Story + Structure + Strategy = Pragmatic Magic at #bea16

Working our plot whispering mojo in sunny LA

In Chicago for BookExpo, prepping to give a talk with Jerusha on the spooky art of Plot Whispering. If you're here, we'd love to see you at #UPubU Thursday at 2:00 PM. If you're not here, hop on the #ALLi podcast.

Here's the logline:
Fiction, memoirs, book proposals, screenplays—it all begins with story. But the road from great idea to a solidly marketable project presents a baffling number of detours. Plot Whispering is a radically sensible, step-by-step method for defining, refining, and executing your story. NYT bestselling ghostwriter Joni Rodgers and freelance editor Jerusha Rodger, dynamic mom-and-daughter duo, have worked their Plot Whispering mojo on bestselling books, high advance proposals, and an Oscar-nominated screenplay. Prepare to be wowed!

Goodbye with enormous gratitude to my friend and editor Marjorie Braman

Stunned and sad to see this news today:

"Marjorie Braman, 60, died July 2 at her home in Taghkanic, NY of complications from breast cancer. She began her 26 years in publishing as an editorial assistant and worked her way up to svp, publishing director at HarperCollins and then vp, editor-in-chief at Henry Holt. She has worked as a consultant at Open Road Integrated Media. Authors she worked with include Elmore Leonard, Michael Crichton and Sena Jeter Naslund. Most recently Braman worked as an independent editor and was a member of the independent editors' group 5e..."

It's an understatement to say that Marjorie changed my life. She acquired my memoir Bald in the Land of Big Hair for HarperCollins in 2001, my doorway to what was then The Big 6 and my first crack at the bestseller lists. While it was in the pipeline, she encouraged me to start a syndicated newspaper column and, even though it was way outside her job description, provided feedback and advice that shaped the direction of that column ("Earth to Joni") and a national magazine column that followed.

HarperCollins published my third novel, The Secret Sisters, in 2006, and Marjorie's feet-to-the-fire editing took my craft sense to the next level. In the years I worked with Marjorie, I learned most of what I know about the art of writing, the craft of editing and the business of publishing.

Elmore Leonard had this to say about how she worked:

"Marjorie was never a pushover, we talked all the time while I was at work on a novel. She would question the identity of pronouns wandering through a paragraph, or cite passages where I was telling rather than showing what was going on. But for the most part Marjorie liked my style and let me run with it." 

It says a lot about Marjorie that this perfectly describes my experience with her. She worked with a lot of big names, but she made a little nobody like me feel like my work was just as important. And she would sharply correct me for calling myself a little nobody. Every once in a while she would send me a fax (and later email) with instructions to print it out and post it on my office wall. One that remained there for almost 15 years simply said: JONI RODGERS: YOU ARE NOT A HACK.

Whenever I felt deflated by the industry slings and arrows, she would chastise me for "acting like an orphan in the storm" and remind me that an author has to be the bravest champion of her own work. We can't depend on the editor or the agent or the PR department. She is solely responsible for kicking my ass into the big girl pants that make it possible for me to thrive as an indie author and freelance editor. And I often hear myself repeating time-proven Marjorie-isms to my editing clients.

When I started putting myself out there as a freelance editor, Marjorie encouraged me and sent me some great advice in the form of this incisive PW article she wrote on the changing roles of in-house and freelance editors:

In this changing landscape, as publishers look more and more at their bottom lines and continue cutting back on in-house staff, I can envision a model in which the in-house editor is the jack-of-all-trades that the publisher requires, while still editing select projects. For other projects, the in-house editor might need to work with a trusted freelance editor to help move things along. But publishers have to acknowledge what every editor—in-house or freelance—knows: editing is crucial and can make the difference between the success or failure of a book.

Marjorie's sure editorial hand made an enormous difference in the books we did together. Her advocacy and mentorship made a huge difference in my career. Her friendship made a profound difference in my life.

Loglines and You: Michael Ferris explains it all in Script magazine

Even the most seasoned writers I know struggle with loglines -- the single sentence at the top of your query that presents a succinct explanation of the plot, tone, and style of the book. Sounds simple enough, but that single sentence can really suck your head inside out. So Michael Ferris' "Loglines and You" article in Script magazine immediately caught my attention. He's talking about pitching a screenplay, but the rules apply to querying a novel or memoir.

Quoth Ferris:

"...your goal with a logline is not to talk about or encapsulate the story in (hopefully) an exciting way. Instead, a logline is meant to highlight the aspects of your script that would entice someone who didn’t give a crap two seconds ago into wanting to read/know more. If you can write one sentence that entices the reader to want to read your script, AND also gives some semblance of what they story will be, you’ve written the perfect logline."

He goes on to offer this example: "A journey of forbidden love between a poor boy and a rich girl on the final voyage of the RMS Titanic." Which isn't actually a sentence, but you get the drift. (They don't need predicates in Hollywood. It's a town without pity.)

Read the rest here (before that logline sucks your head inside out.)

Got prologue? (Why writers might need it even if readers don't)

Author/editor Ray Rhamey in Prologues: Yes or No over at Writer Unboxed today:

As an editor, I have never liked prologues. As a writer, I’ve never written one. As a reader, I skip them. Yet they keep appearing on my Flogging the Quill blog for criticism. I post the opening lines of the prologue plus the opening lines of the first chapter. Just about all the time, the chapter opening works best.

