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  There are no formulas for writing category, or genre, fiction, because formulaic writing doesn't have the zing and pizzazz needed to get published these days. However, genre fiction does have individual conventions the writer must pay attention to in order to write a successful book. For example: In a mystery or crime novel, there must always be a crime or puzzle to solve.

  "Genre thinking" is more and more a critical aspect of modern publishing. One of the first questions an editor asks of a manuscript is, "What is it?" What she means, of course, is, What genre is it? Once that's determined, the manuscript will be judged by the standards of that genre. So even if you've written an extremely intelligent western, for example, intelligence, while admirable, is not the point. What the editor is interested in is your ability to create convincing characters that speak to the readership. How well, and accurately, do you work in historical detail in an unobtrusive manner? How do you keep the reader tense and turning the page? To be successful you must study the books in the genre and define for yourself those qualities that helped to make the genre so special.

  WHAT'S YOUR GENRE?

  Chances are your book idea falls into a category or that it's very close. If you understand what a reader's expectations are, you can make the book stronger and more likely to be sold to a publisher.

  Of course, the reader's anticipation of something inside the book can be spoiled by something on the outside of the book, perhaps poorly chosen artwork (which you can't always control) or an inappropriate title. If you call your romance Slasher From Hell, you're not likely to attract readers who are looking for the type of experience you're providing, and the readers you do attract are going to be disappointed.

  So, you want to be careful with titles, and you want to be careful with the language you use, making sure it's similar to other books in the category you've chosen to write in. (I'll talk a little more about this in chapter twelve.)

  It's important you know your audience and study your category. Go to bookstores to familiarize yourself with the various genres, then read a lot of books in your genre of preference. In fact, if you're not reading the genre, you probably shouldn't be writing in it. Your first successfully published book will, almost inevitably, be centered around some category you really love. You don't "write what you know," as the old saw has it; you draw upon what you know. But you write what you read.

  One of the things this category/genre business does is help the publishers and the bookstore owners know where to place your book in the bookstore.

  When your novel comes out, you're not really competing with all the other books in the store; you're only competing with all the other books in your genre. So, without diverging too much from what's expected, you ought to be thinking about how you're going to make your book different from others in your category. And that difference comes from knowing your genre well enough that you can spot a "hole," or good idea, as was done with the idea of a historical murder mystery featuring Christopher Marlowe as a detective or with Walter Mosley's Easy Rawlins novels, such as Devil in a Blue Dress, about a black PI in the late 1940s.

  MEETING THE READER'S EXPECTATIONS

  Know your audience. One of the biggest differences between books and other media forms is that movies and TV don't discriminate by age and gender. In general, books are written with a specific audience in mind. Self-help books, for example, have a strong female readership, while adventure travel books, such as man against nature (for example, Into Thin Air or The Perfect Storm) are bought and read mostly by men. Only those books that become big sellers transcend those limitations.

  As I mentioned, each genre has its own conventions, that is, a set of expectations. Genres are not just confined to books. All forms of art employ categories. In classical music, for example, you can write an opera, a tone poem, a symphony, a concerto. Depending on the genre she chooses, a composer is also guided by the form of that genre, be it the sonata form, the fugue form, the AABA melodic structure common in popular music, or another form.

  You can mix genres, coming up with what is called a cross genre. Ravel, Gershwin, Stravinsky, and Bartok borrowed heavily from other genres, such as folk music, spirituals, and gospel music, while jazz greats Duke Ellington and George Russell worked in the opposite direction, borrowing from classical forms. Each composer also influenced the work of others.

  The same examples could be made in the visual arts. Graphic novels and comics are clearly influenced by, and influence, young filmmakers and many young writers. New forms often arise from the melding of two genres or the elevation of popular or familiar material. (Nobody has yet managed to blend three or more genres successfully, so the best advice is don't even try until you are experienced. Remember, keep it simple.) One of the great masters of mixing genres and raising popular trash to an art form was William Shakespeare. His command of poetry and insight into the human condition allowed him to blend bawdy comedy with fragile romance, combine powerful drama with Renaissance masques and turn medieval mystery plays (religious plays about good and evil) into something new and brilliant. Daniel Defoe in Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders, took the seventeenth-century equivalent of the kind of story that appears nowadays in the National Enquirer, and elevated it into art.

  DRAW ON YOUR EXPERIENCES

  Part of what successful writing is all about is "seeing" the world around you. What I mean by this is appreciating your life experiences, not just for what happened, but for the universality of the experience that can somehow be incorporated into your story. The more readers can inject themselves into a story (often unconsciously), the more they connect to that story and that author, and the more vicariously enjoyable the reading experience becomes.

