Yesterday I went to BEA (Book Expo America) for the first time and it was great!  Aside from visiting the various booths and meeting a few authors, I was also on a mission: to represent Verbal Pyrotechnics and scout out new and exciting teen books and authors.

What is Verbal Pyrotechnics?

*Drum roll, please*

Verbal Pyrotechnics is an e-zine dedicated to showcasing great teen literature both from emerging and established authors. We’ll be open for submissions starting in July and we’ll have our official website up soon.  In the meantime, check out our blog for more information.

Some time ago, I took a fabulous workshop where the teacher talked about the ABC’s of plot.  She broke it down like this:

A is for Action:  Start your story with some sort of action to get your readers hooked.
B is for Background:  Give your readers the info they need to understand what’s going on.
C is for Conflict:  What’s at stake for your characters?  What’s the conflict?
D is for Development:  This is where you develop the story and build up toward your ending.
E is for Ending:  Which consists of the 3 C’s:

Crisis — the events leading up to the climax
Climax — the big showdown
Consequences — the denouement, or how things tie together

Lately my writing group has been grappling with this idea of the pitch.  Some of us need to come up with a pitch for conference purposes, others just need a Cocktail Party Pitch so they have a soundbite ready for when friends or family ask the inevitable: “So what’s that novel of yours about?”

Which brings us to the heart of this post.  I believe that writing a pitch for your book isn’t all that different from the plot formula above.  I would make only one change: instead of 3 C’s, I think a good pitch has only one C… a Cliffhanger.

Let’s try out this formula on my all-time favorite book: Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen.

When a rich gentleman, Mr. Bingly, moves into the neighborhood Elizabeth Bennet’s mother is determined that he must marry one of her daughters, and does everything she can to introduce her daughters to him. (A)  While Elizabeth knows that if she and her sisters do not marry they risk living a life of poverty, she is humiliated by her mother’s antics. (B)  To everyone’s delight, Mr. Bingly appears to take an interest in Jane, Elizabeth’s older sister, but his meddling sisters and proud and reticent friend, Mr. Darcy, do everything they can to keep Mr. Bingly from proposing to Jane.  As Elizabeth is thrown into the same circles as Mr. Darcy, she takes every opportunity to find fault with him (C).  Over time, though, Elizabeth sees Mr. Darcy in different contexts and her opinion of him begins to change.  Just when she thinks she may have feelings for him, a shameful event strikes her family.  Mr. Darcy leaves suddenly and Elizabeth assumes that her family scandal is the cause (D).  Will Elizabeth’s family recover from this dishonor and will she and Mr. Darcy end up together? (E)

A Few Notes:
For each letter we have one sentence, forcing the summary to stay short and sweet.  The exceptions, of course, are C and D because they are a little more complex and require a little more information; but even in those sections, we don’t get more than 2-3 sentences tops.

Notice also that the primary focus of the pitch is on Lizzy and Darcy.  Jane is the only other sister mentioned, and only in passing.  While the Lydia and Wickham do play a significant role in the novel, their subplot is only described in vague terms and their names are never mentioned.  The focus stays on how the scandal affects the Lizzy-Darcy relationship.

The Results:
In this exercise, we get to the heart of the story, stripping away all side-plots or tangents.  Those familiar with Pride and Prejudice might ask: Where’s Mr. Collins?  What about Lady Catherine?  And why don’t we see more of Elizabeth’s sisters?  The answer is that these characters and story threads, though interesting, are not the main focus of the story.

When you have only a handful of sentences to capture the essence of your novel, you need to stick to the central plot.  This can be especially difficult in novels with intricate plots or many subplots (try doing this exercise on George Eliot’s Middlemarch and you’re likely to give yourself a migraine).  It’s equally challenging to write a pitch for a novel that is very character-driven and where plot is sparse.  In that case, I think your best bet is to think of character-development as being the protagonist’s inner journey.

While this approach may seem a bit formulaic, it is a good starting point and can lead to a strong pitch after some revision.

With me, reading works a lot like a NetFlix queue.  There’s always three or so books at the top, which are the books currently in progress or up next.  These usually have an order, most of the time dictated by school deadlines and the like.  The rest of the queue, though, tends to be rather amorphous, with books moving up and down depending on my mood or what book I happen to pull out from under the sofa first.  (Yes, book storage in this house has become so dire that I’ve taken to hiding books under furniture.)

Here’s my list at the moment.

Up next:

1.  Brilliant — Rachel Vail
2. Jane Slayre — Charlotte Bronte and Sherri Browning Erwin
3. Flash Fiction Forward — Robert Shapard and James Thomas

In the Queue:

• Dial-a-Ghost — Eva Ibbotson
• The Great Ghost Rescue — Eva Ibbotson
• Out of the Dust — Karen Hesse (for the verse-novel challenge)
• Witness — Karen Hesse (novel in verse)
• Make Lemonade — Virginia Euwer Wolff
• This Full House — Virginia Euwer Wolff
• Gully’s Travels — Tor Seidler
• The Graveyard Book — Neil Gaiman
• Going Bovine — Libba Bray
• Catching Fire — Suzanne Collins
• The Mysterious Benedict Society — Trenton Lee Stewart
• Seeing Redd — Frank Beddor
• Where I’m Calling From — Raymond Carver
• Tooth and Claw — T. C. Boyle

What’s in your queue?

Once upon a time, a behavioral scientist called B. F. Skinner discovered that if you rewarded rats with a cookie every time they pressed a button, the rats were more likely to repeat said behavior.  The same is true for people.  Give a kid a cookie when the kid asks for one and chances are, she’ll ask for another.  And another.

Where things get dicey is that if you mess with how frequently the reward is given, you can actually increase the reward-getting behavior substantially.   It comes down to what researchers call a Variable Ratio (VR) Schedule.  This is the most treacherous schedule of reinforcement because reward is given after a random number of responses (red line on the graph).  In other words, give a kid a cookie, but only after she asks for it a certain number of times.  Then keep changing that number on her.  Chances are, she’ll ask even more often than if you just gave her the cookie when she asked in the first place.

What does this have to do with the query process, you ask?  Some might argue that the query process is a variable ratio schedule.  This carrot of publication success is dangled in front of us and as writers we have no way of knowing which query or which submission will be “the one.”  We never know when we’re going to get a “yes” so we all keep sending out more queries and more submissions, inundating the market, thus making the reward schedule even more random.

Personally, I think that’s a rather glum way of looking at things.  To me, writing is more than just a behavior motivated by the reward of publication.  Rather, it’s a quiet act of persistence driven by the knowledge that if I do what needs to be done, something good will come of it.  Maybe it won’t be the thing I wanted or when I wanted, but if I show up at the page good things can happen.

What about you?  How do you view the writing process?