Some Thoughts on Beginning Writing.
I was asked to welcome a new bride to the family at a wedding reception. She was a cute blonde and really smart, so I agreed, thinking it wouldn’t be hard. It was. The words didn’t come, so I googled wedding speeches, thought about who’d be there, and cribbed some good jokes.
The speech went well. The applause was real. The groom’s hug lifted me off the floor. People talked to me about it afterward . . . in a good way.
The bride’s father came up after me.
“I didn’t prepare,” he said. “I speak from the heart.”
Well ... there wasn’t much interesting in his heart, and this was supposed to be an entertaining moment. Applause was brief and polite.
I thought about him the next time I sat down to write. It seemed to me that, complete unpublished amatuer that I am, that starting writing, if you have some hope of selling your work, is a bit like preparing a wedding speech. There are two distinct ways to start. One is to look at what’s popular and is selling and try to find a niche in that market, another, to write from your heart, and hope a lot of someone elses like it.
It's great fun to let the words flow and the characters write their own story, not worrying about word count or audience or . . . much else. That's likely the way to create a really average story. My sense is that writing something worthwhile from your heart requires an organized heart that plans carefully and works hard at the craft.
Some writers have done very well striking out on their own. J.K. Rowling comes to mind, as do Lisa Genova,Still Alice, Fredrik Backman, A Man Called Ove, and Matt Haig, The Humans. Backman makes a story about a man wanting to commit suicide entertaining. The Humans strikes a memorable cord about humanity without developing a major conflict, and Geova’s novel about descending through Alzheimer’s disease is far from mainstream, but still, very compelling.
Having said that, a story that’s hard to categorize presents a hurdle to publishers who are usually looking for specific genres aimed at target audiences. Harry Potter was rejected fifteen times, and, well, I'm not nearly as good a writer as Rowling. Not anywhere close.
The other alternative, looking at what sells and aiming for an established target audience, gives a writer a format to start with, a target word count, and a place to begin when submitting to publishers.
With that in mind, women and middle school kids seem to be buying a lot of fiction.
It’s rare to find any recent adult writing, in print or on a screen, that doesn't have a strong female lead. Established authors like Grisham and Sandford, who’ve build their careers around male protagonists, are now creating female main characters. Sandford's developing a series about Letty Davenport, daughter of one of his most popular characters. Grisham has female leads in The Whistler, Gray Mountain and Camino Island.
Scholastic Books, aimed at elementary school children, is a force in publishing. The Captain Underpants series, featured there, has sold 80 million books and been turned into a movie. The Wonky Donkey, was, for a time, #1 on the Barnes & Noble bestsellers list, ahead of Bob Woodward’s Fear: Trump in the White House, and in second place on Amazon’s list. The authors are damn good writers, still, not bad for a pair of pretty silly books.
When I say look for an established target audience, I don’t mean hopping on specific bandwagons, like vampires. They’re short term hits. If you’re starting from scratch, the publishers are likely to have moved on by the time you’re done. I think t makes more sense to look at bigger trends in plotting and character development and try to find a place where you want to fit in.
Cozy mysteries are formula books that sell in a predicable way. Murder mysteries and detective stories are the core of Netflix. Certain kinds of science and historical fiction are worth a look. If you can write a moving and humorous story about a modern woman’s deep and relatable emotional experience which contains some soft sex, you may well have a hit.
It's likely worthwhile to look at successful writers like Agatha Christie (murder mysteries) Diana Gabladon and Sarah Waters (woman’s historical fiction) and the pile of recent best sellers, and think about what makes their work so compelling. Certainly, they have the basics, simple vocabulary, great clarity, and interesting characters, but, if you look close, they use tricks to create sympathy for the main character(s) and create mysteries without being confusing. Much to think about there.
Just my humble opinion.