How To Write An Urban Novel
It's mean, but the subject had it coming.
HOW TO PRODUCE AN URBAN NOVEL
(Preamble: )
(I do not hold with the notion that the word “urban” is an appropriate synonym for “black.” In fact, I find the term as it is used in most instances today offensive, and not simply because my family comes from rural stock. I have never met an Urban American, nor have I ever heard someone refer to themselves as one. Yet rhythm-and-blues music is now “urban contemporary” (which must mean that Marvin Gaye and Smokey Robinson and The Supremes were not practitioners of soul music or R&B or even race music, but the limpidly euphemistic “urban traditional”). This is, of course, ridiculous. No one who isn’t simply being argumentative for the sake of putting a weird look on your face when hearing a term like “urban traditional” would ever say such a thing. Let us banish the use of the word “urban” for anything relating to people unless we’re talking about people who live in cities. I know it’s a lot to ask for, but I have faith in you.)
I hate “urban novels.”
Urban novels are neither urban nor novel, and I’ll allow you to take the second admonishment any way you see fit. They are, by and large, bile-inducing exercises in marketed eye-gouging. They should be called what they are: black trash literature. Too hard on the palate? Okay, how about: African-American trash literature.
There is an old saying: there’s an audience for everything. Well, urban novels prove it. The books that comprise this “new” genre (read, “re-packaged”) are wildly popular. That they have the look of baseball cards (with content to match) doesn’t hurt, but it’s clearly deeper than marketing. It’s about appetite. People sorely want to read this stuff, and in alarming numbers. Library copies of most urban novel titles stay reserved, people frequently waiting for months to acquire them...many of them people who might not otherwise be so patient or engaged with literature of any stripe. Black bestseller lists such as Essence and Blackboard are riddled with this work. Urban novels rule the fiction paperback sections of these lists, and they’d rule the hardcover section as well if any of the publishers of this crap bothered with the inflated cost of hardcover printings. It’s practically printing money.
I know what you’re thinking: “Scott’s going to whip out Percival Everett again in yet another attempt to make people realize his unsung genius so that everyone will pick up Erasure and applaud its daring challenge to the status quo.” I assure you that this is not the case. Using Everett in opposition to the genre I’m about to rip apart would actually hurt my case. Putting Everett’s work next to even the most erudite and well-edited “urban novel” is largely akin to using a Sherman tank to kill a cockroach. As it stands, I don’t need Everett. I can use authors who have published black crime fiction and done it well, most notably Donald Goines, though you can certainly make a case for Chester Himes and Walter Mosley, just less so. And I don’t think I’m talking out of school when I say that even Wanda Coleman’s short story “Big Dreams” is a better pimp story than anything written in this entire genre. Goines - the author most urban novelists think they’re channeling when they scribe this jaw-dropping garbage - despite the blue content of his work, is certainly doing somersaults in his grave behind this tripe. No matter what you may think of the crass characterizations and gut-wrenching criminality of his oeuvre, Goines at least had a stripe of craftsmanship. The stories were unabashedly ghetto but they had sheen. They were beautiful prostitutes; ugly women with beautiful and relentless bodies that...my god: in doing the research for this article I’ve clearly been infected.
I’ve heard the hip-hop-inspired argument and it doesn’t float so much as tread water. Hip-hop is clearly the largest influence on this work, from its look to its language to its titles to its audience, but it certainly isn’t all-encompassing of hip-hop. Where’s the Tribe Called Quest urban novel, or the X-Clan urban novel? Let us call the muse what she is: a half-dressed gangsta rap video dancer who chain smokes three packs of Menthols a day.
Just yesterday at work I was working the returns station at the library and a young lady stepped up to the desk. She was a black teen about thirteen years of age. In one arm she held a few urban novels (Stacy, Sheisty, et al.). She set these on the desk so that she could pull out the items she intended to return from a book-bag she was carrying. She laid three videos on the desk, all kids’ movies. The Land Before Time, Lilo & Stitch...stuff of that ilk. You can imagine my horror, and this is from a guy who doesn’t even like kids.
Anyhow, enough of the heady social commentary. Let’s really get into what makes one of these books work. Let us find the threads that make these books the literary haymakers that they are in as sarcastic a manner as can be mustered.
If you want to produce an urban novel, here is what you need to do:
1) You need a bad cover.
Covers should depict mostly un-pretty people after they have awakened in their club clothes from the night before, photographed on bad days with Polaroid cameras. Or you can just hit up the Photo Guy (the one standing next to the Guy With Roses In A Bucket over by the spray-painted mural) at the club after last call and pick through his unused shots.
