What If You Could Not Fail

If Ebooks Fail, This Will be One of the Reasons Why

Pearls before Swine, by Stephan Pastis

Thanks to Stephan Pastis

...a Publicist's Dream

I writer friend of mine, one a bit more experienced than I, told me that publicists do best when they have a hook in a novel they can use to pitch it to the media.

Somewhere today there is a publicist who is very pleased with themselves. They found their hook and got articles in both the Los Angeles Times and the Wall Street Journal about a production of Julius Caesar made by prisoners, most of them doing life sentences, in Rome’s Rebibbia prison. The documentary movie of the project, Caesar Must Die, is showing in limited release in theaters across the country.

This all started when Paolo and Vittoria Taviani, brothers and Italian directors, visited the prison to listen to a live reading of Dante’s The Divine Comedy by the prisoners. The brothers realized that if these men could do what they did with Dante, then they would clearly understand the themes of Shakespeare’s play—tyranny, murder, loyalty, betrayal, treachery.

The result was not only a dramatic production of the play, but a 76-minute documentary by the brothers on the making of the play, complete with arguments between some of the prisoners when the action got a little too close to home.

But back to the publicist. Whoever this person was, they did such a good job that they got this quote at the end of the Los Angeles Times article:

“Though it would be comforting to concentrate on the notion that being able to act has enlarged these men's lives, the Tavianis, now in their 80s, won't allow us that easy consolation. Perhaps the most memorable line in "Caesar Must Die" comes when the prisoner who plays Cassius looks at the camera and simply says, "Since I got to know art, the cell has become a prison."

The Wall Street Journal ran a similar passage with the exact same quote.

That’s a good publicist.

See ya’ later.

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

 

Jerzy Kosinski

"I don't fret over lost time - I can always use the situations in a novel."

"The principle of true art is not to portray, but to evoke."

"Going around under an umbrella interferes with one's looking up at the sky."

"And really the purpose of art - for me, fiction - is to alert, to indicate to stop, to say: Make certain that when you rush through you will not miss the moment which you might have had, or might still have."

"Persons who have been homeless carry within them a certain philosophy of life which makes them apprehensive about ownership."

If Nothing Else, I Know My Query is Good

I continue to wait for word from the agent who requested, after reading my query and synopsis, to look at the first fifty pages of Rules for Giving. It has been five weeks and I understand these things take time. Even then, I am on step one-and-a-half of a four- or five-step process.

One thing I am grateful for, however, is that from this experience I at least know that my query letter and synopsis are where they need to be when it comes to getting an agent’s attention. This is a big step. For this I largely credit QueryShark.com. I never sent my query letter into this website, but I did follow it quite a bit. So should you.

The irony is that my query letter to this specific agent was not anything like the one I had drafted to everyone else. He asked for answers to specific questions, and then he also asked for a synopsis. Because of the insight I gained writing query letters, and input from my critique group and from individual fellow writers, I was able to craft a letter that worked.

Learn as much as you can about what makes a good query letter. I recently heard some great advice on describing your novel. If it were made into a movie, how would TV Guide describe it? Also take a look at this blog post on query letters by writer Janice Hardy. It appears, ironically, on QueryTracker.net.

See ya’ later.

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

Image courtesy of Query Shark.

... or Why Cattle are Safe in my Neighborhood for Another Five Weeks

"Don't you know there ain't no devil. There's just God when he's drunk.--Tom Waits, Heart Attack and Vine

I am honoring Lent this year, which I have done for the last couple of years. This despite leaving the Catholic Church more than four decades ago. I have been back only for weddings and funerals. In fact, my goal from a very early age was to leave the Catholic Church. I could not wait to get out.

I cannot point to a specific tenet of the Catholic faith that drove me away. The lack of tolerance of other religions had a lot to do with it. Taking sexual advice from a celibate man struck me as counterproductive.  It also bothered me that Catholics made it a sin not to go to church on Sunday. Any religion that had to get you in by putting a gun to your head raised questions in my mind.

