In case you haven’t seen it: Kindle author.
Filed under Money issues for writers, Self-publishing
I’ve been away for a few days, and if you’ve been watching the weather reports, you know what I spent much of the day before yesterday dealing with–yes, it’s a four-letter word beginning with “S.”
I’ve also been dealing with an eight-letter word beginning with “S”: “Synopsis.” I’ve never met a writer yet who liked dealing with synopses. I’ve always believed I couldn’t write them–just didn’t get it. I’d tell what I thought was the story I’d told, only to have readers respond, “I’m totally confused.”
I faced the need to confront the demon synopsis because I’m trying to get my out-of-print suspense novels up as e-books, and I need covers. I had some ideas of my own, but my excellent and candid volunteer critics (or should I say “impressed” critics in the sense that sailors off merchant ships were once impressed into the British navy) generally agreed that I should solicit ideas from actual designers. At my university, we have students who do superb work. But could I ask students to read two fairly hefty novels between class assignments? Uh, no, not if I want to get the books up any time soon. Hence, synopses.
My first efforts were on a par with my earlier efforts. A masochistic colleague whose opinion I value actually volunteered to read the books and write the things for me. I spared him: read two hefty books between grading assignments in four (yes, four!) writing classes?!!! So he read the synopses I produced. I reproduce here the bare bones of this experience, because it was a eureka experience. For the first time, I was like, “Oh!” It’s what can happen when you have a truly good reader who is willing to tell you the truth and you are ready to listen–a crucial component, but I was desperate. They always want a synopsis. Who wants two pages to be the death of a three-hundred-page gem?
Here is the heart of what my colleague Tom O’Neal wrote for me:
I’ve just been reading Becky Lerner’s The Forest for the Trees: An Editor’s Advice to Writers. At least in the first few chapters, Lerner, a poet-turned-editor-turned-agent (and I gather still all of these things), offers advice at one end of a continuum I’ve noticed. Hers is what I would call a “soft” book for writers: strong on inspiration, on the emotional landscape of writing, on how you’ll know if you’re really meant to write and how to persevere through the cold winter of a writer’s disenchantment. At the other end of the continuum: books like Michael Larson’s book on non-fiction proposals, which I downloaded for help writing my proposal for Survive College Writing (a future bestseller currently interred in a massive data dump of all the things I want to say to the students I saw struggle so hard). Larson is in the “how-to” school; this is what you do and this is what it should look like, down to how long paragraphs should be. Quit yer belly-achin’ and just get going. What’s so damn hard?
In the middle I’d place Susan Rabiner’s Thinking Like Your Editor: How to Write Great Serious Nonfiction and Get It Published. This claims to be a how-to, but there’s a good amount of inspiration here–for example, she maintains that if you’re passionate about your topic, your heart will beat through your prose. But there’s also some of that hard-headed get-on-with=it spirit: All the passion in the world won’t help if you don’t do these X or Y Most Important Things.
Reading Lerner, I find myself thinking about the many conferences I’ve attended over the years. Lerner tells ms, forget about writing the next X or Y; forget about “Marley and Me meets ET.” Write what you’re obsessive about, what haunts you. Write the book that’s your book. Thus far, the implication is that if anything is going to sell and hit, that’s the book that will.
The real question is, where’s that line between “what we’ve seen before” and “we don’t know what the heck it is”? Lerner will presumably tell me if I’ve just gone too far, according to one of the Amazon reviews. I will await the event.
If I were in the inspiration queue–I’m not exactly; I know I’ll always write–I would find some solace in sentences like these from Lerner:
“It takes a certain kind of person to understand and cope with rejection as an appraisal instead of a judgment.” (See this post for another take on criticism of our work.)
“[T]he degree of one’s perseverance is the best predictor of success.”
I value information about what’s not working more than ever, and God knows, I persevere.
I’ve revised to add some new more information about Gail Strickland’s book, Night of Pan. Check out her site. I hope she will visit soon for a blog interview about bringing her book to publication.
I promised to report on the fates of my colleagues at the conference I attended a few years ago.
I obviously don’t know all their stories. Emails began to circulate, friendly requests for updates. Not everyone responded. I did not.
