Chuck Palahniuk

January 10, 2010

In my last post, I implied by pothole that Chuck Pahlaniuk is a poet. He is — at least more than he’s a novel-length plotmaster.

If you’re a regular reader, you know that Novel Dog focuses on macroscopic story elements: plot, reader connection to character, elements that make a story satisfying. You need to read most or all of a novel to assess this sort of thing, so it’s the hardest for a fiction writer to learn.

But not so much on language or description around here, or anything else that you can grasp in a paragraph. Those are the skills that are easiest to learn. As the mathematicians say, “that which is easy is not worth doing,” so I’ll let you learn those skills somewhere else.

(Meanwhile, Dan McMinn’s writing blog divides its posts into ideas on words, phrases, sentences, paragraphs, short stories, chapters, novels, and series. Cool idea.

Also cool is his “sentence pyramid,” seen here.)

But today, I want to tell you what I learned from Chuck Pahlaniuk.

I found him like a lot of his fans. I think the “Gateway to Chuck” is the movie Fight Club, which knocked me out — so I read the book, then his other books.

His novels are a mix of beautiful poetic rhythm and over-the-top gonzo insanity. I can’t describe them very well, so I’ll just show you the opening of Fight Club:

Tyler gets me a job as a waiter, after that Tyler’s pushing a gun in my mouth and saying, the first step to eternal life is you have to die. For a long time though, Tyler and I were best friends. People are always asking, did I know about Tyler Durden.

The barrel of the gun pressed against the back of my throat, Tyler says, “We really won’t die.”

With my tongue I can feel the silencer holes we drilled into the barrel of the gun. Most of the noise a gunshot makes is expanding gases, and there’s the tiny sonic boom a bullet makes because it travels so fast. To make a silencer, you just drill holes in the barrel of the gun, a lot of holes. This lets the gas escape and slows the bullet to below the speed of sound.

You drill the holes wrong and the gun will blow off your hand.

“This isn’t really death,” Tyler says. “We’ll be legend. We won’t grow old.”

Chuck describes his style as “minimalist.” I could look it up… but he saved me the trouble. Chuck (I like his writing so much, and I’ve seen him read often enough here in Seattle, that I feel compelled to call him by his first name) described minimalism in Stranger Than Fiction. He begins like this:

When you study minimalism in Tom Spanbauer’s workshop, the first story you read is Amy Hempel’s “The Harvest.” Next you read Mark Richard’s story “Strays.” After that, you’re ruined.

I love quoting Chuck Palahniuk! I could do it all day. It also tickles me to see a talented guy like him get so goofy over Spanbauer and Hempel. He goes on, getting to the good stuff:

To demonstrate minimalism, students sit around Spanbauer’s kitchen table for ten weeks taking apart “The Harvest.”

The first aspect you study is what Tom calls “horses.” The metaphor is — if you drive a wagon from Utah to California, you use the same horses the whole way. Substitute the word “themes” or “choruses” and you get the idea. In minimalism, the story is a symphony, building and building, but never losing the original melody line. All characters and scenes, they all illustrate some aspect of the story’s theme.

Reminds me of the gold in Goldfinger. In Fight Club, says I, it’s death and destruction.

The next aspect Tom calls “burnt tongue.” A way of saying something, but saying it wrong, twisting it to slow down the reader. Force the reader to read close, maybe read twice, not just skim along a surface of images, short-cut adverbs, and cliches.

Ouch… did you notice “burnt tongue” in the first paragraph of Fight Club, up there? Chuck is always doing this. His phrasing is almost awkward — almost looks incorrect, though if you heard it spoken you might not think so. Try this sentence as an example:

What else you learn about minimalism includes “recording angel.” This means writing without passing judgement. Nothing is fed to the reader as “fat” or “happy.” You can only describe actions and appearances in a way that makes a judgement occur in the reader’s mind. Whatever it is, you unpack it into the details that will occur in the reader’s mind.

That’s running a little deeper than “show, don’t tell.” The reason is the same. If you tell the readers something, they’ve no reason to believe you. But if you “show,” if you describe the details of your story’s reality as a “recording angel” or a “transparent eyeball,” the readers will draw their own conclusions.

And you’ll have tremendous authority as an author. Because readers will always believe their own conclusions.

So, we’ve covered “horses” and “burnt tongue” and “recording angel.” Now, writing “on the body.”

Hempel shows how a story doesn’t have to be some constant stream of blah-blah-blah to bully the reader into paying attention. You don’t have to hold the reader by both ears and ram every moment down their throat. Instead, story can be a succession of smelly, tasty, touchable details. What Tom Spanbauer and Gordon Lish call “going on the body,” to give the reader a sympathetic physical reaction, to involve the reader on a gut level.

If you read on in Fight Club, you’ll find “With a gun stuck in your mouth and the barrel of the gun between your teeth, you can only talk in vowels.”

