Rules! Hell no! I’m an artist!
Two years ago, I sat down with my agent as she gently told me that nobody wanted my book. We had sent my manuscript around to numerous publishers, starting with the industry giants and finishing with small passion-driving independent publishers. Wonderful words were said, and compliments flowed in regards to my writing, my plot, and my characters. They were so well defined I was told and your plot held my interest. Then the dreaded industry standard rejection lines were issued, ‘unfortunately, it is not right for us, or I am not significantly passionate about your book.’ Three years of my work came to a grinding unsatisfactory ending.
It is hard to express the emotional toll rejection takes upon you after years spent crafting your novel. Your creative project still exists on your computer and as a large pile of collated pages in a filing cabinet, but it is like an orphan child that nobody wanted to adopt. The emotional scars of being neglected are ten-fold. My agent assured me that I was still a good writer and that this moment was only a set back. Over the next couple of weeks, we discussed why we thought my book hadn’t been picked up and there was one key aspect that kept coming up – my story didn’t fit easily within one of the industries boxes. My novel slid in and out of a couple of genres, but didn’t land firmly within one clearly defined category; was it a mystery, with supernatural elements or a supernatural book, which flirted with Magic Realism. Basically, that old, but very important question of, ‘what section of the bookstore would you place your novel?’ Was this the reason why my novel wasn’t bought? I can’t be sure, but it was something for me to hold onto in the nebulous publishing world, where an opinion or decision from the right person can make or break a career.
The best way to recover from a rejection, I have found, in my creative-life, is to start another creative project. It is what I love to do – create. The excitement I have as I set out on another journey has not diminished over the years. This time, I decided to set a couple of rules for myself at the outset of the process:
- I was going to write a mystery book
- I was going to follow the rules of this genre
The question then becomes what are the rules? There are many books, articles and blogs on this topic, but the best structure I found was on The Writer’s Dig webpage that is run by the editors of Writer’s Digest. They definite this genre as follows:
Structural distinctions: The basic plot elements of the mystery form are:
- The baffling crime
- The singularly motivated investigator
- The hidden killer
- The cover-up (often more important than the crime itself, as the cover-up is what conceals the killer)
- Discovery and elimination of suspects (in which creating false suspects is often part of the killer’s plan)
- Evaluation of clues (sifting the true from the untrue)
- Identification and apprehension of the killer.
You can find the complete and excellent article on The Differences between a Crime Novel, Mystery Novel and Thriller Novel here: https://www.writersdigest.com/online-editor/differences-crime-novel-mystery-novel-thriller-novel
Rules! Hell no! I’m an artist! I know, I know, there are numerous articles written about how you should write what you are passionate about. How you shouldn’t try to write for the industry or a particular genre. If your book is good enough then it will find a home in the industry. Give your creativity the freedom to discover what it wants to be. These are good points, but my push back on this argument is that you don’t hear the same concerns when a poet conforms to the structural rules of a sonnet or a haiku. Yes, the Modernists rejected the idea of established poetic forms in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, but they broke with the old forms in search of new forms. One of these new Modernist forms was credited to the James Joyce’s novel, Ulysseswhere the author’s narrative uses a Stream of Consciousnessform, to describe a day in the life of three Dubliners. Even when you set out to break the rules, you inevitably create new rules, even if those rules state, there are no rules.
The idea of starting a creative project with a certain set of parameters at the beginning was not daunting to me. Lecturers’ in my graduate programs in creative writing would often prescribe topics to me. Being a gun for hire means adopting someone else’s idea and creating a narrative from it. I’ve been fortunate enough to be hired by producers to write T.V. pilots and screenplays based upon their ideas. Over many years of study and professional work, I have built up a writing skill set that doesn’t get restricted or blocked by inserting a few rules into the process. Journalist always have a defined word count for their newspaper or magazine articles. Websites for the most part don’t have the same restrictions as print, but most successful writers on the Web adhere to the standards established in the print industry.
With those rules established, I set about starting my next novel. The first rule of a mystery is that there has to be a crime, preferably a murder. The second rule is that your protagonist must have a compelling reason to want to solve the mystery. There are many examples, too many to mention in this article, but in the mystery genre, the protagonist is often a detective, a private investigator, a small fussy man from Belgium or even a female writer of mysteries who helps her local police department solve murders. Pretty quickly, I worked out that I’d like my protagonist to be a doctor, an intern which made her a newly graduated doctor. Hopefully, you didn’t miss that pronoun ‘her’ because that was another decision that I made. Straight away you might say, ‘Justin you’re breaking the rules by notchoosing a detective to be your protagonist.’ To that I’d say, ‘that there is a section of the mystery genre called medical murder mysteries. Some of the most successful writers in this sub-genre are Robin Cook, Tess Gerritsen, Michael Palmer and Tom Combs. So, I’m NOT breaking any of the rules!
Also, the female protagonist was not a random, middle of the night decision. An old saying in the pen wielding world is, ‘write what you know.’ I’ve been involved directly or indirectly in the medical world in both the In and Out Patient settings for over thirty years. How you may ask? Through my wife, whom I met the summer before she went to medical school and journeyed with her through the entire process. My experience, although second-hand, gives me a high comfort level with the medical / hospital world and as the first-hand experiences (my wife’s) were seen through a female POV, therefore the decision for the protagonist to be female. These decisions also lead to my wife, Nicole, collaborating on this project and becoming a co-writer with me. We set the story in New York City where my wife did her residency. All we had to do now was create our protagonist, our killer, and bring the worlds they inhabited to life.
In the next article I will explore the two-year journey that created my mystery novel and talk about what comes next now that the finished manuscript is in my agent’s hands.