Three Keys to Writing Memorable Fiction

This week Ruth Harris discusses one of the major elements that separates ho-hum storytelling from bestselling fiction: details. 

Yes, we know you're often told to keep details to a minimum, and that's a good rule, but like the judicious use of seasonings in cooking, choosing the right ones will make the difference between a bland, generic dish and memorable cuisine.

As Ruth says below,"writers don't have to know everything, but they need to be interested in everything." We need to be on the lookout for just the right detail that will add the most punch to a story. Living in the Internet Age, we don't have to spend endless hours in libraries to find them.

What sort of details should you choose? Ruth tells us they're the ones that put your story in a 1) social, 2) cultural and 3) political context. I love the examples Ruth has chosen—they're some of my favorite books, films and TV shows of the past few decades. (There's a reason we work so well together as blog partners!) 

Would Downton Abbey or Mad Men have the same impact if they were set in the present? Could Homeland be set in any other period? Could the AbFab duo exist without the legacy of 1960s Swinging London? 

We are constantly told that story is all—and yes, story is the engine that drives your book—but it won't have the impact you want without a powerful sense of time, place, and cultural context. 

THREE KEYS TO WRITING MEMORABLE FICTION

by Ruth Harris

Social, cultural, and political history are powerful tools no writer should ignore.

• John Le Carré used the Cold War, the Berlin Wall and the real-life unmasking of a double agent to create a compelling setting in The Spy Who Came In From the Cold.
• Isabel Allende’s The House Of The Spirits, a family saga partially inspired by the PInochet dictatorship, is set against decades of political and social upheaval in post-colonial Chile.
• Alexander Solzhenitsyn drew on his experiences in the forced-labor camps of the Soviet prison system to create world wide bestsellers in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and The Gulag Archipelago.

However, writers do not need vast cultural and political disruptions to write powerful fiction readers can relate to. Ordinary, everyday details add enormous power to fiction and bring your story to life.

Whether your book is set in the conservative Eisenhower Fifties, the stylish Kennedy Sixties, Nixon’s Watergate and the gloomy Carter Seventies, the glitzy Reagan Eighties, or the Anxious-Age-of-the-Present, each period offers the writer its own specific backdrop and sound track. Trudeau’s Canada, Thatcher’s England, de Gaulle’s France, Ho Chi Minh’s China, Mubarak’s Egypt, Stalin’s Russia and Hitler’s Germany—all evoke powerful memories and feelings years after the events took place.

Characters need to be firmly anchored in a specific time and place. Even sci-fi and fantasy need social, cultural and political specifics to engage the reader. George Orwell’s 1984, Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale and JK Rowling’s Harry Potter draw their power from their authors’ ability to create credible details of an invented world.

If you research and then judiciously set up the specifics of time and place, you will expand and enrich your fiction. Invoking the relevant cultural, political and social details will draw your reader into recognizable settings against which your characters can act out their dilemmas, frustrations and successes.

You shouldn’t give your reader a history lesson—that’s Doris Kearns Goodwin’s job—but you do want to give your characters a relatable world in which to live. Your characters can be—and should be—shaped by the attitudes of whatever period you choose to write about.

• Peggy and Joan in Mad Men deal with the casual sexism of the 1960’s.
• The characters in Downton Abbey are caught up in a long-gone post-Edwardian upstairs-downstairs world.
• Patsy and Edina, the fashion victims in Ab Fab, booze it up, get high and keep up with nutty trends as they attempt to recreate their younger, glory days in Swinging London.
• Carrie and Brody in Homeland are enmeshed in a paranoid present complete with bi-polar disorder, psycho-active drugs and a hero who might also be a terrorist.
• Elizabeth Moss’s character in Top Of The Lake searches for a missing and pregnant twelve-year-old in a remote, misogynistic area of contemporary New Zealand.

The writers’ skillful use of these various eras bring the fictional characters who inhabit them vividly to life.
By using cultural history, high or low, past or current, your characters will become dimensional as they reflect the world around them. They can be limited by it—or they can rebel against it. Some will choose to drop out, some will learn to manipulate it, others will challenge it, some will be defeated and still others will triumph despite the barriers they face. 

Are you writing about a period in which people feel positive about the future and confident about their prospects? Or are your characters coping with the Depression of the Thirties or the financial crisis or downsizing of the recent past and present? How they think and feel and what they do to deal with opportunity (or lack thereof) offers a potent way to explore and expand the inner and outer lives of the people you’re writing about. 

