Notch Up the Tension, Pick up the Pace – A Workshop with Colleen Thompson
Colleen Thompson, RITA- nominated author of Touch of Evil, Beneath Bone Lake, Fatal Error, and Triple Exposure, gave a riveting talk at the April Romance Writers of America-San Diego meeting on building suspense in fiction. Ms. Thompson outlined five techniques to add tension to your novel:
- Emphasize polarized (opposite) character traits to heighten conflict. If your heroine is a pacifist, make the hero a warrior. If she’s a control freak, make him a rebel. This works not only for the hero/heroine dynamic, but for your main character and all your secondary characters. Think about how you can tweak your characters to polarize them more. And if you are writing romance, make your hero the “worst guy possible” for your heroine – the guy who makes her want to pull her hair out. Sparks will fly!
- Force proximity between/among conflicting characters. Once you have the right dynamic going, if you are writing a romance, make sure your characters stay together. Don’t send one of them off to Tahiti for an extended vacation. How can you keep them together? Here are some ideas: give them a reason to work together – a joint goal. Or put them in competition for that goal. Or have them fight against a common enemy, or fight together for survival. Keeping the hero and heroine together is especially important in romance – it’s hard to pull off a love story if the characters are separated for the first 100 pages.
- Figure out how to strengthen the initial conflict. Every character needs to have his own agenda – including the villain – and his own things at risk. Challenge yourself to move past black and white thinking and instead think in shades of gray. Let your characters make bad decisions and give them room to grow. Don’t be afraid to make the initial situation worse, the bad guy badder.
- Make a bad situation even worse. Once you get past the beginning and into the middle of the book, you need to up the tension even more. One trick is to shorten the fuse. If the heroine had three days to find a cure for her little sister’s rare disease, find a reason to shorten the time limit to two hours. Another trick is to blow the original goal out of the water. If the heroine’s goal was to find a woman who is a donor match for her sister, have her find the woman, only to have the woman die in her arms. And don’t forget that the middle is another place you can make the bad guy more powerful. There’s nothing like having the hero thinking he’s won, only to discover that the villain has come back, stronger than ever.
- Remind the reader of conflict during “breather” scenes. You can’t have nothing but high-tension scenes in your book: the result will be reader fatigue. You need some “breather” scenes as well – scenes where your characters react, reflect, and plan their next actions. But how do you keep your readers engaged in the conflict storyline while in the these scenes? You can use symbolism sprinkled through the scene – for example, if the character just escaped a serial killer, the symbolism of a spider waiting to pounce on his prey will not be lost on the reader. Another technique is to have the characters allude to the conflict through dialog – just a line or two, and in a context that flows naturally in the scene. A technique that may work, depending on the preferences of the editor, is to use an epigraph (relevant quote, phrase, or poem) at the beginning of the scene to keep the conflict in the mind of the reader.
Ms. Thompson’s talk certainly got me thinking about my own novel, and how I could apply these techniques. I found that I naturally use polarized character traits most of the time (regardless of whether the characters are in a romantic relationship), and that the relationships where the characters have polarized traits are the ones that far and away work the best. The ones I am having trouble with are the ones that don’t have polar opposite traits.
How about you? How do you think you could use these techniques in your novel?
What Fans Don’t Know About Publishing – A Condor Writing Panel
Saturday’s panel on publishing focused on an inside look at the industry from science fiction and spirtuality writer Matt Pallamary, sf/fantasy writer Jean Graham, graphic novelist Eric Shanower, YA novelist P.J. Haarsma and paranormal romance writer Linda Thomas-Sundstrom.
