How to Incorporate Backstory That Hooks The Reader

Spoiler warning: Spoilers for the John Rain series by Barry Eisler. Also, The Detachment reached #1 on the Kindle store this week. Congrats, Barry!

I don't often read series out of order, but Barry Eisler was kind enough to send me a review copy of The Detachment when he visited the blog. The Detachment can be read as a standalone, although there are references to events from previous books.

 While I often find “here’s what you’ve missed” sections boring, I enjoyed the backstory passages in The Detachment. They actually made me eager to go back and read the previous volumes. Now why would that be? Time to dig out the old magnifying glass.

Spoilers: Good or Bad?

One of my favorite Threadless T shirts

I hate spoilers. Once I turned on the TV and accidentally watched last 10 min. of The Usual Suspects (I hadn't seen it before). Whoops. I also figured out the ending of The Sixth Sense halfway through and was grumpy the rest of the movie because I'd missed out on the surprise.

But do spoilers actually decrease enjoyment?

Spoiler alert:  A recent study says no.

Top Five Book Picks of 2011

I usually don't do book reviews, but once in a while, it's fun to blog as a reader rather than a writer. Here are my favorite books that I read this past year.  I read many other fantastic books as well, but if I have to limit myself to five...

(Listed in the order in which I read them.)


1. Plain Kate by Erin Bow

I have already gushed about Plain Kate -- the poetic language, the heartbreak. I loved this book so much that I bought two copies – one to keep and one to underline and analyze. I would recommend this book to anyone who likes fairytales and bittersweet stories.

Tips On Responding to Public Criticism (Inspired by Steve Jobs)

The Internet is an interesting place. When people interact through computer screens, it increases anonymity and decreases inhibitions while dehumanizing the person on the other end. This is why online interactions tend to be so polite and respectful.

Um, right.

The truth is, if you spend enough time on the Internet, you’ll eventually take your turn as a punching bag.  As a blogger and future author, I'm very interested in how people react to public criticism. A while back, I ran across this video of Steve Jobs during a question-and-answer session. A man asks an insulting question, and Jobs’ response was quite impressive. It's worth taking a look.

Let's break down this response see if we can come up with some generalizable tips for dealing with public criticism.

Do Re-readers Tend to Be Revisers?

So today on twitter, agent Holly Root proposed a theory:  Editors tend to have been re-readers as kids; agents were rarely re-readers. (via Molly O'Neill)

I don't know about agents and editors, but that made me wonder how re-reading and re-writing are related for writers.  I proposed my own hypothesis:  Writers who like revising were re-readers as kids. Writers who like first drafts, not so much.

People on twitter started weighing in, some who fit this pattern, and some who didn't.  Which made me curious enough to put up a little unscientific poll. 

What are your rereading and revising preferences?  (Email subscribers and people reading in feed readers will need to click through to the web page to take the poll.)

poll by twiigs.com

Hope you enjoyed this post!  To get regular updates from the blog, please use the subscription options in the sidebar.

The Psychology of Attraction: The Intertwining of Sex and Aggression

"His gaze flickered to my lips. I got that. He was once again furious with me and once again perfectly ready to have sex with me. The conundrum that was Barrons. Apparently it was impossible for him to feel anything as far as I was concerned without getting angry about it. Did anger make them want to have sex with me? Or was it that he always wanted to have sex with me that made him so angry?"

--Shadowfever, by Karen Marie Moning


So I’m looking back over the "Psychology of Attraction" series, and so far we have fear, uncertainty, and now aggression. Which makes me think I should clarify some things before y'all stage an intervention. This series is not meant to be a picture of how healthy relationships work, or even how the majority of relationships work. They’re interesting tidbits that might be useful for a novelist. As often is the case, the healthy cases don’t always make interesting stories.

Actually, that's an interesting thought -- that the pathological makes for more gripping stories. Is it true? Is it desirable? Which dovetails nicely into today's post.

When I was researching the article on fear, I ran across some old studies exploring the relationship between aggression and sexuality. The basic idea was that the experimenters made test participants angry and then tested them for sexual arousal.

Showcase The Sexy, But Don't False Advertise (and other lessons I learned when writing my book pitch)

Disclaimer: I’m not a professional slush reader, nor am I a veteran indie author who’s A/B tested dozens of cover blurbs. But I had a decent request rate for my query letters (52% asked for partials or fulls), and agent Jim did use my unmodified query to pitch Midnight Thief in the DGLM newsletter. (Jim also asked to use it as an example in his classes on query writing, which did amazing things for my ego, until Secretly-Supportive-But-Very-Mischievous-Husband asked if the class was called “How Not to Write A Query.” Ah, what are our loved ones for, if not to keep us humble.)

These are the lessons I learned while I was writing my query. Hopefully you will find something helpful for your own queries, book blogger pitches, etc...

1. Showcase the sexy


You’d think that a writer would know what’s sexy about her novel, but that wasn’t true in my case. My first query draft began: