Publetariat

This post, from Maurice Broaddus, originally appeared on the Apex Blog (of Apex Books) in March 2009.

A few years ago, I was speaking to a fellow black horror writer and she told me that she didn’t write characters of color in her work. She didn’t think it was important, even as a black writer, for her to write black characters (and descriptions of characters with dark hair and brown eyes were enough). It was more important for her to write for her chosen audience, who she perceived as white, and she didn’t want to in anyway alienate them.

This is how badly issues of race have infected and confused some people.

Yes, there is a current brouhaha brewing in speculative fiction that has since been dubbed RaceFail ’09. It started when Elizabeth Bear wrote a piece on writing the other which was then openly disagreed with. Hilarity ensued (catalogued here). I, too, wrote a piece on writing the other (in a response to something Jay Lake had written; mind you, both pieces came out a few YEARS ago) and have stayed out of this round of self-examination except to offer up a play-along cultural appropriation bingo card to go along with the “fantasy/science fiction no racism edition” bingo card. And yet, as Chesya Burke laments, such a discussion has largely not reared its head in the horror community. I don’t expect it to, frankly. Not to be too pointed about a race discussion in horror, but the genre largely amounts to white folks writing about white folks for the consumption of white folks. In other words, horror circumvents the issue of “writing the other” by … not.

With a few exceptions, race isn’t discussed much in the horror genre. Most folks are afraid to discuss it or admit there is a problem. With good cause: the last horror brand RaceFail discussion involved the release of Brandon Massey’s anthology series, Dark Dreams. The bulk of the discussion revolved around the series being the equivalent of reverse discrimination (because, you know, there are no all-white, even more specifically, all-white-male, horror anthology series) or writer affirmative action (because obviously writers like Tananarive Due, L.A. Banks, Wrath James White, Eric Jerome Dickey, Zane, or, I humbly submit, myself, can’t be published elsewhere).

In some ways, I can see why RaceFail has gone on within the science fiction and fantasy genre/communities. By the nature of those genres, they explore (and are allowed to explore) big ideas. Horror too often prides itself on being the “lowest common denominator” genre, not built for rigorous idea exploration. “I’m doing an analysis of man’s inhumanity to man” usually amounts to puerile masturbatory fantasies of rape and torture justified by someone getting their comeuppance in the end.

Read the rest of the post on the Apex Blog. 

This post, from Brian Scott, originally appeared on the Book Publishing News blog of BookCatcher.com on 7/20/09.

New changes to an already popular website for readers and writers are proving to be a big hit. www.worthyofpublishing.com was created by Kiwi entrepreneur Aaron Cook, to give writers the chance to gain free feedback on their manuscripts from the general public.

Book lovers can preview and vote for what they would like to see published and available for sale on bookshelves, and leave comments to help authors improve their writing.

One of the most recent upgrades to the website was the message centre, which allows members to communicate with each other directly to share tips and ideas. This compliments the already popular comments section, where members post comments about a writers work for the public to view.

The website has also been made more transparent, so when a reader rates a book their rating is displayed beside the comment they have left for that book.

Cook says the new upgrades have proved to be very popular amongst members, and have definitely brought a more community feel to the website.

The overall concept originated from China around a decade ago. Since the establishment, it has helped numerous authors become recognized by the public and achieve dramatic success. It was mentioned at the most recent Frankfurt Bookfair that the world’s eyes are on the growth of China’s publishing industry, which has been driven by the internet.

Last year twenty percent of China’s bestsellers originated from the internet, many of them have been [from] previously unheard-of authors discovered on similar types of websites to worthyofpublishing.com in China.

Just one of the many examples of a Chinese author becoming a huge success through the internet is Tian Xia Ba Chang, who wrote a book called “Candles Blown by a Ghost" which is a thriller/adventure novel. Over time this book reached over 3.6 million hits online and once finally published sold 500,000 copies in one year.

 

Read the rest of the post on the Book Publishing News blog of BookCatcher.com. 

This article, from Joseph Finder, originally appeared in his Tips For Writers in May of 2009.

My name is Joe, and I’m a research-aholic.

This should surprise no one who reads my books. In fact, I’ve taken some teasing about the length of the “acknowledgments” sections of my books, because so many people have been so generous about sharing their expertise with me.

I have always considered “Write what you know” one of the most useless pieces of advice a beginning author gets. Write what I know? If I’d started out writing what I knew, I’d have come up with 10 or 12 pages about a kid in upstate New York who wanted to be a cartoonist (I did, actually; see my monthly newsletter for more about this). Granted, Philip Roth and Saul Bellow, among others, did very well in turning their life experiences into literature — but I wanted to write thrillers, and my life was not thrilling.

No, for me, writing was all about having my characters do things I could only dream of, whether that was taking the Concorde to Paris, escaping assassins on the streets of Moscow, or wining and dining beautiful women in Boston’s finest restaurants (which I am now able to do, thanks to my wife and daughter, but you know what I mean).

