Writing life – Page 52

The Number One Subject to Study for Writing Success

February 3, 2017 By Cathy Yardley

Sorry – that’s a bit of a clickbait title, I know. But how often have you seen that kind of writing article? How often have writing reference books stated their stances in stark, all-or-nothing, my-way-or-the-highway terms?

Cut out all prologues.

Burn all adverbs.

If you don’t plot, you’re a mess.

If you do plot, you’re a robot.

(Did I mention that the advice is often conflicting?)

I am a contrarian. Much of my writing career has been motivated by sheer spite. I’m not proud of this, but I know myself, and I know that if you tell me I can’t do something, I’m going to laugh and wave at you with my proof of accomplishment at some point. It’s just my nature.

I’ve been writing professionally for nearly twenty years now. In that time, I’d like to think that I’ve learned some things, about the industry, about writing, and about writers. In that time, there is one fact I believe, profoundly, when it comes to writing and publishing. [Read more…]

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Romancing the Career: ‘Writing Is So Hard’

February 2, 2017 By Porter Anderson (@Porter_Anderson)

Diversity in DC

Next week, as you may know, the Association of Writers and Writing Programs holds its sprawling annual convention.

It’s known as AWP. As every eagle-eyed Unboxed Writer will notice, it should have been AWAWP. I like the sound of that. A-wawp. A wet fish landing on a hot dock. But they didn’t ask me, did they? Well, of course they didn’t.

AWP will be seated this year, 8 through 11 February, in Trumpian Washington. Our nation’s extraordinarily stressed capital. We must not hold this against the AWP organizers, who are based at George Mason in Fairfax: Major conferences are booked years in advance to capture the convention-center and hotel-room space they need. In fact, next year, a happier locale for AWP—Tampa, the Tropic of Porter. Our dolphins are standing by. And better yet, our politicians are not.

The AWP conference is a movable feast of diversity, last May for example rejecting Charlotte and all similarly inclined locations for future consideration because of its anti-LGBTQ “bathroom laws.” Next week, on Thursday the 9th, alone, there are sessions on:

“Inclusive anthologies”;
“Revolutionary mothering,” which has to do with a “legacy of radical and queer black feminists of the 1970s”;
“Girlhood, womanhood, coming of age”; “
“Apocalypse poetry by women”;
“Writing in time of terror and environmental collapse”;
The “politics of queering characters”;
“Which comes first, activism or artist?”;
“Community building around art and literature”;
“The body in words…and the feminist working class”;
“Global narratives within US literature”; and
A reading by the Hmong American writers’ circle.

Those are before noon on the 9th. You see, never is heard an exclusionary word at AWP. And this is good.

No, the main qualm that some of us feel here in the competition-soaked commercial world of publishing has to do with that halls of ivy business. While many of us have spent a lot of time in the Academy, of course, we know that students of creative writing on our campuses are rarely fully prepared for the business they expect to storm upon graduation. Many instructors aren’t equipped to teach them, either, finding most of their contracts at their own university presses, where beautiful production and meager sales are the norm, marketing is all but unknown.

Precious few of these students may have been told, even today, how much scarcer traditional publishing contracts have become, let alone that US self-publishers in 2015 produced 625,327 titles with ISBNs. Those indie books without ISBNs take the number of self-published books—before the trade even gets out of bed—well above 1 million titles per year.

There are sessions at AWP, mind you, that get at a bit of this. Our good colleague Paula Munier is on a business-of-publishing panel with some other good folks, also on the 9th. But get this title: “Agents and Editors and Publishers, Oh My! [Are we tired of that Oz formulation yet? Yes, we are.] Demystifying the Business Side of Writing and Publishing.” Now, think about that. Students of writing in college (hotly pursued by MFA programs at AWP) need a 75-minute session on business demystification at a conference?

So what are they teaching the kids back on the collegiate ranch?

Well, I’ll tell you what they’re teaching, and that’s where you come in. My provocation for you today has to do with the very first thing you hear when you click on this year’s AWP conference overview and a video begins playing whether you’d like it to or not. (Remind me to propose the “Writers who’d rather not find auto-running videos on conference sites” session for next year.)

It’s the voice of author Tom Perrotta, author of Little Children. And he is saying to these big children of our campuses: “Writing is so hard.”

[Read more…]

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The Devil Went Down to Georgia

January 31, 2017 By Steven James

Twelve years ago I decided to sell out.

I landed on an idea that I felt would be a financially lucrative novel series. I’d been reading the fiction bestsellers at the time and I realized that they were, to a large degree, formulaic, trite, fast-moving, and written on about a fourth-grade reading level.

I thought I could certainly write that poorly. It would require less revision, fewer edits, and I could pump out the books much faster, probably producing several per year.

All it would require was me being less insanely neurotic about quality. I figured that mediocrity would actually boost my career and help me put away more money for my daughters’ college education one day.

So, I put together a book proposal for the new series and spun out a few sample chapters. My agent sent it out, and it made it to the pub boards of two of the New York publishers.

I admit that I was excited when I flew up to New York City to meet with editors to discuss the book, which we were hoping to put on auction—but in the end it didn’t sell.

Thankfully, oh thankfully, that series didn’t sell.

