TECH: 101 Tips (39)

[mbarker.livejournal.com]

Original posting 23 July 2009

Writers' Digest, October 2004, pages 26 to 33, has a collection of short "nuggets of wisdom" related to getting published. Maria Schneider is the author of the compilation. Take a deep breath, and here we go:

"Today's time-starved, MTV-ized USA Today readers don't have the patience for the kind of polite strolling about the subject that Victorian authors indulged in. They want their stories straight up, fast and furious, with no throat-clearing. That means if you're writing a book about a homicide, get the bullet out of the gun on the first page. If you're promising to improve readers' sex lives, get between the sheets in the opening sentence." David A. Fryxell

What's funny about this is that we also seem to have more bricks being produced -- thick tomes of several hundred pages. And series that run on and on and on. So we've got this demand for fast intense action, potboilers and thrillers that never slow down, and the epic novels that never seem to stop. It's an odd juxtaposition. And I'm not sure that it's real, either. Certainly browsers often pick up a book and look at the very beginning to decide whether or not to buy it, but once they buy it, they want enough story -- a thin book isn't going to make them happy. So make sure that the book starts fast, but also that there is enough there to make the readers happy?