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“I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.”
“That is one last thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out”
“Grammar is a piano I play by ear. All I know about grammar is its power.”
I know a little more about agents now.
A few nights ago the local library, which puts on a number of writing-related
events, hosted an agent who spoke
to the group for more than an hour. I passed on my
weekly critique group that night and went to see what the agent had to say.
This particular agent is an attorney specializing in legal issues relating to authors, both in fiction and non-fiction, and he also doubles as an agent. Listening to him speak, I realized there are several spectrums for agents. One of those spectrums is best described as having the words literary-minded at one end, and legal-minded at the other. This fellow was closer to the legal end.
He is more about the deal—about getting the best terms for the writer in the contract. Making sure all it is as bulletproof as possible. This fellow is less literary-minded. He does not suggest rewrites to the author before sending a manuscript out. If he reads it, likes it, and thinks he can sell it, then he gives you an offer of representation. You accept and you are off to the races.
The only time he will suggest rewrites is if he sees a trend in the responses from editors.
He also counsels writers to get every contract reviewed by an attorney familiar with publishing—everything from an agreement for representation to the deal with the publisher to (and he was only half-joking when he said this) your car rental agreement when you are on a book signing tour.
This fellow is markedly different than the agents who sat on a panel at a writer’s conference I attended last year. The agents at the conference were more concerned with the story, the literary aspect of it. It is an issue of what you want in an agent. The literary vs. legal spectrum is one parameter to consider. The kind of agent you want depends on what you feel you need.
Oh, and there was one other surprise of the night. Another writer in the group asked about his services in correcting typos and grammatical errors. Yeah, you read that right. Does this fellow, or any agent, proofread manuscripts? The answer to that one is a resounding no. Providing a clean manuscript is the writer’s job. That’s why you have critique groups and alpha readers.
See ya’ later.
WhatIfYouCouldNotFail.com by Tim Sunderland is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Yesterday it was all over the news
that Marissa Mayer, the new CEO of Yahoo!, made a change aimed at boosting the
company’s status in the ever-evolving world of e-business. Mayer called an end
to the
work-at-home policy of the internet company.
As a Southern California resident who has never lived more than three miles from the office for the last two decades, and worked at home for half of that time, I can imagine the gnashing of teeth that this caused. Working at home means you can wear your jammies until noon, drop the kids off at school and pick them up, be available for the cable guy, who insists on a four-hour window and you are lucky if he makes that, and you don’t have to flip a coin with your spouse to see who stays home when the kids are sick.
Was that why Yahoo! did away with telecommuting? Too many people screwing off at home?
Not really.
While productivity is not a problem for employees who covet their ability to work out of the home office, what is a problem is that all these workers are by themselves. There is less synergy, less collaboration.
“If you want innovation, then you need interaction,” said John Sullivan, a professor of management at San Francisco State University in an article in the New York Times. “If you want productivity, then you want people working from home.”
The solitude of working at home often confronts me. I’ll ponder a particular element of a plot for hours and come up with zilch. But that night over dinner with my wife, or at a meeting of my critique group, a solution will come to me. The interaction of talking it over with other people will often give me the solution.
No wonder many offices are now designing workplaces to encourage employee interaction. Folks get better ideas this way.
As writers we work alone, a lot. What can we do to break the solitude? I have a few solutions:
Get a dog and take the pooch for a walk several times a day. You get a change of scenery.
If you don’t have anything in writing to share with the critique group that week, talk about a troublesome piece of a story that is holding you up.
Go to lunch once a week with a non-writing person. A fresh perspective with often cause you to consider something you had not thought of before in a story.
Do like I do and share it with your spouse. Mrs. WhatIfYouCouldNotFail.com has a great mind. She is always a good source for twists and turns in a plot.
A Yahoo! memo put everything into perspective. “Some of the best decisions and insights come from hallway and cafeteria discussions, meeting new people and impromptu team meetings.”
Moral of the story: That lonely writer’s garret can work against you. You have to get out in the world.
See ya’ later.
WhatIfYouCouldNotFail.com by Tim Sunderland is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Image by Onomatomedia (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
The most recent electronic edition of Brain Pickings had
a piece on Isabel Allende, a Chilean-American
writer of the magical realism school. I have not read any of her novels,
although I have read some of the
works of one of her contemporaries, Gabriel
Garcia Marquez.
Isabel Allende the writer is a first cousin, once removed of Salvador Allende, who was president of Chile from 1970 to 1973. He committed suicide in the face of a military coup. She is often confused with her cousin, Isabel Allende, the daughter of Salvador Allende.
