Anatomy of a Hook

This morning, I was thinking about Six Word Stories. You know, the writing exercise inspired by Earnest Hemingway's famous short, "For sale: baby shoes, never worn."  After lying dormant for decades, these literary bon mots surged back into popularity a few years ago. Here are a few of my favorites from the Wired Magazine collection:

"Longed for him. Got him. Shit." - Margaret Atwood
"Gown removed carelessly. Head, less so." - Joss Whedon
“I couldn't believe she’d shoot me.” - Howard Chaykin
"Tick tock tick tock tick tick." - Neal Stephenson
"Epitaph: He shouldn't have fed it." - Brian Herbert

Personally, while I enjoy reading Six Word Stories, I always objected to calling these things stories. With the exception of Margret Atwood's spectacular entry above, none of them have plot or characters. Nothing changes, no tale is told, therefore, I put forth that these short pieces (however clever) aren't stories at all. They're hooks, and when done right, they represent a perfect encapsulation of what makes us want to know more about a story.

"Hook" is one of those terms that gets thrown around a lot in writing about writing. You can't even search about "how to get an agent" or "how to write a book" without someone telling you that you have to hook your reader, often from the first line. And for the most part this is true, good advice, but when you use a word, especially a metaphor, so often and so exclusively, its meaning begins to leach away. That in mind, I thought I'd take a few words to stop the dilution cycle and talk about what the hook does mechanically in a story.

What Does the Hook Do?
As its namesake implies, the purpose of a hook is to "catch" a reader's attention. The starting point for all narrative is interest. Even before they've read a word, readers can be attracted by an evocative cover or a clever title, but the real kicker with hooks is that one is never enough.

This is where the fishing metaphor breaks down. Readers are not trout. You can't just have one powerful hook to pull them into the boat and leave it at that. Rather, you're enticing them to climb into the boat of their own accord, first with a good title, then with a good first line, then with good tension, then with plot twists. It's never done, it's always hook hook hook until they've reached the last page, and then you've got to hook them again for the sequel.

I actually wrote about this eternal hooking process in a post called Story Velcro. The basic idea is that if you want your reader staying up all night and turning pages, you have to keep sinking hook after hook into them until they're stuck to your book like velcro. And, of course, with so many hooks, you need to vary it up to make sure the reader doesn't get bored and the hooks become less effective as a result. So, let's take a look at what types of hooks we have to work with.

Because I enjoy dividing things into categories, I like to separate my hooks out into 3 broad classes: Big Ideas, Suspense, and Wit.

Big Idea hooks are exactly what they sound like: big ideas that capture the imagination and then use that thrill, that inspired curiosity, to make you read more. Because of their inherent Wow! nature, Big Idea hooks are often high concept, like the opening line to J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan novel, Peter and Wendy, "All children, except one, grow up." This hook immediately sets out an impossible situation that makes the reader want to know "Why doesn't this child grow up? What's going on?" It also, coincidentally, meets the criteria for a Six Word Story. See how that works?

But the Big Idea hook doesn't have to be highbrow or complicated. It can just as easily be straight and to the point, like the exceedingly simple and highly effective "Snakes on a Plane," which is quite possibly the greatest hook of our generation. (Seriously, they sold the entire movie, millions and millions of dollars, on that line alone. Now THAT's a hook!) The essence, however, is the same. We hear a big idea, and we immediately want to explore it.

Sometimes the Big Idea is the core of the novel as well as the hook, the central spoke that everything else radiates off. Other times, the Big Idea is just one of several cards in the writer's hand. However it's used, though, the Big Idea hook packs the biggest bang for your buck. As Snakes on a Plane showed, people will put up with some pretty awful drek if they love the Big Idea enough. That said, Big Idea hooks rely on execution (i.e., how well you actually explore and use that Big Idea to tell a story) and can overshadow the narrative they're supposed to be pulling the reader into if used incorrectly (see the final two Matrix movies for an example of how Big Ideas aren't everything).

Long story short, the Big Idea is the Dirty Harry gun of hooks, and should be treated accordingly with respect and caution.

But while the Big Idea hook is the most flashy of the three, the Suspense hook is by far the most prevalent and omni-useful. The Suspense Hook is a line that rouses curiosity by implying an interesting situation without giving away the details. Going back to our Six Word Stories, Joss Whedon's "Gown removed carelessly. Head, less so," Howard Chaykin's “I couldn't believe she’d shoot me,” and Brian Herbert's "Epitaph: He shouldn't have fed it," are all examples of Suspense hooks. Each one is a tiny peek into a much larger, more complicated situation, a tantalizing hint of a vastly interesting story, and we as readers can't help but read the next line to find out what happens next.

"What happens next?" is, in fact, the core of what makes the Suspense hook work. You are hooking interest via that most powerful of human drives: nosiness. We always want to know what's going on, what are people doing, even if those people don't actually exist. A good Suspense hook grabs that curiosity and turns it into a page turning engine.

This sort of thing is the bread and butter of the Mystery and Suspense genres, but human curiosity exists everywhere there are people. So long as your reader is human, you can count on enticing them with a leading, suspenseful hook. Keeping them, of course, will require actually making that suspense pay off.

(On a side note, "Weather Report" openings (i.e., "It was a dark and stormy night") also fall into the Suspense category since they are there to create atmosphere, interest, and general What's going on?-ness in the world at large. That said, they tend to do this badly, because unless there's a hurricane bearing down on our heroes, weather is not in itself very interesting. There's a reason these openings get a bad rap, so unless you're dead confident you can knock it out of the park, I'd avoid trying to make weather into a hook.)

Finally, we come to my personal favorite hook: Wit. Wit hooks are exactly that: bits of writing so charming and interesting and well done that we will keep reading just for a chance at more. Jane Austen was a master of the art, and several of her Wit hooks are now well known lines everyone repeats. Even people who haven't read Pride and Prejudice know that "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife." That's how good her hooks are, they hook themselves out of her book and into our cultural consciousness.

Of all the hooks, Wit is the hardest to pull off. It's a delicate and highly creative art that's insanely easy to mess up and depressingly dependent on individual taste. What one reader considers witty, another might consider overwrought or cutesy. That said, when done right, it can win you readers like nothing else. Even if they're bored stiff with the actual story and characters, people will keep reading so long as the text is packed with enough witty hooks to overcome the rest, which is a claim none of the other hooks can make.

That said, wit is not the same as good writing. Granted, many good writers are witty, but there's so much more to storytelling than being a good wordsmith. Your story should stand on the strength of its characters and narrative, not just because there's enough wit in the language to keep the pages turning. There are plenty of successful authors who survive by wit alone, but I wouldn't call them good writers, and I don't tend to keep their books past the initial burst of witty pleasure (or finish them at all, actually).

Special Addendum: Mixing Hooks
Just like in Food Science where the best recipes rely on mixing fat, salt, and sugar into ever more complex concoctions, the absolute best hooks come when you mix two or more of these hooks together. My absolute favorite novel opening of all time is the beginning of Deanna Raybourn's, Silent in the Grave.

"To say that I met Nicholas Brisbane over my husband’s dead body is not entirely accurate. Edward, it should be noted, was still twitching upon the floor."

This is an absolute perfect mix of suspense and wit. I want to know every single thing about what's going on here, and I am still grinning like an idiot over how charming it is. I bought the omnibus of her first three books on the strength of this line alone. A highly effective hook.

But as with everything in writing, the more you try to do, the better you have to be to pull it off. Mixing hooks is a delicate alchemy, and can easily blow up or fall flat if you don't get it just right. But again, as with everything in writing, the more you know about what you're doing, the easier pulling it off becomes.

Hey girl, this sounds great and all, but who appointed you grand poobah of putting things in boxes? Why do hooks have to be categorized, anyway? You're one of those crazy people who labels everything, aren't you?

... Maybe...

While I confess to a slight obsession with dividing nebulous ideas into workable categories...(What? Nebulous ideas defy examination by their very nature, and without examination, how can we improve? I must catch this cloud and pin it down...FOR SCIENCE!!!)

Ahem, anyway, the point here isn't that these three branches I've outlined above are some kind of Holy Trinity of Hooks. Quite frankly, while I of course hope that you like my categories and find them helpful, I don't really care one way or the other if use mine or make your own or say screw it all together. The point of all this, my dear reader, is to take the washed out, overused, high-school-lit-class-vocab-word hook and turn it into something useful again.

Though hooks are one of the most important concepts of writing, constant flogging has robbed the term of all its meaning, and the only way to get that meaning back is to divide, dig in, and examine. If this article has done nothing but make you pissed at how wrong I am about all this, then it's still done its job, because you were thinking critically about hooks, and that very act pours meaning back into a vital term that deserves so much more than an off the cuff, "everyone knows what this is" comment on a writing blog.

It's hard for me to express how angry I get when I see so many people talking about hooks, and yet saying nothing. "Something that hooks the reader" isn't enough. You can't define a term with itself, especially when that concept is the make or break point for a novel. It doesn't matter how good your book is, if you haven't mastered your hooks, no one is going to get past the first page. If there was one thing I would tell new writers to master above all, it would be the hook, because the hook opens the door to everything else.