  Even though plotting is important in writing, we are ultimately concerned with capturing characters—be they real people in true stories or fictional creations—so part of the art of "seeing" the world around us involves developing the ability to recognize character traits in ourselves and others and then going beyond cliches or stereotypes in order to capture on paper in a few short lines memorable portraits of people we encounter and experiences we endure. Those we meet and conjecture about become the models and sources of inspiration for the characters who people our fiction and allow us in our nonfiction writing to understand the unique elements of how we respond in stressful situations, such as the ones we are writing about.

  A few years ago, Gary was famous, as he used to tell it, for the "fifteen minutes" that pop artist Andy Warhol said we will all experience. Gary became one of the finalists to replace newspaper advice columnist Ann Landers, and it was an exciting time with a lot of national television publicity attached to it. He didn't get the job, and the whole media circus eventually left town, but Gary decided to draw on that experience and write a novel called Dear So-and-So. It was, surprise, surprise, about a guy who gets involved in a contest to replace an advice columnist.

  He wrote a few chapters and sent them around to various editors. The response was essentially, "Gary, we like your book, but it's mainstream and will probably sell about twelve copies. Do you think it could be turned into a category book? They are just so much easier to sell."

  So, Gary went away, mulling over his disappointment, and decided he'd rather sell fifty thousand copies of a book than five, so he decided that, yes, indeed, he could make Dear So-and-So into a genre novel. So Dear So-and-So became Dead So-and-So. And in Dead So-and-So he managed to accomplish all the things he'd wanted to accomplish in Dear So-and-So. What he did was change the story to one about an advice columnist who dies. Her best friend, the narrator of the book, believes she was murdered, so he enters the contest to replace her in order to solve her murder. The happy end of this story is that mainstream Dear So-and-So, with some changes, became, eventually, Baffled in Boston, a mystery Gary was very happy to get published.

  If you can take your mainstream book and turn it into a category book of some sort, I recommend it. Genre books are easier to sell, especially when you are not yet
established on the literary scene. Of course, if you can't turn your book into a category of some sort, if you don't read category fiction of any sort, then you can't write it. You have to do what you have to do. If you're writing a mainstream novel and that's what you want to write, then go ahead and do it.

  EXERCISES

  1. Read a book that falls into the category you're writing in—mystery, romance, thriller, whatever. As you go along, note all the things in the book that you think are in the other books of this type. These are the conventions of the category and should occur in your own book.

  2. One of the best exercises in genre writing is to take a legend or fairy story and rethink it in several different genres. For example, the story of Perseus and his slaying of the Gorgon can be rewritten as a historical novel, a biography, a romance, a comedy, SF, etc. Make a list of categories, then take one story like this and write a synopsis for each category you came up with.

  Chapter Three

  Hooks

  Ever thought of yourself as a fisherman, baiting, luring, and snagging your reader? Hooks bring to mind sharp metal objects with worms attached, wiggling invitingly to fish that become snagged fast on the end of fishing lines.

  Hooking a reader is about catching that reader from the outset: no explanations, no setup or slow windup to your story, but bang—straight into it. It's about going for the jugular, in a literary sense; and some of the most susceptible readers to this form of writing are editors and agents. Hook them, and you'll get published not just once, but consistently.

  THE HOOK AS HIGH-CONCEPT IDEA

  I represent the author William P. Wood who has established himself as one of the leading writers of legal thrillers. Two of his books have been turned into major movies, and several others are in development. As a former district attorney, he writes about areas of the law and lawyers that other authors of legal thrillers don't go into.

  One of his books, called Quicksand, is about how federal cases are made and unmade. The story concerns a "power couple" whose feuding over their marital breakup spills into their public life. He is the head of a federal police task force, and she is his boss, a federal prosecutor. Both set their sights on an international arms dealer who plots a serious act of domestic terrorism. The arms dealer intends to achieve his

  goal by playing off the private feuding of the husband and wife in their professional life.

  When I pitched the book to editors, I used the following marketing hook to get their attention: John Grisham meets Tom Clancy. Always ready for the next commercial best-seller, almost every editor's response without pause was, "Sounds interesting. Send it to me." Indeed, one bought it soon after.

  Hooks are used all the time in Hollywood. There is a wonderful satire of this at the beginning of Robert Altman's movie The Player, which is about how a film producer quite literally gets away with murder in order to bring a story to the big screen. The opening crane shot of The Player is a satire of a shot devised by Orson Welles for the noir thriller Touch of Evil. In The Player, the camera swoops and soars like a snooping bug on a Hollywood lot, peeking through the windows of producers' offices while they're having story meetings. We eavesdrop on a variety of pitches writers are making to the producers for new movies. ("Think, a kind of Muppet version of Die Hard!" is typical of what one character says eagerly to a producer, oblivious to the idiocy of the idea.)

  Hollywood types have a somewhat ironic name for this type of pitching: They call it the high-concept idea. The high-concept idea, you may recall, is a shorthand form of "story speak" used by writers, agents, publishers, and Hollywood types to encapsulate a story idea in as intriguing and simple a form as possible. Typically, it is a way of morphing two successful, familiar ideas to define the essence of a new, original piece.

