How NOT to publish a book: A nightmare in cover design

By Ad Hudler

My first novel, Househusband, was about a guy who decides to stay home to take care of his daughter (yeah, that's me), and he does it really well ... out-cooking, out-cleaning and out-parenting all the moms in the neighborhood. Well, the sequel and my most recent novel, Man of the House, is about this same guy, named Linc Menner, who after 15 years of doing the mom thing rebels in a huge way and goes on a tear to reclaim his inner male. (yeah, that's me, and yeah, it's a comedy. It's also the Pulpwood Queens' official pick for July)

So you can imagine how surprised I was when I got this for the book cover of Man of the House.




Ad to Editor: Okay, this is ALL WRONG! The book is about Linc Menner NOT doing the laundry anymore; it's about Linc Menner learning how to shoot guns and use a hammer drill. And I said, 'GUY', not 'GAY!' And what's with all the perfectly-folded pastel-colored clothes? No! They should be a MESS! Didn't the editors at Big New York Publishing House even read this book!? (Disclaimer: There has been huge turnover in publishing lately, and Man of the House has actually had four different editors...which means the editor who bought it left long ago, and the book got dumped on some other poor, overworked soul.)
So they tried it again, and came up with this:


Ad: WTF!? Linc is working construction now. This guy's hands haven't seen sunshine or dirt in their lives! And look at the typeface: It looks like it should say "Breakfast at Tiffany's," not "Man of the House."
So they tried again and came up with this:


Okay, SOME improvement here. At least this guy has hair on his legs, which they actually photoshopped in because I said he still looked too androgynous. But where are the tools? Where are the man toys? I finally talked with a senior-level editor, who asked me what I wanted. I told her: Toolbox. Darker, bolder, boy-like colors. "Oh, hell, just photo-shop a hammer hanging over the edge of the laundry basket." And they came up with this:





But the FONT, I whined. Look at that curly font. What's that all about? Why do you insist on making this look like marketing materials for a day spa? And, finally, after several weeks of Ad Torture, the art director finally agreed to change to this:



So that's what we have, folks. Not a perfect cover by any means, and it still really doesn't portray the content of the book, but it's better than what we started with. You can tell that they also punched up the palette a bit; the colors are bolder. And, I may be mistaken here, but I think they put more hair on his legs. (Ain't digital manipulation grand?) And I have to admit that I do like the Clint Eastwood-inspired line they added in the upper left-hand corner: "Go ahead, make my bed."

So ... as writers we do get a say in the covers ... but we have to choose our battles carefully.
Until next time, catch me on facebook or twitter or at my blog at AdHudler.com. Have a great summer. Enjoy your kids and the nice weather.
-Ad

Q and A with Minrose Gwin, Author Of The Queen of Palmyra

An atmospheric debut novel about growing up in the changing South in 1960s Mississippi in the tradition of Sue Monk Kidd’s The Secret Life of Bees and Kathryn Stockett’s The Help. In the words of Jill McCorkle (Going Away Shoes), “Minrose Gwin is an extremely gifted writer and The Queen of Palmyra is a brilliant and compelling novel.”

What's the backstory behind THE QUEEN OF PALMYRA?


The original title for the novel was "What I Didn't See," and my impetus for writing it was to explore how certain forms of blindness or not-knowing can occur when the stories people may have in their heads don't line up with what's right in front of them. Back in the civil rights period and before, there were so many people who saw and knew that bad things were happening, but they didn't act as witnesses at the time. Some came forward many years later, but the trials and punishments that resulted at those late dates were meager compared to what they should have been. Anyhow, I’ve always been concerned about this kind of blindness, and i wanted to write about it--how does it happen and why? So it wasn't any one story, but several.

You have an extensive writing background but the Queen of Palmyra is a debut novel for you. What did you find most challenging in the writing of it?