Early Elvis, swinging Sinatra, Abbey Road Beatles, Motown Soul, Latino Salsa, Madonna’s Material Girl, Gangsta Rap, Lady Gaga’s and/or Rihanna’s latest immediately evoke times and places your reader will find familiar.

• Did your heroine’s first serious romance—maybe with her tweedy, pipe-smoking Literature Professor—begin and end to Mozart?
• Did your MC come of age when Michael Jackson was moon-walking?
• Did that bad-boy rascal of a boyfriend give your heroine heartache only Patsy Cline could express?

Selecting just the right song and just the right singer can illuminate the emotional life of a character in a memorable way. (Anne here: Just remember to use the title, not the actual lyric--unless you're prepared to pay. Here's a recent blogpost on how to do that.) 

Then there’s wardrobe:

• Garter belts or Spanx?
• Turtlenecks or bustiers?
• Lip gloss or va-va-voom Marilyn Monroe red lipstick?
• A natural Fro, an old-fashioned perm, a blow dry bob or a Gwyneth dead straight ‘do?
• Punky pink streaks, Bergdorf’s blonde or let-it-all-hang-out grey?
• A hedge fund titan in a five-thousand-dollar suit?
• A dude in jeans and a pack of cigarettes in the rolled-up sleeve of a T-shirt?
• A genius techie billionaire in hoodie and sneakers?
• Are their clothes worn ironically? Or un-? 

Choices in clothing, makeup and hairstyles telegraph different personalities and different attitudes. A wise writer will make use of each telling detail as s/he creates characters readers will relate to.

Writers don’t need to know everything but they do need to be interested in everything from the Mau Mau uprising in the 1950s to today’s California surfers. 

Research used to mean trips to the library, flipping through card catalogs and then waiting for the books to be pulled from the stacks. Research once meant slogging through microfilm, piles of old newspapers and magazines. It was time-consuming and often frustrating. Now, thanks to the web and Google, just about anything we want to know is instantly available.

Our world—past and present—is rich in incident, personality and conflict. It’s an oyster with a different pearl for every book, each character and every writer. An open mind and lively curiosity, a habit of reading widely, your own unique memories, passions and interests, plus basic research are your friends.

Embrace them and use them thoughtfully. Your readers will love you for it.

What about you, scriveners? What details do you use to anchor your book in time and place? Are there books that have more detail than you'd like? Do you read for setting as well as story?

SPECIAL WEEKEND SALE (Through Sunday, April 28 only)!

Ruth has reduced ZURI, a love story with all 5-star reviews, to $.99. ZURI will go back to its usual price on Monday, April 29.

Kindle  |  Nook

And remember all of Anne's mysteries are 99c until April 30.

Stephen Colbert wants us all to read the Great Gatsby in the next two weeks. 

After that, why not read Anne's Fitzgerald-inspired The Gatsby Game?

OPPORTUNITY ALERTS:

1) Literary Upstart Short Fiction Contest for writers in the New York area. You can submit your short fiction until May 28th; submissions must be no longer than 1,300-words. Semi-finalists, fifteen in total, will be invited to participate in one of three readings, in front of a live, lively audience, and a panel of judges comprised of members of the local literati. The grand prize winner will get a $500 award and be published in the annual Summer Fiction Issue of The L. Magazine. 

2) FREE book advertising to British readers from EbookBargainsUK Lots of authors and publishers have had huge successes with their free or sale books by advertising on BookBub, ENT, KND, POI, etc. But none of those target the UK, and their links go to US sites Brits can't use. But now there’s a newsletter for UK readers only. It links to all the big UK retailers like Apple UK, Waterstones and Foyles as well as Amazon UK. They don’t sell books direct or get paid for clickthroughs, so they don't have any restrictions on how many free books they can spotlight like BookBub and the others. So it's THE place to tell Brits about your book when it goes free or on sale in the UK. Since Brits have the highest number of readers per capita of any country in the world, this looks like a great idea to me: Plus: the site will be offering FREE book ads until May 31st, on a first come, first served basis. But note: BE SURE TO READ THE DIRECTIONS. I've had complaints that a number of people are just leaving notes to "pick up the details and cover on my website." DO not do this. Just because this service is free right now does not mean you don't have to be professional. 

You can see the nice ads they gave Ruth and Anne in this weekend's newsletter.

And if you're in the UK, do sign up for their newsletter. It brings links to free and bargain ebooks—at the UK bookstore of your choice—in your inbox every morning. You can subscribe here.

