In Publishing, as in Life, Timing is Everything

October 14, 2007 — Pat Bertram

 Performing artists like actors and comedians know that timing is everything. Without the right pause, the right word, the right gesture, the piece falls apart.

Life too is all about timing. Turn a corner and bump into a stranger who will become your mate. Run back into the house to answer the phone before you leave for work and later discover you missed being in an accident by those few minutes. Invest in a friend’s start-up business as a favor and end up being a millionaire.

Getting published is all about timing, too. You’ve written and rewritten your masterpiece, but you can find no takers. At best, you’re inundated with form rejection letters; at worst, you’re ignored. It’s entirely possible you are correct and your masterpiece is the bestseller-waiting-to-happen that you know it is. So how come you can’t get published?

Timing. As in the performing arts and the art of life, timing is everything, but unlike the performing arts, you cannot stand before a mirror and practice until you master your timing. All you can do is keep sending out your manuscript in the hopes that one day it will be on the right desk at the right time. Because one thing is certain, your desk is not the right one.

So how do you cope with all that rejection? Don’t think of it as rejection. Think of it as practicing your timing. Practice may not make perfect, but it does give you a chance.

After all, Gone with the Wind was published after being rejected thirty-two times.

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Writing Your First Book Second

October 11, 2007 — Pat Bertram

I mentioned before that I’m reading the novels of a bestselling author, trying to figure out why she is so popular. Yikes, what a chore! If she’s anything to go by, being a bestselling author has nothing to do with being a good writer. I’ve seen much better writing posted on the Internet by unpublished authors. Apparently, however, once an author has established herself on the bestseller list, she no longer needs to concern herself with the tenets of good writing.

The story I am currently struggling to read is about identical twins. I am on page 250, but if I were to edit the book and take out every single explanation of how the twins looked alike, how no one could tell them apart, how no one could tell which twin was which, how it was like looking at the same person, how it was like looking in the mirror, how they were the same age, how there was no difference between them, those 250 pages would be whittled down to about 100.

So, this is what I’ve learned: you, me, and everyone else who have written a book and tried to get it published have written our second book, the one that will be accepted for publishing after the first one sells. I’ve written three novels (to see the first chapters, click on “My First Chapters” under “links”) but they are all second books. Which isn’t a bad thing. Only by writing can a person learn how to write. I hope to get good enough so that one day I can write my first book, a novel with such a flash of brilliance that it will capture the minds and money of publishers and agents.

Like Andrew Vasch and his series character Burke. In the first novel, Burke was a total loner who lived off the grid. I’m not sure if the book was brilliant, but that character certainly captured my imagination. So I looked forward to the second book, and ho-hum. B-o-o-oring. Burke became like every other series character, only we were supposed to pretend that he was different. Suddenly he had friends galore, everyone knew him, and almost everyone knew where to find him.

See what I mean? Once you’ve established yourself, you can make your own rules. You don’t even have to write well. Your name becomes a brand, and that’s all that counts.

So how do you become a brand? How do you write that first, brilliant novel? Don’t ask me. If I knew, I’d be writing bestselling novels. I certainly wouldn’t be writing this blog.

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Scarlett by any other name would have been sweet.

October 10, 2007 — Pat Bertram

Scarlett O’Hara was originally called Pansy. If Margaret Mitchell had kept that name, would her epic novel ever have become so popular? I doubt it. A Pansy would be sweet and biddable with rare moments of stubbornness, but she could never be as strong-willed as Scarlett, and she would never have caught and kept the attention of such a worldly man as Rhett.

Unlike women characters, men tend not to have exotic names. They usually have common, clipped names, which work well enough in most cases, but what if Rhett had been called Jack or Clint or even Brad? Millions of women would probably still have fallen in love with him, but they certainly would not have found him so intriguing.

Clothes may make the man and woman, but their names (in fiction, anyway) define them.

Though Scarlett fits the name of the character in Gone With the Wind, it could not be the name of a medieval heroine. In those days, almost all girls were named Mary, with Elizabeth coming in a distant second.

I suppose if Gone With the Wind were written in the 1980s, Scarlett’s name would have been Heather. Odd to think that in another forty years, youth will scorn that name as being old-fashioned, fit only for elderly women, much like Effie is today. (I shudder to think how many babies being born right now are being named Britney, Lindsay, or Paris.)

But I digress. The point I’m trying to make is that names matter and should be chosen wisely. A book may not be rejected because of a character’s name, but why take the chance?

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You can be a bestselling novelist, but do you really want to be one?

October 3, 2007 — Pat Bertram

 I’ve been reading the works of a bestselling novelist, trying to pinpoint why she’s been so popular for the past two decades. It’s hard work. Her writing style is surprisingly amateurish, her characters are not well drawn, she tells and explains instead of showing, and she repeats herself as if she can’t remember from page to page what she’s already said.

So, why do people keep reading her books?

Passion. Her characters never like or dislike anything. They love and hate, but mostly love. “She ate a piece of cherry pie, and she loved it.” “They had sex, and they loved it.”

Identifiable characters. She gives her characters tags that readers can identify with (mother, prosecuting attorney, abused child, wronged wife) and lets the reader fill in the blanks.

Issues. She picks an issue people are passionate about, and wraps her story around that.

And most of all, she gives readers someone to love and someone to hate, and makes her character choose between them. And, brilliantly, the character chooses the one the reader doesn’t want.

Example: a prosecuting attorney, who adores her husband and their young daughter, gets breast cancer, has a mastectomy and chemotherapy. The husband can’t handle it, is mad at her for “pretending” that she’s sicker than she is, is totally unsupportive, and even worse has an affair.  A coworker supplies the support the husband refuses to give her, and she and the coworker fall in love and plan to get married when her divorce goes through. A year after being diagnosed, she is doing well, and the husband comes nosing around again. In the end, they get back together.

See? Passion. Identifiable characters. Issues. Someone to love and someone to hate. And the wrong ending.

Why is the wrong ending the right one? If the author went with the new love, who would remember? By having the character go back to her husband, the author is manipulating us into thinking about the story. Would we go back to a husband (or wife) who treated us like garbage just so we can uphold the sanctity of marriage?

As you can see, even though I hated the book, she got me. After all, I am blogging about it.

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