Welcome to my FRED Talk

by Fredrick Soukup

In October of 2018 I received an email offering me my first book deal—something I’d dreamt about for a decade. But after rereading the email a dozen times, I was confused. Having, at that point in my career, received, give or take, a billion rejection letters, I thought, “Wow, that’s the strangest rejection letter I’ve ever received. It almost sounds like a yes.”

Needless to say, the road to publication is a long one. Now on the eve of the release of my second novel, Blood Up North (Vine Leaves Press), I’m aware I have much to learn about writing and publishing novels. Though, I’ve also learned much (I think). So at the risk of repeating suggestions you may have learned from more qualified instructors or compiled yourself, I’d like to impart the lessons I’ve learned. Fingers crossed, they can be of some service to you in your career.

Forget the butterfly.

At the beginning, a story isn’t a story. It’s a premise, a character, a situation, a setting, etc… A cocoon, at best. That’s fine. No, it’s better than fine—it’s a miracle! Someday that butterfly may land in your hands and spread its wings, and the two of you will marvel at its modest genesis. (A serviceable, if corny, metaphor: you see, the butterfly is a book!) But it’s important to remember—and I often have to remind myself of this—that the initial stage of writing a book is precarious. Writers tend to dream; that’s what makes them writers. But there’s a fine line between articulating in detail a path to that butterfly and merely falling in love with its ideal. Since nothing exists but what’s on the page, you may find yourself, in the latter case, exasperated when your repeated cracks at that opening chapter fail to capture all the glorious charisma of the literary classic you have in mind.

Forget the butterfly! It doesn’t exist and it never will. If it did, there would exist as many breathtakingly powerful novels as there have been breathtakingly powerful moments experienced by literate and ambitious individuals. What Austen had in mind when she first started Pride & Prejudice was probably just as brilliant as the finished product, but I sincerely doubt it was Pride & Prejudice.

Even she had to grind. Even she had doubts. Even she had to…

Rewrite (edit)

Or maybe she didn’t, I don’t know. Regardless, in my opinion, a draft is a draft is a draft. Writing one is super GD hard, and you should feel super GD proud of it. Keep in mind, however, that your work has most likely only just begun. For real. In my experience, the only thing more dismaying than looking back at an old draft and immediately noticing your mistakes—or having those mistakes pointed out to you by a peer reader to whom you sent your draft prematurely—is realizing that you’ve sent your project to agents and editors before it was ready. Maybe the ending is sloppy, the side characters are flat. Maybe the pacing in half a dozen chapters lags. Whatever it is, it’ll be difficult to spot in the days and weeks after you’ve finished that first run-through. Take time off (read other books, organize the miscellaneous drawer in your kitchen, rob a bank, whatever…), then get back to it.

While we’re on the subject of shame…

Embrace embarrassment

This story, regrettably, is true. Back in high school, I spent a summer emceeing lumberjack shows in northern Minnesota. In flannel, boots, and jeans, I pumped up the crowds (a hundred or so, mostly families), then provided commentary for two burly lumberjacks competing in axe-throwing, logrolling, handsawing, chainsawing, and pole-climbing. One day, the older lumberjack’s sore back prevented him from climbing the pole and the competitors tied 2-2. After huddling up, they informed me that the competition would be decided by one more toss of the axe. I then turned to the stands—again, mostly families—and, trusting in my quick-feet, said, “You folks are in for a real treat today. The lumberjacks are all knotted up, so it looks like we’re gonna have ourselves a good old-fashioned j*ck-off!”

I have never been more embarrassed. Or, I should say, I had never been more embarrassed. Little did I know that the day would arrive when I’d email an agent my latest masterpiece, mistakenly addressing my query to “Mr. Ann Smith” (I changed the name here, but you get the drift). Nor did my embarrassment abate when over the following months she and her mercurial cohort responded to my project with silence.

I urge you, as I urge myself: embrace embarrassment! Laugh it off, learn from it, let it harden you, explore your emotions and see if they can help you with the next story. Whatever works for you.