Now that I’m contemplating creating (from scratch) a “platform” for the non-fiction book I’m working on (tentatively titled Survive College Writing: What No One Will Tell You about Your First-Year Writing Class), I realize that not becoming part of that somewhat nostalgic network was a missed opportunity. At the time, it seemed clear to me that my job had hustled any real involvement in my personal projects right off the stage. So I withdrew, sat silent, packed away the emotional energy I wanted to invest in writing in hopes it would ferment in its dark corner. I think it has. I get up ready to write every day.
So with regard to the fate of my colleagues at the conference, all I have to go on is that flurry of emails. About ten people took part.
Of those few, up to the last email I received, only one had found a commercial publisher for the book she pitched at the conference. Gail Strickland found a small press (Curiosity Quills Press) that publishes the kind of book she has written and offers her the kind of support she hoped for. Her book, a YA historical fantasy titled Night of Pan can be pre-ordered through her Web site. I’m hoping Gail will give a blog interview about her experiences taking her book through from idea to promotion; if so, I’ll post the date.
The most impressive of the several self-publishing stories is that of one of the attendees who perfected his pitch (not about zombies) and scored a review from Publishers Weekly Select. John J. Kelley’s The Fallen Snow is worth a look–and I especially admire the attention his hard work at promotion has garnered. He’s gotten wonderful reviews! With his permission, I’ve posted his very informative account of the PW Select process here.
Another attendee ended up self-publishing a cookbook based on her expertise at gardening and raising bees. At last account she was still at work on her fiction.
John found the conference helpful in expanding his options for his work. I am still thinking about what I learned, including what I knew before and how the conference changed what I thought I knew. Even so much later (nearly three years), I still have much to process. I think that will take another post.
My abortive meeting with my assigned editor took place on the penultimate afternoon of the conference. The next morning we were to finish up in a group summary meeting with Our Leader.
For some reason I can’t recall, I was eager to meet with him one more time. I made my way to the conference site before daylight in order to be at the front of the line. Along with a woman with whom I had been friendly, I managed to get a slot at the table as we ate breakfast in a crowded coffee shop. What in the world did I want from him at that point? To salvage something from the ruins of my experience (“Is it time travel? Reincarnation? Oh, wait, he must be already dead!”)? To pitch my other book? Who knows.
I do remember that he rewrote my friend’s pitch, ad hoc, in one breath, and that, were I a fan of such topics, I would have found his version immeasurably better. She still had her meeting ahead of her. So she faced the day armed with his words.
I remember as well talking about my other book, my “Sarah” book. He began excitedly weaving a resolution to the deep personal crisis Sarah faces, one that in my formulation would carry her through three books, each with its own sub-crisis and plot. I said, “That sounds like something to consider for the third book.”
“Oh, no,” he responded. “That’s the first book!”
I have already written the first book. I said, “I write my own books, thanks.”
I don’t recall that he took offense at this. Perhaps he secretly did.
Our final meeting consisted of congratulations for all those (most) who had been invited to submit manuscripts to major New York houses. This fortunate group included my friend, who was now supposed to write the book she had been given. I think he generously pretended that I had been given permission to send along my Sarah book. Then he said something I didn’t expect.
“I worry,” he said, “that you’ll all send in your stuff before it’s ready. Don’t do that. Make sure it’s ready.”
My perhaps ungenerous translation: “My business is running these workshops. I have to be able to say that publications come out of them. Most of you have no manuscripts, just ideas. Most of you have never produced anything like a book-length manuscript. You don’t actually know what you’re getting into. Please, some of you, take the time to write something that won’t waste these editors’ time.”
I find myself thinking about several things, remembering this comment. We were apparently selected to attend, to have the chance to meet with REAL EDITORS, on the basis of a one-page synopsis and a bio. Such application materials gave us the chance to make a preliminary pitch and gave the conference planners a chance to verify that we could actually construct reasonable English prose. But I wonder: is that enough? Are you really ready to write a book if you can sell an idea?
I have learned enough about my writing process to know, that for me, the answer is an emphatic NO. For me, there is nothing so demoralizing as knowing that the book isn’t working but that I must deliver. Write a draft. Share the draft with a conscientious critique group. Yes, it takes more time, with no more guarantees of eventual attention from an agent or publisher than if I had simply mailed off the first chapter and a treatment. But it makes the process rewarding. I can write a book that has a chance of working. Not being a genius, and not having a formula, for me, that is feat enough.
A good writing group keeps you honest. Good readers remind you that you can’t fall back on your genius. I guess if I were a genius, I wouldn’t need readers. From my keyboard to the mind of God.
