Writing the Paranormal Novel: Techniques and Exercises for Weaving Supernatural Elements Into Your Story. (41 page)

Go there. Do that. Be silly. Be stupid. Be florid. Be pretentious. You won't know what it looks like until you write it down. No one will see it except you, so why should you care if your second-grade niece could probably have done better? Every bit might be dreadful, or one of the experiments might turn up something worth keeping — but you'll never know unless you give yourself the freedom to try it.

Never, ever throw anything away. Early notes, character sketches, the material you generate doing any of the above — keep every word. I can't count the number of times I've gone back through old material on a work in progress and realized I'd overlooked something good, whether it was an idea, a turn of phrase, or a bit of characterization. Ultimately, it all contributes to voice, so keep it.

If the writing seems dull or stale, try a shift in the viewpoint. If it's first person, change it to third and let you, the author, speak. If it's third person, change it to first and let the character speak. See what impact it has on the story — and on your voice.

You can also try shifting to a different
character's
point of view. Since every character has a different way of seeing the world and a different voice, try writing the same scene through the eyes of two different characters. Make sure the voice is different, and see which one you like better.

Write the themes you
really
want to explore. The stuff that gets under your skin, or makes you giddy, or pisses you off. Too many new writers try to gauge the market and only write what they think is commercial so they can break in. This is usually a bad idea — the book produced by this kind of thinking will probably be dull and lackluster. Don't dance around what you really want to say, and don't worry what your family or friends or co-workers will think about your book. Should anyone ask why you wrote such a thing, you can say, “Hey, I wrote a book. What did you do last summer?”

If you need to, switch genres. If you don't think that relationships can have happy endings, don't try to write a paranormal romance. If you secretly think everything will come out all right in the end in real life, what are you doing trying to write horror? Figure out what idea revs your motor and then build a story around it. The emotional response from you, the writer, will stimulate voice — and engage the reader.

E
ven the most high-flown paranormal novel has to deal with the real world eventually. We need to get that book out the door and into the hands of someone who will publish it. There are a number of points and pitfalls in the process to examine.

Years ago when I started writing novels, you hit up editors with a proposal package that included a twenty-page synopsis and the first three chapters. If you were lucky, the editor wrote back and said, “Send me the full manuscript,” which you did. If you were really lucky, the editor called you to say, “I want to buy your book.” You thanked the editor profusely, hung up the phone, and hunted madly for an agent.

Things have changed.

Before we go any further, I'm assuming you've finished your first novel. You've done the first draft, second draft, more rewrites, and a final polish, and your book is ready to go. This is a requirement before you can send anything out because it's pretty much a given that no editor will offer a contract to a first-timer who doesn't have a full manuscript yet, and no agent will offer to represent one, either. There's a simple reason for this — no matter how strong your initial proposal may be, the editor or agent has no way of knowing if you have the staying power to finish the whole thing. A lot of new authors — in fact, the vast majority of them — never complete a book. (This means that actually finishing a novel puts you ahead of 90 percent of everyone else, so once you finish, you're allowed a few moments of self-congratulation.)

Once your book is the best you can make it, you're
not
going to submit it quite yet. First, you need to put together a short treatment.

Computers and the Internet have largely destroyed the twenty-page synopsis. Word processing made the physical act of writing much easier, and people who wouldn't have the patience for it before are now producing 100,000 words. And they all want to send them out. Editors and agents are inundated with more submissions than ever. Couple that with massive layoffs in publishing that require everyone in the business to do the work of three people, and your average editor has much less time for reading. Treatments have become much more common as a result.

A treatment consists of three to five double-spaced pages. It sketches out in broad terms what happens in your book. Think of it as an expanded version of the back-cover blurb. You don't have much room, so you need to hit the ground running. It might begin:

You'll notice the total lack of explanation about who Henry Bayfield is. It's death to start with something like
Henry Bayfield is a new werewolf with a nasty ex-wife
. Instead, a treatment focuses on what the character does, as in the above example.

