Killer book blurbs

My observation so far about blurbs is that they are really hard to write well in only one draft.   

Even worse, they are really hard to write cold after finishing a book. (Heck, I haven't even finished a novel yet, and I know it's hard!)

Because how to do you choose what to emphasize when you have a pirate kidnapping, and romance between the gargoyle and the gamine heroine, and intrigue over the miniaturized secret nuclear submarine plans hidden in the plug of the crock-pot lost at the church social?  (No, those aren't in my novel, but they should be in somebody's!) So many conflicts, what do you choose?  What’s most important?

I think the best way to approach blurb-writing is to begin drafting them at the beginning of the novel-writing process, then revisit and redraft as each third of the book is completed.  (Need a way to procrastinate while still being productive on your story?  Just go hone your blurb.  You’re welcome.)

Plot bunnies appear, and by heaven, sometimes we must chase them!  And sometimes… the plot bunny develops into such a six-foot pooka of awesomeness that you must bow to it and change your book accordingly. 

In those cases, it helps to revisit and change the blurb immediately before too many more distractions are added. I'm halfway through my current work in progress and I've already drafted my blurb eleven times.

I ran across somewhere that Pixar has some kind of formula for writing awesome movie premises, which can be used for writing story blurbs.  I may not remember it perfectly, but it goes something like this:

Character is in [starting situation].  Then [change] happens and now character has lost [something valuable]. But [external threat] looms, forcing character to [do something very uncomfortable and nasty] in order to reach [her goal].  [Allies] help or [advantages] develop, but they also cause [more trouble].  Finally character is forced to make a choice. Will character choose [Option A] and have [awful consequence A], or choose [Option B] and have [awful consequence B]? 

 Alternatively, for romances, if you have two POVs between your heroine and hero, you can have two paragraphs to examine their internal and external conflicts. Something like this:

Heroine is in [starting internal and external situation]. Then [change] happens and now [hero] stands in the way of heroine achieving her [goal].  But he’s attractive in a [list of devastating ways, skills, power to help her].  Can she overcome internal and external obstacles or will she get horrible consequences and lose love forever?

Hero is in [starting internal and external situation]. Then [change] happens and now [heroine] stands in the way of the heroe’s [goals].  But he’s captivated by her [devastating attractions].  Can he overcome his [internal obstacles] or will he lose her forever? 

 

(Extra points if the hero and heroine are each other’s external obstacles and overcoming those obstacles will cause them to lose in love.)

Yes, the above is formulaic, but it at least gives you a good place to start.

It helps to read other blurbs in the same genre to get a sense of the marketing hooks that are used and other creative blurb structures.  And reading blurbs in other genres can broaden your horizons further.

Another thing that helps is reading other author's blurbs, critiquing them, and trying to make them better.  Nothing's more fun than playing with a bad blurb. Or even a good blurb.

A good way to analyze a blurb is to highlight all the marketing hooks in it.  What kinds of verbs do they use? What language excites you and why?  Do you get a sense of who the character is and what kinds of conflicts and dilemmas they will face?  Is it all in language that screams "exciting"?

Good dialogue

One of the dangers of writing dialogue is that it can be too on-the-nose.  I have a hard time wrapping my mind around the term on-the-nose, so I want to unpack it and offer some alternative ways of defining it.

Here is an example of dialogue taken from The Writer’s Digest article “7 Tools ofDialogue”:  

“Hello, Mary.”
“Hi, Sylvia.”
“My, that’s a wonderful outfit you’re wearing.”
“Outfit? You mean this old thing?”
“Old thing! It looks practically new.”
“It’s not new, but thank you for saying so.”

The article says there are no surprises here, and that is true.  But what is really happening is the characters are being completely forthright and open with each other.  Questions are answered completely and happily.  Also, the stakes of this dialogue are low to non-existent.  After all, why should we care about the wonderful outfit Mary is wearing? 

So one way to make the dialogue more interesting is to make one of the characters evasive.  They may not want to answer questions, or they may not want to do what they are asked to do.  But they want to be polite about it, so they come of with different ways to avoid answering questions fully or at all.  Or they may find a way to answer directly while shocking the interrogator so that the interrogator changes what they want. 

Another way is to make the stakes of the conversation high.  What if Mary’s dress was stolen goods, and she doesn’t want to reveal where she got it?  

Another way is to make the topic an unexpected hot-button issue for one of the characters.  What if Mary hates the dress she’s wearing, but she was forced to wear it for family photos?  What if Mary is not someone who is comfortable wearing dresses and would much rather wear pants?  How would she react to someone commenting she looks lovely? 

Another way is to give the interrogator hidden motives for asking the questions.   What if Sylvia (the girl who is complimenting Mary’s dress) knows that Mary hates wearing dresses, and she compliments Mary on her dress just so she can rub Mary’s face in the fact that Mary is wearing a dress?

Yet another way is to put the dialogue in a story context that makes it more interesting.  For instance, what if the above dialogue happened near the end of a story in which Mary's conflict was a very stormy relationship with Sylvia?  In this case, the above dialogue might be part of a payoff the story was building toward, showing that Mary has accomplished her goal of bringing them into a peaceful coexistence.  It would need more internal dialogue to heighten that effect, but it could fit fairly well.

I think you get the picture. 

I think we’ve shown here that on-the-nose dialogue needs doses of tension, evasion, emotion, and motive.  Lots of this can be done in the internal dialogue of the characters to spice it up.  We’ll imagine them circling each other (mentally), calculating how to meet their goals, measuring and rationing the information they give each other as they battle for ascendency, parsing each other’s words for hidden meeting, reeling under the hidden blows of the other’s words, regrouping and recalculating for the next round, etc.    This is words as a battle.  Conversation as conflict.