June: Publishing Month

Here at The Fictorian Era, we have something of a motley crew, a bunch of writers at all stages of their careers.  Some of us have been writing for only a couple of years, others for many years.  Some are published in a variety of formats, others are still trying to get a foot in the door.  Some are pursuing the traditional route, others are more interested in the indie path.

Not all that many years ago, the traditional path was the only legitimate publishing option.  Within traditional, the options were to go with a major publishing house – the New York Big 6 – or a small publishing house.  Self-publishing wasn’t an option if a writer wanted respect, readers, or an income.  Epublishing changed all that.  Self-publishing – or indie as it tends to be referred to – is becoming more and more of a real option.  We’ve heard the success stories.  We’ve seen writers who originally self-published go on to sign contracts with traditional publishing houses.  And we’re seeing the stigma of self-publishing fade away.

During June, we’re exploring publishing options.  We have guest posts lined up from writers Brandon Sanderson, David Dalglish, Stephen Nelson, Gini Koch, and Jordan Ellinger, literary agent Laurie McLean, and publisher Celina Summers.  We’ll also be hearing from some of the Fictorians, some who you’re familiar with and a couple you don’t hear from often.

June is going to be an exciting month.  We look forward to sharing it with you.

Anatomy of a Collaboration

I recently passed a milestone in my professional career as a writer.  I collaborated on a novel with Eric Flint, and the manuscript (well, the Word file) was just turned in to the publisher (Baen).  Unless the publisher changes the title, it should see print as 1636: The Devil’s Opera.  I’ve made professional level sales of several shorter works, but that’s the first full length novel (165,000 + words) that will come out with my name on it, second billing though it will be.  To say I’m somewhat exhilarated about this event would be a serious understatement.

When will it come out?  I don’t know for sure; possibly in late 2013, more likely in 2014.  There will be both a hard copy edition and an e-book edition from Baen.

What’s it about?  Well, there isn’t a short answer to that.  It’s a new alternate history story in the series that began with 1632, the first novel in the Ring of Fire series.  There are over five million words in print in that series right now, between the novels and the anthologies and the Grantville Gazette e-magazine issues, all dealing with how approximately 3000 residents of a blue-collar West Virginia town survive and thrive when they somehow get dumped back in 1631 Germany in the middle of the Thirty Years War.  This is just another episode in that extended story.  Most of the novels in the series roam all over Western and Central Europe:  large canvases, in other words, with correspondingly large time frames.  1636: The Devil’s Opera will be somewhat unique, in that it’s focused in a single location-the German city of Magdeburg-and it only covers a time frame of maybe four months.  And there’s something in it for everyone:  murder, music, boxing, financial irregularities, taverns and dives, tragedy, guns, humor, skullduggery and skullthumpery, more music, police procedural, a dog . . . oh, and a little romance as well.  If you like video allusions, there are resonances with Rocky, On the Waterfront, Wall Street, The Sound of Music, and NCIS.  Stay tuned; as soon as I find out, I’ll tell you when it’s going to be published so you can check it out.

Okay, enough about the book.  I want to spend a little time talking about what I learned during this collaboration.

Why authors collaborate should be a separate post, I think.  I will note that there are a number of different methods for collaboration in writing.  Almost all of them start out with the collaborating authors doing any requisite world building, outlining the story to be told, agreeing on major characters, etc.  Once all that preparatory work is done, the writing can progress in several different ways.

  1. For example, if sections of the novel require certain knowledge or expertise, one author may write certain parts while the other writes the remainder.  This approach seems to be most commonly used when both authors are of similar levels of skill.
  2. More commonly, one author will write the first draft, while the other author will do the second pass.  If one author is newer to the craft (like me), he will usually write the first draft while the more experienced/skilled writer (Eric) will do the final polish/draft.
  3. And sometimes one author will look at another and say, “You start,” and the story is built somewhat like a tennis match, with no prior planning to speak of and the authors volleying responses back and forth.  A lot of “letter” stories are actually written that way.

And all of those approaches require that one of the authors then do a second pass to tighten up the prose and smooth out any cracks or joints or bumps in the text.

So, yeah, I’m not ashamed to admit I was the junior author in this collaboration.  I’ll play second fiddle to Eric Flint any day.  And yeah, we used option 2.  I wrote the first draft.  I had a small group of alpha readers who I asked to give me feedback as I wrote it during a really rough spell in my life.  It took over a year to write a book that should have taken me no more than four months.  But I finally drove it to a conclusion, and gave the results to Eric.  There was some back and forth between us-he fixed some issues, I fixed some others- plus a final polish pass by Eric, and a round of beta readers in there somewhere.  I think it was the fourth draft that went to the publisher.

Now I definitely learned some things during the writing of the first draft.  I learned a lot more from Eric in the weeks that followed; watching over his shoulder as he worked and reworked the subsequent drafts.  I have a tendency to overwrite, so I expected him to throw away whole scenes and passages, but he really pitched very little, comparatively speaking.  Eric did add some new material, as well, but what he did a lot of was rearranging of the text:  moving blocks of text around, changing scene progressions and chapter structure and sequences.  For example, theoretically I knew that chapters don’t all have to be about the same length.  Eric made it real to me when he carved out single scenes from some of my existing chapters and made them chapters on their own.  Five hundred word scenes became chapters.  A single telegram became a chapter.  And along the way, I discovered this was a technique that would make a particular scene or elements in that scene stand out and be more memorable than they would have been had they been buried in longer chapters.  Just watching that exercise was worth the price of admission.