And again, with burnt tongue: “Tyler and me at the edge of the roof, the gun in my mouth, I’m wondering how clean this gun is.”

This is Chuck in a plug for Borders. He rattles off some of his favorites. (He confesses his love for Amy here, too.)

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Posted by Steve White

Suspense is a Bridge

December 15, 2009

Here is a boring piece of fiction.

In a minute, I’m going to ask you to make it more suspenseful… and you’re going to do it wrong.

Jane Hemingway marched with purpose down Wilshire, past a flower shop, on the way to the post office. After a week-long tech conference in Hawaii, she was almost back in the swing of her life. Just a few errands to run — pick up a week’s worth of mail, for instance — and her normal rhythm would be restored.

Rhythm was what she liked. Steady, repetitive, secure, safe, like a metronome beating out her days. Writing code took all of her mental energy. Irregularities of schedule and unforeseen events distracted her, stressed her out, burning ergs of brain-fuel better used on her programming. She worked hard to eliminate those irregularities. She had a very low tolerance for stress.

Years of the steady removal of distraction had made her who she was. She kept her dark hair cut short, so it required no care. She wore no makeup. Her wardrobe consisted of six flower-print dresses of various colors, chosen so she could dress herself each morning without thinking. She owned a single pair of shoes.

She stopped a few steps past the flower shop. Her mother loved tulips. It would be a nice way to say hello, and after all, she never called her mother as often as she should. Jane backtracked and entered the shop, ringing the bell on the door.

You think you’re a writer? Okay, go ahead — make those four paragraphs more suspenseful. Increase the tension!

How would you do it? More active verbs? Strike some adjectives and prepositional phrases? Or would you (this is my favorite) cut the whole walking-down-the-street scene? Do we need this stinking thing?

Let’s say we do. For our story, the reader needs to know this character and this exposition (she’s an eccentric programmer, close to her mom, physical appearance, etc), because it will all be important later.

Enough, already. Here’s where you went wrong.

You fiddled with verbs and adjectives, or tightened sentences, or tried it in present tense, or maybe first person.

You got distracted by language, and forgot about storytelling.

There are lots of great storytellers who aren’t very good with language. Vince Flynn and Dan Brown come to mind.

(There are great storytellers who are good with language, of course… and plenty of poets who suck at storytelling. And, rarely, successful writers who can do neither.)

So let’s use our skill as storytellers, rather than “writers,” to fix these tedious but necessary paragraphs.

How?

By not changing the paragraphs at all.

Here, check this out.

From his vantage point on the roof, Sven had a clear view of Wilshire Boulevard. Through the cross-hairs of his high-resolution sniper scope, he spotted his target.

Short dark hair, flower print dress. That was her, all right. She was still walking toward the post office, and there was no sign of the package. Good. He hadn’t been fast enough to stop that Chinese intelligence agent from dropping the package in the mail to a random conference attendee, but at least he’d tracked that attendee down. And he was pretty sure she knew nothing about it.

Too bad for her. Sven disengaged the safety — that familiar “click” always started his palms sweating with excitement.

#

Jane Hemingway marched with purpose down Wilshire, past a flower shop, on the way to the post office. After a week-long tech conference in Hawaii, she was almost back in the swing of her life. Just a few errands to run — pick up a week’s worth of mail, for instance — and her normal rhythm would be restored.

Rhythm was what she liked. Steady, repetitive, secure, safe, like a metronome beating out her days. Writing code took all of her mental energy. Irregularities of schedule and unforeseen events distracted her, stressed her out, burning ergs of brain-fuel better used on her programming. She worked hard to eliminate those irregularities. She had a very low tolerance for stress.

Years of the steady removal of distraction had made her who she was. She kept her dark hair cut short, so it required no care. She wore no makeup. Her wardrobe consisted of six flower-print dresses of various colors, chosen so she could dress herself each morning without thinking. She owned a single pair of shoes.

She stopped a few steps past the flower shop. Her mother loved tulips. It would be a nice way to say hello, and after all, she never called her mother as often as she should. Jane backtracked and entered the shop, ringing the bell on the door.

#

Sven’s eyes narrowed coldly. He had hesitated, and now she was out of sight. She couldn’t be allowed to reach that package alive.

Sure, Steve, you’re thinking. When in doubt, throw in an assassin. Lame.

I admit my example is cheesy. But my point is this:

I don’t need to change those four paragraphs. Now, the reader is no longer bored by the Jane exposition, because the reader is busy realizing that Jane is Sven’s target and sweating about his aim, not to mention wondering what the hell the package is. I have given the reader more to think about, so he or she is at a higher cognitive level while reading the exposition.

I have made the Jane exposition interesting, not by changing it, but by changing the reader’s mental state. As a writer, I am a conductor, and the reader’s mind and emotions are my orchestra. Get it?

