Category: Suffering Map

            By odd coincidence, this is post 404.

            There’s an old development saying you’ve probably heard—let’s throw it at the wall and see what sticks. The premise here is that if we use every single idea we have, surely the good ones will do something to get noticed.  They’ll stick to the wall or rise to the top or… something.

            The unwritten part of this premise is that you’ll also end up with a serious mess.  Yeah, my two or three good ideas stuck to the wall, but look at all the crap piled up on the floor under them. Hell, look at the wall itself.  It’s all stained and smeared and streaked.  This isn’t a clean-up situation, it’s a straight repaint.  I can say with confidence that we’re not getting our security deposit back.

            With all that in mind, I’d like to tell you the story of Phoebe McProtagonist…

            Phoebe struggled through life from an early age, born ten months premature on the same day her father died in the Middle East, one week before his two-year tour ended.  Overwhelmed with grief, her mother committed suicide during the birth.  Phoebe’s years as an orphan in child protective services left her hard and jaded, and she never had a single role model—growing up without parents, foster parents, inspiring teachers, sports heroes, pop icons, internet stars, or even a giving tree.

            In high school, Phoebe struggled with drug addiction, alcohol addiction, adrenaline addiction, video game addiction, sex addiction, a hoarding problem, OCD, Tourette’s syndrome, and extreme boredom because she wasn’t being challenged (no inspiring teachers, remember). She got pregnant three times on prom night, couldn’t get any abortions because she lived in a red state, then suffered four miscarriages from drinking lead-tainted Jaegerbombs after graduation.

            (alcohol addiction, remember?)  

            Determined to honor the memory of her unborn children, Phoebe withdrew from society and home-grad-schooled herself, eventually receiving magna cum laude, perfect attendance, and a triple doctorate in music theory, film criticism, and genetic engineering.  Thus armed, she applied to be an astronaut and, after months of rigorous testing, was finally accepted into the astronaut training program by those goddamned f@¢%!#g bastards at NASA.

            (Tourette’s, remember?)

            But when the rest of her team was killed in a launchpad fire that also burned down her house,  Phoebe took time off to sort out her life.  She sorted it out, got her groove back, got her ducks in a row, realized what’s important, and was struck by lightning walking along the beach.  As she sprawled on the shore, feeling a moment of divine bliss and agony as all the hair on her body burned away, giant mutant fiddler crabs came out of the ocean, the product of unregulated industrial waste dumping—

            (red state, remember? See how it all ties together? That’s what good literature does!)

            —and dragged her away into the water. In her final moments, the race between drowning and being eaten alive by the mutant crabs, she realized the single secret to clean energy, FTL travel, and how to make the perfect 7&7.  But there was no one to tell before she died, because she walked the beach alone.

            Okay, that was maybe a little bit over the top, but you might be surprised how common this kind of storytelling is.  I saw it in writers’ groups in college (part of the reason I don’t belong to such groups anymore) and countless times when I used to read for screenplay contests.  You wouldn’t believe the number of dramatic stories that are just brimming with excess plot devices and story threads. Hell, I freely admit some of the early drafts of The Suffering Map were the same way.

            This springs from a common misconception–that writing a bunch of plot points and character elements is the same thing as writing a story.  The logic is that if I load up my story with every possible dramatic idea for every single character, one of them’s bound to hit the target, right?  And then, eventually, the story will be dramatic.  Plus, adversity builds character, therefore it stands to reason all this extra  adversity in my story will make for fantastic characters.

            I mean, Phoebe comes across a great character, right…?

            Simple truth is, this is all just excessive. If I’m doing this, I’m wasting ideas and wasting words, using thirty or forty examples instead of just three good ones.  It’s the kind of thing that tells a reader I was more interested in creating art than I was in telling any kind of decent story.

            Of course, in all fairness, it’s not just the artsy literature types who do this, although I must admit, they seem to be the most common offenders.  We’ve all read (or seen) the action storywhere every punch draws blood, every car chase ends with an explosion, and every leap rattles bones.  Plus every character had a snappy one-liner to toss out (or at least think about) before, during, and after offing one of the villains. And there were lots and lots of villains…

            Then there’s the sci-fi stories that have vast interstellar conflicts and near-magical technology and unstoppable cyborg monsters and omnipotent, cosmic beingsand sacred orbs   Seriously, reading contest scripts I was so sick of orbs.  I came to loathe the word.  Know what else?  Nobody in bad fantasy ever has eyes, they all have orbs.

