Here’s the second part of our three-part “what we learned this year” series. This time around Brandon tells us the most important thing he learned this year. Summed up? Gimmicks cannot compensate for bad writing.

So… what’s a gimmick? We begin with hooks and pitches, but gimmicks can include things like photo-realistic cover art, internet grass-roots campaigns, and factoids like “the author is only 17 years old.” Story elements like cool magic systems, uniquely alien aliens, and diamond-hard science can all be gimmicks. They’re good to have, certainly, and they can work to sell the book, but real staying power (read: earning out your advance, and getting royalty checks for years to come) comes from good writing, page after page.

Brandon confesses to some gimmick use himself, but fortunately we (and many of his readers) believe that his writing is strong enough that we don’t begrudge him the gimmick one bit.

This week’s episode of Writing Excuses is brought to you again by the opportunity you have to sponsor Writing Excuses.

Writing Prompt:  An author comes up with a wacky, crazy gimmick for a book… and then it happens to the author in real life.

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Transcript

As transcribed by Mike Barker

Key points: Gimmicks cannot compensate for bad writing. Gimmicks may sell some books, but good solid writing keeps readers coming back. Excellent writing is enough of a hook to carry a book. The trick is to write really good writing. Once readers crack the book, the writing has to carry it. Focus on the writing first.

[Brandon] Writing Excuses Season Two Episode 31… uh?
[Howard] Oh, you were going to have me… well, 15 minutes long because you’re in a hurry…
[Dan] And we’re not that smart.
[Brandon] I’m Brandon.
[Dan] I’m Dan.
[Howard] And I’m Howard. And this episode is… we’re doing lessons learned in the last year, and I’m going to pose this one to Brandon. Brandon, what’s the most important thing that you’ve learned in the last year… about writing?
[Brandon] Oh, about writing? Gimmicks cannot compensate for bad writing.
[Dan] Very nice.
[Brandon] Nothing can really compensate for bad writing. I’ve learned this through several different experiences reading books that I really enjoyed, watching movies that I really enjoyed, and comparing them to other books and movies that I haven’t quite enjoyed as much. Or I watched and I liked but don’t hold up to re-watching.

[Howard] Okay. So what’s a gimmick?
[Brandon] A gimmick is a twist ending, what I would count as a gimmick. Or a really keen pitch. The pitch that you can boil down… the Hollywood pitch, this is… Mistborn had a really great pitch. I really liked my pitch on Mistborn. This is, “What if the hero lost.” I thought, “Wow, this is great. I’ve got this awesome pitch.” When I pitch it to people, people are like, “Wow, that’s a pretty cool take on the fantasy genre.” I’ve been looking at my other books and saying, “Wow, I need a pitch like that. I need to be able to in one sentence say something that people say well.” Then I stopped and started analyzing and saying, “Well, what’s the pitch to George R.R. Martin’s books?” The Song of Fire and Ice — if you haven’t read these books, they… his writing is genius, brilliant. One of the best pure, just writing wise, fantasy works out there. And the pitch, it’s really, “Ah, a fantasy book like you’ve read lots of before.” He doesn’t have a huge fantastic pitch. There is no twist on the fantasy genre. There’s no brilliant magic system that makes your mind bend when you read it in the beginning.

[Howard] Let’s be clear on something really quick. Having a good pitch for Mistborn allowed good writing.
[Brandon] It’s a good thing. All of these things are good things. Having a gimmick is always good… having a twist ending. A gimmick… the guy, Chris Paolini, 17-year-old publishing a book… that’s a gimmick.
[Howard] That is a gimmick.
[Brandon] It’s a brilliant one. It sells lots of books. But if the writing itself is not fantastic, then the gimmick… it may sell you some books, but it’s not going to get you the long-lasting sort of literary power that I want to be able to bring about in my books. I don’t think I’m there yet, but George R.R. Martin, to go back to that, he is there. It’s sheer brilliant writing, that’s the pitch.

[Howard] Jerry Pournelle, at Life, The Universe, and Everything, about three or four years ago, we did a panel where we were talking about crispy, crunchy writing. Just tightening up the prose. He talked about how they had to trim 10% off this book and so they went through and removed 50 words per page, very meticulously, and kept count that way. He said we wrote very, very tightly. For good or for ill, that book continues to generate royalty sales for them every year. Jerry Pournelle and Larry Niven are getting royalty checks…
[Brandon] Was that Inferno?
[Howard] No. Mote In God’s Eye. They are getting royalty checks every year on this book. 20 years, 25 years later. That’s a book that has got staying power.
[Brandon] It’s one of the greats of science fiction.
[Howard] It had some cool gimmicks. Gimmick number one, we’ve got aliens who are asymmetrical. Gimmick number two was this astronomy thing where the event of them leaving their star spawned a religion. There’s cool stuff in there, but the writing is really, really strong and the book has stayed with us for 2 1/2 decades.