What Isabel Allende the writer has to say about her craft is valuable to all writers.
I need to tell a story. It’s an obsession. Each story is a seed inside of me that starts to grow and grow, like a tumor, and I have to deal with it sooner or later. Why a particular story? I don’t know when I begin. That I learn much later.
Now I can add Isabel Allende to the never-ending stack of novelists I want to read.
See ya’ later.
WhatIfYouCouldNotFail.com by Tim Sunderland is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
It is important for writers to understand conflict and how
it can be resolved. This morning’s Smartbrief
for Entrepreneurs
included a link to an article
on Dan McCarthy’s Great Leadership blog on recognizing the different types
of conflict and how best to resolve them.
Pay particular attention to the conflict of emotion. It reminds me of a lesson I learned from my marriage. (Note to all you men out there who have not learned this lesson—THIS IS A BIG ONE). My wife is in a management position and deals with customer service issues all the time. In the evening she will come home and unload on me. I relish these moments. I work by myself and often I will go for several days without leaving my office and meeting a client face-to-face. I get lonely.
When my wife unloads on me, I have the standard male urge to fix it. My wife, on the other hand, does not want me to fix anything. She wants me to listen. She wants to talk the problem out with a neutral party. By doing this she will quite often come up with her own solution—as long as I keep my mouth shut.
This is by no means a definitive list of the different types of conflicts, but it is a start. Good literature is all about conflict, and writers need to know how to solve conflicts in a realistic fashion.
See ya’ later.
WhatIfYouCouldNotFail.com by Tim Sunderland is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Image courtesy the Medieval Festival in Dortmund 2004
Ballard Street, by Jerry Van Amerongen
Thanks to Jerry Van Amerongen
You might
have heard about the now legendary conversation between author Phillip Roth and
a newly
published writer named Julian Tepper. Tepper, who works at a restaurant
frequented by Roth, presented the older writer with a copy of Balls,
Tepper’s first novel.
Rather than congratulate him, Roth told him to quit while he was ahead, that writing was, in so many words, a soul sucking profession where you threw away far more work than you ever published.
Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love, in a new blog called Bookish, takes Roth on. Yes, Gilbert agrees, writing is a tough job, but any job that you put your heart into is going to be tough. Writing also has benefits.
“…you have no boss to speak of. You're not exposed to any sexual abuse or toxic chemicals on the job site (unless you're sexually abusing yourself, or eating Doritos while you type). You don't have to wear a nametag, and--unless you are exceptionally clumsy--you rarely run the risk of cutting off your hand in the machinery. Writing, I tell you, has everything to recommend it over real work.”
I’ve had a number of jobs in my life. The worst ones were those that were intellectually numbing. Writing is hardly an intellectually numbing profession. Even in the jobs I hated, though, I found a reason to like them, to make them interesting.
In the words of Confucius (and Harvey McKay), “Do something you love and you will never work another day in your life.”
I will allow that writing is tough. If it wasn’t, everybody would do it.
See ya’ later.
WhatIfYouCouldNotFail.com by Tim Sunderland is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Thank
goodness I am out of school. According a
review in the Wall Street Journal of Sticks
and Stones by Emily Bazelton, bullying is at about the same level as it has been
in the past, except that a good deal of
it carries over into online forms—Facebook,
Twitter, and social media platforms only the eleven-year-old in my house knows
about.
I say this because I have intimate knowledge about bullying. I was the victim of a class bully in the seventh grade, and for a few weeks into the eighth grade.
It was horrible. I dreaded going to school. What’s worse, the bully’s mean-spiritedness overflowed into other members of the class. Several years ago I heard a total stranger call someone else the name my bully reserved for me. Talk about post-traumatic stress syndrome. I was unnerved for days, and that experience was decades ago.
But as bad as that experience was, I look upon the current crop of bullying-prevention efforts with a raised eyebrow. My seventh grade tormentor was not the first bully I encountered, and he was not the last one. As an adult I encounter bullies all the time, especially in the workplace, and sometimes they are even your boss. Because of my bully, I was prepared for what was ahead. A true bully will find ways to sidestep the teachers, supervisors and the system and continue his torture. I tell kids they might as well get used to it now and learn how to deal with these idiots.
In a weird sort of way, I am thankful to my bully, or bullies, because now they have become such a rich source of literary inspiration.
How did I solve the problem of my seventh-grade bully? I have a novel planned that will explain it, and will also pay homage to the teacher that helped me through it.
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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