|
This year's deadline is again
June 30. Submit a self-published book in one of the following
categories, up to 150,000 words in length:
·
Mainstream/Literary Fiction
·
Genre Fiction
·
Creative Nonfiction &
Memoir
The winner of each category
will receive $1,500, a marketing analysis and one-hour phone
consultation with Carolyn
Howard-Johnson, a $300 credit at BookBaby,
and 3 free ads in the Winning Writers newsletter (a $450 value). Two
honorable mentions in each category will receive $250. We will publish
online excerpts (1,000-6,000 words) from all entries that win a prize,
along with critiques from judges Jendi Reiter and Ellen LaFleche. Lauren Singer will assist in the
judging. The entry fee is $50 per book.
All contestants will receive a copy of The Frugal Editor
by Carolyn Howard-Johnson (PDF), a $9.00 value, and free guides to
successful publishing from BookBaby.
Thanks to our entrants in the
inaugural North
Street Book Prize for self-published novels, memoirs, and
short story and essay collections. We received 400 entries. Assistant
Judge Ellen LaFleche and Final Judge Jendi Reiter were impressed with
the amount of talent that is flourishing outside the mainstream
publishing industry. Each book is a testament to the author's
perseverance and faith in the story they have to tell. Everyone who
entered should be proud of that.
Ellen screened the entries as
they arrived, reading excerpts from each book to judge its style and
storytelling ability. She came up with a shortlist of about 60 books
for Jendi to evaluate. Jendi read about 25 books all the way through,
and significant excerpts of the others. Then the top 16 finalists went
back to Ellen for a closer reading. We asked ourselves two questions as
we read: (1) Was this book good enough to be published by a traditional
press? (2) If we were reading this book for pleasure, rather than for
the contest, would we continue reading?
Our top fiction entries blurred
the boundaries between our Genre and Mainstream/Literary categories.
They combined the high-stakes action of commercial fiction with the
psychological depth, lyricism, and social significance of literature.
Jenna Leigh Evans took first
prize in the Genre division for Prosperity,
a dystopian vision of contemporary Americans herded into a
corporate-run debtors' prison. Prosperity occupies the same
literary territory as the surreal short stories of George Saunders,
where banality shades into horror, yet small acts of human connection
create moments of grace inside a soulless bureaucracy. Honorable
Mentions went to Glimmer
by Tricia Cerrone, a military thriller about genetically enhanced
teenagers, reminiscent of Robert Ludlum's spy classic The
Bourne Identity; and Jem, A Girl of
London by Delaney Green, a vivid and well-researched
paranormal historical about an orphaned girl in 18th-century London who
cross-dresses in order to practice medicine.
In the Mainstream/Literary
division, first prize went to Gloria Taylor Weinberg for her gritty
historical novel A Homicide in
Hooker's Point, about the aftermath of domestic violence
in a 1950s Florida sugar mill town. Through the eyes of Vicki, a
sensitive, precocious child, we see youthful idealism struggle to
comprehend the gulf between law and justice. Honorable Mentions were
awarded to Vacationland
by Nat Goodale, a bittersweet story of a Maine lobsterman fighting
gentrification, and Otter St. Onge
and the Bootleggers by Alec Hastings, a rollicking
adventure about a French-Canadian youth and his colorful family in the
1920s.
Elizabeth Kirschner's Waking the
Bones was the clear standout in our Nonfiction
division. Already an award-winning poet, she took first prize with her
gorgeous, searing memoir of recovery from child abuse. Her innovative
style, cross-cutting between the past and the present, the literal and
the mystical, captures the experience of a fractured mind
reconstituting itself as a beautiful mosaic. Honorable Mentions went to
Managing Bubbie
by Russel Lazega, a gripping re-creation of his grandmother's escape
from Nazi-occupied Europe, leavened with humorous present-day anecdotes
of her life in America; and Deb McCarroll's The Long Hot
Walk, a thoughtful account of her itinerant childhood
in New Mexico with a schizophrenic mother.
In the later stages of judging,
structural weaknesses—pacing, plausibility, or point of view—were most
often what kept a book from advancing to the next level, even though we
might have liked the voice or the premise. Here are some lessons from
our experience:
Pacing
A book doesn't have to start
with an explosion to grab our attention. We're willing to take a
leisurely walk with a character who can immerse us in a new world.
However, the story's main agenda should be clear early on. Scriptwriter
Bill Johnson's manual A Story Is a
Promise advises that a compelling narrative will
quickly establish a high-stakes problem for the main characters to
resolve by the book's end. The events that follow should move them
closer to that goal, alternating with enough setbacks to maintain
dramatic tension. The protagonists may not get what they want, but the
book must deliver on the "promise" of resolution, one way or
another.
As judges, we lost interest in
books where, 50-100 pages in, there was still no pivotal event or
agenda around which to organize the narrative. Vivid reminiscences,
philosophical musings, and character sketches can only take you so far.
Some books in the Genre Fiction
category ended on a cliffhanger because the author wanted to create
demand for the sequel. This sometimes left us unsatisfied. Don't let
marketing gimmicks warp the structure of your story. Whether it's a
stand-alone or part of a series, your main narrative arc needs closure,
or your readers will feel cheated of their emotional investment in the
characters. This is not to say that every plot thread should be
neatly tied off, because life is not that simple. The story's end
should be a natural resting place between the resolution of one major
episode in your characters' lives and the start of their unknown
future.
