This month’s freebie wallpaper features a quote from The Book Thief, one of my all-time favorite books. Fits 1440 x 900.
Want it? Click on it. You’ll see a page with just the image, which you can then right click and “save image as…”
Image by Binu Kumar
You write something brilliant at three in the morning, but by the next afternoon you want to burn it. You query a dozen agents and no one asks for pages. Your agent has submitted to 50 publishers and no one is interested. Your novel is getting awful reviews left and right.
At every stage of your writing career, no matter how successful you are, you are going to get discouraged. There will always be better writers, who got published earlier, made more money, and got better reviews. So take a second and wallow in your self-pity. Go ahead and get a Kleenex. I’ll wait.
You all done? Ready for my next piece of advice? Here it is.
Suck it up and keep writing.
J.K. Rowling was rejected by 12 publishing houses before getting published. Now? If you don’t know who she is, you must be from Mars.
John Grisham was rejected by 28 publishers before being picked up by a relative unknown for a measly 5,000-copy first printing. Now he has over 250 million books in print, in 29 languages. Nine of his novels have been made into major motion pictures.
Agatha Christie waited four years for her first book to be published. She went on to become one of the best-selling authors of all time; And Then There Were None alone has sold more than 100 million copies.
A Wrinkle in Time, Peter Rabbit, The Wizard of Oz, and even The Diary of Anne Frank were all rejected multiple times before some publisher took a chance on them and they became unforgettable classics. The list goes on. Don’t believe me? Google it!
Or try searching for a favorite book on Amazon and reading the one-star reviews. No matter how awesome the book is, somebody hated it. Here are things people said about The Book Thief, one of my absolute favorites:
“This book is all hype.”
“From its overwrought beginning to its sloppily tragic ending, this book trots out just about every hackneyed trick imaginable.”
“Most books have a least some redeeming value but the only one I can find for this book is the credit I will get at the used book store.”
See? It doesn’t matter what one person thinks, or what a dozen people think, or even what 90% of the people think. We all know that “most popular” rarely equals “best.” Now, we could take the other extreme and say it only matters that you think your work is good, but that kind of relativism is a sissy way to look at things.
But you wouldn’t be reading this post if you didn’t already care about being a better writer. So today, I’m not going to lecture you about studying more. I’m not going to preach that you need to work harder.
I’m just going to slap you upside the head and tell you to believe in yourself.
Don’t let failure be your excuse for giving up. Everybody fails. The only difference between people who succeed and people who keep failing is that the successful people don’t give up, no matter what anybody says.
So the next time you’re feeling discouraged, rejected, beaten down, remember: you’re in good company.
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PART TWO: Hook Examples
As promised, here are some hook examples I wrote based on four of my favorite books. I made them as short as possible – one or two sentences – because expanding from there is the easy part.
Death himself narrates the story of a foster child in Nazi Germany who steals books from bonfires.
For The Book Thief, by Markus Zusak. Actually, she only stole a book from a bonfire once, but you don’t need to be exact in the hook. Take some poetic license. The expanded version could talk about the Jewish fist fighter hiding in the basement, but it is still perfectly intriguing without.
A servant searching for a quiet lifestyle is relieved when he lands a position under a man whose boring habits have not changed in decades – but is shocked to find himself dragged on a wild adventure when his master makes an offhand wager that he can travel around the world in only eighty days.
For Around the World in Eighty Days by Jules Verne. This one is a little longer, but still fairly simple. I leave out the fact that this master is also being pursued by a detective who thinks he robbed the Bank of England. There’s enough charm just in the first twenty pages to arouse curiosity.
A bookbinder who can make stories come alive by reading them aloud is pursued by the villain from a fantasy novel.
For Inkheart by Cornelia Funke. This story is much more complicated than Book Thief or 80 Days, but it still boils down to one sentence nicely – so long as I leave out what the villain is after, that the bookbinder’s wife disappeared into the same book the villain sprang out of, and that the main character really isn’t the bookbinder at all, but his daughter. None of that is important in the hook.
Charles Darnay is accused of crimes against the Republic when he returns to revolutionary France to save a friend from the guillotine. An alcoholic genius in love with Darnay’s wife may be the only person who can save him from a death sentence.
For A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens. I would be remiss if I didn’t pick at least one truly complicated story, just to prove it could be done. This one actually went to two sentences, and required a name! We can leave out how Darnay’s father-in-law was rescued from the Bastille, how Darnay escaped death once already when he was accused of being a French spy, how Darnay came to know said alcoholic genius, why the genius is the only one who can save him, and whether or not he succeeds or even tries.
Overall, notice that I tend to use descriptors instead of character names, and I keep the wording simple and fluff-free. No gimmicks. Just story.
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Now you’ve got the hook part down – here’s what else you’ll need in a query letter.
