What If You Could Not Fail

All It takes is a Period

It is all over the web and newspapers today (check out this article in the Wall Street Journal) --whether or not the Obama campaign should have included a period on their campaign slogan.

We're talking about one word here, folks--FORWARD. The campaign used with a period, as opposed to FORWARD (that was really hard to write without a period). Of course, it is a political campaign, so everyone is trying to read into the period. What does it mean, or more importantly, what could it be interpreted to mean?

Does the period serve to stop what could have been a forward motion? Will people think that period means the campaign is stalled? Will they think it is just a short, declarative sentence--FORWARD. Coming from a marketing background, I can assure you that I have spent many hours sitting in meetings arguing over thinks just as small as whether or not to add a period.

What I find interesting is that the campaign did not test the slogan out with a focus group. After all, folks, we are talking about a campaign for the presidency of the United States.

I should not point fingers, though. I cannot tell you how many times If have labored over whether to use one word or another in a story. I'll change it, then go back and change it again, and then get up in the middle of the night and write down an entirely different word.

It could have been worse. They could have used an exclamation point.

Marilyn Monroe Also Stuttered

Thanks to fellow critique group member Rich Luftig who pointed out that Marilyn Monroe was also a stutterer (see yesterday's post). According to Rich, stuttering is very rare in a woman, and in Some Like it Hot it took her 46 takes to say the line, "It's me, Surgar." According to her own statement, Marilyn began stuttering when she was in an orhanage and later had problems with it in high school. Check out this interview of her on YouTube. 

A Hidden Secret--The Poetry of Marilyn Monroe

Take time to check out this post from brainpickings.org about the poetry of Marilyn Monroe.

What a tortured soul. It has become common knowledge that she was not the dumb blond bimbo so often depicted in her movies. Now two editors have reviewed her papers and found smatterings of poetry that the former Norma Jean Mortenson scratched out, often times on hotel stationary. Interesting enough, she understood the importance of editing in a poem, as illustrated by her cross-outs. There was substance and intelligence there.

To say nothing of having read Ulysses. That’s going to be my vacation book next year

Marilyn Monroe spent her entire life trying to get past a brutal childhood, the demons of chemical dependency, and her inability to make relationships work. Now we get a look at her poetry, which gives even more insight into how deeply she felt and the depths of her despair.

We also see the incredible courage she had inside of her. It takes incredible courage to write down your innermost thoughts, only surpassed by the courage it takes to share them with others.

Would she have done that? We will never now. 

 

Not Everyone Reads your Novel, Even When They Ask for It

Before I went on vacation I gave my novel to five people for feedback. They include my son the English
teacher, several members of my critique group, a wife of one member, and a neighbor.

Here is the secret to giving your novel out to others for review before publication: don’t expect everyone to read it, even if they asked for it.

This is probably not news to everyone, but it was for me the first time.

The reality is that not everyone is a reader. I know, that is hard to fathom, but not everyone wants to spend every waking moment reading all the books on all the lists of must-read books, let alone your novel. As for your writing associates, they have a lot of reading they want to do otherwise. I do not read every novel or book I am asked to read. There is not enough time. When I do commit, however, I do my best to fulfill the promise. Two of the five people the received my book have previously asked me to read their novels.

I know that two people are reading it. They have communicated to me that they are enjoying it. As for the rest, I’m content to wait until they volunteer the feedback. The last thing I want is for someone to rush through the novel and give me only superficial input.

My next step is to market this to an agent. We are getting down to the serious stuff. Any advice is welcome. 

Readers (and Critics) Will Forgive Much if the Book is a Good Read

One of my vacation books was The Warmth of Other Suns, a chronicle of the Great Migration when six million African-Americans left the South beginning about 1915 and continuing until 1975.

This was a captivating story of downtrodden people who left the culture of Jim Crow for jobs and opportunity in the northern cities—Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, Detroit and Cleveland, to name a few. Others came to California.

Wilkerson chose to tell the story through three different individuals who went to separate destinations, had varying levels of education and different family situations. She talked about the bitterness some had for the South, and how others were able to let it go. She interspersed it with general stories of the Southern and Northern states during these times, and how this Great Migration impacted the United States, and in some ways led to the election of Barrack Obama.

