Writing Advice From Agatha Christie

Well, not really advice per se, but this is some good stuff Christie wrote in the introduction to her novel Passenger to Frankfurt. I loved it, and I thought it worth sharing.

The Author speaks:

The first question put to an author, personally, or through the post, is, "Where do you get your ideas from?"

The temptation is great to reply, "I always go to Harrods," or "I get them mostly at the Army & Navy Stores," or, snappily, "Try Marks and Spencer."

The universal opinion seems firmly established that there is a magic source of ideas which authors have discovered how to tap. One can hardly send one's questioner back to Elizabethan times, with Shakespeare's

Tell me, where is fancy bred,
Or in the heart or in the head,
How begot, how nourished?
Reply, reply.

You merely say firmly, "My own head."

That, of course, is no help to anybody. If you like the look of your questioner, you relent and go a little further.

"If one idea in particular seems attractive, and you feel you could do something with it, work it up, tone it down, and gradually get it into shape. Then, of course, you have to start writing it. That's not nearly such fun--it becomes hard work. Alternatively, you can tuck it carefully away, in storage, for perhaps using in a year or two years' time."

A second question--or rather a statement--is then likely to be, "I suppose you take most of your characters from real life?"

"No, I don't. I invent them. They are mine. They've got to be my characters--doing what I want them to do, being what I want them to be--coming alive for me, having their own ideas sometimes, but only because I've made them become real."

So the author has produced the ideas, and the characters--but now comes the third necessity--the setting. The first two come from inside sources, but the third is outside--it must be there--waiting--in existence already. You don't invent that--it's there--it's real.

You have been perhaps for a cruise on the Nile--you remember it all--just the setting you want for this particular story. You have had a meal at a Chelsea cafe. A quarrel was going on--one girl pulled out a handful of another girl's hair. An excellent start for the book you are going to write next. You travel on the Orient Express. What fun to make it the scene for a plot you are considering. You go to tea with a friend. As you arrive, her brother closes a book he is reading--throws it aside and says, "Not bad, but why on earth didn't they ask Evans?"

So you decide immediately a book of yours shortly to be written will bear the title, Why Didn't They Ask Evans? You don't know yet who Evans is going to be. Never mind. Evans will come in due course--the title is fixed.

[I know that Christie's comments about setting won't apply to those of you who write SF/F, but a lot of this rings true for me. Discuss.]

Whom Do You Hate? Er...Unlove? Strongly Dislike...

I received an email from a reader, Lindsay Samuels, a few days ago asking us to plug her site, and I must say it's worth plugging. She's pursuing a degree in Library Science (no easy task, I assure you) and has a site up which is informative and entertaining. Her latest post is great - 50 Most Hated Characters in Literary History. 

Lindsay begins the post with the disclaimer that literature is highly subjective art. Yeah, we all know about that around here, don't we?

I found it interesting and disturbing that the 1st hated characters on Lindsay's list were Twilight's Edward and Bella. Following in the list are Beth March from Little Women, Hamlet from Shakespeare, and Robert Langdon from the Dan Brown novels. I liked Lindsay's little blurb about him:

Historical and religious inaccuracies aside, one of the biggest complaints that readers had against Robert Langdon is his veritable Mary Sue status. The man can do no wrong and has no discernable flaws, making him exceptionally boring and frustrating to read about.

Ah, so true.

Lindsay's article is a fun read. You should check it out. And if you don't see a character you hate (or love to hate...) in the list, add them here! And tell us why. It might be fun to compile our own list of hated characters and put it up somewhere alongside our most loved characters (we'll save that for another day).

One character I strongly dislike is Becky Sharp from Vanity Fair because the reader spends a good portion of the book rooting for her only to see her turn into a scheming, devious murdering (murdering is debatable) liar. That wouldn't be so bad if one views it all as her position as a woman in that time period - and that her terrible deeds are all crimes of circumstance (haha) - but the fact that she never truly loves her child and remains un-devoted to him at all is what makes her unlovable to me. I love the book, though. Go figure. I do think the fact that Becky is unlovable in so many ways makes her an admirable tool in the literary work. We can save that for another day, too.

Legendary?

Happy Monday, everyone. First off, I wanted to let everyone know that the Genre Wars anthology will be delayed by a couple of weeks. We're sorry, but it's taking more time and effort than we thought it would to proofread and format the manuscript, and now that we have it just about done, we wanted to order our own hard copies to preview before we made it available to everyone else. We feel it's important to showcase the writers as best we can, and we want to avoid major formatting problems.

Onward!

The idea of legendary stories is something that often floats through my mind. I wonder how the Greek myths, or fairy tales, or the stories of the Bible are able to have such staying power in our civilization. Well, obviously some of those stories stick around simply because they are powerful stories. Icarus, Medusa, Little Red Riding Hood, Jonas, Moses...how can we not be captivated by stories like that?

But, I find it hard to believe that modern writers aren't also able to invent such thrilling tales. Something that doesn't happen now, however, is that these newer stories don't get retold.

When we walk through museums, how often to we see sculptures and paintings--masterpieces--based on classic stories? The best artists in the world were immortalizing the best stories in the world. These stories were being recreated and propagated through other art forms and through retellings in the writing form.

I'm not talking about "similar" stories. I don't believe, for example, that Avatar somehow helps to make Pocahontas more legendary. (Please let's not get into debates about what story is again!) My point is that I wonder if stories wouldn't be more exciting if we could build off of each other, retell the same stories, persuade artists, writers, and musicians to take our characters and their stories and retell them.

What do you all think about this? Would you want other writers to retell stories you're written? What about visual artists or musicians? How would you feel, for example, if I were to take your story, your book, and basically retell it?

Has Fiction Lost Its Value?

Bella or Sarah?

Olive or Michael?