No, a good group reminds you that you have to work at this stuff. It’s like riding my horse. I keep slipping back into old habits (right knee locking into the saddle, heel slipping up; taking back without realizing it in front of fences). My trainer’s “You’re doing it again” is the only way to create new mind/body memories and make them stick. Little by little I think they do.
So I go to my writing group with major revisions of The Drowned Man (the ms. I took to the conference I’ve been writing about—I’ll get back to that shortly). I decided that one tack would be to veer more toward the “literary.” Now, one thing I’ve learned is that I fall just a few pixels short of literary most of the time. But genre clearly doesn’t cut it. The answer to the “But what is it?” question confounds editors and agents every time. (Well, yes, it’s a sort of mystery, but no, it doesn’t have a knitting shop in it. Not that kind of mystery. Well, not that kind either. Darn.)
Anyway, I thought that even if I didn’t slip across the literary line, I could at least bump up the suspense with some piquant foreshadowing if I changed the point-of-view character. The POV character now telling the story knows what happened in the end, so he can drop some titillating portents here and there. I like the way this works. Problem: as my group told me, I liked his voice a little too much.
They said:
Get rid of the floating talking head. Move the action up front. (Remember, writing fiction depends on the ability to write scenes, not exposition, no matter how piquant.
Did I know this? Yes. Did I do it? Now I am.
Don’t dump a lot of names on us all at once. Get your readers invested in one or two main characters right away. Bring the others on stage when you can give them the stage time they need.
Did I know this? Yes. Did I do it? Now, yes.
Locate your opening scenes in place and time. Let your readers walk into a landscape or a room and meet a flesh-and-blood being (even if he does have to be a vampire). There’s a fine line between being mysterious for the sake of suspense (“I’m confident that that question is going to get answered”) and for the sake of being mysterious (“Who the hell is this person I’m having to listen to? Is there a reason I’m here getting vertigo in this mind fog? Help!”)
Did I know this? See above.
Let readers know early whose story it is. Okay, in someone else’s story told by a narrator (Nick Carraway, for example), readers may have to figure this out. But they should figure it out, IMHO, as they interpret the relationship between the narrator and the other characters. Who embarks on the major trajectory may change with events (and it can even be the reader, IMveryHO). And it quite often is the apparently peripheral character whose trajectory is the most interesting. But starting out in a text, you haven’t won the willingness of readers to do that kind of interpretative work. They want to get started on a road, in somebody’s tracks, before the feral pigs start jumping out of the woods at them (I ended up taking the feral pigs out of my book: see “Deleted Scenes”).
Did I know this? Ditto.
Give readers a sense of something at stake. Okay, they may not get to know right away just how much is at stake. But they need to know somebody’s in trouble, and why. I may still need to work on this. Bellweather knows Michael’s in trouble from Page One and why. He’s telling readers so. But readers have to get a sense of this by themselves. I hope when I take my revisions to readers who weren’t there last time that I get a sense of whether I’ve met this mandate.
Did I know this? Well, yes, but it’s the hardest, least concrete of missions. What makes readers care? Well, someone in trouble. Yes. I want to think about that in tomorrow’s revisions. How do readers know Michael’s in trouble?
You really have to work at this stuff.
Apropos of my narrative about being categorized with the vampires and aliens at the most recent conference I went to, here’s a piece from today’s New Republic online newsletter in which a writer of memoirs, Stephen Akey, laments the apparent impossibility of selling anything that by comparison must be considered bletheringly unmarketable. What most resonates for me in this piece is what he tells us about “platform”: agents, gatekeepers to publication, asking “What type of platform do you have for speaking about the issues in your book?” “What is your access to the media or to major experts in your field?”
Because my current project is nonfiction, I’m particularly sensitive to the purported need for a “platform.” I’m fortunate in that I do have access to some “experts” in my field (and at times have passed for one myself), but I’ve been asked the same question about works of fiction. Yes, I’m sure it would be easier to sell a novel by Regis Philbin than one by one of us unknowns, at least (possibly, since Mr. Philbin might well be a stellar wordsmith) until it gets read.
