aurorawatcherak "I hold it, that a little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical."
Welcome to another edition of Open Book Blog Hop. This week’s question is: “We’ve talked blurbs before. Do you have any tips for writing blurbs?”
Some people think of a blurb as a one-paragraph explanation of the book. But in bloggers’ book reviews, I often see the word “blurb” followed by the entire synopsis from Amazon. This is the type of blurb I’ll focus on today.
The trick is to include enough information about the plot to entice the reader but not divulge too much information that the reader, possibly suspecting the outcome, might not bother reading the book. You’ve seen my “blurb” for Why Grandma Doesn’t know Me at the bottom of all my posts. I’ll include my “blurb” for The Red Dress below as another example.
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When Eve went to her high school senior prom, she wore a red dress that her mother had made for her…
As a journalism major in college, I took Introduction to Advertising and I learned that ads should always contain strong verbs that create pictures in viewers’ heads.
Blurbs are like narrative advertisements, which makes them one of the most important parts of writing a book. They might not be as important as the cover, but they’re pretty close. They require a lot of thought, which I suspect a lot of the indie writers I look at don’t give enough attention to. That’s unfortunate because a long rambling blurb that gives way more information than I want really is a reader turn off.
The first thing I do when I sit down to write a blurb is ask myself what the overall story is and what the crux of the story is at the beginning of the book. That’s going to change as the book goes along, but it’s important to let the reader know where the Yellow Brick Road starts. But you don’t want to write a novel on the back page of the paperback, so I start cutting my blurb down almost immediately. One way I do this is by replacing weak verbs — like “was” or “said” or “sat” for strong verbs. I want to show action because that’s what gets people’s attention. Opt for strong language.
The second thing I do is read through the blurb I’ve written and make sure I am not telling the story inside the book. I want to encourage them to step onto the Yellow Brick Road and give a hint to what they’ll face on their journey, but I don’t want to lead them down the path before they even step onto it. Why read the book if you’ve already synopsized the tale?
I think that pretty much sums it up.
I wonder what my fellow blog-hoppers are suggesting.
When I applied to work at the social work agency where I spent 15 years, the two interviewers asked me “If you were an animal, what animal would you be? And why?”
I’m sure I looked like a moose caught in the landing lights, but I’d never contemplated that question ever. I needed the job, it seemed like an interesting job, so I definitely wanted to answer the question, so I came up with a really silly answer:
I’d be a dolphin because I love to swim and they always look happy.
As I was saying this, I thought they could tell I was an idiot. They hired me anyway. Years later when my job interacted with HR more, I learned the point of the question is that you can answer, not that you have an intelligent answer. It’s a way to see how you handle the unexpected.
Okay, so now I need to answer what crayon I would be.
Oh, gee!
I don’t think a single crayon matters more than other crayons. You need the whole box to make a beautiful picture. So looking at the box, I think I’d choose two rather than one.
My absolutely favorite color is green.
My other absolutely favorite color is orange.
They’re complementary colors and I love them together.
Think green leaves against a green lawn with tiger lilies bobbing in the golden sunlight. I’m not a fan of yellow, but Alaska afternoon-evenings takes on a golden cast.
Color theory is a science and art and I know an interior designer who has built her career on color consultation. Knowing the effects color has on a majority of people is an incredibly valuable expertise she has mastered and now offers to her clients.
There’s a lot to it, though. Something as simple as changing the exact hue or saturation of a color can evoke a completely different feeling. Cultural differences can compound those effects, with a hue that’s happy and uplifting in one country becoming depressing in another.
Green
Cool colors like green, blue, and purple are often more subdued than warm colors. They are viewed as calming, relaxing and reserved. Wendy says they recede from your eye — except in my living room where the green walls mimic a forest in the sun.
Green is essentially blue with attributes of yellow and purple, which has attributes of red depending on the hue. A very down–to–earth color, green represents new beginnings and growth, renewal, and abundance. Green can connote a calm, but it also incorporates the energy of yellow, thus it can have a balancing and harmonizing effect.
