The Makeover – Literary Style

By Robin Weaver

All of us watch those shows (even if we don’t always ‘fess up).  You know the ones I mean.  A frumpy stay-at-home mom and a Goth-looking college student walk onto the set. An overly bubbly announcer introduces some wonderful product and an amazing makeup artist. Then, voila.  A curling iron and a bottle of hair gel later, Frumpy and Dumpy are now the hot momma who could play Mrs. Robinson and the fraternity girl most likely to get an STD.

I am, of course, talking about the infamous makeover. I can’t tamp down my skepticism enough to believe Frumpy and Dumpy really looked that bad prior to the makeover.  Surely the show’s producers intentionally frizzed hair for those hideous “before” images.  Maybe they even put gray paste on the To-Be-Made-Overs’ faces.  I’m also certain some production assistant scoured thrift stores in search of the worst clothing possible.  When the assistant finds her prize, she stomps on the shapeless dress or baggy jeans with combat boots prior to dressing the poor “volunteers.” When presented in cocktail dresses for the REVEAL, like any woman who goes from Goodwill to couture, the makeover models look one heck of a lot better. 

Seriously, though? Short of surgery or drastic liposuction, how much can you really do in a short period of time to improve your looks?

Fortunately, for us writers, fiction is different. Forget hair products. You, the great and powerful Wonder-author, have magic at your disposal. With a few strokes of your literary pen, you can take a bad manuscript and make the tale into a fascinating story.

Have a heroine you don’t like?  Kill her off on page one and promote the amazing sidekick to leading lady. Are you main characters boring? Just add equal parts tension and quirkiness, and Ozzie and Harriet morph into Morticia and Gomez Addams.

You can even reshape your basic plot into a totally different story. Believe it or not, you can do this with minimal rewrite.

In Forbidden Magic, my first novel, I created vampire-type characters living in a world without warm-blooded creatures.  My vamps existed on a mineral mimicking the properties of human blood. Naturally, the mineral was becoming depleted (aka external tension). Unfortunately, no one wanted yet another vamp story.

So, I instigated a makeover.  First, I made my characters Dökkálfar and —ancient elves.  Since my hero and heroine were no longer vampire, they no longer needed blood. Thus I needed another rare substance necessary to my characters’ survival. To keep my external conflict from disintegrating, I decided the sun on my fictional world wouldn’t have the spectrum of Earth’s solar unit.  Naturally, I made this missing spectrum necessary to elfin survival.

So what could emulate sunlight? What else? Crystals. And all the quartz had been mined.

I kept the same plot. My characters’ goals, motivation, and conflict didn’t change. Yet my novel had a completely different look. A makeover.

If your novel isn’t getting the attention it deserves, if your manuscript is dated, or if you just need more oomph, you too can perform the same type of literary makeover. No license required. Remember, a good story (regardless of genre) needs great characters, with great conflict, and a goal worth achieving. The rest is just…well, hair product and cocktail dresses.

How about you?  Performed any literary makeovers on your manuscripts?

Giving Up on Hope

While researching this blog, I read an interesting article about hope. Derrick Jensen wrote, “A wonderful thing happens when you give up on hope, which is that you realize you never needed it in the first place.”

After I got over my urge to grab my red pen and strike the “that” out of his sentence, I began to process the actual meaning of Jensen’s words.  Give up on hope? Is he crazy? Hasn’t hope fueled most of our lives? We start out hoping we can reach the cookie on the table, graduate to hoping we ace our math test, and become adults where hope is our most vital four letter word. We hope traffic isn’t bad so we can make it to work on time; hope we remembered to turn off that curling iron, and hope we’ll meet the man/woman of our dreams.

As writers, we hope the agent/editor will call, hope readers like our books, and hope we will someday make some bestseller list. But is Jensen correct? Should we stop hoping? Imagine, for just a moment, we could actually send out a manuscript and not think about it again until we got the response. If we could channel the energy we put into “hoping,” into writing another book… or into something even more noble like volunteering, what could we achieve? What if we just assumed the book would garner a contract, would actually make money, and just believed the book would appeal to readers. Wouldn’t we be happier?

Giving up on hope doesn’t mean, giving up.  Nor does it mean you shouldn't think positive, just the opposite actually. Relinquishing hope forces you to live in the here and now; to stop worrying about what may happen tomorrow. For writers, it means learning to love the process of writing again, finding the power and beauty in words and stories, and refusing to worry how the manuscript will get published or who will read the pages.

To use Jensen’s words, “When you turn away from hope, you turn away from fear.” Interesting concept, huh?

I know what you’re thinking. ”Exactly how do I do that?”

Still working on that one.