And let’s face it: research is the fun part. Who wouldn’t want to ride along with cops, learn to shoot guns (lots of guns!), and talk to interesting people about the cool things they do? It’s much more fun than sitting alone in front of a blank computer screen, trying to figure out what happens next.

Research has also given me some of my best plot points and material. A weapons expert once showed me how to smuggle a gun through airport security and on to a plane. Believe me, I could not have thought that one up by myself.

But every hour you spend doing the fun stuff of research is time you’re not writing. And I’m here to tell you that research, while fun and often necessary, is addictive and dangerous.

It’s also a great crutch. All novelists feel like impostors at times; it’s only natural to feel unqualified and insecure in what you’re writing about. You don’t really know it — what do we know, we’re writers, right? Ñ so you want to find out as much as you can. But in the age of the Internet, you’re always one hyperlink away from the next website or article, and it can go on ad infinitum. The easiest thing in the world is to put off writing while you find out exactly how many gallons the New York City reservoirs hold, or how long it takes to fly from Washington to Timbuktu, or whether Brazilians drive on the right or the left-hand side of the road.

So stop. Put the story first. Write your story first, and fact-check later. It doesn’t have to be 100% accurate; it just has to be plausible.

John Grisham was 100 pages into his latest book, The Associate, which was set at the Princeton Law School — when he found out that Princeton doesn’t have a law school. It didn’t derail him; he just moved the story to Yale, which does have a law school. The key is that the setting wasn’t the important part, the story was — and he’d already written 100 pages, so he was able to go back and make the necessary changes.

Read the rest of the article on Joseph Finder’s site, and click here to subscribe to his newsletter or Tips For Writers. 

This post, from Justine Larbalestier, originally appeared on her blog on 7/23/09.

In the last few weeks as people have started reading the US ARC of Liar they have also started asking why there is such a mismatch between how Micah describes herself and the cover image. Micah is black with nappy hair which she wears natural and short. As you can see that description does not match the US cover [Publetariat editor’s note: cover image included after the jump].

Many people have been asking me how I feel about the US cover, why I allowed such a cover to appear on a book of mine, and why I haven’t been speaking out about it.

Authors do not get final say on covers. Often they get no say at all.

As it happens I was consulted by Bloomsbury and let them know that I wanted a cover like the Australian cover, which I think is very true to the book.¹ I was lucky that my Australian publisher, Allen & Unwin, agreed with my vision and that the wonderful Bruno Herfst came up with such a perfect cover image².

which is why I was a bit offended by the reviewer, who in an otherwise lovely review, described Micah as ugly. She’s not!³

The US Liar cover went through many different versions. An early one, which I loved, had the word Liar written in human hair. Sales & Marketing did not think it would sell. Bloomsbury has had a lot of success with photos of girls on their covers and that’s what they wanted. Although not all of the early girl face covers were white, none showed girls who looked remotely like Micah.

I strongly objected to all of them. I lost.

I haven’t been speaking out publicly because to be the first person to do so would have been unprofessional. I have privately been campaigning for a different cover for the paperback. The response to the cover by those who haven’t read Liar has been overwhelmingly positive and I would have looked churlish if I started bagging it at every opportunity. I hoped that once people read Liar they would be as upset as I am with the cover. It would not have helped get the paperback changed if I was seen to be orchestrating that response. But now that this controversy has arisen I am much more optimistic about getting the cover changed. I am also starting to rethink what I want that cover to look like. I did want Bloomsbury to use the Australian cover, but I’m increasingly thinking that it’s important to have someone who looks like Micah on the front.

I want to make it clear that while I disagree with Bloomsbury about this cover I am otherwise very happy to be with them. They’ve given me space to write the books I want to write. My first book for them was a comic fairy book that crossed over into middle grade (How To Ditch Your Fairy). I followed that up with Liar, a dark psychological thriller that crosses over into adult. There are publishers who would freak. No one at Bloomsbury batted an eye. I have artistic freedom there, which is extraordinarily important to me. They are solidly behind my work and have promoted it at every level in ways I have never been promoted before.

Covers change how people read books

Liar is a book about a compulsive (possibly pathological) liar who is determined to stop lying but finds it much harder than she supposed. I worked very hard to make sure that the fundamentals of who Micah is were believable: that she’s a girl, that she’s a teenager, that she’s black, that she’s USian. One of the most upsetting impacts of the cover is that it’s led readers to question everything about Micah: If she doesn’t look anything like the girl on the cover maybe nothing she says is true. At which point the entire book, and all my hard work, crumbles.

No one in Australia has written to ask me if Micah is really black.

No one in Australia has said that they will not be buying Liar because “my teens would find the cover insulting.”

Both responses are heart breaking.

This cover did not happen in isolation.

