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  Perhaps you've heard editors talk about "a sense of place." The world you create can be centered around an occupation, such as a high-powered law firm, or around a school, a ghetto, a jungle. Your world can be Gary, Indiana, or Flint, Michigan, but your story should be set there for a reason, not just because you happen to know the area well. What's unique about the place?

  For example: What if an out-of-work auto mechanic found himself in a situation where he was forced to become an amateur private eye? The story would have to involve car manufacturing or other things connected to Detroit, or Flint.

  The world of the movie Tootsie is a TV soap opera. The world of Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park is a theme park. Indeed, the world doesn't even have to be a physical location. The worlds of the TV shows ER and Chicago Hope are not just hospitals, but medicine. The world of Dick Francis's novels is horse racing, while Jackie Collins writes about the world of Hollywood glamour.

  Most people want to go someplace exotic and foreign, somewhere with vivid colors and strong smells, and strange stark differences from the world they currently live in. They want to go to Istanbul, go to the set of a movie being made, follow a homicide cop on the job, go to an advertising firm, something of that sort. It's important to remember, though, that you don't have to have lived the life to write about it. You need to be willing to interview people who have lived in the world you propose to write about, and you need to research it thoroughly. .

  So, your story should be unique to your world. A good rule of thumb is that if you can move your story to another location, or world, you are not using the unique qualities of the story's setting to your advantage, and your story will have no personality or character that makes it stand out.

  Active

  The second element of a good idea is active characters. You don't want to write about some woman who returns from Saudi Arabia and sits down for dinner and everyone tells her what's gone on while she's been away. She's then a passive character. You want her to be the character who takes action. Look at Bruce Willis in the movie Die Hard (from a novel by Roderick Thorp). What if he had called the police and stayed put, hiding from the bad guys and waiting for the police to arrive? Then we would have a story about the policeman who came to save everyone, not the John McClane character.

  Movies and stories, both fiction and nonfiction, are told about the person who takes action, not the person who sits back and watches, observing the action without getting involved or just reacting to the events of the story. So make sure your characters are active and really do something to affect what's going on in the story. It's not what happens to the character that makes her interesting. It's what she does about it. Without an active character, there is no emotional power to your narrative. In a word, it becomes a boring story.

  Goals

  We'll look at this subject in depth in chapter six. For now, think about whether your characters have clear and definable goals, goals that can be visually dramatized on the page. Ask yourself, What does this character want? It should be something specific and imaginable.

  Here's an example: A character's goal is inner peace. That's what he's moving toward. He wants to be peaceful and calm.

  By itself, this isn't a visually dramatic (or even active) goal. However, if the character is going to acquire this inner peace by climbing Mt. Everest, it's a different story. If he's going to fight the snow, the cold, the wind, exhaustion, and everything else, that's fine. If he's going to acquire this goal of inner peace by going to the jungles of Guatemala as a doctor for some impoverished people, that's fine, too. But if he's going to acquire inner peace by sitting in a temple and meditating for twenty years, that's not good. That's not a goal you can make visually dramatic.

  Stakes

  The last quality of a good idea is stakes. High stakes. If you're asking people to sit down and read a three-hundred- or four-hundred-page book, devote many hours of their time, pay twenty or twenty-five dollars for this thing in hardcover, there had better be something really important at stake. If there's not, your readers aren't going to care enough to commit to your book—and what's worse, will be angry and disappointed if they don't think they have received a good enough payout for their investment of time and money and their expectations.

  Take, for example, Ian Fleming's James Bond novels. World peace is always at stake. (James Bond stories are really a hybrid of World War II commando action stories and hard-boiled private eye stories, set in peace time. Fleming puts us on the front lines of the cold war at its hottest.) Thousands of people are going to die, the oceans are going to be poisoned forever, and readers get excited and compelled to read the book or watch the film.

  If, in a James Bond story, the villain's main goal is to poison pigeons, do you think anyone will bother to read the whole story to find out whether the goal is reached? Of course not. The stakes aren't high enough. (It's worth mentioning, though, that a short story about an old man who is trying to protect local birds from some bird hater is potentially a good idea. It's all a matter of proportion. In a short story, where the reader's commitment is relatively short, you can get away with stakes that are relatively small, as long as they are high to the character. Life and death, everlasting love, the fate of nations— these are things the reader can care about.

  In many ways, stories, whether true or invented, can be thought of as biographies of watershed events in the central character's life. The story begins when the trauma, or watershed event, begins, and the story ends when the trauma is resolved, or the watershed event ends. And because it's about a character, it also involves readers' emotions for and about this person.

  As we go along we'll talk about conflict, resolution, and tension. Apply everything we talk about to your idea and ask yourself whether your idea is able to take in these concepts. Can it be made to fit the examples of successful dramatic structure we'll discuss? Having done that you'll know what to keep and what to leave out.

