I’m practically an expert on this subject because, even though I’ve had a completed manuscript since the late 90s, I remain an unpublished novelist.

I know, it’s an impressive feat, right? I bet you are just dying to know all my tricks so that you, too, can be an Undiscovered Novelist!

Don’t Finish Your Manuscript

This, of course, is the first and easiest way to remain Undiscovered. If you don’t write it, nobody can read it, and your anonymity will remain intact.

Write a Terrible Novel.

This is the second-easiest method. If you’ve written a long, droning, boring, pointless, ungrammatical mess of typescript, the chances are good that nobody, but nobody, is going to pay you for the privilege of publishing it.

Really, though, those tips are for amateurs. Anybody can claim to be a novelist and then not carry through by writing an actual, well, novel.

The real challenge for being an Undiscovered Novelist is to actually HAVE a completed manuscript, one that is good, interesting, and entertaining, one that has real character development and depth, and a multi-layered plot that all ties together. A masterpiece, that is, or at least something that is good.

To have all that and still remain unpublished is tricky. It takes a master of evasion. An expert at avoidance. That’s where my distinct talents come into play. Because, naturally, my completed novel is wonderful. Every time I pull it out of mothballs, it makes me laugh, smile, cry, and tingle all the way to my fingertips, it’s so darned entertaining. But, you know, that’s my little secret, which brings me to tip number 1.

Keep it a Secret

Obviously, the most guaranteed way to remain Undiscovered is simply to never tell anyone that you wrote a novel. You can keep it, tied in a ribbon, tucked under your pillow until the day you die, and nobody will ever know. Then, when your heirs, stifling sobs of grief, come to clean out your house, they will find it and, sitting on the edge of your bed, find themselves entranced and wondering, “Why did he never tell us?” At which point you can become the posthumous John Updike and your heirs can all go on Oprah to talk about what an unappreciated genius you were.

Expect Too Much

Or, maybe you’d actually like to be published. You think your manuscript is the bee’s knees and that it should be published … but you expect the world to come to you. Maybe you casually mention it to a publishing acquaintance, expecting them to kneel and beg for the privilege of seeing your manuscript. Or, perhaps you send out one or two query letters, fully expecting to be the instant object of a bidding war. At this stage of the publishing process, an unfettered ego is definitely going to help you remain Undiscovered for a long, long time.

Be Lazy

You may have heard that you need to send out query letters to literary agents, manuscripts to publishers, phone calls, emails, follow-ups … The surest way to ensure that you never get anything published is to neglect these. Send out a couple queries, and then, exhausted from your labors, rest up for the next several months. After all, you’ve heard that people in the publishing industry are perpetually busy (bless their hearts), so it’s really just polite to give them plenty of time to respond, right? And why send out another batch of queries until you’re really, really sure that the first set is dead? It’s best to give it several months, maybe a year, just to be safe.

Don’t Follow Up

Okay, you sent out several queries, but you haven’t heard anything. (Yay!) Naturally, since you know how busy everybody is, you wouldn’t want to nag them, so … that’s it. You just leave well enough alone.

Give Up

This is the easiest way to remain Unpublished and Undiscovered. You’ve sent out a slew of queries, samples, even full manuscripts, and you even went to the trouble to follow them up to make sure they had arrived and were being read (that very minute, no doubt), but you still haven’t been inundated by offers. That makes this easy! You simply give up at this point. You tried, right? So, you just … stop.

I should warn you that this last option can come at some cost to your ego. If you do, in fact, know that your manuscript is dripping with pearls of wisdom and contains some of the finest verbiage since John Grisham or Shakespeare first put pen to paper, it may be hard to believe that nobody is knocking down your door, trying to get to it. Why wouldn’t they? At some point, you may start questioning whether it’s the fault of your prose. (Nah, couldn’t be.) Or … maybe it’s your fault for giving them a clear run to your door? You didn’t make sure enough of them knew the book existed? You didn’t tell the right people?

Hmm. See, at this point, when you KNOW your novel is brilliant but it remains unpublished, you’re left with two choices.