In my Alaskan livingroom, when six months of winter are grinding us into depression, our walls invigorate or calm depending on the quality of the sunlight coming in the windows.
Orange
Warm colors such as red, orange, and yellow connote fire, fall leaves, sunsets/sunrises, and are generally energizing, passionate, and positive.
Orange is a very vibrant and energetic color. In its muted forms it can be associated with the earth and with autumn. Brown is actually a shade of orange, adding a lot of black. Because of its association with the changing seasons, orange can represent change and movement in general. Orange is also strongly associated with creativity — like writing. In designs, orange commands attention without being as overpowering as red. It’s a bit more friendly and inviting, and less in–your–face.
Crayons
I colored when I was a kid, but I especially loved to watch my daughter color. She is a true visual artist and you could see that even when she was a preschooler. I mounted one of her color pages because it was so good. It’s orange and blue flowers with green leaves, set against a brown background (I think she meant it to be the ground). It’s in a box somewhere in our basement.
I’m nowhere near the artist Bri is, but the featured image is something I did with pastels at her instigation. You can see a combination of my two favorite colors in the crayon box.
The thing about orange and green is that they both have vibrant, advancing quality but can also be a relaxing mellow vibe. And that’s me. Alaska is a grand adventure and I’m married to an adventurer. We regularly hike into the Alaska wilderness and head off to scenes we’ve never seen before, but I also like to curl up in a comfy chair by a crackling woodstove and read a good book. Vibrant and mellow, in alternating tones. This is why I have to have two favorite crayons.
It’s a big assumption that I know beforehand it’s a long writing session, which I don’t think I usually know it’s going to be. I started writing when I was in high school, when I lived in my mother’s daycare center. So I’m very used to writing in snatches of time. I don’t really schedule writing. I might do it during my lunch hour, or while dinner is in the oven, or for a little while before I go to bed, or if I wake early and can’t go back to sleep. I can write in the living room while my husband is watching television. I might occasionally pause to watch the show. I definitely don’t mind a little chaos around me when I write. Sometimes I’ll string a couple of hours of writing in snatches like that.
But, there are occasional times when I know I’m going to have several hours to write without interruption. Now that my children are adults and my husband likes to go hiking alone and neither of my inlaws lives in my house, those times are more frequent than they have been.
Preparing
If I’ve managed to actually schedule and it isn’t just an accidental discovery of several hours I can devote to writing, I get my research largely out of the way so I can stay off the Internet while I write. Although I am a discovery writer, sometimes I have several scenes loosely drafted and my notes might act as a framework for the scenes.
I eat something — usually fruit because it doesn’t make me drowsy. If it’s winter here, I might swap that with oatmeal because it helps keep me warm, and if it’s a small bowl, it doesn’t make me drowsy.
I prepare a thermos of coffee or tea — almost always decaf these days. If it’s in the summer, I might substitute for lemonade or iced tea.
I decide where I’m going to write. Often it’s the bedroom simply because it’s comfortable, but if I’ve got the house to myself, I might use the living room. I arrange the draperies so they’re not closed — I like to see the sky — but they block direct sunlight because that’s annoying on a computer screen. I arrange pillows and a blanket in case I get cold. I had a recent opportunity to use our son’s tiny home while he was away and his comfy loveseat worked pretty well until my mind got bored with the solitude.
In the house, I put my phone on vibrate in my jacket in the entryway off the living room so it’s not bothering me, but I can still hear it if someone lights it up. My family knows if they need me they should call multiple times in succession and I’ll check it out. I put the television on a long suite of music appropriate to whatever I’m writing. YouTube music can be hours long and often comes with cool atmospheric images that give me something to stare at when I need a moment to decide what comes next.
Then I go to the bathroom. An empty bladder means I can spend a lot of attention on writing.
I sit down and write until I need to go to the bathroom again or something from my outside life interrupts me. I once wrote about 18 hours in several stages of going to the bathroom, eating some food, and preparing a beverage for when I became thirsty. I’m sure there’s better ways to do this. Let’s see what my fellow blog-hoppers do.