Driving the plot forward. I'm prone to focus my attention on language and character development, but with a novel you have to make things happen. some days I'd find myself ceaselessly rewriting to polish the prose when what I should have been doing was getting my people from one point to the next.



How do you approach novel writing? Organically or do you outline?

I began this novel with a picture in my head: a terrified girl in the back seat of an old car, her father driving, then stopping, then doing what Win Forrest does. The girl seeing but not seeing, knowing but not knowing. I thought I knew where the novel might go, but quickly realized it wasn't going there, so I let it take its own course. what I've found in writing this, and my memoir too, is that if I try to control the action and the characters too tightly, the story becomes old and tired rather quickly. I need to keep myself interested to keep writing.

Who are you literary influences?

I read a lot of fiction and teach a lot of fiction, so I have many favorites--Toni Morrison, Marilynne Robinson, Mark Doty, Michael Cunningham, Jill Mccorkle, Lee Smith, not to speak of Faulkner and Welty. Voice is of utmost importance to me, and these are all writers with a strong sense of voice.

What is one of your favorite sentences in the novel?

I like the first sentence quite a bit: "I need you to understand how ordinary it all was."

A lot of aspiring writers read this blog. What was you path to publication?


I first published my memoir, WISHING FOR SNOW, about my mother's mental illness and my miserable job of taking care of her, with a university press that has a strong stake in creative writing, and that got me a toehold into the publishing world. I'm really grateful to LSU press for taking a chance on me. Then, through a very generous writer friend, I got a wonderful agent to read my manuscript, and the rest fell into place at Harper Collins with an incredible editor there. I did major revisions each step of the way. It was arduous and took some time. I'm lucky and grateful.

Minrose Gwin is the author of the memoir Wishing for Snow, cited by Booklist as "eloquent" and "lyrical"—"a real life story we all need to hear." She has written three scholarly books and coedited The Literature of the American South. She teaches contemporary fiction at UNC–Chapel Hill and, like her young protagonist, grew up in a small Mississippi town

All those piano lessons finally pay off

About now, I wish I had a really good roadmap for working on my next novel. No matter what I tell my students, my fellow writers, every novel is different. There is no map. For me, much of the writing process has to be reinvented along with the plot and everything else. If there is one comfort to me, it is that I pretty much know where to begin—and that is with a character, one that lives and breathes, in my mind and (on a good day) on the page.


I know that many writers say that they don’t use people they know as characters in their fiction. Well, I will admit that I almost always draw from life—my aunt’s way of sipping tea, my volleyball coach’s frown, my husband’s snore—bits and pieces, mostly. As I hunt for my characters, I am most attracted to people I have known in passing, rather than my intimates. I need to know just enough about a person—too much and the facts get in the way, too little and there is not enough there to hang my hat on. The main character of my first novel, Wilma Mabry, is a good example. She was inspired by a piano teacher that I had as a child. We called her Miss Wilma, and yes, I borrowed her first name for my book, may she rest in peace. Miss Wilma was a fixture in our town--one of those strict, steely-eyed teachers who can strike terror in the heart of any child (or grown-up, for that matter). I was a terrible piano student, and I was scared to death of the woman. Miss Wilma's best student, James (I've forgotten his real name), had the lesson time just before mine on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons. James was a wonderful pianist, and on some days, I could put aside my terror and simply enjoy his playing. I noticed over the course of the year that James was preparing to go to college as a music major and perhaps for that reason, Miss Wilma was as mean (if not meaner) to him than she was to me.

Years later when I decided to write a little character sketch of Miss Wilma, I remembered a particular lesson time in the spring—just before James was to go for his music scholarship audition. On this day, the day when Miss Wilma was having the young man do his final run-through, I arrived at my lesson to find that Miss Wilma was entirely transformed. There was not one ounce of meanness in her. She was completely in a dither—her eyes fluttering—she seemed to alternate between girlish excitement and nervous mothering. James had his family's old, old, station wagon parked out front and Miss Wilma kept asking him, "Do you have enough gas? Do you have money? Oh, do you have your sheet music?" Understand—I was ten, maybe eleven at the time, but there was something about that moment that seemed important to me. I was seeing something rare and unknown in this person whom I thought I knew through and through.

