How Gossip Girl Helped Me Revise My Plot

I'm a huge Gossip Girl fan. Deride if you must, but know that George Sand being the writer a character most wants to have dinner with was an actual plot point in Season 2 (episode: "New Haven Can Wait"). There was also a Wharton tribute episode ("The Age of Dissonance"), plus GG gave us a memorable nickname to denigrate hack literary writers: F. Scott Fitzjackass ("The Fasting and the Furious"). Suffice to say, there are a lot more literary Easter eggs in the show than appear at first glance.

What does this have to do with writing tips? 

I'm about 70% through the fourth draft of The Red Road. This is the do-or-die batch of revisions, the one where I have to make final decisions about what stays, what goes, and what needs to be added. Drafts 2 and 3 were mostly about cutting my ridiculously verbose paragraphs down to their essence, and losing the overly "literary" tone that appeared every so often. This draft is about plot and subplot arcs, character arcs, and themes. 

The good news: the book has plot and subplot arcs, character arcs, and themes. The bad news: they aren't right yet.

The other night, I was super frustrated by the amount of work left in front of me. So I did what any frustrated writer would do--poured a glass of wine, turned off the computer, and settled down to re-watch a Gossip Girl episode with the hubby. One of the million reasons why I love my husband is that he tolerates...dare I say shares?...my unholy fascination with Gossip Girl.  He routinely uses that "F. Scott Fitzjackass" quote. Anyway, we're currently on season 4, when the Brooklyn team (Jenny, Vanessa, and Juliet) work together to take down Serena.

You don't need to know much about Gossip Girl to understand this particular plot arc. In a nutshell, the "outsider" Brooklyn girls want to ruin Serena, a glamorous rich girl from the Upper East Side. Their plan is simple: one by one, they will strip away everything Serena has that they don't: a devoted best friend, two boys who like her, her academic future at Columbia, and her family's trust.

They develop elaborate ruses to strip away each of Serena's support networks, and then go in for the kill: one super-elaborate ruse that is meant to destroy Serena's credibility for all time. The girls map out each takedown and orchestrate them individually. And guess what? It almost works. Serena gets put in the nuthouse and everyone thinks she's a lying, slutty drug addict.

And then it hit me: The Red Road needs a little Gossip Girl action. One of the main problems I'm having is that I feel the heroine's actions are too abrupt in the third act. I take her from a smart but worried schoolgirl into a revenge-seeking assassin. It doesn't work because she doesn't have enough reason to jeopardize what she has going for her. 

I realized I need to get all Gossip Girl on her ass and strip away the things she has one by one:

• Best friends
• In GG, the villain selected Blair for entry to an exclusive on-campus club at Columbia, leaving Serena out in the cold. Blair, who's always had self-esteem issues where Serena is concerned, now feels like the superior one. 
• In my book, I need to make sure to isolate the main character by giving her friends what they want, so they have more reason to act selfishly and maintain the status quo than they do to support Emma.
• Her academic future
• In GG, the villain sends an email from Serena's phone, asking one of her professors to trade sex for grades. This is, of course, enough to get her in trouble with the dean, who wants to expel her. 
• In my book, I'm adding two new chapters that basically put a black stain on Emma's academic record--enough to make good schools question her suitability as a scholarship recipient. The action she takes is entirely her choice, which means she knows exactly what she's doing, but can't help herself. She'll have a choice, and I need her to make the wrong one.
• Her family's trust
• In GG, the villain drugs Serena, dresses up exactly like her and takes pictures of herself snorting coke, then dumps Serena in a crappy cross-town motel and basically waits for her to overdose. When Serena wakes up and calls for help, her family thinks she's returned to her old, careless ways that apparently involve doing massive amounts of drugs and generally not giving a crap.
• In my book, what would disappoint the family most is Em sabotaging her own future--and acting out. This family values strength and silence in equal measure. So the worst she could do is show weakness, make mistakes, and be vocal about it, forcing the other family members to witness her collapse. This happens after the incident I'm adding that destroys her academic future, in a new chapter or two I'll have to write from scratch.
• The boy who likes her

• In GG, the villain starts an anonymous rumor that Serena has an embarrassing case of VD. This makes both of the guys who like her consider other options. Once this is proven false, however, the villain has a backup plan. She masquerades as Serena (literally...it's a masquerade ball) and while disguised, kisses both guys. Naturally, there's photographic evidence floating around that turns both guys against Serena.
• In my book, this is the one step I'm not sure I want to take. I kind of want to keep her love interest on her side so she always has a way out...and then I want her to refuse to take it. 

