Angela Hunt: Writing to sell

The title of George Will’s book on understanding major league baseball is Men at Work. His point: Although we call baseball a game, those who achieve excellence at it spin their natural gifts into gold by working very hard year after year. Angela Hunt’s hints about becoming an author are similar: perspiration, not inspiration. As a writer methodically at work, she has published 125 books including novels like Esther and The Novelist, children’s picture books like The Tale of Three Trees, and nonfiction books like The Fiction Writer’s Book of Checklists.

You graduated from Liberty University and then sent cards to Lynchburg businesses saying you’d write anything for them? For five years I wrote anything anybody needed: letters, catalog copy, radio ads, articles.

Sounds very methodical, very workmanlike. You have to take the gifts that God has blessed you with, you have to hone them so they can be greater. It’s the parable of the talents. Literal talents in the modern meaning. And if God gives you a talent, He will hold you to account for what you’ve done with that. You have to study, practice, exercise: That’s how you grow.

As you write, do you think, “I’m doing this to express my thoughts.” Or are you thinking in terms of markets, and who will publish your work? I’m thinking in terms of my readers. Is this going to communicate well to them? Is this an allusion they will be familiar with? A lot of English majors love those 50-cent words. But if a reader has to stop and go pick up a dictionary, that’s not a good word to use. I want them to be so engrossed in the story that nothing jerks them out of it. Anything that’s too “writerly” is novelist self-indulgence. I want to communicate the fastest, sharpest, most direct way that I can.

‘You have to take the gifts that God has blessed you with, you have to hone them so they can be greater. It’s the parable of the talents.’

You’ve written, “If you want to write to sell, you need to learn how to write and behave professionally.” So you’re not waiting for inspiration, you go to work at a certain time. Absolutely.

Tell us how your typical writing day works. I get up and do my housewifely things: Clean the kitchen, make breakfast, do the laundry … do the treadmill, have my quiet time. At 10:30 to 11:00, I settle down and give myself a quota. On a paper calendar I pencil in: “Today you will write word 1 through 5,000.” The next day: “5,001 through 10,000.”

That’s a lot. Five thousand very sloppy words. But they’re on the page and I can clean them up. For drafts two, three, four, five, however many it takes, it’s “edit pages 1-20” or whatever the numbers are. I don’t go to bed at night until I’ve done my daily quota—unless a family emergency comes up.

If there’s blood all over the floor and you’re only at 2,000 words … I can stop. … For me it’s not about pushing toward the 5,000 words as much as it is getting to the 5,000 words and quitting. I know I have a touch of OCD, so I use a writing program that tells me when I hit 5,000 words. The minute I do, I push away from my desk and go have a life. Otherwise I wouldn’t.

What time is that minute usually? Sometimes it’s 8 or 9 p.m. Depends if I’ve spent all day playing video games and answering emails.

How much planning do you do? Do you outline your whole novel before you start writing? Authors tend to be sops or ops: seat of the pants, or outlined planners. If I were to outline every bit of a novel before I started writing, that could take some of the joy out of it: I would feel like I’d already written it and wouldn’t want to keep going. Plus, there are things that occur to you on the second or third drafts, and that joy of discovery is amazing. I do enough outlining that I know where I’m going, but it’s spare enough that I can still discover things and learn while I’m writing, which is exciting for me.

Do the characters take on a life of their own? To a point, but I’m still their creator, so I’m still in control.

Predestination, but the characters have some free will? It’s exactly like that. I have the master plan. They think they have free will, but we know who’s in charge.

Each time you do a new draft, do you look to do something different? My first draft is fast and floppy, getting lots of words on a page. Get the story down, don’t go back and fix anything, just get it on there. The second draft you begin to go back and fill in the missing pieces. Say in the first draft of a medieval novel I’ve written, “they all sat down to lunch.” In the second draft I find out what medieval lunches were like. It’s about filling in plot holes, either deleting extraneous characters or adding new ones.

The third draft … Is all about adding mood music. If it’s a scary scene, I will write in a thunderstorm. If it’s a romantic setting, I will move it from the kitchen to a park. The fourth draft is when I listen to the manuscript, because your ear will pick up things that your eye will glaze over. Writing needs to have a rhythm, a pleasant flow and a sound to it, unless it’s a hectic scene: Then you need short and choppy because that’s another way to ratchet up tension.

The fifth draft is … Picky stuff. I check for all my weasel words, like was, which is the ickiest—ugh—verb in the world. The “cat was on the table.” It tells me nothing. Our readers today have grown up with video, we are a video generation, and we expect books to play out like a movie in our minds. Even when you’re writing nonfiction, they need images to hang their hats on. So I want the images to be there. So instead of “the cat was on the table,” he could be sleeping, yawning, retching, anything but “was on the table.” I ask my computer to replace all of the was-es with capital WAS, same thing for were. I also get rid of a lot of that, suddenly, very—terrible words. I mercilessly cut them or replace them because they’re not pulling their load.

Your book Writing Lessons from the Front is useful. One of your lessons concerns evoking emotions: How do you do that? Tears in the writer, tears in the reader—but the key is to tap into the emotions that your readers already have. I taught a college course, and I showed all these videos about children and parents. They didn’t cry one single bit, not a tear.

Would their parents have cried? Oh yes, I cry through all of them. But when I showed a Christian the Lion video, the kids started crying. They didn’t have children yet, so they didn’t have parental emotions to evoke—but they’d all had pets. You have to consider your audience and what they’ve experienced: Then you tap into those things.