It would have sent me down a career path that I know, and (if I’m honest with myself), that I knew at the time, wouldn’t have been one I could be proud of.

Not long after that, I had an opportunity to ghostwrite for one of the biggest names in publishing. “You’ll make a lot of money,” my agent told me. “You’ll be a New York Times bestseller.” So, I had to figure out what to do. Write my own stories, even though they didn’t have Mr. Famousguy’s name on the cover, or go ahead and write stories for him, make a ton of money, buy myself some time, and then go write my own books after I’d cashed the check.

It wouldn’t have been immoral. I’m not judging ghostwriters. I have many friends who ghostwrite and I’ve done work for hire myself. In this case, the bigger question was whose stories I was going to spend my life telling. It would have been a lucrative job at a point in my career when I could really have used the money.

At that time, my daughters were young, and one day as we were driving home, I was talking in the front seat with my wife about the possibilities of the ghostwriting.

I guess I didn’t even think they were listening in, but kids have a tendency to do that—especially when we don’t think they are.

When there was finally a pause in our conversation, my youngest daughter asked me, “So what are you going to do, Daddy?” She was maybe five at the time.

I was about to tell her that I was planning to help this other man write his stories, but right before I answered, I felt a nudge deep in my heart to say something different. [Read more…]

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My Guardian Angel of Bread

January 27, 2017 By Liz Michalski

I lost my Guardian Angel of Bread this month. That wasn’t his name, of course. Jimmy, an old-school Italian gentleman, was (it still seems strange to write that) the father of one of my best friends. I met Jimmy when I was in my twenties, a newly minted adult trying to figure life out. By becoming friends with his son and his wife, I was immediately swept into a wider circle that celebrated all of the most important things — good conversation, good wine, and good food.

Jimmy was a great cook. But it’s his bread I remember the most. On one of my first visits, he pulled four perfect, heavenly-scented golden loaves out of the oven. At that stage of my life, I was still a Wonder Bread girl.

“You baked that?” I asked in awe. In reply, he handed me a loaf and a stick of butter. Both disappeared quickly.

After that, I made sure to come around regularly. There was almost always an extra loaf just waiting for me. But Jimmy was a man who prized self-reliance. After a few months of this, he cut me off.

“It’s time for you to learn,” he said. I ignored him and hoped he’d forget. He didn’t. At last, breadless for several months, I reluctantly agreed, and that’s how I found myself spending a whole Saturday on a crash bread-making course. We started at the beginning, measuring water and yeast, letting it proof, mixing in the flour and salt. Jimmy eschewed recipes, which made following along difficult. He also wasn’t a fan of using a mixer, claiming that bread was all about the “touch.” Easy for him to say — he’d worked construction for years, and had the strength and stamina of someone much younger.

I, on the other hand, was quickly exhausted. Kneading was not my thing. He’d given me my own ball of dough to work with, and looking at its diminutive size and raggedy shape, he shook his head.

[Read more…]

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Creating Your Book Talk

January 23, 2017 By Brunonia Barry

With my third book, The Fifth Petal, coming out tomorrow, I’ve finally put the finishing touches on my elevator pitch. I come from a marketing background, so you’d think it would have been the first thing I’d do, but, for each of my books, there could have been at least 5 different quick pitches: some seemingly contradicting others, some so vastly different that you wouldn’t have thought they were for the same book. The one I settled on was this: With modern Salem now home to thousands of neo-witches, could the hysteria happen again? What would a modern day witch-hunt look like in Salem?

I’m not a big fan of elevator pitches, but I understand that they’re a necessary compromise. If you have just a moment to speak, and someone asks what your new novel is about, you’d better have some polished verbiage ready. If you don’t, you’ll have lost a valuable opportunity to spread the word. Not that it does the story justice, there’s always so much more to tell, but a concise pitch can offer a potential reader an invitation to a broader, deeper conversation.

But what do you do when you need to tell them more? As I set out on my book tour, something I haven’t done since 2012, I find myself trying to see the bigger picture. I have one hour at each location to tell my story, do a reading, and conduct a Q&A with the attendees. That all sounds good, but to really talk about the book would take days. So what parts should I reveal, and what should I leave for the reader to discover? What will motivate audience members to read the book for themselves?

Let’s start with a dose of truth. This book took five years to write, and it’s not a simple story. It contains three mysteries, winding through three time periods that move all the way back to Salem’s witch-trials of 1692. The subject matter touched on is vast as well: colonial and European history, witchcraft, murder, music therapy, alcoholism, sound healing, tree lore, biblical references, Norse and Celtic mythology, banshees, non-linear time, psychology, and complex trauma. Even PBS would need a month of nightly specials to cover the same territory.

So how do you include those subjects in your talk without confusing a potential reader? When is less actually more? The elements I listed above weave in and out of the story, providing imagery and building texture, but they in no way describe the narrative. If I tried to speak about them all in my presentation, potential readers would probably run screaming from the building. So how do you find a balance between discussing the broad scope of the novel and getting lost in the weeds?

I’ve learned some of the answers through trial and error. Hopefully, I can make the process easier for you. At least I can let you know what works for me. I’ll share a few dos and don’ts and, wherever possible, I’ll give examples that tie-in to my new novel. [Read more…]

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