Think

Opinion pieces offering commentary on various aspects of book culture, publishing and self-publishing.

Good Is The Enemy of Great- 5 Things Special Forces Taught Me

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This post by Bob Mayer originally appeared on his Write On The River blog on 6/20/15.

I’ve had varied experiences, especially in the military. Cadet at West Point, Infantry platoon leader, recon platoon leader, and then Special Forces A-Team leader and other position in Special Operations over the years. I experienced organizations at various levels, from bad to great.

However, the most dangerous place to be is ‘good’.

What good means is that you and/or your organization is doing well enough to get by. To accomplish the ordinary tasks. But in Special Forces our tasks were often extraordinary. Complacency could have fatal consequences.Voltaire is credited with saying: “Good is enemy of great.”

I’ve found this also to be true in my civilian career as a writer and CEO of Cool Gus. Here are some basic rules I learned in Special Operations and continually apply to avoid settling for good; and you can too:

1. Great is hard work. If it was easy, everyone would be doing it. The one common core I saw in Spec Ops and in successful authors was they work damn hard. I watch people buying lottery tickets and think that’s what many wanna-be’s do with their career and their life. They hope luck will strike them; luck comes to those on top of the hill. Who climbed up there on their own.

 

Read the full post on Write On The River.

 

Understanding the Flashback—Bending Time as a Literary Device

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This post by Kristen Lamb originally appeared on her blog on 6/15/15.

Last time we talked about flashbacks and why they ruin fiction. But, because this is a blog and I don’t want it to be 20,000 words long, I can’t address everything in one post. Today, we’re going to further unpack “the flashback.” I think we tend to use broad literary terms to encompass a lot of things that aren’t precisely the same things, and in doing this, we get confused.

In my POV, the term “flashback” is far too broad.

We can mistakenly believe that any time an author shifts time, that THIS is the dreaded “flashback” I am referring to and the one I (as an editor) will cut.

Not necessarily.

We need to broaden our understanding of the “flashback” because lumping every backwards shift in time under one umbrella won’t work.

My favorite example is the term “antagonist.” I’ve even been to conferences where experts used the terms “antagonist” and “villain” interchangeably as if they were synonyms, which is not the case. A villain is only one type of antagonist. It creates a false syllogism. Yes, all oranges villains are fruits antagonists, but not all fruits antagonists are oranges villains.

 

Read the full post on Kristen Lamb’s blog.

 

How to Write Character Reaction Patterns

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This post by David Wiseheart originally appeared on Character Secrets on 3/20/15.

Writing teachers, story coaches, and screenwriting gurus often say:

“Story comes from character.”

Or:

“Story is character.”

And that’s true.

Unfortunately, these writing teachers rarely go into detail about what that actually means.

Or how it works.

Well, I’m about to show you exactly how it works.

 

Master the Pattern, and You Master the Game

In a story, when a character is confronted with a major stress, they react.

How do they react?

Characters react to major stresses in ways that are both unique and predictable.

There are patterns.

I call them character reaction patterns.

If you know a character’s type, then you can know how they will tend to react to major stresses.

Knowing these patterns can help you to write or re-write your story.

If you’re outlining a plot, you can use these patterns to come up with new scenes. This can be a huge help in plotting your screenplay or novel.

 

Read the full post on Character Secrets.

 

How Indie Authors Can Make Two Categories Count On Amazon

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This post by Cate Baum originally appeared on Self-Publishing Review on 5/20/15.

Amazon made a decision sometime in the last two months or so to cut off new indie books to the five plus two categories allowed to all indie/self-published authors who had both paperback and Kindle formats on Amazon. Why could this decision have been made, and how can authors make the most of the measly two categories now allowed when publishing on Kindle?

Spoiling It For The Rest Of Us

What happened? Maybe the mounting problems for authors who had trad-published, or had genre books in the last couple of years with categories forced a change. Publishing companies and indie authors on imprints and small presses with money riding on book campaigns were being drowned in self-publishers categorizing their books too loosely in ways to get seen – especially in the erotica genre. I talked about this as being a problem I foresaw Amazon reacting to, and was only two pitchforks from being burned at the stake for mentioning anything that could cause a vibration through the “freedom for writers everywhere” faction.