Every single one of these Gossip Girl plot points applies to my character...and maybe to yours, too. 

The next time you're looking at your book's lumpy middle and wondering how to stiffen it up, think Gossip Girl. What does your character have that the villain needs to take away? Pick it off in small pieces, and those small pieces will add up to a collective whole that gives your hero plenty of work to do in the story's climax.

If all else fails, just stream old episodes of your favorite TV show. You never know what will spark an idea for your next plot twist.

Demons, Funnels, and an Empty Checking Account: Why I Decided to Sell Short Fiction

In 2010, I had an idea for a short story about the lost colony of Roanoke. My first love is historical fiction and I've always been tormented by the idea of unsolved mysteries, so it seemed like a natural fit for me. Still, my writer's brain wanted more. It wanted to put a supernatural twist on the story. What better way to explain the strange disappearance of the colonists than by introducing something creepy and otherworldly? Namely, a demon named Croatoa. I know, I know...there are actual scientific theories about what happened to the colonists. But that's not nearly as much fun as a long-fingered black-haired demon.  

But I digress. It was a cold December and I was about to finish my first semester of grad school. It was time to write the final story for my first graduate-level creative writing class. I'd already turned in one historical fiction story, and one story about a talking dog who was really the devil. To reveal my amazing depth and breadth as a writer, logic dictated that I avoid (a) history and (b) the supernatural.

But since when have I done anything the way I'm supposed to?

I wrote the Roanoke story anyway.  Whether it risked my grade or not, it was the story I wanted to write. That's how I roll. 

I wrote it from the point of view of Eleanor Dare, the mother of the first English baby born in the New World. I wrote about the last days of the colony, when hunger and cold and starvation and drought and attacks by Native Americans had taken their toll. I wrote about a demon named Croatoa, who offered Eleanor Dare a terrifying bargain. I wrote about Manteo, the Croatoan man who had already been to England twice by the time the last, doomed Roanoke colonization party arrived. And I turned it in for my final: 20 pages of brutal, bloody, tragic prose.  I don't know what my grade on that particular story ended up being, since the professor said he would read our finals over a fire and burn them before assigning our final grades. But my grade in the class was an A, so I'm guessing it didn't suck too hard.

This is pretty much how I write
 most of my non-literary short stories.

Being in grad school led to a burst of creativity for the next 16 months that resulted in me having quite a few short stories, mostly written for creative writing classes. I submitted almost all of them to journals and anthologies. Quite a few of them actually made it in and have been published. As is the case with most journals and anthologies, they requested only first North American rights, which meant that once the story had been published, all rights reverted to me.

Until recently, I thought of my short stories as a means to an end: a way to get better at writing. A way to rack up a few publishing credits for this here "Awards & Publications" page. A way to earn backlinks for this blog. But I never thought of them as anything else.

Then I read a blog post on Anne R. Allen's blog.  Writers, if you're not reading her blog, you're missing out. I only discovered it recently, but every post is chock-full of helpful and interesting information. The post I read was called, "Why You Should be Writing Short Fiction." In it, Anne writes, "What--short stories? Aren't they just for writing classes?" She had my attention right away, since that's what I'd always thought. She said she knew of a bestselling writer who put a bunch of her older short stories up for sale on Amazon (under non-famous name, of course) and ended up making $500 a month. People found them, bought them, and liked them. 

Hmm, I thought. I have folders of short stories, all just sitting there.

But I still didn't do anything about it. I was working on marketing my books and getting my website up and running, and I didn't want to think about it yet.

Then, Sean Platt and Johnny B. Truant released Write, Publish, Repeat. Their advice is to create a marketing funnel, with short stories, novellas, and books in tiered pricing layers that draw browsers in and convert casual readers into repeat buyers and (hopefully) fans.

Hmm, I thought. I don't have shit for a funnel.

That's when I started thinking of ways to use my short stories as part of my marketing funnel. The book I want to write next is historical fiction (both of them, actually). I have several historical fiction short stories, including Croatoa. Why not put out some of the short stories and try to use them to generate interest in my historical fiction? 

