What If You Could Not Fail

Er, um, Do You Want to Buy Something? Maybe?

It is said that most people would rather go to the dentist than speak in public. A close second on that is the prospect of selling something. Asking someone to buy a product or service and being told no. That is too much for some people, even in the most controlled of situations.

This confuses me when we are speaking of writers. Being a writer, especially of fiction and even more so of poetry, is a courageous thing to do. You are opening your heart, baring your innermost feelings and perceptions, and then asking someone else to read it, invest their time in it, and to pass judgment on it. (You might not be asking them to pass judgment on it, but they will. Trust me.)

The best writer in my critique group is the worst salesperson. Why is this?

A recent piece in the entitled Can Entrepreneurs be Made?, in Harvard Business Review has some answers to this riddle. The title says entrepreneurs, but whenever you read that word in the article, change it to writers who sell themselves.

There are many parallels. The writer, Anthony K. Tjan, co-authored a book entitled Heart, Smarts, Guts and Luck. These are the traits they cite as important to successful entrepreneurs.

Luck. Tjan has an interesting approach here. He points out that “you can cultivate Luck by being open and humble, by having the right attitude and approach toward relationships and by building Lucky Networks.” That is another way of saying luck favors the prepared mind.

Smarts are something we as writers hone through education and experience, and lots of rewrites.

Heart is something all serious writers have. The heart to wake up at 4:00 every morning to write for a few hours before the rest of the family stirs and you have to go off to the day job. The heart to write and rewrite and then rewrite again. The heart to edit and hone and question every word until your prose is perfect.

Which leaves guts. We already know that as writers we have guts, but when it comes to promoting ourselves, it takes a different kind of guts. As Tjan puts it, “guts are about having the courage to initiate, endure and evolve around an idea.” That’s something we do all the time with our writing. Now we just have to do it when it comes to selling our writing.

Read the article. It’s worth your time, and whenever it says entrepreneur, change it to writer.

See ya’ later.

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A Partnership with the Reader

What you do not say is as important as what you do say—a piece of writing advice every writer has heard at one time or another.

Mrs. WhatIfYouCouldNotFail.com and I have a yardstick by which we measure movies. We know a movie was worth our time and money if it is the topic of conversation at breakfast the next morning. The more we talk about it, better the movie was.

Tender Mercies, a 1983 film starring Robert DuVall and Tess Harper is a good example of this, and also of the piece of writing advice that heads up this post. In case you have not seen it, Duvall plays Max Sledge, a has-been-now-gone-to-drink country western singer who makes a comeback, not so much in his career (although there is a little of that) as in his life. Duvall won the Oscar as Best Actor and Horton Foot won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay (two decades earlier Foote won for Best Adapted Screenplay for To Kill a Mockingbird).

Tender Mercies was a great example of how some of the most important parts of the movie—were not in the movie. You see little of the developing love story between Duvall and Tess Harper’s characters. One day he asks her to marry him and the audience is not surprised. There is no wedding, either. There is a scene in which the marriage is mentioned and that is it. Between a great script and great editing, though, your mind is able to fill in the gaps. This leaves more time for other, more important parts of the story.

There was a blog post this morning on QueryTracker.net by Jane Lebak that talks about what you don’t say.  Lebak’s post deals more with overtelling a story with the use of adjective and adverbs—he screamed angrily or his loud and boisterous voice. Lebak makes the point that your dialog and expository passages, as well as the plot, should make this obvious. I agree. There is no need for the adjectives and adverbs.

The best part of Lebak’s piece, though, is when she quotes fellow writer Ivy Reisner, who said “ … partner with your reader. Give two parts and let the reader fill in the third.”

This is where the conversation over breakfast table comes into play. For a reader it might not be the breakfast table, but maybe your book club, reading reviews, or just cogitating about it while you pound out an extra mile on your morning run, or wherever else you do you serious thinking. As writers we need to give the reader something to think about and let them determine what really happened, how a character really felt, or what the theme of your novel really is.

See ya later.

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The Invisible Bookshelf

This will be a project for the upcomng weekend. Thanks to The Reader's Nook. 

 

 

Developing an Ear for Dialog

As I prepare to start looking for an agent for Rules for Giving, I am also getting some final proofreads.
One of the comments I get that people like the dialog. This comes mostly from writers, or those familiar with the craft. Since this is my first novel, I’m not sure where that talent comes from. I think mostly it comes from reading authors who are good at dialog.