Tension is not achieved by style. It is achieved by strategy. The aim of that strategy is to give the reader more to think about, more to wonder about, and more to suspect.

You can do this by asking questions (“What’s in the package?”) and setting the stakes high at the beginning. Then, the reader will gladly burn through any exposition you need to get across to make your story work.


Suspense is a bridge you can build. It can carry your readers over writing like the italicized paragraphs above.

The bridge metaphor helps me remember how to write — much better than the word “tension,” which merely describes the emotion that the reader feels when the writing works well.

“Tension” only makes me think of a piece of rope.

You, the writer, ask questions continuously, on page 1, and again on page 10, and again on page 110. And you answer them too — perhaps on page 8, and page 18, and page 88, so that you have a telescoping pattern of small-scale (zigzagging) and large-scale (thematic) suspense.

In other words, if you want to increase the tension in Chapter Five, try rewriting Chapter Three. If Act II is dragging, rethink Act I.

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Posted by Steve White

Books That Give Writers an Edge

December 2, 2009

Mckee_Story
I have a short stack of books by my desk that are dog-eared, highlighted, and full of Post-It notes for bookmarks. It’s my “how-to-write” stack.

Stein on Writing is there, and Making Shapely Fiction, and McKee’s Story (which keeps coming up on Novel Dog. My copy has 12 Post-Its and two bookmarks).

But I’ve been thinking about the books that have taught me about writing — or at least, helped me to write — that are not “how-to-write” books.

Can a book on pottery teach you something about writing?

How about a book on improvisational theater?

If you think I’m going to mention Blake Snyder’s Save The Cat
 again, you’re right. Screenwriters know things about narrative structure that we novelists need to learn. McKee’s book is a screenwriting book, too.

But there are a few more that have inspired me and taught me good stuff, and since you won’t find them in the WRITING section, I’ll share them here.

Steven Johnson wrote a book about the increasing complexity found in television shows and video games, called Everything Bad is Good for You. He ties this increasing complexity to the Flynn Effect, which is the increase in average I.Q. scores over the past few decades.

Whatever. But his study of the relationship networks of television characters put a nice light bulb over my head. He also writes about television dialogue. Modern TV viewers, he says, are perfectly comfortable when the dialogue makes no sense at all.

Everything Bad is Good for You, Steven Johnson

“The dialogue on shows like The West Wing and ER… rushes by, the words accelerating in sync with the high-speed tracking shots that glide through the corridors and operating rooms… The truly remarkable thing about the dialogue is not purely a matter of speed; it’s the willingness to immerse the audience in information that most viewers won’t understand….

“You don’t need to know what it means when the surgeons start shouting about OPCAB and saphenous veins as they perform a bypass on ER; the arcana is there to create the illusion that you are watching real doctors.”

I’ve adopted arcana as my term for dialogue that is over the reader’s head, and there to help the reader suspend disbelief. You can find this sort of dialogue in any police procedural or spy thriller. (A different type is in hard SF or elaborate high fantasy, where the author gets to make the arcana up. Fun, but not easy!)

Johnson quotes a snip from an ER script (Crichton again, baby) to make his point. Play along with me here, and count up the words you don’t know:

KERRY: Sixteen-year-old, unconcious, history of villiari treesure.
CARTER: Glucyna coma?
KERRY: Looks like it.
MR. MAKOMI: She was doing fine until six months ago.
CARTER: What medication is she on?
MR. MAKOMI: Emphrasylim, tobramysim, vitamins A, D, and K.
LUCY: The skin’s jaundiced.
KERRY: Same with sclera, does her breath smell sweet?
CARTER: Peder permadicis?
KERRY: Yeah.
LUCY: What’s that?

By the way… arcana, done badly, is called technobabble.

Another book I’ve blogged about is Outliers, by Malcolm Gladwell. It’s about success, and it’s a short brain-hop from there to “writing success.” The kicker in that book was the ten-thousand-hour rule, which might seem like a long time to you, but sounds just right to me. That’s the time you dedicate to careful study of a subject in order to become a master at it.

Writing included.

I always keep The Gift of Fear in the back of my mind, should I ever need to invent a character who is a stalker or an assassin. Its author, Gavin de Becker, is a security expert who studies the predictability of violent behavior, and his book is about real stalkers and assassins.



Likewise, Sam Gosling’s Snoop: What Your Stuff Says About You is handy for describing the home or office of your character, since Gosling is a Ph.D. psychologist who digs through other people’s things for a living, looking for reliable trends.

Next is the inspiration for this post. I had written about adversarial dialogue, and W. Jacob Gardner (an animator on Monsters vs. Aliens) left a comment saying, in essence, “Oh, you mean like in Keith Johnstone’s Impro?”

Er, yes.

And actually, I’ve read that book. If you thought I was kidding about improvisational theater, you’re wrong. (I was kidding about pottery.)

