Brilliant by Rachel Vail

The third book in Rachel Vail's Avery series was released last Tuesday.  I got my hands on a copy, started reading and all I can say is that Brilliant is... well.. rather brilliant.

Although I have not read the first two books in the series (Lucky and Gorgeous) I'm completely sucked in.  While this is the third book in the series, Brilliant stands quite well on its own and a reader who has not read the previous books will have no problem getting into the story.  In fact, I like the protagonist Quinn so much, it's hard for me to imagine reading the other two books in the points of view of her younger sisters.  I'll be curious to read them and see how they compare and how they handle Quinn's character when she's not the central focus.

I think the thing that allowed this book to make such an impression on me is how similar I find Quinn is to myself.  Sure, I've read plenty of books where I identified with the protagonist.  In fact, one could argue that a strong protagonist has some quality, some essence, that the reader sees reflected in themselves and that is what allows us to sympathize with the character.  But this is different.  Quinn is so similar to how I was in high school, down to the way she gets along with her sisters and her propensity for academic achievement.  It's like if someone asked me "if you were a character from a novel, who would you be?" I'd want to answer "Elizabeth Bennet" but really, the truth is it's more like Quinn Avery.

What about you?  Do you have a fictional-character twin?

Scouting Mission at BEA

Yesterday I went to BEA (Book Expo America) for the first time and it was great!  Aside from visiting the various booths and meeting a few authors, I was also on a mission: to represent Verbal Pyrotechnics and scout out new and exciting teen books and authors.

What is Verbal Pyrotechnics?

*Drum roll, please*

Verbal Pyrotechnics is an e-zine dedicated to showcasing great teen literature both from emerging and established authors. We'll be open for submissions starting in July and we'll have our official website up soon.  In the meantime, check out our blog for more information.

ABC's of Writing a Pitch

Some time ago, I took a fabulous workshop where the teacher talked about the ABC's of plot.  She broke it down like this:

A is for Action:  Start your story with some sort of action to get your readers hooked.
B is for Background:  Give your readers the info they need to understand what's going on.
C is for Conflict:  What's at stake for your characters?  What's the conflict?
D is for Development:  This is where you develop the story and build up toward your ending.
E is for Ending:  Which consists of the 3 C's:

Crisis -- the events leading up to the climax
Climax -- the big showdown
Consequences -- the denouement, or how things tie together

Lately my writing group has been grappling with this idea of the pitch.  Some of us need to come up with a pitch for conference purposes, others just need a Cocktail Party Pitch so they have a soundbite ready for when friends or family ask the inevitable: "So what's that novel of yours about?"

Which brings us to the heart of this post.  I believe that writing a pitch for your book isn't all that different from the plot formula above.  I would make only one change: instead of 3 C's, I think a good pitch has only one C... a Cliffhanger.

Let's try out this formula on my all-time favorite book: Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen.

When a rich gentleman, Mr. Bingly, moves into the neighborhood Elizabeth Bennet's mother is determined that he must marry one of her daughters, and does everything she can to introduce her daughters to him. (A)  While Elizabeth knows that if she and her sisters do not marry they risk living a life of poverty, she is humiliated by her mother's antics. (B)  To everyone's delight, Mr. Bingly appears to take an interest in Jane, Elizabeth's older sister, but his meddling sisters and proud and reticent friend, Mr. Darcy, do everything they can to keep Mr. Bingly from proposing to Jane.  As Elizabeth is thrown into the same circles as Mr. Darcy, she takes every opportunity to find fault with him (C).  Over time, though, Elizabeth sees Mr. Darcy in different contexts and her opinion of him begins to change.  Just when she thinks she may have feelings for him, a shameful event strikes her family.  Mr. Darcy leaves suddenly and Elizabeth assumes that her family scandal is the cause (D).  Will Elizabeth's family recover from this dishonor and will she and Mr. Darcy end up together? (E)

A Few Notes:
For each letter we have one sentence, forcing the summary to stay short and sweet.  The exceptions, of course, are C and D because they are a little more complex and require a little more information; but even in those sections, we don't get more than 2-3 sentences tops.

Notice also that the primary focus of the pitch is on Lizzy and Darcy.  Jane is the only other sister mentioned, and only in passing.  While the Lydia and Wickham do play a significant role in the novel, their subplot is only described in vague terms and their names are never mentioned.  The focus stays on how the scandal affects the Lizzy-Darcy relationship.

The Results:
In this exercise, we get to the heart of the story, stripping away all side-plots or tangents.  Those familiar with Pride and Prejudice might ask: Where's Mr. Collins?  What about Lady Catherine?  And why don't we see more of Elizabeth's sisters?  The answer is that these characters and story threads, though interesting, are not the main focus of the story.

When you have only a handful of sentences to capture the essence of your novel, you need to stick to the central plot.  This can be especially difficult in novels with intricate plots or many subplots (try doing this exercise on George Eliot's Middlemarch and you're likely to give yourself a migraine).  It's equally challenging to write a pitch for a novel that is very character-driven and where plot is sparse.  In that case, I think your best bet is to think of character-development as being the protagonist's inner journey.

While this approach may seem a bit formulaic, it is a good starting point and can lead to a strong pitch after some revision.

The Queue

With me, reading works a lot like a NetFlix queue.  There's always three or so books at the top, which are the books currently in progress or up next.  These usually have an order, most of the time dictated by school deadlines and the like.  The rest of the queue, though, tends to be rather amorphous, with books moving up and down depending on my mood or what book I happen to pull out from under the sofa first.  (Yes, book storage in this house has become so dire that I've taken to hiding books under furniture.)

Here's my list at the moment.