            Friggin’ orbs.

            And sooooo many horror story that have cubic yards of blood and gore everywhere.  Plus there’s a little chalk-skinned child who moves in high-speed “shaky vision.”  And a secret psychopath.  And one person who snaps and gets dozens of people killed because they opened a door or invited something in or played with the puzzle box. 

            It’s been almost thirty years, people. Thirty. Years.  Haven’t you figured this out yet?  Nothing good comes from opening the damned puzzle box!  Even my mom knows this!

            Y’see, Timmy, whatever my chosen genre is, just loading a bucket up with plot elements and flinging them at the wall does not create a story.  It’s the opposite of writing in just about every way possible.  No, not even if I only consider the leftover stuff. As I mentioned above, all those other ideas are still going to leave stains and streaks, no matter how solid the good stuff is.

            Take that as you will.

            Next week I’ll talk a bit more about cons, and I might talk about excessive stuff a little more, too.

            Until then, go write.

            Kind of a goofy title.  Hopefully it’ll make sense in a few minutes.
            Hey, did you know today is the 50th anniversary of Star Trek?  Yep, the original series premiered fifty years ago today (tonight, really).  “The Man Trap,” the one with the salt vampire.

            May we always boldly go where no one has gone before…

            Anyway…

            If you follow me on Twitter, you know I often spend my weekends watching a half-dozen or so B- or openly awful movies while working on toy soldiers or tanks or something. And I often tweet out little bits of advice when I see a storytelling screw up that should’ve been easily avoided. They’re more frustrating in film, because it means someone had the screenplay sitting right there in front of them before this messed-up scene was put on film. And yet… they still put it on film.

            And sometimes the screw-ups are so bad, so overwhelming, that all I can do is drink…

            A recent awful film I saw hit on a really big problem I’ve seen a few people wrestle with. To be honest, I wrestled with it on my oft-mentioned book, The Suffering Map.  And when I realized what I’d been doing, not only did I feel like an idiot, but I realized that book might be salvageable someday after all.

            With a certain amount of rewrites.

            What am I talking about?

             A few weeks back I was watching a movie that was probably going for the idea of a goofy, somewhat inept hero with much more capable friends. Think of Jack Burton in Big Trouble In Little China or even, to a lesser extent, Shaun in Shaun of the Dead.  Alas, that’s a very tricky balance to pull off, and this writer/director didn’t have the skill or experience to do it.

            Meanwhile, the cute bartender (who liked him because… well, it was in the script, I guess) is well-trained with firearms, has a plan, stays calm under pressure… and keeps getting regulated to reaction shots and wide shots of the supporting character.  Except for one or two scenes, she’s almost a background character.

            And then, at the end, the hero sweeps her off her feet.  After the world’s been saved by someone else.  No, a third person altogether, not either one of them.

            That movie killed half a bottle of rum.  One of the big bottles.

            Anyway…

            Example two.

            In my early drafts of The Suffering Map, my main character, Rob, pretty much dominated the book.  There were some good supporting characters in Sondra, Miguel, Levi Gulliver and his ravens, and my villain, Bareback (a shameless Cenobite rip-off in those first three or four drafts), but Rob was easily 70-75% of the book.

            When I finally made a serious revision, one of the big changes was giving more time to Sondra. Really, the story involved her almost as much as Rob, and she had her own arc that I’d all but skimmed over because… well, he was my main character, right?

            By the next big revision (the last one) the novel was pretty much split clean between them.  But it still wasn’t quite right, and—as I’ve mentioned before—it was rejected a few times.  It was around this time that I finally trunked it.  Well, cyber-trunked it.

            Y’see, Timmy, both of these stories suffered from the same problem—not being aware of who should be the main character.  They’re not focusing on the heroic, active person—the person who’s actually making choices and doing things. And learning from those choices and changing because of them. What I came to realize was that Rob shouldn’t be the main character of The Suffering Map—Sondra should be.  She was more active, she was more interesting, and she had a serious arc.  Really, the book was her story.  Which I knew, but I was so stuck in the headspace of it being Rob’s story that I didn’t recognize the actual hero.