For whatever reason, it was this powerful memory that came to me when I began to write the first scene about Miss Wilma. In about an hour, I wrote three short pages that were the beginning of my novel. Of course, by the time I got to the bottom of the first page, the Miss Wilma I was writing about was not the real Miss Wilma, but someone else altogether, a character with a life, a history, a personality all her own. However, Miss Wilma Mabry -- the life of the character -- was born in the memory of that particular moment and somehow propelled forward by it. The scene itself—those first three pages—survive in the novel (much revised, of course) as the beginning of Chapter 2, which begins exactly as I began that first sketch: "Of all Miss Wilma's students, James Moody was the prize…"

Everything in The Piano Teacher grew from that first scene: the other characters, their relationships with Miss Wilma, the town of Swan's Knob, and even the plot. All of these things were really a function of Miss Wilma's character, an outgrowth of it. It’s hard to remember exactly how I came to transform Miss Wilma from the buttoned-up piano teacher worried even about the marks she's made on her students' sheet music into the woman, who in the end of my novel, subdues a murderer with a kick of her Aigner pump.

During the time I was writing the book and to this day, I think of her mostly as a real person—in much the way you might think of a beloved aunt who has long ago passed away. You can no longer actually touch her, have a conversation together, but you can fully imagine a conversation with her about any topic, you can remember exactly her touch, and she is bound visit you in your dreams, as Miss Wilma did. Shortly after I finished the book, she appeared in a dream and lectured me about the state of my wardrobe. Then she marched me down to the local department store and bought me a dress.

Lynn York is the author of The Piano Teacher (2004) and The Sweet Life (2007). She lives in Chapel Hill, NC. Her website is www.lynnyork.com.

BRING YOUR CHARACTERS TO LIFE by Jackie Lee Miles

I attended this workshop on characters and learned the most amazing things. The first thing I was told is that the center of your character lies in their ability to care about something. This will make your reader care.



Example: Assume that Joanna Mott is married, insecure about her looks and her identity, and is devastated by her discovery that her husband is having an affair with their attractive single next-door neighbor, Felicity. As a reader you know that Joanna has abandonment issues from childhood, though presently she doesn’t even know the word exists. She simply feels unattractive. You know from the narrative that she was left in the care of her aunt as a child and grew up with her female cousin, Miss Alabama.



Now you have the makings of a sympathetic character with an element about which she truly cares. You’ve made her a wife who feels extremely unattractive with rational insecurities who desire more than anything to keep her marriage intact. You’ve assigned a caring element to the character and thus have committed her to a stance by which she will live.



This is the character’s dominant dynamic. You can now write with more assurance that you know where you are going. The character who cares passionately about something, and is willing to make a stand because of it, is worth bothering with.



Alfred Hitchcock said it best:



“First you decide what the characters are determined to do, and then you provide them with enough characteristics to make it plausible that they will do it.”



Then ask yourself what makes them tick. Here you are free to be creative, so long as it’s plausible, for no one ever knows undisputedly what causes people to behave the way they do. Why does the rich housewife steal? Was she poor as a child or is it the thrill of pursuit when she gets away with it?



Next remember that character is always linked to contest. Scarlett is nothing unchallenged by the Civil War. What are Romeo and Juliet without the feud between the Montagues and the Capulets? “To Kill a Mockingbird” is left adrift without the prejudices of the south coupled with the fragile innocence of Boo Radley.



Another good thing to do is tag your characters. Give them names that distinguish them, names that evoke images and feelings in the reader’s mind before the characters even begin their journey with the reader. Assign them characteristics that make them stand out. In the story above regarding Joanna, she has arms as long as a monkey’s attached to hands as small as an infants. As a child she was known to swing from anything that dangled, causing her aunt to fret that her limbs would get even longer. Now fully grown, she tucks them one across the other, anxious for others not to notice. Regardless of her efforts, they notice.



