Bastard Stepchild

Yo. Thriller Guy has a question: Why is the novella the bastard stepchild of the writing world? What is it about this not-so-short, not-too long, form that makes it so unattractive that even TG, or rather his alter ego Allen Appel, hardly ever buys or reads them? TG realizes that this is a question that approximately two or at the most three of his readers will find the slightest bit interesting, but that’s the thing about a blog, since you’re doing it for free you get to choose the subject.

Every once in a while you’ll see an article or blog post that announces that the novella isn’t dead, or that it’s making a comeback, and then in another couple of years there will be another article saying the same thing, which means that the form is pretty much dead if they have to keep announcing its resuscitation every couple of years.

TG used to think, and it was probably true, that the uncomfortable length made it difficult to market for traditional publishers. You know, the guys who printed stuff out in “books” and sold them in emporiums cleverly named “bookstores.” Let’s get technical, then TG will get back to ranting about something or other in a minute.

All professional writers who are working on a fiction project always know how many words they are “up to” at the end of every working day. Those that tell you they never pay attention to word count are lying sacks of shit posers who will also tell you how much fun they had cranking out their 2,000 words every day, whether they feel like it or not. TG has written many times -- probably far too many times -- about how difficult it is to be a professional novelist. (Note that no one ever describes themselves as a “professional novella-ist.”) So he will skip that whine, and point out that since there’s no everyday payoff for a written work that can take, usually, around a year to produce, novelists have to find things that are positive enough to keep them coming back to the desk every day. Counting words is one of the major benchmarks. So if you got in 500 words for the day, that’s ok, at least you’re hacking away at it; 1,000 is damn good; 2,000 is a remarkable day, one that leads you straight to a largish glass of whatever alcoholic beverage you use to congratulate yourself. As Constant Readers of this blog know, that’s gin for TG, but everyone has their own comfort drink.

So, while there are a number of differing opinions on what constitutes a short story, novella or novel, we’ll just use the Science Fiction and Fantasy writers of America’s word length for each category:

Short Story --- under 7,500 words; Novella --- 17,500 to 40,000 words; novel --- over 40,000 words. In general, a mystery novel is usually 60,000 to 80,000 words, a thriller is 100,000 words. The SF&F folks also have a category, Novelette, that takes up the 7,500 to 17,500 category, but that’s a no-man’s category in TG’s estimation. Besides, what we’re talking about in particular is the novella, which usually comes in at 60 to 120 pages when in printed form. And how does a novella differ from a novel? Besides the obvious answer, being shorter, a novella is usually about one character and there are no subplots and fewer conflicts. Thriller Guy is sure he’ll get some arguments, but here’s a list of some excellent books that are considered novellas by most, though TG thinks some of them are really short novels.

 A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess; Coraline, Neil Gaiman; Heart of Darkness,  Joseph Conrad; I Am Legend, Richard Matheson; Legends of the Fall, Jim Harrison; The Mist, Stephen King; The Snow Goose, Paul Gallico; The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Robert Louis Stevenson; The Tenth Man, Graham Greene; The War of the Worlds, H.G. Wells; The Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemingway; Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Philip K. Dick; The Postman Always Rings Twice, James M. Cain; Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck

If you haven’t read all of these, shame on you; hop over to Amazon or somewhere and download them or order them used or whatever. Wait a minute, why did TG even start in on this topic? Oh, yeah, he was going to expound on his own experience with the novella form.

Allen Appel (we’ll let him take over from here) has three novellas as Kindles on Amazon: The Christmas Chicken, The Flock, and The Maltese Chicken. 

The Christmas Chicken was written first and came from an idea hatched with writer pal

Larryabout a little Victorian blind boy who asks Santa for a dog and ends up with a chicken, though, being blind, he doesn’t know the difference. Hilarity ensues. (Really) It started out as a short story, but I am at a total loss when writing in that form; it kind of got away from me and, like Topsy, just growed. (Are we allowed to say that these days?) It got longer and longer and eventually ended up at 20,336 words, around 43 pages and in solid novella territory. Sometime later, while sitting on the porch with a glass of gin, I decided that as a challenge to myself, I would write another story featuring a chicken. I have no idea why I decided to do this, it was probably the gin talking.

