The 38 Most Common Fiction Writing Mistakes - Jack M. Bickham [50]
All of these aids keep you from writing a good book that is simply not acceptable because of publisher prejudices you might have learned about at the outset. All such aids and studies help you learn more as a novelist.
On the other hand—and hence the title of this chapter—it's a common observation among publishing professionals that too many new novelists hang themselves up trying to find "a sure thing" in publishing. Chances are that even the tip sheet you get from a publisher today will include no-no's that you might include in a novel and still sell to that publisher, if everything else about the book was wonderful. There just are not a lot of ironclad rules at book length.
Further, trends change with astonishing speed in book publishing today. By the time you got a tip sheet saying submarine stories were "in"—and Tom Clancy's best-seller was being made into a movie—a dozen other publishers might have jumped on the bandwagon to prepare submarine novels of their own, glutting the market and ending the trend. Not long ago, spy novels involving the CIA and the KGB were hot stuff. Then the Soviet Union changed drastically... readers grew tired of such spy maneuvers... and the subgenre died on the vine.
Maybe you can spot a developing hot trend and get your book written in time. But it's chancy business. Even if you guess perfectly, a lot of other people are probably guessing right along with you. And then it's going to take you a year to write this hot idea... a year to sell it... another year to get it through the editing and publishing process.
And how hot is that hot trend really going to be in three years?
For all these reasons, chasing after the market can be a self-defeating process. In addition, consider how much creative, analytical energy market-chasers expend, trying to outfox the trendsetters. Might it not be more profitable to stay aware of trends generally, yet concentrate your energies on simply writing the best novel you know how to write?
In today's crazy fiction markets, its devilishly difficult to outguess the future. You may hear people say they have it figured out. Don't let them make you uneasy. Your business is creating stories. If you do that well enough, the trends will tend to take care of themselves.
Be aware. Pay attention to the business end of writing. But always keep in the back of your mind a reassuring fact every hot new fiction trend was Usher's expected "leaders" in started by a lonely writer, working alone, bucking whatever the last trend seemed to be, and creating such a grand story that it started a new trend the moment it was published.
Or to put that another way: the best books don't follow trends; they establish them.
33. DON'T POSE AND POSTURE
YOUR STYLE AND ATTITUDE in your stories should be like a clean pane of glass through which the reader sees the action. If you pose and posture in your copy, you'll draw attention to you as a writer, rather than to what's happening on your page. And that's always bad.
The two kinds of posing and posturing that seem most widespread these days are:
• The Frustrated Poet
• The Tough Guy/Gal
Both are phony. Both may be sick. Both wreck fiction. To make sure you won't do either of these acts, let's look briefly at each of them.
The frustrated poet act most often shows up when the writer is trying to do one of two good things: face a strong emotion in a character, or describe a striking bit of scenery. The writer usually decides to gear up and mount a massive effort to string together some really striking word-pictures. What results is what we sometimes call a purple patch—a few sentences or paragraphs crammed with adjectives and other crutch-words designed to "be pretty" or provide some "fine writing." At best it's a pretty but cumbersome and distracting effort to get at the finest detail, when presentation of such poetic detail isn't necessary for the reader's understanding of the story. At worst, the purple patch