Think

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

Make The Music You Make

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This post by John Vorhaus originally appeared on Writer Unboxed on 3/27/14.

I’m addressing the kids today, and if you’re not one, but know someone who is, won’t you please pass this along? (If you find it worthy, I mean.) I’m hoping to help your young peers understand what to expect as they walk the writer’s road.

I was a pack rat of words long before computers came along. I filled journal after journal with tiny, tense, Bic-penned attempts to master the mere act of putting words on the page. What I wrote was so stupid! So self-absorbed and questiony. Why am I here? What is my purpose? What do I have to do to get laid? I hated almost everything I wrote almost as soon as I wrote it. I didn’t know the first thing about story, and that’s what galled me most of all. My writing went nowhere, and I knew it. But I didn’t stop for the same reason you don’t stop; for the same reason junkies don’t stop. We’ve chosen our art, or it’s chosen us, and now we have to deal.

So I kept filling the pages of the horrible journals (filling, primarily, unlined black hardbound books that, because I am a pack rat of words, rest in the eaves of my very garage even as we speak). I discovered my first rule of writing: Write what you can write, or, more broadly, make the art you can make. And don’t lament the art that lies presently beyond your grasp. Presently that will change.

I had to write the horrible journals to write myself out of the horrible journals.

I had to start somewhere.

 

Click here to read the full post on Writer Unboxed.

 

Go Midwest, Young Writer: Why the Middle of the Country (Not Brooklyn) Is the Future of American Literature

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This post by Jason Diamond originally appeared on Flavorwire on 3/24/14.

For those who only look at the bigger picture, yes, New York is the publishing epicenter of the country, and a lot of people who write do live in Brooklyn. As someone who writes for a living and calls Brooklyn home, I can totally back up everything you’ve heard about thriving independent bookstores, nightly literary events, and writers crowding every coffee shop. Going out means routinely bumping into editors, agents, publicists, and other people who help get new books out into the world, and that gives you every reason to think that New York City is the only place to be if you’re a writer.

But it isn’t, and I don’t necessarily think there is one specific place that is responsible for creating literary culture, just as I don’t think there’s one where you should go to be a writer. Yet a closer look at the literary map of the 50 states reveals that even if the publishing industry writ large is situated in New York and Los Angeles, some of the most exciting things going on in American literature are taking place in the middle of the country.

“I have spent my whole life watching people leave,” writes David Giffels in his collection of essays, The Hard Way on Purpose. “This is a defining characteristic of the generation of postindustrial Midwesterners who have stayed in their hometowns.”

 

Click here to read the full post on Flavorwire.

 

How To Tell A Great Story, Visualized

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This post by Kate Torgovnick May originally appeared on the TED blog on 11/8/13.

A good story can make a campfire that much eerier. A good story can flip a conversation at a party from completely awkward to wonderful. A good story can glue your nose to a book. And, on screen, a good story can rivet generation after generation.

So, uh, how do you tell one?

Andrew Stanton, the Pixar writer and director behind both Toy Story and WALL-E, has many ideas, and he shared his expertise in his TED Talk, The clues to a great story. Below, see his golden rules of storytelling visualized by Karin Hueck and Rafael Quick of the Brazilian culture and science magazine Superinteressante. Each month, the magazine’s editors take a TED Talk and give it to their graphic wizards to interpret in any way they see fit. Here, a reimagining of Stanton’s talk on stories. Via the Ugly Duckling. Just click the image to see a larger version.

 

Click here to see the accompanying infographic on the TED blog.

 

Declarations and Forecasts of Great Change in the Book Business Need Specificity to be Useful and Often Do Not Provide It

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This post by Mike Shatzkin originally appeared on his The Shatzkin Files blog on 3/4/14.

A recent post here that incited a long comment string and another on FutureBook that was quite unrelated from the estimable Brian O’Leary have helped me formulate some thinking which I hope can be helpful in evaluating any “Great Change” post that arises about publishing. And they do, indeed, arise often.

O’Leary’s post builds on a theme he is persistent about pursuing, which is that communication, which in his writing seems to conflate with publishing, is moving to a linked-and-continuous conversation rather than a set-content-package (like a book or a magazine). The post suggests that the “books”, such as they are, will emerge from the conversations.

This recalls for me a comment I heard a few years ago from the father of digital publishing, David Worlock. David told me, “surely, in time, the number of books created within the network must exceed the number of books created outside the network”. By “network”, David meant “Internet”.