At the time I was reading a very cool book by another pal, Peter Cannon, who is a Lovecraft scholar who had written a pastiche called Forever Azathoth, which is very funny. If you’re into Lovecraft on any level I recommend it highly. So I had Lovecraft on my mind, and thus was born The Flock. It’s about a man known simply as The Hunter who sets off into the dark

woods to undertake a life-threatening mission. What he finds in the strange community he arrives at is, well, fairly disturbing. It’s not written to be funny. It came in at 12,500 words, around 26 pages. Not quite in official novella territory but certainly not a short story.

By this time I felt like I needed one more

chicken story, so I decided to write one that was in no one else’s style, just my own. This is a modern tale, a thriller that centers around a chicken: The Maltese Chicken, titled to honor the falcon but not as a joke. The chicken actually comes from the Isle of Malta. It ended up being 36 pages, 17,232 words. A solid novella. By then I was pretty much through with writing about chickens. But I was happy with the three stories and happy to see I could write something besides novels and blog entries. So I put the three stories up on Amazon and charged $.99 for them. I would have simply put them up for free, but Amazon doesn’t like that. They’ve been up for several years and I haven’t sold a single copy of any of them. Well, maybe a couple of copies of The Christmas Chicken. My novels continue to sell, slowly, true, at least compared to Hugh Howey and J. Konrath, but it’s clear if a person buys the first in the Alex Balfour time travel series that person goes on to buy the next four as well. So I know people like my stuff. Occasionally I sell a copy of my novel, Abraham Lincoln: Detective, which I figure has probably been bought by one of my time travel readers who has finished the series. But never the novellas.

So what’s the deal? Why don’t people buy novellas? Or maybe the better question is why don’t people buy my novellas? Huh?

Yeah, you. I’m talkin’ to you. Check them out.

   

Why Your Book Sucks.

Thriller Guy was riding in his car the other day listening to his XM radio and they played a promo they’ve played a million times, which annoys TG greatly, but this time it led to some further thought. Some NPR producer or someone said,  “Drama is anticipation mixed with uncertainty.” TG has heard this many times on this promo and his first thought is usually, “WTF does that mean?” And being really lazy, he usually doesn’t dwell on it any further. But because TG has recently been working with several authors on their novels, and because subjects like this are always of interest to readers of this blog, (or so one would hope) a few tumblers clicked into place and some further thoughts percolated to the top of TGs brain pan.

Let’s take this definition of drama and break it down. Anticipation means, in its simplest form, expecting something to happen. When we are reading a book, the story leads us to anticipate certain events. We may hope for them to happen, or we may fear that they are going to happen. If they do happen we may feel fulfilled, happy or sad. If they don’t happen, we may feel cheated or that the author has missed an opportunity, but if it’s written properly what we usually feel is surprise. These are the twists in plotlines that are so great, the one’s that make you sit back and say, whoa, I didn’t see that coming.

Uncertainty, is simply defined as not definitely known.

So when you put the two of them together, you get drama. If you’re reading a book, you anticipate what is going to happen to the characters, but because of the way the author manipulates his story you may not be able to figure out what is going to happen and this pushes you to a more heightened feeling of excitement as you read. This is where authors want readers to be: excited, turning the pages as fast as they can eager to find out what is going to happen. In other words, drama has been created.

Drama as defined by the OED is an exciting, emotional, or unexpected series of events or set of circumstances. This is kind of a bloodless definition, but further searches in dictionaries don’t provide any better ones.

OK, hang with me, TG is going to get to the point eventually. When reading his clients’ manuscripts, TG is often struck by the lack of the kind of reading excitement we are discussing above. The stories may be exciting in the way that reading about a car chase is exciting, or watching one in a movie, or a gun battle or an airplane dogfight or military battle, or any number of scenes one hopes to find in the thriller genre. But aside from the single level of physical excitement that is engendered by the words, there’s often no depth, no drama in these scenes. Why is that? Drum roll, please…

Because there’s no uncertainty in the characters or the plot.

This is often because the characters -- heroes and villains – are pretty much like many other heroes and villains in many other books. Ditto the love interests, backgrounds and life circumstances. Think scruffy private investigators who drink too much, military men who seem to be able to leap tall buildings in a single bound and take a few gut shots from high powered weapons and be up and fighting later the same day, evildoers who were abused as children, terrorists whose parents were killed by American servicemen, CIA turncoats who commit treason for the money, secret agents who lose their jobs unfairly because they were trying to do good, any character who does something either good or bad because a loved one needs an operation, gutless government types, whores with a heart of gold, evil government types who have a secret agenda, etc. TG could go on and on because he as seen it all, both in published novels he reads and reviews and in the manuscripts others hire him to “fix.”

