Scenes and Sensibility

by Janis Patterson

I had a revelation while working on an upcoming project. I needed a snippet out of each of my books that could be narrated in five minutes.

Five minutes is not a long time.

The first excerpt I tried ran almost fifteen minutes. The second twenty. The third... well, suffice it to say it was not five minutes. None of the passages I had marked were. Oh, I tried to cut back, but what was left - though five to five and a half minutes - was nothing. A collection of words without direction or emotion.

Now for years I have been complimented on my writing, on my creation of emotion and sense of place. Apparently I just don't do it in five minute slots.

Which started me thinking. We have become a sound-bite society, where a maximum of opinion is expected to be expressed in a minimum of words or be cut off. Where entire opinions are encapsulated into thirty seconds. Apparently the long, slow, intensifying build-up that gradually takes you to a satisfying conclusion (even if just for a single scene) is out of fashion.

It's rather like comparing the short, often-repeating core melody of a pop song to the growing, sweeping intensity of a symphony movement. Or a lengthy master shot in a movie compared to short bursts of action like the cuts in a music video. Both styles have their advantages, both are good, and both have their supporters and their detractors.

I'll admit I'm firmly set in the sweeping grandeur of the symphony camp. Short flashes are very well, but you barely have time to know what's going on where let alone get the flavor, the emotion, the sense of place I feel is necessary for a good story. Obviously some people disagree with me, including the project coordinator who is firm in her dictum of five minutes, which means I have to dig deeper in order to find an excerpt that satisfies me at a length which satisfies everyone else.

Sigh.

Blurbs, Excerpts and Other Annoyances

by Janis Patterson

I’ve said many times the bane of my life is doing publicity. From the time I was nine years old I grew up working in my parents’ advertising agency where creating ads and placing them internationally was an everyday occurrence. I know how to do publicity. I can write a press release that can sell a thousand widgets. I can do a visual that is pure poetry. I just hate it, especially when one doesn’t have an adequate budget – or even much of a budget at all! Even worse is the fact that I was raised in a very old-fashioned manner, meaning that one does not put oneself forward, that is it vulgar to stand up and say ‘Look at me, look at me!’ My family was not quite so primitive as to believe that a lady’s name appeared in the newspaper only three times in her life – birth, marriage, death – but to blow one’s own horn was both crass and cheap.

Sometimes our earliest lessons are the hardest to unlearn.

Which brings me to blurbs. And their bigger cousin, the excerpt. Lots of places take blurbs and excerpts on certain publicity days. Everyone knows you need an excerpt on your website. What ‘everyone’ does not tell you is how we are supposed to take our complex, multi-character, multi-plot book and boil it down to 250-300 words that have any kind of clarity or appeal. Some of us cannot even say ‘good morning’ in 250-300 words!

And as for excerpts - ! Same problem,  just longer. You’re supposed to have a pithy, intriguing scene that will so enchant someone that they will immediately want to buy the book – all in about 1,000 words or less. Trouble is, in my books at least, intriguing scenes are not perfect little capsules. The action is ongoing and interlaced, not chopped up into precise soundbites. And by action, I mean the story – not car explosions and shootings and fistfights. Though all of those do happen occasionally in some of my books…

For that matter, how can you take a slice out of a book and have someone know what’s going on without any backstory or knowledge of the characters? In the excerpt John and Mary are talking – or fighting – or making love. Who are John and Mary? Friends? Lovers? Foes? What is their relationship? Do they have a backstory? What outside forces are acting on them? To get all that information into an excerpt brings it perilously close to an info dump.

Do you get the idea I don’t like either blurbs or excerpts?

On the other hand, I don’t know of any other way to get any attention for one particular book out of the bazillions that are flying around out there. No one book will please everyone. Some books please more people than others. How to get a reader to pick up and buy my – or your – book when there is such an incredible choice out there is a daunting if not downright impossible task.

And I don’t have any better answers. If I did, I’d be both smart and rich.

Now, if you will please excuse me, I have a blurb to write and some excerpts to choose. Darn it.