Listen to This

Terry Shames here: The question we’re on about this week is, “What comes first, the book or the pitch? Do you develop the larger idea of a book to test out with your agent/publisher, before writing the book? Or do you write the book and then look for the pitch in it? 

 I’ve always wondered how the first stories got developed. It’s pretty easy to imagine hunters sitting around a fire telling those who stayed home the story of their great adventure. How they found their prey, how they stalked it, how it fought back, and how they won in the end. 

But somewhere along the line someone decided to embellish the story a bit. From there, it wasn’t such a great leap to suddenly tell the story of something that really didn’t happen, except in the mind of the story-teller. I imagine that first person who made up the story as saying, “Listen to this. I’ve got a story about...” And his listeners either said, “Ooo, that sounds good! Tell us,” or “That sounds stupid. Shut up.” Thus, the first pitch was born. 

I have been spoiled, in that with the Samuel Craddock series, both my agent and my publisher never asked for anything more than a paragraph of what the next book was about. I didn’t pitch anything. I simply told my agent and editor what the book was about and they said to go for it. The funny thing is that after the books are written, I often find that the premise that I presented bore no resemblance to the finished book. 

Now that I have left my original publisher, things have changed. I have had to write the next book, and my agent wanted it to be dynamite before she would shop it. She sent it back to me twice to tighten and revise.

I had an agent and an editor for a long time before I discovered that they would actually work with me on developing a book. I thought I had to think of an idea, write the book, and turn it in as well-written as possible. Then one day my agent mentioned that she had been working with a client for six months on a story. I said, “Really? You do that?” She was surprised I didn’t know she would. Same thing with my editor. Someone said that the editor helped him figure out a plot. Again, I was totally surprised. I thought I had to work it all out before I showed to the editor. 

I’m still surprised when an author gets a book contract on spec. My agent has never offered to do that. She wants the complete book before she shops it. I don’t know whether that means other writers have more casual agents; whether their writing is better than mine and agents and publishers trust them to come up with a good book; or if they convey their ideas so well that their books get snapped up pre-written. Or maybe they just have better ideas. If someone has an established publisher who publishes all their books, and their books sell a lot of copies, I can understand that. But I’ve heard of authors whose books didn’t sell particularly well, but who pitched their publishers on a new concept without writing anything more than a synopsis—and got a contract. 

 I’ve also heard of authors being recruited to write a series based on something a publisher thinks will sell. 

That may be fine for some writers, but I can’t figure out how someone comes up with characters and a plot that didn’t come out of their own imagination. Again, maybe they are better writers than I am. 

 For me, a book goes through several iterations of character/plot development before I even know what the story is. So the idea of pitching it full-blown seems impossible. As I mentioned above, the finished product rarely looks like the book I had in mind to begin with. Whether that would matter to an editor, I don’t know. I suppose it would depend on how good the finished product was. 

 I’m curious to know how other writers respond to this week’s question. Stay tuned.

Learning and Teaching that Elusive Core

Terry here. This week we are talking about whether getting formal training as a writer is useful, and whether we can teach writing.

I got my master’s degree in English with Creative Writing focus at San Francisco State University. I loved every minute of the program. When I was an undergraduate, on the advice of one of my professors, I veered off from majoring in English, and I majored in political science. He said he thought if I wanted to be a writer, I ought to broaden my knowledge of the world.  I liked my political science education and it left me with a strong background in government and politics which as continued to interest me.

At some point  I felt like my writing education had been stunted. There were books I hadn’t studied, courses I hadn’t taken,  so I went back to school. The curriculum It mostly consisted of literature courses that I had missed.

The classes on writing I hardly remember at all. I recently ran across stories that I wrote for the classes and found that I had made As in all of them. My take on that was, “So what?” I learned as much from just writing and participating in critique groups.

That doesn’t mean I don’t think it was valuable, I just don’t remember the fine points. I have no idea whether I would be the same writer today if I hadn’t taken the classes—or if I would have been a better writer, or a worse writer. No matter how many classes I took, I still struggle with the basics that every writer struggles with: voice, plot, description, dialogue, and character development.

What I don’t struggle with is how to write a sentence and a paragraph, how to state a theme, develop it, and end strong. You may not think that matters in fiction, but it does. In the opening of the book or short story you have to give the reader a sense of what she should expect: the theme. You use your sentences and paragraphs to build your story line, to populate it with characters, and to set scenes. Sentences work for paragraphs, paragraphs work for scenes, scenes work for chapters. And if you build the story properly, eventually you come upon the ending that satisfies the theme. Easy no?

Not exactly. As always, the devil is in the details. And that’s where writing workshops and  courses come in. Some writers who are not only natural storytellers, but know how to build a book properly as well, without formal help, without critique groups, without beta readers. But I think those are rare. Most writers—both fledgling and fully-formed—benefit from classes, whether they are attending or teaching. Preparing to teach a writing class can be just as valuable as being a student in one.

I never get tired of attending workshops, classes, panels at conferences, and critique groups. I don’t always hear new ideas, but I often hear old ideas presented in ways that I really “get” for the first time. That happened several years ago with a weekend workshop I attended. One of the instructors told us that to write a good book we had to reach deep inside and find the books that only we could write. Old advice, yes. But somehow the way she presented it made me hear it in a different way. I understood suddenly that this was not just the admonition to “write what you know.” It meant something deeper. It meant to dig for something you cherished, something you knew on a visceral level. Shortly afterwards, I started writing my Samuel Craddock series. I had written several books before that, but with that series I finally found my passion, my voice, my setting, and my characters.

I’ve never taught writing in school, but I have taught in workshops. I like to teach aspects of writing. I love to see the look on a student’s face when something clicks.

But I also like the preparation. Every time I put together a class, I dredge up important things that I may have forgotten. Sometimes I even think of something new--not a new concept, but a new way of looking at it that I hope will be useful for my students. I don’t think it’s necessary to have formal training, but taking classes may smooth the way for grasping that elusive core of writing that we all strive for.

Terry Shames
A Risky Undertaking for Loretta Singletary
www.Terryshames.com