Every year at every publishing house, intentionally and unintentionally, there are white-washed covers. Since I’ve told publishing friends how upset I am with my Liar cover, I have been hearing anecdotes from every single house about how hard it is to push through covers with people of colour on them. Editors have told me that their sales departments say black covers don’t sell. Sales reps have told me that many of their accounts won’t take books with black covers. Booksellers have told me that they can’t give away YAs with black covers. Authors have told me that their books with black covers are frequently not shelved in the same part of the library as other YA—they’re exiled to the Urban Fiction section—and many bookshops simply don’t stock them at all. How welcome is a black teen going to feel in the YA section when all the covers are white? Why would she pick up Liar when it has a cover that so explicitly excludes her?

Read the rest of the post on Justine Larbalestier’s blog.

1. I didn’t see the Australian cover until after the US cover was finalised.
2. Yes, another protag of mine who looks like a WNBA player. What can I say? I’m a fan.
3. If you’re interested, I imagine another character in the book, Sarah, as looking like a younger Rutina Wesley, who’s not a WNBA player.
 

This article, by Ruth Mortimer, originally appeared on Marketing Week on 7/23/09 (in the U.K., where it’s already 7/23 as this article is being posted, 7/22 here in the U.S.). File this one under ‘games some publishers play’.

These may be hard times for publishers, but using a star author to sell another less well-known writer’s book is lazy marketing.

The word “deadline” tends to catch my eye. As a journalist, it’s the term that defines your weeks, days and hours. So browsing in WH Smith recently, I was intrigued to see that Dan Brown, author of megahit The Da Vinci Code, had written a book called Deadline with the intriguing (and horribly familiar to all writers) tagline: “Time Only Matters When It’s Running Out”.

I didn’t think The Da Vinci Code, which is a crime-thriller-cum-religious-tale, was a particularly well-written book when it first came out in 2003. But nobody can deny it has mass appeal and its racy and pacy plot has spawned a whole set of imitators. With more than 81 million copies sold so far and two hit films based on Brown’s novels, it’s one of the publishing successes of the century.

So I picked up Deadline. Would it be the story of a young female journalist struggling for the scoop of the decade against the odds? At which point, I noticed someone else’s name on the cover beneath Dan Brown’s: Simon Kernick. “Aha,” I thought, “The title is actually ‘Simon Kernick: Deadline.’ Perhaps Kernick is the fictional detective starring in this novel?”

But as I looked closer, it dawned on me that in fact, Brown had not written this book at all. And Kernick is not the detective hero of the piece. The front cover, which proudly boasted that it was “exclusive” to WH Smith, bears the legend: “Dan Brown. If you like your thrillers as fast, furious and unputdownable as Dan Brown, then we thought you’d enjoy…Simon Kernick. Deadline.”

I had got it entirely wrong. Kernick is, in fact, the author of Deadline. Brown is not.

Publetariat Editor’s Note: this story comes from a U.K.-based site, and apparently, the ‘Dan Brown’ cover isn’t being released here in the U.S.  The cover on the left is the U.S.-edition hardcover.  

This is selling one author’s book with the name of another author as the hook to draw in the shopper. Rather than simply referring to Dan Brown on the cover notes, suggesting similarities between the authors’ styles, at first sight it seems that Brown is the main writer.

The whole top two-thirds of the book is dedicated to Brown, rather than Kernick. Careless shoppers, like me, could quite easily buy it thinking it was Brown’s own work and only realise their mistake when they’d parted with their cash. 

Read the rest of the article on Marketing Week. Also see this additional commentary from Sarah Weinman on Confessions Of An Idiosyncratic Mind, and the Simon Kernick is Awesome photoshop contest on Smart Bitches, Trashy Books. 

This article, from David Halpert, originally appeared on the Writinghood site on 7/21/09.

Not only is the English language one of the most complex languages on the planet it is also one of the most verbose, awkward, and contradictory. That being said here are the five most commonly misspelled expressions in the English Language.

Pored over texts, not poured over texts

This one probably stuck with me the longest in terms of misspelled expressions but among the public it’s also one of the most misspelled expressions as well. Want to know what “pouring” over texts has to do with water. Absolutely nothing. While it’s easy to assume that one might pore over a document the way water pours over a surface, the two have nothing in common. In this case, “pore” means “to read or study with steady attention or application“.

Just deserts, not just desserts

A lot of people think that when you say to someone they will get their just deserts, it somehow relates to a giant sundae you will get to eat and the other person won’t, but actually the expression “just deserts” relates to the way you’d spell an arid piece of sandy land. “Deserts”, however, can also mean “‘that which is deserved” from the Latin desiree meaning to get one’s come uppance. Don’t fall into this common trap.

Wreak havoc, not wreck havoc

When spelt “wreck” (pronounced reek) the general public believes to wreak havoc is synonymous with taking your car out on the highway and wreaking havoc on the road, and while “wreck” means to destroy or cause chaos it is used completely out of context. Havoc itself as a noun means chaos, destruction, and general disorder, but so does wreck when used as a verb. To be used beside one another would be a double negative, for example, to cause destruction to chaos, meaning in the wrong sense, to cause order. In the correct version, “wreak havoc” means “to inflict or execute (punishment, vengeance, etc.)“.