Johnstone teaches acting. He was trying to get his students to master ad-libbing realistic dialogue, and finally told them, “Try to get your status just a little above or below your partner’s.” The result:

“The actors seemed to know exactly what I meant and the work was transformed. The scenes became ‘authentic,’ and actors seemed marvelously observant. Suddenly we understood that every inflection and movement implies a status, and that no action is due to chance, or really ‘motiveless.’ It was hysterically funny, but at the same time very alarming.”

Status is Johnstone’s word for the secret behind the motive of every character in a scene. Each seeks to raise, or lower, or maintain his or her status via dialogue, in an effort to maintain self-perception and expected social order. Realistic characters do this, because you and I and all humans do it.

If you, as a writer, screw with this, you can get amazing results, because all audiences are passionately interested in the relative status of characters. It’s wired into us, Johnstone says.

He goes very deep into revealing human nature through acting — some of his stage experiments will melt your brain — and the rest of the book is about the psychology of imagination, among other things. Improv actors make stuff up on the fly, and need to be deeply in touch with their creative powers. That sort of thing is good for writers too, so the book is more useful than you’d think.

Last is a doozy: The 4-Hour Workweek, by Timothy Ferriss. This is the book that taught me how to slay the time-management dragon, after years (and years!) of deep seething rage at not having enough time to write.

It’s too much to explain here, so I’ll tease you with the relevant chapter titles — then I’ll tell you which part helped me the most.

Chapter 5: The End of Time Management: Illusions and Italians
Chapter 6: The Low-Information Diet: Cultivating Selective Ignorance
Chapter 7: Interrupting Interruption and the Art of Refusal

The real dynamite for me was in Chapter 5. I’ve tried to explain it to friends, and they haven’t believed me. Here goes.

Ever heard of Pareto’s Principle? (Vilfredo Pareto is the Italian mentioned in Chapter 5’s title.)

It’s also called the 80/20 Rule, and it says that 80% of your success actually comes from 20% of your tasks. The discipline doesn’t matter (like the 10,000-Hour Rule) — all that matters is you face the hard reality that most of your tasks are not moving you toward your goal very quickly. And the 80/20 is arbitrary… it could be 95/5, or 99/1.

It works backwards, too. 80% of your stress comes from 20% of your stressors.

Once you face this reality (and you’re clear on what your goals actually are), you’re ready to put your schedule under the microscope. This is Step One. Find tasks that aren’t working, and ruthlessly strike them. Stop doing them. Do less!

I tell you, I loved that part. Notice that this requires no creativity at all.

Later, you can phase in new tasks. But for now, don’t bother. If you do it right, you should be able to drop about 80% of your tasks (!) and lose only 20% of your success (which is still a grade of B- in my book).

The second phase of Ferriss’s plan is an application of Parkinson’s Law. That is, “a task will swell in (perceived) importance and complexity in relation to the time allotted for its completion.” If you have a week for a project, it will take a week… even if you could have done an equal job in an intense three hours, and get results that are, in the end, just as good.

This is a natural part of human psychology. It’s not your fault. But you can put it to your advantage by forcing yourself to do week-long projects in three hours. This is Step Two.

Step One and Step Two can be combined into a self-perpetuating feedback loop, in which you

strike tasks in order to move deadlines up (that’s Step One) and

move deadlines up in order to strike tasks (that’s Step Two).

Fine, don’t believe me. See if I care.

Here’s a fancy-pants video from Ferriss on Chapters 5, 6, and 7.

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Posted by Steve White

What if Your Readers Hate Your Character?

November 18, 2009


I obsess a little about Blake Snyder’s “save the cat” concept, because I have a bugaboo about exciting movies and novels with tedious or creepy main characters. I tend to defenestrate such things. Books can take that, but DVDs don’t hold up well to sidewalk impact.

So I ripped the “save the cat” scenes from four movies — two Blake mentioned in his book, and two I noticed in favorite movies of mine. They are:

Aladdin (1992), written by Ron Clements, John Musker, Ted Elliott & Terry Rossio.

Sea of Love, written by Richard Price.

Heist, written and directed by David Mamet.

Raiders of the Lost Ark, written by Lawrence Kasdan.

I think I’ve beaten this topic to death now, and I promise to move on. (Thanks, Blake. We still miss you.)

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Posted by Steve White

Adversarial Dialogue: “I love you, stupid”

November 6, 2009

Here is an easy way to spice up dialogue between characters in your fiction, whether screenplays or novels.

Make it adversarial.
Adam's Rib

That’s a precise word. Donald Maass, in The Fire in Fiction, went for pages trying to communicate the idea (sorry, Donald) that Sol Stein nailed in a single word in Stein on Writing.