I don’t know how long “in time” was intended to be in David’s mind, but I figured “decades”. And in that time frame, I agree.

The other long-ago wisdom I keep recalling as I read predictions about our digital reading future is what was always said by Mark Bide when we began our “Publishing in the 21st Century” conferences for VISTA (now Publishing Technology) in the 1990s. Mark always reminded the audience that “book publishing is many different businesses” so that everybody would keep in mind that what we said about trade might not apply to sci-tech and what we said about books for lawyers and accountants doesn’t apply to publishers of college textbooks. What brought everybody together was the form of the “book”, which was already then a weak unifying principle for what were really many very different businesses.

 

Click here to read the full post on The Shatzkin Files.

 

Conferences and Conventions – What's A Writer To Do?

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This post by Gayle Carline originally appeared on her blog on 3/14/14.

I’m going to Left Coast Crime next week. Their website defines it as “an annual mystery convention sponsored by mystery fans for mystery fans. It is held during the first quarter of the calendar year in Western North America, as defined by the Mountain Time Zone and all time zones westward to Hawaii.”

Notice anything missing in the title or definition? Writers. Authors. This is not a convention for writers. And yet, it is. It is a place for authors and their readers to meet and mingle.

Writers conferences are for writers, period. They are for anyone who is even thinking they might want to write. You-The-Writer are there to learn something about writing, selling your writing, or marketing your writing. You will most likely meet people who talk and think a lot like you. They will be your tribe members and you will be able to discuss your writing with them because they get it. They get you.

At a convention, You-The-Writer are there to meet readers. There aren’t a lot of writing workshops. There are few, if any, panels discussing the business aspects of being an author. It’s all geared toward giving fans a behind-the-scenes look at your novels. You will meet mystery lovers who want to read more mysteries, like yours. With any luck, they will become your fans and you will be able to share your stories with them because they enjoy mysteries.

 

Click here to read the full post on Gayle Carline’s site.

 

On Mental Illness, Dishonesty, & Swearing

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This post by Jamie DeBree originally appeared on her The Variety Pages site on 3/24/14.

Just another manic Monday, right? It’s snowing. Again. And that’s all I’ll say about that.

There’s a link floating around (I may have shared it, can’t remember) drawing similarities between successful writers and the mentally ill. A little while earlier, there was this article on how creativity and dishonesty often go hand in hand. And of course there’s the meme that occasionally goes around FB about how people who use cuss words tend to be perceived as being more trustworthy/honest.

Ironically, all of these are somewhat depressing for me, but not in the way you might think. You see, I’m not mentally ill. Sure, I have a rather rich fantasy life that translates into stories which I then feel the need to write down and share, but while I may occasionally feel “down”, I’m not clinically depressed, and while I may talk to myself occasionally and have a “thing” about cupboard doors/drawers being left open, I’m not crazy. I don’t neglect my husband, I keep my obsessive-compulsive tendencies in check for the most part, and I live a fairly balanced life.

Strike one.

 

Click here to read the full post on Jamie DeBree’s Variety Pages.

 

I Didn't Get The Job, So I Wrote A Book

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This post by Caleb Pirtle III originally appeared on Venture Galleries on 3/16/14.

There was only one job I ever wanted.

I didn’t get it.

I tried more than once.

Everyone smiled and said thank you for applying and we’re glad you would like to work for us, but, no, we don’t need you.

The newspaper, it seemed, could do quite well without me.

I knew from the time I realized the difference between a subject and a predicate that I wanted to be a writer.

Growing up on an East Texas farm, I read everything I could get my hands on and I got my hands on everything I could find that had a front cover, back cover, and a bunch of words stuck in between.

I spent so much time crawling through the book shelves at the Kilgore Public Library that I became part of the furniture, and one day, I looked up from the printed page of another Hardy Boy Mystery and had two thoughts that would forever change my life.

Reading stories is good.

Writing stories is better.

 

Click here to read the full post on Venture Galleries.

 

Why Teens Love Dystopias

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This article by Dana Stevens originally appeared on Slate on 3/21/14.

It’s not a mystery why so many young-adult best-sellers (and the lucrative movie franchises based on them) would take place in post-apocalyptic societies governed by remote authoritarian entities and rigidly divided into warring factions. The word dystopia comes from a Greek root that roughly translates as “bad place,” and what place could be worse than high school? Adolescence is not for the faint of heart. The to-do list for the decade between ages 10 and 20 includes separating from your parents, finding your place among your peers at school, beginning to make decisions about your own future, and—oh yes—figuring out how to relate to the world, and yourself, as a suddenly and mystifyingly sexual being.