But I’m not a carpenter by birth or trade, and labor as I will to build something akin to a sound platform, I’m imagining ending up with something more akin to a three-legged seesaw. I’m reminded of an admonition I found somewhere–wish I could tell you where: “Less tweeting, more writing.” Yet, I am rather enjoying picking up my HTML book and envisioning the Web site on which I will advertise and sell my otherwise doomed works of fiction. It will be vibrant, informative, interactive, irresistible. If only I could figure out how to add a background layer to my new logo in GIMP. . . .
Stop reading blogs and get back to work, you.
Last night, at a reception for a retiring art professor at my university, another member of the fine arts faculty asked me how my retirement was going. I was extremely busy, I told her, with the writing projects I had been putting off for so many years.
“That’s good,” she said. “I worry about my own retirement. Whenever I’ve had a sabbatical, I get kind of crazy. It’s just me and the blank canvas, alone in the studio, day after day after day.”
I ungenerously said that I didn’t have that problem because of my work strategy. And, indeed, it’s one that has stood me in good stead in many a situation when the blank page could have been an intimidating desert. Sadly, I could not make it work while I was teaching. Every morning of my professional life during the semesters, I had to get cracking on those papers, because if I hadn’t set upon them first, they would have slavered over me all day, fouling the emotional energy I needed for any other task. Summers, after a good whole-body shake, I could get back on schedule—for about ten weeks, enough sometimes to get an academic article out, but not enough for the deep-gut work of a novel. I know many people find the resolve to both teach and write creatively, but my resolve foundered on all those stacks of student words.
I want to write one day soon about reading and responding to student writing, which I consider one of the most important and necessary tasks any person of reasonable intelligence and goodwill can undertake. But anyway: Here are my strategies, for what they’re worth:
I never say, “Today, I have to write a whole chapter,” anymore than I ever said, “Today I have to write a whole article.” (Wish I could have convinced my students of this very simple rule.) Nothing makes a writing project more frightening that when it stretches across a whole day (and night!) and can’t be abandoned until it’s done. Now, I could actually handle this kind of mandate during my abortive foray into romance writing, but in that case, you have your outline, you know how long each chapter needs to be, you’re not hoping for any happy surprises. Totally different head.
Instead, I use one of two strategies.
Set a timer. While that timer’s running, you do nothing but sit in front of the computer and type words on your chosen task. It doesn’t matter how many you type (or handwrite, as I often do). It doesn’t matter how good they are, or whether they’ll even end up in the finished product. It doesn’t matter how much you slow down to self-edit or how much you kick infelicities aside for a more focused assault later. It only matters that they pile up for that particular task. You can’t feed the dogs or take out the compost. Every time you find yourself saying, “I’ll just. . . .”: No. Start short, say thirty minutes. Surprise, surprise, if you don’t have another task on your agenda, the next thing you know, the timer will go off and you’ll ignore it. There’ll be sentences lined up waiting to be written. You’ll write three times what you planned.
The other option is similar, and I’ve used it effectively many times. Say to yourself, “All I have to do is fill up this page.”
A variation on these options is the “45-15” rule I recently read about in my email newsletter from Freelancers Union*: Forty-five minutes on task, then fifteen to feed the dogs, clean up the breakfast dishes, write that thank-you note or check your bank balance. Then another forty-five on task, fifteen off. I never make it work out quite this cleanly—I tend to keep writing too long and impinge on the fifteen. But I like knowing I can get the banal necessities done AND keep writing.
Finally, unless you’re on a hot streak, STOP at a reasonable time. Your brain needs, demands, incubation time. Do something completely different, AFTER your writing quota is done. These days I generally go ride my horse. But I remember that I wrote well when I was a waitperson in the evenings. As anyone who ever waited tables can tell you, in any moderately busy establishment, from the moment the first table fills until you pull your tips out of your pocket hours later, you think of nothing but getting out the drinks and food. You get up the next morning and find out that things have happened in your brain while you were not there.
Everybody, of course, has his or her own strategies and methods. If you’re on deadline, never mind. But the next time I’m on deadline, if ever, I want to be well past the “creation” stage when that page can be so blindingly empty.
Excuse me. My timer went off ten minutes ago.
*If you’re not familiar with Freelancers Union (www.freelancersunion.org), get familiar with it. Invaluable resource.
. . . . generally, ironically, came from those family members and friends we should ideally avoid.
But they are the ones who will actually read your stuff.
Now if I can just make use of these treasures—and get more.
Filed under Learning to write, Myths and Truths for writers
Paddy and his mom!
Just Can't Help Writing 