Up next:

1.  Brilliant -- Rachel Vail
2. Jane Slayre -- Charlotte Bronte and Sherri Browning Erwin
3. Flash Fiction Forward -- Robert Shapard and James Thomas

In the Queue:

• Dial-a-Ghost -- Eva Ibbotson
• The Great Ghost Rescue -- Eva Ibbotson
• Out of the Dust -- Karen Hesse (for the verse-novel challenge)
• Witness -- Karen Hesse (novel in verse)
• Make Lemonade -- Virginia Euwer Wolff
• This Full House -- Virginia Euwer Wolff
• Gully's Travels -- Tor Seidler
• The Graveyard Book -- Neil Gaiman
• Going Bovine -- Libba Bray
• Catching Fire -- Suzanne Collins
• The Mysterious Benedict Society -- Trenton Lee Stewart
• Seeing Redd -- Frank Beddor
• Where I'm Calling From -- Raymond Carver
• Tooth and Claw -- T. C. Boyle

What's in your queue?

Schedules of Reinforcement and the Query Process

Once upon a time, a behavioral scientist called B. F. Skinner discovered that if you rewarded rats with a cookie every time they pressed a button, the rats were more likely to repeat said behavior.  The same is true for people.  Give a kid a cookie when the kid asks for one and chances are, she'll ask for another.  And another.

Where things get dicey is that if you mess with how frequently the reward is given, you can actually increase the reward-getting behavior substantially.   It comes down to what researchers call a Variable Ratio (VR) Schedule.  This is the most treacherous schedule of reinforcement because reward is given after a random number of responses (red line on the graph).  In other words, give a kid a cookie, but only after she asks for it a certain number of times.  Then keep changing that number on her.  Chances are, she'll ask even more often than if you just gave her the cookie when she asked in the first place.

What does this have to do with the query process, you ask?  Some might argue that the query process is a variable ratio schedule.  This carrot of publication success is dangled in front of us and as writers we have no way of knowing which query or which submission will be "the one."  We never know when we're going to get a "yes" so we all keep sending out more queries and more submissions, inundating the market, thus making the reward schedule even more random.

Personally, I think that's a rather glum way of looking at things.  To me, writing is more than just a behavior motivated by the reward of publication.  Rather, it's a quiet act of persistence driven by the knowledge that if I do what needs to be done, something good will come of it.  Maybe it won't be the thing I wanted or when I wanted, but if I show up at the page good things can happen.

What about you?  How do you view the writing process?

Story A Day Challenge Weekly Update: Part 3

Getting back into my story a day routine has been more challenging than I anticipated.  Just as writing often leads more writing, not-writing simply perpetuates the not-writing cycle.  Last week I wrote an update about the things that help me get my daily writing done.  Today I will discuss the things that are not helpful.

In order to protect my daily writing, I will not...

• ...allow one false start to sabotage the rest of the writing day or week.
• ...gripe or complain about writing.  I'm doing what I love; there is nothing to complain about.
• ...rationalize or make excuses for not writing.  Excuses take up energy that could be poured onto the page.
• ...procrastinate.

And if I do have a bad writing day I will...

• ...acknowledge and move on.  I will not mentally flog myself until every ounce of creativity has been beaten from my brain.

After all, the point of this challenge is to jump-start my writing and in that regard, I've already made some progress.

Paperless Critiques using a Kindle

I don't know about you, but one of the things that drives me crazy about critiquing pieces for workshop or critique groups is the mountain of paper.  Not only does it mean that a lot of paper gets used in the printing of individual pieces, but it also means that after receiving critique from a group, I end up with piles of paper clogging up my apartment and when it comes to implementing the changes, I have no idea where to start.

To that end, I've come up with an almost-paperless method of critique, using my trusty Kindle and MS Word on the Mac.  Why a Kindle, you ask?  Personally, I like the portability of it; I like being able to read critique pieces on the subway or bus.  In addition, I'm not a huge fan of reading pages of text on a back-lit screen and I find the Kindle screen easier on the eyes than other paperless alternatives.

Here's a step-by-step how-to for using your Kindle to read and comment on workshop pieces.

1. Get the critique piece on your Kindle.  The best way to do this is to convert the piece to a mobipocket file (.mobi) or an Amazon Kindle (.azw) file.  My critique group emails MS Word documents to each other for each submission so all I need is my Mac and a little program called Stanza (which you can download for free on the web).  Here's how you do it:
        Step 1:  Open Stanza.
        Step 2:  Go to:  File -->; Open -->; [Select the file you want to convert]
        Step 3:  The file should open on your screen.  Now go to: File -->; Export Book As -->; [Select either mobipocket (.mobi) or Amazon Kindle (.azw)] and save file.
        Step 4:  Now just transfer the .mobi or .azw file to your Kindle and you're ready to read on-the-go.
2. Why a .mobi file?  Why not just a .pdf?  When you open a PDF on a Kindle, the entire page of shows up on the screen meaning that the text is very small. Also, the page is "locked" that way so you can't make comments using the Kindle's note-taking function.  If you use a .mobi file (or .azw) it adjusts the text that appears on the screen depending on the size of type you choose.  It also allows for taking notes.
3. Making Comments on the Kindle.  I haven't figured out yet how to export comments I make on my Kindle back to my computer, but I do find the note-taking function on Kindle useful and I use it like this:
   
   
   
   • I make a note of something using the Kindle note-taking function.
   • Once I'm done reading, I go back and retype the notes in more detail using track changes in MS Word, which I can then email back to my critique buddy.
   • TIP: I delete comments from my Kindle as I go so I know which comments I've already done.  When all comments have been deleted from the Kindle document, I know I've finished my critique.
   • Finally, I'll type up a page or two of "big picture" comments which I bring with me to the workshop or critique group meeting.

I'm still working out the kinks in this process, but overall, I'm enjoying not having so much paper everywhere and also having the portability of the Kindle.