The strong link between YA and dystopia is no trendy post–Hunger Games phenomenon. Grim allegorical tales about dysfunctional futuristic societies have been staples in popular books for young people at least since Lois Lowry’s The Giver series in the early ’90s (a film adaptation of the first volume is set to come out this summer), if not as far back as William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, published in 1954. But since the massive success of Suzanne Collins’ trilogy about a bleak futuristic society that pits teenagers against one another in a televised gladiatorial fight to the death, young readers—along with the many not-so-young readers who are now consuming YA lit in mass quantities—can’t seem to get enough of projecting themselves into the future. And that’s despite the fact that the future, as presented both in the real-life media and in the entertainment we consume, looks to be fairly awful: a bare-knuckles struggle for survival in the ruins of a civilization laid waste by war and/or environmental disaster.

 

Click here to read the full article on Slate.

Related, also from Slate: Everyone Knows Where They Belong – The Choosing Ceremony, the Sorting Hat, the Reaping: YA and the quest to know who you are

 

The Self-Publishing Debate: A Social Scientist Separates Fact from Fiction (Part 2 of 3)

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This post by Dana Beth Weinberg originally appeared on Digital Book World on 12/4/13. Click here to begin with Part 1 in the same series, by the same author, also on Digital Book World (post will open in a new window or tab).

In the writers’ groups I attend, self-publishing is a touchy issue. I know a number of writers who served their time in the trenches, writing and submitting and rewriting and resubmitting their work over and over again to agents and publishers before that one magical “yes.” It’s not unusual to meet a writer who tried to get published for ten years or more before winning a publishing contract. These writers have overcome significant odds, and they are rightly proud of their achievements. In the same group, there are a number of writers who haven’t yet broken into traditional publishing or haven’t even tried but who have decided to self-publish. Some don’t have the war stories and battle scars from trying to break in, while others do. Despite not having the traditional publisher’s stamp of approval, all of them are also proud of their achievements and expect equal consideration as published authors. It might be easy for the traditionally published authors to maintain their sense of superiority over self-published authors (and, thus, their sense of comfort that they had done the right thing all those years that they waited and tried) were it not also for the token members of the group who have self-published and made a lot of money at it.

Is self-publishing an amateurish endeavor, a means of sharing stories, a strategic move in a writing career, or an entrepreneurial activity? In Part 1 of this blog, I examined the top priorities of the nearly 5,000 authors who responded to the 2013 Digital Book World and Writer’s Digest Author Survey in relation to whether and how they have published their work. Now I turn my attention to the differences in writing productivity for the four different types of authors identified in the survey: aspiring authors, self-published authors, traditionally published authors, and hybrid authors with a combination of self-published and traditionally published works.

The necessary ingredient to success in a writing career is actually writing. So how do our various types of authors stack up in terms of manuscripts completed, whether published or unpublished?

 

Click here to read the full post on Digital Book World.

Click here to read part 3 in the same series, by the same author, also on Digital Book World. (post will open in a new window or tab).

 

Are You Publishable or Not? Reading the Tea Leaves.

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This post by Dave King originally appeared on Writer Unboxed on 3/18/14. Since it’s addressed primarily to those seeking mainstream, traditional publication it may not seem like a fit for Publetariat, but now that many are making the wise decision to adopt a hybrid publication model, it will likely be of interest to many Publetariat readers.

Writing never feels more lonely than after you’ve sent your manuscript out to every agent and publisher you can think of and gotten nowhere. Of course, you can always take comfort in the long list of massively successful books that were initially rejected by nearly everyone who saw them. But for every brilliant book that gets rejected out of blindness or stupidity, there are thousands that get rejected because they’re just not very good. How can you tell which camp you fall into?

The quality of your rejections are a good sign. Granted, form rejections don’t tell you much, but if all of your rejections are form letters, it’s probably time to either start a major rewrite or put this manuscript in a drawer and start the next one. (If your manuscript is getting repeatedly turned down on the query alone, you might want to take a second look at your query letter.) If you’re getting glowing rejections (“I love the book, but it’s not right for our list.”) then you’re probably doing something right and should keep sending the manuscript out — though you might want to refine your agent search to make it more likely it will hit the right desk. And it’s still a good sign even if you’re getting, “I love the book, but . . . “ If a publishing professional has taken time to give you free advice, then your manuscript is probably worth the effort.

