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If I Knew Then What I Know Now

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past meets present
The author before and after learning how to use a semicolon

I get approached from time to time by aspiring new writers, asking for advice on how to get started. The longer I’ve been doing this, the harder it gets to answer them. At this point I’ve been in the game nearly 20 years, so how do I condense what I’ve learned into a quick conversation or a brief email? And what if they are interested in a completely different type of writing than the kind that has made me as rich and famous as I currently am? (Hmmm – now that I think about it, that wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing. But I digress…)

So how to advise them? Do I lecture them on the ever-changing industry? Warn them of the dangers of reading the works of Clive Cussler? Or simply hand them a dog-eared copy of The Elements of Style and turn around and run? Depending on who asks, it’s hard to determine which advice would be the most useful.

When in doubt, fire up the time machine!

I’ve been binge-watching the old Stargate SG-1 TV series recently, and several of the stories focus on time travel, a concept that has always fascinated me. In a couple of episodes, the main characters manage to pass messages to versions of themselves who are living in a different time.

This got me to thinking: what kind of messages would Current-Day Keith send to Past Keith?

After considering obvious nuggets like “buy stock in Amazon” and “don’t enroll in Trump University,” I started thinking about what I would tell Keith The Writer From The Past (or, KTWFTP). Since SG-1 episodes usually incorporate a ticking clock or some other increasingly urgent complications, I decided to ramp up the pressure, and limit myself to five pieces of advice. Here’s what I came up with to share with the younger (and yes, hairier) Keith.

1. Know your genre – and its conventions.
Probably the biggest – and hardest – lesson I’ve learned as a writer is that genre matters. Historically the genre of a book just wasn’t something I thought or cared about – as a reader or as a writer. But after writing one hard-to-categorize manuscript after another, the first message I would pass on to KTWFTP is to pick a damn genre already. It will make things SO much simpler.

Why? Genre simplifies things by setting expectations. It helps an agent sell your book. It helps a publisher market your book. It helps a reader choose your book.

And if you’re self-publishing, it helps YOU market your book, which is utterly crucial. In an era when anybody can publish anything, you need a way to make your book stand out to your potential readers. [Read more…]

Authors Guild: Solitude and Solidarity

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Image – iStockphoto: Katharina 13

Writers, among some of the most solitary workers in the world, can find growing support and services in a newly redirected Authors Guild that favors the majority, not the few.

Writing Alone, Working Together

To quote the immortal Alistair Cooke on Masterpiece Theatre, “Last time, as you’ll remember …” I was going on here about author advocacy. In the comments that followed, I discovered that everyone isn’t up to date on the Authors Guild, which is the States’ leading author advocacy organization, in business since 1912.

In the month since my last column here, in fact, the guild has made a series of moves that help define its developing role in the writer community and so this is a good time to back up and do a bit of groundwork on what the guild is, how it has changed since the start of 2015, and why authors may want to consider joining the 10,000 or so members already in place.

I’ll bullet out some talking points:

While you can see the organization’s member benefits laid out for yourself, here, I’ve chosen these recent points because they give you a look at the guild’s quickly developing proactive stance in six important areas:

  • Retail conflict mediation on behalf of authors
  • Legal action in defense of writers’ right to free expression
  • Outreach in a first wave of regional hubs, each chapter with two guild “ambassadors” guiding programming
  • Career training and strategy in the form of those traveling workshops for authors
  • Pro-diversity support for efforts like the gender-balanced coverage of books that VIDA has promoted for years
  • Fact-finding data collection and professional interpretation to get a grip on author economics today

As a point of disclosure, I’m not a member of the guild because I report on the guild’s work frequently as a journalist and have followed and commented on its changes and development since 2014. And my message today is more recommendation than provocation. If you don’t know the Authors Guild and its work–or if you have ideas about it that you haven’t revisited in some time–this is a good moment to give it a look.