Some interesting market tidbits were tossed out by the panelists:
- Romance was 50% of the market last year, this year, so far, it is 56%
- science fiction is 7.8%
- Suspense/mystery is not currently selling well
- Paranormal/dark stuff is selling well
- YA is selling well
- An author’s first book published is on-average the 5th book that author has written
- 70% of books never make back their advances
- The profit margin on books is between 2-5% (note – I’ve seen this higher – at 7%, by comparison, the profit margin on hospitals is 3.6%, personal computers is 7.5%, and cigarettes is 17.4%) *
The panel discussed the issue of piracy – sites posting free or unauthorized, for sale copies of author’s work. This was characterized as a large problem, but difficult to quantify in terms of how much income authors and publishers are losing due to both illegal sales and potential lost sales due to free copies downloaded by potential customers. It is also frustrating for authors to see people making money illegally from their work, and although the author can issue a takedown notice, these sellers just move to a new email name and start again. The counterpoint opinion was also debated – authors such as Eric Flint and others in the Baen Free Library believe that offering one or two volumes of their early work will encourage readers to buy subsequent volumes. They say readership goes up. This is also difficult to quantify.
Personally I lean toward the Baen Free Library point of view. The Internet makes policing and protecting content impossible, as we’ve seen with the music industry. Giving away all your content, however, doesn’t make sense for authors. It probably doesn’t make sense for anyone, but some content creators, such as musicians, who have live concerts they can charge for, could give away recordings and charge for other aspects of what they do. Not so easy for writers. What the internet has proven to do well is a tiered system of content provision – a small bite of free content for everyone, more content for those who will pay. The Baen Free Library is a nice way to do that. It doesn’t solve the issue of pirates scanning all your books and selling them: if you want to solve that one, you are back to giving away your work for free. Until we build a new economic model that fits the new paradigms of the economy – the speed and ubiquity of Internet, the zero cost of digital files, the value of content, and the disappearing value of the middleman – I don’t think we will solve that problem.
The discussion moved to marketing. P.J. Haarsma mentioned the difficulty of marketing young adult books when the publishers seem to believe that the right people to market to are librarians, parents, and teachers – not kids. “They don’t seem to understand that adults are the very people kids don’t listen to at that age,” Haarsma said. Matt Pallamary recommended pushing your book on podcasts, because they go viral quickly and easily and get the word spread about your book. Eric Shanower mentioned hiring a publicist, and booking ad space in Radio-TV Interview Report. He and Matt Pallamary reported varying return on investment from their ads.
The panel also discussed co-op advertising deals between the publisher and Barnes and Noble (the only large chain left). B&N controls the co-op money from the publisher. The publisher has no control over what books are featured with the co-op advertising money. However, the publisher can pay directly to put an author’s book in an end-cap display.
The discussion on marketing mirrored what I have heard at other conferences: publishers aren’t able to do much for writers. What they are able to do isn’t necessarily going to meet the needs of an author’s actual book or market. It just reinforces what other writers, agents, and editors are saying; if you want your book to succeed, you have to take responsibility for marketing it yourself. That means you have to figure out the target market, decide how to reach them, develop a plan, and implement it, all likely without much support from the publisher (unless you are lucky). Fortunately, we can learn from each other, and panels like this help that process.
What do You Do When Your Characters Don’t Work? – A Condor Writing Panel
Condor – San Diego’s annual science fiction convention, held Feb. 26-28 – hosted a number of writing panels. Leading off Friday at noon, “One of Your Crucial Characters Isn’t Working: What Do You Do?” featured horror author Tamara Thorne, fantasy author Kevin Gerard, science fiction author Jane Fancher, screenwriter Art Holcomb, and science fiction author Dani Kollin.
The panelists discussed their own work and the challenges they have faced with problematic characters. One of the interesting issues that came up was secondary characters vs. main characters. A panelist pointed out that sometimes the secondary characters are more interesting, both to the writer and to the reader, because they are mysterious. We know a lot about the main character, not so much about the “man in black.” The challenge is creating the same (or ideally higher) level of interest in someone we know much more about.