 

Click here to read the full post on Writer Unboxed.

 

'True Detective' Creator Nic Pizzolatto Looks Back On Season 1

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This interview by Alan Sepinwall originally appeared on HitFix on 3/10/14. It’s being shared here because True Detective has deep literary roots that extend all the way back to The King in Yellow (public domain work, free in Kindle format on Amazon), a dark and somewhat mysterious story written by Robert W. Chambers and first published in 1895. That story has gone on to become a major influence on such celebrated authors as Lovecraft and Gaiman, and of course, on True Detective series creator and writer Nic Pizzolatto.

 

Earlier tonight, “True Detective” concluded its first season — and, with it, the stories of Rust Cohle and Marty Hart. I reviewed the finale here, and as a bookend to a conversation we had before the season started, I spoke with the show’s creator, Nic Pizzolatto, about the finale and the season as a whole (along with a vague but intriguing hint about season 2, which hasn’t been officially ordered yet, but only because I suspect HBO is waiting until they’ve signed the actors they want before announcing). That’s coming up just as soon as I strike you as more of a talker than a doer…

The structure of the series means you could have done anything with the ending, up to and including killing the two leads, because you get a clean slate with the next season. Why did you choose this particular way to end the story?

Nic Pizzolatto:
This is a story that began with its ending in mind, that Cohle would be articulating, without sentimentality or illusion, an actual kind of optimism. That line, you ask me, the light’s winning, that was one of the key pieces of dialogue that existed at the very beginning of the series’ conception. For me as a storyteller, I want to follow the characters and the story through what they organically demand. And it would have been the easiest thing in the world to kill one or both of these guys. I even had an idea where something more mysterious happened to them, where they vanished into the unknown and Gilbough and Papania had to clean up the mess and nobody knows what happens to them. Or it could have gone full blown supernatural. But I think both of those things would have been easy, and they would have denied the sort of realist questions the show had been asking all along. To retreat to the supernatural, or to take the easy dramatic route of killing a character in order to achieve an emotional response from the audience, I thought would have been a disservice to the story. What was more interesting to me is that both these men are left in a place of deliverance, a place where even Cohle might be able to acknowledge the possibility of grace in the world. Because one way both men were alike in their failures was that neither man could admit the possibility of grace. I don’t mean that in a religious sense. Where we leave Cohle, this man hasn’t made a 180 change or anything like that. He’s moved maybe 5 degrees on the meter, but the optimistic metaphor he makes at the end, it’s not sentimental; it’s purely based on physics. Considering what these characters had been through, it seemed hard to me to work out a way where they both live and they both exit the show to live better lives beyond the boundaries of these eight episodes. Now they are going to go on and live forever beyond the margins of the show, and our sense, at least, is they haven’t changed in any black to white way, but there is a sense that they have been delivered from the heart of darkness. They did not avert their eyes, whatever their failings as men. And that when they exit, they are in a different place.

 

Click here to read the full interview on HitFix.

 

Parsing Is Such Sweet Sorrow

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This article by Emma Pierson originally appeared on Five Thirty Eight on 3/17/14.

More than 400 years after Shakespeare wrote it, we can now say that “Romeo and Juliet” has the wrong name. Perhaps the play should be called “Juliet and Her Nurse,” which isn’t nearly as sexy, or “Romeo and Benvolio,” which has a whole different connotation.

I discovered this by writing a computer program to count how many lines each pair of characters in “Romeo and Juliet” spoke to each other,1 with the expectation that the lovers in the greatest love story of all time would speak more than any other pair. I wanted Romeo and Juliet to end up together — if they couldn’t in the play, at least they could in my analysis — but the math paid no heed to my desires. Juliet speaks more to her nurse than she does to Romeo; Romeo speaks more to Benvolio than he does to Juliet. Romeo gets a larger share of attention from his friends (Benvolio and Mercutio) and even his enemies (Tybalt) than he does from Juliet; Juliet gets a larger share of attention from her nurse and her mother than she does from Romeo. The two appear together in only five scenes out of 25. We all knew that this wasn’t a play predicated on deep interactions between the two protagonists, but still.

 

Click here to read the full article on Five Thirty Eight.

 

Lush Rot

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This article by Lincoln Michel originally appeared on Guernica on 3/17/14.

Flannery O’Connor, True Detective, Southern hip-hop, and the gnarled roots of Southern Gothic.