3) The Saturday Evening Post’s Second Annual Great American Fiction Contest—yes, THAT Saturday Evening Post—is holding a short fiction contest. Could you join the likes of F. Scott Fitzgerald; William Faulkner; Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.; Ray Bradbury; Louis L’Amour; Sinclair Lewis; Jack London; and Edgar Allan Poe? $10 entry fee Deadline July 1, 2013

4) Find a Writing Group through Galley Cat! One of the most reliable and popular news outlets in publishing is creating a directory for writers to network to get critiques of their work You can sign up here. 

5)  Readwave: A showcase for short stories: ReadWave is a community of readers and writers who love to discover and share new stories from contemporary writers. Readers can access thousands of stories and read them for free on mobile or desktop--and writers can use ReadWave to build up a fanbase and market their stories online. ReadWave has created a new reading widget, that allows bloggers and website owners to embed stories online in a compact form. The ReadWave widget is the first reading widget to allow readers to "follow" the writer. When a reader follows a writer they are added to the writer’s fanbase and can receive updates on all of the writer’s future stories. ReadWave puts writers in touch with the readers that are right for them. This looks like a great innovative site. You know how I've been encouraging you to write more short fiction? This is where to put it to start building a fan base.

The Gatsby Game is Out!

My life continues to zoom along at warp speed. Mark Williams just told me that THE GATSBY GAME is up at Amazon this morning--a week ahead of schedule.

It's a book I had to write--one that's been sitting in my head  for decades. It's based on the mysterious death of David Whiting during the filming of the Burt Reynolds film, The Man Who Loved Cat Dancing. I knew David personally, and I've always wanted to tell my theory of how he might have died, based on what I knew of his quirky personality. (It was ruled an accident, but many people call it a suicide, and some think it was murder.)  The characters in THE GATSBY GAME are fictional, but some of the scenes really happened--and David was as obsessed with F. Scott Fitzgerald as my character Alistair Milbourne. A couple of letters that serve as clues in the novel are real--and I still have them.

This has been called one of Hollywood's Most Notorious Scandals of all time,  Here is what writer Phil Nugent said about it in his article in Nerve.com. Note he says David Whiting committed suicide, which was probably not the case.


#7: The STARS: Sarah Miles and Burt Reynolds

THE SCANDAL: In 1972, Miles and Reynolds, both of whose careers were just taking off, co-starred in the Western romance The Man Who Loved Cat Dancing. In the movie, the rough outlaw played by Reynolds abducts and eventually wins the heart of the flinty English beauty played by Miles, in the course of a story that requires her to suffer at the hands of crueler, less photogenic men. Midway through filming, Miles herself was physically attacked by her business manager, David Whiting, and sought sanctuary by fleeing to Reynolds' quarters; the next morning, Whiting was found to have committed suicide.

THE FALLOUT: At first, the creepy synchronicity between the movie's plot and what happened on the set inspired a certain amount of interest and rumor-mongering, and Esquire ran a purplish article by Ron Rosenbaum titled "The Corpse as Big as he Ritz."...[Miles'] failure to become a star probably had little to do with the unhappy fate of David Whiting. As for Burt Reynolds, Cat Dancing was a blip in his career, sandwiched between his first big hits Deliverance and White Lightning, and was almost instantaneously forgotten."

In spite of what Nugent says above, the scandal did have a terrible impact on Sarah Miles. It destroyed her marriage (although she and Sir Robert Bolt did eventually re-marry) and her career came to a screeching halt. She's detailed these events in her fascinating memoirs, Serves Me Right and Bolt from the Blue. 

I've never met Miss Miles, but I have great sympathy for her. I think she was only guilty of too much compassion for David, who was a brilliant, tragic, and sometimes comically self-deluded man/child.

I have made the nanny the protagonist of the novel, giving her the name Nicky Conway, echoing the detached narrator of The Great Gatsby, Nick Carraway. Although there was a real nanny suspected in David's case, I know nothing about her, and Nicky is not meant to represent her in any way. 

I changed the setting of the story from the small town of Gila Bend, Arizona to the small California oil town of Taft, for no particular reason except I've always wanted to set a story in Taft, which has a tragi-comic history of its own (it was originally named Moron) and it's closer to me than Gila Bend.

THE GATSBY GAME (with a forward by Saffina Desforges) is available as an ebook at at amazon.com and at amazon.co.uk, and will soon be up at B&N and iTunes, and will be available in paper in 4-6 weeks. 

