Debut Novel Tips from Jamie Freveletti

Big Weekend News: Congratulations to today's guest blogger, Jamie Freveletti, whose debut was just named Best First Novel at the ITW (International Thriller Writers) Awards Banquet.

---

Guest Post from Jamie Freveletti

I’ve been asked by “Do Some Damage” to guest blog. Thank you!

My second book, Running Dark, just launched, so my first year as a published author has ended. I see that Joelle’s first year is about to start (congratulations!) so if I may, let me give some tips.

1. START WRITING YOUR SECOND RIGHT NOW

My deal was a two-book deal, so I was now under contract to write a second. My idea for Running Dark involved Somali pirates taking over a cruise liner. When I started with this premise, the pirates had yet to become the force they are now in the Gulf of Aden. So picture this, I’m in New York meeting with my brand new publisher and when they ask “What’s the second going to be about?” I say “Somali pirates taking over a cruise liner.” I am met with silence. Then a polite, “Pirates? Like Jack Sparrow?” I hastened to explain that I’d read about one event in 2005 when some pirates had shot rocket propelled grenades at a cruise ship. They took out two staterooms and had the guests hitting the deck, but no one was hurt and the ship got away. To their credit, they let me run with it. The pirates took their first oil tanker when I was 60,000 words in and I no longer had to explain the concept of Somali pirates.

Running Dark is garnering good reviews and everyone loves the concept. I couldn’t have created this book unless I kept writing the second in the forefront of my mind. Start writing your second right away. You’ll find that launching the first can be an overwhelming experience, but the second is what a career is made of.

2. TO TOUR OR NOT TO TOUR?

My publisher (Harpercollins /Morrow) did not wish me to tour. In fact, they seemed to shudder at the idea of a debut author touring, a reaction that I didn’t thoroughly appreciate at the time. They emphasized regional signings in areas where I could generate enough attendees to make the launch worthwhile. They were concerned that as a debut author I wouldn’t manage to do this in locations that I had no contacts, few or no one would show and both me, and more importantly, the bookseller, would be disappointed. Did I tour? Yep! Was it worth it? I think so. Did lots of people come to see me speak? Not always. Touring as a debut author is an interesting experience. I’ve flown one thousand miles and then driven thirty minutes to a store that has three people waiting to hear me speak. In fact, for a signing in LA not one person appeared because they’d closed the street for a “Public Enemies” premiere. I couldn’t compete with Johnny Depp. Still, the bookseller had warned me, asked me to come anyway, and handed me sixty preordered books to sign.

Touring gets you to meet the booksellers, and this is why you’re doing it. If you can afford it, tour. (And this year, HC planned the bulk of my tour across the country).

3. GO TO NEW YORK AT LEAST ONCE A YEAR.

I go to New York at least once, but usually two or three times a year. Once is during “Thrillerfest” an industry conference put on by the International Thriller Writers. The other trips are business or friend related (I used to live there). On every trip I make a point to have a drink or dinner with my editor, agent, and take a run through Central Park with my marketing director, also a runner. New York is the center of the publishing industry. Many of the biggest players are there, and you should be, too.

4. HIRE AN ADDITIONAL PUBLICIST

I have an outstanding publicist, free, through the house. She does the heavy lifting in a lot of areas. But after I decided to tour, I hired my own local publicist to help plan. (Dana Kaye of Kaye Publicity). She interacts well with NY, and helps me with the myriad of details that arise when a book is launching. If you can afford it, hire a PR person at a reasonable cost. Your New York publicist has sixty files on her desk and probably would welcome the help.

5. SALES COUNT BUT CREATING A GOOD PRODUCT DOES, TOO.

Writers are under intense pressure to sell. I debuted during the biggest economic downturn in forty years. Readers that used to buy a hardcover without thinking, no longer did. Libraries saw a surge in business, as these readers, unwilling to give up their beloved books but no longer able to pay for them, utilized the free service. Established authors saw fifty percent declines in sales. Many writers have taken the “you must sell” mantra too literally, and they have turned themselves into marketers, which chews up their time and relegates the actual writing of the second to a back burner. Don’t do this. Yes, I realize that if you don’t sell the first you may not get to the second, but if necessary you can sell the second under a pseudonym, leaving the first--and your poor numbers-- behind. Search for balance. I know one writer who has tried just about everything you can imagine to market. While I think he’s sold more books than he would have otherwise, he has remained solidly midlist. If marketing automatically turned one into a New York Times bestseller, he would be one right now. Take a lesson. Keep writing in the forefront of your day.

6. ENJOY EVERY MINUTE

Writing as a career is great. I’ve worked a lot harder jobs. Being a lawyer is intellectually stimulating and lucrative, but the days are long, (and the nights, and the weekends). Cocktail waitressing can be lucrative, but boring. Candle making, one of my first jobs, was hot, dangerous when the wax poured on us, and cemented my desire to go to college. Only the toughest survived that job, and I wasn’t one of them.

Writing is a strange alchemy of imagination and hard work, but I love it, and I hope to be doing it for a long time to come. My publisher just picked up books three and four and so I’m employed for a while.

Thank you to every reader who made it possible.

Questions of Character

As I write this it's a little after 11pm Saturday night and I'm downtown Ann Arbor killing time before heading over to see a midnight showing of TAXI DRIVER, one of my favorite movies. It's odd, when I was single and lived down here I never made it to any of these midnight movies, but now, married and living on the outskirts here I am. I'm also at the Starbucks where I used to go when I absolutely needed to finish something because it used to be the only joint in town without free wireless access. Alas, it's finally succumbed.