One of my favorite vignettes was the story of a family named Owens who left Alabama in 1920, headed for Cleveland. They were so convinced that Cleveland was the place to go that their son was named for the town—James Cleveland Owens. The first day in school on Cleveland, James told the teacher to call him by his initials—J.C. The teacher misunderstood his southern accent, instead calling him Jesse. From that day forward the man who went on to win four gold medals in the 1936 Olympics, and enraged Hitler, would be known as Jesse Owens.

If Jesse Owens’ parents not been part of The Great Migration, would he have accomplished those things? Not likely.

Scholars have long hypothesized that the Great Migration was the result of the onset of mechanical cotton pickers and the boll weevil, both eliminating many jobs in the South, and the onset of two world wars that reduced European migration to a trickle in the north, thus creating a labor shortage. Wilkerson, who interviewed 1,200 people over fifteen years, adds her own opinion: that many of the migrants were fleeing the brutality of the former Confederacy, where lynchings were a fact of life and Jim Crow laws and sharecropping were but slavery by another name. Wilkerson has some critics, but I think she makes a good argument.

The Warmth of Other Suns is a narrative of many things the ordinary white American knows little about—the brutality of The South, misconceptions about the migrants, and how this movement of people affected history.

The frustrating part of this book, however, was Wilkerson’s repetitiveness. There were numerous instances where she told the same story over and over, highlighted details repeatedly, or told the same statistics in a slightly different way.

Wilkerson is a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, but at times it was as if the book was a series of separate newspaper articles that were compiled into a single volume and the author did not bother to go back and eliminate information that was duplicated.

The book was published by Random House. Where were the editors? If so many readers caught these flaws, surely they would have.

I checked the reviews on Amazon and found many other readers were bothered by these flaws, too. Some readers even gave the book five stars on Amazon, but still complained about reading the same information more than once. The book even won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Non-Fiction.

The message: readers and critics are willing to forgive much for a compelling story, and this one is.  The Warmth of Other Suns is a compelling story. It has flaws, but I still recommend it for a good read.   

 

Using Technology to Help You Write.

 Used with permission from Debbie Ridpath Ohi at Inkygirl.com.

They Always Want to Blame the Parents

We came home from vacation in Yosemite and Pismo Beach, exhausted but relaxed. One measure of our vacations is whether we are able to stay out of the emergency room. We succeeded on this trip, although we flirted with it a few times. A friend of mine, the mother of two sons, claims she is on a first-name basis with every national park medical clinic west of the Rockies.

I can relate.

Now the serious stuff. There is a book on my reading list, We Need to Talk About Kevin, about a mother coming to terms with her teenage son, who has committed a Columbine High-type massacre. The movie adaptation comes out in general release in November, and I want to read the book before I see it.

In light of what happened last week in Aurora, Colorado, however, I have bumped the book up, scheduling it as my next read.  

Like everyone else, I was horrified to hear about the theatre shootings. We were in a remote campground, so the internet service on our cell phones was spotty. When I was able to get on line, the second or third thing I read was how the media had already identified the parents of the suspect and were camped out at their San Diego residence.

There it is. It must be the fault of the parents. What did they do to create such a monster?

Mrs. WhatIfYouCouldNotFail.com and I share a couch full of kids. They are all over the spectrum—overachievers, underachievers, and every point in between. We marvel at how we could have raised so many kids and they are so different. The truth, I have concluded, is similar to the philosophy a boss of mine once had: Kids are like wildflowers--you throw the seeds out there, water them, and hope for the best.  

Mental disease is a tough subject. We all know someone who struggles. How do we make the decision that they are a danger to themselves or others? The suspect in this case was away from family and friends. He dropped out of school. He had few friends. He could easily have had a psychotic break with reality and gone unnoticed.  

As parents we do the best we can. Do we make mistakes? Yes. Kids do not come with operating instructions.  There are also so many other factors, biological and environmental, that affect people. There is evidence that mental illness and addiction is genetic, but quite often it is a crapshoot. It rears its ugly head when you least expect it.

