What If You Could Not Fail

Rules for Giving

Welcome to my blog.  Follow up as I talk about my adventures in writing.  Right now I am working on editing the draft for my novel--Rules for Giving:

RULES FOR GIVING is the story of happily married Gavin Oliver, celebrating his first day of business ownership by sneaking in an early morning golf game when he encounters Rose, the daughter of an old girlfriend. Her world has caved in—a philandering fiancé, a vengeful date rapist, and a recent abortion—and she asks Gavin for help. 

At the thought of again seeing the first woman he ever loved, Gavin consents. He has other problems, though. A former partner at the advertising agency he now owns is plotting against him, promising to take the firm’s cash cow client. Gavin also discovers Rose’s real goal: unraveling her mother’s demons—the same demons that haunt him.

In one week, from one Friday golf game to another, Gavin uncovers crimes, secrets and betrayals that threaten his business, his marriage and his life. 

The personalities in RULES FOR GIVING include the mercurial Rose, searching for the secret her mother is trying so hard to conceal. There’s Marjorie, the indomitable retired high school counselor who advocates castration for date rapists. Finally, meet Leona Kunckles, a 6-foot-2-inch lipstick lesbian, an Army Special Forces veteran and 5th degree black belt turned private detective, known affectionately as “Leo the Knuckle.”

I'm Back with a Cover for My Novel

I have been away from this blog for a while. Work, life and other concerns. I return, however, with bad news that is really good news. The bad news: after contacting scores of agents, and a few publishers, I have been unable to get the literary community to recognize the genius of my novel, Rules for Giving. Yes, there were a few nibbles, but nothing ever got serious.  The good news: this past June, at the urging of my wife, I decided to self-publish through Amazon’s CreateSpace. Since then I have gone through an interesting experience, which I will relate in the next few posts.

One of the first things I did after signing up with CreateSpace was contemplate the cover concept. The cover almost always the first thing people see about your book, so it has to be eye-catching, and it has to tell a story.

Resist the temptation to make the cover complicated. Stick to a central idea, and keep it simple. Also think about marketing, since most first-time authors, whether you self-publish, or go through a publisher, will find themselves responsible for marketing. Strive for a cover design that will lend itself to some good marketing vehicles. How does the cover look when it is shrunk down to the size of a postage stamp for your Facebook profile photo? How does it look when you blow it up large enough for a backdrop for a book signing or literary fair? Back when I wrote for the car magazines, it was widely acknowledged that a red car on the cover of a magazine sold more copies. Color matters. All these things matter. 

CreateSpace offers cover design services, but the CreateSpace covers I’ve seen were not electrifying. Even though I was going to have to pay CreateSpace for the cover work, I popped for a graphic designer I have worked with in the past in my marketing business. Before contacting her, though, I sat down with my wife and discussed cover concepts. We ran them by the graphic designer, who came up with a concept. I uploaded it to CreateSpace.

Here is where the surprise came. CreateSpace took the design and made it better. Not only did I like their changes, but the graphic designer liked it, too. When a graphic designer likes someone else’s changes to their work, that is the ultimate sign of approval.  

As you can see from the proof, CreateSpace took the tree that was part of the cover design and wrapped it around the spine of the book. A nice touch. They changed the original design color to orange, reflecting the heat wave in the novel.

It was a good start to my publishing experience. A great cover to match a great story.  

See ya’ later.

William Goldman

"The easiest thing to do on earth is not write."

"One way an author dies a little each day is when his books go out of print."

"Life is pain, highness. Anyone who tells you differently is selling something."

"As far as the filmmaking process is concerned, stars are essentially worthless - and absolutely essential."

 

Tom Clancy

Traditionally I try to limit the quotes from a writer to four, but it turns out that Tom Clancy had a lot to say about writing, some of it pretty good stuff. Read on:

The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense.

 The only way to do all the things you’d like to do is to read.

You learn to write the same way you learn to play golf. You do it, and keep doing it until you get it right. A lot of people think something mystical happens to you, that maybe the muse kisses you on the ear. But writing isn’t divinely inspired—it’s hard work.

Two questions form the foundation of all novels: “What if?” and “What next?” (A third question, “What now?”, is one the author asks himself every 10 minutes or so; but it’s more a cry than a question.)

I’ve made up stuff that’s turned out to be real, that’s the spooky part.

Success is a finished book, a stack of pages each of which is filled with words. If you reach that point, you have won a victory over yourself no less impressive than sailing single-handed around the world.