Read the rest of the article on Writinghood.

This post, from mainstream-published author Laini Taylor, originally appeared on her Grow Wings blog on 3/1/09.

I’m not quite sure why I got started thinking about this today, but I did. I have an acquaintance who is a very gifted writer but suffers crippling self-doubt that has, so far, prevented her from achieving her dream of writing — and publishing — a novel.

She soul-searches a lot and goes in cycles, up and down, and the ups are beautiful and full of epiphanies, the kind of epiphanies out of which beautiful writing blooms. Just, so far the ups have not been sustained long enough for an entire book to make its way into the world. Doubt rolls back around and derails her.

I suffer cycles too. Really, every writer I know has them: the peaks and troughs of good writing days versus bad ones. Euphoria to despair and back again.

For those of us who have made it through and finished a book as well as we possibly can . . . how did we? I was thinking about this acquaintance, rooting for her and wondering what it might take for her to pull it off, and the word "confidence" entered my mind.

But no, I thought. That’s not it. Confidence is not what it takes to finish a book. I mean, it’s great if you’ve got it, but you don’t need it. What you do need is determination, and that’s something that’s easier to come by. I think, anyway. Confidence is this kind of full trust in one’s abilities, and I most certainly did not have that when I was writing Blackbringer. I did, however, have a mulish determination to do it. It wasn’t that I knew I could do it, it was that I really really wanted to. I mean, really really. Really.

Really.

And that, as it turned out, was enough. You don’t have to believe in yourself all the time; you don’t have to read self-help books and fix your self-esteem problems before you can succeed. You just have to be stubborn and keep on and keep on. Instead of the Little Engine saying "I know I can, I know I can," you can, to be cornball, instead be the Little Engine that says, "I won’t quit, I won’t quit." It’s kind of easier. For me, anyway.
 

Read the rest of the post on Grow Wings.

This article, from Francesca Mari, originally appeared on The Daily Beast on 7/6/09.

Enterprising fiction writers are marketing themselves to book groups in person, by phone, and over Skype to boost sales. Meet the new breed of literary types on the make.

There is a thing authors do, nervously, when they think no one is looking. They check out their numbers—online sales figures, ratings, rankings, reader reviews. Not long ago, Joshua Henkin, a professor of creative writing at Sarah Lawrence and Brooklyn College, was doing just such a thing in his home office. He was scrolling through Goodreads.com, monitoring the reception of his new novel, Matrimony. A user named Shelley had given him a mixed review—three stars out of five. Henkin clicked on her name and decided to email her, offering to attend her book club, if she had one. She did—that very evening—and, after several exchanges, Henkin was set to call into it.

Joshua Henkin has topped 175 visits to book groups. “With 10 people in each group,” he said, “that’s 1,750 books sold right there.”

Henkin had already participated in over 80 groups, most of them personal visits to between 10 and 12 middle-aged women. By now, he’s topped 175. “With 10 people in each group, that’s 1,750 books sold right there.” When his first novel came out in 1997, Henkin said the book got good reviews but fell by the wayside in sales, in part because his editor was dying. “I’d heard enough horror stories in publishing that even if a book got great reviews it wasn’t going to sell well, and I got the sense that so many people were in book groups,” he says. So when Matrimony first came out, he emailed friends to put him in touch. Now groups find him. And he’s willing to drive up to two hours, one way, to any group that asks. “Most sales are going to come shortly after publication. When you see sales stay steady,” Henkin says, “something is going on in terms of word of mouth. And that tends to be book clubs.”

Henkin’s efforts are an enterprising response to the publishing industry’s chronic woes. Money is scarce for publicity, and the way it’s often hoarded to buy full-page ads for the books that make bank (think: James Patterson, Stephen King) means that authors must be on-call at all times. To make a living off of fiction, most writers must be as attuned to marketing as they are to writing. Mickey Pearlman, an author, editor, and professional book-club facilitator, says, “The only thing that’s going to save publishing is book clubs.” Pearlman offers four-hour book-marketing seminars (for $500), focusing on “how to creatively market your book on the Web and in other outlets”—one of those outlets being, of course, book groups. “You’re building an interest in you,” Pearlman says, “so they’ll be very likely to buy your next book.”

The focus on book clubs has spurred the evolution of a new breed: the author-hustler, the writer who succeeds in large part because of door-to-door salesmanship. After the writing comes a new challenge, one of industriousness, perseverance, and charm. Since 2000, Adriana Trigiani has averaged two to three book clubs a week by phone, and this past April, she led “The World’s Biggest Book Club,” a 300-person event run out of New York’s Convent of the Sacred Heart High School (the very set of Paris Hilton and Lady Gaga’s [mis]education).