This book would never have been published if it weren't for my blog, so I'll be talking a little about the rumored "death of the blog" in my Sunday post, and I'd love to have readers weigh in on whether they think blogging (or not blogging) has impacted their writing careers.

The $79 Kindle and the Most Interesting Publisher in the World

OK, I can finally say it: I have three brand new novels coming out this fall!

Within a couple of weeks, THE GATSBY GAME will debut as an e-book. It’s a stand-alone mystery set in the Mad Men era that proposes a fictional solution to one of Hollywood's most scandalous mysteries. (It's #7 on the top 10 list, if you follow that link.) 

The e-book will be published by a cutting-edge new e-publisher: Mark Williams International Digital Publishing.

Two comic mysteries will follow with MWiDP: GHOSTWRITERS IN THE SKY and SHERWOOD, LTD. They are the first two in a series featuring a perennially penniless socialite and her gay best friend.

Yeah but…sez you—what about Popcorn Press? Haven’t you already signed with them? Aren’t they re-launching your two UK books, FOOD OF LOVE and THE BEST REVENGE? Haven’t they been very, very good to you?

Yup. But because both of these presses belong to a whole new “united we stand” type of small publisher, Popcorn will partner with MWiDP and publish paper versions of the three ebooks. Paper copies will be available at the Popcorn Press site (and amazon.com) about one month after the debut of the ebooks. And yes! Paper copies of FOOD OF LOVE are available for pre-order at the Popcorn Press site right now for only $9.99. 

So who/what is Mark Williams International?

Because MWiDP only officially launched this week, I haven’t been able to talk about it before, but if you follow this blog, you’ve seen Mark Williams’ comments to many of our posts. He’s the “quiet half” of the UK’s phenomenally successful writing duo known as Saffina Desforges. He’s also mentored a number of other UK writers to bestselling superstardom.

After zooming up to the top of the UK’s Kindle lists—and staying there for months—Mark and Saffi have been courted by some of the biggest agencies in New York and Hollywood. But they turned them all down. They realized there’s a lot more money (as well as freedom) in the indie publishing world.

But Mark, who has been a teacher and editor for many years, knew a lot of writers (like me) who don’t have the time or entrepreneurial skills to self-publish. He also ran into many successful US indies who didn’t have a clue how to break into the European markets.

So he came up with the idea for a company which is a mix of small e-publisher, self-publishing facilitator, and marketer. They will provide professional vetting, editing, cover design, coding and uploading--and also use the networking and collective marketing developed by indie Kindle authors. MWiDP will also take on successful indie authors who want to expand their markets on other continents.

It sounded so good, I jumped in, even though it meant turning down three offers from the traditional publishing world: three offers I would have killed for a few months ago.

Here’s what happened to me at the beginning of September—just as I was madly preparing my three presentations for the Central Coast Writers Conference. In the space of less than 48 hours, I had a request for a read from one of my dream agents, an offer of representation from a top agency, and an offer of a read of my full manuscript from an editor at a prestigious mid-sized publisher. I also had requested full manuscripts awaiting reads at two other agencies.

But each offer had strings.

• #1 was an initial request for a partial—the beginning of a road that usually takes over a year and so far has had about a 95% failure rate for me.
• #2 was a maybe-offer conditional on a draconian rewrite that involved cutting most of the mystery elements, removing the gay characters and subplots and turning the book into something I wouldn't feel good about promoting.
• #3 was from a company I’d recently discovered has a seriously author-unfriendly contract.
• The two fulls had been sitting at the agencies for over 6 months with no word from the agents, in spite of several inquiries, so I had no idea if they were still being considered. (More and more agencies no longer bother to send rejections for requested manuscripts--even fulls.) 

I mentioned my dilemma in an email to Mark--and he let me in on his as-yet-to-be announced publishing company plans.

Twenty-four hours later, I’d joined Mark and Saffi’s new venture. Here’s my page at their new website. 

What am I—nuts? Isn't this just drinking the Kool-Aid that Janet Reid warned us about?

Maybe. And I absolutely do not recommend this for everybody. Especially for newbies. I think most first-time authors should try the traditional route first. Even if it's only to build up some soul-calluses. Publishing a just-finished first novel usually ends in disappointment and often discourages good writers from staying in the game.

But for me, it’s already looking like a smart move. One of the major factors that swayed me was that Mark could get my ebooks out quickly. He'd already read two of the three manuscripts and knew they were almost ready to go.

He also told me this will be the “Christmas of the Kindle.” He predicted Kindles would get very cheap for the holidays—under $99—and said they'll be THE gift. He expects this holiday season to be the hottest e-book buying moment in history.

