A poignant story of love and self discovery that you've already forgotten

My family watches MST3K's Santa Claus Conquers The Martians every Christmas. It's our personal wacky tradition, and often I surprise myself by catching a new reference even though I've seen it twenty times.

This year, I caught Tom Servo whispering under his breath. Joel has managed to get ahold of some classic Christmas films, and then at the end he's down to a few low-budget films from the bottom of the bag.

Joel: This one is The Christmas That Totally Ruled. It's about a curmudgeonly old man who learns the true meaning of Christmas.
Servo: Fresh idea!

The meta-irony here, of course, is that I found something fresh in a movie I've seen at least twenty-five times, but for now, just keep it in mind that every genre has its cliches.

On January 1st, I got a multi-book ad in my inbox, and one of the books was this:

"A poignant story of love and self-discovery." Doesn't that make you want to run right out and plunk twenty dollars on the counter at Barnes and Noble? "I heard someone talking about this book," you might say. "It was really intriguing, and I just can't get the concept out of my mind."

Or, as Servo would say, "Fresh idea!"

Would I be correct in assuming that fifty percent of the books published in the past hundred years involve love or self-discovery? And that many involve both? This particular book's genre is literary. Can you name a title in the literary genre that in no way deals with self-discovery? Some characters may resist self-discovery, but I think in most literary fiction, discovering things about oneself drives the character development.

What makes literary love and self-discovery so precious to the reader are the circumstances under which they take place. The love takes place across enemy lines at wartime. The self-discovery occurs at great personal price in a woman wondering why she consistently sacrifices for people who don't value her at all.

Queriers, take heed. Anyone who takes part in a Twitter pitch event like #PitMad, take even more heed. Don't do this to your story.

Do not pitch your romance as "A couple meets and falls in love, but they face many obstacles to happiness." Yes, that's a given. Tell me that he's an animal rights activist and she's a slaughterhouse owner, and now we've got something more memorable.

Similarly, don't query your fantasy as "In a world where magic is commonplace, one amulet may hold the key to power."

(I can do this all day. "In order to succeed, Chris will have to overcome many hurdles, but the stakes have never been higher!")

Avoid having your future agent to open your query and mutter, "Fresh idea!" just before deleting it.

1. Read widely in your genre so you'll know the standard tropes.
2. Go beyond those tropes when pitching your story. You can do that by including setting, timeframe, or other details that set your book apart.
3. Keep touch with those tropes, though, so your story feels comfortably within its genre. 

The last point means you need to take your trope and leave it unsaid while simultaneously dancing all around it. 

Take your curmudgeonly old man learning the true meaning of Christmas. Don't say curmudgeonly, but tell us he's hated Christmas ever since his wife died four years ago on Christmas Eve. Don't say he learns the true meaning of Christmas, but give us a bit of his situation (maybe he volunteers to take a 24-hour shift at a local animal shelter so everyone else can have the day with their kids.) And then give us the situation that challenges our MC's steady state. He finds a runaway boy huddling among the dog crates for warmth, and now they're going to spend Christmas together.

We don't need to hear "finds the true meaning of Christmas" but by that point in the pitch, your brain has anticipated the trope, and now we want to know about the kid, about the man, about the puppy we're sure the kid is going to bond with during the holiday, and maybe about the turkey sandwich they split because all the takeout places are closed and it's the only food in the building.

Maybe you want to read it now. Maybe I do too.

I suspect the poor book in the ad above is a complicated and intriguing novel that a beleaguered marketing intern on a deadline had no idea how to pitch, and that's why it ended up as "love and self-discovery."

But for your own complicated and intriguing novel, see how much you can add with only a little work. Try adding in a timeframe: "A story of love and self-discovery during the Black Plague." Or a location: "A story of love and self-discovery at a hot dog cart in Times Square." Or character: "An anarchist descendant of Alexander Hamilton engages in a journey of love and self-discovery."

Take the hobbles off your story so the thing can stretch out and run. And then, when it catches your future agent's eye, she'll say, "Fresh idea!" and really mean it.

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Dealing with Reader Expectations

It doesn’t matter if you’re published and your book is now out for review, or if you’re sending your first book to a beta reader, you have to deal with reader expectations. Most of the time it isn’t an issue. The reader has no expectations, other than they hope your story will entertain or emotionally move them.

Other times they have specific expectations that you may or may not meet. The reader might read your blurb and expect ABC to happen in the story instead of XYZ. And because of that, they give it a less than favorable review. There’s nothing you can do about it. You didn’t write the book they would have written, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Be proud of the story you did write. It’s the one that called to you and the one that you needed to bring to life. If the comments are from a beta reader, give the book and comments some distance then look at it through the individual’s eyes. It could be that you decide she was right, and you can edit the book accordingly. Or you might realize she didn’t share your vision for the book and ignore her suggestions. That’s okay, too.