Chris Bohjalian, whose book Midwives was an Oprah selection in October 1998, began phoning into groups after he was forced to cancel his book tour in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. Requests keep increasing, and this year he anticipates talking to 120 groups. As soon as The Divorce Party came out, Laura Dave was reaching out to book clubs at the suggestion of her editor and publicist, both of whom recognized her book’s potential appeal to the middle-aged woman. “Every time I speak to a book group,” Dave says, “almost without exception that book club refers me to another book club that emails.” Dave has done over 100 discussions in person, by phone, and on Skype. She says that Gwyn, the middle-aged narrator of her second novel, is a composite of some of the women she’s met in groups.
 

Read the rest of the article on The Daily Beast.

This post, from Dennis Palumbo, originally appeared on The Writer’s Store site.

A particularly arrogant film producer once said to me, “I could be a writer, too, if I only had the time.”
 

Which implied, I guess, that if he didn’t have to attend meetings, deal with studios, manage production budgets—–in other words, if he didn’t have a real job—he too could just sit around, effortlessly knocking out compelling narratives and crafting pithy dialogue.

Yet for most writers, time is exactly that thing they can’t seem to get enough of. Certainly not without carving it out for themselves, strenuously hewing a private space for their writing from a dense forest of financial and familial duties. Most writers understand that they must somehow demand the time to write; that, in many ways, writing is a “job” like any other, requiring diligence, constancy and commitment. But getting others to understand this is not always so easy.

Robert Frost said that the one thing all nations on earth share is a fear that a member of the family will want to be a writer. There are a lot of reasons for this, from parental concern about a child’s ability to earn a living, to legitimate desires to spare the would-be writer the heartbreak of rejection and disappointment, to irrational fears about the aberrant life-style that writers are stereotypically known to indulge. Next to announcing that you want to be an actor, proclaiming your ambition to write is guaranteed to strike terror in the hearts of parents, siblings, and spouses. Especially spouses with whom you’ve had children.

The pressure to provide for a family is acute for most people, but even more so for writers, often struggling with both the difficulties of their craft and the insecurity and fickleness of the marketplace. Finding time to write is hard enough when you have a writing job—on staff at a TV series, say, or developing a screenplay for a studio. At least then you can justify the time spent away from the family, lost in your thoughts, scribbling notes on coffee shop menus, banging away at the keyboard at all hours.

But if you have a non-writing job, some 9-to-5 gig to pay the bills, any time you might need for writing, for pursuing a writing career, seems a selfish luxury. It’s time seemingly owed to personal obligations, to the tasks of running a home and raising a family. In such cases, “demanding” time for your writing carries with it the possibility of frequent relationship strife, as well as a significant burden of guilt.

In my private practice, many of my writer clients deal with this guilt constantly. They feel an obligation both to the demands of their creative ambitions and to those of their families. Even when their spouse or partner goes along with their need for time and solitude, many of them still feel guilty. Often it increases the pressure to achieve quick financial success. It affects their decisions about what kinds of things they should write. It makes them feel that every second spent writing must “count.”

More than one writer has said to me, “What if my script doesn’t sell? I’ve spent all this time doing it, obsessing over it. I’ve been distracted and impatient with my kids. Totally unavailable to my wife. What if it all turns out to be for nothing?”

Sometimes the fissures in the relationship at home become wide enough to cause panic. “I’ve made a deal with my husband,” another writer once told me. “If this spec doesn’t sell, I’ll give it up. I mean, how long can I keep doing this, banging my head against the wall? I’m not getting any younger. And I don’t want to lose my marriage.”

Even successful writers, those who make a living at their craft, find it difficult to continually justify to loved ones their need for private time. “Unless my kids hear the keyboard clicking,” one noted screenwriter confided in me, “they feel okay interrupting me. You ever try to explain to a four-year-old that you’re working, when all you’re doing is staring at the ceiling? Hell, sometimes I have a hard time convincing myself.”
 

Read the rest of the post on The Writer’s Store site.

This post, from Dr. Susan K. Perry, PhD, originally appeared on the Psychology Today site on 6/27/09.

All advice is suspect. I’m not suggesting you break all the so-called rules of creativity you’ve collected. Only that every tip can be counteracted with its opposite. And some advice is just plain bad for you. If interviewing 76 successful novelists and poets taught me one thing, it’s this: advice that one person swears by, another will find ludicrous. Here, then, are 11 types of advice to avoid:

1. Advice that limits your potential. An online student of mine once asked if what a famous novelist had written was correct, that if you’d left a novel unfinished for a few years, it was a lost cause. I reassured her that if her passion for the project was still there, or could be resurrected, she could pick it up again. One writer went back to a novel he’d put aside more than a decade before and was able to salvage parts of it. He’s now happily engaged with a new version of the project.

2. Advice that cramps your imagination. Some people would have you write only from your own point of view or about a group to which you belong. That’s too rigid. Credible stories and poems have been written from the point of view of the opposite gender or from some other time or culture that you couldn’t possibly know personally. Writing is about pretending.