  EXERCISES

  1. Write a word, then write another word, but don't try to associate it with the first word. Just write the first thing that pops into your head. Now try to put these words together into a single, somewhat coherent idea. Having done that, ask yourself, Does this idea have the qualities talked about here?

  Does it have an interesting, new world or sense of place to which you are bringing the reader? Does it have active characters who really take control of their own fates and do whatever needs to be done? Does it have goals that can be made clear and definable; can the reader look at the page and say, "Yes! He just reached his goal!" because the reader (and the character) knows what it is? Does the idea have high stakes? Life-and-death matters? Love? Something, anything, really important at stake? Something that will make readers care about what happens to the characters and become emotionally involved in their lives?

  2. Take a notebook and pen to a cafe or a mall. Sit in a corner and study people. Use "What if... ?" or "Suppose...?" statements to generate ideas about what you imagine to be their stories.

  Chapter Two

  Understanding Genres

  I walked into a book superstore the other day, and it was wonderful to just wander around the maze of bookshelves, taking in the thousands of book covers and book titles lining the shelves. It was almost a churchlike feeling.

  Being around all those books can somehow be comforting in a way I can't really explain. I've felt like this about books since I was seven or eight years old and used to go to the local library every week, either with one of my parents or, eventually, as I grew older, on my own. Many writers feel similarly—I know that Gary did, for example.

  There are so many books in print (an average of fifty thousand a year are published in the United States alone by one count): Some are hardcover (sometimes called cloth); many more are paperback, both mass-market (the small-sized books that fit in your pocket) and trade (the larger-sized ones that almost look like hardcovers). All are different from each other but have one thing in common: Each book can be sl
otted into a category, or genre.

  BROWSING THE GENRES AND CATEGORIES

  "Category" and "genre" are marketing terms that mean, more or less, the same thing. Their purpose is basically to help you find more easily what you respond to and like. They are also guidelines that let you know, generally, what you can expect to find in a certain type of book.

  Genres developed as a way of marketing and selling mass-market paperbacks. As a result, even mainstream novels, when reprinted as mass-market paperbacks, need to be slotted into a genre of some sort.

  Browsing bookshelves with an eye to studying genres can be very revealing, especially if you're thinking about writing your first book.

  A common mistake an inexperienced writer can make is to assume that because, for example, romance develops in his cop novel, then the book must also be a romance. That's why, when you ask such a writer what his book is about, he often says, "It's about this thing, but also that thing, and maybe a third thing as well."

  If you decide to write a crime novel, think about what it is that's always true about these stories; what it is that's always true about romance, always true about a comedy. In comedy, for instance, one of the conventions is nobody really gets hurt, although in black comedy, which is a variation of satire, this is not necessarily true.

  When we talk about genre, we are referring to the main focus of the type of story that's being told. If your story is set on the American Frontier in the 1880s, and it involves ranchers and squatters, and gunfighters and greedy railroad barons, etc., you are writing a western. It doesn't matter if the hero falls in love and has a torrid affair with one of the robber baron's daughters; it's not a romance unless the main focus of the story is squarely centered on the romance between the two characters.

  You could have a story about two cowboys who come across evidence that a werewolf is attacking and killing first their cattle and then settlers. This might be considered a cross-genre novel, but really it is just a horror novel set in the American West. Similarly, a story about a cowboy who has to solve the murder of a friend would be a mystery or crime novel with a western setting. Historical mysteries such as this are popular because they take readers to strange new worlds and the crimes involve elements from that world that while familiar in some ways are also refreshingly different and unpredictable in many others.

  Let's browse some of the stacks in this bookstore.

  Romance

  Romance fiction has a strict form, usually variations on girl meets boy, girl loses boy, girl finds boy again. You can write to the publishers of such fiction and they'll send you guidelines that will tell you how they like their books to be structured, how long they should be and so forth. Many romances are written by women, but certainly not all. In fact, Gary wrote a romance titled Share the Dream under the pseudonym Marian Chase.

  All genre books feature cover illustrations that help sell the books. Romance novels often have muscled, bare-chested heroes a la Fabio cradling beautiful heroines who are falling into their arms. In general, the reader of romance fiction expects that both the hero and heroine will be alive and well and thoroughly in love with each other at the end of the story. They also shouldn't be separated for long periods of the book, and the story should end at a point in their story where there is the most hope for their relationship.

  Why is the romance genre so popular? According to Kensington Senior Editor Kate Duffy, quoted in Editors on Editing (Grove Press), "If romance were as common as rudeness, I'd be unemployed." In other words, it touches something that we're all looking for in our separate ways. The quality of the book is determined by the perceptiveness of the writer and his ability to put words on paper. It's also true that you need to be able to create strong female characters who speak to the genre's readership, which is predominantly female.

