Behind-the-Scenes with Carolyn Crane

Today our featured guest is Carolyn Crane, author of the new urban fantasy Mind Games. Carolyn has taken a few moments out of her very busy writing schedule to share six writerly behind-the-scenes anecdotes about her recent novel. We hope you enjoy this special behind-the-scenes peak.  As  a special treat, we are also giving away a signed copy of Mind Games to one lucky Wicked Jungle reader.  Details on how to enter the contest can be found below. Good luck and a big welcome to Carolyn!

Guest Blogger: Carolyn Crane

Hey, thanks so much, Melissa, for inviting me here! So, because this is a community of writers as well as readers, Melissa suggested I talk a little about behind the scenes stuff around Mind Games. So, a few things:

How I got the idea.

This is actually something I may regret going around telling, but I got the idea after reading Straw Dogs, a hugely depressing book by this philosopher, John Gray, who takes a super dismal view of humanity. It made me feel really awful, and I thought, if I had an enemy, I would give them this book as a gift, so that they could feel as disillusioned as I did. In fact, I actually recommended it to somebody I was mad at. Then I thought, what if there were people who disillusioned other people for money? Hey, that would make a great plot!

Non fiction books: secret sauce.

There’s this one scene from Mind Games where this creepy villain follows my heroine out of a grocery store, and she knows she can’t get away from him, so she asks him to carry her groceries as a way to tie up his hands and free hers. Totally inspired by a tiny detail from a book on predators and intuition called The Gift of Fear, which I had read years ago—the detail popped out of nowhere.

I think non-fiction books are such a goldmine for writers because you build a store of details like that. I’ve gotten super valuable ideas, details and analogies out of books on animals, art, you name it. To me, reading nonfiction is like making an investment in myself as a fiction writer.

How one of the central concepts of Mind Games got totally degraded!

So, this is sort of funny. A bit of background: the psychological hit squad in Mind Games is called the disillusionists, and it’s run by this tortured mutant mastermind who has these extreme powers of psychological insight, and he recruits people who are really messed up to be on his hit squad. Anyway, in early drafts, they’d disillusion criminals in a kind of philosophical way. As you can imagine, this made for a pretty thinky book. Philosophy is not really action packed! Who knew?

Little by little I revised it; in the final drafts, the characters are basically just weaponizing their internal darkness, turning it outward on their targets to overwhelm and “reboot” them, and the targets bounce back with a fresh attitude. However, the ‘disillusionists’ name stayed. I’m always wondering when somebody is going to notice that nobody is being technically disillusioned. It’s sort of like that Irony song by Alanis Morissette where none of the stuff she sings about is all that ironic.

Rejection.

I wrote three totally finished, polished, slaved-over novels before selling Mind Games—we’re talking like 8 years of failed novel projects. It was hard because when I’m working on a novel, it’s my world, and I put all this energy into it, and have all these hopes, and then at some point, enough agents or editors say no that I realize that it’s going nowhere. It’s a little like having your heart broken. The secret for me is to start over on a new project, and find things to love about it. If you’re a writer who is in a learning and growing mode, you’ll usually end up liking the new novel better than the old one anyway. I know everybody says this, but it really does work to just keep going forward.
Querying and a trick.

Contrary to popular belief, most writers sell without connections, and I’m one of them – a slush pile baby. (To see actual statistics on how first novels get sold, there’s a fantastic study done by Jim Hines [http://www.jimchines.com/2010/03/survey-results/])

Anyway, the most important thing in a query letter is the “hook,” the sexy line that sells your book. My trick for writing a hook is to write the best hook I can. Then put it aside and write another completely different, but excellent hook. Then another. Do it ten times. And I mean, write ten good hooks. The trick works because people get fixated on their first ideas, and your first idea is rarely your best one.
Characters & being popular at parties.

Writing can mirror life in such weird ways. For example, whenever I deliberately try to create a character that is attractive or fascinating, that character usually ends up boring. But when I’m not trying to do that, like I’m making a secondary character, and just working on creating a realistic, true, quirky or even offensive person, a lot of times people LOVE that person. It reminds me of being at parties—when you’re trying to be popular, it doesn’t work out, but when you’re just being yourself and you don’t care, people are more interested in you.

That happened with this character Simon–he’s a disillusionist whose specialty is recklessness, and he doesn’t like my heroine, Justine, who is the new girl, with a specialty of hypochondria. So I made him menacing and weird and mean, and he wears clothes like a space age pimp. I meant him to be this dark force, but readers love him. And he actually is fun to write. So much so, that I’m letting him have an expanded storyline in books 2 & 3.

Contest: Win a signed copy of Mind Games!

Once again, a big thanks to Carolyn for joining us today on Wicked Jungle. We want to keep the conversation going so this contest is going to be all about comments!  To enter post a comment below about the Carolyn’s post, her novel, or your experience as a writer. Can you relate to any of the things Carolyn referenced?

Each person who posts a comment will get one entry in the contest.

You can get an additional entries by doing the following (note these are in addition to posting a comment. You must comment first to be qualified).

Option A: Tweet about the contest on Twitter (you must include @wickedjungle for your tweet to qualify each tweet will get you an additional entry).

Option B: Become a follower of our blog (only new followers joining between the time of the contest will be counted).

Contest Ends Friday at 12PM Eastern!!!