But hey, it happened as predicted, and very quietly, too.

While some authors were releasing up to eight books of erotica at the same time to flood book charts with their ‘brand,’ and categorized them as “Westerns” when their lover boy rode a horse, or “Crime Fiction” when the book featured a gangster type doing the bedding, Amazon was flooded with books that used to stay in their own little (adult) area – it became nigh impossible to even enter the YA Sci-Fi section of Amazon without a bevvy of bare chests and chiffoned thighs gracing the listing pages.

So the greedy few seemed to have spoiled it for the rest of us. Well done, kids!

 

Finding “The Two”

 

Read the full post on Self-Publishing Review.

 

A Golden Era for Young Readers: The Story Behind Little Golden Books

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This post by Rob Lammle originally appeared on Mental Floss on 6/12/15.

There’s a good chance you grew up reading the adventures of The Poky Little Puppy, Tootle, or Scuffy the Tugboat in the pages of Little Golden Books. But how much do you know about the story behind these beloved tales?

Before the introduction of Little Golden Books in 1942, children’s books weren’t necessarily made with children’s interests in mind. They were usually large volumes that were too difficult for young readers to handle or comprehend, and were awfully expensive at $2 to $3 each (that’s about $28 – $42 today). But George Duplaix of the Artist’s and Writer’s Guild, in partnership with Simon & Schuster Publications and Western Printing, wanted to change all that.

Duplaix thought the solution was small, sturdy, inexpensive books with fewer pages, simpler stories, and more illustrations so little kids could actually enjoy them. Western was already publishing a line for kids called Golden Books, so Duplaix and his team piggy-backed on those marketing efforts, calling the new line Little Golden Books.

The first 12 titles were released on October 1, 1942, at a price of only a quarter a piece. They were an instant success. After only five months on the market, 1.5 million copies had been sold and many titles were already in their third printing; by 1945, most were in their seventh printing. One of the keys to their sales success was the fact that they were available in unusual places, such as department stores, drug stores, and supermarkets. Busy parents could keep rambunctious children occupied while they ran errands, and not feel guilty about the additional 25 cents tacked onto their final bills.

 

Read the full post on Mental Floss.

 

“Let's Talk About Genre”: Neil Gaiman And Kazuo Ishiguro In Conversation

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This conversation between Neil Gaiman and Kazuo Ishiguro originally appeared on New Statesman on 6/4/15.

The two literary heavyweights talk about the politics of storytelling, the art of the swordfight and why dragons are good for the economy.

Neil Gaiman’s New York Times review of Kazuo Ishiguro’s latest novel began a debate about the borders between fantasy and literary fiction. For a special issue guest-edited by Neil Gaiman and Amanda Palmer​, the New Statesman brought the pair together to discuss genre snobbery and the evolution of stories.

Neil Gaiman Let’s talk about genre. Why does it matter? Your book The Buried Giant – which was published not as a fantasy novel, although it contains an awful lot of elements that would be familiar to readers of fantasy – seemed to stir people up from both sides of the literary divide. The fantasy people, in the shape of Ursula Le Guin (although she later retracted it) said, “This is fantasy, and your refusal to put on the mantle of fantasy is evidence of an author slumming it.” And then Michiko Kakutani in the New York Times reviewed it with utter bafflement. Meanwhile, readers and a lot of reviewers had no trouble figuring out what kind of book it is and enjoyed it hugely.

Kazuo Ishiguro I felt like I’d stepped into some larger discussion that had been going on for some time. I expected some of my usual readers to say, “What’s this? There are ogres in it . . .” but I didn’t anticipate this bigger debate. Why are people so preoccupied? What is genre in the first place? Who invented it? Why am I perceived to have crossed a kind of boundary?

NG I think if you were a novelist writing in 1920 or 1930, you would simply be perceived as having written another novel. When Dickens published A Christmas Carol nobody went, “Ah, this respectable social novelist has suddenly become a fantasy novelist: look, there are ghosts and magic.”

 

Read the full conversation on New Statesman.

 

Can I (Successfully) Be Sued for My Scathing, Cruel, Factually Misleading (but Very Witty) Review of Your Book?

