Why you don't get published.
Friday, June 23, 2006
Q & A 49 Minions' plots too wacky?
It has always been my belief that an author can write about any topic, break all the rules, if he or she is a good enough writer. Having said that, is it my imagination or are most of the plots summarised in the queries on your site too wacky to be published? I've been reading the queries in order to learn how to write a query, but I find myself saying over and over, is this for real? And what's with all the goofy character names?
I don't generally read genre, so it's very possible that this is exactly the type of thing that does sell, and I'm the clueless one.
Assuming the books in the queries are competently written, are these plots salable?
If you think those are wacky plots, wait'll you hear this one: A 600-year-old guy, having loaded two of every kind of animal on Earth into a boat, drifts around for forty days while it rains so much everyone else on the planet drowns. Once the rain stops, he frees all the animals and presumably burns the boat, which, by now, stinks to high heaven.
Believe it or not, the book in which this plot appears has sold six billion copies. Among the top twenty bestselling fiction books of all time are The Exorcist, Animal Farm, Catch 22, and Valley of the Dolls. Possibly, a two-paragraph plot summary of these books would sound wacky.
Some people read fiction to escape from what is real. It doesn't bother them nearly as much when there are witches and talking scarecrows, or orcs and elves, as it does when the characters don't respond to these things in a believable way.
That said, Evil Editor must admit that some of his minions are totally out of their minds.
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19 comments:
"The distance between insanity and genius is measured only by success." Bruce Feirstein
Frankly, I would pay to read some of the books "summarized" in Guess the Plot.
Especially that one about Pumpkin James and his god-bong. :)
Humph.
Some of the wacky plots sound more interesting than the real ones.
A man is made king because he knows the punchline to a joke. Years later he realizes that his wife is also his mother. After poking his eyes out with a gaudy hunk of jewelry, he wanders off to visit a friend. He dies peacefully and gives his name to a rather pessimistic theory about human motivation.
It doesn't bother them nearly as much when there are witches and talking scarecrows, or orcs and elves...
EE, you forgot Pookas talking to Sock Monkeys!
Of course the wacky ones are more interesting than the real ones. This guy reminds me of my husband, who teases me for picking apart plot holes in shows like Star Trek and Angel.
"Yeah," he says, rolling his eyes hard enough to detach his retinas, "this could never happen in real life." Then he snorts, scratches his butt and goes back downstairs to blow away nazis on Battlefield 1942.
But then, even he managed to suspend disbelief long enough to enjoy watching the Lord of the Rings movies, so I guess he's not a total idiot.
I've always wondered about people who want to read about real life. Even in mainstream romance, it ain't exactly real. There's no farting, belching, scratching of embarrassing areas. There's no ear-piercing shrieks because he leaned his knee on her hair in the middle of sex. No halitosis, drippy noses or, "good god, honey, you're not touching me til you've had a shower."
Reading about real life. Hah!
The tightrope walk between 'fresh' and 'stupid' is rather hard to walk. All a writer can do is tell their own story and hope it resonates... In my opinion.
Feemus: You forgot to add in Tiresias. Perhaps change the second line to "Years later, a blind, transsexual soothsayer convinces him that his wife is also his mother."
WTF were those greeks and romans smoking???
I heard it was lotus blossoms.
Thanks, Rei.
I'm updating my query now.
It's not so much that the plots are wacky. It's trying to compress the essence of plot of a 100,000 novel into three paragraphs that DRIVES you wacky, until you want to scream, "Just read the damned thing for yourself and find out what's it's about, okay?"
I am the person who asked the original question about wacky plots. My question wasn't why anyone would read stories about other galaxies, pixies, orcs, vampires or talking penguins. I get why people read genre. But some of these genre plots sound so complex and unlikely, that I find them very hard to believe, even as fantasy or whatever. When I read the Guess the Plot summaries, I usually say, "well, it certainly isn't THAT" to each option. And then I get to the end of the list and realise that one of those was for real.
I'm not putting down genre, but doesn't it have to make some kind of sense within the confines of it's genre? Like if you are writing a voodoo story, and then the main character falls in love with a women, but doesn't know she's his sister, and then he meets a talking penguin, and then he's framed for the murder of the penguin, but his sister/lover is on the case because she's a detective... Hey, don't none of you steal this plot! I'm going to start working on this project right away!!
I'm not sure I buy Miss Understanding's contention that wacky plots are somehow the exclusive domain of the "genre" fiction which she assures us she never reads.
The plots of say, Pynchon or Rushdie or Dickens or Cervantes or Ariosto or DeLillo or Ellison or.....These all strain credulity, esp. if they were summarized in two paragraphs. And none of these are "genre" authors, except in the sense that everything belongs to a genre.
One may not like novels with wild or wildly proliferating plots, but this characteristic is certainly not a constitutive feature of "genre" fiction.
If you take Rushdie as an example, of course his books aren't realistic, but they has it's own internal logic that works (at least the logic works in his good books). But maybe you're right, maybe Rushdie would sound just as wacky in a query letter. I don't think you can say the same of Dickens. Maybe we should have a contest in which minion take really well known books and write query letters for them!
I see you point, Miss. But I still think that a Dickens plot would look pretty crazy in a summary. Hell--Dicken's plots are pretty crazy spread over a thousand pages.
All those coincidences and parallels and caricatured characters: these might follow an internal logic, but they are patently wacky. Ditto Fielding--what would a plot summary of Tom Jones look like? That plot is so sprawling and so transparently contrived, even the most carefully written summary of it would make the reader say "huh?" and then say "and how many f---ing inns ARE there in England?"
Oh, and Gulliver's Travels. And The Recognitions. And Giles Goat Boy. And The Breast.
I'm just sayin'.
Which brings me back to my first point: If you're a good enough writer, you can pull anything off. I don't know about anyone else, but at this stage, I don't presume to be able to pull off the kind of plot that Dickens or Rushdie could get away with. Hell, even Rushdie can't pull it off every time. Has anyone read The Satanic Verses? Talk about wacky.
WTF were those greeks and romans smoking???
Apparently, the god-bong. Someone tell me where to find that query. I missed it.
This was a great thread. I was on beverage alert right up until Miss Understanding and Dave got serious. Talk about killing a buzz.
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