Whew, that got long and technical, but still, I trust, enjoyable. If you're a writer, I hope this breakdown of hooks helps you find new, more effective ways to use them in at your own writing. If you're a reader, I hope this insider knowledge helps you realize when you're being tricked into reading a bad book supported by hooks alone (because who has time to read bad books?). Thank you as always for reading, and please feel free to leave your thoughts, good and bad, in the comments!

Yours as always,
Rachel

The Art of Story Velcro

I apologize for the extended blackout. Our house has been beset by a green plague (also known as pollen), and fallout has not been pretty. I'm not sure what cruel and whimsical force gave humans sinuses, but I think I hate it right now.

But while all of this sneezing and general miserableness didn't leave much space for writing/tweeting/blogging/cleaning/being a functional human being, it did allow for a great deal of thinking. Specifically, I've been thinking about what makes a story un-put-downable, and how I can get more of it.

You know how sometimes you'll have a book that you're enjoying, but it takes you forever to finish? Like, it's good and you want to know how the story ends, but life conspires and you just keep putting it down. Now, you know those books that take you over? The books that keep you up until all hours of the night when you desperately need to sleep but you simply can not put the sucker down? Yeah, those books.

The difference between these two types of books can be difficult to pin down. After all, they're both good, it's just that one was addictive and one wasn't. Why? What creates that special MUST READ brand of story crack?

I'm sad to say I haven't figured out the entire recipe for book crack yet (but man, once I do, watch out world! None of you are ever getting anything done again ever!), but I do believe I've figured out a major ingredient: reader engagement.

Reader engagement is just a fancy term for how into your book a reader is. When you can't put down a book, you are highly engaged, and engagement is a facet of reader interest. Specifically, if I want a reader to keep reading, I have to keep them interested on as many levels as possible. Interested in the plot, in the romance, in the world, in the outcomes of my character's lives, etc. And the more interest I can build, the more engaged (and addicted) my reader will be. As a story teller, I am competing against the reader's busy life for attention and time. To win this battle, my story needs to be almost impossible to rip yourself away and incredibly easy to get locked back in to if you do manage to pull free. In short, I need to story Velcro.

If you look at Velcro up close, you can see that one side is covered in thousands of tiny hooks which snag on the soft strap and hold the two together. Once stuck, the two sides require force, sometimes massive force, to pull them apart again. This is exactly what I want in my stories, to snag my reader so tightly they'll need to exert massive force to pull away, and every time the force stops, they fall right back and get hooked again. This sort of broad, inescapable engagement is essential to creating an un-put-downable book, and to achieve it, I take my cue from Velcro. I make hooks.

Putting hooks in your story is hardly a new concept, but I'm not talking about the big hooks that convince someone to pick up your story in the first place. If the reader's already reading, those hooks have done their job. We're in subtler territory now, which means smaller hooks, sometimes tiny ones, spread all throughout the story for the purpose of keeping your reader locked at that same level of interest that made them pick up the book in the first place.

To see this in action, let's take my favorite go-to example: Harry Potter. Most people picked up the series initially because a boy magician going to a secret wizard school is pretty great hook, but they stayed because J. K. Rowling is a freaking master of story velcro. Practically every paragraph of Harry Potter is filled with interesting tidbits, things you want to know more about. First there's the mystery of a baby left on the doorstep, and then empathy with Harry's terrible home life. This is followed by the wonder of obviously magical happenings and overall giddy excitement that is the world of Harry Potter itself and then finished by intense character drama and an exciting climax.

Rowling doesn't hit you with all of this at once. Instead, she picks at you, revealing one tidbit after another, hook hook hook hook, snagging you and pulling you into her story until you can no longer (and have no desire to) get free. Even when her hooks never really panned out (like all that stuff about the dragons in Norway), they kept me reading. I take several issues with the plots of the Harry Potter series, but I read each new HP book at midnight on release day just like everyone else. And that, my friends, is the power of amazing story velcro.

On a practical writing level, I believe that creating this sort of deep engagement is more of an exercise in attention than talent. You need to remember to think like a reader. When you look at your story, you have to put aside what you want it to be and see the text for what it is. You might know your main character is going to transform from a spineless wimp into an amazing person over the course of eight chapters, but your reader has no idea, and it's the writer's job to keep that reader hooked long enough to allow the transformation to occur. To do this, in every scene, in every paragraph, you have to ask yourself, "how can this be more interesting?" and then be ready to find that answer in all sorts of different places.

The best story velcro happens on multiple levels through out the story. It's not enough to just cram your paragraphs full of amazing ideas and prose (though that can take you pretty far if your ideas are cool enough, just look at China Mieville). But this sort of shot gun approach can overwhelm readers unless done amazingly well. A far safer (and easier) approach is to try to think vertically through all the threads of the book and apply your hooks on multiple levels. For example, if you've just done a lot of talking about world building, throw in some snappy character dialogue that reveals interesting facets about your cast. If it's a low point in the plot tension, create character tension to fill the gap. Have an argument, hint that someone might be lying. My personal favorite is to have something vaguely sinister happen just on the edge of the scene to make a reader gasp and go "WHAT'S THAT?!"

Wherever you see an empty spot or a place where reader attention might be flagging, work in a hook, even if you're not sure what to do with it yet. Not only will this keep your reader engaged at every turn, it also deepens the book and gives you something cool to pull up later in the plot, sometimes entire books later, and come out looking like you planned it all along.

I realize this probably sounds overwhelming. I mean, working in hooks when you're also supposed to be thinking about tension and character development and, oh yeah, just getting the freaking story down and making sense? That's a lot to think about. But as I said two paragraphs up, this isn't a matter of talent or genius or inspiration, it's an exercise in attention. The most important thing a writer can be is attentive to their own work. Having care, paying attention, adding detail, these are how you create depth, and the more you deepen, the easier it becomes to add nuance and flourishes to every part of your work.

Fortunately, writing is neither a spectator sport nor a timed event. Creating the dense network of hooks required to make excellent story velcro is a multi-pass project that goes on for as long as you're working on a story. For my part, I keep shoving in hooks all the way up to the final copy edit. But so long as you are actively thinking about reader engagement, even if it's nothing more than rejecting boring sentences in favor of more interesting ones, you are actively making your story better, and that's always a step in the right direction.

Writing Wednesday: Reader Investment and the Ticking Time Bomb

I've talked about tension and hooking my reader a LOT on this blog over the years. (Seriously, a lot. Search my blog for tension and you get, like, 20 posts.)

Given all the pixels I've already spilled on the topic, you might think I've already covered every single aspect of writing tension that exists. Well, you'd be wrong! There's always more stuff to say about tension in stories! This is partially because the mechanics of good tension are deep, subtle, and worthy of exploration, but mostly, I talk about tension because tension is really freaking important. More important than characters or plot or any other critical element of writing.

Note that this isn't to say those other things don't matter. They matter a ton! Just try writing a book with cardboard characters and see how far that gets you. It's just that tension matters more, because while you could have the best characters/plot ever committed to paper, no one's ever going to read long enough to see them if your tension sucks. Maintaining good tension is how you keep a reader's attention over the course of your writing, and since 99% of being a successful author is writing shit people want to read, I'm sure you can see how keeping your tension on point is critical to story success.

This is both a great example of narrative tension and a really great book on the subject!

So if you're new to the blog and I've just made you paranoid about your own tension, click here to get caught up! (And if you have no idea what I'm talking about with all this tension stuff, click here for my very first post on the topic to see me work myself into a froth explaining what tension is and why you desperately need it in your life).

For the rest of you old hands (or who just don't want to read back posts), today's tension topic is all about tricks and mechanisms for maintaining tension and reader investment over the course of a scene, chapter, or even an entire book. (And yes, I did just use the word "mechanisms.")

Gird your loins, peeps! It's about to get technical in here!

Writing Wednesday: Reader Investment and the Ticking Time Bomb

So I've already talked about how you can use hooks to grab a reader's attention and yank them into your story like an angler landing a sweet, highly literate fish. (And if you're not sure what a hook is, go read this post.) For maximum effect, most authors use hooks at the very beginning of the story to draw a reader in and then again and again throughout the rest off the text to keep them there. This post is about what happens after the hook has done its job.

Congratulations! Your reader now reading your book! Now: how do you keep them there?

7 Posts to Help You Use Hooks Better

Hi everyone, this is Travis. I realized that we have a lot of new readers lately. If you want to be a better writer, there's years of materials here on Pretentious Title to dig through!

But no one likes digging through years of old posts. So, to help you all out, I've put together a quick link round up of some of Rachel's most popular How To writing posts. Today's topic is: the Hook. What it is, how to use it, and some great examples of the hook in action.

I hope you find these links handy! If you'd like more of these roundups, let us know what topics you'd like to see covered in the comments below. And remember, One Good Dragon Deserves Another comes out tomorrow!

(Rachel takeover: REVIEWS! In addition to the absolutely wonderful FBC review I mentioned Weds, OGDDA has already racked up great reviews from The Midnight Garden and Notes from a Readerholic as well! SO HAPPY YOU GUYS! Thank you!!!)

And now, the links!