Most works of fiction have an underlying theme. That’s kind of necessary as a means of organizing a good story and providing some compelling problem the main characters can focus on. A story without conflict is generally boring and deserves not to be read. Conflict drives narrative and fiction is all about the narrative. In resolving the conflict, an author can develop themes.
In my series Transformation Project, the overarching theme is that big anonymous government centralized in atomized collectivized cities is dangerous. If you’ve read the series, you should come away wi that libertarian theme. Some subthemes are that family isn’t perfect, but they generally have your back…that small communities of adaptable people voluntarily coordinating with one another can survive without “guidance” from a massive federal government…that you need to be armed if you want even a hope to survive…that it’s a good idea of have a stock of food, fuel, medicine, and ammunition on hand before you need it. These are underlying themes that are often unspoken. You pick up on those themes as you read because they are among the problems my characters must deal with.
In my series What If Wasn’t, I kind of tell the theme with the title of the series. We can’t change the past no matter how much we want to. The main character Peter does regrettable things with real consequences and he has to live in the aftermath. So do his family and friends. A second theme is that he can change himself and so can they, which I find adds a lot fo tension to the story. Peter has choices, but he must decide to take them, but his hard work to affect healthy changes in his own life doesn’t mean the people who used to love him will forgive his past actions.
Daermad Cycle’s overall theme is God will find a way to work through imperfect human beings and the messy societies they create. But that theme is mixed in with a lot of sword fights, sorcery, and political intrigue.
Three examples of stories that have messages hidden within their narratives, neither of which is particularly hard to discover. But none of my stories hit readers over the head with my themes.
Story Morals Tend to be Overt
In Transformation Project there are characters who are expressly anti-government, but even they talk about the weather and where their next meal is coming from. In the most recent book, Corralling Liberties, some of my main characters try to interact with the new federal government and they find a leader in Marshall Ellerby who is trying to do right by what remains of the country. If I were writing a morality tale, Ellerby would be evil, but at worst, I write him as sincerely incapable of overcoming the odds against reunification. I spend time showing how another character who did some truly evil things justifies his behavior. But nowhere do I say “this is all because big government is bad and doesn’t give a care about individuals.”
Showing Rather than Telling
Morals tend to be overt. They’re lessons the author wants to make sure the reader learns. To assure that, the moral is often stated very clearly. Think Aesop’s fable of the Turtle and the Hare which ends with “Slow and steady wins the day.”
That type of overt message violates a basic tenet of novel writing — show don’t tell. It insults the intelligence of the reader. It’s why I don’t read a lot of Christian fiction. Even as a person of faith, I don’t want to be hit over the head by a FAITH message. Give me a compelling story about Christians overcoming adversity and I’m down for curling up for a weekend with a good book, but give me a moralistic message that beats me over the head with the message “You must be a Christian” and I’ll stop reading it before the book is finished. In a similar vein, I don’t want my books to bash readers over the head with my underlying themes.
My Plea
Please don’t write stories with morals. Unless you’re writing children’s books for the sub-10-year-old class, just don’t. Sure, have underlying themes, but don’t tell me what I’m supposed to learn from your novel. If that’s your goal, write a non-fiction book, and don’t try to sell it to me as compelling fiction. I can learn whatever subtle message undergirds your novel without you telling me what that message is. And your book will be better for it.
For an apocalyptic writer, there is no better resource than the front page of the newspaper, the nightly broadcast news, or certain streams on Youtube.
I get amazing ideas from these sources simply by asking myself — what-if. Before there was a George Floyd incident or the first hint of inflation, I read the news, asked “what-if” and came up with many of the precursor signs found in Life As We Knew It. Drawing on my knowledge of economics, when I watched President Obama using “quantitative easing” to make the national debt look less daunting, I suspected it would cause inflation eventually. While that term was new, when I dug into it a bit I learned it was another term for “printing money”. I knew from my historical studies of the Depression of 1929 that too much money chasing too few goods would result, eventually, in inflation. So I included a scene where Shane discovers inflation at the Mega Mart. I had his family mention that a dollar doesn’t go as far as it used to. I had the news mention looting, which occurs when people can’t afford increased food prices (although there are other reasons for looting).