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This post by Mark Fowler originally appeared on Rights of Writers on 6/19/14.

In a television appearance on the Dick Cavett Show in 1980, the novelist Mary McCarthy was asked which writers she regarded as overrated. McCarthy singled out the playwright and memoirist Lillian Hellman as “a bad writer, a dishonest writer,” and went on to say “every word she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the.'”

As Franklin Foer tells the story, “when Lillian Hellman heard the quip in her bed, she laughed. By the time her assistant arrived for work the next morning, Hellman had called her lawyer, and set in motion a $2.25 million libel suit against McCarthy.”

Did Hellman have a legal leg to stand on? I’ll come back to that question in a minute.

There’s no doubt that a scathing take-down of a book or movie or other work of art can provide a wicked source of pleasure to both the reviewer and her readers. Some deliciously disapproving book reviews may be found in this collection of pans, this one, this one (focusing on harsh assessments of literary classics), and this one (featuring caustic reviews by New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani). At least two books have chronicled the history of bookish slam pieces: The Fine Art of Literary Mayhem and Rotten Reviews Redux. And there is even a Hatchet Job of the Year award for the “best” worst review.

But can a negative review of a book or film or other creative work go too far and give rise to a successful legal claim against the reviewer? The answer: yes, but (thank heavens) rarely. To make sure your reviews don’t plunge you into legal hot water, you should bear in mind the sometimes fuzzy line between constitutionally protected opinion and legally actionable libel.

 

Read the full post on Rights of Writers.

 

How Much Are Words Worth?

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This post by Scott Carney originally appeared on his blog on 4/27/15.

Writers tend to keep their thoughts in the realm of ideas rather than calculate the seemingly mundane matter of the mechanics of the trade. However, a few months ago I sat down in a Chinese restaurant with a friend of mine who writes for the New Yorker and we agreed to leave our narrative musings to the side and think about practicalities. We were going to try to figure out how much the printed word is worth in America today.

We wanted to calculate how many feature stories the top magazines in America assign every year, and how much they typically pay their writers for the assignments. The list was only going to be for the top publications in America–the ones that pay between $1.50-$5 per word and that comprise the top tier of journalism. These are the magazines that line the shelves of airport bookstores everywhere and the ones that we write for pretty regularly. Think The New Yorker, New York Times Magazine, Atlantic, Wired, Men’s Journal, Rolling Stone, Playboy, Vanity Fair, Mother Jones, O, The Atavist, and the dozen or so other magazines that sits on the tops of toilet tanks and the tables of dentist offices from Seattle to Orlando.

It was back of the envelope math at best, but as far as either one of us could determine, it was the first time anyone had tried to figure out how big the pie was for long form freelance writing in America. There are hundreds of amazing writers in the country, delving into stories that drive the national conversation on everything from politics to the cult of celebrity to human rights abuses to cutting edge scientific and technological discoveries. These are the types of pieces that we make a living on, and ones that, frankly, we feel are important to write.

After ten minutes listing the average number of features in each magazine multiplied by the number of issues annually we had a number: 800. On average these stories would run at about 3000 words and pay $1.50 per word. It was only a ball-park estimate of the overall freelance writing market cap. But it was also a rather depressing one. Let me put this in bold so it stands out on the page.

 

Read the full post on Scott Carney’s blog.

 

The 10% Rule – Or How Stephen King Made Me A Better Writer

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This post by Erin Whalen originally appeared on her site on 8/25/15.

When I was a kid, I was a HUGE Stephen King fan.

I read The Shining in grade four. Carrie and Salem’s Lot and The Stand in grade five. Cujo in grade six. (Still can’t bear to think of the ending to that one.)  Different Seasons in grade seven. Christine in grade eight. And so on…

As I grew older and developed an appreciation for books that strove to do something more than scare the pants off people, I left Mr. King’s works behind. But I’ve always had great appreciation for his ability to create compelling characters and spin a yarn that could captivate and terrify me and leave me wanting more.

So when a friend recommended his book On Writing, I decided to check it out.

Turns out Mr. King’s book on the writing process is just as captivating as his novels. He offers fabulous advice and a compelling account of his own experience of becoming a writer and honing his art.

