The Golden Goose

Once upon a time, I called up a friend who worked at a big New York publishing house to ask for some professional advice. I was nearing completion of the third draft of a novel and had yet to dip a single toe into the murky waters of agents and editors and publishing deals (oh my!)*. My friend inquired as to my novel’s subject matter, length, and genre. When I told her I thought it fell under the category of Literary Fiction, she audibly sighed.

“Literary fiction is a hard sell,” she said. “Genre fiction is much more marketable. And if you really want to get published, Chick Lit is HUGE these days.”

I just about choked on my tongue. I knew my friend meant well, but I would have rather abandoned writing all together than pen some vapid romance novel disguised as female empowerment, one where the core conflict centers around who the spunky young heroine should date: the sweet but shy guy at work, or the hot asshole at the bar.

Fifteen years later, my feelings have not changed. For the last two and a half of those years, I have toiled away at yet another literary fiction novel; this is not out of some sort of pride or obstinacy, but because I cannot write a story that I do not love. But of course, there are many shades of love.

Next month, some friends and I are going on a week-long creative retreat to an Internet- and television-free cabin just outside of Yosemite. I am excited to spend time with dear friends (and our dogs), to meander through the wilderness and lounge by the lake, but I’m extra jazzed because I’ve decided to use this getaway as an opportunity to take a break from my current novel-in-progress and work on another project for a little while. The only trouble is that I’m having a hard time deciding which of two projects to dust off for the occasion.

Project No. 1: The mostly complete second draft of the accidental** young adult novel (working title Sooni Greene) I wrote four years ago. It has some good things going for it – interesting characters, important social themes, and conflict well beyond dating matters – and I have always planned to revisit it at some point.

Project No. 2: A quick and dirty first draft of a ‘tween book (working title The Burnt House) that I wrote about a year and half ago. Missing persons, neighbors burning down their houses, and tears in the space-time continuum…what more could you ask for in a mystery/coming of age story?

As I pondered my options, my publishing friend’s words echoed somewhere in the back of my mind: “Genre fiction is much more marketable.” At present, I have two genre novels to chose from: Tween or Young Adult***. Instead of instinctively selecting the storyline that feels the most compelling to me right now, I caught myself contemplating which of the two would be more likely to get published.

So does this mean that I am finally on the trail of the Golden Goose, that elusive “marketable” novel that I can both love and publish?

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*Sadly my knowledge in this realm has improved only marginally since then.

**Accidental in that I did not set out to write a young adult novel. But it’s interesting what you discover when you vomit out 70,000 or 80,000 words in a short period of time.

***And wouldn’t it be ironic if my first published book was for the under-eighteen set?

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Post-NaNoWriMo, aka The Love Haze

Hmmm, smells like a tear in the space-time continuum.

Despite the risk of nettling my fellow WriMo’s, I will start with a bold statement: This year’s November writing bonanza was by far my easiest. This is not to say that I did not get stuck in the mud a few times along the way. There were of course moments when I questioned my characters and my plot—for instance, the plausibility of dogs sniffing out disruptions in space and time just as easily as they can sniff out the cocaine hidden in your suitcase. But these literary roadblocks were more like mud puddles than floods, and I was able to navigate around them without stalling for too long. (How many travel-related metaphors and similes can you cram into a 113-word paragraph?)

So why was this November any different from my three previous jaunts? How was I able to escape with only minor psychological scrapes and bruises? Now a solid ten days into December, I can reflect back on a few of the key distinctions:

My Target Audience

Each NaNoWriMo, I challenge myself to write in a voice or format I’ve never tried before. This year I decided to write a book for kids. Or rather, for that magical age that falls somewhere between Barbies and keg parties, the ‘Tweens. Admittedly, this did pose some hitherto unknown challenges: Would an 11-year-old know what “bereft” means? Can I really write 50,000 words without cursing? No drinking, smoking, casual sex, infidelity, drug flashbacks, bar fights or hookers? What the hell (sorry, heck) else am I supposed to write about?

Trust me, you do not want to try to herd me.

But these challenges were promptly countered by one of the really great things about kids: they aren’t yet jaded. When I was a kid, I loved to read mysteries and adventure novels…bring on the magical and the supernatural! I didn’t question a character’s motivations or scoff when the next-door neighbor turned out to be a witch or a unicorn herder. I did not need to suspend my disbelief because I still believed in most anything. I was – pardon the pun – an open book. So whenever I bumped up against a question of plausibility in my ‘Tween novel, I shook it off and kept going. Because of course an 11-year-old will believe that a rusty old ladder can serve as a bridge between the worlds of Here and There. Duh.

Plot-Driven vs. Character-Driven

My favorite books to read and to write have typically been character-driven. Another first, this year I decided to try my hand at Plot with a capital P. In nearly every piece of fiction I have written to date, I struggled to get to know my characters, to understand their thoughts and behavior, and how they grow (or don’t) over time. But with my plot-driven story, it felt like I was putting together a jigsaw puzzle; once I identified the “big picture”, it was just a matter of sorting through the pieces. Lesson learned: It’s much more difficult to determine the trajectory of a character than of a storyline.

However, when I mentioned this discovery to a writer friend of mine, she promptly asked, “But do you feel less close to these characters?” And the answer was unequivocally yes.

A Good Sounding Board

If all writers’ have just one thing in common, it may be that we tend to spend a little too much time in our own heads. Writing is a very solitary activity, and anyone who has ever had the fortune to find a good sounding board in a friend or colleague understands the value of talking through the issues. I was lucky indeed to have such a person this time around.

Having said that – and in keeping with my previous point – I find it much easier to obtain helpful input from others when it comes to matters of plot over character. Determining the sequence of events, when to reveal the plot twist, etc. is a very different matter than looking to someone else to predict your character’s emotional growth. That’s almost like a psychologist spending 20 hours with a patient, summarizing that person in two sentences, and then asking a total stranger how to advise him. Almost.