Then came my great literary awakening, which included a lot of Mark Twain, followed by some college-level philosophy classes. I ultimately concluded that the best label for me is skeptic.

Why skeptic?

Philosophically, being an agnostic is a wussy position. You are saying that you don’t see any solid proof that there is a god, yet, there is no solid proof that there is not a god, so you’re not committing yourself either way. Basically you are hedging your bets, afraid to take a stand.

You could say you believe in god, that you are a theist, but when you look at it from a scientific perspective, it does not make any sense. Am I supposed to believe there is an alternative existence that is better than the one I have now, and goes on forever? Forever is a long time. This also opens the question of who is running things. I prefer to think I have some say in this.

This leaves us with atheism, which is a step that I am not completely comfortable with, either. There are too many unexplained things so say it all happens by chance.

I like the scene in the book M.A.S.H. in which Trapper John is having a crisis of conscience, having lost one too many patients. He’s talking to the unit chaplain Father Mulcahey, who asks Trapper if he believes in God. Trapper’s answer is something akin to, “From a scientific perspective, it doesn’t make any sense, but I can also tell you that things happen in surgery that I’m not good enough to do.”

So I am a skeptic, which I define as someone who wants to believe, they are only looking for the proof. They just haven’t found it yet.

For the last six or seven years I have been a member of a liberal Christian denomination. What I like about them is that one of their premises is, “Wherever you are in your faith journey, you are welcome here.” Sounds as if this was tailor-made for me.

Also, I’m thinking of the other Christian saying, “Act as if we have faith, and faith shall be given to you.”

Which gets us to the Lent thing. My denomination acknowledges Lent. My wife, the Amazing Leslie, has more faith than I do, so she chooses to recognize Lent. I do it to support her, and also because I am acting as if I have faith, in the hope that it will be given to me.

In past years I have given up cigars, which I only smoke when I golf. Right now I am not golfing much, which makes that an empty promise. So this year we are giving up meat and soda. At first we said ALL meat—beef, pork, chicken, fish, etc. We didn’t plan this well enough in advance though, and quickly found being a vegetarian is a lot of work. We had to back down and say just beef and pork. I’m still trying to keep the commitment at lunch, though. If I am home, it is peanut butter, and if I am out, then I order vegetarian. Subway makes a good veggie sandwich.

So as it turns out the meat thing is really not much of a problem. The ban on soda, however, is kicking my butt.  I am a Diet Dr. Pepper guy, and I get a craving at least three or four times a day. But we are a week into Lent and so far, so good.

One philosophy behind fasting is that you limit the intake of foods that make you groggy and lethargic. You are then more apt to reach a level of clear mindedness where in you are susceptible to new ideas and higher levels of thought. That’s not a bad thing for writers.

Maybe lent is a good thing after all.

See ya’ later.

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

Steer photo by Stefan Stegeman

Steak photo by FotoosVanRobin from Netherlands (My Perfect Entrecote  Uploaded by Partyzan_XXI) [CC-BY-SA-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Can't Put It Down

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

About POV

I have been giving some thought to the writer’s point of view lately, especially as I plan my next novel. I wrote Rules for Giving in the first person. My next two novels will be in varying versions of third person. Very little planning went into Rules for Giving. I sat down and wrote it—no outline or anything— which might explain why it took four years. But since then I have become a devotee of outlining, and I can see how outlining, and planning the novel can help you to see POV differently, allowing you the opportunity to weigh one against the other.

I notice that as I become more aware of POV, I am more conscious of other authors and how they often wander out of their POV and no one catches it in the editing process. I recently finished Gone With the Wind. That was largely told in third person close, from Scarlett’s POV, but a few times the author wandered into someone else’s head. Then there were two entire chapters, out of sixty-five—that were told in someone else’s POV entirely.

The two novels I have planned for third-person will be multiple POVs, wherein the POV will follow the story from the perspective of several characters, most of whom will be in scenes separate from the other characters.