Well, TG, you may ask, how do I go about creating original characters, or original plots? The same way TG has told you over and over again in this blog: by reading, reading, reading classic and contemporary novels in whatever genre you are writing in. Here’s a rule: if you are writing your first thriller, you should spend one fourth of your work time for the first six months reading other thrillers. After your first book is published, you can cut back the time, but you should be constantly reading thrillers as part of your research. Oh, TG, you whine, there are so many bad books out there, I don’t want to waste my valuable writing time with bad books. The thing is, if you can learn why a book is bad, you learn how to make your own book good: by not doing what the guy did in the bad book. And this means reading the damn thing all the way through, then tossing it into the trash. There may be surprises along the way while you’re reading.

There’s a certain hubris that comes over many writers when they switch to a genre that they consider popular or even beneath their talents. TG has complained about this on these pages as well; literary writers who want to tap into the money to be made in popular novels, journalists who think they have a great story to tell, government insiders who also think they have fabulous stories. The thinking is always, how hard could it be? They feel that if they are able to do one thing well, then they are able to do another thing, with connections to what they do well, well. How about that for a convoluted sentence? So, to reiterate, if you want to write an original thriller with original characters you need to read other thrillers, and you need to read a lot of them, both good and bad. And you need to get over yourself.

OK, onward.

If your plot is unoriginal, then your reader will always know where you are going with it, meaning there is no uncertainty, meaning no drama.

If your characters are unoriginal, the reader will always know how they are going to react to every new situation, hence no uncertainty, hence no drama.

If you don’t know what everyone else has done, you won’t know what you should do.

Print it out, cut it out, paste it to your monitor: Originality engenders drama.

Sit down; shut up; read, read, read.

Strong Female Characters?

There have been plenty of words written about writers writing characters of the opposite sex. About how difficult it is and how poorly done the characters can often be. Usually this means men writing women characters, rather than the other way around. Thriller Guy understands that in the thriller genre, which is authored predominantly by male writers, female characters are often not drawn with the depth of the lead characters. (And TG is being generous in implying that the male leads have much depth themselves.) Even the happy-go-lucky male sidekick has more work put into his characterization than the romantic interest, female team members or superior officers. The truth is, a lot of writing deficiencies get conveniently overlooked when bullets are flying and derring-do is being done.

(In the spirit of TG’s continuing effort to bring book-learning to his readers, allow him to offer a small explanation of the words derring-do in the para above. TG looked it up because he was suddenly afraid that it might be spelled the more logical way, daring-do rather than the way he thought it was spelled. But no… From Grammarist.com: “Derring-do is the standard spelling of the noun meaning daring deeds or heroic daring (used especially in reference to swashbuckling heroes). The phrase originated in a late 14th-century Geoffrey Chaucer poem, and it has taken many forms over the years—including durring don (in Chaucer, literally meaning daring to do), dorryng do, derring doe, and derrynge do. And given the term’s meaning and history, it is often understandably spelled daring-do. But as far as most English reference books are concerned, derring-do has been the correct spelling since Sir Walter Scott used it in Ivanhoe in 1819.)”

Back to our regularly scheduled entry…

Women characters. TG has said, many times, that the “romance” elements attempted by most thriller writers end up being not very romantic and mostly embarrassing. The savvier writers eschew romance completely. TG’s pronouncement is that romance almost never adds anything, and almost always detracts. Part of the problem is most thriller writers don’t understand how to write a romantic scene – they almost always go way overboard – and part of the problem is that their women characters are not very well drawn in the first place. Does TG have an answer for this problem? He suggests putting as much original thought into the female characters, and other secondary characters, as one is going to do with the main character. Write out small, or even large, detailed bios of all characters, not necessarily to put into the manuscript, but to give a solid background when writing about that particular character. (TG is aware how boring this sounds.) Just try harder. Work on it. It’s always fun to write when guns are drawn and shots fired, but sometimes characters have to sit down to dinner or talk while riding in a car. Scenes like this can add texture to a novel, something that many thrillers lack. But we haven’t even arrived at the real subject of this entry: strong female characters.