The Book Thief, by Marcus Zusak, is one of the greatest books I have ever read. This was a big surprise, because it was published in 2005 by a thirty-something author, and I’m not often impressed by modern literature. But this book belongs among the classics.
What drives me nuts is that even though most people who read it love it, few seem to have a clue why – and thus cannot fully appreciate its awesomeness. Basically, it is a perfect example of one of the finer aspects of Show, Don’t Tell: trick your readers into paying attention.
The classic authors, the ones who evolved storytelling from folk art into fine art, found new ways to describe everyday things. They looked at the world with poet’s eyes and then wrote it in a way that hit their readers in the gut. New authors, however, generally just copy the old ones, and what was once creative has now become cliché.
Here’s an example:
Snow blanketed the ground like a great white sheet. Next to the train line, there was a trail of deep footprints. Trees were coated in ice.
There is nothing wrong with this. The imagery is really good – at least, it was the first time some writer looked at snow and said “hmm, that looks like a blanket.” But how many times have you seen “snow blanketed the ground/mountains/landscape” in a book? Chances are, you’ve seen it so many times, that you glaze over it. Consider instead Zusak’s version:
It felt as though the whole globe was dressed in snow. Like it had pulled it on, the way you pull on a sweater. Next to the train line, footprints were sunken to their shins. Trees wore blankets of ice.
Notice he uses the same concept as in the first excerpt – he even uses the word “blanket” – but he does it in a new way. He personalizes the simile (“the way you would pull on a sweater”), and compares snow with clothing in an active way that gives inanimate objects a human quality. The globe pulled on a sweater. Footprints sunken to their shins. Trees wore blankets.
The plane was still spewing smoke. A black haze poured from the engines. When it crashed, it had made three deep gashes in the earth, and its wings had been ripped from its body.
Again, not bad. Terms like spewing, poured, gashes, and ripped from its body make it interesting. But all that has been done before. Let’s try Zusak:
The plane was still coughing. Smoke was leaking from both its lungs. When it crashed, three deep gashes were made in the earth. Its wings were now sawn-off arms. No more flapping. Not for this metallic little bird.
Notice again the human qualities he gives the plane, even though he goes on to compare it with a bird. Coughing. Lungs. Arms. It’s so strange, you have to slow down to decipher it; you have to pay attention. Which, in turn, makes you feel every word.
Writing this way is hard. You can’t just pour it out – you have to think about it. But it can mean the difference between great writing, and okay writing. I read somewhere that Zusak tried to put one great thing on every page. My advice is to do the same. Also, read The Book Thief.
“I have a great book idea, but I have no plot.”
I hear this pretty frequently. Most new writers seem to think that plot lines are supposed to spring into their heads fully formed. Then they feel deficient when they come up dry. But plotlines rarely appear out of the blue – and never fully formed. More often an idea is nothing but a world, a character, a single scene, or a mere image. We must take these fragments and grow them into stories.
But how? Yes, some of it still has to be inspiration, and I can’t teach you how to be inspired, but here are some methods that will help:
Image – have nothing but a picture in your head? Don’t fret. C.S. Lewis started out with nothing but a mental picture of a faun carrying an umbrella, and got the seven-book Chronicles of Narnia out of it. Let yourself daydream about the image for a while. Once it has grown into a scene, read below.
Scene – Markus Zusak got the idea for I Am the Messenger when he noticed a 15-minute parking zone outside a bank and wondered what it would be like to be stuck lying on the floor of the bank during a robbery, worrying about a parking fine. So start by writing down everything you know about that scene. Is it a beginning scene, a middle scene, or the climax? Who is there? How did they get there? What will be the result of their actions ?
World – maybe your idea centers on a world that has some interesting little difference from ours (like it’s full of mutant humans with magical powers). How did the world get that way? (Are they mutating due to a nuclear explosion, or are they doing it to themselves intentionally?) What are the social, political, religious ramifications? (Are they suing a power plant? Are they fighting laws against genetic manipulation?) What are the real-life ramifications for an individual person? (Is the psychic teenager ostracized by his parents? Is the housewife fighting crime at night?)
Character – maybe you’ve invented Sherlock Holmes, Sydney Carton, or Margo Roth Spiegelman and this person is begging to have a story written about them. Again, write down everything you know. Pretty, plain, strong, smart, cowardly, kind, mean, funny? What is the most important thing in the world to this character? Maybe it’s his wife, maybe her son, maybe it’s getting into Harvard or on Broadway, or escaping prison. Then, threaten this thing. Take it away and make them rescue it. Endanger it and make them protect it. Entice them to pursue it, and throw obstacles in their path.
Moral – Stop. Rewind. I forbid you from writing a book based on a moral alone. It will come off as salesy, preachy or both. Come up with some other idea, follow the directions above, and if a moral happens to grow naturally out of the story you are already writing, more power to you.