Tom Clancy is a great one for multiple POVs, and quite often his perspective changes numerous times in one chapter, especially when you have opposing military figures in a battle, such as in Red Storm Rising. I see my novels as having a single POV prevail throughout the chapter, although as I think about it, at least one scene occurs to me where it might have to have two POVs.

Then, of course, you always get the writers who sometimes like to mix it up—third-person interspersed with first person, or even second person.

In his book Writing the BlockBuster Novel, Albert Zuckerman posits that one of the prerequisites for a blockbuster novel is multiple points of view. Also check out this blog post about the different POVs on the Suite 101 blog.

See ya’ later.

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

Image by Richard Rappaport [1] [2] (Own work) [CC-BY-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

 

Loading the Literary Dice

Since I am in the process of looking for an agent, those sorts of questions have been weighing on my mind a great deal as of late. As part of my research I came across this piece in The Millions entitled Navigating the World of Literary Agents. There was some interesting information:

Odds. Your chances of getting accepted by an agent through the slush pile of queries ranges with each agent, but the author determined that at the agency he visited as part of a story he wrote, it was about 1 in 11,111.

Your Query Does not Get Much Time. The author writes about watching one agent “power” through 18 queries in 14 minutes.

How do Agents Find Writers. The better agents attend writer’s conferences, visit MFA programs and scour literary magazines.

Get Your Name Out. The author also got his name out writing for writing related magazines and websites.

The Importance of the Writer’s Conference, again. The author reported a marked increase in responses to his queries, including phone calls from agents, after he stepped up his attendance at writer’s conferences.

Read the article. There is some interesting information to consider.

See ya’ later.

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

Image by Stephen Silver (Open Clip Art Library) [see page for license], via Wikimedia Commons

Man up (or Lady Up) and Drop it in the Mailbox

Details, Details, Details—and No, I Did Not Stutter

There was an interesting blog post in QueryTracker.com about drawing people in with character emotion. To be specific, it was not so much about saying a character was frustrated, but showing through conversation and actions that they are frustrated. It references a guide called The Emotion Thesaurus that lists the sorts of body movements and behaviors that are easily associated with specific types of behaviors.   

I got into a Facebook conversation with a fellow writer about this a month ago or so. I think it was Carol Wills (correct me if I am wrong).

Between the two of this, we came up with a good example:

Jane was mad at Dick

As opposed to

Jane kicked Dick in the balls

The second one is much more interesting.

Something I learned from fellow critique group member Drew Turner was never miss a chance to give the reader a sense of place in the story, especially if it is interesting. I took this into consideration when I was editing my novel Rules for Giving. Early in the story the protagonist, unable to sleep during a particularly vicious heat wave, and because he had a lot on his mind, ends up driving to a nearby homeless encampment and befriends a resident. Even though it was the middle of the night, I included a few details to give a sense of place:

Our conversation drifts into a lull, but it is far from silent. In the middle of the night Tent City still has sounds—a low hum—muffled voices, a seesaw of different people snoring, the rustle of fabric as someone shifts inside their shelter, the sound of coughing fit that comes with years of cigarette smoking. On the other side of the camp someone yells something I can’t make out, followed by a woman laughing.  

One of the hooded sweatshirts walks in our direction. John shifts his feet and puts down his soda. When the sweatshirt has closed the distance by almost half, John, still seated, calls out. “No action here tonight, Tony.” Sweatshirt turns and walks back towards the others milling about.

John relaxes and picks up his drink. “He was hoping you came down here looking for drugs. He’s selling. You have to be careful down here. This place turns on you in a minute.”

Then a few pages later, as the protagonist is preparing to depart:

                Inside the clutter of tents and lean-tos another smoker goes into a coughing fit. The coughing gets louder and I realize the hacker has left their shelter and is outside. The coughing goes on for several minutes before subsiding. Thirty seconds later it is replaced by another noise—the sound of a man urinating with the enthusiasm of a young horse. 

                John clucks his tongue and mutters. “People are supposed to use the outhouses.”

Adding this kind of detail is always a battle for me because it means adding words, but it makes the story much richer.

See ya’ later.

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