Cue the Golden Retrievers

One of my guilty pleasures is reality ghost shows like THE DEAD FILES and MY HAUNTED HOUSE.  One of these shows is AMERICAN HAUNTING.  

In each episode, some poor family has the show’s cameras put all over their house to record ghostly happenings, various experts like mediums and researchers are brought in, the violence ratchets up to the point that they realize something a lot meaner than an annoyed and dead former owner is around, then an exorcist, priest, or psychic exorcist comes in and kicks out the evil thing.  

Most of these shows are filmed in the darkness and even the filming in daylight tends to be in dark tones, but after the evil whatever has been removed and the miasma of dark nastiness is lifted, the outside and inside of the house are shown in much brighter light.  

At the end of one show, the family is sent away while the psychic exorcist is at work, then they return.  As expected, the sun is bright, and the house is filled with light, but very unexpected was the presence of two golden retrievers waiting for their family to come home.

Since there had been no golden retrievers present during the filming, I was flummoxed.  Other episodes had cats wandering around and an occasional small dog as well as dogs in outside pens.  Why hadn’t they shown the golden retrievers?

I thought about it for a while and realized that it’s hard to think of evil in the presence of golden retrievers, the dog equivalent of dolphins or friendly angels, so the producers of this show had them removed from the house during the filming.  

This got me thinking about writing and how most writers fail to use images and metaphors that offer such a visceral reaction.  Even though a writer thinks about creating dark images during the unhappy times in the story, she may fail to offer light images when the unhappiness has been banished.

Sure, some images like sunlight and golden retrievers are a bit cliched, but that’s because they are honest images that convey emotion.  

Consider this the next time you are rewriting those scenes after things change for the better or worse.

 

What's Your Genre?

Within a genre or subgenre, there are different styles and types of books.  The difference can be the sensual/sex level, the romantic level, the amount of plot and characterization, scientific level, adventure levels, world building levels, etc., etc.  

These differences often mean that one reader will like certain books but not others within the same subgenre.  

In your own reading, you have probably noticed that you gravitate toward certain writers, and others leave you cold.

I have a question for you, and I want you to think really hard about it.  

Can you name several authors or book series that you want your books to be like?  I'm not talking subject matter, I'm talking the whole feel of the books.

Why are this question and its answer important?  

Novels don't exist in a vacuum.  Your novel will not only need a publisher to publish it, you'll need an audience to write to.  And despite publishers saying they want different, they want close-to-the-same different, and readers are the same way.  

You absolutely must have an answer to this question before you begin to market your book to agents/publishers/readers.

Cross-genre World Building.

Cross-genre books mix elements of two genres. The paranormal romance is really a romance with fantasy or horror worldbuilding.  The sf romance is science fiction world building in a romance, etc., etc.

I'm a firm believer that you have to understand, read, and respect the genres you are mixing, or you shouldn't write it.

In recent paranormals romances I've read, the author didn't have a clue about fantasy or that you shouldn’t steal a prominent writer’s world building because it is blatantly obvious and annoying.  One had a magic system that was a generic mishmash as well as a complete HIGHLANDER rip-off with swords, decapitations, and magic being transferred.

Another took the Harry Potter universe with its magic system and world, then tossed in her characters.

I've read futuristics that were really Klingons in love with the alien and STAR TREK names changed, or the science was so bad a third grader could have spotted the errors.

The danger of not understanding one of the genres is writers lose parts of their audience. Cross-genre is not only supposed to mix the two genre, they are supposed to mix the two audiences. Insult half that audience by not knowing your stuff, and there goes sales.

By ignoring the basics of the other genre, these writers are destroying “the dream" of the books, and that bothers me a great deal as a writer and a reader.

Classifying Cross-genre

 If a novel is cross-genre, one of the genres must be the strongest and its genre tropes and plot must drive the novel throughout.

A sf romance is first and foremost a romance.  Linnea Sinclair's sf romance novels are driven forward by the romance. Catherine Asaro's novels are science fiction novels with a romantic element. The science fiction plot and world building drive the novel forward, not the romance.

A werewolf novel that is driven forward by the world building and various werewolf political/pack struggles is urban fantasy.  A werewolf novel where boy wolf meets girl vampire, and they fall in love during various werewolf political/pack struggles is a paranormal romance.

The important thing to pull out of this is that you must understand what the central genre of your novel is so your novel doesn't fail by genre standards which are really reader expectation standards.  