Paraphrased observations from Eric along the way:

  1. “If you’re going to write a murder mystery, it’s best to have the body on the first page if you can manage it.  It makes a great hook.”
  2. “For a modern mystery, if you want a gritty tone, the city needs to be one of the characters.”
  3. “For modern mysteries, tone down the melodramatic descriptions.  Modern mysteries work better if the descriptions and the speech tags are a little flatter than, say, fantasies.”  (I mentioned I tend to overwrite.)
  4. “You’ve crossed the line with this hero-he’s getting way too hard.  You’ll lose reader sympathy with him.”  (That one was about balance of characterization.)

Eric once told me that a novel collaboration requires almost as much work from him as if he had written the entire novel himself.  Because he’s the senior partner in most of the collaborations I’ve seen him do, that’s probably true.  However, I suspect the nature of his work in a collaboration is very different than when he is working a solo project.  From what I could tell in this collaboration, Eric spent much less time and energy in the creative part of the process and much more in the editing and revising part of the process.  And I suspect that, overall, he spends less personal time in arriving at the final product.

Setting aside polite modesty, my first draft was good.  Eric made it noticeably better.

1636: The Devil’s Opera by Eric Flint and David Carrico.  A novel that is different than either one of us would have written alone.  I’m proud of it.

Sunday Reads: 27 May 2012

We’re looking forward to June during which we will be exploring publishing options.  With guest posts from writers Brandon Sanderson, David Dalglish, Stephen Nelson and Gini Koch, literary agent Laurie McLean, and publisher Celina Summers, it’s going to be a big month.  We look forward to exploring publishing options with you.

In the meantime, here’s 10 reads worth your time:

The Undiscovered Author talks Amazon, Apple, Antitrust and You.

Speaking of Amazon, Carl Franzen discusses Amazon Ready to Lower E-book Prices In Wake of Publisher Settlement.

The New York Times explores Writer’s Cramp: In the E-reader Era, a Book a Year Is Slacking.

Heroes and Heartbreakers.com explores the issue of race in romance novels with Choosing Between White, Off-White, and Beige.

Warriot Poet discusses 5 Undying Myths About Published Writers and their Eerie Powers.

Kristan Hoffman talks about Learning To Embrace My Limits.

Courtney Carpenter discusses how to Discover The Basic Elements of Setting In A Story.

Writing about an animal?  Kaitlin Ward looks at some essential elements of Animal Behaviour.

Janice Hardy discusses Fixing A Stalled Scene.

For inspiration, check out The Scale of the Universe.

 

Missed any Fictorians articles this week?

Guest post from Marsheila Rockwell – Tie-in Fiction

KD Alexander – Life Block

Mary Pletsch – Filing Off the Serial Numbers: Part 1 – Fan Fiction

 

 

 

 

Filing Off the Serial Numbers: Part One — Fan Fiction

Filing Off the Serial Numbers:  Part One

Fan Fiction

There’s a lot of buzz surrounding E.L. James’ “Fifty Shades” trilogy, an erotic romance series that originated as a “Twilight” fan fiction.  Beyond the discussion of the series’ spiciness (too much for some and not enough for others) are the raised eyebrows over the trilogy’s leap from a derivative of a popular series into a popular series in its own right.

I’m not a copyright lawyer, and therefore not an expert in “how much change is enough” to turn a fan fiction into a marketable story.  But if you’ve got a hard drive full of fan fiction epics, and are debating following in the footsteps of “Fifty Shades,” here are some things to consider:

Can I create an original setting and still have the story work?  Your lead character is a witch?  Fine.  Your lead character is a teenage witch attending witch school?  Okay.  Your lead character is a teenage witch attending witch boarding school and wins fame by participating in a witches-only sport played while riding on brooms…  If your story falls apart without Quidditch-or any other signature elements of the franchise that inspired it-it’s not going to work outside of fan fiction.

How much can I change the characters and still have the story work?  I suspect “Fifty Shades” would have been a harder sell if the romantic lead had remained a vampire-but the central themes could still be conveyed with a human character.  This is nothing against vampires and everything about the amount of flexibility a writer would need to change her lead from a direct import of someone else’s character into a unique character in his own right-particularly a character who would logically fit into the new setting.  If your tale of star-crossed lovers absolutely demands that the beleaguered couple be giant shape-shifting robots, or if your story is an in depth character study of Captain Kirk and therefore dependent on the personality remaining exactly the same, it might not be possible to make it work outside of fan fiction.

Wait, isn’t this going to involve an insane amount of editing?  Yes, yes it is, more than just swapping out every “Mal Reynolds” for  a new name of your choice.  At this point, you might be asking yourself if it’s worth it, and if you couldn’t write something new in the amount of time it takes you to do that editing.

I can’t answer that.  I can’t answer how much passion you feel for the story you’ve written or how much confidence you have in the quality of the end result.  I can say that I’ve seen a writer (Christine Morgan) build an excellent novel (“Black Roses”) out of what was originally a fanfiction short story; the novel took the central plot from the fanfiction (a woman gets a supernatural stalker in the form of an incubus, which begins to murder her past lovers and now threatens her current love) and retold it with original characters and expanded details in an original setting.  In this case the author’s passion for a plot concept-an idea that was not irrevocably tied to someone else’s characters or world-spawned a strong original story.

Part 2:  What if I’m not borrowing from fan fiction, but from real life?