It also could be that you wrote a story that went outside the box when it comes to your genre. Some readers will love this. Others will cry foul. Now obviously if you kill off the love interest, you won’t get too far calling the book a romance. There is an expectation from readers of the genre that the story will end with a happily-ever-after. When you kill off the hero, it’s hard to achieve that goal. The solution in this case is easy. Don’t call your story a romance. It isn’t. If you call it women’s fiction (for example), you have a better chance of finding the readers who will better appreciate it. But other than this, like before, be proud of your story. One thing you quickly realize is you can’t please everyone. There’s no point trying. You’ll only drive yourself insane if you do.

If you are going to go outside the box, make sure you’re familiar with the expectations of the genre first. It might be you just have to twist the tropes of the genre on the head. For example, in romance, a common trope is where the bad boy meets good girl and he reforms for her–and only for her. Some readers have favorite tropes they love to read and will pick up your book if it contains it. This is great. On the downside, they’ve read the trope so many times, you need to come up with a fresh approach to make your book memorable. There are also readers who hate certain tropes, yet for some strange reason, they still read them, waiting for a chance to tear the story apart in their review. If you’ve done the unexpected with the trope, you’ll surprise the reader and might even possibly delight her. And this could mean a positive review and word of mouth.

And then there’s the individual who reads the blurb and misses the obvious clues that your book is horror, and complains in the review that there is horror in the book. Yes, this happens more often than you realize. There’s nothing you can do about that, and that includes leaving a comment on the review about how the person is an idiot. It’s perfectly fine to think that, but it’s not okay to share that opinion with anyone—unless you want it to come back and haunt you. 

When you write a book, do you write want you want to write, or do you write to meet the readers’ expectations (or a little of both)?

Stina Lindenblatt @StinaLL writes New Adult novels. In her spare time, she’s a photographer and can be found at her blog/website.  She is represented by Marisa Corvisiero, and finds it weird talking about herself in third person. Her debut New Adult contemporary romance TELL ME WHEN (Carina Press, HQN) is now available. LET ME KNOW (Carina Press) will be available Sept 1st, 2014.

Filing off the serial numbers

When Pixar posted their rules of storytelling, my favorite was Rule 12.

#12: Discount the 1st thing that comes to mind. And the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th – get the obvious out of the way. Surprise yourself.

This weekend, I critiqued a story where this was my first encouragement to the writer. Her technique was fine, and she had her pacing down, so why didn't the story grab me? Trust me, I analyzed this piece to death, and even while driving to my critique group, I was still coming up with new angles for making the story start to breathe.

But finally I came down to the final answer: tropes and stereotypes dominated the story, whereas the places the story lived were the places the author had struck out her own path.

I'm obfuscating and declarificating the details because it's her story, not mine (whereas I make merciless fun of my own story.)  But at one point in the story, a walk-on character mentions her pet. The character is a gentle, sweet old lady, Mrs. Witherspoon, who owns a purebred Persian cat named Cuddles. During the conversation, she mentions her neighbor, Bo, who keep a nasty alley-cat named Butch. 

You can see the stereotypes at work here. But what if she'd thrown away her first idea? What if the sweet little old lady had the nasty alley cat? What if she'd named the nasty alley cat Cuddles? What if the redneck neighbor was raising purebred Persian cats and had several champion showcats? What if the fluffy purebred Persian cat were named Butch?

This is where you can start taking your readers' presuppositions and turning them on their heads, keeping everyone intrigued because no one is predictable. Send your story off the rails -- or rather, lay out rails and send your story on a different set of rails. Why? Because your readers are going to enjoy the ride more with the occasional surprise that makes them say, "Oh…?" followed by, "Of course!"  

The story in question had taken all the tropes of its genre and recombined them, but they were still all the same tropes, and because of that, you pretty much knew the ending after the second page. Every genre has its stereotypes (the damsel in distress, the tortured man with a past, the reluctant hero, whatever) but your job is to get more mileage out of those characters by filing off the serial numbers and fully owning them.

Escape the stereotypes. Your mobster doesn't need to be named Frankie or Vinny. Your romantic lead doesn't need to have green eyes and beautiful hair. Your villain may still be a mad scientist, but maybe his motivation is more than just "I wanted to show everyone my brilliance, until the day I went too far." Your first ideas are probably good, but take them further. Reshape them. Surprise us.

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Jane Lebak is the author of The Wrong Enemy. She has four kids, three cats, two books in print, and one husband. She lives in the Swamp and spends her time either writing books or knitting socks. At Seven Angels, Four Kids, One Family, she blogs about what happens when a distracted daydreamer and a gamer geek attempt to raise four kids. If you want to make her rich and famous, please contact the riveting Roseanne Wells of the Jennifer DeChiara Literary Agency.