How Do I Know What I Think Until I See What I Say?

Lately, I've been reading a lot of books where the main character and her best friend don't get along. This is confusing to me. Why is the main character friends with someone she dislikes, or is afraid of, or actually hates? I get that it happens--I've seen Mean Girls . I've read Queen Bees and Wannabes . Heck, I'm old enough to have been the prime audience for Heathers . But in order for this fractured best friend relationship to be convincing, it has to be set up. In both Heathers and Mean Girls , there's a reason why the protagonist is friends with a bunch of b*tches--she chose to be. She knows that they're jerks. In fact, she can feel herself becoming a jerk right along with them. It's part of the character arc, the point of the story, that being friends with these girls is not who she really is. But the relationships I've been seeing lately don't make that kind of sense. The protagonist doesn't have a reason to be friends with...

Agent Jonathon Lyons has an entry here describing an author he had an interaction with this week, and can I just say WOW. WOW. Seriously. I mean, I understand being annoyed or hurt by rejection. It sucks. It sucks when you don't get the job you want, or the guy you ask out says "no thanks", or when the agent you're dying to get says "not for me." And I understand the impulse to say, "you're WRONG!" But it's really not a good idea. It's like that scene in A Few Good Men when Demi Moore objects to a ruling by the judge. The judge overrules her. This is where it should end. But instead, Demi Moore asks for reconsideration. "We strenuously object, your Honor!" she says. Oh, you strenuously object? Well, then, you must be right! Or, I'm totally right and you should sit down, Demi. Thanks. I'm assuming that an author's strenuous objection to rejection engenders a similar response in an agent. "Oh, you ...

Today, while I was proctoring an exam, I wrote the ending of Electric Boogaloo. Let me back up - in addition to my day job as an attorney, I also teach for The Princeton Review. I usually teach LSAT prep, but today I was proctoring an SAT exam, which is always interesting because the people in the room are the people who I hope will one day read my books. So I view it as sort of research. But I also view it as boring. The SAT takes approximately 6 million hours to take, and the only thing worse than taking it is sitting through it without having my whole future rest on it. There's not even anything at stake! (I'm sure the people taking it would kill me if they heard that.) Anyway, I usually take my computer so I can write during the exam. Even though I am supposed to be working on TNP, I was in an Electric Boogaloo mood today, missing the characters, so I finished a scene in that manuscript. But after I finished that scene, I was sort of stuck. I've always known h...

Recently, I saw Sweeney Todd - the Johnny Depp/Helena Bonham Carter version. It was okay. I prefer the Len Cariou/Angela Lansbury version from the stage, but then, I almost always prefer the original versions of most musicals. I'm a sap that way. But the movie version of Sweeney Todd got me thinking about the role of (and risk of) sidekicks in stories. In case you haven't seen either version, Sweeney Todd is the story of ... Sweeney Todd (I know - you're shocked). He used to be married and have a baby, but then a judge fell in love with his wife and had him sent to prison in Australia. The musical begins when he returns to seek his revenge on the judge. Upon his return, he meets Mrs. Lovett, the proprietress of a meat pie shop, who remembers Todd from before he left. The two form an unlikely partnership when Todd kills someone who threatens his plan of revenge, and Mrs. Lovett bakes the victim into meat pies. Yes, that's right - it's a heart warming musical...

As an attorney (and an eldest child), I am naturally a rule follower. I spend most of my time interpreting or creating rules that govern the nature of the relationship between my company and the other companies it does business with. These are called contracts. So, naturally, when it came time to start submitting queries, I went online and dig a little investigating to see if I could figure out what the "rules" were. If you are an author who has gone through the submission process, you know what I found - chaos. Some agents want this; some want that. Some want pages; some want chapters. Some want the query letter this way; some want that. Some want you to swear fealty to them and only them. Some want you to submit in goat's milk on a parchment written by the light of the full moon. You catch my drift. As a result, some authors have rebelled and decided to do things their own ways. One author--I honestly don't remember who--did a whole submission package that ...

I've been working on the TNP for a while now, and this week a sudden and horrible thought came to me -- what if this book is unsaleable? NOOOO! I don't write with an eye toward selling necessarily. I don't make character choices or plot choices or language choices with an eye toward "the market" or "trends" or what have you, especially not in first drafts. I write what I would like to read. But still, since I'm in the middle of the query process with The Book, the question crossed my mind. See, The Book fits squarely into a precise genre and subgenre. It's a fairly original idea (in my mind, anyway) and excellently executed, OF COURSE :) , but there's no question where it would go in the book store. But the TNP is not of a type that I've seen before. It's ... less specified. And so, as a result of the query process, I started getting concerned that the TNP--which I am writing, you may recall, as a hedge against The Book not s...

One of the writers in my writing group, Cinda Chima, has written three related books (check Cinda's stuff out here ) and while we were reading the third book for her, she had some questions about how much information to include about what had happened in the prior two books. Her books weren't sequels, like Electric Boogaloo is, but the question is still a tricky one, because you have to assume that a large portion of the readership for the second or third book are going to have read the first one. Since her books were related, but were not direct sequels (meaning each book focused on a different main character, but the books took place in the same world as each other, and some of the characters overlapped - a main character in one book, for example, becoming a supporting player in another), Cinda wanted to make sure that she included enough information for the new readers without boring the returning ones. It's a tricky balance - how much back story to include. This is t...