            The bad movie did the same thing.  It only took a few moments of mental re-plotting to see how much stronger and more entertaining the film would be if it had been focused on the bartender.  She was smart, clever, willing to take charge… all the stuff we want and need in a main character.

            Granted, it’s always possible to bend or break those rules, but—as I mentioned above—it’s not an easy thing to do, and probably not something to attempt without a lot of serious experience.

            I also think it’s worth addressing the elephant in the room.  In both of these examples, the better lead, the one shunted to the side, was a woman.  This isn’t always going to be the case, but I also didn’t want to gloss over it. 

            For me, it came down to The Suffering Map being my first all-out serious attempt at a novel.  I was worried I didn’t have the skill to pull off a female lead, and at the time I was right. But as I kept rewriting it over the years, and Sondra became a better character, I developed those skills. Alas, as I mentioned above, it still took me a while to get past the idea of “Rob is the main character.”

            In the bad movie… well, I don’t know what they were thinking.  I wasn’t there.  It’s possible, as I mentioned above, they went for a goofy hero with better sidekicks and really messed up the balance.  Or maybe they just planned on her as a love interest, put in a lot of character traits thinking it’d be cool to have a love interest who wasn’t just window dressing, and couldn’t register the fact that they’d made this supporting character into a far better protagonist than their lead. We’ll never know.  All I can say is that it was far from the movie’s only problem, and no one should ever watch it without a serious amount of alcohol on standby.

            But back to our topic…

            If I’m doing a story with a good-sized cast of characters, it may be worth taking a moment to look at the story from a few different points of view.  Maybe that clever thing I’m trying to do with my main character isn’t working.  Maybe she’s the main character.  Or that guy.  Or that person in the coat over there.  My goal as a writer should be to tell the most interesting story possible, and sometimes… that might not be the story I started with.

            Next time, I’d like to blather on a bit about where you’ve decided to write.

            Until then… go write.

            Hey, a quick bonus post or Writers Coffeehouse folks.  Or any of you who are interested in such things…

            One of our Coffeehouse topics this past weekend was querying agents, and I told the folks there about how I actually got attention from two fairly well-known, high profile agents because I had a good query letter and could talk like a professional in one-on-one meetings. And I thought it might be useful to some folks to have said letter as a rough template.

            Ironically, the book I was querying with was The Suffering Map, my early novel that I use so often here as an example of how not to do things.  Seriously, I use it so often there’s a tag for it.  A big one.  You could figure out a lot of the book  just by reading about all the elements I screwed up in it.

            Anyway…

————————

                                                                          May 15^th, 2003

                                                                          My Old Address

                                                                          San Diego CA 92116

Name

Agency

Address

New York NY

Ms. ########,

            If you could travel in an instant to anywhere, or any-when, in the world, where would you go?  Now, what if there was a price?  What if each journey submitted you to a nightmare of pain and torture before you arrive, unharmed, without a mark on you, at your destination.  Getting there is not half the fun.  So why would Rob Fable do it a second time?  Or a third?  And what would happen if he got addicted to it?

My novel, THE SUFFERING MAP,  is a suspense/ horror novel that also involves a great deal of mythology, history, and a sprinkling of pop culture.  It’s set in my home city of San Diego, and the title refers to a mysterious device, found (well, stolen) by Rob, which allows him to travel while submitting him to the whims of a being called Bareback.  It also brings him into contact with Sondra, who develops an unusual bond with the Suffering Map, and Gulliver, who has his own plans for the mechanism….

        Rob comes to realize the financial potential of the device and travels with it more and more.  When he discovers some of the historical results of using the Suffering Map, though, he finds it isn’t that easy to stopusing it.  In the end, Rob must come to terms with his addiction to the ancient machine as his friends try to save him and themselves, for Bareback has his own plans, and the power of history is on his side.

            I would like to send you either the full manuscript of The Suffering Map (approximately 120,000 words), or some sample chapters and a synopsis, at your preference.  Please find a SASE enclosed for your convenience.