Another point of discussion: sometimes authors get enamored of one of their characters and feel that this character adds something to the story. But in reality the character is diluting the story, either by taking attention and roles away from other characters or simply by being unnecessary. It can take an outside perspective of a critical reader to point this out if the writer can’t see it for himself. Basically, story trumps character.
Some key points:
“Sometimes your character is in the wrong story. You are trying to make your character do things instead of listening to that.” – Art Holcomb
“What do you want to say? Sometimes people reach a point and stop. You need to keep writing past there.” – Art Holcomb
“Look at your character archetypes. You can see what’s missing, what is duplicated.” – Jane Fancher
Takeaways from the Southern California Writer’s Conference, Part 2: Platform Building for Fiction Writers
I’ve been hearing a lot about the necessity of building a platform. Apparently before a publisher will pick up a first time writer’s book it not only has to be superbly written and perfectly timed for the market, but the author also has to have thousands of loyal fans ready to buy it. Seems like a tall order. How I am supposed to get those fans without having a book already published? Sure, authors like Neil Gaiman and Warren Ellis have huge followings on Twitter and the web, but they got them after they were published, not before.
If I’m writing non-fiction, I can start a blog about my topic. If, for example, I’m writing the true story of a stalwart band of heroes guarding Sumatran rhinos from poachers in the Bukit Barisan Selatan rainforest, I can blog about their exploits and my efforts to chronicle them and build a following that way. But what if I’m writing a novel set in the far future about an orphan lost on a space station the size of a city? Or my book is a romance between the hard-charging stock broker and the mild-mannered hedgehog farmer who loves her? How do I blog about that before it’s been published?
I asked that question of Southern California Writer’s Conference webmaster Jeremy Lee James and he had a pretty good answer for me. First, you don’t have to blog about your unpublished book. The point is not to sell the book to people who have no way of buying it (yet). The point is to create demand for you, the author, and eventually for your book. How do you do that? The keys, according to James, are voice and content. Develop your own voice and use it to say what has meaning for you, just as you do with your writing. Blog and tweet about topics you have a real passion for. If you love Sumatran rhinos, blog about rhinos. If you are deep into research into how cities are designed and built for your space station saga, blog about that. If you’re obsessed with how men and women communicate—or what happens when they don’t—and that’s what prompted you to write that romance, blog about that. Do it in your own voice and unique point of view, and you’ll have something of your own to offer people.
If you have short samples of your fiction you can post or link to, do that too. Giving potential readers a brief taste of your work can persuade them to look for it in the bookstore.
But what if you aren’t a blogger? Is there another way you can build a platform? According to Lynn Price, editorial director of Behler Publications, there is. Authors can develop expertise in subjects related to their book and arrange to speak to groups that care about that topic. As with blogs, this appears to be easier for non-fiction writers than fiction writers. For my mythical book on guarding Sumatran rhinos from poachers, I could speak to animal conservation groups, animal rights groups, Southeast Asian interest groups, the list goes on. But for my space station saga? I’d have to get a bit more creative.
Price suggests that fiction writers find a topic within their work that would be appealing to an audience. If I am already developing an expertise and interest in urban design and how it might apply to space station design, I could offer myself as a speaker to groups on those topics. (OK, that’s a bit of a stretch, but you get the idea.) The point is that blogging and Twittering is not the only way to build a platform.
Whatever way you choose to build that platform, starting sooner is better than later. It takes a long time to build an audience, and beginning when you sell your book to a publisher or when it hits the shelves puts you farther behind than you might realize. You’ll be in a better position to develop your relationship with your potential readers if you have already started to connect with them through the web or in person before your book is published.
How much time should you spend on platform building? That’s up to you. For me, writing my stories matters more than anything else. But I want to spend some time each week connecting with other people, writing on topics that matter to me, and developing my voice. I think all of that will make me a better writer. If it helps me develop my platform too, so much the better.