Remembrance of Dings Past

Provocations graphic by Liam Walsh

By the summer of 2014, the Authors Guild already had begun to change, but the going was slow and the effort was hobbled by the raging Amazon-Hachette negotiations. The debate around that situation had given rise to the Authors United collective of writers, many of them marquee bestsellers, who sided against Amazon. The group was led by Douglas Preston and counted Richard Russo, then the guild’s vice-president, among its supporters. Scott Turow’s presidency of the guild had concretized an anti-Amazonian perception of the group in many minds.

As I wrote in July 2014, “Even beyond issues of Amazonian ardor or otherwise, the most general, overarching, abiding complaint about the Turow-led guild has been, in a word, elitism.”

But Turow was on the way out. Author Roxana Robinson would succeed him as president. And the most important change would be the arrival at the beginning of 2015 of Mary Rasenberger, an attorney, as executive director.

Rasenberger would quickly begin turning things around in May 2015 by launching the guild’s Fair Contract Initiative, enumerating for publishers in a series of uncompromising white papers its new demands for contract reform. By October of that year, the guild would make common cause with the UK’s Society of Authors in demanding better pay practices from publishers for authors.

The advocacy efforts were growing smarter, leaner, more professional, and were expertly articulated in such concise articles as the guild’s Publishers’ Payment and Accounting Practices Need To Keep Up With The Times.

Publishers were “sitting up,” and so were authors. Rolling out its contract position papers, opening its membership to self-publishing writers as well as trade authors, and learning to re-engage with readers in its blog posts (rather than shutting down unpleasant comment threads), the guild was shaking off criticisms of advantages for elite names in the business and speaking up for the overall community of writers in an increasingly challenging environment.

Two weeks ago at BookExpo in New York City, Rasenberger was on a panel staged by the Association of American Publishers on copyright challenges, and she spoke (‘It’s the Author Who Suffers’) to the dangers faced by writers when copyright protection is under fire. She’s a former policy planning advisor for the US Copyright Office in Washington and she and her team have been to the Hill this year to lobby for streamlined and less expensive copyright registration for writers of small pieces. You can keep up with news from the organization here.

While many more instances of engagement, contact, program development, and outreach are occurring, the main point I’d like to commend to you today is this: the guild has a dedicated team and strong support for Rasenberger’s turnaround efforts, starting with Robinson as president and now with the presidency of James Gleick. The Authors Guild is not your father’s old boys’ (or girls’) club.

However fair or unfair criticism of the organization was in the past–like Bible-verse fights, you can find an anecdotal contradiction to any point–the Authors Guild has been pressing forward for more than three years now, and a lot of hard work is starting to pay off in new programs and an accelerating national vision–not an NYC hunker-down.

In case you haven’t seen any news reports lately, writers in the States have probably never had more reason to stand together for the indispensable freedom of expression that their work requires. One of the proudest factors about the guild is that it has journalists as members, as well as novelists, poets, historians, literary agents and representatives of writers’ estates. Our sisters and brothers in journalism are being called “the enemy of the people,” just this week again, by a president who also tried to use prior restraint–a cease-and-desist letter–to stop Macmillan from publishing author Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury.

Beyond the political crisis of the moment, the inherently non-aligned nature of the author workforce means that collective demands are more critical than ever–for better pay, better contracts, better treatment by the industry, the courts, and the government.

While no membership is for everyone, I submit that this is a great moment for authors to check out the Authors Guild and consider adding their voices to its growing choir of support.

[Read more…]

Finding Rhythm In Your Prose

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As a little girl before my feet touched the floor in Chicago orchestra seats, I fell in love with Gershwin’s “Porgy and Bess,” that jazzy rhythmic music that was classical and southern and black all at the same time. I didn’t just hear it. I felt it.

With the birth of hip hop, I grew up listening to Chuck D and A Tribe Called Quest drop rhymes on the turntable. In my bedroom, I tried to mimic what I’d heard but my raps fell flat, and the jerky, awkward movement I passed off as dancing lacked rhythm.

Still, I must have absorbed rhythm because now when I read literature and write it, I recognize poetry, lyricism, and music in prose. When I sit at my keyboard to pen a novel, sometimes it’s a deliberate, painstaking process to create that rhythm on the page and other times, it flows as if it’s always been inside me.