Terri McMillan’s Waiting To Exhale was the worst thing to happen to the cover of books by black authors. Ever. Publishers have unapologetically taken to having hacks in the art department cut out monotonic women in church hats out of brown construction paper for almost anything written by a black woman (not to mention a few black guys) in some bogus attempt at Romare Bearden-ism.
If there is an upside to the industry-wide laziness for urban authors, it is that your urban publisher doesn’t want your book to be confused with that soft junk. That’s why your cover will look like a Master P record.
2) Use lots of typos.
On the cover, in the story, amidst the acknowledgements...wherever you can fit them.
3) Use unnecessary prologue.
Usually movie tag lines or pointless inner monologue or - and this is the worst - moral framing. “What would you do to defend or protect your family?” Cue action movie soundtrack.
4) Use lots of ghetto names.
Dough-Low. Menage. Dollar. Big Nita. Drugs. Ice. Daddy. Drelex. You get the idea.
Note: I didn't make any of these names up.
5) Include lots of endorsements.
In all fairness, there are plenty of non-urban novels that litter their pages with an over-abundance of brand names when simple nouns will do. Unfortunately, lots of those books are by black authors too. I remember being struck dumb by the shopping lists that passed for description in a Marcus Major book, and Terri McMillan has gone so far as to plug herself in a book. As in, “Such-and-such was reading Waiting To Exhale by some woman named Terri McMillan.” Utterly neurotic.
Urban novels, however, take it to the max. These aren’t merely product placements. In urban novels, the mere mention of things becomes a storytelling element. Characters don’t ride motorcycles; they mount 1300-R Suzuki Hayabusas with gold spokes and red trim on the leather-back seats. They don’t grip the handle of a gun; they wield an H&K Mark 23...EVERY time they mention the firearm. “The man pulled out an H&K Mark 23. He loaded his H&K Mark 23. He spun around, with his H&K Mark 23, and pointed the H&K Mark 23 at the guy driving away in the 2003 Cadillac Escalade, pumping LL Cool J’s “I Need Love” out of a Bose cabinet of 24-inch subwoofers with the chrome tweeters.”
This exposes the primary inspiration for authors of this type of material: television and music. Even the emulations of characters are subjected to this lack of inspired writing: “Menage felt like he was in one of those Doublemint chewing gum TV ads…” (Menage’s Way, p.79). How does that feel, exactly? I mean, besides televised and short?
6) Name-drop. Lots of name-dropping.
No one is brown-skinned, smoky-hued or fair. They are “like Toni Braxton” or “like Denzel, but with longer hair.” These aren’t character descriptions; they’re casting calls.
7) Write minutely detailed sex scenes.
The more trifling, the better. I’ll spare you any choice examples mainly because there are simply too many to choose from, but trust me: flip any of these books open at random and you’re likely to open to a page of some of the most poorly written, crassest material you’ve ever seen.
8) Use strong women who aren’t strong.
Women are generally hustlers’ girlfriends, targets and deus ex machinas with breasts, even when they’re the lead character.
9) Use slang as description.
It’s one thing for a character to call another character a “niggah.” It’s a completely different thing when the author does it. Or describes the protagonist’s better half as his “wifey.”
10) Work blue.
Think of the nastiest thing you could say or do to another person. Then multiply its nastiness by three. Then write it down. Congratulations: you've started an urban novel. Here is one of my favorite examples from The Strength of You:
“Fe-Fe fell out laughing and before Teck knew it she’d rolled him over and slid between his legs, took his dick into her mouth, and was slowly gettin’ her eagle on. He let his head roll back and in between seeing stars, he could swear that her tongue felt better than a..."
(Wait for it...)
“...hot and wet prison wash rag coated with melted Vaseline.”
Ew. I don’t even want to look at the typewriter that produced that paragraph.
11) Use italics on everything.
12) Tell, don’t show.
Tell the reader how Rah-Lo comforted Celeste, “telling her that he loved her and that he would die if another man had her.” Never just SHOW that conversation, right? Describe scenes in screenplay swipes: “Crown Heights, Brooklyn; specifically, Crown Heights Plaza, a middle-income co-op housing development where...” You get the idea.
13) Use BIG TYPE.
These books are 220 pages on average. That’s a lot of white paper to fill if you can’t write worth a damn.
14) Have a prison record.
Half of the authors on Triple Crown Publishing’s roster are CURRENTLY in jail. Good to see that state money on reform is going to good use.
15) Give thanks first and foremost to God.
Without whom passages like the one in example ten aren’t possible.
16) Promote! Promote! Promote!
Email and website information should be on the acknowledgments page and order forms in the back. Don't forget about those black book clubs!
17) Include a moral lesson.