But no matter what…

Don’t stop ‘til you get enough (also, don’t ever get enough)

If you’re like me, a tad on the self-demanding side, please remember to give yourself credit for your achievements, however small: a kind review, the completion of another draft, even a nice rejection letter. For instance, did you see what I did there with my initials? Pretty clever.

Be kind to yourself. Disheartened writers write disheartening books about disheartening characters. If you aren’t careful, you may fall into the same vortex of despair in which I’ve spent much of the past twelve years. If you see me there, feel free to wave, but please do keep it down—I’m working.

Fredrick Soukup is the author of Bliss (Regal House Publishing, 2020) and Blood Up North (Vine Leaves Press, 2022)

Can Writers Stop Calling Romance Novels “Porn”?

By Elizabeth Everett, Author of A Perfect Equation

Let’s start with two definitions.

Pornography: printed or visual material containing the explicit description or display of sexual organs or activity, intended to stimulate erotic rather than aesthetic or emotional feelings.

Romance Novel: A work of literature which features a central love story with an emotionally satisfying and optimistic ending.

It seems obvious to me that these are two wildly different definitions. Why, then, do so many people use the word “porn” in conjunction with the romance genre? Even more distressing, why do other authors use it?

If this was the mid-seventies of the last century, it might make more sense. Pornographic movies had tenuous story lines and, specifically in the historical romance sub-genre, there were narratives that included non-consensual sex.

Times have changed a great deal, but stereotypes remain. Even a cursory examination of the impact of the pornographic industry on women and young people reveals multiple studies that leave no doubt of its negative impact on the lives of the people participating in as well as watching pornography.

In contrast, a slew of articles have been written in the past two years about how romance novels have been a balm for reader’s mental health during the pandemic and a spike in romance sales proves the point.

Genre fiction has always gotten the side eye from other writers, but the contempt for romance is particularly strong. I have a few theories as to why this might be.

The first is that in our American culture, we are still ambivalent about sex. On the one hand, we use sex to sell everything from sneakers to cereal. We hypersexualize young people in our media and everything from fashion to food is designed to appear “sexy.” On the other hand, when we talk about the actual sex act, we still use words like “dirty”, “smutty”, and “nasty.” Sex education in the classroom is still controversial and frank, open discussion about sexual health is still taboo. Adults, when they find out that I write romance, immediately begin to titter and make jokes about how my partner must enjoy that I write sex scenes. Men in genre fiction – especially thrillers and crime fiction – rarely get asked about if they get off on writing about sex killers or are titillated when they depict mutilated naked women as victims. Yet, romance authors report that it is quite common to receive inappropriate questions about their enjoyment of writing sex scenes from interviewers and other authors as well as from the general public.

The second theory is a bit more nuanced. The romance genre has made strides – although I think we can all agree not enough – by expanding representation in romance novels. Peruse any romance section and you’ll find Queer, disabled, and neurodiverse main characters, to name a few. While there is some prejudicial push-back on love stories for everyone, “porn” and even worse, “mommy porn”, is most often applied to books where women are depicted enjoying non-penetrative or consensual sex. We’ve internalized misogyny to the point where depictions of intimacy where women are active participants and achieve satisfaction are suspect and subject to ridicule. It’s no coincidence that in many thrillers and crime fiction novels if a woman is sexually active, she’s going to wind up dead at some point.

My deepest disappointment with this hypocrisy is when other authors participate in it. The point of including physical intimacy on the page in a romance novel is obvious. It is a powerful way to illustrate the deepening emotional connection between the two main characters. While you can always separate love from sex, sex with love is a compelling narrative that has driven many a classic novel – but oftentimes praise is saved for those novels where the woman is punished, or the relationship ends in tragedy.

The next time an author is tempted to dismiss romance novels as trash or “porn” – I urge them to pause and do one of two things. First, read a romance. It’s not that hard, there are lots of them out there to appeal to any age, race, gender, religion, or sexuality. Second, these are your peers. Take a moment and consider the comparison you are making between a piece of pornography and a three-hundred-page novel that charts the course of a relationship and brings devoted readers the profound emotional satisfaction that is this genre’s special gift.

