Back to School

Before I get started, welcome new subscribers! I think most of you probably got here from one of my workshops. I love that for you, lol. Please enjoy!

I didn’t mean to take the summer off from newsletter writing. Life just gets flipped upside down sometimes. A stressful day job project, a broken air conditioner, and a close family member who has been in and out of the hospital has all added up to distract me from all but the essential stuff. So I decided that, as a way to kind of get the newsletter ball rolling again, I’d just talk about a bunch of things I thought about this summer. (Now that it’s almost October…)

First, I read this little article about writer’s block. I read somewhere years ago that writer’s block is basically your brain telling you something’s not working, and in my experience, I usually get stuck when either a) the scene I’m working on has a fundamental flaw or b) I’m spinning my wheels instead of helping the story move forward. “Something not working” could be within the story, or it could be in your own mind, so I think it’s worth analyzing why you’re stuck rather than getting mired in being stuck.

(Although sometimes it’s literally just “I want to write but don’t have the energy,” which has been the last month or so for me. Alas.)

Second, I did the full Barbenheimer (albeit over two weekends) this summer, and it made me think about art that breaks the mold. Hollywood will take the wrong lesson from Barbie and try to franchise it, but to me, what made both movies great was their originality. Not gonna lie, I’ve had superhero fatigue for a while, and my interest in these big franchise movies waned a few years ago, but I was back at the theater this summer to see something different for a change. I think that’s probably true of a lot of people. (I was going to write a longer essay on this, and I’ve got tabs open in my browser to various links supporting my thesis that Barbie and Oppenheimer were such big hits because they were different, and not just the same old stuff Hollywood has been serving us for the last decade. Probably other people have made this point better than me, though. I’ve seen discussion online to this end.)

I think this relates back to novel writing, though, because the fiction market is similar. I’ve heard several writer friends bemoan the fact that what’s hot in the market right now is not what they want to write. I’m actually starting to wonder if the era of trade paper “rom coms” is ending soon. Even if you’re not a romance reader, if you’ve been to a bookstore in the last three years or so, you’ve probably seen tables piled high with trade-sized paperbacks with cartoon covers, to the point where they’ve basically pushed out everything else in the romance market. My local Barnes & Noble, for example, doesn’t have a single mass market romance paperback in the romance section anymore. (On the other hand, the romance section at my local library is only mass markets, and those trade paper “rom coms” are shelved with regular fiction. So make of that what you will.) (I keep putting “rom coms” in scare quotes because while most of them are genre romance and thus romantic, not all of them are comedies, but they are branded as such. This is not the books’ fault; I think publishers are over-relying on this cover trend.)

Anyway, my point is, the book market has been flooded with a very specific sort of book for a while (this is probably true in other genres, but romance is what I am most familiar with) just like we’ve been flooded with superhero movies in movie theaters, and it has the effect of making writers think that, if they don’t write the popular thing, they won’t get a contract. But I think Barbeheimer shows that there is an audience for different and, if I’m right that trade paper rom coms are on the downswing—mostly a gut feeling, although I’ve seen some evidence that I don’t want to get into here—there’s an audience for your oddball idea. I hope that publishers start diversifying the romance shelves again to be less samey, but I guess we’ll see. (I don’t mind the cartoon covers—I know some readers aren’t fans—it’s really the homogeneity of the books I’ve picked up recently that bugs me. With some exceptions, nearly every recent romance I’ve picked up in the last six months has been written in first person present and has been vaguely funny, with a lot of the humor coming from putting the characters in absurd situations. And I had to stop reading historicals because the last couple I read were very paint by number. I used to love this genre, but every book I pick up recently feels like something I’ve read a dozen of already.) So I think it would be great to see something new and different in genre fiction, just saying. And maybe now’s the time for it.

Third, the other thing I was working on a full essay about before I kind of ran out of steam was this PEN America report about online backlash to books. The entire article is long but definitely worth your time. A lot of my thoughts on what’s been going on are reflected in the article. (It’s a whole litany of things. Review bombings on Goodreads, which sometimes lead to authors/publishers pulling books before they’re published, are just the tip of the iceberg.) And the point is not that problematic books should be allowed to be published and sold if they are truly problematic, but that some online backlash does not reflect the actual content of the books being attacked. Probably it’s more worth your time to read the PEN America report than to read me drone on about my opinions on it, though.

Next, I think the further fracturing of social media communities recently is going to make it hard to market books from now on. I don’t really have much more to say on that, it’s just been on my mind. There seem to be fewer low-cost ways for indie authors especially to market books, and I don’t know how that will affect the market yet.

And, it was announced this week that the WGA strike is coming to an end. I haven’t seen the deal they made yet, but it sounds like they got some concessions regarding the use of AI. I’ve probably said this here before; my concern with AI is less that the machines will come to life and kill us all and more that media companies will use it as an excuse to replace humans with computers and/or pay humans less for their creative output. We as a society already undervalue creative work, and I think AI will make it worse. (I also think the generative AI programs are getting dumber? I noodled around with ChatGPT some this summer, and I feel like its output has gotten worse. Can it write a B+ college essay for you? Sure. Do we want it writing novels or movie scripts? Not really, unless we enjoy mediocrity, which I do not.) But I suspect that a lot of the programmers and tech bros working on AI don’t understand that the human component of a lot of creative writing is the true key to making it engaging and enjoyable.

Last few things:

• I think some of my new subscribers got here via the webinar I did for Savvy Authors Con on Turning Your Idea Into a Novel. I’m teaching an expanded version of this class (with a focus on prewriting and planning to write a novel, just in time for NaNoWriMo!). Sign up here!

• If you’re new here, you may not know of my deep appreciation for the ooey gooey cheese of a Hallmark romance movie. Hallmark just aired a house swapping romance that I thought was pretty solid; you can read my recap here.

• I’m gearing up to self-publish a novella by the end of the year, but more about that in a future newsletter!