Add contradictions. Play against the norm. Surprise the reader, especially with the villain. Give them human qualities. If the antagonist is after the protagonist’s husband, craft a scene where the antagonist is wounded when she is put down in public by her mother, who favors the younger brother and sister. The antagonist may be an evil, conniving husband stealer, but this scene will show she’s also very human.



Next, give your reader some idea of how your character looks, but allow enough room for them to use their imaginations. Use tags. Scarlett’s main of hair is a tag. Auntie Mame’s cigarette holder is a tag. Kojak’s lollipop is a tag. The list goes on. Get creative. Instead of your character having a cat, how about a miniature pet pig she takes for walks on a leash?



Years ago when I was selling insurance, a client had two of them. They climbed under the table where we sat and tried to eat my shoes.



After this, you will have to identify your characters abilities, speech, mannerisms, and attitudes. Only then is your character fully-fleshed. Once you’ve done that, simply give your character something to do. Put him in a tight spot. Craft that which your character wants more than anything and send him on his journey in pursuit of it, with plenty of obstacles in his way.



When you design a sympathetic, flawed character, you have the first element of a story. When you construct that which is important to him and why, you have the inner essential of a story. And when you take that flawed character with his specific passions and rationalized behaviors and place him on a path to discovery and change, you have the makings of a story worth reading.



And always remember the core of your character lies in his actions. If Joanna, in my example above, is terrified of being abandoned and swears she will do anything to keep her husband from leaving her and does, think how effective it will be when she finds she can not only let go and move on, but triumphs because of it.



This is the essence of characters we can’t forget. They have human fears, human desires and the ability to rise above their circumstances, to conquer, and to change. These are the characters we can’t get enough of.



The teacher who spoke to me of what makes a good character left me feeling I could indeed create memorable characters. I just had to follow the rules. I can do that. I know you can, too. When you are working on your next novel, may you be blessed when creating your characters. May you find the right words to bring them to life. May you dazzle your reader with their antics. And may they forever leap off the page.



Amen.



Jackie Lee Miles is the author of Roseflower Creek, Cold Rock River, Divorcing Dwayne and All That’s True (to be released January 2011). Visit the website at http://www.jlmiles.com. Write to the author at Jackie@jlmiles.com.

On the Road (with my parents on a cross-country trip) and characters by Kerry Madden

Characters and road trip and stories...
I am on a cross country road trip with my parents. They flew into Birmingham yesterday where I've been living/commuting since August, teaching creative writing at UAB (University of Alabama at Birmingham). We are now making our slow way back across the country to California where I'll rejoin my husband and youngest child, Norah, and I can't wait to be home again with them. (Our older two are in college, and they will be returning home this summer - I miss them horribly too.) I'm writing this on a "Comfort Inn" computer in a noisy lobby (no wireless in the rooms) in Monroe, Louisiana.

Driving through Alabama and Mississippi today, I learned that my father, a former college and professional football coach, gave my mother a 3-wood golf club for an engagement present back in 1960.

My mother, a young school teacher in Florida, said, "What am I supposed to do with this?"

She did not play golf, and he taught her to swing at the tee to develop her swing.
She eventually liked the idea of learning to play, but after having kids (they had four) she did not like the idea of  paying a babysitter for 5-6 hours for 18 holes of golf, even though back then babysitters only charged fifty cents an hour. (Football coaches in the late 1960s made $12,000 a year.)

We also belonged to the country club in Ames, Iowa when my dad coached at Iowa State, which charged a $15.00 a month minimum. Mother would say to us, "Kids, go get cleaned up and presentable! We have to eat up our minimum!" She said we never failed to trash the place, and I do remember punching my brother for stealing a maraschino cherry out of my sparkling Shirley Temple.