It doesn’t mean “confrontational” in the sense of conflict. That sort of dialogue — say, between hero and villain — comes naturally to writers. Hero vs. Villain dialogue is always fun to write (and usually, to read) because it’s exciting when people don’t get along.

But what can kill your story is the dialogue between your good guys while your villain is off-stage.

Say, a young woman and her sisters in a wagon train on the Oregon trail, watching ominous storm clouds. Or a loving husband and wife, discussing a shooting reported in the local paper. Or a mother and daughter on the morning of the first day of school.

First thought: Cut the scene. But maybe you need it for exposition or foreshadowing or character development or to set up a plot point.

Okay then. Make the scene more interesting with adversarial dialogue. Don’t let them console each other too often. They don’t need to be cruel, and they don’t need to be at each others’ throats. But give your characters some biting wit, some dialogue with an edge.

Here’s a video where I talk about adversarial dialogue, and describe a couple of examples — such as a clip from Gilmore Girls, written by Amy Sherman-Palladino.

(This is from Write on the Sound 2009. If you can’t understand what I’m saying, leave a comment below.)

Interestingly, the fiction genre that seems to have adversarial dialogue mastered is comedy. Often, comedy doesn’t have much conflict to fuel the reader’s curiosity. Maybe to compensate, comedy is loaded with adversarial dialogue.

Not that it matters. This is a genre-proof trick.

Here is the segment from the screenplay of Adam’s Rib (by Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin) I mention in the video. It’s about a married couple of lawyers who, eventually, end up arguing opposite sides of a court case:

#

AMANDA: Look! All I’m trying to say is that there are lots of things that a man can do and in society’s eyes, it’s all hunky-dory. A woman does the same thing – the same, mind you, and she’s an outcast.
ADAM: Finished?
AMANDA: No. Now I’m not blaming you personally, Adam, because this is so.
ADAM: Well, that’s awfully large of you.
AMANDA: No, no, it’s not your fault. All I’m saying is, why let this deplorable system seep into our courts of law, where women are supposed to be equal?
ADAM: Mostly, I think, females get advantages!
AMANDA: We don’t want advantages! And we don’t want prejudices!
ADAM: Oh, don’t get excited, honey, and don’t -
AMANDA: I’m not excited -
ADAM: Oh, you’re giving me the Bryn Mawr right too.
AMANDA: Well what did she try to do? She tried to keep her home intact.
ADAM: Yeah, by knocking off her husband.
AMANDA: She didn’t knock him off. He’s alive. She didn’t kill him.
ADAM: She tried. She missed.
AMANDA: Well, all right. Now supposing -
ADAM: What do you want to do? Give her another shot at him?
AMANDA: No, I don’t… it’s the kind of thing burns my goat!
ADAM: Your what?
AMANDA: My goat! My goat!

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Posted by Steve White

The Best Characters do the Wacky

October 23, 2009

Here’s a simple ingredient for compelling characters: Eccentricity.

Sol Stein, in Stein On Writing, lays the smack down:

Stein on Writing

Eccentricity is at the heart of strong characterization. The most effective characters have profound roots in human behavior. Their richest feelings may be similar to those held by many others. However, as characters their eccentricities dominate the reader’s first vision of them.

If you were to examine the surviving novels of the twentieth century, you would find that a majority of the most memorable characters in fiction are to some degree eccentric.

This is not a tough argument to make. Imagine your favorite characters in novels you love the most. Boom, eccentric.

If you’ve got other strengths (like a wild premise or setting), maybe you can squeak by with “everyman” sort of characters.

The problem is that our main characters are a shadow, a fragment, of ourselves… the writer. And inexperienced writers are afraid of what they might reveal, afraid of seeming ridiculous or perverted.

So inexperienced writers create characters who just want to get through this (whatever “this” is), who just want to live a normal life.

Bad news for those writers: The weight of literary history is against them. Examples:

Captain Ahab
Melville’s Captain Ahab, Fitzgerald’s Gatsby, Salinger’s Holden Caulfield, and Joseph Conrad’s Kurtz all possess eccentric personalities and drives.

Sherlock Holmes possesses unique powers, but he’s also got a set of bizarre quirks (from misogyny and cocaine addiction to… well, I would say he’s ADD).

Quirks are everywhere, from Indiana Jones’s hat and whip, to Harry Potter’s scar and glasses, to Manny’s mechanical arm (that’s Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress).

Shall we include unusual background, or legacy? That’s gets us Harry Potter again, and Luke Skywalker.

Call of the Wild
Animal characters are no exception. Buck (in London’s The Call of the Wild) is no ordinary dog, and a main character in Adams’s Watership Down is not only a rabbit, but a psychic rabbit.

I’m not saying that eccentric characters are all you need. If you do have nicely freakish characters, your job isn’t finished. Now you can try for some character complexity and tap the power of your readers’ envy.