1. Assume that it’s your fault for not trying hard enough, or
2. Accept that it’s Just Not Meant To Be and start polishing your “I Did It!” button because, congratulations! You are still Undiscovered and Unpublished!

And, really, isn’t that what you wanted?

(Your turn, folks. What tips did I miss?)

Truly, it’s not something I talk about often, but I love writing fiction. Ironic, I know, because I don’t do it very often.

I write non-fiction a lot. All the time. Blog posts. Emails at work. Notes to friends. Marketing pieces. Comments on blogs. Pretty much everything is non-fiction. Facts and opinions, and I’m fine with that. I like all sorts of writing, so I’m not complaining. If I truly wanted to be writing fiction and nothing else, well, I wouldn’t be having this (non-fiction) conversation with you. I’d be up to my eyeballs in the next Great American Novel.

So, why am I bringing this up? Well, Melissa‘s talking about Fiction all month, so there’s that.

But also, on a whim, I opened up the Word document of one of my unfinished novels. …Um, yes, I have more than one. I have one, complete novel, a half-written sequel to it, and a third, half-written novel that kind of bumped the second one out of its place in line but which has been stymied by a circa-1912 legal problem whose solution escapes me. None of these are novels I’ve managed to sell, and since I’ve been focusing on the non-fiction writing for the last several years, they’ve been languishing on my harddrive, poor things.

Anyway, I opened the Word document of that half-written sequel of mine and started to read … and ended up with a huge smile on my face. I LIKED it. I enjoyed it. I was enchanted … it felt wonderful.

Now, I’m not saying that that my fiction is the best fiction in the world. But the fact that simply skimming over the story I had in progress made me feel so good about it reinforces my Number One Rule for Fiction.

Write Something That You Would Buy.

I’ll read almost anything. I’m a reading addict, for heaven’s sake. I can’t go to sleep at night without reading in bed. I carry a book around the house with me, so it’s always in reach. I read while brushing my teeth, while stirring things on the stove, while waiting for the kettle to boil. It’s pretty much my default behavior–if I’m not doing something that is incompatible with reading (driving, bathing, walking the dog), chances are good I’m reading.

When I wrote my first novel, I wrote it because the story that came to me was so good that I wanted to READ IT. And since nobody else had written the book, I was forced to do it myself.

The entire process was a pleasure. Figuring out the story. Making sure my characters were realistic (I hope). Working out the interweaving of the various plots. I loved it. It was like creating my own puzzle, and I ended up with a book that, had I seen it in a bookstore, I would have bought in a minute.

There’s plenty of fiction out there that I read but have no desire to try to write. Tom Clancy-esque action/adventure would require too much technical research. I like reading mysteries, but working out the gruesome details of a murder is too, well, gruesome for me. Those dark, brooding, symbolic books that are loaded with Meaning but leave you feeling like you’re carrying the world on your shoulders are too depressing for me to immerse myself in.

No, the three books I’ve written (more or less) all tell stories that I love. Love! The kinds of stories that make my eyes light up when I think about them. The kind that make me smile. The kind that–even if somebody else had written them–would live on the bookcase next to my bed for the next several eons, just so I could keep them close.

Forget about writing what you know. I mean, yes, it’s decent advice, but even better? Write what you LOVE.

Do you know what my favorite part of writing fiction is?

Putting the pieces together.

See, the best fiction … heck, the best writing … starts with a single germ of an idea. Something that sparks. Something that sets off a chain reaction.

If you’re lucky, that one thing is GOOD. It’s beautiful and holds together and deserves to be part of something bigger. But one good idea isn’t enough to make a story.

You need to start putting it together with other pieces. Pieces that compliment it. Pieces that help make that little idea GROW.

These include things like:

Three-dimensional characters. It’s characters that make a story interesting–if you don’t care about the people, who cares how brilliant the idea of what’s happening to them is? I’m a lot more likely to keep reading a less-than-stellar book if I care what happens to the characters, than to find out if the earth is going to explode.