I don’t know the answer to what happened in Aurora. It leaves me speechless. I do know, from having been a parent myself, that children have their own minds and their own perceptions, and in the end there is very little you can do but “throw the seeds out there, water them, and hope for the best.” 

Ten Days of Greatest Hits

Hello. I am on a ten-day vacation in Yosemite National Park and then Pismo Beach. As hard as it is to believe, there will be times when I will not have an internet connection. In the meantime, please enjoy one of my favorite posts from this last year. The first one comes in about half-an-hour.

 

What Does the Higgs Boson Have to Do with Literature?

Much has been made as of late of the Higgs boson, or the God particle (BTW, the s in boson is pronounced as a z--bozun).

First of all, what is it? I am going to explain it as a lay person who barely knows what he is talking about. The Higg boson is the particle, or the energy, that gives mass to matter.  Take a chunk of steel. There is a lot of Higgs boson going on there. Go to the beach and pick up a hand full of sand. Not a lot of Higgs boson going on there. Now think of the stuff that falls between—Jello, cotton balls, marshmallows. Differing levels of Higgs boson.

Most of us have to take the word of physicists that the Higgs boson exists, because all of this is going on at the subatomic level.

Interesting enough, the existence of the Higgs boson particle was hypothesized in 1964 by Peter Higgs—thus the Higgs boson, but its existence was only confirmed in the last few weeks.

So how does this relate to us as writers? In 1972 Romain Gary, a French diplomat (he was born in Lithuania), novelist and director, published The Gasp. The novel is the story of an element of energy called the gasp. The gasp, it turns out, is the life force of an individual. Scientists figure out how to capture the gasp as it leaves the body when a person dies. It is used to power everything from cigarette lighters to cars and, of course, destructive weapons.

I read The Gasp not long after it was published in the U.S. Thanks to my misspent youth, a lot of brain cells have expired since then and I don’t remember much of the plot. I do recall, however, that it was a good novel.

Romain Gary died in 1980, but as I read about the discovery of the Higgs boson, I can’t help but wonder if Gary was influenced by Peter Higgs' theory when he wrote The Gasp.

That’s one of the good parts of being a writer. We can envision things that exist only in theory and armed with that vision we can write an entire book about it.

See ya’ later.   

 

What's the Deal on Social Media?

WhatIfYouCouldNotFail.com has been up for just over a year now. The first five or six months of this
blog I didn’t do a lot to promote it. A post or two every week and some links on Facebook. Nothing to light the world on fire.

Then I got more serious about social media and hooked into LinkedIn. Hits to the blog started going bonkers. I was soon averaging 30 and 40 hits a day. Just recently I did something (no quite sure what) and the hits spiked again. My average for the last few weeks has been closer to 50 hits a day and in the last week along I have had four days of 70 hits for better. Yesterday alone was 98 hits.

I realize there are other writing blogs out there getting tons more traffic, but for just a year, I’m happy. Besides, during this time I have also been running a business, finishing a novel and being a husband and father.

I freely confess I have yet to publish a novel (hoping to correct that soon). So why all the social media? Why am I not finishing my novel?

First of all, I can do two things at once, and making daily entries to a blog is also a good way to get in some writing exercise.

But more importantly, social media is now a part of the new fabric of publishing. Whether you are self-publishing your writing, or you still have ties and aspirations to traditional publishing, you are be expected to promote yourself.

Lynn Price over at the Behler Blog talked about the importance of social media in a recent post. She said it better than I:  “Having an online presence is two-fold; not only are you meeting new people who have the same interests as you, but it’s the main chance for your readers to learn more about you. Now, that may squick you out because you’re a private person, but many readers who love a book have a natural curiosity about the author. A blog, FB, or Twitter account satisfies a reader’s author fix.”

Just as important is the realization that social media has a cumulative effort. It takes time to build up a following. Again, I refer to Lynn Price: “You don’t sign up with FB, Twitter, or start a blog and expect instant attention. It takes time…LOTS of time to gain a readership. If you aren’t established now, then the social media promotion doesn’t flip up my Vickie Secrets.”

In that vein, I want to pass on some Twitter advice from the Arts & Books section of the Los Angeles Time. Click here.

See ya’ later.