Rachel's Top Posts About Hooks

Anatomy of a Hook - Using 6 Word Stories to examine the hook in its purest form.

The Art of Story Velcro - Using every aspect of your story to hook readers so hard, they never let go.

How to Write a Great Blurb - Who says writing great blurbs has to be torture?

Where to Start Your Story - It's not always where you think.

Tension - Why hooks work in the first place. The alpha and omega of successful writing.

How to Write a Prologue People Won't Skip - For all my fellow prologue junkies out there!

How I Manage Large Casts of Characters - Using character hooks to keep readers invested.

Thank you again for reading, and happy Almost OGDDA Release Day!

- R & T

author toolbox: the three hooks

(Cross posted from The Magic District)

One of the biggest problems I've had with my writing is excess flab. I have a bad habit of putting in scenes that I like (important, wonderful, fantastically written scenes) just because I like them, and not because that's where they should actually go (or be in the novel at all). This led to really big, unsellable books full of tension killing, scared cow scenes that went nowhere. It took me a lot of editing (and a lot of bad feedback) to finally learn my lesson: just because a scene is good does not mean it has a place in your novel. The good ship book is a small vessel. There's no room for scenes that don't pull their weight. But I'm an author. I generally like everything I write on some level (otherwise, why would I write it?) So how do I know what DOES belong?

To combat this problem, I created a checklist I call "the three hooks". Whenever I am planning a novel, the first thing I do is write out everything that happens. If I don't know what happens, this is when I figure it out. Some authors can just get an idea and go, and I do that a lot, too, but in the end novels always come back to their essence: a pile of scenes leading the reader from the beginning to the end. Once I have this pile of scenes, either in finished or outline form, I take each scene and I apply a set of standards. For the scene to pass, it must:

• Advance the story


• Reveal new information


• Pull the reader forward

Without all three of these elements, a scene, no matter how good or beloved, is just wasted words. A scene that does not advance the story, like a flashback revealing character information that is not pertinent to the story, may be brilliantly written, but it does nothing for the book. A scene that does not reveal new information, say a talking head recap scene, may be chock full of snappy dialog, but it does nothing for the book. A scene that does not pull the reader forward, say a break in the narrative where everyone is happy and all their needs are met, may be very cathartic for the author, but it does less than nothing for the book. In fact, I'd say a scene like that would give you negative progress. Resolved tension leads to put down books, and that is not what we want!

These hooks don't have to be obvious (in fact, the more creatively you can hide them, the better things get), but they do have to be there to keep the story rolling. These are the hooks that keep your reader reading, the tiny little claws of interest you constantly need to wiggle into the reader's brain to keep them turning pages. If every scene in your novel moves the plot ahead, reveals new and important information, and gives the reader a reason to turn the page and move on to the next scene, then you've got a book that a reader can not put down, and that is what it's all about.

Writing Wednesday: Tips for Great World Building

Hi folks,

Rachel refused to come out of her writing cave this morning. Something about Dragons, interruptions, and tasty with ketchup. So it looks like I'm going to be doing the blog post today. Mwahahaha! Last week was a business post, so this week I'm going to try to keep it writerly with a post on settings and world building.

Writing Wednesday: Tips for Great World Building

I've been making my own settings since sixth grade. Not for books, but for the table top RPGs that I run for my friends. Surprisingly to me, this experience has been invaluable when I help Rachel world build for her series. In fact, one of the most crucial contributions I make to Rachel's books have to do with her settings. She's even written a post about my world-building help called My Husband, the World Wrecker. 

(RACHEL NOTE: This is true. All of my settings were either blatantly stolen from or enormously improved by Travis. Also, YOU GUYS, he is the best GM ever! Seriously. I learned so much of what I know about stories from being a player character in his games over these last 14 years. Just goes to show that you really do pick up novel writing skills from everywhere!)

I'm not a writer like Rachel, but this is something I've done a lot both together with her and on my own, so today I want to share with you some of the things I've picked up over my two decades and countless worlds worth of experience into what makes for really good world building. Now, this will be less "how to world build" and more "how I world build", but I hope that you all find this interesting none the less.

Starting Out, the Big Hook

All my best worlds start with a hook. The setting itself needs to have a core component that invokes curiosity, "OMG factor," an exciting twist, has implications, or invokes a sense of irony/dread.

However, I'm not a fan of every type of world hook. I definitely feel like some are better than others. Specifically, I'm a big big believer in the power of,

The contradiction. Aka, the mystery, the thing-that-doesn't-add-up, the glaring exception...

All the coolest settings I know of (including Eli, Devi, and Dragons ^_~) have the contradiction deep within them. Our brains are desperate for order. We instinctively crave for everything to make logical, or at least explainable, sense. When we see something that doesn't make sense, say a broken rule of the universe or society, the urge to know why it doesn't drives us nuts.

In story, just add on the fact that not-knowing might have deadly consequences and you'll get some great baked-in tension.

For example,

How to Write a Great Blurb

This week, I finally read Blake Snyder's Save the Cat!, the screenwriter's classic How To Tell a Story book. As a non-screenwriter, I still found it very interesting, but the part I liked the best was definitely the chapter about loglines.

So a logline is basically the one sentence description of a movie you used to see in the paper back when people actually looked at news papers for movie times. Things like:

"The fight for the future begins when a computer hacker learns the world exists in the sophisticated alternate reality of a computer program called 'The Matrix'"

"A 17th Century tale of adventure on the Caribbean Sea where the roguish yet charming Captain Jack Sparrow joins forces with a young blacksmith in a gallant attempt to rescue the Governor of England's daughter and reclaim his ship."

"Toula's family has exactly three traditional values - "Marry a Greek boy, have Greek babies, and feed everyone." When she falls in love with a sweet but WASPy guy, Toula struggles to get her family to accept her fiancée while she comes to terms with her own heritage."

These are loglines for The Matrix, Pirates of the Caribbean, and My Big, Fat, Greek Wedding respectively, though I probably didn't even have to tell you that. We know these stories, because these were all loglines that sold movies. In the business part of Hollywood, that's a logline's job: to sell a script.

In this area, at least, we novelists have it WAY better than screenwriters, because we have blurbs. Unlike loglines, which have to be short enough to pitch in that proverbial elevator, blurbs (or query letters, which are basically blurbs personalized to an agent) are allowed to take up entire paragraphs. Compared to the loglines above, that's an embarrassment of riches in terms of space to lay out our stories, and yet we still struggle to fit it all in. How do you convey what your 100,000 word book is about in two paragraphs? That's barely enough space to lay out the main characters and a basic sketch of the plot.

Well, you're in luck, because telling the story isn't what blurbs are for! A blurb, like a logline, isn't meant to be a synopsis or a report or anything so heavy. Instead, it is the answer to the question, "What is your story about?" And as any author who's admitted their profession in public can tell you, when someone asks "What is your story about," they're not signing up to hear a book report. They just want to know what's the genre, and why should they care.

Once you understand that, you've taken the first step toward mastering the blurb, because blurbs, like the loglines above, aren't there to tell the story, they're there to sell the story. They're meant to hook, to tease, to excite, to get whoever is reading them to want to read more. That's it, that's the entire point, and once you realize that, writing blurbs becomes very simple.

Not easy, of course. Blurbs still have to be short, witty, tantalizing, and full of hooks, which is hardly a walk in the park. But with a few guidelines (and the knowledge that you're writing ad copy, not a book a report), blurbs can stop being things you hate and become fun writing exercises.

Years ago, when I was haunting the NaNoWriMo forums, I came across the best single line hook for a novel I've ever read. It was one of those "boil your novel down to one sentence" challenges, and the entry was "He broke the world, can he fix it?"

That's a hell of a hook. I think I actually asked out loud "I don't know, can he?!" If there'd been more, I would have read it right there. Now, having read Save the Cat!, I think I understand why I was so immediately snapped up. In his book, Snyder mentions that the two essentials for every logline are irony and mystery. "He broke the world, can he fix it?" is just these two things in their purest form, a giant, unbreakable thing has been broken by an individual (irony), can he fix it? (mystery)

This two pronged approach is most easily visible in loglines where the enforced brevity leaves no room for anything else. Looking back up at the logline for The Matrix, we see that our real world isn't real at all (irony) and that we're going to be fighting machines to get back (inherent mystery, can we win?). Blurbs, being longer, are a little different. They still rely on mystery and iron, which could also be called the ingredients for a good hook, but they have the space to pack in more: more characters, more intrigue, more hooks. The canny writer will use this to her advantage.

Take, for example, the blurb for Magic Bites by Ilona Andrews:

"Atlanta would be a nice place to live, if it weren't for magic… One moment magic dominates, and cars stall and guns fail. The next, technology takes over and the defensive spells no longer protect your house from monsters. Here skyscrapers topple under onslaught of magic; werebears and werehyenas prowl through the ruined streets; and the Masters of the Dead, necromancers driven by their thirst of knowledge and wealth, pilot blood-crazed vampires with their minds. In this world lives Kate Daniels. Kate likes her sword a little too much and has a hard time controlling her mouth. The magic in her blood makes her a target, and she spent most of her life hiding in plain sight. But when Kate’s guardian is murdered, she must choose to do nothing and remain safe or to pursue his preternatural killer. Hiding is easy, but the right choice is rarely easy…"

This is a fantastic blurb on all accounts. There's requisite the irony (how could a city with magic not be a nice place to live?!) and mystery (Why is there magic? Will Kate catch the killer?), but there's also about ten billion other amazing cool hooks waiting to grab us--magic and technology switching places! A ruined metropolis crawling with magic! Necromancers who mind control vampires! A kick-ass heroine! A killer on the loose! How could you not want to read this book?!