We received a fair number of
family sagas that spanned several decades and generations. Such a long
journey needs more signposts than most of these authors provided. Preface
your book with a diagram of the family tree. In chapter or section
headings, indicate the year and geographic location of the events that
come next. Focus on a couple of main characters in each generation, and
try to choose them based on a theme that their lives have in common.
Plausibility
Sexual relationships that cross
professional boundaries are a staple of prime-time soap operas about
doctors, lawyers, and politicians. As judges, we find them less
believable in novels, perhaps because the written genre goes deeper
into characters' inner life and motivations. If you're writing about a
cop who flirts with a suspect, or a lawyer who used to date his client,
you have to show that he recognizes the conflict of interest and is
worried about it. Or, the character's lack of concern for professional
ethics should fit into your larger picture of him as a villain or
maverick anti-hero.
Teen girls with paranormal
powers were a trend in this year's entries. They read minds, talked to
animals, fought off kung-fu masters and zombies, cured diseases, and
learned skills faster than a super-computer. Though such exaggerations
are the norm in genre fiction, remember that less is more. When you
load too many unrelated talents onto your protagonist, there's not room
in the storyline to make use of all of them.
Most importantly, technological
fantasy is no excuse to skimp on psychological realism. She
might be able to walk through walls, but to be a relatable character,
she should still have a teenager's immaturity, impulsiveness, hopes and
fears. Puberty and sexual attention are disorienting enough for normal
youth; if paranormal changes in her body don't freak her out,
she's not reacting in a believable way.
Dialogue and social mores can
establish your setting in historical fiction—or break the illusion.
Once again we'll note the importance of specifying your story's time
and place. We read several books set in Southern small towns
reminiscent of To Kill a Mockingbird or
Sinclair Lewis's Main Street, only to be thrown
off by pop-culture references that put us closer to the 1980s than the
1930s. Were these details an error, or was the writer just assuming
that rural America hadn't changed since the Scopes Monkey Trial?
Watch out for characters whose
mode of expression is too sophisticated for their age and education
level. On the flip side, we were ambivalent about books where
characters spoke in ethnic dialect, because white authors have
historically used dialect to stereotype people of color. We were more
comfortable with dialect when the book had multiple African-American
characters whose different speech patterns served the storyline of
their differences in background and degree of assimilation into other
communities.
While we're on the subject of
stereotypes, don't use body type or gender performance as a proxy for
virtue and vice. You can always tell the villain in a Disney movie
because he or she is fat, disfigured, swarthy, and (if male) has overly
refined, effeminate mannerisms. Too many of our entries relied on such
lazy and prejudicial descriptions to designate unsympathetic
characters. Not only does this stigmatize people based on appearance,
it misleads us about the nature of evil. In real life, the most
successful perpetrators get away with it for so long because they
appear to be normal, wholesome, high-achieving, and attractive by
conventional standards.
Gratuitous sexual scenes
represented a missed opportunity to connect the characters' physical
desires to their personality and place in the world. We're not talking
about explicitness so much as relevance. Like anything else your
characters do, their sexual pursuits should add depth to the story. The
same goes for scenes of violence. Ellen often cites James Lee Burke's
"Dave Robicheaux" mystery series as a model in this regard.
The violent episodes always reveal something about the detective's
emotions, Vietnam War memories, or ethical dilemmas. They're not
just there for shock value.
Out of the entries that reached
Jendi's desk, a book without a rape or child abuse
backstory seemed like the exception to the rule. It's good that these
subjects are no longer taboo, but an irresponsible treatment of them is
worse than none at all. Please, please, research PTSD and give
your character realistic triggers and a long enough recovery time.
Remember that the police and the court system are not always a safe and
effective solution for victims, especially ones who are not white and
middle-class. Also, don't use rape to "humanize" previously
invincible female action heroes.
Point of View
In the Memoir category, one
common structural weakness was the choice of protagonist. These authors
were part of an interesting milieu but not personally central to the
events that made it worth writing about. Their memoirs didn't have a
strong enough narrative arc because they essentially had the wrong main
character. In such cases, the author would have been better off writing
a historical novel based on their research.
We read several memoirs where
the narrator's childhood reminiscences were emotionally and physically
vivid, but the adult years became vague and abstract, jumping over
large stretches of time or holding the reader at arms' length from the
personal feelings involved. We can only speculate about reasons for
this pattern. Did the author lose her nerve? Was she concerned about
exposing people in her present-day life? Was she just more connected to
her inner world when she was younger? In any case, we felt that these
authors were holding out on us, and were disappointed that the books'
strong start fizzled out.
Our Wishlist
Diverse literature matters to
us. We were gratified to receive many books centered on women and
girls, African-American families, and working-class communities.
However, we found that books about Black people and racism were mostly
set in the Jim Crow South of yesteryear. We'd like to see a literary
response to current racial inequalities such as mass incarceration and
police violence, or any contemporary issues, really. There were
surprisingly few books with gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender
characters. We would greatly welcome more queer writers and stories
next year. We'd also like to hear about the experience of other people
of color—Asian, Hispanic, Native American, and so forth. Winning
Writers is working on outreach to a broader range of writers. Please
help spread the word!
We would like to recognize and
encourage these finalists:
Genre Fiction
Mainstream/Literary
Fiction
Creative
Nonfiction
|
No comments:
Post a Comment