3. Advice that insists there’s one way to schedule your creativity. Must you write every single day? If you don’t devote yourself to writing full-time, does that mean you’re not taking yourself seriously? Avoid any advice that starts "You MUST," or that feels like a punishment. Productive artists work out all sorts of schedules that fit in with the rest of their lives.

4. Advice that makes you feel bad about yourself. A young poet told me she’d felt devastated by the admonition a teacher once gave her to put her poems in a drawer for ten years before actually sending them out. She took the advice literally and was thoroughly stymied. In fact, that kind of advice plays into a paralyzing perfectionism. Usually a few days or weeks is enough to see your words through fresh eyes.

5. Advice that tells you more about the advisor than about your own work. A talented poet friend of mine showed some of her work, much of which tends to be about the darker side of dysfunctional family life, to a co-worker. The listener’s response was this: "Don’t you ever write anything about nature?" The water cooler critic in this case apparently thinks poems are only about pretty things.
 

Read the rest of the post, containing items #6-11, on Psychology Today.

This post, from Mel Keegan, originally appeared on The World According To Mel blog on 2/14/09.

Writing has been likened to bashing your head against a wall — with one exception: it’s not so great when you stop.

I guess this is because writing is in your blood, something you do because it’s … what you do; and the fact is, you’ll do it whether anyone is reading what you write, or paying you, or not!  Writing is a vocation, like religion, medicine, the law.

Publishing is a different can o’ worms (or kettle of fish, if you prefer). Publishing is like jabbing yourself in the foot with a sharp stick. In terms of the pain and anguish you’re inflicting upon your anatomy, it’s about the same … but it can actually do you more physical damage! Let’s face it, if you give your head a good enough bash on the wall the first time out, you’re going to knock yourself right out — and I ought to know! I did this last week! (See also Gay novelist, battered and fried.) Technically, you could jab yourself with a sharp stick enough times to do a whole lot more damage —

Which is where the publishing analogy becomes utterly perfect. Publishers are gluttons for punishment, especially the self-marketing variety. They could stop anytime. But, do they? No. We go on, bashing our heads (and jabbing our feet) when we know that every single day we’re going to be up against unutterable rubbish like this:

Six reasons that self-publishing is the scourge of the book world.

…and I cannot tell you the degree to which this article is wrong in its sweeping statements. The blood boils. Consider this:

1. No one vetts self-published books, allowing even the most puerile piles of crap to adopt the guise of polished, professional prose.

Point one: Mr. Tom Barlow, you must stop generalizing on this first line. All self-published works are not the same, and some are vetted to destruction point. Some will be proofread many more times, by more pairs of eyeballs, than could plausibly be assigned to them by "small" publishing houses who can’t afford a large enough editorial staff to do a proper job. (Point two: drop the alliteration. It makes you sound like an over-inflated idiot.)

2. Self-publishing kills the drive for writers to improve their craft. The artificial, undeserved success they will achieve will trap them in mediocrity.

This is such utter piffle, I was speechless for a moment. Mr. Barlow, who told you this? You were sold a priceless line of BS. The drive to improve one’s craft is born in a writer, and continues to flow in his or her veins irrespective of whether they’re published (slim chance) or not.

Editors do little to inspire writers to improve, because the process of editing any but the bestselling author is so robotized, so impersonal. You mail your manuscript in; a year later you get the galleys back, and a few days to read through them. You have no real idea of what was done to the work, or why, you just check it for errors and mail it back as fast as humanly possible.

And what gremlin whispered into Tom Barlow’s naive ear, that a self-publishing author of a "puerile pile of crap" is going to achieve any kind of success whatsoever? Does he think books sell themselves? Does he honestly believe readers will buy a book without having read at least 10% of it as a free download, seen the cover at full-size, and read numerous reviews, either online or in the print media?

Any copies sold, anywhere, any time, are the result of massive amounts of hard marketing work by the author, and before it could start, said author had to have a real, solid work to go out there and sell. The rubbish he’s describing exists — by the wagonload — on Amazon, on Lulu, and "wherever books are sold." The point he’s missing is this: "puerile piles of crap" DO NOT SELL COPIES. Their authors do not enjoy success, artificial or otherwise, and what traps them in mediocrity is their own — mediocrity.

Read the rest of the post on The World According To Mel blog.

This post, from Robert Gregory Browne, originally appeared on his Casting the Bones site on 6/26/09.

One of our best American writers, Elmore Leonard, has famously said that he tries to “leave out the parts people skip” when he’s writing. Anyone who has read a Leonard novel knows that they are lean, move quickly, and certainly don’t require any skimming.

But what exactly does that mean?

People start skimming when they lose interest. When they want you to get on with things. When they’re not as engaged by the story as they should be.

So how do you keep them engaged? I have a few ideas:

Keep your prose style simple and economic and clear

You can certainly be clever and artistic, but never sacrifice economy and clarity for the sake of “art.” Much of that art, in fact, is writing in a way that the sentences and paragraphs and pages flow from one to the next, giving the reader no choice but to hang onto every word.