This is the power of a great blurb. The paragraph above tells us almost nothing about the actual plot. There's only one named character (Kate Daniels) and a single recognizable location (Atlanta). We don't know why magic came back or what the world is like or even what Kate actually does for a living, and yet I want to read it all RIGHT NOW, as do hundreds thousands of other people going by her regular appearances on the NYT Bestseller List. We all want to read because this blurb does a great job of selling the setting, characters, and voice of the book.

That last bit is really crucial, and one of the reasons why authors should never farm out their blurb writing. Unlike loglines for movies, blurbs are more than just a sales pitch. They're also a sample of the writing we can expect inside. If a writer can't write a good blurb, or at least an interesting, engaging one, I have to wonder if they can write a novel. Blurb writing is hard, yes, but it's still writing. When I see an overworked blurb full of awkward sentences, predictable turns, and cheesy stock phrases ("the fate of the world," "toughest challenge she's ever known," "Character's perfect life falls apart when"), I can't help but wonder if the book isn't just as bad. That's never what you want people to wonder! You don't want them to wonder at all, you want them buy/request sample pages with squeals of delighted glee!

So, if you're sitting down to write a blurb or a query letter for your book, or if you already have a blurb/query letter and you're not getting the responses you want, take a step back and ask yourself if your blurb is doing its job. Is it highlighting what's best and most interesting about your work? Is it only telling people what they will read, or is it showing them why they want to read it?

Again, blurb writing is not easy. I can write 1000 words an hour, but I've spent two days on a 200 word blurb and still not been completely happy. That can feel a lot like failure when it hits, but your blurb is worth that level of effort, because the blurb is the most important bit of writing in your novel. The blurb is the first impression, the foot in the door. It's the very first thing anyone will read of your work, and if that blurb can't convince a reader or agent to keep going, your novel will not be read. So never be afraid to take your time and never settle for a blurb you don't love. It might take dozens of tries, but a good blurb is always worth the work in the end.

I hope this has helped you get a bit more insight into the World of Blurbcraft! I wanted to put up a really terrible blurb as a counter example to the Ilona Andrews one above, but there's no writer I dislike enough to embarrass them like that. Besides, you know a bad blurb when you see one. Everyone does, which is why they don't work. So use that same gut instinct on your own blurb. It might hurt, but I promise it's a good, becoming-a-better-writer kind of hurt.

And that's my post on blurbs! As always, thank you for reading, and remember to pile those hooks high!

Happy writing!
Rachel

Writing Wednesday: Anatomy of a Scene

Hello everyone, and welcome back to Prose Summer Camp!

Today, we're going to be taking a look at the workhorse of fiction, the scene. But first, announcements!

First, on Monday, Trav had a great post about why you shouldn't price your novel at $0.99. For the record, I absolutely agree with everything he says, but (as we always say around here), our way is not the only way. Case in point, after we posted the article, the awesome and very successful Annie Bellet contacted me on Twitter to tell me that she and several other authors have had fantastic success pricing at $0.99! This lead to a great discussion which I begged her to put into a post, and she gracious obliged. So, next Monday we'll have a guest post from Annie about why you should price your novel at $0.99! I've already read it, and it's going to be awesome.

Secondly, we've added a ton of new posters to the shop! Including this little beauty...

Squeeee!!!

Folks, I've got one in my hands right now, and it is gorgeous! The colors are so much more vibrant than on screen. We've also got posters for the covers and art for One Good Dragon Deserves Another (finally) and No Good Dragon Goes Unpunished as well, and they look just as good. You need more dragons in your life, right? Head on over to the swag shop to take a look and get some special Heartstrikers art for your walls!

Now that's out of the way, let's get down to brass tacks, with...

Prose Summer Camp: Anatomy of a Scene

So far in this series, we've talked about the small, technical details of good writing like improving sentence structure and how to write good sentence level description. We even had Bob come in to help us with dialogue! 

Now we're going to zoom out a bit and take a look at a larger, but still fundamental, aspect of good novel writing: the scene. As always, though, a disclaimer:

**This is how I write. All of the tips below are drawn from my taste and experience as a writer. If you don't like my writing style, knowing how I plan my scenes might not be useful. This is fine! Everyone writes in their own voice. I hope, of course, that you will still find some it helpful, but please don't take any of this as me setting down the One True Path of Writing. I'm just telling you what works for me in the hopes that it might also work for you.**

Now that's out of the way, let's talk about what a scene can do.

How to write a prologue people won't skip

There are many different parts to a book - middles, endings, beginnings, climaxes, that train station scene at the end of the last Harry Potter - but no slice of the novel engenders quite as much derision and outright hatred as the prologue. Agents don't want to see it, readers skip it, editors cut it, yuck.

With so much open hate the pressure to just forget about a prologue can be intense, but just because prologues are tricky to pull off doesn't mean you can't have one. When used correctly, a prologue becomes an invaluable tool and an indispensable part of the story. The secret (as always) is that you have to know what you're doing. 

The Prologue's Purpose

As a writer, I never, ever, EVER want to write something readers can skip. A good novel is like a well tuned race car, every piece has its purpose within the whole. If a reader can skip a part of your book without consequence, then you have to ask yourself does that part really need to be there. But prologues are even more sensitive since they come at the very beginning. Mess up the middle of your novel and you'll get a bad review, mess up the opening and the reader will put the book down and forget about it forever. 

With stakes like these, it may seem safer to just skip the prologue and save yourself some trouble, but I say prologues can be a huge help to your novel so long as the writer understands that the purpose of a prologue is to improve the reader's enjoyment of the book. 

Your prologue is not your first chapter, it's not even the beginning. It's what comes before, the set up, the before dinner cocktail that eases you into a wonderful night. The most successful prologues fall into two types: prologues that exist to feed the reader information they otherwise couldn't get, and prologues that set the mood.

Past as Prologue

The easiest (and my personal favorite) prologue is one that serves as a vehicle to give the reader information they couldn't otherwise obtain within the structure of the story. For example, in my second Eli novel, The Spirit Rebellion, I open with a scene from Eli's past showing how he ran away from home and came to be the Shepherdess's favorite. 

This was perfect prologue material. It was something Eli himself would never talk about and, since it happened several years in the past, I couldn't show within the constraints of the novel's timeline without resorting to a flashback. More importantly, by showing this scene to the reader at the very beginning, I was able to foreshadow and set up several events that happened later in the book. I gave my reader information about what happened in the past in order to make the events of the present more powerful. In other words, I used my prologue to set up context, and then I used that context to twist the knife.

This sort of one-two set up is incredibly powerful, and you don't have to limit yourself to the past to make it work. In The Spirit War (Eli book 4), I show events that are happening in the present, but on the other side of the world. Again, I used the prologue to feed the reader information the characters couldn't know in order to create tension. Eli and company had no idea what was going on across the sea, but the reader knew exactly how big a shit storm was coming, and that knowledge created a ticking time bomb that twisted the tension in the novel to heights I couldn't have achieved otherwise.

By giving the reader inside information, I was able to drop subtle hints that the characters didn't notice, but the reader did. This let me create a "don't open that door!" situation to keep the reader on the edge of their seat without having to resort to gimmicks. Thanks to the prologue, the hooks were already there, buried deep in the reader, all I had to do was pull.

That said, I have to admit this sort of prologue works much better in subsequent novel than it does in a first book. The prologue for The Spirit Rebellion I mentioned earlier wouldn't have worked nearly as well if I hadn't been able to rely on my readers' built up curiosity about Eli's past to pull them in. This isn't to say you can't use the "show a hint of the past to put the present into context" prologue in a first book, but there are more hurdles. In a first novel, your readers aren't yet invested in your world or your people. They don't care about what happened in the past yet. Hell, they don't even know it is the past unless you tell them. You have to make them care right off the bat, and that can be a difficult trick to pull off, especially if your prologue jumps around between times and characters. 

As with everything in writing, it all comes down to execution. If you can pull it off, a good Past as Prologue can take your novel to new heights. By giving the reader inside information, you can tighten your story's tension to a cutting edge with very few words simply by leaning on and hinting at what the reader already knows. It's showing the maid hiding a body before you spend the novel with everyone else wondering whodunit while the murderer is pouring their tea and your reader is going out of their mind waiting for her to strike again. It's tension through revelation, and with the right treatment, it can be magic.

Setting the Stage

The second type of prologue is more nebulous, artistic, subjective, and, consequently, much easier to mess up. I'm talking about the atmosphere prologue which, rather than flat out revealing plot information, focuses instead on setting the stage and preparing the reader to enter your world. A good (and very famous) example of this kind of prologue would be the opening of Dicken's A Tale of Two Cities: 

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way— in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

In this prologue, Dickens sets his stage. Though the novel is in third person, the author here speaks directly to the reader, describing the context of the story and the political situation of the time. Simultaneously, the exalted language and sweeping statements gets us in the mood for an epic tale of revolution so that by the time the plot actually kicks in in the next chapter we are 100% on board.