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Posted by Steve White

Dialogue: Rock Your Reader’s Socks With Tags and Beats

October 9, 2009

Here’s a challenge I posed to my audience at the 2009 Write on the Sound conference:

Choose the “best,” if you dare, from these five exchanges of dialogue. Which would you write?

1.
“Come on now, Baby,” she said. “You don’t need that knife. What are you going to do with that?”

“I just can’t stand it anymore!” he said. “I’ve had it!”

2.
“Come on now,” she cajoled. “You don’t need that knife. What are you going to do with that?”

“I just can’t stand it anymore!” he ejaculated. “I’ve had it!”

3.
She approached him cautiously. “Come on now, Baby,” she cooed. “You don’t need that knife. What are you going to do with that?”

He swung the knife in a wild arc. “I just can’t stand it anymore!” he exclaimed. “I’ve had it!”

4.
“Come on now, Baby. You don’t need that knife. What are you going to do with that?”

“I just can’t stand it anymore! I’ve had it!”

5.
She approached him cautiously. “Come on now, Baby. You don’t need that knife. What are you going to do with that?”

He swung the knife in a wild arc. “I just can’t stand it anymore! I’ve had it!”

(Adapted from Stanbrough, Writing Realistic Dialogue and Flash Fiction)

The talk was a lot of fun. About 50 showed up. I tried to catch it on video, using my laptop and the webcam from my work. The result wasn’t perfect… but it wasn’t bad enough to delete, so here’s the seven minutes when we discussed the five dialogue exchanges above.

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Posted by Steve White

Two Query Letters That Worked

September 26, 2009

I would trade all the query letter guides, manuals, and help books for a set of query letters that actually worked. Nothing is better for polishing your query letter than seeing actual letters that made an agent say “Send it.”

A couple of writer buddies of mine have just heard those two magic words, so I asked them for permission to post their letters here. I’m also posting the responses from the agents, although I’ll change their names to the names of Star Trek characters.

#

Dear Captain Kirk,

I stalked you at the PNWA conference last weekend but when I finally had a chance to talk to you, you had to leave to make another appointment. You told me to send you my query electronically. I particularly wanted to talk to you because your Web site says you are interested in Latino/Latina works.

If Clive Cussler had written Ugly Betty, it would be The Inside Passage. The Inside Passage is a ninety-five thousand word thriller about a group of terrorists plotting to blow up an American cruise ship, but the story is really about a young Latino man coming of age in an Anglo world.
Ted Higuera is the brash, goofy son of illegal immigrants from Mexico. An unlikely football scholarship was his ticket out of the barrio. Now he is graduating from the University of Washington and the well-to-do father of his college roommate and best friend, Chris Hardwick, offers the boys the use of his sailboat for a summer cruise up the Inside Passage.

When Ted and his friends stumble upon an al-Qaeda plot to blow up a cruise ship, the clock starts ticking.
The Inside Passage could be in the headlines today. It will appeal to readers of thrillers in general, but also be marketable to sailors and the yachting set. More importantly, it should find an audience among the country’s forty-five million Latinos. The Latino segment of the population is the country’s largest minority. By 2030, they’ll be the largest single demographic group in the country with buying power of over a trillion dollars.

There are virtually no Latino heroes in American popular culture. The Latino population is hungry for a hero of our own. Ted could be that hero.

My grandparents emigrated from Mexico. I have lived Ted Higuera’s life. I am a life-long sailor, a Security + certified security expert, a graduate of the University of Oregon with an MBA from City University of Seattle. I’ve been on the board of directors for the Write on the Sound writers conference in Edmonds, Washington for three years. I’m the treasurer of Los Norteños, a group of Latino writers in the Puget Sound area, and a member of two writers critique groups. Stories of my sailing adventures have been published in Nor’Westing and Good Old Boat magazines, several of my recipes have been published in KCTS Cooks and I’ve sold short stories to Voices of Lung Cancer and Potpourri. I have done readings at the Fisher Poets Gathering in Astoria, Oregon, for the Seattle Latino Heritage Festival, at Los Norteños’ Day of the Dead celebration and my work has appeared at the Sustainability/Sostenibilidad exhibit at the Benham Gallery.

I am including the first chapter of my manuscript. Also included is the plot synopsis. If you would like to read the entire manuscript, please respond to this e-mail.

Thank you for your consideration. I know that you are very busy and I appreciate you taking the time to look at my work. I look forward to hearing from you soon.

Sincerely

Penn Wallace

#
Here’s the response from the agent. I’m including it so you can see the sort of detailed instructions you may be asked to follow when submitting.
#

Dear Penn,

Thank you for your query; we greatly appreciate your interest in our agency, even the stalking!