[Brandon] You’ll find all kinds of books that are released have one great really cool interesting idea where the writing isn’t genius. That comes, it splashes, you say, “Wow, that was interesting” and then you forget it. A good example of this is… no, maybe it’s not a great example, but we talked about the Dark Knight, the Batman movie. If you look at the Batman movie, yeah, it sold a lot of tickets. People loved it. But also at the same time, there have been big blockbuster superhero movies before. There were several last summer and the summer before. I think the Dark Knight will have large amounts of staying power because the writing is so solid that it’s going to have this sort of eternal nature that when you watch it… you can watch it 10 times and say, “Wow, this movie is great.” Whereas the movies that relied on, for instance, the gimmick of really cool special effects 10 years from now…
[Dan] Or the big famous star. Riding a trend.
[Brandon] Any of these things. You’re going to look at them. Maybe they will actually have a flash-in-the-pan. Maybe they will be a successful movie, but if the writing isn’t excellent, that’s all that is going to come of them. It’s going to vanish. If you’re relying on your special effects rather than your writing, then your special effects will always be outdated. This is why we can watch the original Star Wars movies and still love them despite the special effects.
[Howard] It was solidly written. It was a good story.
[Brandon] it was solidly written.
[Howard] Even though it was, admittedly, campy space opera. But they dialed back the camp just enough that this had…

[Brandon] Now, movies have a lot of other interactions going on. Fantastic acting can work as well as fantastic writing. But I use these examples because more people are going to be familiar with them. The same thing happens in books however. Let’s look at… I’m biased, but let’s look at The Wheel of Time. The Wheel of Time books have not only sold a lot of copies, they have spawned a community of fans who are deeply invested in these books, who love these books, who follow them and have been following them for years and years. I’m one of them.
[Howard] And for a long time, I have believed those people were fundamentally flawed. But that’s because I had never read the books myself. I haven’t read all the books myself. I am 2 1/2 books in and now I see what’s going on with these crazy people. I’m starting to get it. I’m not one of them. But I understand them and their behavior is justified.
[Brandon] I can… I could… I’d have to go to my library and point them out, but I could pick out a good dozen books I read that same year as Eye of the World came out. That had big releases, that were big… lots of sales of copies. I don’t know whether they sold more than The Wheel of Time or not. I know The Wheel of Time, like any introductory book, most of the time the first book sells the fewest copies until it starts to get rolling. It did not have this huge hardcover release. It was released mostly in paperback. And yet, 20 years later, people are still reading those books. The reason being the depth of the writing. There are layers and layers and layers of things embedded into these stories. And what I’ve learned is, that comes first. If you can have the other stuff, that’s great. But you don’t actually need the other stuff because if you have excellent writing, that’s enough of a hook in and of itself to carry the book.
[Howard] Let’s break for a commercial.

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[Howard] This episode of Writing Excuses is brought to you by bringing things to you from Writing Excuses. It’s true. You too can advertise here at writingexcuses.com. Just follow that link over there in the…uh… left-hand? Right-hand sidebar? Right-hand sidebar. Left-hand sidebar. Follow that link on the sidebar…
[Dan] One of those sidebars has a link.
[Brandon] Somewhere.
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[Brandon] And we’re back.
[Howard] We are back. Indeed. Let’s talk a little more about gimmicks and why authors are tempted to use them. You mentioned Christopher Paolini. The gimmick of “I’m 17 and I wrote a book” is no longer a gimmick that is open to, say, me so I’m not going to be tempted to try this…
[Dan?] Although it would be funny if you did.
[Howard] I… no, I’m not going to go there. What are gimmicks that authors have tried or that writers have tried or might be tempted to try?
[Brandon] There’s lots of things. The cool twist on the cover is a gimmick. Remember when I…
[Howard] Cover art? That’s something a writer has no control over…
[Brandon] But these are things that the book packaging… some of the powerful authors… remember, when I say a gimmick that does not necessarily mean that anyone using one of these is writing poorly.
[Howard] I know.
[Brandon] For instance, I used… anyway. So there are book cover gimmicks. There are this book comes with a CD of expanded information gimmicks. A really great gimmick that I believe David Weber used… is it David Weber? Honor Harrington?
[Howard] Yes, David Weber.
[Brandon] He released a CD that came with all of the previous volumes on e-book in the hardcover release. You just got all of them. That’s a great gimmick.
[Howard] That was the Baen Free Library. [http://www.baen.com/library/]
[Brandon] It was the Baen Free Library, but he actually released a hardcover that came in the back with a CD that had all the previous volumes. So you could buy one and read them all. Great gimmick. Authors? If you’re looking at the text of the narrative, the twist ending is a very big temptations gimmick. I don’t know. If you can pull it off, it’s going to help. It’s almost always a good thing. But it doesn’t mean you need to have one. If you are writing a story that is focusing on something other than this twisting tortuous plot, then it’s okay to not have the plot twist ending.