Unfortunately, these type of prologues are often the ones agents/readers/editors are talking about when they hate on prologues. When done well, atmospheric prologues can be the most memorable part of a book, the lines people can still quote years later, like the first line of the Dickens quote above (which most of America can quote even though a very small percentage of those people have actually read the book).  When done badly, the atmospheric prologue becomes a long winded, boring, and disjointed from the story it's supposed to be introducing. When done very badly, it can become a cosmic info dump (more on that below).

This isn't to discourage you from trying an atmospheric prologue. As I said, some of the best writing comes from this sort of work. But because it is so easy to mess up, you have to be extremely careful and self critical when writing an artistic prologue, especially if you're trying to sell your novel for the first time. Trust me, nothing makes you come off as a pretentious, boring doofus like a badly done art prologue.

At its best, an artistic prologue is the beautiful beginning, the gorgeous credits at the opening of a movie where, by the time they finish, you just know you're going to love the film even though it hasn't yet begun. But the atmospheric prologue is an all or nothing deal with an extremely high bar. If you can't knock it out of the park, you're probably better off just starting on chapter 1.

What a Prologue Isn't
So those are the two large classifications of prologue, and though I'm sure you can find outliers if you look hard enough, the vast majority will fall into these two camps. That said, perhaps the most important part of writing a good prologue is understanding what makes a bad one. So, to make things a bit easier, here's a list of shit that doesn't fly in prologues:

1. The Cosmic Info Dump 
In the beginning there was darkness, and then Gaia the Earth Mother created the light and the waters and...zzz...

Ahh, the creation story opening. This little gem is almost exclusively a fantasy trope, but can you see it in other forms all through fiction. In Science Fiction, it can be the history of how people got into space, in mysteries, it might be how your detective got into business solving murders, whatever. The point is that this sort of industrial scale info dumping does not belong in a prologue.

The very worst thing you can do to a prologue is to treat it like a chute to shove setting information down a reader's throat. If background details are really important, they'll come up naturally in a story. If they aren't important enough to be woven into the novel, then why the hell would you put them in your prologue?

To be fair, there are plenty of big, successful authors who have done this kind of info dump prologue successfully. To this I say hooray for them, but just because someone else got away with it doesn't mean you get a free pass. No matter how beautifully you write it, dumping information on your reader in huge blocks is lazy writing plain and simple. Maybe you can get away with it, but for my money, if you're going to do all the work it takes to make an info dump like that palpable, why not just not be lazy in the first place? Background info belongs in the background, not at the front of the book.

2. The Action! Prologue
Have you ever picked up a book and opened the first page to find yourself dropped unceremoniously in the middle of the action? Right off the bat there's dramatic stuff going on you and all these characters are dying or doing seemingly very important things, but there's no context, so you flip back a page to make sure this is actually the beginning only to find out that yes, this is the start of the book, and you have no idea what's going on.

This is the Action! prologue, also called in medias res, where the author dumps their reader smack dab in the middle of the action in the hope they'll stick around to see what happens. This sort of thing is a very powerful tool that can be used to great effect. It's also just enough rope to hang yourself.

With so much emphasis being put on hooking your reader from paragraph one, the Action! prologue can seem like a good bet. You get to start right in with the big explosions for a flashy opening and then go back to cover all that boring, "why this stuff was blowing up" paperwork once chapter one begins. (Of course, if the why of the blowing up is too boring to start your book then you've got bigger problems than your prologue, but you get the point.) Even if your why is very cool, though, starting in the middle of the action can be problematic. Sure you get immediate tension and interest, but it's all just dazzle, smoke and mirrors with no context and, thus, no depth. And unless you dig that depth very quickly, your reader will quickly see through the ruse.

Unfortunately, digging in to build that depth brings its own problems. Full throttle starts tend to throw a lot of information at the reader very quickly, and that puts a lot of pressure on your audience to keep up, especially if you're asking them to remember stuff while you're setting off explosions in their face. Readers can handle pressure, but at the very beginning of a book with no context or investment, some might not see a reason to try. If you're lucky, they'll simply skip ahead to the actual beginning of the book. If you're not, they'll put the book down entirely.

This isn't to say an Action! beginning can't work. There are plenty of novels, especially in the thriller genre, that get right to the shooting and worry about the details later. However, just like driving a high performance sports car, writing a high octane opening takes a surprising amount of skill and practice. It also has to be right for the book in question. If your the rest of your novel doesn't eventually match the boom at the beginning, even the best written Action! opening can feel jarring and out of place.

Like everything in writing, it all comes down to execution. If you can pull off an Action! prologue, bully for you. But as a general rule of thumb, if your opening has your reader wondering if the publisher put chapter 5 at the the beginning by mistake, that's bad.

3. The Wha?
Have you ever read a book where the opening just seemed to make no sense at all. Like, there's action taking place, and it's clearly important, but you have no idea why or what's going on? Maybe the prologue opens with a woman standing on a hill and then she opens a box of sand and pours it to the wind, after which we jump to a child in England during the Blitz eating a stolen ice cream cone while the narration waxes poetic on the ephemeral nature of life. Through it all, there's the implication that this that this is all actually very deep and you should be moved, but you're not, because just don't know enough yet to care.

This is what I call the Wha? opening, because by the time you've reached the end, that's all you can say. Wha? In theory, a Wha? opening is supposed to be confusing, an artistic mystery to draw the reader in while also planting a question in the reader's mind that the novel itself will then proceed to ruminate on. These sort of openings are mostly found in literary novels and are part of why I have a hard time taking lit fic seriously. Even the best written ones can't help coming off as pretentious.

I will freely admit to some bias here. The Wha? prologue is my absolute least favorite way to open a book. I get how it's supposed to work, I've even read some that were quite lovely, but I have never, ever seen one of these that actually helped the novel it was attached to.

For me, these are the ultimate skippable prologues. Even in the hands of a master, it's almost impossible to make these sort of beginnings meaningful because meaning requires context and the Wha? opening lacks context by its very definition. Actually, I've found these kind of openings much more enjoyable after I've already read the book, and while I'll admit that has its own merits, do you really want to open your novel with something that doesn't get good until the end of the story?

As with all the "bad" prologues I've mentioned, I'm sure there are exceptions out there. As always, you are the only one who can decide whether or not this kind of prologue works for your novel. That said, however, I think prologues like these--the giant info dumps, the jarring, no context action, and especially the nonsensical disconnected arty openings--are the type of extremely hard to pull off, usually terrible openings that give all prologues a bad name, and I would think very, very carefully before putting any of them in one of my novels.

What a Good Prologue Can Be

When setting out to write a prologue, or anything really, the most important thing to remember is your audience. Your reader is your partner, the one you must entertain. As such, they can be your best friends and greatest champions, climbing mountains just to hear the end of your story. Readers are the ones who make your story come alive and support your career, but before any of that can happen, you have to earn their trust.

Readers picking up a new series for the first time (or agents looking at a new novel in the slush) owe you nothing. They will not jump through hoops for you, and they certainly won't extend you the benefit of the doubt. It is your job as the writer to entertain them, to make them love you. As with all romances, first impressions are vital. You have to be very, very careful to start on your absolute best foot if you want them to stick around. This is why getting your prologue right, especially on a first book, is so important. It's your opening shot, maybe your only shot, and if you flub it, your book may be done before it even begins. But if you nail it, a good prologue can hook your reader even better than a fantastic first line, because a good prologue hints at everything a novel can be, and if you can sell the reader on that, you've got them right where you want them.

At its very best, the prologue is the perfect augment for the story it begins. It is the icing that takes a cake from delicious to gourmet, the overture that deftly plucks you out of the real world and prepares you to fully appreciate the symphony to come. A prologue should never exist merely to hold information you want the reader to know but couldn't be bothered to work into the main story, nor should it be treated as an optional extra for those readers who want a little more. Like every part of your book, a good prologue must be necessary, a vital piece of the whole. It should be unskippable, a joy to read all on its own, and if that sounds hard, it's because it is.

Remember, the reason so many people hate prologues is because most of them are bad. Even good writers fall victim to the bad prologue because prologues are really freaking hard to pull off. It's like a gun: incredibly powerful, but it can shoot you in the foot if you don't treat it with proper respect.

I hope this post helps you prologue responsibly. Maybe if we all work together we can end the prologue's exile to the butt of bad writing jokes and restore it to its proper place of honor among the author's tools. Or at least keep agents from wincing when they see the word "Prologue" at the top of the page. Baby steps, people, baby steps.

I hope you enjoyed the post! Do you have a prologue in your novel? Has it given you problems? Let me know in the comments!

As always, thanks for reading, and if you enjoyed this post, I hope you'll check out my new book on writing, 2k to 10k: Writing Faster, Writing Better, and Writing More of What You Love. It's less than a dollar, so give it a try!

Thanks again, I couldn't do this without y'all!

