’ve gotten stuck until I’m sick of the book. I’d try working it from different angles, try just writing something. Ick. For me, it’s better to work on a completely different section of the book and come back to the problem area later (sort of like taking a test.) It managed to screw up my momentum if I stopped and picked at it.

Writing nearly every section of the book out of order. Not too bad on the creativity end of things, but when you’re putting the scenes in order and trying to write in transitions? It was a nightmare for me. Now I just write out of order when I’m truly stuck on a section or I’m in the mood to write a scene with a different tone.

Stopping to research. As Alan mentioned in his excellent post on Friday, research and the first draft can be a bad combination. I get so easily distracted online.

Setting up a particular time of the day to write. If anything came up and I couldn’t write during that scheduled time, then I waited until the next day to write. I get a lot more done if I just go with the flow and write when I have a chance.

Putting in chapter breaks as I go. This REALLY messes me up. I think it makes me start looking at the technical side of things (formatting) before I’m done with the creative end.

Have you figured out what works for you? Are you still trying different approaches to writing a book?

“A midlist author is one whose books are well received but have failed to make a commercial breakthrough; whose work sells solidly but unspectacularly, who’s well known within the writing community but the majority of book buyers have never heard his name.”

— David Armstrong, “How Not to Write a Novel: Confessions of a Midlist Author,” 2003

Some people say that midlist doesn’t apply to genre fiction writers—that we’re our own species altogether. It’s true that publishers have their own set of expectations with a genre book. There’s an established audience for the book. Plus, it’s easy to project sales by comparing the novel with similar books in the genre.

But midlist and genre writers do still face some of the same questions from aspiring writers and readers:

Could I make a living from my books? Wellllll….I wouldn’t quit the day job. I think you can get to a point, though, where you have a good backlist of books with your name on it (you’re collecting royalty checks on those) and you’re continuing to produce books (at least one a year, if not more) that you can get a nice income. I’m not there yet, myself. :)

“Should I know who you are?”

No. Unless you’re an avid cozy mystery reader, then there’s no way you’d know me out of all the other writers in the store who aren’t bestsellers. But it’s a question that always really rattles me. I think it’s because of the person asking the question—they think they should know you. So they feel uncomfortable and it’s a feeling that’s contagious.

The times that someone does know who I am, there has usually been 1) a local write-up with pictures that coincides with 2) me looking as horrible as possible after finishing yardwork.

What’s nice about the midlist? You’re not making so much money from your advances that you have to sell an extraordinarily high number of books for the publisher to reach a sell-through.

What should a midlister keep an eye on? : Sales. It’s not a favorite thing for many authors to watch—we’re not usually business people. But, as literary agent Kristin Nelson put it, success as a midlister

… also depends on where they are in the midlist. There are different levels—the consistently-selling midlister versus the midlister who is now having declining sales for each subsequent project.

Consistent sales are a good thing. :)

For me, writing is something I’d be doing even if I weren’t making money at it. And, really, I think that the fun of it, the challenge,and even the frustration involved in writing should be what spurs us on. Unless we really hit the big time, our biggest reward will probably be the feeling of satisfaction we get from the writing itself.

This is a meme that’s made the rounds but I thought it made a good point about character perspective—and maybe getting another character’s second opinion on our protagonist’s point of view.

In an amazing feat of synchronicity, Elspeth Antonelli ran the exact meme on her own excellent blog yesterday, so I’ll link to her here.

I’m editing this for space, but you can see the entire Dog Diary vs. Cat Diary here.

The Dog’s Diary

8:00 am – Dog food! My favorite thing!
9:30 am – A car ride! My favorite thing!
9:40 am – A walk in the park! My favorite thing!
10:30 am – Got rubbed and petted! My favorite thing!
12:00 pm – Milk bones! My favorite thing!
1:00 pm – Played in the yard! My favorite thing!

The Cat’s Diary

Day 983 of My Captivity

My captors continue to taunt me with bizarre little dangling objects. They dine lavishly on fresh meat, while the other inmates and I are fed hash or some sort of dry nuggets. Although I make my contempt for the rations perfectly clear, I nevertheless must eat something in order to keep up my strength.

The only thing that keeps me going is my dream of escape. In an attempt to disgust them, I once again vomit on the carpet. Today I decapitated a mouse and dropped its headless body at their feet. I had hoped this would strike fear into their hearts, since it clearly demonstrates my capabilities. However, they merely made condescending comments about what a “good little hunter” I am. Bast**ds!

**********************************************

I don’t know about you, but when I read I usually tend to identify with the story’s protagonist. That can be pretty hard to do—authors sometimes make protagonists intentionally unlikeable.

But usually, I’m the #1 fan/buddy of whatever protagonist I’m currently reading. I’ve even read books where I’m on pins and needles worrying whether a criminal protagonist is going to escape from the authorities.

One of my favorite techniques is when an author pulls the rug out from under me. I can have so much tunnel vision as a reader that I’ll get totally sold on the protagonist’s perceptions and perspectives. The way they see the world of their novel is the way I do, too.

When an author suddenly throws a scene at me where the protagonist’s views are challenged or even derided by another character? I’m totally thrown. It’s like I’ve been seeing life through the dog’s eyes and now I’m introduced to the cat’s point of view.

Whom do I believe? The protagonist is my friend! I’ve been looking at the novel’s world through his eyes the whole time. Does he have poor judgment? Can I trust his opinions and perceptions?

What’s the purpose of the technique? To add some complexity, uncertainty, and a degree of conflict to a story.

Have you ever used an unreliable narrator or protagonist?