As the treatment progresses, you'll have to condense greatly:

The ending can be done in broad terms as well:

In three to five pages, you don't have much room to explain symbolism, theme, or character development. That's the way it goes. Focus on the main plot points and count on the sample pages to draw the editor in.

You'll need to send a certain amount of your manuscript as a sample to showcase how fantastic your book is. Usually this consists of the first three chapters or so, but in case your chapters are extra short or long — or you don't use chapters — we're looking at the first fifty or sixty pages, or about 15,000 words.

Here's a big tip: End your sample chapters in some kind of cliffh anger. You don't have to leave your protagonist dangling over a pit of lava, but try to end with something that makes the reader naturally want to continue. You could leave off in mid-dialogue, or with something interesting just about to happen. The goal is for you to make the reader try to turn the page and be annoyed that there's nothing left to turn. If you get that reaction, you're likely to get a request for the full manuscript.

Format your sample manuscript as follows:

 


• Double-space it. Don't use 1.5 spacing to save paper or space. Double-spacing makes your manuscript easy to read for people who read all day. 1.5 spacing will put the reader in a cranky mood, and that's the last thing you want.
  

 


• Put a 1″ margin all around the page. Be careful — some word processing programs have a 1½″ margin as a default, so check.
  

 


• The only acceptable fonts are Courier (or Courier New) and Times New Roman. That's it. Some people will go so far as to claim that Courier is the One True Font. I've never heard of anyone getting rejected because they used Times New Roman (I use it myself), but I
  have
  heard of plenty of people who got rejected because they used Arial, Verdana, or Love Potion Number 9. Don't use them. Editors hate Arial because a
  1, j, l,
  and
  i
  all look alike. They hate other fonts because they're flat-out hard to read.
  

 


• To indicate
  italicized text
  , you should underline. Bolded text should be done in
  bold
  .
  

 


• In the upper left corner of the first page, put your real name. Under that, put your address. Under that, put your phone number. Under that, your e-mail address. It doesn't matter whether this particular section is double-spaced or not.
  

 


• Space down a couple times. In the center of the line and in all capitals goes THE TITLE OF THE BOOK. Beneath that in normal text goes the word “by” and your name — or your pen name, if you're using one, as in “by Steven Harper.”
  

 


• Skip another line, then start your sample pages.
  

 


• In the upper right corner of every page except the first goes a header with the following information: Last name/
  Part of Book Title
  /page number. An example looks like this: Harper/
  Paranormal Novel
  /12. The page number goes at the top of the page in case someone drops your manuscript and accidentally mixes up the pages. It's easier to reorder loose pages when the numbers are at the top.
  

 


• Do
  not
  bind, clip, staple, or otherwise fasten your manuscript in any way. Editors and agents don't want to fold pages over a staple.
  

 


• Use the same format for your treatment.
  

Now that everything is formatted and ready to go, you're actually going to hold off on submitting it. Save it on your computer, but don't print it out yet. Why? Because not all agents or editors will want to see the whole thing. Set it aside — we're going to figure out who might want to read it.

At one time, few agents read unsolicited manuscripts. (
Unsolicited = one they didn't ask for
.) Then came the Great Anthrax Scare. Remember those days? Two people got anthrax packages in the mail post-9/11, and the FBI told us to be suspicious of strange packages. The odds that any of us would actually receive anthrax were worse than winning a multistate lottery, but never mind — we needed to be scared.

One group that regularly receives strange packages by mail is (was) book publishers. Aspiring authors sent them boxes and padded envelopes every single day. Claiming to be fearful of employee safety, nearly all publishers announced their editors would no longer accept unsolicited manuscripts.

A few weeks later, the anthrax scare died down. The FBI said the mail was safe. But mysteriously, editors didn't resume reading unsolicited manuscripts. With amazing deft ness, they foisted that little chore onto agents, who became the new gatekeepers to publishing.

Pre-anthrax, you submitted to an editor first, got an offer, and then found an agent. Nowadays things have largely reversed themselves — you submit to agents, find one who'll represent you, and then get an offer from a publisher. This is not a hard-and-fast rule, though. A few publishers still accept unsolicited manuscripts, and you can submit to them, too.