                                                                          Sincerely,

                                                                          Peter Clines

———————–

            So, look at what we’ve got here. First off, it’s short and simple–one page only.  I introduce the four major characters and explain the title.  Also notice that while pretty much the whole thing is talking about the story–this could almost be a back of the book/inside flap description,  I also slip in a bit of humor (okay, maybe he didn’t find the Suffering Map…) and some credentials (I’m not just writing about a city I’ve never been to or visited once).

            I wrap it up with a professional closing.  At the time this particular agent hadn’t set out firm guidelines past “query first,” so I suggested some options, each one showing that I have an understanding of the process.  By offering the full manuscript (with a word count) I’m confirming it’s done, and I have an idea how long such a book should be.  Offering a synopsis implies I either have one ready or know how to prepare one.  And all of that helps show that I’ve got an idea how to use words to convey ideas.  Y’know, like a writer…

            One more thing. The little device of asking questions—good, semi-rhetorical questions—encourages people to consider answers.  So even though I address these questions a bit later (to some degree), I’m still leaving room for the agent to wonder about what the answer is. The Suffering Map, as implied, has a mystery element to it, so questions worked well for me. YMMV.

            However… I hear that “asking rhetorical questions” has been getting used in queries a lot lately, and the device is bordering on gimmicky.  Most agents hate gimmicks, because even though it may be new and clever to me, odds are they’ve seen it a hundred times.  This week.  Some might just roll their eyes and keep reading, for others it may be a dealbreaker.  So be cautious with gimmicks.  Or something that may be bordering on gimmick-hood.

            And, again, please don’t forget—this is an example of what worked for me. Your individual query letter needs to reflect your book and your skills as a writer, so copying this and making minor tweaks won’t really help.  This is just a guide, so when you’re talking about your book you’ll have a sense of what to say.

            On our regularly-scheduled Thursday post, I wanted to talk about sucker punches.

            Until then, go write.

            And if you’re at that stage… query.

            If I can shamelessly namedrop a bit,  I heard a great Richard Matheson quote from Jonathan Maberry a while back, which I will now paraphrase as such.

            Writingis the art of telling stories.  Publishingis the business of selling as many copies of that art as possible.

            If you break it down, this collection of rants is probably 98% about writing, maybe 2% about publishing.  This week, if I may, I’d like to step away from the straight writing stuff that I normally do and touch on an issue more on the publishing side of things.

            Nobody here likes getting rejected. Not for an apartment, not for a job, not for a date. Definitely not for our writing.  But that’s life. Rejection happens all the time, even to the folks who get considered professionals.  I had a short story rejected from an anthology last year.  I’ve been trying to pitch a book trilogy to my editor for two years now, and he’s just not interested. Heck, my agent’s not even that interested in it.  These things happen.

            I bring this up because there’s a meme, or sometimes an article, that floats around a lot, presenting a bunch of facts that go something like this… 

            “Famous writer X showed their manuscript Y to twenty-three editors before someone bought it.  Not only that, bestselling novel Y2 by famous writer X2 was rejected by forty-two editors. Can you imagine that? Forty-two people passed on Y2?  Ha ha ha, how many of them are kicking themselves now?”

            This list can be ten or fifteen authors/books long, and I see it get used a lot to show how A) I shouldn’t give up hope just because of all my rejections, B) editors don’t know anything, C) the publishing industry is a dinosaur that’s going to die out any day now, just wait and see, or D) all of the above.

            So, at first glance, this list can seem like a really awesome thing. It makes me feel more positive about rejection.  It makes me feel more positive about that stupid editor’s decision.  It validates my feelings about big publishing and their ongoing habit of ignoring my letters.  And this is good, right?

            Thing is, there’s three problems here.  And I think they cause more issues than all this positive affirmation solves.  Y’see, Timmy, this list isn’t as clear-cut as it seems…

            First problem is the false parallel that often gets drawn because of this list.  Carrie was rejected many times and my early book– The Suffering Map –was rejected many times.  Therefore, logically, my book must be just as good (and just as worthy of being published) as Stephen King’s breakout hit.

