No, but What Do YOU Think?

This morning in the Water Cooler, we had an interesting conversation about contests and a pitfall I'd never considered.

The Water Cooler is a chat room on the website of our Fantasy, Futuristic and Paranormal Chapter. One of our board members is an amazing web designer and she created these various chat rooms for us. The Water Cooler is for hanging out while you write. Sometimes we do timed sessions and then report back word counts or pages edited. Sometimes we throw out problems we're struggling with, for feedback.

Sometimes we just yak.

This morning, one gal mentioned that she wasn't working on her WIP -- lingo for Work in Progress -- but instead doing penance and judging a contest entry. Penance because she'd failed to notice that one of the entries given her to judge was the exact same entry she'd judged for another contest the week before. These are for our chapter On the Far Side contest and everyone is supposed to be done judging by tomorrow.

She turned the entry back in and took another because she "would have had to write all the exact same comments."

So, it's an interesting thing. So many RWA chapters sponsor contests that the market is arguably flooded. And yet, these are opportunities unmatched in the business, that you can get your work in front of agents and editors who serve as final judges, but who won't accept unsolicited submissions. Some people get caught up in collecting contest finals and wins (one group keeps count and actually gives the person with the most finals in a year an actual TIARA -- yes, these are all women). But really, the point is that this is a chance to get your manuscript that much closer to publication.

The real prize.

The editors and agents serve as final judges, meaning that they judge the finalists. As determined by the chapter members who volunteer to judge. And sometimes people from outside the chapter, if the chapter in question can't get enough volunteers.

Now, many people in RWA belong to several chapters -- maybe a local one or two and a couple online groups. So there are two or three contests you'll be hit up to judge right there. More if you're feeling generous and volunteer to help another group. The pool of people submitting to the contests is largely this same group and they usually hit as many contests as they can, to maximize their chances.

There's a word for this syndrome.

MFA programs have been accused of producing literary clones. (I tried Googling "MFA Syndrome" to give you a good link to an article, because I know I've read a couple, but all the hits were in other blog posts. Hmmm....) The academic/MFA environment produces literary writers who get university posts to teach MFA programs.

Right! Incest.

And we all know what the product of incest is. Lethal mutation at worst; reduced heterogeneity at best. Reduced heterogeneity in biology leads to weaker individuals, for those not up on their genetics and evolutionary biology.

There have been complaints that the contests are past their prime. That the agents and editors don't request full manuscripts as much. That they aren't making as much money for the chapters.

Maybe we should think about doing something different.

And the German Judge Gives It...

I realize my title is probably dating me.

There's a whole couple of generations who don't understand references to German judges. Or who think Mikhail Baryshnikov is just a cute guy on Sex and the City; they're surprised to hear he's a dancer and ask what kind. I swear to God I've had this actual conversation. I have witnesses. They didn't understand about Political Asylum either, or why he might have claimed it.

The German judge, for those who didn't watch the Olympics in the 70s and 80s refers to the international panel of judges scoring the various Olympic events. There was often a perception that the German judge was a) tougher and b) inclined to mark down competitors from the non-communist countries. For accuracy, we should really say the "East German judge," but idioms aren't about accuracy.

There's been an interesting conversation on the Fantasy, Futuristic & Paranormal writers loop the last day or so, about contest judges. I've written before about the RWA chapter contests, so I won't reiterate here. But the way it works is you generally get scores from two or three judges. In many contests, if the point spread exceeds a certain margin, a discrepancy judge is called in and the lowest score is dropped. The idea is to account for reader preferences, which can really affect scores. For example, on a recent contest I entered, one judge gave me a perfect score of 100 (with comments that it was so splendid she couldn't gush enough) and another judge awarded me a 54 (with a snarky comment that beastiality is not an appropriate subject for a romance.)

One got me; one didn't.

In the real world, this would translate to a person who would buy my book and one who would burn it. Fair enough. The common wisdom is that these kind of splits result from having a "strong voice" -- readers tend to love it or hate it. All of this is lead-up to using one of my favorite examples, from country music. (Yeah, you saw that one coming, right?)

I heard this story on NPR many, many moons ago, but it's always stuck with me. They were discussing the perception that country music radio stations had become less, well, interesting. It turns out that there had been a huge study where "they" looked at what caused people to change the radio station -- anathema for advertising, of course. They found that people changed the station, shockingly enough, when a song they hated came on. So, it seemed simple: don't play the songs people hate. BUT, what the studies showed is that the songs people rated as most hated were also rated most loved by an equal number of people. Where people converged was on the songs that they neither loved nor hated. More importantly for radio, when a song played that a person neither loved nor hated, they were likely to let the radio station play on.

Thus country music programming went to playing music that the vast majority of people neither loved nor hated, playing innocuously in the background, exciting nothing untoward.