Plot points that are interesting, creative, and believable (at least a little bit). You can be writing romance, mysteries, thrillers, or science-fiction, it doesn’t matter. What happens in your book has to make sense within the boundaries of your book. If your characters have superpowers, that’s fine, but make sure the rules are consistent. Your romantic leads can have a “cute” meeting, but don’t stretch my gullibility too far.

Because, little by little, as you add pieces and thoughts, your idea can grow into something bigger. Something you couldn’t have seen coming.

The best books, the ones I personally love the most, combine characters that I love (or at least, who evoke an emotional response, even if it’s hate) and that I’m interested in, and to whom interesting things happen. The more multi-layered and seamlessly woven a plot is, the more I like it, but it has to WORK.

All the pieces–the plot, the characters, the scope of the story–they all have to fit just right, like a jigsaw puzzle to be perfect. (Let’s not forget good writing, too, huh? Fascinating characters and an elaborate, perfect plot still won’t keep my interest if the actual writing is terrible.)

Because, when it all fits? When everything holds together, it’s like magic. One loose thread, one bad connection, and the entire thing can fall apart.

The act of finding and creating all those pieces, though? I love that part.

Write the Way You Talk

You have heard this “rule,” haven’t you? It’s all the rage these days. Internet gurus tell their initiates that all they need to do to gain thousands of readers or sell gazillions of widgets is to simply Write the Way You Talk. They insist that a dependence on grammar rules is not as important as simply saying what you need to say, without getting bogged down by pesky grammatical details.

This is a topic that actually gets discussed in my house. When my father gets some kind of marketing piece that sounds convincing and interesting, he doesn’t let a few mis-spellings or grammatical no-nos get in his way. After all, you don’t need to have been an English major in college to know good business, right? A go-get-’em entrepreneur isn’t going to let concern over the placement of an apostrophe slow him down when there’s money to be made and people to sell. His feeling is that a person’s verbal skills do not necessarily reflect their intelligence (true) or their competence (um…).

But What about the First Impression?

My mother and I, on the other hand, feel that sloppiness in the sales materials implies sloppiness in the product–or in the salesperson. That, if you can’t be bothered to proof-read the copy that’s supposed to convince people to buy your product, how can we be sure that the product is any better?

All in all, it brings up an interesting dichotomy.

Now, I’m the first one to admit that I may be more of a stickler than other readers (cough). But then, I like things neat, tidy, and organized. Piles of papers have to have their corners aligned. Crooked pictures drive me batty. I like things to be correct, accepting no substitutions.

Do You Have to be Correct to be Good?

I know, of course, that people and their writing are imperfect. I also fully embrace the fact that “good” writing is not necessarily the same as “correct” writing (especially in a sales pitch). Finding one typo in an email emphatically does not make me assume that the writer is an incompetent, lazy slob who dozed through English class in 7th grade. It just makes me assume the writer is human–which is preferable than one that is, say, a computer, or inhumanly perfect (because that would just be annoying, really). A breezy letter with a folksy tone wouldn’t sound right in itself without contractions and a certain amount of casual grammar usage.

But when there are multiple errors, and the apostrophe for “don’t” is after the “D”, I really start wondering about who is writing this thing. How smart can they actually be if they cannot spell “your” correctly?

Have you ever gone to look at a house and been greeted by a whiff of cinnamon, or baking bread, and thought “Wow, this is fabulous. So welcoming! They obviously know what they’re doing.”

First Impressions Do Matter

It all goes back to that First Impression business. A person in a suit is going to be taken more seriously than a person in a clown costume. (Crazy, right?) A house with a tidy yard is going to look more appealing than one that looks like a junk yard. A shiny, polished, immaculate car is going to inspire more interest than one that looks like it just came out of a war zone.

You don’t have to be perfect. But it never hurts to look like you know what you’re doing. And if you can’t string four sentences together without egregious abuses to the laws of grammar, you’re not going to inspire my confidence.

I’ve got a guest post up at Joanna’s Confident Writing today. Go on over and read it! You know, so Joanna won’t think we’ve let the place fall down around her ears while she’s away…