One of the best takeaways I got from his book was “the 10 percent rule.”

It goes like this:

Whenever you finish a piece of writing, check its word count then go back through it and ruthlessly remove at least 10% of the words.

So if it’s a 750-word article, delete 75 words. If it’s a 500-word article, take out 50 words, etc.

 

3 Tips on How to Shrink Your Word Count

As you implement the 10% rule, you’ll become aware of words in your writing that don’t add essential meaning to what you’re trying to say.

Here are 3 specific examples to look for:

 

Read the full post on Erin Whalen’s site.

 

The Mystery Writer's Toolbox

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This post by by Shannon Roberts & Renni Browne originally appeared on The Editorial Department on 4/21/15.

A look at what’s inside and its relevance to all genres

Questions. Motives. Clues. Red herrings. Villains. Suspense.

All of these are elements in any good mystery. And all of them should be elements in your novel—whether it be science fiction, literary fiction, family or historical drama, horror, romance, or something else entirely.

Any good story is driven by QUESTIONS, the most important being: What do the protagonists want? Why can’t they have it? Then there’s the villain—what drives your antagonist? If there’s a MacGuffin, who will find it—and how? Why did the brother do that? What is the secretary hiding? And so on.

This gets us to MOTIVE. It isn’t just for cops and crooks—it’s for every character in every story. All of your characters have (or should have) interesting motivation for what they do, and often those motives are mysterious to the reader. Wanting to figure them out or understand them is part of what keeps us reading, so you want to keep at least some of your characters’ motives hidden. Your protagonist, of course, needs to be highly motivated—and being a hero or a heroine is not a motive.

Protagonists should have a personal stake in events of the story—they or someone close to them is in danger or vanishes, something of great value to them has been lost or stolen, a horrific secret needs to be uncovered or kept secret. Such stakes most often show up in mysteries, but the principle is just as important for fiction in other genres. Make the stakes high and personal for your main character.

On to CLUES—how they work and why you need them.

 

Read the full post on The Mystery Writer’s Toolbox.

 

In a Rush to Publish? Better Ways to Shave Off Time

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This post by Elizabeth Spann Craig originally appeared on her site on 6/5/15.

There has been a good deal written about the need for self-publishing authors not to be in a rush to publish. And yet, there has been a good deal written about the need for self-publishing authors to quickly produce for financial success.

These bits of advice aren’t really as contradictory as they seem. The time to move things along, I believe, is when we’re writing. The time to be thoughtful and unhurried is during the packaging process…the editing and cover design. The finishing touches need time.

What can we do to make our writing go faster? Here are some things that have helped me:

 

On a daily basis:

Know what you’re going to write that day (at least the plot points).

Think about where you left off and what you’re going to say next before you open the laptop (I mull things over in the mornings as I let the dog out and as I’m making myself coffee.

 

Read the full post on Elizabeth Spann Craig’s site.

 

A Study of Reading Habits in the Age of Aquarius, or, The Novel as Time Machine

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This post by Greg Olear originally appeared on The Weeklings on 3/4/15.

i.

IN MARCH OF 2011, I was on a panel with three other novelists at the Quais du Polar literary festival in Lyon, France. We were there, if memory serves, to talk about strong female protagonists in crime fiction, but the discussion wound up encompassing much more than that. At one point, we were asked about the utility of the novel. In a century of smart phones and dumb tweets, with attention spans shorter than ever, what possible purpose could such an analog medium serve?

I had no ready answer for such an existential question. Fortunately, the French novelist Sylvie Granotier was prepared. It is exactly the analog nature of the form that makes the novel so necessary, she said. In a world of ADHD, she explained—in English as fluent as my French was not—the novel, alone among the art forms, demanded more, not less, attention from its readers. Only the novel could combat the erosion of our collective ability to focus. And it did this by insisting that its readers move at the deliberate pace set by the novelist.

“The power of the novel,” she said, “lies in its ability to stop time.”

 

ii.

