May 11, 2006
I have talked a bit about how my latest project, DANCING IN THE DARK, was chosen from a mental laundry list of possible story ideas and that the decision was mostly made based on what I viewed to be as certain commercial properties. Yeah, but what were they?

I'll try and see if I can break them down a little bit. They're worth considering.

1. A proactive main character. Too many main characters in unsuccessful fiction are passive. Events happen to them. It's really important to have a character who ACTS, who tries to take on events and fights. With the possible exception of the Book of Job, generally that's what we want in our heroes--fighters, people who do, perhaps, what we don't in real life.

2. A beginning, middle and end. This is a little tricky. I don't plot out my novels or outline then, at least not yet. But I do need a sense now that, yes, there's a story there. There's an initiating event, there will be a series of rising complications that my main character will have to maneuver over, around or through, and that I will be able to tie everything up at the end with a reasonably satisfying resolution.

3. Plausibility. This may be for my own brain as much as anything else. I often have problems reading cozies because the little old lady solving crimes repeatedly becomes ridiculous, the so-called Cabot Cove Syndrome named for Murder, She Wrote. I need this for me, because I have to believe in the situation. There are plenty of mysteries involving amateur sleuths that I enjoy, but I'm not inclined to write them. Whatever you choose, make it plausible. Not all story ideas work that way and stretching it can make your work unpublishable.

4. Researchable. I keep stretching this one. It's probably the problem with my uncompleted novel for the bioprospectors. I do pretty good with it until I get to the Congo, then start to falter. Not that I've been mountain climbing in Peru or signing biotech contracts in London, but these are relatively short bits in the book. To place 300 pages entirely in Congo is a little daunting and I try to balance the time spent researching with the time spent writing. But some people love it, so it's not an insurmountable obstacle.

5. Competition. I don't go out of my way to study the competition, but at least for this latest book and the choices, one of my ideas was to write a police procedural. Now, there's no shortage of police procedurals out there. But in the mystery/thriller field, they're not the best sellers and frankly, you're up against John Sanford, Michael Connelly, JA Konrath, Ed McBain (passed on, alas) and dozens of others. So I decided that this might not be the best way to go.

6. Hook. I've never had much luck with this, but this time I was thinking maybe I did. My brain tends not to work this way, but this time I spent some effort trying to nail down exactly what the "concept" of the series would be, something a marketing department of a publisher might say, "Ah, we get it." In my case, the title also went along with this, as the main character's name is Joanna Dancing and the title is DANCING IN THE DARK.

7. Did it interest me. Don't forget this. If somebody wrote me a check and asked me to write a romance novel about lesbian hockey players, I'm sure I could do it. I would find something interesting in that story. But it's definitely not the kind of story I would choose to do on my own, so I wasn't completely crass and commercial.

8. What are my strengths? This might take time for writers to figure out. Over the years I've figured out what my strengths are and I'm trying to play to them. That is to say, in my case, fast pace, dialogue, action, cliffhangers, tight timeframes. Pretty much the definition of a thriller, so I went that way. Other writers are good at setting or good at tone or mood, but those aren't really my strengths, though I'm aware of them and work on them, but definitely I keep the sucker moving along, so out of my potential ideas, those were my best candidates.

9. Would it be fun? Would it be fun for me to write, and would it be fun for readers to read. That doesn't have to mean is it funny like Janet Evanovich, but entertaining--is it the type of story you can imagine somebody who has the choice, after a long day at work or whatever, picking up and reading instead of watching TV, going for a walk or surfing the Net?

There were probably other things that I took into account not quite so consciously, but these were issues I mulled over, and I suspect it would be worthwhile for all aspiring novelists to at least take these into consideration when evaluating their ideas.

Best,
Mark Terry