So what am I working on? Well I'm glad you asked. I'm working on revisions for MURDER BOY of course...sort of. While I'm not generating any new prose, per say, I'm generating many pages about the characters in the novel. Because, you see, while I know the story, and thought I knew the characters, I do not know what really makes them tick. I recently got the manuscript back from an agent who was nice enough to send me about 2 pages of what was wrong with it. For some that might be heartbreaking, for me it was educational. What the letter basically boiled down to though was you characters, who we don't really get to know, go around doing things that don't seem to mean anything to them.

This was a bit of a shock to me because one common in all of the other agent letters I've received for other novels was that I had a knack for creating cool characters. But those were all first person novels, which is my natural storytelling voice, and lends itself better to fully developing a character. So of course I went back and tried writing MURDER BOY in first person and failed miserably. This is a story that needs to be told in third person and it needs to be told in multiple viewpoints. This agent did point to a couple of characters she thought were interesting, and I agreed. So instead of the 10 or so characters I tried to cram into the previous drafts, I want to focus just on a core of 4-5. So I went back and started from scratch. The first 15 pages came easy, they were about my main character, I already know what makes him tick, he's me, mostly. But then I switched to the viewpoint of the antagonist and froze up.

While this guy had some neat character quirks and I knew what his goals and motivations were story-wise, I had no idea what made him tick. I had no idea how he would react in the various scenarios he's thrust into over the course of the novel. I needed to know where he came from. What made him who he was and, most importantly, what kind of cell phone he used. Yes, believe it or not, that's the piece of information I've struggled most over regarding my antagonist, his choice of cell phone. But as I ran the various options through my head I realized a person's choice of cell phone can say HUGE things about that person as a character. Are they contract or buy-the-minute sorts? Basic phone or all the bells and whistles. BlackBerry, iPhone, or Droid. I thought more about this than I ever could have imagined, but by the end of it I had some very keen insights into this character. And, more importantly, I had a way into his opening scene. Now, instead of a cliched scene of a bounty hunter spying on someone, I open with him at one of those high pressure cell phone kiosks trying to decide what sort of cell phone he's going to buy.

SO tell me, folks, as a writer, how do you make your characters tick? How much do you need to know about them before you start writing? And for the readers, how much do you like to see about a character on the page? If an author posts interviews and character studies and such on their website do you like to know back story and all of that or do you only care about what's happening to them immediately in the story?

Mobile Writing Tools: TaskPaper and WriteRoom

by
Scott D. Parker

As fellow DSDer, Dave White, stated on Thursday, after a time, you can run out of writing things to talk about. I mean, he's right, you know. There is no substitute to sitting your butt down in a chair (or stand, as I've come to do more and more) and just write. A writing utensil and a canvas is all you need. That, and time. And patience to get better. Talent helps.
Lester
But in this digital age, we do have options. Shakespeare, Byron, and Twain wrote longhand. Hemingway and Lester Dent used a typewriter. Modern writers have computers that can do more than any lithographer ever dreamed possible. In an age where computers used to take up whole rooms, now, we have laptops that can run circles around the UNIVACs that powered the Apollo missions. I don't know about y'all, but there are times when my slender MacBook Pro is simply too cumbersome to lug around to the office, especially if I'm having to carry the laptop of my day job.

Enter the iPod Touch. I mentioned that got mine in April with the goal of having it take the place of my iPod nano (for music), Palm Pilot (for ebooks), and Moleskine (for note taking). What I didn't realize is that it also subverted my laptop as my go-to, mobile writing device.

There are lots of apps out there for writers. I use a combination from Hog Bay Software: the iPhone versions of TaskPaper and WriteRoom. As I'm conceiving of my next, big novel, I tote around my iPod Touch (iPod, from here on out). If I have an idea for the story, I break out the iPod, launch TaskPaper, and enter the idea. Yes, I don't use TaskPaper as a to-do list, as it was originally intended. I use it as a repository of ideas, sketches, and, very soon, actual prose. Like the maxim that the reader completes the writing process, the user completes a piece of software, even if that use is not what the framers had intended.

The beauty of this method is the syncing. The iPhone versions of TaskPaper and WriteRoom sync with SimpleText.ws, a website hosted by Jesse Grosjean, the owner/developer of these wonderfully minimal apps. As long as I have a wifi connection, the ideas I jot down in TaskPaper are automatically synched with SimpleText. Then, later, when I return home to my MacBook, I sync the SimpleText site with the actual text files I keep on my hard drive. Voila! All ideas preserved, in more than one place in more than one media. It's almost foolproof.

All of this can be done using the on-screen touch keyboard. I've gotten pretty adept at typing with my thumbs. But these are all short bursts of creativity. What about the time when I plan to make prose. Will I have the patience to thumb chapters into existence?

What tipped the scales in the iPod-as-writing-tool debate was a bluetooth keyboard. I bought the Apple one, not for any slavish devotion to the company but, rather, for synchronicity. It just works with the tools I have. Linking the keyboard to the iPod is simple. Launching WriteRoom (the app I'm using to write this post) is simple. Then, as if by magic (it really feels that way sometimes), I start typing and the letters appear. It's brilliant! And It has allowed me to leave my laptop at home. Now, prose can spew forth from my brain and my keyboard and iPod can keep up.

I haven't start prose creation yet but I will soon. Another great feature of SimpleText is that is syncs (read: imports) with Scrivener. Scrivener can "see" SimpleText and import any and all files into itself. Ever more fun and ease is to be had by this working method.

It's pretty darn nifty, this technology. But it still doesn't compare with Rule #1: Just Write. My own version of Rule #1 is this: Just Write. However You Want To.