Category: Marketing

General Writing, Marketing, Reviews and Analysis

How I Learned to Love Series

Bruce Byfield

Shamefacedly, I have to admit: I’m now writing a trilogy. And to make matters worse, I feel pretty good about it.

It wasn’t always that way. For much of my life, I’ve looked down on trilogies. Tolkien may have needed to divide The Lord of the Rings into three books in order to be published, but that was something imposed on him, not something he planned. Those who have come after him usually don’t have the same excuse. As a result, trilogies have come to mean one book’s worth of material stretched over three, with a sagging second book that should be hurried over as quickly as possible to get to the better stuff. To me, trilogies were a sign of flabby writing and imagination.

As for series — well, I’d say don’t get me started, but I’m already on the backstretch. While I’ve read series, too often they seemed to me to be shameless catering to readers’ demands for more of the same. Nothing a serious writer (sniff!) would consider. Something always died in me when I heard aspiring writers cheerfully planning a twelve book series. “Why are you planning to be a hack?” I always wanted to ask.

Weighed down by these prejudices, when I became serious about writing fantasy, I resolved to only write single books. The trouble was, my current work in progress kept bolting and trying to become a duology. No, a trilogy. No, a series. Two-thirds of the way through and worried about length, I finally admitted the obvious: there were three sharply defined arcs in the tales, and I would have a far better chance of publication if I placed them in separate, shorter volumes.

I take comfort in the fact that in the marketplace, if not necessarily the canon, I am following in the footsteps of Tolkien. The only difference is that I am doing so before being asked. These days, that’s the likeliest way of getting agents or publishers to even consider me.

More importantly, I have to admit that a trilogy or a series does not condemn me to literary mediocrity. Plenty of respectable writers do series. Lois McMaster Bujold, for example, has kept her Miles Vorkosigan saga fresh for over twenty books. She does so by making each book independent of the others except for the same background and many of the characters. Mostly, they center on her hero Miles at a different stage in his life. More recently, though, the series have centered on Miles’ cousin, mother, and wife. And throughout, books have borrowed from genres ranging from space opera to mysteries and romantic comedies. Similarly, her forays into fantasy like the Curse of Chalion, The Paladin of Souls, and her Penric novellas share little more than their background. With tactics like these, Bujold manages to keep the individual books in her series fresh. They benefit from the shared background, but stand on their own.

More recently, I have come across Daniel Abraham’s five volume series, The Dagger and the Coin. According to my former attitudes, this work should be twice-damned, because it is not only a series, but one with multiple points of views — a choice many writers have followed down the path to disaster. However, Abraham manages to pull off these challenging choices, largely because of his unusual characters. Ensnared by genre tropes, how many other writers would make one character a young girl learning the intricacies of banking, of all things? Or an utterly conventional noble woman forced to struggle for her family’s and country’s survival? Or a villain who is a lonely introvert out to revenge himself for bullying, who cares for his young ward? Each of his leads is so strongly motivated that arc could be a novel in itself, and the fact that most books in the series have a minimal resolution hardly matters. Like Tolkien, the books are really one novel, and kept me too busy hurrying on to the next one to exercise my prejudices.

As I should have known, the problem was never with series in themselves. It was with mediocre writers, mindlessly following conventions. If there are any limitations to trilogies or series, strong writing and originality can overcome them.

So, yeah, I’m writing a trilogy. Want to make something of it?

Diversity, General Writing, Marketing, Publishing, Uncategorized

Lies Writers Tell Themselves: Forced Diversity

thelocaldialect

When it comes to diversity, there’s a lot of misinformation floating around in writerly circles. Much of this misinformation takes the form of reactionary strawmen, creating scenarios that make victims out of the (usually white) writers who are resistant to recent changes in the publishing industry and thus the status quo. These writers feel threatened by an increased awareness of the need for diversity.

