Thanks to comments to this recent post, the Awesome blog back channel chatter (i.e. my Gmail account) and my own life, I’ve been thinking a lot about how to adapt the content and themes of a novel into an essay or an op-ed.
What follows is less a how-to than the beginnings of a mental framework for approaching this opportunity:
1. Fiction and nonfiction aren’t that different
Being a novelist doesn’t automatically qualify you to be an essayist, but they aren’t as far apart as they might seem. A good argument builds and progresses like a good story does. They both have beginnings, middles and ends. In each case you want tension, surprise, changes in emotional value, and so forth.
You may not consider yourself an essayist, but if you can shift your beliefs, then you may find that you’re more of a nonfiction writer than you think.
2. Overt is good
One of the nice things about essays is that they’re about what they’re about, and you can say what they’re about without being penalized.
In your novel, two characters are keeping secrets, but the reader doesn’t even know they’re keeping secrets until page 100. In an essay, you get to announce it right up at the top:
Here Is My Essay About Secrets and What They Mean Today.
3. The background becomes the foreground
In your middle-grade reader, two ten-year old boys have a complicated friendship. In your research, you discover (warning: I’m making this up) that in Ancient Greece children were assigned a friend in order to learn the value of friendship.
The insights you glean from your research into Ancient Greek arranged friendships is invaluable, but in your book it only realistically works as backstory. In this case, an essay allows you to put otherwise unusable material to work.
4. Finding the peg
Writing for newspapers and magazines is all about timing. The story that is irrelevant today is essential tomorrow. Succeeding at writing tie-in articles requires patience, diligence and opportunism.
You want to have your essay relatively ready to go. Then, when that story breaks about keeping secrets or strange friendships, you can start contacting people. You say, “Hey, you know how Obama keeps talking about the importance of friendship? Well, I have a personal essay about friendship that includes some little know facts about arranged friendship in Ancient Greece. Interested?”
5. Tie-ins can happen before, during or after
I waited until my book was out before I started pitching related essays. In retrospect, that was a mistake. Writing tie-ins to your book (whether it’s fiction or non-) is a great way to test out material, build audience, and mark territory. As I mentioned in post about author Jason Bradbury and his model robot, there is no need to wait.
6. Remember this is all optional
Is writing an essay based on your novel a good idea? Of course!
Is it also yet another opportunity to beat your head against the publishing brick wall? I’m afraid it is.
Don’t kill yourself trying to make this work. Wear this advice lightly, but be on the look out for opportunity.
My experience is that writing short, manageable work teaches people how to WRITE like no other genre. It’s why college MFA programs have focused on short fiction since forever.
Magazines are tough markets, but I’ve found rejections from them don’t sting as much. Most of them are email submissions and responses, in general, are quick. It’s easy to maintain a quick turn-around, say 48 hours.
And nothing kills the sting of rejection like having a stable of short works constantly on the market. I currently have between 8-10 works out (pretty low in comparison to some folks). I sold a couple recently so I’ve lost count.
Ok, I have to go post about this on my blog now…
And yeah, I know I’m repeating stuff I’ve said here before but I’m passionate about this.
I’m going to start looking around and see about doing this.
This is different from the “excerpted or adapted from the forthcoming book…” pieces that are so ubiquitous in magazines, yes?
@Sara: Yes.
With excerpt or adaptation you read the piece and think, “I think I’ll like this book.”
The kind of piece I’m talking about you’d read and think, “I like this author (and might like their book).”
It’s more indirect but it still can be powerful.
In discussing the “essay” in this instance are we talking about a form decidedly different than say, the nonfiction narratives of Tom Wolfe, David Foster Wallace, Donald Barthelme etc. written for magazines?
@Dennis: Essay, article, meditation, humor piece, op-ed, manifesto, polemic, blah, blah, blah. I wouldn’t get too hung up on labels.
One thing I’d like to add to your list, as sorta like, maybe rule 2 1/2. I just took a creative non-fiction course (different style of writing, I know, but still relevant), and the biggest thing I learned is that the creative part can only be successful after the fact of the non-fiction part. You can’t write a successful creative non-fiction piece without fully understanding and developing your non-fiction.
So I think the same applies to magazine style essays. Facts and subject matter will always come first in that side of the writing world, and it’s important to think of it almost more as a creative form of journalism, rather than a journalistic form of creative writing. In other words, voice and style in an essay can only be built out of a solidly non-fiction, non-creative writing foundation. Which, if you do it right, makes it creative. Which, if you do it right, makes it more awesome.
- Kid