So here's what I did:

1. Dug out my old manuscript.
2. Polished it up. Added some stuff. Took a few awkward lines away.
3. Made a cover. (Deepest apologies to my fantastic cover artist, but with a dead laptop and an empty propane tank, money is allergic to me right now.)
4. Popped the completed manuscript into my eBook template.
5. Added two bonus features to the end of the story: a historical note on Manteo, and a detailed timeline of the Roanoke Colony. I wanted to make sure the reader had a bit more than just the story, so I used the idea of a DVD's special features and came up with the timeline/historical note idea.
6. Added a brief excerpt from my vampire book at the very end, with the cover art and a buy link. The idea here is that someone interested in a historical fiction story with a hint of the supernatural might also really like my vampire book, which also hits both of these genre's high notes. 
7. Priced it at .99c. My books are all $2.99, and since this story is much shorter, the price needs to reflect that. Maybe when I have more items up for sale, I can make one of my funnel items permafree, but for now, I chose the entry-level price point of .99c.
8. Published through Amazon KDP and Smashwords. Since I don't plan on doing a ton of promotion for the story, I didn't make it exclusive to KDP. I want the max amount of exposure for the minimum amount of effort, which means more venues = more eyeballs. 

So this is now the beginning of a grand experiment in which I see if I can replicate other authors' success selling short fiction. I haven't publicized the release much, since I had an interview that went live at the same time and I can only stand so much of myself. In general, my books make very little money and this story likely will, too. As of now, it's sold one copy through Smashwords and made me .73c. But that's .73c I didn't have yesterday, so that's cool with me.

I don't think I'll be one of the lucky few making $500 a month off of it, but I also know I have a dozen more than can follow. It's the production time that's going to slow me down. I am writing two books right now, and don't have much time left over to market the older books plus edit, format, produce, and publish a buttload of short stories. But I'm going to try because, well, Protestant work ethic bequeathed to me by my Swedish and Scottish ancestors just will not quit. Why watch TV at night when you could work on 800 projects all at once?

That's one thing about being a one-woman indie author show. You have to love it in order to live it. So here I am, loving it and living it, and wanting to help you do the same. I'll post updates here as needed to let you know how my short story experiment goes.

If you want to check out Croatoa, you can get it from Amazon or Smashwords.

To learn more about how I researched and wrote the story itself, check out this post on my website:

Croatoa: How I Turned the Lost Colony of Roanoke into a Short Story

Why Having a Day Job Is Good for the Creativity

Ruth Brown Snyder. In the electric chair.
If this doesn't creep you out,
I don't know what will.

Have you ever seen a photo of a woman being executed in the electric chair? You have now. But what do this woman, a day job, and the life of a working writer have in common?

I'll tell you.

I work full time, with an hour commute each way. All told, my time is not my own from 6:40 a.m. until 6:00 p.m. 

That's a lot of time that I can't control or do anything with. 

So when I start complaining, it's almost always about not having enough time to write new books and market existing books. I'm deeply, deeply jealous of writer friends who don't work and can spend all day toiling over marketing plans and promoting their books. I can't. And while this feels like a huge disadvantage most days, I'm trying to look on the bright side. 

So I found three ways my day job makes me a better writer.

1. Money. As Dean Koontz wrote in How to Write Best Selling Fiction, "Money is freedom; money is time; money is fame; money is respect; money is a yardstick of many things, but most of all, money is money." I have bills. Lots of them. So devoting 11+ hours a day to being able to pay them is not only necessary, but it helps my mental state remain unstressed and clear for writing. 

If all I'm doing is worrying about the electricity getting shut off or the car repossessed, I'm not going to give a crap about made-up people or worlds. In that respect, having a day job makes my non-office time all about what I want to do. I'm not looking for a job, stressing out, or drifting between friends, hoping someone will feed me for free. Every minute off the clock is spent planning, dreaming, or doing. Yes, you could argue that a true writer writes no matter what. But even true writers really need to eat. Plus, getting foreclosed would make it really hard to charge my laptop. 

2. SEO and social media knowledge. I'm a writer. But I also know a bit about SEO. And a bit about social media. I read most of the big SEO blogs and have two monitors at work, where the good folks of Google+ scroll by all day long, presenting helpful insider tips for me on marketing, social media, writing, self-publishing, and of course, life insurance. I file all that knowledge away in my brain (and, if my brain fails, Evernote) for the day when I have the time to unleash it. 