When you are writing your book, staying within genre or subgenre expectations makes the book much easier to market to the correct readers.  

Making a Main Character Likable

Sometimes, you can start out your story with a main character who isn't very likable, but a character must bcomee likable or, at the very least, relatable for the reader.  Here are ways to show more than the prickly outer elements of her personality.

If you give the main character a worthy goal in the first pages of the novel, then you give yourself time to make a seemingly unlikable character grow on the reader.

By worthy, I mean something the reader will want that character to succeed at-- rescuing children, helping a nice person find happiness, etc.   Even if the character starts out doing it for a base reason like money, the reader will still want him to succeed.

Simple things can help make a character start to grow on the reader.  Pets are always a good option.  Either he has one, or he can't resist the heroine's kitten, or something like that.  Having him interact positively with a child is also a good likability quickie.  

Recently, I read a short story in which the heroine breaks into the apartment of a possible villain-- a hard-ass security agent.  A teddy bear is sitting on his couch, and he later admits it belongs to his nephew.  With that simple stroke, the author made a seemingly unlikable bad guy a much nicer person.

Giving a character a vulnerability that the reader can relate to is also a good likability quickie.  It can be as simple as a chick lit heroine having a bad hair day and the boss from heck, or the bad ass hero getting into a small plane and freaking out because he finds a snake.  

Eventually, more likable elements of that character's personality will have to be shown, though, so the bad parts of her personality don't overwhelm the reader.

In some genre fiction like thrillers, the immediate likability quotient doesn't have to be high at the beginning, particularly if the character is strong and effective in what he needs to do.

But in a romance, the hero or heroine should be likable from the very beginning.  The other main character can become likable as the book progresses, but he should not start as totally horrible.  Some character traits like cruelty can't be forgiven or changed because, in real life, they never are.  

It's the Romance, Stupid

In the 1992 campaign against George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton and his advisers realized that the economy was Bush’s weak spot so they decided to focus on that subject.  Around Clinton’s headquarters, the sign, “It’s the economy, Stupid,” was posted to remind everyone to stay focused on that issue.

In the same way, a writer needs to hone in on the targeted audience of her book.  

When you are writing and you get a clever idea about the romance heroine’s business problems, you need to decide if that has anything to do with her relationship with the hero.  If it doesn’t, out it should go.  

Particularly at the beginning of the novel, that target audience should be kept in mind.  The reader wants girl to meet boy as soon as possible so the heroine’s backstory and anything else must be second in importance in those first pages.  

In the same way, the mystery reader wants the murder to happen, the science fiction reader wants some brand new scientific idea or world to startle him, and the horror reader wants his pants scared off of him.

When you are rewriting, always remind yourself that “It’s the romance/mystery/sf/horror, Stupid” and focus your book to that kind of reader.

How Many Point of Views?

 QUESTION:  How many viewpoint characters can I use?  And must I have the bad guy’s point of view?

The point of view character or POV is writing jargon for the person whose head you are inside during a scene in fiction.  With the exception of omniscient viewpoint novels, all current genre novels have only one character’s POV at a time.

The number of point-of-view characters you use in a novel depends on genre needs as well as the story you have to tell. If your choice of POVs isn't mandated by the market, you use the number of POVs you need.

In STAR-CROSSED, I used six POVs because my story was so complex, and the novel was big enough at around 130,000 words to allow so many characters.  One of the POVs was my villain.  

I have also created complex suspense plots with only one or two POVs because the plot was so tightly connected that those POVs were enough.  None of those had the antagonist's POV.  

If the antagonist doesn't have a POV, the reader will still get a sense of the person because of what he does.  

The main characters are also discovering who or what this person is by following the clues of the crime or the situation.  As the characters learn about this criminal so does the reader.  

If this person's crimes are methodical, this gives the reader a bit of information about him.  If he cuts off the victims' fingers with a surgical knife, the reader learns something else about him.  

By the time the bad guy is unveiled, the reader should have a very good sense of this character without a POV.  At the moment of unveiling, the reader will usually be given the final pieces of this character's emotional puzzle.

Some writers have trouble writing the bad guys because they are concentrating on the good guys and the plot needs of the novel.  I always suggest that a writer write a summary of the plot from the point of view of the bad guy starting with the crime, if there was one, and move from that point to the final unveiling.

The bad guy's choices and his story must be as logical for his personality as the plot choices and story of the main characters.