<3s and="and" p="p" ponies="ponies">Rachel

Writing Wednesday: "He never wasted a single failure"

I got dragons to write, so this one's going to be short and sweet :)

Writing Wednesday: "He never wasted a single failure."

So as you guys might know, I'm a pretty big anime nerd, and my current show of obsession is Food Wars (aka Shokugeki no Soma)!

WHY IS THERE NOT MORE OF THIS RIGHT NOW?!

This show is SO GOOD, YOU GUYS!

On the surface, it appears to be just another goofy shonen school fighting anime that picked cooking and rampant nudity as its hooks to stand out in a crowded market. I actually ignored it for several months because I thought it was all gimmick, but after one episode, I realized I was epically wrong. Food Wars is amazing! Not only is it a perfectly executed fighting anime with some of the best tension I've ever seen (trust me, give this thing three episodes and you will be obsessively binge watching anime characters cook rice just like the rest of us) and awesome cooking techniques that are based in reality, the writing is really freaking good.

This is noteworthy in and of itself. I'm a pretty big anime fan, but even I can admit that story, especially on the episode level, is sometimes a weak point in the genre. This goes double for a weird series like this that has so much else going on, but so far Food Wars seems incapable of screwing up. The tension mechanics at work so perfect it hurts and the large cast is both amazingly well drawn and expertly handled so no one gets lost. These would all be (and are) fantastic reasons to watch the show, but what really knocked my socks off was the dialogue writing. Even in translation, there are several lines that made me green with envy, but my stand out favorite of the first season was

"He never wasted a single failure."

Tension

Ok, so I was going to post this at Orbit, but after much hemming and hawing, I decided it was too nuts and bolts of writing oriented. I'm going to write something a little more reader oriented for Orbit later, but for now, have a post about developing tension. I hope someone finds it helpful, or at least entertaining! - R

Have you ever read a book so quickly you had trouble remembering everything that happened? I'm not talking about rushing through books for school (though we've all been there), I'm talking about turning pages like a desperate animal because you simply CAN NOT WAIT to get to the end and see how it all turns out. (I read the Harry Potter this way, attacking anyone who came near me. Limbs might have been lost, I couldn't tell you. I was reading.) Now, have you ever wondered what the author did to make you so desperate to get to the end?

Well, probably not. You were reading, after all. But let me ask you a second question: have you ever been reading a book and liking it ok, and then suddenly you finish a chapter, put the book down, and feel absolutely no urge to pick it up again? Like, it wasn't a bad book, you were just... done, even though the book wasn't.

At their simplest level, these phenomena are two manifestations of the same book construction principle: Tension, one done right, one done not-so-right. I'll let you guess which is which.

Tension is one of those things critics and agents and editors and book reviewers and pretty much anyone who reads critically is always commenting on.  It's the tug of the novel, the gravity that pulls the reader toward the end. It's the force that makes you turn a page, and it's every bit as important to good fiction as plot and character. (Don't believe me? Try reading a novel that has no tension and see how far you get.) But while it's easy to talk about tension like it's some mystical force, it's not very helpful to someone looking to actually put tension into their work. As someone who struggled a lot with tension as I learned how to write a novel, I offer you the simple writer's definition I finally came up with for myself.

Tension is making the reader ask a question, and then not answering it.

At least, not immediately. To give an example, let me turn back to that old stand by, Harry Potter. Why HP? Well, not only is it one of those few things I can expect everyone to have read, but also because Rowling is the freaking ninja master of tension. In the very first paragraph of Sorcerer's Stone , JKR spends her first sentence talking about how the Dursley's are perfectly normal. The second sentence reiterates this, adding that, of course, these are the very last people you'd ever expect to be involved in something magical.

And right there, the tension's locked in. Already you're asking the question: what magical doom is going to befall these stringently normal people? JKR spins this answer out over the course of a chapter, by which point more questions have been posed and you can't help it, you have to keep reading to learn those answers. Some hooks are big, some are small, some are long term, some are short, but they all add their pull. Before you know it midnight has come and passed you're still up, snarling at anyone who dares try to pry that book from your clenched fingers. You, dear reader, are hooked.

Speaking of hooked, the above example could also be called a hook, which is another thing critical readers, especially agents, are always going on about. But all of that violent language - hooking a reader, grabbing a reader, pulling a reader in, has to do with tension. They all force questions: Will she get out alive? Where is her husband? How did that wizard end up in evaporating most of central park? Can a zombie find love?

Of course, part of a satisfying read is having all your questions answered eventually. Dangling threads make for pissed off readers. But, and here's the most important thing I've learned about tension, you have to be very, very careful doling out your answers. If questions are the engines that drive a reader forward, answers are the destination. Once all pertinent questions are answered in a book, the tension is gone.

Let's jump back to paragraph 2 and the book you put down. For sake of argument we'll assume you didn't put it down for obvious reasons (characters were too stupid to live, something horrible happens that makes you throw the book across the room, the story completely jumped the shark, etc). So we have a decent book, maybe even a book you were enjoying, which you just stopped reading and have no real urge to start again. Why? What made you stop? All other things in the book being decent, I will bet you money that it was because the tension fizzled.

Several years ago this happened to me with a romance novel. Things were rolling along initially - broody hero, snappy heroine, money problems in high society, all good and going along fine. And then, a little over half way through, the couple confessed their love for each other and got married.

I put the book down shortly after. Now, I had another five chapters at least of the couple solving the mystery of whatever, but as you see, I didn't care. At least not enough to keep going.

In Romance, the tension question is always "will they get together?" Once this question and all its requisite "How? Where? Why? Is there sex?" facets are answered, that's it. Unless the framing plot is AMAZINGLY compelling and has plenty of tension of its own, once the couple is happily together, the question is answered and the tension is over. Most of the time, that also means the story is over, even if the writer's not done writing.

All that said, though, the final point I'd like to make is that there's no greater tension builder than reader investment. You can hook people with questions all day long, but unless you give the reader a reason to care about the characters and world you're trying to hook them into, they're not going to stay. Initial curiosity will get someone to turn the first page, but not the second. However, if you can create a character the reader cares deeply about, if you can force them to worry for that character, to make them ask "what's going to happen?" and really mean it on a deep, emotional level, you've achieved the highest pinnacle of fiction. But the only way to get to this lofty peak is good tension right from the beginning.

And that's what I've learned about tension so far. Any advice you see here is purely my own and should, as with any single opinion, be taken with a grain of salt. I hope you found it helpful, or at least interesting. I'm always interested in how other people approach tension, or any part of story telling, so if you have a comment, please chime in. I'm all ears (well, all eyeballs, since this is the internet).

AMA: Answers part 1!

Wow, you folks are AWESOME! What great questions! Let's get started!

WARNING: Some of these contain very slight spoilers for the Eli series. Nothing big enough to put under a cut, but if haven't read past book 3 and/or are very sensitive to spoilers, you might want to exercise caution!

All good? Onward!

Paul Weimer: What kind of genre fiction do you like to read for pleasure, Rachel? What is your favorite book you read this year? What sort of non fiction inspires you and your writing? Can you divorce the art of analyzing the craft when you read a book? 

I've always been a wide ranging reader, and since I've started writing, I've tried to reach even further. For non-fiction, I love research heavy sociological books like A Billion Wicked Thoughts: What the Internet Tells Us About Sexual Relationships (fascinating!) as well as lyrical non-fiction like The World Without Us, which (for the record) is one of the most beautiful and thought provoking books I've ever read.

For fiction, I love fantasy (duh), especially glorious epic fantasy, though I don't like really dark fantasy (bad people doing bad things for no good reason is an automatic put down for me). It's not that I hate excessive violence or gritty realism per se, I just tend to prefer lighter stories and happy endings. There's enough misery in the real world.

I also love romances, both of the paranormal variety and Regencies, Urban Fantasy, and weird, beautiful lit fic by people like Lynda Barry and Jeff Noon. My favorite authors whom I will never write like include Sarah Monette, China Mieville, and Margaret Atwood. And to balance out all that literary pretension, my favorite series of all time at the moment is Immortals After Dark by Kresley Cole. Regin the Radiant is my spirit animal.

As to the "can I turn off my writer brain long enough to enjoy a book" part of the question, the answer is... no. There is no off switch for the writer. I am constantly analyzing books to see how other authors put them together, and for the most, that's a good thing. I find all kinds of new tricks to steal! Sometimes, though, it can be annoying, but really, if the story's good enough, I get swept anyway. I have read some truly AWFUL books just because I loved the characters and wanted to know what happened. This is because, while I can never turn the writer brain off, my reader brain is by far the stronger influence, forcing me to stay up to unholy hours of the night finishing even badly constructed books because MUST KNOW WHAT HAPPENS!

Elizabeth: Did you write Eli as a morally grey character on purpose or did he just more or less present that way? Miranda seems to be the only.character that really balances out Eli's grey morals. Do you think the story would have been really different if their morals were reversed?

I love this question! You are exactly right when you say that Miranda balances Eli, because that's what I created her to do. From the very beginning, Miranda was meant to be the cop to Eli's robber, the hammer of iron clad responsibility to help remind him that he is actually a good person and make him do the responsible thing.

