Hooray for hens and their book buying

Back at the WLT Agents & Editors conference, Evelyn Palfrey introduced me to the term “hen-lit,” books aimed at the beyond-30s generation. (It’s what she’s written, and well, too.)

This morning I saw this item in the writersmarket.com report from Debbie Ridpath Ohi:

Hyperion launches new imprint for women

Named Voice, the new imprint is just one of several aimed at female readers. Warner Books already has a women’s imprint called 5 Spot and will be launching Springboard Press in the fall; aimed at baby boomers, a large percentage of its titles will cater to female readers. “Voice is specifically focusing on women from their mid-30’s and older and will have a resolutely anti-chick-lit bent," said its founders.

There’s more in a New York Times story, if you have a free online subscription.

I don't know if I want to put too fine a point on this, but if you're writing fiction, you're writing for women, three readers out of four. Of course, you should write whatever story is in your true voice. But imagine telling it to your sweetheart, girlfriend, wife or office pal, if you're a fella — and if you care about getting picked up by a publisher who'll print more than 1,000 copies of your book

Taking the shortcut to telling

Show, don't tell. It's a chestnut, a bromide, a mantra for writers. Those who want to sketch pictures of stories that readers want to live in, they make a habit of showing a world, not telling about it.

Telling can be a hard habit to break. A lot of the writing many of us began with was reporting: on books, our summer vacations, the literature we were force-fed in high school, current events or debate team ammunition. Facts, or our feelings, told instead of painted. It's one of the greatest differences between fiction and non-fiction. The former needs to show to do its work. The latter tells as a matter of course.

But sometimes fiction can abide a bit of telling. To move things along, in brief stretches. To set up a scene briefly, which follows the telling immediately.

Telling is a shortcut in writing fiction, or creative non-fiction. Readers want the longer path so they can dally in the delights of a world created by words.

Headed west for vivid words

This weekend I'm heading 400 miles west of the Workshop, to do some work of my own on my writing. The Writer's League of Texas is hosting its first Summer Writing Academy, where about two dozen of us will learn about writing novels, screenplays, or in my case, Making Fiction Come Alive.

My instructor is Jodi Thomas, a USA Today bestselling author of romances who's also the writer in residence at West Texas A&M University. I figured that with teaching experience in her background and more than a dozen books in print, Jodi would be a good choice to learn the language of vivid love. I bought a copy of her novel The Texan's Wager. It starts strong, with our heroine stranded in the middle of nowhere, kicked out of a wagon train with no weapons in 19th Century Texas.

Trouble right away, the cardinal rule of how to kick off a compelling story. I'm looking forward to being a little more kicked out in the week to come, too, kind of a retreat away from the life that supports me and my family.

Alpine, of course, will be beautiful, in the summertime cool of the Davis Mountains. I'm especially keen to drive to Ft. Davis soon, to visit Dayton's birthplace and the spot he fell in love with his wife. There's nothing like being an eyewitness to detail to make the writing come alive.

Slipstreaming toward a genre

One of the hard things for an writer to accomplish is knowing where their book will land on a bookstore's shelves. Write a mystery, romance or western, and you have no challenge on this score. Write a story that simply tells a tale, though, and you have two choices: mainstream, or slipstream.

The latter term was coined by science fiction writer Bruce Sterling in 1989, and it's even got a Wikipedia entry. Eventually that entry will lead you to Sterling's article. He quips that he's made up the word based on mainstream. Slipstream is also a kind of propulsion drive used in Star Trek, too, but in Sterling's view it's a story that crosses genres (say, sci-fi and mainstream) and describes a world that's different.

For a master list of the wide and wooly range of slipstream, have a look at the titles Sterling compiled along with Nova Express sci-fi editor Lawrence Person. (Both living in Austin, by the way, home of our Writer's Workshop.)

Sterling's article is worth reading if you're writing something that isn't quite one genre or another. For now, I've decided that Viral Times is slipstream fiction. It's not a section in Barnes & Noble, but at least it's a more accurate description of how rich the story will be once its finished.