On Sizing up the Competition

In my previous blog entry, I discussed the perils of comparing one’s as yet unpublished novel to better known works in order to provide a clue as to its nature. Today I examine the immediate competition-- published books that may have elements in common with your story but may not be as familiar. I wonder (and worry)--is it better to be similar to successfully published works (and risk seeming redundant), or different (and risk agents/publishers not knowing how to categorize or place your book)?

Clearly, it’s helpful to know what’s out there. I have assiduously made a point of reading other books about young women in Japan. I found five published in the last five years and read all of them after I had written draft three of my novel. Here’s my superficial analysis.

Four are debut novels, and one is a memoir.

Interestingly, all are told in the first person (one with multiple viewpoints). (Mine is also first person.)

Three are written in the present tense. (Mine is past tense.)

One is written by a Canadian, one by an English woman (and published only in Great Britain, I believe), and three by Americans.

Both the non-fiction book (Bar Flower, Lea Jacobson, St. Martin’s Press, 2008) and the British novel (Sayonara Bar, Susan Barker, Doubleday, 2005) are set in hostess bars, like mine, but in recent years.

The erotic novel (Amorous Woman, Donna George Storey, Neon, 2007) takes place just a few years after mine, and has one section where the protagonist works in a bar.

One of the stories (Lost Girls and Love Hotels, Catherine Hanrahan, Harper Perennial, 2006) uses “love hotels” as a major motif but the narrator is an English teacher.

The most recent (If You Follow Me, Malena Watrous, Harper Perennial, 2010) is also about a young woman who teaches English and has the least in common with my plot but succeeds in portraying a “fish out of water,” without denigrating the culture it is describing.

The erotic novel is light and beautifully told. If You Follow Me is funny, charming, and serious all at the same time. The other two novels and the non-fiction book all assume a slightly superior tone—“I am above these things I have to deal with.”

Except in If You Follow Me, all the women appeared to speak Japanese. (The protagonist in If You Follow Me does learn Japanese during her time there.)

So what did I get from reading my competition?

• Women who spend time in Japan want to write about it.
• Clearly, there is some market appeal for books of this nature (Harper Perennial chose two of them). But how well did these books do? Is the market saturated, or is there always room for a story freshly told? Will I have to try that much harder to sell my story? Are my “credentials” good enough?
• Inevitably when a book focuses on the same culture you have chosen you will find scenes that resemble yours. I know I wrote mine independently, and I probably even have the dated draft (in the computer) to prove it, but I still fear sounding like I cribbed the ideas (the present of the finger…). I can’t now claim that I haven’t read these books.
• Making fun of another culture is easy. Achieving an authentic and sympathetic voice is not.
• Some people overwrite. Overwritten stories are not fun to read.
• I believe my instincts were right to reset my novel closer to the time of the Japan I knew rather than make it contemporary. One can’t always be thinking of the movie they are never going to make.

I’ve been working on my novel far too long. All of these books were published since I wrote my first draft (and most since I wrote my second). Of course, In the meantime, I’ve written a second novel. Isn’t it time to stop worrying, stop comparing, and get that first one out there?

On the Comparison Trap

If there is one question I hate, it’s, “To what other books would you compare yours?” “Or what other books is your book like?” Agents and editors often ask writers to describe their novels in terms of other published works. In addition to finding this question difficult to answer, I believe it poses a couple of traps to the writer seeking representation.

First, comparing a well-known work of fiction to your own implies a certain level of hubris that might be thrown back at you. (You , my dear, are no Jane Austin.) But it hardly makes sense to pick something so obscure that the agent or editor is unlikely to have read or even heard about it.

Second, let’s say you can come up with a comparison. Now you have to justify how your story is unique. If it’s sufficiently different, then maybe the comparison doesn’t hold. A query letter is not the right place to offer these kinds of explanations, yet it is the place one has to sell oneself sufficiently to get read.

One way of dodging this bullet is to say, readers who like X will enjoy Y. Here, the comparison is implied rather than outright, but it’s still a comparison with all its attendant perils.

Of course, there is always that trick, popularized in the movie, The Player. My book/screenplay is Gone with the Wind meets Catcher in the Rye. The advantage of the analogy is it takes the focus off the direct comparison by splitting it between two targets. But how will the agent/editor know what aspects are most salient about the analogy? Is it the genre of the books we chose, the point of view, the time period, the overall tone, the plot, the themes, etc.?

Is the story in the above analogy a coming of age tale about a young Confederate soldier, who, feeling that his life is pointless as he watches his old way of life being destroyed, goes AWOL , taking his baby sister with him? Or is it a contemporary novel, set in the South, about a day in the life of a headstrong, but wealthy teenage girl, who leaves home and ends up in the middle of a gang fight? The possibilities are endless.

However, as an exercise, the analogy game is thought provoking. So here’s my attempt.

My novel about a young woman who loses her moral compass in Japan is kind of Memoirs of a Geisha meets Lost in Translation. Both books take place in Japan. With the former it loosely shares the overall plot told as a first person narrative of being about a naïve young woman who must learn for her livelihood the ins and outs of entertaining and pleasing men. However, Memoirs is set in an earlier era, the protagonist is Japanese, and she appears to have little choice about accepting this lifestyle. My novel is more contemporary (set in 1981), the protagonist is American, and she freely makes her choices.

Like my story, Lost in Translation highlights the complexity and challenges of being an American temporarily in Japan. Although my novel has its light moments, its overall tone is more dramatic than satirical or humorous. In addition, the protagonist in Lost in Translation is a middle-aged man; mine is a young woman.

How would an agent interpret my analogy? And what if they make different assumptions than the ones I’ve posed? Will they feel disappointed or worse, misled? Am I in danger of descending into absurdity? Will the agent pass if my analogy seems too far-fetched?

So as I construct the dreaded query letter, might I be better off just bypassing the comparisons and trusting that my story will entice on its own? There’s an original idea!