Elizabeth Everett lives in upstate New York with her family. She likes going for long walks or (very) short runs to nearby sites that figure prominently in the history of civil rights and women's suffrage. Her series is inspired by her admiration for rule breakers and belief in the power of love to change the world.

Writing About the 1990’s

by D. Marshall Craig, M.D.

As the author of the Dr. Kyle Chandler Thriller Series, a series of suspense/thriller novels about a busy trauma surgeon with a private investigation hobby on the side, the premise for these stories is set in the mid-1990’s. Why would I set these books in that decade instead of the present-day, you ask? Well, there’s a couple of simple answers to that question.

Prior to my career as a fiction novel writer, I was a plastic and reconstructive surgeon for twenty-five years. I completed my surgical training in the late 1980’s and started my private practice in 1990. Believe it or not, I wrote the initial draft to the first book in the series, Cut to the Chase, in the late 1990’s. One of the best pieces of writing advice that I was ever given was that an author should “write about what you know.” And I definitely knew about the practice of medicine in the 1990’s because I actually lived through it. So when it came time to re-edit and resubmit my manuscript for publishers, I left the story timeframe in the 1990’s.

The overall independence of the field of clinical medicine, particularly the status of private practice medicine, is quite different today as compared to the 1990’s. Back in the last decade of the twentieth century, managed healthcare was just beginning to exercise its influence over how physicians were expected to treat their patients. Today, physicians are minion employees of large healthcare corporations where bottom-line profits take precedence over doing what is best for your patients.

Because large managed healthcare corporations were beginning to dominate healthcare in America in the 1990’s, I made them the antagonist in my first novel, Cut to the Chase. One of the recurring scenarios in my series is that as my protagonist progresses in each novel, he is like David facing overwhelming odds against a Goliath opponent. In each situation, it leads to the theme of “never give up.” So I extended this theme in my second novel, Hidden Agendas, where my protagonist, Dr. Kyle Chandler, is up against powerful corporate businesses, one somewhat legal, yet corrupt, the other quite dangerous. It made the antagonist for the second novel just as believable since large corporations of the 1990’s were just as ruthless back then as they are today.

Will the readers understand enough what it was like back in the 1990’s to stay interested in the stories of my series? I think so, but I’m sure it might depend on the age bracket of the readers. After all, the 1990’s is definitely not the same as the year 2022. My two sons marvel at the thought that we actually survived in a world without cell phones and the Internet for most of that decade. If you needed to find out some information about something, you couldn’t just quickly “Google” it. You had to go all the way up to the library or bookstore and look it up. Imagine that. There was no such thing as an iPhone. You listened to music from cassette tapes and CD’s, not streaming phone apps. Not really worse than today, just a tad different.

You might suggest that younger readers may not be as interested in stories set in an earlier time period. You could argue that because they didn’t live in that time period, they probably wouldn’t understand the 1990’s as well as the present time. I’m going to send you a little pushback on that one (listen young readers, you’ll eventually get to the stage where you think thirty years ago is NOT that long ago, trust me). I’ve read dozens of stories, both nonfiction and fiction, where the setting of the book is more than decades ago and I still enjoyed the book immensely. I truly feel, and I’m going to bet that other readers do also, that the era of the story you are reading doesn’t matter if the plot and characters are interesting and attention-grabbing.

So how do you grab the reader’s interest and keep them turning the pages of your story even though it is set in the 1990’s instead of in present day? Well, for my series of suspense/thriller novels, I try to create an interesting beginning to hook the reader. I make my characters seem believable but still individually unique. Most of my characters and plot situations come from the crazy individuals and hard-to-believe situations I experienced or heard about during my career in medicine for over thirty years. I use machine gun fast, snappy dialogue between characters to create a kind of tension. I feel the plot should be fast-paced with a surprise ending. And I think these techniques work just as well for stories set in the 1990’s as present day.

Across a 30-year career in medicine, D. Marshall Craig, accumulated plenty of wild stories and met more than his share of interesting characters. He always thought they might one day make for a good book. Then in 1995, when large insurance companies started muscling their way into the healthcare industry, providing a natural antagonist, he decided to put pen to paper. Or in this case, fingers to a little bitty vintage Dell laptop.