And guess what happened on Wednesday this week? Amazon announced its lowest price Kindle will now sell for…$79. And the new Kindle Fire--an ereader/tablet that competes with the iPad, will cost only $199 (a loss to Amazon they expect will pay off in other sales.)

So I think Mark has a pretty clear crystal ball.

He pointed out that in the three or more years it would take to grind even one of my books through the traditional publishing machine, the whole publishing world will have changed. There may not be any more big brick and mortar bookstores. That window in Barnes and Noble where I’ve fantasized seeing my work will probably display only Nooks and Snookibooks. E-books will reign.

So I realized that for me--after fifteen years of bloodying my knuckles on New York doors--it made sense to get all my books out right now. (This isn't all the books I've written, BTW--I've got some practice ones in the files that will never see Kindle-light.)

Mark certainly doesn’t recommend that everybody take out their rejected manuscripts and throw them on Amazon (or submit them to MWiDP.) But I had three finished, multi-critiqued, edited new mysteries. (And yes, Mark did ask for more edits and I’m in the process of killing some darlings, but his suggestions improved the books instead of gutting them.) 

Do I recommend this for everybody? Again I repeat: no. Going the indie or semi-indie route is likely to lead to disappointment if you don't have a body of work and you’ve only been at this game a little while. Writing narrative is a craft that takes years to perfect. You don't open a restaurant after your first cooking lesson.

The reason this move is best for me is: not only will MWiDP make my ebooks available immediately, but my chances of acceptance by the Big Six are abysmal. I only recently figured out why I've been getting so many "I absolutely loved this, but..." rejections.

1) I’ve been previously published, without stupendous sales numbers.

2) My work doesn’t fit into a neat genre category.

3)  I write funny. Humor is subjective and can’t please all of the people all of the time.

4) Funny books by women are often lumped together as chick lit—the most hated genre in New York.

If you’re just starting your writing journey, please don't let me keep you from pursuing your personal publishing dreams. By the time you have two or three books ready to go, the industry will have settled a bit from the e-revolution and you’ll have many more options than we have now. The Big Six may not be as big and Amazon and maybe Apple might be the most desirable publishers. There will also be lots of collectives and small e-publishers like MWiDP to choose from.

If you’re in the process of looking for an agent, please keep at it. Agents will have very different job descriptions in a few years, but having a savvy agent in your corner will always help your career. I’d love to have one myself.

But right now, with all these books ready to go, it makes sense for me to join Mark's new venture and be ready for “the Christmas of the Kindle.”

So who is this Mark Williams dude?

He’s not a guy to toot his own horn. He doesn’t even post a picture of himself on his blog. What I’ve been able glean from his emails and posts is:

• He’s a very good writer and editor.
• And a phenomenally smart guy.
• He’s based in London.
• He spends a lot of time traveling the world, teaching third-world children and building schools.
• He first became interested in electronic publishing because of the opportunity it provides to get books to children in remote parts of the world.  
• He’s traveled and taught in lots of dangerous places, like Soviet Russia and Saddam’s Iraq. He has braved revolutions and lost dear friends in horrific civil wars.
• Right now, he’s helping get solar power to a primitive village in West Africa so they can use computers and electronic readers—an effort partly funded by money from his book sales. (He asks that when you get your new Kindles, you consider donating the used ones to his project.)
• He is apparently living in a mud hut. I don’t know if that’s a metaphorical hut, but it doesn’t sound like the Hilton.
• I’ve got to admit I’ve done a little searching the old Interwebz for a picture—but a name like Mark Williams is as generic as, well, Anne Allen, so I haven’t got a clue how to find him. Unless maybe he’s this guy:

So here I go on another publishing adventure….whee!

So how do you feel about all this, scriveners? Are you ready to take the self-pub or indie-collective plunge? Holding out for the traditional publishing dream? Willing to go indie, but want an agent to guide you? Or are you a successful US indie who’d like help getting into the European and Asian markets?

*********

I'm starting little blog tour in my own slow way this week. I reveal a few personal secrets in a guest post at Karen Jones Gowan's blog, Coming Down the Mountain due to post next Friday, Oct. 7th, and I spilled more beans at Prue Batten’s ‘Mesmered” blog: (with a great comment from Mark Williams hisownself.) Plus I've got some very nice cyber ink from Danielle Smith over at Chick Lit Reviews. Anybody who'd like an interview or blog visit, do let me know (and anybody willing to do a review, I'll be forever in your debt.)