  Most stories are reminiscent of others. Indeed, a writer friend only half joking once said to me all stories can be reduced to two types: A stranger knocks on the door; and someone goes on a journey. So pitching high-concept ideas relies on a common reference language of successful movies or books (or ideas in general) that conveys a great deal more than just the titles used.

  This is a form of cultural literacy. For example, when we talk about the scientist Sir Isaac Newton, we often make the assumption that the person we're talking with understands that by mentioning Newton we are also making a sort of shorthand reference to a story about Sir Isaac sitting under an apple tree, getting hit on the head by a falling apple, and discovering the principle of gravity. And that led to his affirmation that the sun, not the Earth, was the center of the solar system, the elliptical orbits of planets and so forth. Thus, by connection "Newton" and "Newtonian" have become terms we use in casual conversation that imply and encompass "gravity" and Newton's other scientific discoveries.

  The high-concept hook is about pitching the marketability and originality of your idea. Walk into any large bookstore, and take a moment to appreciate the thousands of books on the shelves that radiate out from the front door where you're standing. With all those books already on the shelves, how are you going to single out your book, and get reader attention for your work? The answer is to start with a snappy, intriguing description that also manages to suggest information about the uniqueness of your story.

  When you go to the video store to rent a movie, you don't usually get a chance to see what you're renting. Instead, what you tend to rely upon is the brief description of the film on the back of the box, and you make your decision, more often than not, on that description, not on the film itself. The same is true of books. If the flap copy, or sales pitch, for your book is flat because your conceptualization of your book's strengths is thin, your book won't get the best shot at reaching the widest possible audience.

  By using a reference language of well-known ideas, you are relying, at least in part, on tweaking your readers' imaginations enough that they want to read the book (or film script, etc.), to see if their image of what this morphing of ideas suggests is actually what you managed to produce. Hopefully, what you wrote will be even better than they imagined.

  They've taken the bait. Potential readers are taking the time to examine your work. They'll examine the blurb about the book, read the opening paragraph in the store, maybe flip through and check out some odd pages. They like what they see. At each stage you have to hook readers ever more firmly until, intrigued enough, they go to the cash register and plop down hard-earned cash to fully experience whatever it is you've written that will fulfill its promise. Do that successfully, and readers will remember your name affectionately, and you have hopefully started a trend of author recognition that will spill over to your other books.

  The hook is primarily about concept. If a writer fails to fully conceptualize his book, he is asking to have it published poorly, should it be bought at all. At one time, publishing worked on the principle that an accepted manuscript would be edited first by the acquiring editor then by a copyeditor. Once in the system it would be assigned a publishing season (such as spring or fall) and decisions would be made about the jacket, marketing, advertising, publicity, print run and so forth.

  What is happening more and more, however, is that, because of the rushed nature of modern publishing, decisions about how a book will be published are made before the finished manuscript has even been submitted to the editor. By the time the copyeditor sees the manuscript, the only thing the art department and marketing and sales departments are interested in is the concept of the book, usually expressed in the original proposal, or accompanying story synopsis in the case of fiction. If that concept is thin or vague, the publishing house won't be able to publish the book well because no one will have the information needed to know why the book is being written, what it's trying to do, and therefore why anyone would want to buy it.

  Conceptualization is the single most important thing a writer can do to help a publisher publish a book well. In non-fiction in particular, it really isn't surprising that many of the best titled books are also those that sum
up the book's concept. Some examples of published titles that illustrate this are Consciousness Explained, The Overworked American and The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers.

  THE QUERY LETTER

  When you sit down and write a query letter to an editor or agent, the hook you've come up with for your story is very important.

  Writers often complain about having to compose query letters, and I hear all the time about how unfair it is that editors and agents seem to judge a manuscript not on its merits, but on the query letter, and worse, the one line or one paragraph hook that accompanies it.

  What the hook does, apart from intrigue me, or an editor, is show me that your story has a specific focus and that the focus is original in thought—and most importantly, won't disappoint me when I read the manuscript.

  Save me from yet another letter that begins, "Dear Mr. Rubie: What if a vampire got AIDS!" or, "Drug-dealing gangsters are killed by a vigilante librarian avenging her daughter's death from an accidental overdose." Good stories? Perhaps in the execution. But the fact is they are old and obvious ideas agents and editors see all the time.

  If you can't write a compelling one-page query letter, how can you expect to write a compelling novel? It is not so much what a query letter says that catches an agent or editor's eye, it's the way it's said. In other words, its dramatic structure. The letter is, in effect, an advertisement for the degree of accomplishment of a writer's story sense and ability to write. A query letter also tells the publisher that you know precisely what a book is, what a writer does and so forth. In other words, that you are a professional. Many books fail to catch an editor's eye simply because the writer displays amateurism and creates in the editor's mind the fear that the author has no idea how to write a book, let alone how to write a good one.