We’d love to take a look at some pages. Please send the following information as a package:

• A one-page synopsis, including in it the essential dilemma represented in the work, and word count. A copy of your query will do, if it covers these basics.
• A brief outline, by chapter — simply a few sentences per chapter that will give us a feel for pacing, plot, and flow.
• The first 50 pages in standard 12pt font, double-spaced format, single sided, with pages numbered.
• An author bio, including published works and relevant info. If the manuscript has been represented by another agent, previously in print form, or seen by any publisher, we need to know that up front.
We do not request the above items lightly. Please do not send without them, as they are vital to the decision making process and things you will likely need to have to find representation/publication, regardless. It’s fine if it takes you a while to complete them.

Kirk
Do not send by email. Please mark the package “Requested Material -September.” Do not send by anything that requires a signature and/or a special trip to the Post Office. If you’d like any of the material returned to you, please include the appropriate SASE.

Partials are running four to six weeks at this time. If you have any comments or questions in the meantime you are always welcome to contact me via email.

Thanks again for your time and for the chance to view your work. We very much look forward to seeing it.

Best regards,

Jim Kirk

#
Now, here’s another successful query letter. You’ll notice similarities – both of these writers went to the PNWA conference and tried to get together with a number of agents they had researched – but be careful not to miss differences in style and format.
#

Dear Mr. Spock:

I attended PNWA as a speaker and a worker at the Mystery Writers of America table but was not able to connect with you at that event. I’d like to ask you to review my mystery novel, Death Policy.

Death Policy is a 71,000 word humorous mystery novel featuring Kaitlyn Willis, a 38-year-old, triple D-chested, blond Code Enforcement Officer for the City of Cedar Grove, Washington. While investigating a nuisance complaint, Kaitlyn stumbles on more than rusty cars and piles of trash. She finds a sad case of animal hording—and a dead body.

Readers of other light mysteries by authors like Elaine Viets, Stephanie Bond, Laura Childs, Victoria Laurie, and Kate Collins will enjoy this book.

Kaitlyn Willis has just come off a nasty divorce followed by a lonely dry spell and the first guy she’s interested in is investigating her for murder.

Kaitlyn is pulled into investigating the murder to stay off the suspect list and protect her friends. All the while she’s helping her best friend through a bad break up, trying to repair a bank account sucked dry by her ex-husband, dealing with a homeless cat who has decided to adopt her–and falling for the police detective on the case. Kaitlyn’s “week from hell” ends with fear for her job, wondering which of her co-workers she can trust, and coming face-to-face with the killer.

I have written eight novels and have published numerous nonfiction articles. I teach fiction writing to beginners at Cascadia Community College. I’ve won several writing contests, including the Pacific Northwest Writers Association, and am a regular speaker there and at Willamette Writers Conference and Write On The Sound. You can find out a little more about me and my commitment to writing on my website, www.leslieadkins.com.

A short synopsis and 10 sample pages are pasted below. On your request, I am prepared to send the complete manuscript of Death Policy. Thank you for taking the time to consider representing my work.

Sincerely,
Leslie Adkins

#
And here is the agent’s reply. The standards – and styles – among agents vary wildly.
#

Hi Leslie,
Sorry we didn’t connect. I’d be happy to take a look at DEATH POLICY. Kindly send a copy along for my prompt review—a Word attachment is most preferable if possible.
Best,
Spock
Spock
#
You can go ahead and read the manuals, but your learning curve on queries will be steeper if you just model your stuff on what works.

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Posted by Steve White

Can you pass this Dialogue Grammar Quiz?

September 14, 2009

[September 17, 2009]

You don’t need to clear off your desk, and you don’t need a #2 pencil. There are eight grammatical blunders in this clip of dialogue. Can you find all of them?

Fred rubbed his temples and tried to think. “There’s got to be a way out of this,” he thought.

“Give it up, Fred”, said Jerome. “The DA’s got tons of evidence.” Fred pounded the table. “It’s a set up. I’m being framed!”

‘Sure, sure.’ Jerome shook his head. “If I had a nickel for every time I heard that. But the witness pointed to you, you weasel. She pointed to you and said “That’s the man, Your Honor.” The whole courtroom heard. Heck, the whole county heard!!”

“What kind of defense lawyer are you?,” Fred cried, “You’re supposed to be on my side!”

This is an excerpt from the handout I’m designing for my upcoming talk on dialogue at the Write on the Sound conference October 3. I’ll post the answers here once I give my talk.

If you’ve spotted some errors, leave a comment.

#

[October 4, 2009]

I gave the talk yesterday afternoon, and as promised, here are the answers:

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.

.

Wait for it…

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.

.

Wait for it…

.

.

.

Fred rubbed his temples and tried to think. There’s got to be a way out of this,[1] he thought.

“Give it up, Fred,”[2] said Jerome. “The DA’s got tons of evidence.”

[3]Fred pounded the table. “It’s a set up. I’m being framed!”