* * *

But as we drove through Mississippi today, Dad recalled his first job as a graduate assistant at Mississippi State in Starkville. Mother remembered turning on the television in Starkville and hearing a politician say, "Vote for me! Soggy Sweat! Don't forget. Soggy Sweat!"

She said to Dad, "Where in the world have we landed?"

As a young mother, she went to visit her parents in Illinois and boarded a train in Jackson, Mississippi where Dad tipped a porter to keep the bottles of baby milk cold in the train's refrigerator.

My father asked Bear Bryant for a job in 1962. Coach Bryant wrote him back and said, "I only hire players I've coached." Not to be deterred, by father stopped by the football office in Tuscaloosa with a baby, my mother, and his in-laws to show Coach Bryant what he had missed by not hiring him (the family was on the way to Starkville).

But Coach Bryant wasn't in the office as it was June.

Dad told the secretary, "Tell him Joe Madden stopped by."

He didn't hear from Coach Bryant.

* * *

The last road trip I took with my parents was in 1983 when I was an exchange student at Manchester University in England. I took them to through England, Scotland, and Ireland. I made them go see a Harold Pinter play in London, and after it was over, Dad stood up and announced to all in earshot, "Folks, I have seen my first AND LAST Pinter play." (He had wanted to see something called RUN FOR YOUR WIFE.)

I was deeply mortified.

Dad also had rule for the road in the UK: three pubs to one museum.

Later, I showed them the Bronte Parsonage and tried to teach them about Emily, Anne, and Charlotte Bronte. I showed them the Lake District, and St. Andrews. I made Mom read MIDDLEMARCH. I took them to meet the McLaughlins (the Big Mickeys) in Donegal, our Irish relatives whom I had found on an earlier trip. In that tiny sitting room in Malin Head, Ireland, Dad tried to balance hot tea and crumbly Irish soda bread on his lap and keep up with the conversation and thick accents among his Irish relatives. Kitty, an "aunt" with yellowed cigarette fingers said to him, "I think you're not liking it much here, Joe Madden."

It was the first time I recall my father looking like a young boy and getting caught.

It was also during that trip that I informed my parents that they were "bourgeois capitalists," and Dad, who was drinking a pint of lager in a pub, said, "You're damn right!"

* * *

Cut to 2010, and I feel really lucky to get to take another road trip with my parents. We stopped in Vicksburg, Mississippi to watch the kids play in the fountain in a park called Catfish Row. (I'll add pictures to this post later.) Now it's Monroe, and tomorrow it's Texas...we're going to take our time getting through Texas...

There will be more characters and stories to find along the way...

Kerry Madden is the author of OFFSIDES, WRITING SMARTS, GENTLE'S HOLLER, LOUISIANA'S SONG, JESSIE'S MOUNTAIN and most recently, UP CLOSE HARPER LEE, Viking. www.kerrymadden.com

CRAFTING CHARACTERS By: Mary Alice Monroe

We all come across some unforgettable characters from time to time. Some may reside in your own family, while others live in the pages of your favorite books. Here are some of my all-time favorite fictional characters:

     Peter Pan (The Adventures of Peter Pan) Who doesn’t love that clever, adorable boy who won’t grow up? 

     Atticus (To Kill a Mockingbird) The father all of us wished we had, the father men aspire to be. (in fact, my daddy was a lot like Atticus.)

     Pilot-Major John Blackthorne (Shogun) A fabulous, well rounded character—plenty of flaws and yet noble. He embodied the misconceptions between East and West that continued for hundreds of years.

     Pip (Great Expectations) Such heart!

     Penelope (The Shell Seekers) A fully realized character that reveals the culture and sensitivities of the WWII “Greatest Generation” of women and the tremendous post war cultural changes.

Each of these characters was flawed, yet each pursued a journey discovering the depth of their strengths and virtues. 