I've seen this play out in writing workshops, too. Half the class will love a particular scene and half will insist it ruins the piece and must be removed. The profound emotional reaction means the writer has hit on something, but it takes courage to accept that for every person who loves what you wrote, someone else will hate it.

And it's tempting, especially in genre, where people hope to actually make money with their books, to write the thing that will sell to the most people, innocuous and exciting no untoward responses.

Then again, it can be a little satisfying, too, to throw a little bestiality in the way of the book-burners.

Clear-cutting

I've been editing my novel. Not for the first time, naturally. I finished it almost exactly a year ago and have edited the work several times since.

Right now, though, I'm whittling down the first 30 pages. In genre fiction -- maybe all kinds, I don't know -- much rests on the first 30 pages. Contests generally ask for it (or the first 20 or 25, if they're chintzy), because agents generally ask for that. Then hopefully they ask to read the whole thing.

But everything really hinges off of the first 30 pages. They'll argue it's a Blink thing, that a good agent or editor knows within a few sentences if the work is what they can market. Or rather, they know right away if it's NOT. What this means though, is there's no room for leisurely introductions or backstory. An editor at the RWA convention complained of writers who tell her the story "really gets going in the third chapter." That, she said, is where the story should start.

Okay, I can see this. That a genre novel's glory is its ability to sweep you away. In our increasingly impatient society, there's little patience for the slow build. Selling books is selling excitement. Capture the reader on the first page and you've sold the book.

What I'm noticing as a reader, however, is how many books start off great and completely fall apart. Sometimes the first three chapters promise something that vanishes or was never really there. And the second half of the book is frequently terrible. To the point that I wonder if the editor ever read the second half.

And then I wonder, do they care? Is the market such that all the emphasis is on selling that book. Mabye it's become immaterial whether the reader will then buy or borrow that author again.

Not that I'm not playing the game. My book is one of those where the exciting action kicks in around Chapter 3 or 4. I felt like the slow build-up was important, but I'm capitulating. I've condensed 60 pages into 30. No point, I figure, in holding onto the perfect opening to an unpublished book.

A lot of what goes in that kind of slash-and-burn edit is description. A (terrible) contest judge recently slammed me for too much description, which she compared to Anne Rice. The judge invited me to recall how much people hated how she'd describe the wallpaper. I'm thinking, uh, Anne Rice? Multi-million dollar best-seller, Anne Rice? One of my favorite authors before she went off the deep end, Anne Rice? Oh no, don't write like she does!

But, I concede to the gateway and have cut cut cut. My delete key is dripping black font. I really hope, though, that the rest of the story satisfies. Perhaps a lean, mean beginning can lead to a meaty repast with a lovely, fatty, overblown dessert at the end. In a room with gold, flocked wallpaper...

Where have all the gamma males gone?

The alpha male. Given writer Lise Horton’s astute comment from yesterday, I just have to keep going. First I have to tell you a little about Lise and how I “met” her.

She’s a virtual friend, which speaks to our burgeoning electronic society today. It’s not just for adolescents anymore! I met Lise because she coordinated a contest for a chapter of the Romance Writers of America. For those who aren’t familiar, RWA is an enormous international organization, subdivided into smaller chapters. Some of these chapters are regional and involve bricks & mortar meetings, while others are organized by topic and exist only on the internet. And many of these chapters conduct writing contests. These contests are extraordinary in my experience in the world of writing, because they almost all offer putting your manuscript in front of an agent or editor, either as the prize or as the final round of judging. There are a lot of contests and you can choose by which agent or editor’s desk you’d really love to sprawl across. Manuscriptually speaking, of course.

Lise is an amazing gal because she read EVERY ENTRY for the contest she coordinated. And, though I didn’t final in that contest, in the “so sorry” email she wrote to me, she told me her impressions of my manuscript, which were really complimentary. I can’t tell you how much that meant to me. I bill my book, Obsidian, as paranormal romance. Again, this is an RWA thing, but it means a story with sci fi/fantasy elements that’s also built around a love story. Only in my story, the heroine doesn’t meet the hero right away (she’s too busy with being unexpectedly dumped in fairyland) and he’s more of an antihero anyway, being a mercurial and manipulative fae, and the love relationship is more of a love/hate thing (c/f: mercurial and manipulative). At any rate, Lise gave me much-needed words of encouragement that, though my book doesn’t fit the mold, there is a place for it in the world.

Now, I don’t know how many contest coordinators read every entry. Lise said she did it because she felt a responsibility to have a sense of the manuscripts, so she’d know something about them to make sure the judging was fair. I thought it was a spectacular assumption of responsibility.

Plus, Lise has such interesting things to say about the alpha – and, lest we forget, the beta – males. She’s right: romance is escapist entertainment. And so the fantasy of the man who can take control of a chaotic world and make it perfect for us is the ultimate escape. Yes, dress me in designer clothes, plop me at a resort and make sure nothing unpleasant ever happens to me. It’s not reality. It’s not even what we really want. But for escape? Sign me up!