The manipulation of the news surrounding Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, gave me an idea for also including riots. I wanted signs that the country was in trouble and these signs were all around me, shouting from the headlines of contemporary newspapers.
The various arguments on different news sites about Muslims, environmentalists, and right-wing nationalists gave me the idea of a single entity calling the shots, manipulating all of them to do his bidding. Over the years, I’ve had so many people write me and say “It was Iran, right?” No, it wasn’t Iran. A rabid environmentalist friend of my daughter believed it was “right-wingers” who done it for a really long time. She had me half-convinced to make a group like the Branch Davidians responsible, but in the end, I went with my first idea, a lone radical with the charm to convince groups of people to do his will. Oddly, my young friend’s politics changed a bit as she approached 30 so when she read Corralling Liberties she wasn’t overly disappointed to discover who “done it.” She says it makes total sense now that someone that obsessed with a certain outcome would block out all other considerations.
During the first SARS scare in Asia, I played with the idea of a genetically modified virus. My thought was a standard flu virus would be a perfect vector for another bug designed to target certain DNA (male) and the high fluctuating hormones of adolescence. There’s a graduate student at the University of Alaska-Fairbanks who thinks I’m kind of diabolical.
I get this question a lot. How did you know? I didn’t. I just asked “what if” and it turns out I’m not bad at future-guessing.
Downside
Of course, there’s a downside to using current news as the foundation for a series that’s taking 10 years to write. While I can still use contemporary issues for ideas, I have to resist the temptation to put current news in the story. Donald Trump remained a real estate developer in New York throughout this series. He never ran for president. I really did not foresee his candidacy. Given the situation in New York at this point in my series, I don’t even know if the Donald is alive.
I did, however, predict incompetent presidencies being a problem in the apocalypse era. I don’t deal deeply with them because they’re all dead by the time of my novel series, but they’re one cause of a complex situation.
Idea Then Research
While I often get ideas from the front page, a lot of research comes in line to make the information accurate. I spent a lot of time googling. Or I should say, I spent a lot of time googling because these days Google Search is pretty infested with propaganda, so you can’t trust the first 2-3 pages of search results. You have to dig back further to find fact-based information. Browsers like Brave get a little closer to truth than Google, but ultimately, you have to research to assure your research isn’t propaganda. Especially when you’re writing about something that occurs in the “real” world, it is important to be as accurate as possible, and these days that takes a lot more diligence than it did a decade ago or so. Sometimes I’ve gone to the library and pulled out real books to uncover the truth.
If you could live in any place, any time, any world, where would you live?
I’d love to live in a world where there are no mobile phones, no Internet, and no cars. Therefore I’d like to go back to Victorian times, where life was lived at a slower pace. People weren’t always looking down at their phones, because there weren’t any! You walked everywhere or went to your destination by horse and carriage or by bicycle.
I’m also a creature of habit who dislikes change. I still want to live in the UK because that’s home to me, and the place I’d most like to live in is the Isle of Wight. The scenery is beautiful, and even now the pace of life there is a bit slower than on the mainland. I would have loved to be part of celebrated…
Welcome to another edition of Open Book Blog Hop. This week’s question is: “If you could live in any place, any time, any world, where would you live?” You can click here to participate in this week’s hop and read other responses.
I would like to live in a world where everything is accessible. All signs, not just those for restrooms, hotel rooms, and elevators, would be in Braille. Those unable to read Braille or print could press a button on the sign to hear its content read. Elevators would utilize voice commands. That way, if you’re alone in an elevator and unable to read the Braille or print on the buttons, you could simply say the floor you need just like you’d tell your smart speaker what music to play.
In restaurants, menus would be presented on tablets with headphones available, so those unable to read the print could…
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