“Sure, sure.”[4] Jerome shook his head. “If I had a nickel for every time I heard that. But the witness pointed to you, you weasel. She pointed to you and said ‘That’s the man, Your Honor.’[5] The whole courtroom heard. Heck, the whole county heard!”[6]

“What kind of defense lawyer are you?”[7] Fred cried.[8] “You’re supposed to be on my side!”

1. Don’t put thoughts in quotes.
2. Dialogue punctuation goes inside quotes.
3. New speaker, new paragraph.
4. Dialogue gets double-quotes, not single.
5. Repeated dialogue from a third person gets single quotes, not double.
6. Use exclamation points (and question marks) once only. (Right?!?!)
7. Don’t follow terminal punctuation (like a question mark) with a comma.
8. Tags are offset by commas when they appear in the middle of a sentence. If the following dialogue is a complete sentence (“You’re supposed to be on my side!”), end the tag with a period.

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Posted by Steve White

How Many Characters Do You Need?

August 30, 2009

Okay, I blew it.

And I’m here to fess up.

An old writing rule of mine went, “Thou shalt not multiply characters beyond necessity.” Sort of a spin on Occam’s Razor, that kept me from packing my fiction with every character that popped into my head at the time.

Why have five characters if you can tell the story with four? And why have four characters if you can merge a couple of them and tell the story with three?

Fewer characters means a tighter story, fewer distractions, a faster plot… and a lower word count. You can make that 8,000-word unpublishable beast into a lean 3,000-word speed demon that’s easier to sell.

Everything Bad is Good for You, Steven Johnson

Notice we’re talking about short stories here. In short stories, limiting the number of characters to the minimum that you dramatically require is a good rule.

So last month I’m reading the latest Steven Johnson, a random library pick called Everything Bad is Good for You, and he’s talking about how drama (television, in this case) has grown in complexity over the past few decades. Modern TV drama, he argues, requires greater viewer memory and foreknowledge, has more parallel plotlines, more esoteric dialogue… and a lot more characters.

To help prove his point, he presents a “social network” of an episode of Dallas (1978-1991), a character map of everyone in the episode.

Dallas Social Network

Then he presents the character map of an episode from the first season of 24 (2001). It’s quite a bit more complex, with more characters and more relationships.

24 Social Network

Johnson’s argument that TV viewers have gotten used to, and enjoy, complicated dramas with a mess of characters, is only peripherally interesting to me as a novelist. Unless…

How have novels changed over time?

I was just wondering about that when I picked up a copy of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice.

(Austen was a source of inspiration for Stephenie “Twilight” Meyer. Plus, Pride and Prejudice is wicked old, published in 1813, five years before Frankenstein. Generally I dig old fiction.)

I didn’t get very far in Pride and Prejudice. Sorry, fans. Austen broke a lot of rules of modern fiction. Good rules. Like, use speaker attributions in dialogue, so readers know who is speaking. And, don’t give characters similar-sounding names — Austen blesses us with five, that’s five sisters, all called “Miss Barrett” by other characters.

So rather than reading it, I started reading about it… and came across a character map (Johnson might say a “social network”) of it.

Pride and Prejudice Social Network

Holy crap, it’s a mess. No wonder I was confused.

It reminded me of Johnson’s map of the 24 episode.

2001.

1813.

Whatever the date, it’s clear that my old rule, “Thou shalt not multiply characters beyond necessity,” er, um… needs revision.

Still dandy for short stories. Not so useful for novels.

What, then? Pack your novels with characters?

Mckee_Story
I’m going to turn, again, to Robert McKee’s Story, because I think he really nails this. He says that a writer can use other characters as a lens through which we see the main character. More characters in your story may, if done well, better illustrate a complex central character.

In essence, the protagonist creates the rest of the cast. All other characters are in a story first and foremost because of the relationship they strike to the protagonist and the way each helps to delineate the dimensions of the protagonist’s complex nature.

When McKee says complex, he’s talking about the Yin-Yang complexity of characters, the dual presence of opposite traits, that I’ve talked about in an earlier post.

Consider this hypothetical protagonist: He’s amusing and optimistic, then morose and cynical; he’s compassionate, then cruel; fearless, then fearful. This four-dimensional role needs a cast around him to delineate his contradictions, characters toward whom he can act and react in different ways at different times and places. These supporting characters must round him out so that his complexity is both consistent and credible.

Then McKee lets loose with a character map of his own.

STORY page 380

Character A, for example, provokes the protagonist’s sadness and cynicism, while Character B brings out his witty, hopeful side. Character C inspires his loving and courageous emotions, while Character D forces him to first cower in fear, then to strike out in fury. The creation and design of characters A, B, C, and D is dictated by the needs of the protagonist.

Wow. I’m not saying that Jane Austen and Joel Surnow included big casts of supporting characters in order to reveal the complexity of their main characters.

But forget them — I’m talking about me here. And you. No one is stopping us from doing it. Lesson learned.

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Posted by Steve White

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