TG was surprised some weeks ago when following a link to arrive at an essay written in NewStatesman by Sophia McDougall titled I Hate Strong Female Characters. TG’s immediate response was, I thought we were supposed to write strong female characters. But on reading the article, TG has to admit that Ms McDougall has a valid point, and even though she was mostly talking about movies, TG feels the same thinking can be applied to novels and thriller writing in particular. You can go here to read the original article, (as of this moment this link is no longer working, perhaps they'll get it back up) or TG will put it in a nutshell for you.

Her thesis is this: Thriller writers (and moviemakers) are beginning to understand that they need to make female characters more interesting than they have been in the past. So what do they do? The usual response is to make them strong. Tough. Able to fight, shoot and kill as well as any male member of the team. McDougall says this is a mistake, an oversimplification. She uses Sherlock Homes’ characteristics to make her point. “He’s a brilliant, solitary, abrasive, Bohemian, whimsical, brave, sad, manipulative, neurotic, vain, untidy, fastidious, artistic, courteous, rude, polymath genius.” In other words, a fascinating character with many fascinating facets. And the usual female thriller heroine? She’s strong, and that’s about it. Maybe a few clichéd characteristics are thrown in – an abusive ex-husband, a failed marriage – but nothing of any serious interest or depth. TG admits there are few heroes or villains of any gender in the thriller field who are as complex as Sherlock, but it might be good for writers to keep the great Holmes in mind when creating their own characters. Hannibal Lechter comes to mind for complexity, but what does Clarice Starling offer other than a stubborn tenaciousness?

Think of movies in general; whenever the point must be quickly made that a woman is going to be no pushover, she cold-cocks some leering Neanderthal and the audience immediately gets the point and pigeonholes her: she’s strong! (Then they cheer.) But, as McDougall points out, at the end she almost always has to be rescued by the hero anyway.

So what’s the takeaway? Like TG said earlier, try harder. Make the same effort with all your characters. Look for nuances in your hero, the villain, the hero’s love interest and all the sidekicks of varying types. Some of you may be asking the question, “So, TG, have you read anything interesting lately where a male author has made the effort with a female character?” TG is glad you asked that question, having reviewed Red Sparrow by Jason Matthews last year and given the book a starred review. Other critics were quick to rush in and pile onto

TG’s coattails. Here’s a bit from the NYT’s review:

 Jason Matthews is a 33-year veteran of the C.I.A. who, according to the press release in front of me, “served in multiple overseas locations and engaged in clandestine collection of national-security intelligence.” Lord knows how he got the manuscript of “Red Sparrow” past the redacting committee at Langley, but he has turned his considerable knowledge of espionage into a startling debut.

The novel pits an ambitious, hotheaded rookie spook, Nathaniel Nash, against a gorgeous Russian intelligence officer named Dominika Egorova. The plot, which swings convincingly between Moscow, Helsinki, Athens and Washington, begins with echoes of Fleming’s “From Russia With Love” — an attractive Soviet “sparrow” is used to compromise a randy Western spy — and ends with an extended homage to the denouement of le Carré’s “Smiley’s People.”

As you can see, the Times loved it. TG interviewed Matthews and found him a mild, self-effacing fellow who is genuinely interested in writing thrillers that are not just action oriented but built on interesting many-faceted characters. Unlike most of the “insiders” who write thrillers after stints in the CIA and other government agencies, Matthews has read in the field and understands the basics and the ground rules. And he is working on a follow up to Red Sparrow.

So here’s the thing. TG finds many thriller writers woefully unable to create interesting complicated characters. For nuance they give their heroes a dead wife to weep about, or maybe a dead kid. They make them drunks, or washed up. And the women characters? They make them strong, when they bother to give them anything besides beauty and large breasts. Maybe they give them self-defense skills. And that’s about it. Until thriller writers learn or work hard enough to create great characters, their genre (our genre) is always going to rest on the bottom of the pantheon, somewhere slightly above romance novels but beneath pretty much all the other genres as far as literary quality is concerned.

Yes, TG understands, thriller readers don’t care about literary quality, it’s all about the guns. But maybe it’s time, my brothers, to start aiming higher.

TG has decided to write his next blogs showing the Ten Shopworn, Clichéd, Overused Characteristics of Thriller Characters: Heroes, Villains Sidekicks, Romantic Interests. Then he will follow up with the Ten Tired Thriller Plots. Again, the takeaway? You can keep making the same mistakes, or you can learn and change your ways, it’s up to you.