TOUCHY TOPICS TUESDAYS: between the gutters of commerce and the ivory tower

Here's the way most of us work when we begin what we hope will be our careers as fiction writers.

We write a book, then we try to write a synopsis that will sell it. There's no chicken-and-egg question for most of us: the artistic process of the writing definitely comes first, inspired by all sorts of things other than the marketplace, and the commercial "spin" on it a rather distant second.

The problem with this sequence, as I was reminded by looking at one of my own old synopsis drafts this morning, is that addressing the sales aspect of a book only after that book is entirely completed it often doesn't work well, or for that matter, at all.

A synopsis is not a magic cape that you drape over a book to turn it into different, something that will sell. It's a lens you design to let others see the book as sharply as possible—and if that book isn't salable, the best possible synopsis won't make it so. The sad thing about this is that by waiting until the book is complete and we're too exhausted to go back and change it, we've made potentially fixable problems into probably unfixable ones. If we want to publish, wouldn't it be better to consider the marketplace during the book drafting stage, rather than when it's too late to do anything but collect rejections and sigh with despair?

Even to me, there's something sacreligious-sounding about those words. Aren't we supposed to listen only to the dictates of our Muse? Isn't it crass to consider tailoring our work to the imperatives of Commerce?

Not necessarily.

The trick, it seems to me, is to operate from the middle ground. Don't attempt to define your work entirely from the grubby gutters of commerce. That never works. But if you want to publish, don't write an entire book with your gaze firmly fixed on the inside of your pure white ivory tower, either. There's information that will help strengthen your book in both places—and I do mean "strengthen," not just "sell," though it will help you do that too.

Here's my personal best guess at how to find that middle ground.

Get the working premise of the book firmly in your mind, in whatever way you do that. Know what your intention for its genre and shape and voice are. Write or outline or muse enough to feel reasonably certain (there's no such thing as total certainty here, or at least there shouldn't be) you won't be making any radical changes to those basics.

After that point but before the entire book and every story and style element within it are set in the proverbial stone, do some gentle mental moseying around the marketplace. Don't overwhelm yourself; just browse. Who's writing comparable stuff? What can you learn from them, not so much in terms of craft but in terms of how their work is presented and summarized and marketed? How can you nudge your book in one way or another to make it stand out a bit more from the major competitors you see? What would your book as you understand it now sound like in synopsis? Do a rough draft to see. What does that draft suggest to you about elements that might be weak or uninteresting or difficult to explain powerfully?

Notice the words in this paragraph. Gentle. Mosey. Browse. Learn. Nudge. Suggest.

You're not becoming what my friend Joe Castagna once called a Trend Whore.

You're just being a good observer, one who is curious, open-minded, alert, and ready to use some of what you notice when it serves you.

And isn't that just what an artist is supposed to be?