Because these books are supposed to be cautionary tales...at least in the last ten pages.
HOW TO PRODUCE AN URBAN NOVEL
(Preamble: )
(I do not hold with the notion that the word “urban” is an appropriate synonym for “black.” In fact, I find the term as it is used in most instances today offensive, and not simply because my family comes from rural stock. I have never met an Urban American, nor have I ever heard someone refer to themselves as one. Yet rhythm-and-blues music is now “urban contemporary” (which must mean that Marvin Gaye and Smokey Robinson and The Supremes were not practitioners of soul music or R&B or even race music, but the limpidly euphemistic “urban traditional”). This is, of course, ridiculous. No one who isn’t simply being argumentative for the sake of putting a weird look on your face when hearing a term like “urban traditional” would ever say such a thing. Let us banish the use of the word “urban” for anything relating to people unless we’re talking about people who live in cities. I know it’s a lot to ask for, but I have faith in you.)
I hate “urban novels.”
Urban novels are neither urban nor novel, and I’ll allow you to take the second admonishment any way you see fit. They are, by and large, bile-inducing exercises in marketed eye-gouging. They should be called what they are: black trash literature. Too hard on the palate? Okay, how about: African-American trash literature.
There is an old saying: there’s an audience for everything. Well, urban novels prove it. The books that comprise this “new” genre (read, “re-packaged”) are wildly popular. That they have the look of baseball cards (with content to match) doesn’t hurt, but it’s clearly deeper than marketing. It’s about appetite. People sorely want to read this stuff, and in alarming numbers. Library copies of most urban novel titles stay reserved, people frequently waiting for months to acquire them...many of them people who might not otherwise be so patient or engaged with literature of any stripe. Black bestseller lists such as Essence and Blackboard are riddled with this work. Urban novels rule the fiction paperback sections of these lists, and they’d rule the hardcover section as well if any of the publishers of this crap bothered with the inflated cost of hardcover printings. It’s practically printing money.
I know what you’re thinking: “Scott’s going to whip out Percival Everett again in yet another attempt to make people realize his unsung genius so that everyone will pick up Erasure and applaud its daring challenge to the status quo.” I assure you that this is not the case. Using Everett in opposition to the genre I’m about to rip apart would actually hurt my case. Putting Everett’s work next to even the most erudite and well-edited “urban novel” is largely akin to using a Sherman tank to kill a cockroach. As it stands, I don’t need Everett. I can use authors who have published black crime fiction and done it well, most notably Donald Goines, though you can certainly make a case for Chester Himes and Walter Mosley, just less so. And I don’t think I’m talking out of school when I say that even Wanda Coleman’s short story “Big Dreams” is a better pimp story than anything written in this entire genre. Goines - the author most urban novelists think they’re channeling when they scribe this jaw-dropping garbage - despite the blue content of his work, is certainly doing somersaults in his grave behind this tripe. No matter what you may think of the crass characterizations and gut-wrenching criminality of his oeuvre, Goines at least had a stripe of craftsmanship. The stories were unabashedly ghetto but they had sheen. They were beautiful prostitutes; ugly women with beautiful and relentless bodies that...my god: in doing the research for this article I’ve clearly been infected.
I’ve heard the hip-hop-inspired argument and it doesn’t float so much as tread water. Hip-hop is clearly the largest influence on this work, from its look to its language to its titles to its audience, but it certainly isn’t all-encompassing of hip-hop. Where’s the Tribe Called Quest urban novel, or the X-Clan urban novel? Let us call the muse what she is: a half-dressed gangsta rap video dancer who chain smokes three packs of Menthols a day.
Just yesterday at work I was working the returns station at the library and a young lady stepped up to the desk. She was a black teen about thirteen years of age. In one arm she held a few urban novels (Stacy, Sheisty, et al.). She set these on the desk so that she could pull out the items she intended to return from a book-bag she was carrying. She laid three videos on the desk, all kids’ movies. The Land Before Time, Lilo & Stitch...stuff of that ilk. You can imagine my horror, and this is from a guy who doesn’t even like kids.
Anyhow, enough of the heady social commentary. Let’s really get into what makes one of these books work. Let us find the threads that make these books the literary haymakers that they are in as sarcastic a manner as can be mustered.
If you want to produce an urban novel, here is what you need to do:
1) You need a bad cover.
Covers should depict mostly un-pretty people after they have awakened in their club clothes from the night before, photographed on bad days with Polaroid cameras. Or you can just hit up the Photo Guy (the one standing next to the Guy With Roses In A Bucket over by the spray-painted mural) at the club after last call and pick through his unused shots.