In his column in The Believer some years ago, Nick Hornby wrote in praise of the short novel—the work of fiction that, as he put it, if you start reading when the plane taxis along the runway at LAX, you will be just wrapping up as the wheels hit the tarmac at JFK. His novels all meet this criteria. So do mine. Indeed, the lion’s share of fiction churned out by the big publishing houses seems to be written with the sole purpose of amusing the bored business traveler.

 

Read the full post on The Weeklings.

 

Soliloquy on Book Prices (or How I Learned To Love eBooks)

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This post by Greta van der Rol originally appeared on her site on 5/17/15.

You know how sometimes things you’ve been reading/talking about kind of merge? That happened to me this morning. Somewhere I read about author earnings and the cost of books. Somewhere else I wrote an article about the power of the franchise in writing and that led me to the Thrawn trilogy and mention of a book where Grand Admiral Thrawn is an important, though rarely visible, character and that led me to dig out that very same book. Troy Denning’s Tatooine Ghost, to see if I still thought it was as good as I remembered.

I’ve also been re-reading one of my favourite books, McDevitt’s Slow Lightning. It’s face down on the desk beside me as I write. And the sticker with the price is waving at me.

I bought the book (a 5×8 paperback) in about 2003. It cost AU$19.95 from Readers Feast in Melbourne. Same for Tatooine Ghost.

Wow, I thought, glancing along a row of paperbacks on a shelf (just one row). There’s over $400 worth of books there. At least, that’s what I paid for them. They’re worth squat now. And as for that glass—fronted cabinet behind me, the one full of hardbacks… Then I thought some more and wondered if these prices were from before the Big Row about book prices. I don’t recall the details, but it was all about the excessive cost of books in Australia. So I thought I’d check the current price of some of those books.

 

Read the full post on Greta van der Rol’s site.

 

5 Ways to Get Early Feedback on Your Book Idea or Manuscript

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This post by Nina Amir originally appeared on The Book Designer on 5/27/15.

Gathering reader feedback on your manuscript before you to print might be the most valuable step you can take toward producing a successful book. You can obtain this information in a variety of ways depending upon how you choose to write your manuscript.

In fact, you can even get early feedback before you write your book. This type of test marketing can save you a lot of time and energy spent producing a manuscript that might never sell.

The goal of getting early reader feedback on your book idea or manuscript is simple: Incorporate the valid suggestions you receive to help you craft the best possible book.

The following five strategies provide you with the means to get beta readers or reviewers for your ideas and your work. Each has a different set of benefits, and each is useful at a different stage. Choose one that suits your style, your point in the book-production process and the work at hand.

 

1. Blog Your Book

The main benefit of blogging a book, purposefully writing your book post by post on your site, comes from the author platform you build by doing so. As you produce the first draft of your book on the Internet, you gain loyal blog readers and subscribers. They are your potential book readers or buyers even though they have already “bought into” reading the first draft of your book—your blogged book.

 

Read the full post on The Book Designer.

 

Thoughts On The Unreliable Narrator

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This post by Susan Crawford originally appeared as a guest post on Writer’s Digest on 5/15/15.

Dana is the main character in my book, The Pocket Wife. She is bipolar and off her medication; she’s also going through lots of “stuff,” and this toxic mixture is beginning to bring on a manic episode. In Chapter One, Dana is poised for flight. Still, she is quite lucid. In fact, except for a few oddities–reading a novel in two hours, feeling the “offness” of things in the air– she is a fairly normal housewife, bored, missing her son who has recently left for college, and annoyed with her workaholic husband.

Many stories told from the unreliable narrator’s point of view are written in first person. The Pocket Wife is told in third person, so Dana isn’t speaking directly to the reader. Nonetheless, we are often in her head and privy to her thoughts and conversations.

I think it’s important not to open a story or novel with the unreliable narrator already obviously a bit wonky because then the reader is less apt to really invest in him, or, for the sake of simplicity and because Dana is a woman, in her. If she’s too bizarre right off the bat, we’re far less likely to relate to her, and relating to a character, at least for me, is necessary if I’m going to climb inside her life for the next 300 or so pages. For me, this has very little to do with age or race or gender. E.T. was one of the most popular movies of all time. Its main protagonist, for whom the film was named, is a very short, mud-colored alien. But we can relate to him!

 

Read the full post on Writer’s Digest.