Cormac McCarthy comes to mind. Not only is his dialog superb, but McCarthy is also one of those authors who does not use  quote tags, quote marks or commas. This forces him to be precise in his writing and requires that the reader concentrate.

I don’t have McCarthy’s reputation—yet—so I have to play by at least some of the rules. So here they are—Tim’s humble rules for dialog:

1. Listen to a conversation of two people as they encounter each other initially. The first comments are about the weather and their kids. Delete this stuff. Do not go there. Have you ever heard a reader complain that the characters in a novel did not discuss the weather or each other’s families. If you must include this information—and I have no idea why you would want to—then at least do it in the expository portion of the text, such as, “After asking Bilbo about his family and complaining about the weather, we discussed the issue at hand.” Even that sounds lame.

2. Even when you write dialog, keep it to a minimum. Only the important stuff. Let’s take an example. Your character is teaching someone how to golf. Here’s the dialog:

 “You’ve never golfed. You don’t know what you’re missing. Here, let me show you.” For the next hour we discussed and acted out the golf swing, talking about grip and tempo, how to use the hips and shoulders, concentrating on the follow-through and how actually hitting the ball should be an afterthought …”

Notice what we didn’t include that in the dialog. That’s boring stuff.

3. Edit dialog like you edit copy. This is a delicate balance. You can’t quite edit dialog to the absolute bare bones as you would with copy (you can if you are Cormac McCarthy, but neither  you nor I are close to that league), but take a hard look at it.  The reader will forgive much in exchange for the joy of reading a well-written story.

4. Beware of the quote tags (I’ve discussed this before). Limit them to he said and she said (or he says and she says if you are writing in the present tense). Resisted having your character whisper, yell, scream, warn, or—God forbid—gesticulate. I just finished reading Riders of the Purple Sage by Zane Grey. He had a character ejaculate dialog. Puh-leaze.

5. Don’t be afraid to throw in some profanity, but it had better work within the context of the story and the character. If your character is a nun (two or three novels from now I have a character who wears the habit) she would not be saying, “Shit”—or maybe she would, but then you have to justify it. Just this last weekend novelist Alexander McCall Smith cautioned against profanity in the Word Craft column in the Saturday Wall Street Journal. I disagee, but remember context. Also, if you ever want to hear a man of the cloth drop the f-bomb, you only have to get him on a golf course. No problem.

I have yet to attain publication status as a fiction writer, so I am hardly the expert. In the three-and-a-half years I have been working on Rules for Giving, however, these are some of the things I have learned. Feel free to pass them on.

See ya' later.

 

What's That Mean?

I have been working on a short story for the last week and was considering using a word that did not exist, but I knew it would be easy enough for the reader to figure out:

That he wore a gun and a badge only added to Wengle’s phallicism.

I was using phallicism, based on the word phallic, was another word for sex appeal, but I wanted to convey more—a sexual magnetism. After all, as I later described him, “the guy gets more ass than a toilet seat.” In the end I decided against it. I wasn’t quite sure the narrator, who makes the toilet seat reference, would use such a word as phallicism.

Then I read Helen Swords column in the New York Times from last month. She was talking about these very types of words, where you take a known word and use it a different way by adding a “suffix like ity, tion or ism.”

Sword calls these “zombie words,” mostly because they suck the life out of your prose. She makes a good argument. When I was younger, living another life, I spent nineteen months as a police officer (someday I’ll write about it). When I left I went back to college to hone my skills as a writer. One of the comments I heard from my peers was, “You write like a cop.” It was true. Cops are very big on nominalizations, as are attorneys.

I took me a while, but I was able to purge the cop talk from my writing. It creeps back in every once in a while. When I spot it, I obliterate it.  

Still, after reading Sword’s column, I can’t help but think I sort of like the word phallicism. It said what I wanted it to say. The sin with nominalizations is when you use more than two in 10,000 words.  My only concern now is the same one I had in the beginning—I’m not quite sure the narrator would use that word.

See ya' later. 

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Why Character Backstory is Important

Some writers create a character sketches for each of their major characters. Much of the sketch never makes it into the novel, but it serves to give them a frame of reference for where the character is coming from when they say or do something.