Terri McMillan’s Waiting To Exhale was the worst thing to happen to the cover of books by black authors. Ever. Publishers have unapologetically taken to having hacks in the art department cut out monotonic women in church hats out of brown construction paper for almost anything written by a black woman (not to mention a few black guys) in some bogus attempt at Romare Bearden-ism.
If there is an upside to the industry-wide laziness for urban authors, it is that your urban publisher doesn’t want your book to be confused with that soft junk. That’s why your cover will look like a Master P record.
2) Use lots of typos.
On the cover, in the story, amidst the acknowledgements...wherever you can fit them.
3) Use unnecessary prologue.
Usually movie tag lines or pointless inner monologue or - and this is the worst - moral framing. “What would you do to defend or protect your family?” Cue action movie soundtrack.
4) Use lots of ghetto names.
Dough-Low. Menage. Dollar. Big Nita. Drugs. Ice. Daddy. Drelex. You get the idea.
Note: I didn't make any of these names up.
5) Include lots of endorsements.
In all fairness, there are plenty of non-urban novels that litter their pages with an over-abundance of brand names when simple nouns will do. Unfortunately, lots of those books are by black authors too. I remember being struck dumb by the shopping lists that passed for description in a Marcus Major book, and Terri McMillan has gone so far as to plug herself in a book. As in, “Such-and-such was reading Waiting To Exhale by some woman named Terri McMillan.” Utterly neurotic.
Urban novels, however, take it to the max. These aren’t merely product placements. In urban novels, the mere mention of things becomes a storytelling element. Characters don’t ride motorcycles; they mount 1300-R Suzuki Hayabusas with gold spokes and red trim on the leather-back seats. They don’t grip the handle of a gun; they wield an H&K Mark 23...EVERY time they mention the firearm. “The man pulled out an H&K Mark 23. He loaded his H&K Mark 23. He spun around, with his H&K Mark 23, and pointed the H&K Mark 23 at the guy driving away in the 2003 Cadillac Escalade, pumping LL Cool J’s “I Need Love” out of a Bose cabinet of 24-inch subwoofers with the chrome tweeters.”
This exposes the primary inspiration for authors of this type of material: television and music. Even the emulations of characters are subjected to this lack of inspired writing: “Menage felt like he was in one of those Doublemint chewing gum TV ads…” (Menage’s Way, p.79). How does that feel, exactly? I mean, besides televised and short?
6) Name-drop. Lots of name-dropping.
No one is brown-skinned, smoky-hued or fair. They are “like Toni Braxton” or “like Denzel, but with longer hair.” These aren’t character descriptions; they’re casting calls.
7) Write minutely detailed sex scenes.
The more trifling, the better. I’ll spare you any choice examples mainly because there are simply too many to choose from, but trust me: flip any of these books open at random and you’re likely to open to a page of some of the most poorly written, crassest material you’ve ever seen.
8) Use strong women who aren’t strong.
Women are generally hustlers’ girlfriends, targets and deus ex machinas with breasts, even when they’re the lead character.
9) Use slang as description.
It’s one thing for a character to call another character a “niggah.” It’s a completely different thing when the author does it. Or describes the protagonist’s better half as his “wifey.”
10) Work blue.
Think of the nastiest thing you could say or do to another person. Then multiply its nastiness by three. Then write it down. Congratulations: you've started an urban novel. Here is one of my favorite examples from The Strength of You:
“Fe-Fe fell out laughing and before Teck knew it she’d rolled him over and slid between his legs, took his dick into her mouth, and was slowly gettin’ her eagle on. He let his head roll back and in between seeing stars, he could swear that her tongue felt better than a..."
(Wait for it...)
“...hot and wet prison wash rag coated with melted Vaseline.”
Ew. I don’t even want to look at the typewriter that produced that paragraph.
11) Use italics on everything.
12) Tell, don’t show.
Tell the reader how Rah-Lo comforted Celeste, “telling her that he loved her and that he would die if another man had her.” Never just SHOW that conversation, right? Describe scenes in screenplay swipes: “Crown Heights, Brooklyn; specifically, Crown Heights Plaza, a middle-income co-op housing development where...” You get the idea.
13) Use BIG TYPE.
These books are 220 pages on average. That’s a lot of white paper to fill if you can’t write worth a damn.
14) Have a prison record.
Half of the authors on Triple Crown Publishing’s roster are CURRENTLY in jail. Good to see that state money on reform is going to good use.
15) Give thanks first and foremost to God.
Without whom passages like the one in example ten aren’t possible.
16) Promote! Promote! Promote!
Email and website information should be on the acknowledgments page and order forms in the back. Don't forget about those black book clubs!
17) Include a moral lesson.
Because these books are supposed to be cautionary tales...at least in the last ten pages.