What happened to me was pure dumb luck – I’m not the new Hemingway. Of course, fortune does favor the brave. In battle, you forgive a man anything except an unwillingness to take risks. Sometimes you have to put it on the line. What I did was take time away from how I earned my living. My wife gave me hell – ‘Why are you doing this?’ – but she doesn’t complain anymore. I wanted to see my name on the cover of a book. If your name is in the Library of Congress, you’re immortal.

Books and movies are different art forms with different rules. And because of that, they never translate exactly.

All Writers Know a Strict Teacher They Can Thank

An article in last Saturday’s Wall Street Journal talks about the value of tough teachers, those teachers—we’ve all had them—who expect the best and have little patience for anything else. Those of us of a certain age remember teachers who inspired us and made of work and learn. Many of their methods would not be allowed in the classroom today.

More interesting, though, was that the author of the article, writer Joann Lipman, suggested eight principals—she called them a manifesto—for education. I was surprised how much these observations can also be applied to successful writers:

A little pain is good for you—Like good education, in which you study till it hurts, good writing is not a painless process. Hemingway said it best: “There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”

Drill, baby, drill—I took a writing class in college in which the professor opened every class with five minutes of silent writing. Didn’t matter what we wrote about. We seldom shared it. What was important was that we wrote. It was something to warm us up. The same goes for flash fiction, working on grammar, or anything else. The good writers have drilled in the basics. They paid attention in school. They understand the value of taking some time and going through a few exercises to help develop characters and plot before you dive right in.

Failure is not an option—We all know writers who send out to a few agents or publishers, get a rejection or two, and then fold up and walk away. You don’t see them at the critique groups anymore and they don’t share their writing. The successful writers are the ones who don’t give up. They query agents, they write and rewrite, and then they query again. These are the writers who get published. A friend of mine who has been published in many literary journals tells about how he wrote and rewrote a short story for a year. It got published last month.

Strict is better than nice—This goes back to my observation, one I have often repeated when talking about critique groups. You should avoid those groups that serve as little more than mutual admiration societies. You need critique groups that will kick your ass, haul you over the coals, and hold you to a higher standard.

Creativity can be learned—The more I write, the more I see stories in situations that I might have once overlooked. There are stories all over. Just a few weeks ago I saw a middle-aged woman—probably in her sixties—with an incredible set of legs. From the waist down she looked like a teenager. I can’t get it out of my head. There is a story there someplace. If I was not actively writing, I don’t think I would have seen her in the same way. This happens to me all the time. I know I learned it.

Grit trumps talent—The writing version of this is that the best writers are not always the ones who get published. The ones who do get published are those with the most persistence, who can hear the word “no” from agents and publishers and still persist. Winston Churchill said it best” “Never give in. Never give in. Never, never, never, never.” 

Praise Makes You Weak—This can be a problem with critique groups. In an effort not to offend you, members tell you that your writing is great when it’s really not. Most of the time the new members will listen to more seasoned writers and gradually come to appreciate what good writing is. Occasionally this does not happen. Sometimes critique groups have to be more direct, and you as a writer have to be prepared to take it. Writing is hard, or else everyone would do it.

Stress Makes You Strong—Screenwriter William Goldman once talked about the plight of the writer on the movie set. “Electricians know about electricity,” he said. “Lighting folks know about lighting. Make-up people know about make-up. No one ever bothers these people. But everyone thinks they can write.” Listening to criticism is stressful, and sometimes can be annoying. It makes you work harder, though, if for no other reason than to prove those people wrong who say, “Oh, so you write. What a nice little hobby.”

See ya’ later.

WhatIfYouCouldNotFail.com by Tim Sunderland is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

It's Pucker Time!!

I’ve been a bit of a wreck for the last week or so.

In June I met an agent at the Santa Barbara Writers Conference who, through the advance submission process, read the first five pages of my manuscript Rules for Giving. There is a bit of a story behind this (click here), but this past weekend I took him up on his advice and sent my manuscript and a check for $1,500 off to a freelance editor for a review and assessment.

This was a hard concession for me. I’ve spoken to other writers who have paid good money to get their manuscript edited, and I think the qualifications of the editors were dubious at best.

When a literary agent reads a sample of your manuscript, however, indicates an interest, and urges you to get it professionally edited, you start looking at it differently.

So how did I choose an editor? The research process was not that hard. I asked around and found that this agent has worked with an editor in the past. I called her and hashed out the details. Her resume was impressive, and I double checked with the agent, who agreed with my choice.  After going through my novel one last time and then scratching the $1,500 out of my budget (a few other expenses took precedence—summer vacation with the family, car repairs, etc.) I was ready to send the novel off to the editor.