There was an example of this in a recent piece by actress Molly Ringwald (quick—what movie do you most associate her with?) in the online New York Times. Ringwald has tried her hand at writing and this week published a novel and a work of non-fiction. Her transition to writing came from her acting. In the piece Ringwald talks about how she found it necessary to develop backstories for the characters she portrayed.  These backstories gave her an understanding of the emotions behind what the characters said and how she should deliver their lines. It was Ringwald’s character backstory that gave birth in The Breakfast Club to the line, “It’s like any minute … divorce,” referring to Claire’s parents (Claire being the character played by Ringwald).   

Ringwald also talks about how, despite her best efforts as a writer, people will interpret characters within their own frame of reference. She uses the example of a friend of hers who read her novel and saw one of the characters wearing a “breezy hippie dress,” something Ringwald had not intended, but which she later realized with within her friend’s right as a reader to do.

It would be interesting to see how this element of description plays when it comes to location. I recently finished reading Riders of the Purple Sage by Zane Grey. Much of the action takes place in the unique geography of southern Utah where, over millions of years, water has cut narrow channels or canyons into the bedrock, many so narrow that only one person can pass through at a time. I have camped in this area, so I am familiar with the geography. Grey’s description is not the best, it leans towards the convoluted, and I wonder how someone who has never been to that region would picture it in their mind.

As Ringwald observes in her article, though, in the end it comes down to the writer and the reader and how they come together, one providing and other interpreting the descriptions.

See ya’ later.

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Don't Bore Your Readers

Within a few pages of the beginning of Rules for Giving the reader learns that the protagonist, Gavin Oliver, has two problems. The first problem is this twenty-three-year-old girl, the daughter of one of Gavin’s long-ago love interests, has appeared on the scene. The second problem (and this is the one he is not yet aware of) is Gavin’s business, which he has just taken over as owner after a messy partnership battle.  

In the first draft I rambled on and on about the dynamics of the business and Gavin’s rival. It was boring as hell. I needed to show, not tell. In the rewrite I used a device, a newspaper article, to let the reader know some of the particulars about the business. On his way into have a cup of coffee, Gavin picks up the morning newspaper and reads about his recent conquest:

Pasadena Business Changes Owners

Pasadena, CA—Becker Marketing & Advertising, one of Pasadena’s homegrown businesses, is changing hands. Corrine Becker, founder of the thirty-two year old agency, sold her interest in the company to Gavin Oliver. She plans to retire.

 Oliver has been a partner in the business for the last five years and has worked there for eighteen years.

The agency, which billed in excess of $40 million last year, employs 24 people. Clients include Volunteer Insurance, the Catholic archdiocese, Pasadena Memorial Hospital, Right & Ready Markets, and several mid-sized manufacturers.

Until several weeks ago the ownership of the agency was split between four employees—Becker, Oliver, office manager Ynez Orozco and Willa Malin. Malin resigned two weeks ago to pursue other business interests. Orozco retains a minority interest in the firm. 

In four paragraphs I conveyed a lot of material:

• I emphasize the geographic location of the action.
• I tell them what the protagonist does for a living and how he acquired the business.
• How long he has worked at his employment.
• How big the business is.
• I introduce several characters.
• I hint at a conflict with the mysterious words, “Malin resigned two weeks ago to pursue other business interests.” This one sentence tells the alert reader that a problem is coming. Gavin just doesn’t know it yet.

Using a newspaper article to tell backstory is not a tool you can use all the time. It is one of those one-time devices. I read a mystery/police procedural author who, it seems, uses it all the time. The reality is he has used to twice, but it seems like more.

Remember: show, don’t tell. My suggestion is read Self Editing for Fiction Writers. It’s one of several great books on fiction writing.

See ya’ later.

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I Have to Get to Know These Folks

There is a book called The Influentials that marketers like to read, especially those of us that believe in the power of word of mouth (hint: you had better believe in it, because it is serious).  Whenever I teach a marketing seminar I quote from the cover of that book:

One American in ten tells the other nine how to vote, where to eat, and what to buy.

This morning I was reading an article in the Wall Street Journal and was reminded of this book and how there is a whole group of influentials out there in the literary world that I must get to know. The piece tells the story of how debut author Kathleen Grissom used book bloggers to propel sales of her novel The Kitchen House. The first printing of 11,500 did not garner a lot of interest when the novel hit the bookshelves 2-1/2 years ago. It might have been doomed to the loss column, but thanks to an aggressive campaign by Grissom, The Kitchen House is now in its 21^st printing and has sold 254,000 hard copies and more 150,000 e-books. Grissom now has a couple of bucks in the bank.