            We can all see the flaw there, right?  Just because an editor rejected a good book doesn’t mean all the books they reject are good. Some of them—let’s be honest—some of them are not good.  Some of them are bad.  We can all probably name one or two folks who aren’t as good at writing as they think they are.  And they can probably name two or three folks, too.

            I can freely admit, I’ve had books rejected by agents.  And they deserved to be rejected.  They were awful.  Honestly, in retrospect, I’m kind of ashamed I submitted one of them. 

            The next problem, to be blunt, is that writers don’t always send stories where they’re supposed to go.  Sometimes we get overeager or don’t do all the research we should.  If I’d sent Ex-Heroes to Harlequin, of course they would’ve rejected it. So would the Black Library (a very specific niche press), Razorbill (a young adult press), or Lonely Planet (a travel book publisher).  Getting rejected from these places would be completely understandable, but would it really say anything about the quality of my writing?  Or that editor’s ability to recognize good writing?

            So should I consider those when I say that my book’s been rejected half a dozen times?

            Heck, a while back I spoke with a woman online as she lamented that her story had been rejected four times.  Ignoring the fact that four times is nothing, it turned out she’d submitted to four radically different markets.  She’d tried marketing it as young adult, sci-fi, fantasy, and as a horror novel.  Which really meant she’d been rejected once.  Once as a young adult story, once as a sci-fi story, and so on.

            Is that worth calling it quits over?

            Also, there are some writers out there who… well, who can’t take a hint.  They’re the literary equivalent of the guy who thinks if he keeps asking Phoebe out every Friday night, eventually she’ll break down and say yes. When an editor rejects a manuscript… that’s it.  Unless they specifically ask to see it again, I shouldn’t try to sneak it back in their pile six months later. No, not even if I explain that I tweaked three of the chapters. My goal is to convince them I’m a professional, and that’s not how professionals work.  But some people do it anyway, often the folks who tend to do “carpet bomb” submissions of twenty or thirty editors at a time.

            If Phoebe rejects my advances twenty times, is that twenty rejections?  Or is it just one (and I’m really bad at taking a hint)?

            So rejection numbers don’t necessarily tell a complete story.

            Finally, this list implies a really big misconception, something a lot of beginners (or willfully uninformed folks) don’t get.  When they hear that bestselling author Wakko Warner was rejected thirty times, they make the assumption that Wakko sent out the exact same book with the exact same query letter thirty times.  Thirty editors all saw the same book that got published, letter for letter, and every one of them passed on it.

            As someone who’s made those rounds, I’d be willing to bet some serious cash that’s not true.

            After a given number of rejections, a good writer’s going to take note that something isn’t working.  It might be a low number, just two or three.  It might be as high as a dozen.  But only a really deluded person is going to keep doing the exact same thing again and again and expect the results are going to radically change.

          Personally, I’d rewrite my cover letter after every fourth or fifth rejection.  Sometimes it would be to update it with a new sale or credit.  Other times I’d come up with a cleaner, slicker way to get a point across.  All too often, it was to fix the typo that had slipped past three revisions and didn’t get noticed until after I sent things out.   Whatever made me do it, it was rare for more than a handful of editors to get the exact same letter from me.  And  different people interpret those letters different ways

            Not only that, if I was lucky enough to get any sort of feedback… I listened to it.  I didn’t always follow it word for word, but if the people who were in the position to buy my stories offered suggestions, I considered them.  The Suffering Mapwent through a pretty decent revision halfway through my submissions, and then another one right after I attended the SDSU Writers’ Conference. 

            Out of its dozen or so submissions, I’d guess at least three different versions of it went out under three or four different cover letters.

            So, with all of this in mind…  is it that amazing a particular book was rejected forty-two times? 

            It seems kind of, well, normal, doesn’t it?

            It’s always fantastic to look back at the people who inspired us and how they got their start.  If I want to walk that same path, though, I need to look at that start without any blinders or preconceptions. Which is going to make the path look a lot tougher.

            But it’ll also make it easier to follow.

            Next time…

            I don’t know. Between the ranty blog and the Writers Coffeehouse, it feels like I’ve been going on and on about so many things, it all feels a bit repetitive to me.  Is there an appropriate writing topic anybody’d like to hear me babble on about?

            If not… I’ll put something together…

            Until then, go write.