I don’t remember drinking sweet tea as a child, and no one in my family wore seersucker. But I do remember the kudzu. There wasn’t as much of “the vine that ate the South” in Virginia as there was in the Deep South, but there was a growth of it hidden in the woods that stretched between two branches of our neighborhood. My friends and I would play back there, launching smoke bombs from beneath the cover of giant leaves. It had already overtaken a football field length of land, descending down from a green tumor of a hill. Each year, it grew a little more, eating into the neighbors’ backyards.

The South is in a perpetual state of crumbling, at least in its own mythology. The paint is peeling off the walls. The yard is littered with trash. General Sherman burned the countryside to the ground. The plantation houses have been chewed apart by termites. Everything is collapsing and being overtaken by vines. In Absalom, Absalom!, Faulkner describes the Deep South as “dead since 1865 and peopled with garrulous outraged baffled ghosts.” Of course, most of us can only play the most microscopic of violins for the collapse of an economy dependent on slavery, brutality, and dehumanization.

It’s comforting for Americans to see bigotry in art and entertainment confined to one ever-shrinking area. It allows us to admit our sins while simultaneously distancing ourselves from them.

This sense of rot and ruin is somehow fertile, like compost. The same region has given us everything from deep soul and bluegrass to southern hip-hop and sludge metal. Southern literature is also vast, yet perhaps best associated with Southern Gothic—a style of American literature that presents the South as land of freaks, violence, and the grotesque. This is the tradition that gave us such titans as William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, Truman Capote, Carson McCullers, and Cormac McCarthy.

 

Click here to read the full article on Guernica.

 

How To Write A Book Review For Amazon.com

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This post by Kristen J. Tsetsi originally appeared on her site on 3/12/14.

The integrity of The Book Review has been demolished by too many reviewers who use the book review space as a personal venting venue, whether it’s to beat an author with one-star reviews because s/he said something in public that annoyed people, or to slap an author with a once-star review because the F word appeared on too many pages.

Unfortunately, there’s really no way to stop the bad-review assaults written by people with personal vendettas, but it is possible to improve the quality of book reviews – making them truly helpful to other potential readers – by answering a short, simple set of questions while writing the review.

First, some examples of what not to do. Consider the following reviews pulled directly from Amazon:

“Don’t waste your money. Justin Bieber needs a more supportive family not so self absorbed, he seems like a nice person to bad he does not have a solid support system.” – One-star review of Nowhere but Up: The Story of Justin Bieber’s Mom

“She is putting her story out there and being vulnerable to the people who love her and follow her that is a very personable thing to do . I love her more for it” – Five-star review of Nowhere but Up: The Story of Justin Bieber’s Mom

I have no idea whether I want to read Pattie Mallette’s book based on these reviews. What I do know is that one person feels bad for Justin Bieber and his apparently lacking support system, and another really likes Justin Bieber’s mom. These are valid emotions, but they’re not book reviews. Neither does anything to help a person make a purchasing decision.

 

Click here to read the full post on Kristen J. Tsetsi’s site.

 

Clean Up Your Blog – A to Z Preparation

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This post by Donna B. McNicol originally appeared on her Writing My Life site on 2/17/14.

Updated repeat from a 2012 blog post:

I’m fine tuning my blog in preparation for the, hopefully, gazillion visitors I’ll have during the month of April. Okay, so maybe not a gazillion, but a lot more than normal. I just read and implemented some of the tips on Sommer Leigh’s blog post, Sommer’s Top Ten Tips for A-to-Zing it in April.

There was one tip that REALLY caught my attention since I recently vented about it: Blogger and Word Verification [rant] If you want people to comment, you really need to make it easy for them to do so. Check your blog to be sure, and while there check to be sure you allow anonymous commenters as well (as mentioned by Sommer).

One missing tip that helps keep your blog looking professional as well as identification once loaded. It’s time to add a favicon to your blog. For years professionals have used favicons to identify their websites. For those with blogs hosted on their own domains, it’s an easy enough process to create the .ico file and upload it to the home directory. I use the freeware program IrfanView to create .ico files from images. You can easily crop, resize and ‘Save As’ with this program (and much more).

But for those of us using Blogger, we were left out in the cold. Not any more! If you look at your browser tab, you will see the icon with my face (from my blog header). I use that for my blog as well as my website, DonnaMcNicol.com.

 

Click here to read the full article on Donna B. McNicol’s Writing My Life.