One of the biggest strawmen is the idea of so-called “forced diversity,” the idea that publishers now refuse to publish manuscripts that are not sufficiently diverse, that editors are asking writers to re-write manuscripts to change the race or sexuality of a character, that agents who specifically request diverse or #ownvoices stories are rejecting everything else. When this argument comes up, righteous indignation usually follows, with grumblings about the author’s artistic vision, censorship, and lots of “how dare they tell me what to write.” Hand-wringing about cancel culture and the perils of being a white writer are usually not far behind, the sense of being “damned if you do and damned if you don’t,” being a major theme.

Here is something that is a fact: for as long as the publishing industry has existed, it has been dominated by white voices. While there have been amazing books written by marginalized voices over the years, publishing itself is a an industry that is predominated by upper middle class white people. A 2015 Publishers Weekly study showed that the industry itself is 79% white, and the editorial departments were 82% white. With publishing so overwhelmingly white, it is hard to take any claims of white victimhood particularly seriously. A look at the current New York Times bestseller list reveals 9 out of 10 books on the adult fiction book list were written by white authors and feature white protagonists. Does it really look like diversity is being forced upon authors who have no interest in writing diversity? Hardly. The idea that the white author is somehow at a disadvantage seems more a case of sour grapes, a ready-made excuse for the endless stream of rejection letters, than any reflection of the actual state of the publishing industry.

That all said, it is true that there has been some effort on behalf of publishing to become more diverse. Agents frequently include diverse books and the #ownvoices hashtag in their wish-lists. Certain segments of the industry are more diverse than others — YA, for instance, on the same New York Times Bestseller list, had 7 out of 10 white authors on the list, and of those there were stories featuring other types of marginalization — namely sexuality and disability. Still though, white authors are in no danger of being pushed aside, still occupying a full 70% of the bestseller list.

The argument about non-marginalized writers being forced to alter their vision to suit the demands of diversity crazy editors and agents also fails to hold up to any close scrutiny. Although this little bit of urban myth seems to get passed around writer circles, I’ve heard no first-hand accounts of an author directly being told “we’ll publish your book if you make the main character Black” or “I’ll accept you as a client if you make the romance gay.” What seems more likely is that authors have heard, perhaps from beta-readers, perhaps from critique partners, and perhaps even from agents, that their book lacks diversity and might be improved if more diversity was added. This isn’t forced diversity, this is a suggestion for improvement.

It has always amused me that artistic integrity and the sacred vision of the author suddenly becomes so much more important when suggestions are made about diversity than anything else. If an editor suggests that a character is unrealistic as portrayed, and that perhaps the author might give that character a different job, or a different socio-economic background, most writers will not take offense. But suggest that a character should be another race or a different sexual orientation (because after all, diversity adds realism to our fictional worlds, reflecting the world in which we live), and authors suddenly are very concerned about their artistic integrity. The former, it seems, is an acceptable example of the editor giving corrections, whereas the latter is an example of an editor trying to control the author.

Authors, understand this: if someone suggests your book would be improved by the addition of diversity, they are not trying to challenge your authorial vision. They’re not trying to force diversity on you. The person who suggests this — beta reader, critique partner, editor, agent — is telling you that your work does not reflect the world we live in. In the real world, people are not all white, all heterosexual, all cis-gendered. In real life, there’s a guy with a wheelchair buying cereal at the supermarket, there’s a woman wearing a hijab working at the bank, there’s a teacher named Chang at your high school and lesbian couple dropping their son off at daycare. For too long publishing has reflected a warped vision of the real world, and if now it seeks to self-correct, this is not an attack on the non-marginalized writer, but a long overdue chance for the industry to ensure that all readers will see themselves reflected in the books they read.

Because at the heart of the matter is this — diversity and representation matters, and it matters more than the hurt feelings or the righteous indignation of non-marginalized writers, and not just for lofty reasons either. Publishing is, first and foremost, a business, and marginalized individuals are customers too. At the end of the day, the writer may indeed write according to their own “artistic vision” but the publisher too will purchase what sells. If diversity, right now, is selling, then it is a reflection of a demand on the part of a significant segment of the population to see themselves represented in what they read.

If diversity is forced, then it is forced by the readers themselves, and ultimately, publishing is an industry that serves the needs of the reader, rather than the ego of the writer.