[http://baencd.thefifthimperium.com/ has a set of the Baen Free CDs]

[Howard] Let me visit this in another way, because I think the temptation to use gimmicks or the temptation to try something other than just really, really strong writing to sell your work stems from a desire to be the next Dan Brown or the next JK Rowling or the next Stephanie Meyer…
[Brandon] [garble]
[Howard] Somebody who comes out of the gate with a series that makes piles and piles of money rather than being the next… and I don’t want to fault any writers I like… but the next Kevin J. Anderson or Eric Flint…
[Brandon] Or Brandon Sanderson…
[Howard] Or Brandon Sanderson. Guys who crank out good books consistently in the strength of just strong writing and years of being really good at it.
[Dan] Trying to be the next whoever is also a symptom of another gimmick which is the bandwagon. Vampires are huge right now. That’s going to be my gimmick. I’m going to write a vampire story and it’s going to sell a million copies.

[Brandon] Newer writers a lot of the time come up to me and say, “What’s the secret? What’s the trick?” They’re looking for the trick. The trick is write really good writing. Now all of this stuff we talk about…
[Howard] You know what I would recommend? Anybody looking for the trick, go buy Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s book The Black Swan. Because in this book… it’s nonfiction… he describes that these kinds of events are happy, completely unpredictable accidents, and all you can hope to do is position yourself so that if an accident like that happens to you, you exploit it properly.

[Brandon] Also, I would say, the pitch… the Hollywood pitch. That’s a gimmick, so to speak, that we use in writing. We may do a podcast on how to pitch your book, in fact I want to. But the concept…
[Howard] The gimmicky pitch in the movie Bolt where the pigeons are pitching the movie idea to the dog. A movie pitch, you expect I’m going to tell you about the story. No, that’s not what happens. The pigeon stands there and poses… wait for it… aliens. That was a… the pitch itself was gimmicked. I loved that, because it very nicely satirized pitching.
[Brandon] We’ll do one on the pitch. Having a good pitch for your book is a plus. But the concept I’m trying to get across here is write really, really well. Then when you got back, then take a look at what you have and say, “How can I develop a pitch?” Or “How can I best enhance what I have?” Maybe you do need to add a twist ending. But…
[Howard] You gotta have hooks. You gotta have value in there.
[Brandon] You gotta have the in-late-out-early, you’ve gotta have a damn of the beginning, and all of these things. Even the first line is a gimmick. The fantastic first line is a gimmick. That is good, it will help you, but it will not compensate for a bad first page no matter how good your first line is.
[Howard] I have read a lot of books where I picked it up and read the first line and thought, “Oh, this looks wonderful” because the prose was so neat. Then I realized, “Oh, somebody spend hours crafting the prose in the first paragraph, and then the same amount of time writing the next three chapters.”

[Dan] I think one aspect of this is a series. I think series have the tendency if you’re not careful to fall into gimmick. Where you set up an interesting situation, an interesting character, an interesting whatever, and then all of those quirks that were so cool the first time, you drag them out too far. You hew too closely to your own formula. And it falls into gimmick, and then the writing starts to suffer. You can see this in a lot of TV shows, especially. House was fantastic the first two seasons. He had some of the best writing on TV. Today it really is just a parody of itself. Because it’s, here we have a grumpy guy, here we have our methods… and those have just become gimmicks rather than story elements.
[Brandon] Since we’re talking on it, I’ll just throw out… one maybe example is my series Alcatraz Versus the Evil Librarians. That series sold based on a gimmick. It really did. The gimmick was evil librarians. In fact, it was such a part of the sales that they, when they were buying the books, Scholastic Press, said as long as he’s willing to revise the titles so that evil librarians is in the title. That’s one of the main things that we want to do.
[Howard] There were multiple gimmicks and hooks at work for you there. The other is let’s play on the popularity of the whole boy wizard thing — Harry Potter.
[Brandon] Somehow I ended up with a character on the front cover who looked an awful lot like Harry Potter. They changed that for the paperback. But anyway…
[Howard] That was nice.
[Brandon] These things are all gimmicks and it’s okay to have those. It certainly helped Alcatraz sell… to the editors at least… and it helped some of the popularity. But once readers crack that book, at that point, the writing has to carry it. That’s what I’ve learned. Focus on the writing, Brandon, and then worry about all this other stuff.

[Howard] This has been Writing Excuses. It is my delightful responsibility right now to point at Brandon and asked him for a writing prompt. Brandon?
[Brandon] Have a person who’s got the greatest gimmick ever for a book that they’re going to write the story, but then in real life that thing happens to them. Whatever it is they’re going to write their book about, that’s just going to be this wacky crazy gimmick, it happens to them.
[Dan] [garble]
[Brandon] Thank you for listening.