I'm still in sunny CA, working from an abysmally slow hotel computer, so I'm writing offline before posting and hoping I'm continuing where I left off yesterday.
Gillian asked about the "construction" of blurbs and titles before a book is written. I'm probably the wrong person to ask because I'm very bad at coming up with catchy phrases, keywords, and marketing hooks. That's what sales people are for, IMO. My forte is character, my brand is houses and rural Southeastern America. All I want to do is pull my wild ideas into an outline to sell to an editor. But in this market, that's not enough anymore, especially if I want to venture into new territory.
I don't want to jinx my current idea by playing with it in public, but I'll pull an old one out of my "idea folder." Several years ago when I was feeling bored, I decided to play around with "mumlit." I came up with an idea for two sisters who switched their polar opposite lives. Again, I have no idea where the original idea came from, but I needed to build on that basic idea to send my agent a blurb of what I wanted to do.
Because Deb Dixon is a wonderful marketing guru, I fell back on a pattern I learned (or semi-learned
) in her GMC workshop. I looked for the most dynamic words I could find to describe my protagonist, Marcy Dawson. She's the wise-cracking housewife sister who made a home and family instead of a career. I called her a "self-deprecating housewife" in my set-up because that gave me an image of all those humorous chicklit books and added the factor that she's already married to show it's mumlit.
Then I needed a description of her sister, the closest thing to an antagonist that I had. And it needed to be from Marcy's viewpoint, so I simply called her Helen Hudson, "the model perfect sister." Not much, but it was all I had since Helen was a gorgeous model who sold cosmetics, and "model perfect" provided a nice opposition to "self-deprecating housewife," at least, in my mind at the time. I could have called poor Marcy overweight and unambitious, but then she wouldn't have sounded very sympathetic, and she was really a wonderful character who was quite aware of her flaws. The model perfect sister was the one with character flaws large enough to drive an Escalade through. Pity my irony isn't too obvious in blurbs.
Next, I needed conflict, any kind of conflict, to throw into the mix. Since the sisters are jealous of each other's lives, the obvious action was to have them switch places. (I didn't say this was an original idea, just an obvious one!)
The ideal blurb would read in a format something like: (adjective noun) Self-deprecating housewife Marcy Dawson (goal) needs a new life before (motivation) the remainder of her house falls on her head, but (conflict) when her model perfect sister lands on her doorstep and the next-best thing to a miracle drops in her lap, how can she resist proving she’s more than just a mom?
Then, to show the tone of the book, I added: Can she find love and happiness if she turns into Cinderella? Or will glass slippers just break and cut off her toes?
So if construction is what you're after, there's a basic model. I'm not saying it's a good model or the only model. It's just a structure that can be used if you need one. I'd be happy to play with it some more if anyone wants to improve on the concept. I'd love to have someone teach me a better method, because this one is just plain painful. Tearing my wonderfully motivated characters down into nouns and adjectives simply makes me want to go watch TV, and I hate TV.
It's no wonder I ran off to California rather than sit down and pin my new ideas down in an enticing manner in 50 words or less. It's worse than writing summary outlines, which is what I have to do next.