Grissom drove sales by identifying influential book bloggers and sending them advance copies. These bloggers have a lot of pull with the book clubs. According to the WSJ article, book clubs often intersect, with members belonging to more than one club. News of a good novel travels fast through these networks and sales got hot. Grissom has spoken to a lot of book clubs, some in person and others over the phone in group calls.

As I make plans for what will happen when I publish Rules for Giving, I have thought about how important books clubs are to sales, but I was at a loss of how to reach them. The key, at least in Grissom’s experience, appears to be the book bloggers—the Influentials.  I did a little searching on the internet and came across a list of influential book bloggers. These are people I need to follow and get an idea of how they operate. I’ll keep you informed.

See ya’ later.

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Sometimes We Need to Break the Rules

I am reading We Need to Talk About Kevin, a haunting novel told in a series of letters from a wife to her husband (they are separated), almost two years after their son and only child went on a rampage at his high school and killed nine people—seven students, a cafeteria word and a teacher. The boy now sits in a correctional facility, where she dutifully visits him every two weeks.

The book, by Lionel Shriver, was already in my reading stack, but the recent shooting in Aurora, Colorado, prompted me to move it to the top.

I am not a quarter of the way through the book, but it is dark and hard to put down. The narrator had mixed emotions about her impending motherhood from before conception, and from what I can determine, her son was a difficult child from the very beginning. Added to this, for me the mother is an unreliable narrator who sees the situation only through her guilt-colored glasses. She cannot help but blame herself for what happened. It seems as if everyone else does, except for maybe her husband. On that one I am not sure yet.

What I find interesting, though, is the story behind the novel, which is told by the author in the P.S. section. Lionel Shriver had already published six novels, none of which had realized a profit, although at least some received good reviews. She finished We Need to Talk About Kevin just in time to watch almost 3,000 people die in the World Trade Center attack on September 11, 2001. Her agent assured her that no one wanted to read her doggie downer of a novel, and they parted ways.

Shriver shopped twenty more agents, all with similar results. Then she broke one of the Ten Commandments of How Things Are Supposed to Work and approached a publisher directly. My guess is she went through the query letter-synopsis-first-three-chapters dance, or something similar. She doesn’t say. What she does say is that the editor read the novel over a weekend and made her an offer on Monday. It was published in 2003 and quickly found a home on a number of book club lists, including Good Morning, America and Barnes & Noble. It has been published in a dozen languages and was the recipient of the Orange Prize in the UK.

The movie version, starting Tilda Swinton and John C. Reilly, comes out in November (see trailer here).

So what’s the deal? Shriver broke the rules and the result was wild success. Is this further proof that the agent-editor-publisher formula is wildly out of touch, hopelessly hung up on vampire and zombie novels and the next big genre. Probably not. This story has happened many times before, and most of them before the advent of self-publishing. What it is an indicator of is that sometimes you have to be persistent and break the rules.

See ya later.

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The First Step in Getting Published ... and I am Already Behind

I found a great new website for writers—TheMillions.com. In the last week I have clicked on two good posts there (click here for my comment on the first one). Today’s post, “A Right Fit”: Navigating the World of Literary Agents,” by Michael Bourne was equally as good, although it left me depressed. With apologies to Bob Dylan, I feel I’m knocking on an agent’s doors.

Within a month I expect to be marketing my novel Rules for Giving to an agent. Bourne’s post makes me feel woefully unprepared. I don’t have any short stories published in literary magazines, one of the places agents look for new talent. I have some short stories lying around, but nothing that can get published in a few weeks.

I have not gone to a dozen writer’s conferences, booking appointments with agents and schmoozing the right folks. I went to the Southern California Writer’s Conference in San Diego earlier this year, and maybe you can count the two days in seminars I spent at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books (I did make a connection with an agent there—I am sure she felt my energy across the room and she will no doubt remember the intelligent question I asked).

Most of the writers I know are like me—unpublished. I don’t know anyone who is going to refer me to their agent. There is a former member of my critique group, an MFA who now teaches writing part-time. I have received encouragement from him.

Another route is to employ the services of an editor to review my manuscript. I have heard the rumblings of an unofficial (or official) pipeline between editors and agents. Use the right editor and they can whisper your name to the right agent. The cost of using an editor, however, is in the thousands of dollars, and it’s a crapshoot. From what I gather, there are as many bad editors out there as there are good ones (check out this post from a few months back).

All this by way of saying that I still have a long road ahead of me. I guess I can’t quit the day job yet.    

See ya’ later. 

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