  There are different types of romances: Arabesque is a line of romances written specifically for an African-American audience. Regencies take place in the early 1800s. There are time travel adventure romances, such as Diana Gabaldon's Voyager, offbeat romances, such as Robert Waller's The Bridges of Madison County, and many more.

  What they all have in common is the story of two people who fall in love. At the heart of every romance is how a relationship between a woman and a man develops into love and the problems that men and women have communicating with each other and negotiating their roles in a relationship.

  If you read romances, it's a good field to break into as a writer, with a strong supportive network for novice writers from groups such as Romance Writers of America.

  Horror

  The biggest-selling novelist of the last decade is probably Stephen King, followed closely by Anne Rice and Clive Barker. Horror fiction, once a part of science fiction and fantasy, has grown up to become a major genre in its own right.

  Horror fiction has been best described by author Peter Straub as, "The thin ice of life." While it was a strong selling genre for authors to break into a couple of years ago, recently the only horror novels that are being published are from the well-established writers. What is horror's premise? To take everyday things and events and magnify them, exposing readers' fears so they can examine them safely. Ultimately, horror is about confronting and dealing with fear of death. Appropriately, the covers of horror novels often feature a combination of skulls and skeletons and fanged creatures dripping blood.

  Historicals

  The serious historical novelist needs to be able to weave a fictional plot into real historical events without distorting the historical characters who appear.

  To succeed, both fiction and nonfiction in this area has to be written by a recognized scholar, or someone with credentials of some sort, as for example a Ph.D. You can have other credentials, though. A parish priest could write a major work on religion and get it published; a teacher could write a book about education; a journalist could do a book about, say, the medical establishment; a parent of a sick child could have researched all there is to know abut the disease and then write about it. At the end of this book you'll find a sample nonfiction proposal about dyslexia that is exactly in this category. You need to have some edge, however small, beyond your interest in the topic, though. In general, those who are passionate about something also tend to have studied it a lot and are often experts by default.

  The appeal of the historical novel is often the chance to meet real people as they really were. The historical writer also strives to maintain the customs, culture, and mind-set of the period. In a time of political correctness, it is sometimes difficult to maintain the integrity of portraying cruelty, ignorance, and hardship which clashes heavily with contemporary values. Perhaps for that reason historical novels are much tougher to write and sell now than previously.

  The historical novel has relevance because of what the past has to tell us about the present. Arthur Miller's play The Crucible, about the Salem witch trials, was written in the early 1950s, but is also an allegory about the McCarthy House Un-American Activities' Committee witch-hunt for Communists. Most historical novels are best slanted to other genres, such as historical romance or historical mystery to make them more marketable.

  Crime Novels

  Here's another aisle of books. Baffled in Boston, Gary's last murder mystery, appears in the mystery section, sometimes also known as the crime section. This is a popular genre with millions of devoted fans. There are "tough guy" mysteries, sometimes called "hard-boiled," such as those written by Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett or Mickey Spillane, which feature a cynical private investigator or PI; or soft mysteries, sometimes called "cozys," usually featuring an amateur sleuth and typically along the lines of an Agatha Christie, John Dickson Carr or Murder, She Wrote kind of puzzle story.

  Then there are police procedurals, where the usually gritty detail of what cops do to bring a criminal to justice is more prominent than the puzzle. One of the first examples of this was Ed McBain's 87th Precinct series. These days, most mystery editors agree that successful new mysteries
are more concerned with interesting characters and setting than just an intriguing "puzzle."

  Thrillers

  If the genre is thriller, we're going to have a protagonist who is in a lot of danger, what Stephen King called, in Misery (his horror novel about how to write fiction, believe it or not), "get out of that" storytelling. The car is about to go over the cliff, with our hero lying unconscious in the backseat. Get out of that . . . Every time the protagonist does something in a thriller, it is like going from the frying pan into the fire, danger on every single page; an organization or somebody is trying to get this protagonist. Readers of this genre of book expect this type of convention, and if you don't provide it, you're going to create a disappointing book. There are classic thrillers you should be familiar with, such as John Buchan's The Thirty-Nine Steps, Richard Condon's The Manchurian Candidate and Frederick Forsyth's The Day of the Jackal.

  Science Fiction and Fantasy

  By the early 1990s, Science Fiction and Fantasy books were multibillion dollar generators of profit for publishing houses. Science Fiction (SF) and Fantasy, while around for a long time, took off as a genre after the striking success of the movie Star Wars in 1977. In many ways it has also paved the way for how publishing in general developed in the 1990s.

  SF and Fantasy are "author driven," which means, simply, that readers pay attention to who wrote the book they last read and enjoyed and make efforts to find something else by that author. Author-driven material overcomes one of corporate publishing's biggest problems: how to mass market a commodity (that is, a book) in an industry that for most of its existence has been defined by its idiosyncratic nature. The generalized approach to selling books through the cult of the author as personality, which is now dominating publishing, first developed in the SF and Fantasy genre and spread to the others as its marketing success grew.