I like to think that crafting characters is like painting. You start with a rough sketch: what they look like, their habits, strengths and flaws. I add a bit of color with tags, speech style, and quirky habits. I add motivations and conflict. As I write the novel, the characters are fleshed out. Like an artist with an oil painting, layers are added for depth and clarity until the portrait is fully realized.

Do not grow frustrated if a character seems to be lacking in the early process of your writing. Remember, no artist presents a masterpiece with just a pencil sketch. You must add layers of brush strokes and various colors before the painting is complete.

My painting, so to speak, is nearing completion. I hope these latest characters make a lasting impression!

Mary Alice Monroe has a new book, The Butterfly’s Daughter, due out May 2011. For more information about the author and her work, visit www.maryalicemonroe.com. You can also follow Mary Alice on Facebook and Twitter.

Characters I Have Known

Can you read a person like a book? A character that saunters into your path where suddenly your head snaps up and a part of you comes to attention? I know that feeling. It can happen in what we might call the natural world or in those so many of us live in as we create novels of all genres.

Characters have a certain way of speaking, of cracking a line, of giving the eye that causes us to lean in a little closer and listen to the story that is about to be told. 

Recently when author friend Shellie Rushing Tomlinson and yours truly hit the road in search of story we discovered one at every turn. We also encountered a few characters along the way. One of the most memorable being the one and only Mr. Jack Reed of Tupelo's well known Reed's Gumtree Books. He decided to pull up a chair and captivate us with some true tales of the business, of the things his seen come and gone, and how staying young at heart and having hero's is real important to living a good, long life. 

I think if we hadn't had another book event in Nashville we would still be there, trying to get just one more antidote out of the man that was full of them. Overflowing he was. But here's the thing. Shellie and I were both ready to talk about ourselves, our radio shows, to interview other customers, and, yes, even each other but when Mr. Reed walked in it was all over. And we both knew it, too. 

Here's why. 

When a character comes calling you have to have your listening ears on. Pricked up high. So that suddenly a bonifide whistler of a man comes waltzing through the back door of your mind, you have to just decide whatever that other thing was - it can wait. That blind snake milker living down in those swamps - oh, yes, there's a story there that woman longs to tell. That old woman rocking and reminising. That baggy man shuffling his shoes in the dirt of wasted dreams. Here's the deal American Idol will be there next week. That list of things to do to get published - one more day. All those unopened bills, well - if your staring down cutoff day - give it an hour. And give that character their due while their willing to talk. Just like we did Mr. Reed.  

Because the fact is -

We don't know when that opportunity will roll its way around again if ever. I've lost a few good characters in my life. Some to the wicked wracked out strange tragidies. Some with faces so young they are now immortal. Some just to the ever moving hands of time. I never felt as though I had captured any of them, spent enough time with them, listened to enough of their stories. 

I feel the same way about the characters who have been knocking on my door, well, now nigh for a decade. One with a foot stomping impatience waiting for her story to be told. And yet, I've been writing and living and running and puttering - in other words living this big old, wonderful, messy life. But - those characters - they tell me time is not waiting for me to set aside my precious hours in neat packages to listen to them. 

No more than real folks do in this real, natural world of hours. Babies don't want for us to slow down before they grow up, lovers don't wait for us to make time for one more dance, grandparents don't wait to tell us one more story before they go. 

It's up to us. Purveyors of characters such as we are. Storytellers, story seekers, greedy story grabbers one and all. 

Here's to all the wild, wooly, wonderful characters in this life and from beyond the page who dare to  inhabit our worlds and in the process give us half a fighting chance to capture a moment of their light. 

River Jordan is a Storyteller. She lives in Nashville with her husband and their big, white, lap dog where she also produces a weekly radio program on Radio Free Nashville 107.1fm.  She is captivated by the new book cover of The Miracle of Mercy Land (Random House/Waterbrook) due out September 7, 2010. For more information on the author, her work, and the radio program visit http://www.riverjordan.us