Lately, it seems like real characters are more interesting than fictional ones (and real stories more bizarre than fictional ones). So, why shouldn't readers flock to biographies, celebrity or otherwise, to learn about human nature?

There was a time when fiction provided more for readers. Aside from entertainment, fiction had the power to educate people on topics that were too taboo to discuss in the open. Want to learn about the psychology of adultery? Read Anna Karenina. Want to know what it's like kill someone? Try Crime and Punishment. When these books came out, they were revolutionary, not simply because they were well-written, but because they were valuable. They provided readers with information that helped them navigate through their own lives. They served as predictions, as warnings, as assurances. But, nowadays, when I want to learn about extraordinary people in extraordinary circumstances, I'm often better off in the realm of reality.

Times have changed. Subject matters that used to be private no longer are. And, because of that, I think readers don't see the value of fiction, if indeed that value still exists. It has become merely a form of entertainment--and an energy consuming one at that! If books aren't doing anything more than providing a few hours of distraction, why not see a movie instead?

So, I wonder: Is there still value to fiction? And, if so, what is it? Are we, as writers, neglecting to provide our readers with something more than just a story?

Something Borrowed Something Blue

Okay, so the post title doesn't exactly fit, but I wanted to build off of Scott's "Old and New" post yesterday. Shoot me.

I AM going to talk about something blue, however, and surely these thoughts are borrowed, mostly from Harold Bloom. Maybe "Something Harold Something Blue" would have been a better title.

I'm a slight depressive. I like to be depressed. I used to fight it--being surrounded by people who are happy made me think that I was supposed to be happy too. Then, a few years ago, I had a shift in my world view. I decided that I liked experiencing a fuller range of emotions. I didn't mind feeling sadness as long as I wasn't sad all the time. (Strangely, this made feeling sad a happy experience, which perhaps messes up my logic.)

It's probably not surprising, then, that some of my stories are about depressing topics. I used to think this was amateurish--don't we seem to dwell on the depressing dramas when we first pour our hearts out? But, as I was recently reading some criticism by Harold Bloom, I saw how he was celebrating many dark writers. Bloom doesn't admire Faulkner because Faulkner knows how to show and not tell. No, Bloom admires Faulkner because Faulkner has explored and beautifully rendered the dark side of his characters. So, while a trickling steam of rejections has been depressing me lately, I feel hopeful after reading about the classics discussing depression.

Same thing with sympathetic characters. I can get caught up in rooting for a protagonist as much as the next reader. But, I'm still fascinated by the Momoi Gimpeis and the Joe Christmases and the Brods and the Mahlkes--the characters that seem to maneuver despite their hopelessness and nihilism.

But, I wonder: has the range of literary acceptability gotten smaller over the decades? Do people--even a small subset of people--still want to read about darkness? Or, more generally, do people still want to explore books about a variety of emotions, or have we centered more on reading for joy? Or, am I alone?

Literary, Commercial, Mainstream: Are they all the same?

Ashley asked: "What's the difference between literary, commercial, and mainstream fiction? Mainstream isn't touched upon very often (and that's what I consider my WIP), so I wonder, is it not as prominent as the other two? And how is it very much different from commercial?"

Ashley, I don’t think anyone will say that the lines between literary, commercial, and mainstream fiction are at all clear. To answer your question, I decided to consult the sources that actually rely on this sort of categorization, and those sources aren’t the writers.

The two main reasons why you will need to fit your book into a category at all is because 1. you want to find an agent to represent your work and 2. you want to place your book in the corner of the store where interested readers will find it. So, let’s see how those two groups are breaking it down.

Agents

I checked out the preferences of a few literary agents to find out how they are using the terms. The website QueryTracker.net, which serves as an agent database, has two of the three genres in question, commercial and literary fiction, among a host of other genres. Emma Sweeney from the Emma Sweeney Agency uses only the term literary fiction. Paige Wheeler from Folio Literary Management prefers both commercial and “upscale” fiction. Laney Katz Becker, also from Folio, prefers literary, commercial, and mainstream. Blogging agent Nathan Bransford considers commercial fiction to be a blanket term for all genre fiction. So, he would say that literary fiction is the un-genre, un-commercial stuff, which has nothing to do with the actual commercial value of the book. Sandra Dijkstra, from what I can interpret, also seems to go by this definition. She prefers both commercial and literary fiction, which I’m assuming covers everything—maybe I’m wrong. Interestingly, another agent from the Dijkstra agency, Elise Capron, says she prefers “character driven fiction,” “offbeat fiction,” and “debut fiction.”

So, my take home message from this short look into the agent side of things is that different agents interpret the terms differently, and you should do your homework for each specific agent before you query them. Decide if your book falls into the categories they prefer, and decide what you should call your book based on those categories. Don’t feel committed to any one category. You might end up calling your book mainstream fiction for one agency and literary fiction for another. For a third you could end up calling it offbeat debut fiction.

Book Stores

Genre categories are probably most important in that they help your readers find you. When going into a bookstore or shopping online, genres help to orient the customers so that they don’t look for Russian Classics next to Romance novels. This is especially important if they’ve never heard of you as a writer. I’ve discovered new writers in the literary fiction shelves of stores, but never in the sci-fi shelves, simply because I rarely go there. It would take forever to find anything if all of the books were just alphabetized.

Looking at the big books stores, Borders has only the literary fiction category, as does Barnes & Noble. Amazon, on the other hand, has both literary fiction and general fiction. None of these places have mainstream fiction or commercial fiction. In general, I would guess that the stores (and libraries) lump all three of these categories together.

So, Ashley, for you, I’d say to call it whatever the agent calls it when you are querying each of them. You probably won’t need to choose once it’s ready for publication, but I’m guessing—based on what little I know about your writing—that it will fall into the literary fiction shelves.