Mar 30, 2012

Writing Way Outside The Box - Contest Entry

Writing Way Outside The Box
by
Julie Eberhart Painter

Editors and agents frequently ask what makes this book/story different? Why should we invest time and money in seeing it to print?

The criteria has to be that the story is either a familiar theme from a unique perspective, or it’s really off the wall, another reason for instant appeal or instant rejection. Despite the outside the box style, it has to make sense to readers.

Several examples come to mind. One is a new TV show called Awake. This is a story about complicated grief, something I saw in bereavement groups when I volunteered as a counselor’s co-facilitator with hospice. When guilt (He was driving the car when it crashed.) is mixed with extreme loss, the grieving can produce an extrasensory reaction like the one being portrayed in Awake. The man who suffers the loss of either his wife or his son is seeing two psychiatrists. Each is trying to sort out why he is living—either asleep or awake—two lives, one with his wife and one with his son. It's obvious he is grieving and in extreme (dramatic) denial. By keeping them both alive, but mourning one and then other he honors them both.

Another story with an unusual perspective is, Turn of Mind, by Alice LaPlante, who wrote the entire book from the point of view of Jennifer, an Alzheimer’s patient who may or may not have murdered her best friend. One reviewer called it a diary of a disease, but it’s also a murder mystery. The mystery is the linear backstory while the rest is the fragmented and confused thoughts of the patient as she sinks deeper into dementia still trying to remember what happened the night her best friend died.

The Lovely Bones and The Sixth Sense movies are two other examples of unique formatting and unusual points of view.

When choosing a way to tell any story, it must come from the most visceral place, the heart of the character with the most to lose. If the authors mentioned above had chosen an outside narrator, the stories would have been reduced to journalism.

Using the material from research as a linear back story, the writer should put his or herself into the main characters’ heads, starting with their first awareness that something is off.  Writers need passion and patience to wander through an experience as if never having seen it or felt it before. That sense of marvel brings the story to life.

It's the feelings that sell the book. LaPlante's book is totally un-linear, except for carrying the plot time line by using the female detective’s unannounced visits to search out the truth. Could a woman with advanced Alzheimer’s have murdered her best friend? Now that’s off the wall and out of the box.

Julie Eberhart Painter is the author of seven books. Her champagne books include Mortal Coil, Tangled Web and the CTRR award-winning Kill Fee. Author website at: www.books-jepainter.com


Julie Eberhart Painter's Books

Mar 29, 2012

Out of the Box, Forever! - Contest Entry

OUT OF THE BOX, FOREVER!
by
Rolynn Anderson

Truth is, I’m not sure what it feels like to be ‘in’ a box…all my life I’ve roamed outside the cardboard confines.  In fact, I was hired to open a brand new out-of-the-box high school, to become the first female principal in a big conservative school district.  Oh boy, do I have stories to tell about that experience!

I spend four months out of the year on our trawler exploring the Northwest’s Inside Passage with my DH.  Knots of stories on those cruises-very OOTB!

I ‘became’ a writer in 2001.  Published by the famous Wild Rose Press in 2011.  Soon to be published by TWRP for the second time in 2012.  Will self-publish in 2012.  Eight more novels ready for prime time.  Still climbing all around the box.

But let me tell you some specific out-of-the-box experiences with my first published novel, LAST RESORT.  Here’s the OOTB list:

1.  Never wrote a thriller…LAST RESORT is one.

2.  Hadn’t used more than three POV’s…LAST RESORT has five!

3.  Wanted to add a non-hibernating grizzly to my British Columbia setting…my research (and a cool story about grizzlies that swim long distances) told me I could.

4.  Thought I couldn’t show a sympathetic side of a terrorist…readers tell me I did.

5.  Heard a rumor in Big Bay, B.C. that helicopters were taking a TV crew back and forth from a B.C. resort to the Olympic Games in Whistler.  Worked that rumor into a truth and a framework for a terrorist event.

6.  Didn’t know anything about helicopters…now I do.

7.  Wanted a punk party girl in my novel…got my nieces and nephews to help me build her language.

8.  Canadian and American undercover intelligence agencies working together?  How in the world would that happen?  Found out.  Made it happen.

9.  What does a corporate fixer do?  Learned about the career…made up the rest.  My heroine is fabulous at her job!

10.  Thought about selling LAST RESORT in marinas surrounding the  real-life setting for my novel.  Marina managers bought dozens of my novels and sold them to boaters cruising up and down the Inside Passage.  Want a ‘no way’ shiver up your spine?  A Big Bay marina manager I pitched to…runs a small fishing camp called…LAST RESORT!  Here’s another coincidence goose-bumper...she met and married a fishing guide, just like my heroine!

Can’t wait to hear all the OOTB experiences from my writing buddies.  We stand together on seeing and crafting worlds in new ways!

SUSPENSE SPIKED WITH ROMANCE
LAST RESORT on sale now, print & download
Wild Rose Press: http://tinyurl.com/682vwgv
FB: http://tinyurl.com/63vsnmt

Rolynn Anderson is a retired Washington State high school principal (and English teacher) who now spends four months on her  trawler, INTREPID, cruising up and down the Inside Passage to Alaska, and the other eight months on the Central Coast of California.  

The Last Resort

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