I wasn’t prepared for the stress that came with this, however. For the last week I have been looking at my boxed manuscript and my check for $1,500 and obsessing. I was short-tempered, pre-occupied, and a general asshole to my wife.  

I’ve had others read my novel—members of my critique group, friends, a few selected readers who I thought would give me honest feedback—but this is someone I do not know, they have a lot of experience at this, and I am paying to tell me what is wrong with this manuscript. I expect to get the manuscript back with substantial markups and pages of notes and observations (okay, I have a fantasy that she might send it back with a few typos corrected and little else but accolades for the brilliance of my prose, but that is fantasy).

The input from this editor matters—all the more because in my discussions with her as we arrived at an arrangement, she agreed that once the manuscript was where we wanted it, she would talk to the agent on my behalf.

This past weekend I went down to the UPS Service Center and shipped off the package. The editing process will take two or three weeks (which means four to five). From there I am expecting a few weeks to a few months of rewriting, and then with any luck it is off to the agent.

I’ll keep you informed.

See ya’ later.

WhatIfYouCouldNotFail.com by Tim Sunderland is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

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The T-Shirt Philosophy of Writing

As I have mentioned previously in this blog, I am outlining my next novel—the Orange and the Black. Good thing that I am. I have changed the opening scene three times.

I have come to appreciate the value of outlining. It allows me to go back--and in a sentence or two--weave in a new plotline, add or delete characters, or expand upon themes. If I were writing this novel without an outline I would have already gone back more times than I can count to write in additional characters and ideas.

A writer friend of mine—working on her first novel—told me that she was able to start only after, “I gave myself permission to write a shitty first draft.”

With any luck, I might get away with only writing a shitty outline.

I’ve written in these pages before about the value of getting something down on paper. I came across it in article in The New Yorker by John McPhee. When you have a draft, or even an outline,

… your mind is knitting at the words. You think of a better way to say something, a good phrase to correct a certain problem. Without the drafted version—if it did not exist—you obviously would not be thinking of things that would improve it. In short, you may actually be writing two or three hours a day, but your mind, one way or another, is working on it twenty-four hours a day—yes, while you sleep—but only if some sort of draft or earlier version already exists. Until it exists, writing has not really begun.

Even an outline serves this purpose. It allows you to formulate and solidify ideas—and then your subconscious takes over.

See ya’ later.

WhatIfYouCouldNotFail.com by Tim Sunderland is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

David Sedaris

“If you read someone else's diary, you get what you deserve.” 

“A good [short story] would take me out of myself and then stuff me back in, outsized, now, and uneasy with the fit.” 

 “At the end of a miserable day, instead of grieving my virtual nothing, I can always look at my loaded wastepaper basket and tell myself that if I failed, at least I took a few trees down with me.” 

“Writing gives you the illusion of control, and then you realize it's just an illusion, that people are going to bring their own stuff into it.” 

“When forced to leave my house for an extended period of time, I take my typewriter with me, and together we endure the wretchedness of passing through the X-ray scanner. The laptops roll merrily down the belt, while I’m instructed to stand aside and open my bag. To me it seems like a normal enough thing to be carrying, but the typewriter’s declining popularity arouses suspicion and I wind up eliciting the sort of reaction one might expect when traveling with a cannon.

It’s a typewriter,’ I say. ‘You use it to write angry letters to airport security.” 

Reading Scripts for Dialog Tips

At the recent UCLA Writers Faire I came across a tip for getting a better handle on dialog in your writing.

Read the scripts from recent movies.

It makes sense. Scripts are all dialog. The first three Bourne movies—The Borne Identity, the Bourne Supremacy, and The Bourne Ultimatum--were suggested as excellent scripts to read (by the way, the movies are all about forgiveness, in case you were wondering).

These movies are based on the Robert Ludlum novels. Resist the temptation to read the novels. The writing is not that good, and having seen the movies, you will expect lightning fast pacing. Instead, things move slowly.

There is a good website to find scripts--http://www.simplyscripts.com. Keep in mind that the script you download may be different than what comes out in the final movie. Nevertheless, they are still a great tool.

See ya’ later.

WhatIfYouCouldNotFail.com by Tim Sunderland is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Elmore Leonard's Ten Rules of Writing

1. Never open a book with weather.
2. Avoid prologues.
3. Never use a verb other than "said" to carry dialogue.
4. Never use an adverb to modify the verb "said”…he admonished gravely.
5. Keep your exclamation points under control. You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose. 
6. Never use the words "suddenly" or "all hell broke loose."
7. Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly.
8. Avoid detailed descriptions of characters.
9. Don't go into great detail describing places and things.
10. Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.

My most important rule is one that sums up the 10.

If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.”