WRITING WITH FOUND OBJECTS – 6

Years ago at Southwest Writers’ Conference, as still unpublished authors, my friends and I attended a panel on “saleable fiction.”  I have the name of the person who taught it under my tongue, but it just won’t come to the fore.

Anyway, it was enlightening to me, partly as something I’d been striving towards (without having a name for it) in the past, and partly as a totally new concept.  What I mean is that it was a concept I was becoming aware of, but I’d never been able to lay it out logically.

This writer taught it by drawing diagrams.  One circle was all the things you are interested in writing, one circle was the things other people are interested in reading.  The intersection was the part that’s saleable.

It looked something like this:

Your real passion might be for getting it on with hydrogen peroxide (look, I’m TRYING to be far fetched, okay?  But people’s interest in that is next to none.  So you might have to tailor it as a love story with a lot of skinned knees or something.

Of course those interests are largely made up, but let’s talk about something closer to the truth.  My preference in fantasy reading is for these involute little fantasies where you’re not absolutely sure if anything fantastic happened or not.  People’s taste runs to urban fantasy.  Enter the Shifter Series where they are shifters, but other people are never sure something happened.  (Something underscored by the daring finds furniture refinishing mysteries, where it is entirely possible that these people in the mysteries have no idea of the real dragons, etc. around them.

No, perfect compromise, right?

Well, sort of.  My “urban fantasy” really isn’t.  It’s multi-voice, not female-centered; it lacks the love/hate of the feral male, and just in general it breaks the rules (from a distance and squinting, Darkships Thieves is far more an urban fantasy structure and plot than the Shifter’s series.

Does this mean I’m not allowed to do it, or not allowed to call it urban fantasy?

Of course not.  It just means that people coming at it fresh might think that I’m doing the typical UF, and either be disappointed, or stay away from it.  It is in a way a lot like false advertising, even though I’m not doing that.  People overlay their expectations on the book and either accept it or reject it based as much on expectation as on my writing.

What it means, in practical fact, is that the Shifter series is taking its time about finding an audience.  It’s finding it, but not as well as if it had just been in the expected mold.  Then it would have a ready made audience of people looking for urban fantasy.

Of course, there’s a price there too.  Go too far towards “expected” and you produce a book that finds a ready audience but is perfectly unmemorable.  Something that might do very well for you at the height of a trend, but that will vanish without a trace once that particular bubble pops.

So you have to find a unique balance of “keeping it interesting for me” and “keeping it interesting for the audience.” And either way there will be a price to pay.

In the same way as these transitory trends for urban fantasy, or western Romance, or whatever, there are deeper-lying trends in each culture.  I once had a mega bestseller ask me why her books didn’t sell in Europe.  I bit my tongue and told her “not a clue” because the real reason was something she couldn’t remedy.  As an American she didn’t GET the class structure which her world was supposed to have.  This meant her books did very well in the States, but in Europe people sensed something wrong.

In the same way, the prototypical Portuguese Romance is closer to Romeo and Juliet than to Jane Austen.  Both dying, or one dying and the other mourning the rest of his/her life is the “ideal”.  Here, that thrown into the romance market would make a dent on the wall, so hard.

Also, despite the glitterati, the ideal American story is the from-rags-to-riches-by-the-sweat-of-my-brow.  While that might do well in Europe too, I don’t think it’s the ur-narrative.  But here, if you manage to weave that into your story, it will give it an enormous boost in sales.  It’s the uber-myth of the culture.

This too, you’ll need to be aware of, depending on your audience.  What does the public read?  Which authors do they react best to?  And I don’t mean the ones that were hyper-pushed, but the ones that made it on their own (for a while this was impossible to find, but now it might be possible again, with indie.)

This is one of those things that hasn’t changed in the transition to indie.  Whether your writing is derivative or startlingly new, there will be a price to pay.

Figure out the genre you’re writing in, and what’s new and old then, then figure out what you must innovate and what you can follow to the letter.  Then make your decision on startlingly original or following the formula.  And then accept the price to pay and live with it.

Something old, something new, and the writer will always be a little blue.