As daunting as the task of building a platform sounds, I’m relieved to have discovered that there’s a strategy out there for writers of fiction as well as non-fiction. Be true to your voice, write what you are passionate about, connect with people in person, and show your readers how great your stories are. Don’t wait until you are published to begin; a head start is critical for building an audience. And most important: write. That’s what we’re all here to do.
Takeaways from the Southern California Writer’s Conference Part 1: Cross-Reading Leads to Better Metaphors
I was at the Southern California Writer’s Conference last weekend and as always came back with some valuable ideas and connections.
At author Bob Yehling’s panel on Cross-Genre Writing, Yehling urged listeners to keep a stack of four to five books around and read them at the same time to improve the reader’s ability to use figurative language. Apparently the right/left brain connections built by this method help generate metaphors, similes and analogies.
Presently I’m reading Eight Lives Down: The Most Dangerous Job in the World in the Most Dangerous Place in the World, by Chris Hunter; The Land of Nod by Mark A. Clements, The Art of Subtext by Charles Baxter, and re-reading A Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin. I’ve been reading more than one book at a time for a while now, motivated by a desire to cram as much into my time as possible. I’ve noticed that figurative language has been coming to me more easily but assumed it was just due to practice. But perhaps Yehling is onto something here, and it’s my daily cross-reading instead. Has anyone else been doing this and gotten similar, or different, results?
(Very) Short Fiction: Writing Stories for Twitter
How do you write a story in 140 characters? It’s simple. Action, reaction, and a twist.
Start with a basic concept. And by basic, I mean really basic. The space limitations of Twitter won’t let you write War and Peace, or even an O’Henry story. But it will let you get a cute little story down if you keep it simple.
Then figure out how to tell it. What happens? Which action starts the story off? What reaction brings the point across? And what twist or ending wraps it all up? Ideally you’ll have no more than one to three sentences at this point. Then trim it down to 140 characters.
Here’s an example to illustrate these principles. The science fiction/fantasy twitter fiction magazine Thaumatrope put out a call for February-themed submissions. This got me thinking about Valentine’s Day with its associated traditions: romantic dinners, chocolates, valentine’s cards, candy hearts…hmm… what can I do with candy hearts? What if, in the future, candy hearts were laced with nanotech robots that caused the person who ate them to do the thing written on the candy? Eating a LUV ME heart would cause the person who ate it to fall in love with the person who gave them the candy heart. Sort of a high tech version of a love spell. Cool. There’s the concept, and the prompt for the action.
So who would use something like this? Well, again in the vein of keeping it simple, let’s go with a girl who wants to a guy to fall in love with her. So the action is that a girl gives a guy a LUV ME candy heart laced with nanotech robots. What’s the next step?
The next step is the reaction. What happens? We could go a couple of different ways with this. It could work, it could fail, something bad could happen, the guy could do something,,,but I decide I want it to work. In fact, I want her to feed him another, then another, until he agrees to marry her (what can I say, I’m a romantic.)
Next I need a twist. Something needs to happen that makes this a story, not just a sequence of events. A twist could mean that the technology fails, that someone interferes, that the guy finds out, or anything else turns things around and creates an ending to the story. I decide that I want this whole plan to backfire on my heroine. Guess I’m not such a romantic after all.
Now comes the hard part: communicating all that in just 140 characters. I start with the action – feeding the guy the candy hearts, then blend in the reaction – he agrees to marry her, then cap it off with the twist – she gets fed a candy heart he leaves for her.
So this is the final version, 140 characters long, published by Thaumatrope on Feb. 14:
“Fed my guy nano-laced candy hearts. KISS ME, LUV ME..the bots sealed the deal with MARRY ME. Yum! A blank one..uh, why did I sign a pre-nup?”
I enjoy writing these; finding a concept that works in such a restricted format and then whittling the words down to just the right ones is lots of fun. Try it yourself and see.
The Author
Janet Tait writes urban fantasy, paranormal romance, and horror from sunny San Diego.
Contact her at admin at janettait dot com
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