The watercooler conversation on my job turned to books one day recently and my colleagues tried to recite the opening lines of their favorite books. Most struggled and failed to remember any but for one woman the words flowed like music. It was the opening of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita:

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul.

Not only do those words capture the disturbing essence of this character’s tortured and forbidden obsession, but they roll across your tongue like water. I’m convinced that’s what made the opening memorable for my colleague. In the next line, Nabokov breaks down this girl’s name into the rhythm of its syllables.

Lo-Lee-Ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.

When I introduced four historic names off the top of my novel-in-progress, I played with their arrangement and read them aloud over and over again until the rhythm sounded and felt right.

I knew the ancestors were dancing somewhere, this night a love note to Harriet and Sojourner, W.E.B. and Booker T.   

Jacqueline Woodson, one of my favorite authors, says she rewrites everything until she gets the rhythm and story right on the page. She tells her life story in Brown Girl Dreaming, a memoir of poems. Her mastery of that form influences her handling of prose in the novel Another Brooklyn, where there’s a cadence, a steady beat running as a current along the narrative. Here, the protagonist, August, and her brother watch life below their window.

The people passing beneath us were all beautiful in some way.

Beautifully thin. Beautifully obese. Beautifully Afroed or cornrowed or bald.

Beautifully dressed in bright African dashikis and bellbottom jeans, miniskirts and halters. 

The words we string together and the way they bend into each other to make sentences reveal patterns and convey meaning. The rhythm and flow of this sentence in Ann Patchett’s Bel Canto leaves me breathless as the action intensifies.

Roxane saw them as the man with the gun saw them, Carmen saw Cesar, and Mr. Hosokawa saw Carmen and he scooped her from the space in front of him, the force of his arm hitting the side of her waist like a blow. 

That’s a long sentence punctuated by only one comma and with the insistent repetition of the word “saw” you can feel the situation escalating as the characters hurtle toward something awful, something deadly. When you read that passage, you can almost hear the building of a long, dramatic crescendo in an opera.

How do we find the rhythm that is innate to the story we’re telling in the moment? [Read more…]

Big Issues. Small Stories.

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Our social media feeds are cluttered with the significant yet chaotic issues of the day. Either we’re resisting or resisting the resistance. I’ve engaged in a war of words on occasion via Facebook and Twitter, trying to convince someone I can’t recall ever meeting in real life to consider my point of view. Did we meet at a writing conference or in fourth grade? When we want to be part of the larger conversation and extend our voices beyond 280 characters, many of us turn to the power of our prose.

Writing an issues book feels like the world’s on fire and we’re trying to snuff out the flames with a garden hose. Our stories and characters seem too small to carry such big topics. But they aren’t.

No one is looking for a didactic text or a sermon or an edict from on high. We want to understand the heart of these charged issues through human experience. That’s where we come in as storytellers.

I can’t stop raving about An American Marriage by Tayari Jones because that novel tackles the lasting ramifications of wrongful incarceration on families without preaching to the reader. In media interviews, Jones explains that she received a fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University to study this weighty topic. However, she got nervous when she didn’t have much to show after a year of research. Soon, she realized that the best way to tell this story was not with statistics and data points but through the lens of one marriage.

At the start of Roy and Celestial’s young marriage, he’s imprisoned for a crime he didn’t commit. He asks the ultimate question of his wife: Will she wait more than a decade for him, for his release? In letters they write to each other during his time behind bars, they say:

“Dear Celestial, I am innocent.”

“Dear Roy, I am innocent, too.”

At its heart, this is a love story. At its heart, this is also a human story about impossible choices and the devastating impact of wrongful incarceration.

To tell the story of war is not to write about nukes and napalm. Every war has its people and their stories, as the author Tim O’Brien discovered when he served in the Vietnam War. I read The Things They Carried often just to immerse myself in the rhythm of the language he uses. That collection of linked stories makes you feel but doesn’t tell you what to feel about the Vietnam War. There’s no running tally of battles and body counts or discussion of whether the conflict was justified. Instead, O’Brien writes about a world where there are no winners and no one is right or wrong. They just are.

