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How To Produce An "Urban Novel"
Note: This is an excerpt from an entry I did back in February before I started posting here. Today, someone mentioned the list I created for the entry and I thought, "What better place to re-post...?"

The original entry is about twice as long, but this is the fun part...



...

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 shot 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 of the outside of the building) 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.

5) Include lots of endorsements.
In all fairness, there are plenty of non-urban novels that litter their pages with an over-indulgence 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.” Simply 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?

6) Name-drop. Lots of name-dropping.
No one is brown-skinned, smoky-hued or fair. They are “like Toni Braxton” or “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 dues 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. Here’s one of my favorites 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 10 are not possible.

16) Promote! Promote! Promote!
Email and website information should be on the acknowledgments page and order forms in the back.

17) Include a moral lesson.
Because these books are supposed to be “cautionary tales”...at least in the last ten pages.