I wouldn't have been forced to learn as much about social media as I have without this job. I resisted it pretty heavily until my paycheck became partly dependent on it. I still resist it in part...I refuse to get a smartphone (no Instagram for me, folks). At the same time, I have license to check every network there is, absorb as much knowledge as I can, and learn as much as I can to deploy on command and for my own benefit (after hours, of course). I have more weapons at my disposal than I did before I had this job. In this world, marketing is everything. And I'm so much better at it now than I was before, when I thought marketing was posting a new book on this blog.

3. The occasional stranger-than-fiction story that falls in my lap. I write about life insurance, all day every day. To make sure I have something new to say, I have to dig into some pretty weird stories. One weird story involves the woman in the picture, Ruth Brown Snyder. I was writing a blog post about the movie Double Indemnity, where life insurance fraud is a plot point. Come to find out, the movie is based on a novella by James M. Cain, who based the story on a real-life insurance fraud case.

Check this shit out. 

Ruth Brown Snyder was married to Albert Snyder, but having an affair with Henry Judd Gray. She told Gray that she wanted to convince her husband to get a life insurance policy and then kill him. Getting the husband to get a policy worked just fine. But she made seven (count 'em!) unsuccessful attempts to kill Albert before she and Gray decided to try something different. They garrotted Albert and made it look like a home invasion robbery. 

But there's some backstory you also need to know before we proceed. Why did Ruth want to kill Albert? It might have been because he made no secret of his real love, a woman named Jessie Guishard who died before she and Albert could be married. He loved her for years, which, you know, probably made Ruth feel awesome about herself. This guy talked about Jessie, kept her portrait on the wall, named his boat after her, and referred to her as "the finest woman I have ever met." I kinda feel for Ruth on this one. 

Anyway, so the cops are investigating this supposed home invasion gone wrong. They think it's kind of weird that nothing actually went missing. When they found a paper with "J.G." on it, they asked Ruth who "J.G." was. Ruth asks them what Judd Gray (her lover) has to do with anything. But the cops weren't referring to Gray. They were referring to one of Albert's papers with "J.G." on it--Jesse Guishard. So Ruth just handed them her lover's name. (Way to go, Ruth.) Once the cops started looking at the name Ruth dropped, they put two and two together.

Ruth and Gray were arrested, tried, and found guilty of murder. Both were sentenced to death via the electric chair. Of course, all photography of the execution was forbidden. But reporter Tom Howard was from Chicago (not New York) and knew he wouldn't be recognized as a reporter on the scene. He rigged up a weird leg camera that would take pictures without anyone knowing. He snapped his shot, and it was plastered all over the front page of newspapers the next day. The photo was described as one of the most famous images of the 1920s. The camera Howard used to take the shot is now in the Smithsonian.

James M. Cain was a reporter at the time of this trial. He wasn't covering it, but it was big news at the time. (Who did cover it? Mary Roberts Rinehart, D.W. Griffith, and Damon Runyan). When he wrote his novella, Double Indemnity, he interviewed some insurance agents in L.A. One told him,  "All the big crime mysteries in this country are locked up in insurance company files, and the writer that gets wise to that...is going to make himself rich."

Guess I'll keep the day job.
Until the whole money tree thing happens.

So, not only did I find this incredible quote and this wacked-out story, I now have an idea for a short story of my own. And I got it because of my day job. 

Serendipitous, yes? 

The lesson here is that no matter how unrelated your day job seems, if you're a writer, it's feeding your brain. It's feeding your bank account. It's putting ideas and experiences in front of you that you might not have otherwise. Process them, and then use them in the work you want to do.

Billy Joel and High School: One of These Really Needs the Other

I plugged a flash drive into my car's stereo system the other day, and a golden oldie cycled through yesterday:  Billy Joel's "We Didn't Start the Fire."  You guys know this one, right?


It made me wonder...do kids these days even know what the heck this song is talking about?  Studebaker, Rosenbergs, h-bomb?  How many graduating seniors could take the lyrics of this song and present even a rudimentary knowledge of the people or events they're referring to?  I watch segments like Jay Leno's "Jaywalking," where people can't even identify Washington DC on a map, or tell the difference between Washington and Lincoln.  How in the hell is this song going to mean anything to someone who thinks the Gettsyburg Address was delivered during World War II?

Granted, I might not even have been able to parse all the references in this song in my senior year, and I was up to my armpits in AP classes.  But it seems like a killer idea for a history class final or project.  How awesome would it be to hand out lyric sheets to a class and have them learn what actually happened in the last half of the 20th century?

Plus, the song still kicks ass, so you'll always be entertained.  Take a personal challenge and see how many of these places or events you know.