Eli came into my head fully formed, but that doesn't mean I didn't spend a lot of time figuring out exactly how he ticked. One of Eli's biggest struggles is his natural affinity for rule breaking (a direct result of his overly strict childhood courtesy of Banage) warring with his deep inner moral compass which, to his dismay, seems firmly planted on good. Eli wants to be outside the system, to steal from fools and ride high at the expense of a society he sees as overbearing and silly. He wants to do what he wants and is a fairly selfish person. But selfish people aren't always bad, and when push comes to shove, Eli always does the right thing. Miranda's role in the series is to be that shove. Without that dynamic, or even if it was reversed, I don't think the series would have been a quarter as much fun.

J. Leigh Bralick: When you wrote the Eli Monpress books, did you have all the interweaving threads that would pull together in book five identified at the very beginning? I just finished it (and ADORED it...and am working on my review!!), and am stunned and amazed and in awe of your genius at how you wove in these little elements throughout the whole series rather on-the-sly like, and then at the end they all came together in jaw-dropping brilliance. 

So I wanted to know if some of them kind of poked their heads out in the last book and waved their arms and said, "Hey, don't forget about me!" or if you knew all along that they were important. :D

Thank you so much for the kind words! And yes, I did have most everything planned out pretty early. The details came later, but the general tangle of relationships and meta plot was there in essence almost from the start and cemented by the time I finished Spirit Eater.

This isn't to say a lot of plot threads didn't suddenly pop up and scream "YOU FORGOT ME!" all through the series (Oh god, they did) but because of my publication schedule (the first three books came out in three months at the end of 2010) I was able to go back and plant seeds in the first two books while I finished the third. This was PRICELESS. Without the ability to go back and put fix things like I did, the series wouldn't have been nearly as complex.

Even though I've written 6 books since I finished Spirit's End, I consider pulling off the end of the Eli series as the highest achievement as a writer to date. I've never wanted anything to work as much as that final book, and the fact that you and others think it does makes me want to sing for joy. Part of me is terrified I'll never be able to pull off a balancing act ike this again (the Eli series was its own breed of magical unicorn for me in a lot of ways), but then, at the time, I didn't think I'd ever make Eli work either. Just goes to show you never know what you can do unless you reach for it.

BG: I think you said you were planning to write about antagonists. I'm interested in reading what you have to say about that.

I still intend to do a big post about bad guys (and not so bad guys) in the future, so I'm going to hold off on getting into this too deep. The basic gist, though, is that the villain is the other half of your story. The heroes drive the story, but the antagonist drives the conflict. Boring villains make for boring books, but since your villains don't get nearly as much page time as the MCs, making them interesting or even sympathetic requires some pretty clever writing.

One of my favorite sayings is "every villain is the hero of their own story." This was why I softened Benehime instead of making her just plain crazy evil. In her mind, she was the victim and she deserved freedom and happiness, and really, she did, she just went about it all wrong. Methodology is often the only thing keeping a villain from being a hero. The ends don't justify the means.

For example, in my new series, one of the antagonists is working toward an unarguably greater good. If circumstances were different, he would be one of the heroes, but he isn't, because to get to that greater good he ruthlessly stepped on others and caused enormous suffering. This was a line I drew. I could have easily justified his unsavory actions to the reader just like the character did in his own mind. But I didn't, because I was trying to make a point.

These are the sort of things you can do as an artist when you start really digging into and using your villain role. There is such a huge breadth of moral complexity and depth in the way we frame who is a protagonist vs. who is an antagonist. Everyone can hate a cackling evil villain. It's easy, nothing is challenged  But when your antagonist is a reasonably good person does bad things in pursuit of a greater end, or who was forced to do bad things by terrible circumstance, then the reader has to think. You're forcing them to use their own moral judgement along with your protagonist to figure out what really is the right thing to do, and that right there is where the book hooks in deep.

So there's a teaser! I'll be doing a much more thought out and in depth post on this in the weeks to come.

Wyndes: Why do authors make their blogs hard to read by putting white text on a black background? I know that sounds facetious, but it seriously is a question that I'd love the answer to. I get why designers do it -- hey, it looks cool -- but it impairs readability dramatically, making it harder for every person with astigmatism (50% of the population!) to read the words. It seems like such a strange choice for the people who should care about the words first. I write this as someone who is seriously considering changing a title because I can't find a capital "C" that I like, so it's not like I don't understand putting design first. I just don't get why so many writers do it.

I'm afraid the short answer to this is: I like it. My eyes are very sensitive to light and I find reading white text on a black screen much easier than dealing with a glaring white or patterned background. That said, as an author who was a graphic designer and has an astigmatism, I'm deeply sympathetic to your plight. If it really bothers you, my suggestion would be read the blogs that give you trouble on an RSS reader (there's a link to my feed on the sidebar marked FEED ME RAWR!) where you have complete control over the color scheme. I personally like Google Reader, but there are many lovely free readers to choose from. Sorry for the eye pain!

And that's it for today! Again, thank you for the amazing questions, y'all really saved my blogging bacon! I'll be getting to the rest next week. Until then, if you have a question you'd like to add to the pot, please feel free to leave it on the original post.

<3 Rachel

Writing Wednesdays - Varying Your Pacing For Dramatic Effect

But before we start, did you know that ONE GOOD DRAGON DESERVES ANOTHER, the sequel to NICE DRAGONS FINISH LAST, is now available as an audio book?! Well it is! And you should totally get a copy because the performance is amazing!! Go listen to the sample at least, you won't be disappointed!

I had a big NaNo post in the works, but it's not quite November yet (okay, it's barely the middle of October), and so, being the dug-in enemy of holiday creep that I am, I've decided to put the NaNo post off until next week and write about one of the most important and difficult to pull off aspects of writing: pacing. Specifically, I want to talk about how to vary your pacing to make your readers feel different things, sort of like pulling a lever on their emotions!

(Pause for evil author cackling).

Ahem. Moving on.

Writing Wednesdays - Varying Your Pacing For Dramatic Effect

What Project Runway Taught Me About Writing

My husband and I have been on a Project Runway binge lately (we've only just finished season 8 so NO SPOILERS!!!). A few days ago, I joked on Twitter that I was going to do a post on all the lessons I've learned about writing while watching the show. Things like "When someone tells you they hate your book/look, don't argue, just quietly hate them." (Seriously, Gretchen, SHUT UP. You are only digging that hole deeper when you argue with the judges!) or "Make separates and accessorize. The designer/writer who makes the same cocktail dress/book every time always goes home early."

Anyway, the whole thing started as just an excuse to make Project Runway jokes on Twitter, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized I wasn't actually joking...

At its heart, Project Runway is a show about being creative under pressure. It's about putting your work and yourself out there to be judged, often harshly, by a jaded and fickle industry famous for chasing trends. It's about staying true to your artistic vision even when other people hate it, because if you change your style to try and please everyone, all you end up with is boring. It's about balancing art with commercialism, drama with practicality, structure and craftsmanship with time limits, all while staying within the constraints of a tightly defined medium...

Sound like anything else I talk about on this blog?

The parallels between writing and designing are by no means perfect, but the ones that do exist are pointed enough that I feel justified in making an entire post on the subject. Please note that while I won't be referencing specific events in the show, I will be assuming at least a basic understanding of Project Runway and reality TV elimination shows. If you have no idea what I'm talking about, the Wikipedia article on the show has a great breakdown of the basic format. You can also watch several seasons for free at Lifetime. Note that I am not being compensated by Project Runway or Lifetime in any way for this post or these links. I just really freaking love this glorious, redonk, catty circus of a show.

You tell it like it is, Heidi.

Anyway, now that's out of the way, on with the post!

Art vs Commercialism, or, "You Have to be True to Yourself as a Designer"

The more I think about this topic, the more excited I get, and not just because it gives me an excuse to post pictures of Tim Gunn (though that was a definite bonus). See, as I've done my yearly "Ask an Author" thread on the NaNoWriMo forums, one of the themes I run into again and again is this idea of "What should I do to sell my book?" This question manifests in many forms, from the ever popular agent questions to "I notice there's a lot of X out there, can I write Y and still get published?" to questions about how long a novel should be in order to be acceptable to publishers. My answer to these questions is always the same: keep the restrictions in mind, but always stay true to your story and your vision. And every time I say I say this, I hear Tim Gunn in my head saying "you have to trust your instincts and be true to yourself as a designer."

I know this all sounds a little cheesy, but work with me here. On Project Runway, the ultimate goal, the Holy Grail, is an outfit that is creative and beautiful, but still wearable. A dress you can't walk in is useless, but a dress that's too plain is boring (which is the kiss of death on Project Runway). The judges always go crazy over the outfit that is wearable, but still interesting. Something that is exciting and sexy and beautiful without being costume-y or overwrought. They want something that will make them go "Wow!" but can still be sold at a department store.

This delicate balance between creativity and commercialism is also at the heart of publishing. Publishers and readers are constantly looking for the next new thing. They want a story that knocks their socks off and shows them something they haven't seen before, but at the same time it can't be too far out there. The book still has to be readable, and it has to be something that can be summed up in a 150 word blurb and make people want to buy it. Bonus points if the story's on trend for what's hot in reading right now, but it can't be too trendy or it will seem old hat before it's even published.