And clarity is always important. If a reader is confused about what is going on, she may well give up on you.

Don’t bog your story down with too much description

Descriptive passages can be quite beautiful, but your job is to weigh whether or not they’re necessary. Are they slowing the story down?

One of my favorite writers of all time is Raymond Chandler. But when I read his novels, I sometimes find myself skipping entire paragraphs. Chandler seemed to have this need to describe a room or character in great detail, and while that may have been part of the job is his day, I think it’s much less important now.

Gregory MacDonald, the author of the Fletch books, among others, once said that because we live in a “post-television” world, it is no longer necessary to describe everything. We all know what the Statue of Liberty looks like because we’ve seen it on TV. We’ve seen just about everything on TV, and probably even more on the Internet.

So, I think it’s best to limit your descriptions to only what is absolutely necessary to make the story work. Meaning: enough to set the scene, set up a character, or to CLARIFY an action.

Let’s face it. Saying something as simple as, The place was a dump. Several used syringes lay on the floor next to a ratty mattress with half its stuffing gone is often more than enough to get the message across.

If you can, describe a setting through the eyes of whatever character controls the scene (meaning POV). If you include the description as part of that character’s thought process, colored by his or her mood or personality, the description then becomes much more dynamic and also reveals a lot about that character.

One man’s dump, after all, may be another man’s paradise. And showing how a character reacts to a place is much more interesting than a static description.

Read the rest of the post on Casting the Bones.

This article, from Susan K. Perry, PhD, originally appeared on the Psychology Today site on 5/7/09.

Create real memories, says sci-fi author Samuel R. Delany.

Flashbacks threaded into a novel are handy devices for dealing with past events. But many writers misuse flashbacks, writes science fiction author Samuel R. Delany in About Writing: 7 essays, 4 letters, & 5 interviews.

Delany, winner of both Hugo and Nebula awards, has written dozens of books, including science fiction novels, short stories, and nonfiction. That experience, as well as his 35 years as a creative writing instructor and critic, have convinced him that flashbacks are often constructed lazily and clumsily.

Here’s Delany on memory and fiction:

However much, as readers, we lose ourselves in a novel or story, fiction itself is an experience on the order of memory-not on the order of actual occurrence. It looks like the writer is telling you a story. What the writer is actually doing, however, is using words to evoke a series of micromemories from your own experience that inmix, join, and connect in your mind in an order the writer controls, so that, in effect, you have a sustained memory of something that never happened to you. That false memory is what a story is.

As if to corroborate Delany, an article by Gary Marcus appeared recently about a woman who seems to have perfect autobiographical recall. That’s apparently a genuine oddity. Writes Marcus:

Ordinary human memory is a mess. Most of us can recall the major events in our lives, but the memory of Homo sapiens pales when compared with your average laptop. … it’s easy for us to forget things we’ve learned; and it’s sometimes hard to dislodge outdated information. Worse, our memories are vulnerable to contamination and distortion…. The fundamental problem is the seemingly haphazard fashion in which our memories are organized…. Human recall is hit or miss. Neuroscientific research tells us that our brains don’t use a fixed-address system, and memories tend to overlap, combine, and disappear for reasons no one yet understands.

Now back to Delany. It’s the fiction writer’s task, he says, "to make that unreal memory as clear and vivid as possible," which depends on the order of the words the writer selects. Delany, in fact, lauds the use of realistic flashbacks, the true-to-life flashes that last from half a second to 10 seconds at the most. "Thus, in texts," he writes, "they are covered in a phrase or two, a sentence, three sentences, or five sentences at most."

In my own novel-in-progress, I use a lot of momentary flashbacks, sometimes as a way of metaphor-making. Here are two examples:

 

1.  He could smell his own skin, the prickles under his arms, in his groin. A fear scent etched in memory from the first week he’d had his driver’s license and his car had skidded sideways on the freeway.

2.  My husband dipped his hands again and again into a bowl of curly orange-colored snacks, until his palms and fingers took on a putrid glow. His wedding ring was incongruous on those oversized little boy orange hands. The setting sun glinted off one of the ring’s small diamonds. A sudden image popped up of a glittery Cracker Jacks ring from when I was six, and me, in my bedroom, staring into the ring’s central bit of multi-faceted glass. A microcosm lay within: a sunny country setting, large leafy tree to the left with a person sitting under it, a meadow, a stream. A sense of this being a place you could walk into. I shrieked for my mother, but try as she would, she wasn’t able to catch a glimpse of it. Nor could I, ever again.

Realistically, explains Delany, when you try to concentrate on a past event longer than a very few seconds, the present always intrudes. So he refutes the logic of having a character walk down the street and run over the previous three months, say, in a relationship. Those stories simply start in the wrong place, he insists.

Read the rest of the post on the Psychology Today site.