He writes about First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross and the letters he carried from a college girl named Martha.

In the late afternoon after a day’s march, he would dig his foxhole, wash his hands under a canteen, unwrap the letters, hold them with the tips of his fingers, and spend the last hour of light pretending.

Grief, love, and terror have faces through O’Brien’s stories. We understand war as much as we ever can through these soldiers and the things they carried like rifles and chewing gum, brass knuckles and bibles, condoms and comic books.

It’s a delicate balance to strike as we explore complex issues without being heavy-handed and polarizing. Young adult literature is leading the way in tackling real-life issues that are making headlines right now. In The Hate U Give, Angie Thomas wades into the long-simmering tensions surrounding police shootings of unarmed black men.

Her novel follows Starr, a sixteen-year-old girl who sees Khalil, her childhood best friend, gunned down by a cop. To add further complexity, Starr’s uncle is a police officer. In a country deeply divided by black and white, Thomas shows the gray areas where answers aren’t easy but people are desperate for change. This is the scene right after Khalil is killed.

“No, no, no.”

Khalil doesn’t move. He doesn’t utter a word. He doesn’t even look at me. His body stiffens, and he’s gone. I hope he sees God.

Someone else screams.

I blink through my tears. Officer One-Fifteen yells at me, pointing the same gun he killed my friend with.

I put my hands up.

As I brainstorm topics for my next novel, I’m considering a few societal issues I’d love to unpack through characters in a novel. The first question I ask myself is why. [Read more…]

The Question Your Novel Answers

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Please welcome Nancy Johnson back to WU today, this time as our newest WU contributor! We’re thrilled to have her with us!

Race has colored every part of my life from the stories my parents told from the front lines of the Civil Rights Movement to my own experience of being called the n-word by a white coworker.  During the years it took me to conceive my novel and write it, I encountered the stories of countless black boys and men murdered nationwide at the hands of white police officers and in my city of Chicago at the hands of people who looked like them in their own communities. There were also the stories of the disenfranchised white working class that felt left behind struggling to grasp a new foothold in America. All of these stories informed my understanding of the world and the question of my novel.

The complexities of race and class loomed above me gray and amorphous like a storm cloud and I wrestled with these issues that offered no easy answers. I thought about what I really wanted to know. What was the question that kept me up at night?

Is what connects us in our common humanity more powerful than forces of race and class that divide us?

Over the years I’ve often heard the advice to write what you know. Many of the characters in my novel are composites of relatives, friends, ladies from the beauty shop, the guys who gather to swap stories at my local Starbucks, and of course, me. However, the larger story is all about interrogating what I don’t know through the lives of my characters.

When I worked as a journalist, one of the most important storytelling lessons I learned was to tell the larger story through the narrow prism of one person, one family, or one community. I couldn’t easily get my arms around the socio-political behemoths of race and class. However, I could relate to Ruth, a black engineer trying to connect with the son she abandoned at birth. A woman isolated by her own mother and brother when she left them behind in a dying factory town to pursue her ambitions. I found myself drawn to Midnight, a smart, mischievous eleven-year-old white boy with a dead mother, a sick grandmother, and a father who recently lost his job at the plant.

The lives of Ruth and Midnight intersect in The Kindest Lie, my novel about two people from vastly different backgrounds with a common need for family, belonging, and home. I chose them to bring my story question to life, to put flesh on the bones of my understanding. Throughout my writing of the book, I asked even more questions of these characters: Are we always tethered to our pasts, to the people and places that birthed us? Is mothering innate or learned? How does toxic masculinity transcend race? What are the perceptions we hold about our own race and class status that we hide from the world for fear of judgment? Do our mistakes define us or can we rewrite our own stories?

As I wrote each scene, I returned to my primary question and the secondary ones to make sure every scene addressed them. I tried to get under the skin of these characters who came to the story with their own histories, biases, and truths. I gave them permission to be blunt and politically incorrect. Even messy.  For example, [Read more…]

 

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