Rhamey polled a cross section of agents and got a pretty resounding thumbs down on the prologue. Most agents find them unnecessary at best and at worst, lazy and distracting. There's some excellent advice on reality checking the necessity factor. Kindly pragmatist Nathan Bransford gently suggests "the easiest litmus test is to take out the prologue and see if your book still makes sense." Less patient Miss Snark is quoted: "Signs your prologue sucks: it’s about a dream, it’s about the weather, it’s about someone who is dead, it’s about someone who never appears again in the book. The first sign you are not the exception to this rule is if you think you ARE."

I don't disagree with any of that, but like 99.9999% of craft discussions on the great writer time suck that is the interweb, this discussion is about what agents need from writers, not what writers need from writing. In my humble opinion, agents not liking prologues is not a good reason for writers to avoid writing a prologue; it's just a good reason for not showing your prologue to agents. The underlying philosophy is that anything you write that doesn't get published is a waste of time, and that's absolutely untrue.

Not everything needed by the writer for the writing is needed by the reader for the reading, but the first thing the reader needs is a writer who fully understands the book. It's another use for the great airplane safety lecture metaphor: put your own mask on first, then render assistance.

I've sworn off starting books with prologues for all the excellent reasons stated in the post, but I always start the writing process by writing a prologue. A wise editor once told me that a prologue is "the journey of the book in microcosm." There are things I need to figure out up front, and a prologue -- even though it never makes it into the finished manuscript -- helps me gather my thoughts and anchor my vision. A tone is set. Imagery is called out of the mist. Characters make themselves known. A steering mechanism is fixed. As I work through the ms, I cherry pick passages from the prologue and weave the essential stuff into the story. The nonessential stuff remains forever in a big bucket of outtakes with a lot of other stuff I needed to explore for my own benefit.

That said, in structuring a recent book, I realized I did want to keep the prologue intact. So I changed the word "Prologue" to "Chapter One." Problem solved. (So often the simplest solution is the most elegantly efficacious.)

The Cialis Warning for Writers: Don't make it harder than it has to be.

This is going to be one of my apt but slightly off color publishing allegories, so for those who are put off by such things, please, step away from the blog.

Whenever I see those Cialis commercials in which they warn "If you experience an erection lasting longer than four hours, call your doctor," I'm compelled to tell Gary, "Hey, baby, if that ever happens to you, forget the doctor--call me!" But formulaic humor aside, in practical reality, too much of a good thing is just as bad, if not worse, than not enough. Priapism (won't-go-away erection) is a harmful, painful medical emergency that can lead to ischemia and even gangrene in extreme cases. Yeah. Seriously not good.

Dragging out the manuscript process to ridiculous lengths is similarly unhealthy and ultimately unsatisfying. Meticulous is great until it becomes masochistic. Rewriting is good craftsmanship until it becomes obsessive rehashing. Artistic integrity is laudable until it becomes a smokescreen for an author's fear of the marketplace.

"Write with an erection," Tom Robbins famously said. "Even if you're a woman." He was talking about giving ourselves to the madly infatuated glory of process, and he's absolutely right, but prolonging process at the expense of fulfillment can damage and even kill a book. A satisfying publishing experience becomes less and less likely after grinding months or even years of psyching yourself out about it.

This month, I find myself involved in a delicious little work for hire project with a big fun factor and absolutely no literary heft. The deadline is insanely short. I've set a 4,000 words/day schedule to allow a few days at the front for research and a week at the end for rewrites. Last week, as we forged the contract with the publisher, I was pondering all sorts of parlor tricks and storytelling shenanigans that would elevate this project beyond the musical little trifle I'm being commissioned to write, and my agent sternly told me, "Don't make it harder than it has to be."

The creative exercise for me here is to reign in my tendency to write for my own enjoyment at the expense of the reader's--a brand of discipline my fiction has always lacked. Writing novels, I go where I want to go at the pace I like to travel with all sorts of tangents and bantering and envelope-pushing. I get luxuriously lost in the process I love. There's certainly nothing wrong with that, of course, unless you'd like to make a living writing, in which case, everyone this side of Infinite Jest has to give at least a modicum of consideration to the peanut gallery. The writer who fails to consider the reader is as tragically deluded as a man who thinks the quality of lovemaking begins and ends with his erection.

In this case, a fast, funny, straightforward, technically well executed story is what the publisher wants to publish and what the target readers want to read. It's the book equivalent of a quickie. There's fun there. And satisfaction. But it is what it is. Get in, get off, get out. Save the tantric gymnastics for the right partner and be honest with yourself about how long you really need it to last.

Buy This Book: The Writer's Notebook: Craft Essays from Tin House

A host of heavy hitters including Dorothy Allison, Jim Shepard, Aimie Bender, and Nick Flynn explain it all to you. The Writer's Notebook combines the best craft seminars from the Summer Writers Workshop's history with craft essays by some of Tin House's favorite authors. Includes do’s and don'ts, writing about sex, close readings, personal anecdotes, and a CD of workshop discussions and panels.