Just as the designers on Project Runway are scrambling to meet this seemingly impossible standard, so are writers struggling to balance their own creative vision with the needs of the modern publishing world. Even people who self publish have to meet reader expectations. Books that are too weird might be extremely creative, but readers and publishers will often pass over them because they're too strange to be taken seriously. Does this mean the book is bad? No, it simply means it's not publishable, which isn't the same thing at all.

It is perfectly possible to have a fantastic, non-commercially viable book just as it is perfectly possible to make a gorgeous dress that is a work of art and yet will never be mass produced or available for sale. But publishing, just like Project Runway, isn't about art. Or, at least, it's not wholly about art. It's not a show for making dresses that will sit on mannequins in a showroom. It's about who can make the best, most interesting clothes that could potentially be sold to real women.

By the same turn, whether you're going through a traditional house or doing everything yourself, commercial publishing is about writing books people want to buy and read. This is why it's so important to know what you want from your writing career. If you want to be an artist first, then commit to that. Accept that your vision comes before sales, and don't get upset when you're not commercially successful. If you want to be a bestseller, same story. You need to commit to your decision and focus on how to make the biggest, most interesting splash while still playing within the tightly defined rules of your genre. And if you want to be both (which is what I and I think the vast majority of authors really want) then you need to commit to learning how to balance art and commercialism.

I'm not saying this is easy. Reliably creating a new, exciting, wonderful stories that are commercially viable is just as difficult as creating beautiful, interesting, new types of clothing that are still wearable and comfortable. If this crap was easy, everyone would win Project Runway, and everyone would be a mega successful author.

Personally, I take great comfort in the fact that it's not easy, because then, when I fail, I know it's not because I'm a failure, but because I've set myself to a nearly impossible task. I also know that I can pick myself and keep working, because unlike Project Runway, I don't have to worry about getting sent home and losing all my dreams forever if I have a bad day. Bonus!

The Vast Effort behind "Effortlessness"

Nina Garcia and her dreaded Death Glare.

Not to betray my endless Tim Gunn love, my favorite point of view on Project Runway is actually panel judge and Marie Clare Creative Director, Nina Garcia. Where Michael Kors is the (bitchy) voice of the pro designer and Heidi Klum fills the role of the potential client, Nina is the voice of the Fashion Industrial Complex. She is the one who looks beyond artistry, beyond technical skill, even beyond her own personal taste to see where a design can successfully go. She thinks about how a dress would be styled in an editorial spread, she thinks about hanger appeal, she is constantly asking "Who is your customer? Who wears this dress?"

These are all amazingly pertinent, professional questions that a lot of designers don't consider, especially in the beginning of a season. But if we replace the word "dress" with "book" and "designer" with "writer," all her questions are still important. It's very easy as a writer to get caught up in your own vision of the story, and having someone like Nina Garcia haul you up and ask "Who reads this book? How will this book be sold?" can be fantastically eye opening. 

If Project Runway was Project Bookshelf, Micheal Kors would be the Tom Clancy style big bestseller, Heidi Klum would be the book buyer, and Nina Garcia would be the acquiring editor. Fortunately for us, most fiction editors are not nearly as mean as she is, at least not to their authors, but it's their job to ask these same sorts of questions. And that's really important, because these are vital issues a lot of authors don't consider, or worse, don't feel they need to consider until the book is done. But just as those designers got a lot better after they started taking Nina's criticism to heart, I think we as authors can't help but improve if we start out our projects thinking about the realities of the markets our books are going to face and incorporate those decisions naturally into our writing process rather than trying to shoehorn our vision into a commercially acceptable shape later (or worse, standing on the runway and arguing with the judges about why they're wrong. No one wins that fight.)

All of that said, however, one of Nina Garcia's favorite words is "effortless." You can always tell when she really likes something because she'll trot out that word, especially if draping is involved. But when she says "effortless," she often qualifies it with the reminder that effortless doesn't mean easy or undesigned. This is because "effortless" in fashion and writing only means the appearance of serendipity. Just like Heidi Klum's ageless makeup, it is an illusion of careless grace that actually requires an enormous amount of care, thought, and work to produce. 

Illusion is the key. When all that work is visible, garments (and novels) are criticized for being "overworked" or "overdesigned." Designers (and writers) are told they're "trying too hard" for adding purposeless details like zipper embellishments or piping in their effort to show how much work went into something. Nina's other favorite phrase is "you need to edit." She is constantly telling designers that they need to step back, look critically, and edit their work down to its essence. "Less is more," she says over and over when some designer has stuck 50 bows on his dress and styled his model's hair in a big Lady Gaga style bow bun. "You need to remove, not pile on."

Of all the advice I steal from Project Runway, this is the sentiment that translates most directly. Writers are creative people by definition, and as creative people, it's very easy to get lost in our own work. When you have an amazing idea that doesn't really fit the story but is too cool to leave out, writers will think of all kinds of wacky rationalizations why they don't need to cut the scenes they love. We often defend these decisions by saying we're adding depth and hooks to our novels when, in reality, we're doing the writing equivalent of over designing. 

To be fair, a lot of over written books do well, but then, a lot of ugly, over designed clothing gets sold for reasons I can not fathom. But just because some people get away with it is no excuse to go easy on our own editorial eye, because the best books/designs, the ones that endure, are the novels/dresses that appear effortless and natural. The end goal of all work in writing is to appear like no work at all. To give the reader a story that simply flows like it was always meant to be. 

In writing as in fashion design, if you do your job right, no one will even notice how hard you worked to do it. They will not see your struggles or your late nights or your botched scenes or how you rewrote the first paragraph 100 times. All they will see is the beautiful, effortless finished product, perfectly presented, and that is as it should be.

"Make It Work"

I couldn't possibly do a Project Runway themed blog post without talking about the show's famous catch phrase, "Make It Work." I might not be working 18 hour days, sewing and creating under enormous pressure just for a chance not to get eliminated from the show that has promised to make all my dreams come true, but it's still powerful mojo. When I am upset, the sound of Tim Gunn saying "Just make it work" is like a Pavlovian trigger for my ability to get up and press on. And that's really, really important, especially in writing, because the moment you start writing on a deadline, Make It Work becomes your mantra.

Whether you're writing for yourself or for a publisher, there are times when the book just has to get done, and you don't know how it's going to get there. Maybe you've written yourself into a corner, or maybe you went entirely the wrong direction and now you hate everything. Maybe you're just stumped on a plot point and you have no idea what to do next, but you need to figure it out pronto, because if you don't get this book ready to turn in to your editor in the next month, you're going to throw off your entire publication schedule. Your book will be late, your readers will be mad, and you won't get paid when you thought you were going to be. DOOOOM!

Okay, so maybe I'm exaggerating a little bit, but when you're in the middle of the crisis, the idea that not finishing this book on time will destroy your career feels absolutely real. More than one author has crumbled under the pressure, but funny enough, this is where Project Runway has us beat, I think. Because no matter how stressed those designers get, no matter how crazy the time limit on the challenge, when it comes time to put on the show, they always have something to send down the runway. It may not have been their best look, but in the end, the designer who can pull it out and make it work is the designer who is successful, and the same goes for writers.

I usually shy away from generalizations, but I don't think I'm going out on a limb when I say that every writer has faced a moment where they didn't know how to go forward. When this happens, especially under a deadline, the difference between writers who choke and writers who succeed is their ability to do like Tim Gunn says and make it work.

This isn't just a careless bon mot. The ability to resist panic is not a natural one. We're born panicky, wary animals who seem predisposed to jump to the absolute worst conclusion, and the ability to rise above this, to be calm and creative under pressure and get the job done, is the line that separates the professional from the amateur. Fortunately, it's also a talent that can be learned, and part of Tim's role on Project Runway is to teach this ability to panicked designers who've just realized how screwed they are.

No matter how carefully you plot or how good you are at managing time, if you pursue a career in writing, you will eventually come face to face with the "I'm totally F'ed" moment. When this happens, it is perfectly natural to freak your shit. Once that's over, though, it's your job to calm down and find a way to make it work. Because you're a professional, and professionals always find a way to deliver. The same "never give up" attitude that gets you published keeps you published, and the harder you embrace that truth, the more quickly you recover from disappointment and find your way to make it work, the more successful you will be.

***

One of the most amazing things about being a professional artist, or professional anything, is discovering that the more things change, the more they stay the same. The pressures of being a commercial artist vary wildly from industry to industry, and yet the core remains unchanged. Designers, writers, graphic artists--we all face the same struggle to produce creative yet salable work under pressure while not sacrificing the vision that makes this art our own.

My situation is very, very different from the contestants on Project Runway, and yet I can still learn from their mistakes, and that's a lot more than I ever expected from a cheesy reality show about making high fashion dresses on ridiculous deadlines out of random crap. So thank you, Project Runway. I learned a stupid amount about myself from your ridiculous programming.

I hope you enjoyed this absurdly long blog post about a television program! Thank you for putting up with my waxing rhapsodic over reality TV personalities, and as always, good luck with your writing!

It is, Heidi, it really is.