 This post, from Henrik Edberg, originally appeared on his The Positivity Blog on 6/13/08.

“The world is a fine place and worth the fighting for and I hate very much to leave it.”

As you probably know Ernest Hemingway was a writer, journalist and Nobel Prize Winner. Some of his most famous stories include “The Old Man and The Sea” and “The Sun Also Rises”. He also participated in both World Wars and worked as a correspondent during for instance the Spanish Civil War. Now, here are 9 of my favourite words of wisdom from Ernest Hemingway.

1. Listen.

“I like to listen. I have learned a great deal from listening carefully. Most people never listen.”

Learning to really listen to someone rather just waiting for our turn to talk can be a difficult skill to develop. Often we may have much on our mind that we want to say and so listening falls by the wayside.

How can you become a better listener? Here are three tips:

• Forget about yourself. Focus your attention outward instead of inward in a conversation. Place the mental focus on the person you are talking and listening to instead of yourself. Placing the focus outside of yourself makes you less self-centred and your need to hog the spotlight decreases.

• Stay present. This will help you to decrease the bad habit of thinking about the future and what you should say next while trying to listen. If you are present and really there while listening then that will also come through in your body language, which gives the person talking a vibe and feeling that you are really listening to what s/he has to say.
   
• Be open. Keep your mind open to the possibility that whatever the person is about to say will actually be interesting. If you have already made up your mind that he or she will say something boring then it will be hard to pay attention.

Also, if you really listen then that alone will often provide you naturally with a better and more genuine answer than the clever response thought up while trying to listen simultaneously.

2. Take the first step.

“The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them.”

The thing is if two people or more are waiting for someone else to take the first step then that step may never be taken. Or you may at least have to wait for a very long time.

If you after some time realise that, like in this example, you couldn’t trust the person then at least you have learned that.

By not taking the first step you’ll perhaps never know. So instead of waiting around and trying to figure things out just take first steps of different kinds in interactions. Be proactive.

3. Keep your eyes on where you are going.

“Never mistake motion for action.”

It’s very easy to get lost in busy work. You may spend much time in your in-box or filing and organizing things. But at the end of the day or week, what have you accomplished?

Just because you’re moving doesn’t mean that you are moving in the direction you really want to go. To do that you have to do the things that you know are really important and in alignment with your goals. And not getting lost in busy work.

So, improve your effectiveness and productivity. But, more importantly, never lose your view of your big picture. And take the action and do the things you need to do to get yourself where you want to go.

4. Just do.

“The shortest answer is doing the thing.”

How do you get things done? You take action and do them. You may need to do some planning, but don’t get lost in that stage or in over thinking things. Planning or thinking won’t get you any results in real-life if you don’t take action too.

So take action and just try something. Maybe you’ll succeed. Maybe you’ll fail, but if you do then failure can always teach you a bunch of things. The worst thing is not failure, it’s to just sit on your hands and do nothing.

Developing a just do it habit – where you learn to do what you know you want to do despite how you feel or what your thoughts are telling you at the moment – can be difficult. But it’s rewarding not only because you’ll get actual results and – sooner or later – success. It also builds real confidence in yourself, in your capabilities and in your own personal power to achieve what you want in life. 

Read the rest of the post on The Positivity Blog. 

This post, from Maria Schneider, originally appeared on her Editor Unleashed site on 5/28/09.

The “should I start a blog” topic popped up on the forum yesterday, and I want to offer my answer to this question once and for all: Yes, of course you should start a blog!

Why wouldn’t you take advantage of this fabulous, free opportunity to not only practice your craft, but also start actively building your readership.

Every writer circa 2009 should have a blog. It’s free and the technology is accessible to all. Don’t worry yourself over things like SEO and RSS or HTML. You don’t need to know any of that to start a blog, although your knowledge of these things will naturally grow as you become more comfortable with blogging.

I’ve written many posts on website building and blogging. I highly recommend starting out with a simple WordPress.com account for the most user-friendly, free service. Then, when you’re ready to expand into a full-fledged multi-page website, it’s easy to transfer those files onto WordPress.org, which is a more flexible and powerful platform.

The most important thing is to start and stick with it. That puts you ahead of the pack in more ways than you realize.

Here, I’ve assembled a number of the posts I’ve written on blogging/website building in one handy post. If you’re just starting a blog, this will be more information than you need, so you may want to skim the information and come back to specific topics when you’re ready. 

Choosing a Domain
Since I’m a writer and no techno-wiz, I’ve just gotten past a steep learning curve to build my website from scratch, and I wanted to share what I learned in a weeklong series here on Editor Unleashed.

I’m going to start from the very beginning, because I wished several weeks ago for one reliable resource to take me through all of the steps in a very basic way. Read more…

Website Software and Hosting
OK, so you’ve got your domain registered and you’re ready for the next big step in building your website. Now it’s time to figure out software options and hook up with a Web Host (aka server).

Read the rest of the post on Editor Unleashed.