Posted on - No Comments on The hows and whys of showing, not telling, or, when it pays to get just a trifle graphic

The hows and whys of showing, not telling, or, when it pays to get just a trifle graphic

Before I launch into today’s disquisition on the ins and outs of showing, rather than telling, an announcement for those of you within driving distance of San Francisco: author, blogger, and FAAB (Friend of Author! Author! Blog) Mark Pritchard will be giving a reading in the City by the Bay this coming Saturday, May 17. For those of you not already familiar with Mark’s Too Beautiful blog might want to run, not walk to his fascinating What Are You Working On? series of author interviews.

Mark will be reading in the Progressive Reading Series at 7:00 pm on Saturday, May 17 at the Makeout Room, 3225 22nd Street at Mission, San Francisco.

And hoo boy, is he ever going to be joined by an impressive line-up of writers who could tell you a thing or two about showing, not telling! Lookee:

Josh Bearman and Starlee Kine (This American Life)
Pam Houston (“Sight Hound,” “Cowboys Are My Weakness”)
Adam Mansbach (“End of the Jews,” “Angry Black White Boy”)
Mark Pritchard
Mary Roach (“Stiff,” “Spook,” “Bonk”)
David West

This evening benefits the campaign against California’s Proposition 98, and advance tickets are highly recommended.

Okay, back to business.

Last time, I argued that in both fiction and nonfiction, readers regard summarized information as less important — to the story, to the argument — than material presented in a more fleshed-out form. This is a pretty darned good reason to follow the old show, don’t tell rule in and of itself: vividly-rendered scenes, striking character development, and detailed proof are simply more memorable than quickly-sketched outlines.

Yes, you did read that correctly: I said character development. For some reason that I have never been able to understand fully, the show, don’t tell axiom and character development are seldom mentioned with in the same breath in writerly circles, or even in the same weekend seminar or composition class.

As an editor, I find this a touch odd, as in the average manuscript — come closer, so I may whisper a trade secret to you — a tendency to draw conclusions for the reader almost invariably detracts from the efficacy of character development. Heck, some professional readers would even say that telling is the natural enemy of character development.

Why? Well, several reasons, most of which dance around the issue of how people tend to read.

To understand the first reason, we need go no farther than to the opening paragraph of this post: as anyone who has ever tried to slog through a poorly-written textbook can tell you, readers are less likely to remember (read: think that they will need to remember) information presented as generalities than the same collection of facts enlivened by specifics.

Which means, in practice, that conclusions about a character tend to slip out of a reader’s mind. As you may recall from yesterday, a passage like:

Eustace was an inveterate coward, a hider behind matronly hips that had for many years been too narrow to provide truly effective concealment for his ever-increasing girth. He didn’t particularly care whose hips they were — Mom’s, his sister Rose’s, his girlfriend or wife du jour’s – so long as they were balanced between him and the frightening world.

may be amusing in the moment, but it’s unlikely to stick in the reader’s mind as anything but a pretty passage of prose. If Eustace were an important character, even a single scene that SHOWED him acting cowardly would establish this trait far more effectively than even four or five repetitions of simple assertions about it scattered throughout the text.

Why do I bring up the possibility of this much repetition? Because, alas, many aspiring writers confuse tellin} the reader what a character is like with character development.

But when the pros talk about character development, they don’t usually have broad summary statements in mind. (Yes, even if they don’t say so explicitly.) They’re generally thinking of the many, many different tiny, revealing, and delightful details a writer could use to show what a particular character is like — and how s/he grows and changes throughout the book.

This ideal should not be confused, of course, with the kind of narrative that showers the reader with a million and twelve tiny facts, each presented as equally important. That tends not to go over so well.

Especially — brace yourselves; here comes Millicent — in those all-important first few pages that determine whether a submission gets rejected out of hand or given a fuller reading. Writers seem particularly fond of overloading the reader with physical and environmental descriptions in early chapters, as if everything that could possibly be seen needs to appear in the reader’s first glimpse of the protagonist or can never be mentioned at all.

Let’s take a gander at how the average submission might introduce poor Eustace:

Whey-faced Eustace went more than usually pale, his already-pasty cheeks draining of what little blood had managed to work its way up from its customary pooling place farther south, in the region of the stomach his mother kept so well supplied and the acid-washed jeans in which she still ironed a lovingly uncool razor-sharp crease every morning. Certainly, his blood did not seem to be in the habit of regularly visiting his brain, where it might conceivably have provided some much-needed R&R to the synapses and corpuscles that would have been in charge of critical analysis in a better-lubricated mind. His reddish-blond hair, never too good a scalp covering even in its heyday, now seemed to be fleeing his astonishingly full eyebrows with all possible dispatch. If his chest hair had any aspirations to assert itself, it was still working up the nerve under his carefully-starched button-down shirts — fourteen of them hung lankly in his cedar-stuffed closet, awaiting Mom’s magical touch with spray starch. His shoes, shined to within an inch of their lives — a good trick, with sneakers — all pointed their toes toward the closet door, the front hallway, and the world beyond, as if they felt that Eustace’s timidity were the only thing keeping them from the life of adventure they deserved.

All RIGHT, already: we get the picture. We also would have gotten the picture with half as many details.

Don’t buy it? Okay, here’s a pop quiz: cover the last example and try to list all of Eustace’s physical and sartorial traits in the order they appeared. Difficult, isn’t it?

That’s not the fault of any of the individual details, incidentally. The problem here is one of emphasis — and presentation.

Too many facts in a row simply become a list, in the reader’s mind. By a couple of lines in, all of that information starts to blur together, encouraging — dare I say it? — skimming.

Faced with this kind of reaction (as well as the dread prospect of agents’ turning pale at manuscripts much over 100,000 words), many writers rush to the opposite extreme, cutting details to the proverbial bone in an effort to streamline their work.

Which isn’t necessarily going to improve the manuscript, if emphasis is the problem. What will solve it is removing non-revealing details that only serve to distract from what the writer wants the reader to take from the scene.

That last set of observations raised some hackles out there, didn’t it? “But Anne,” I hear some of the behackled exclaim, “I hate to quibble, but first you tell us not to summarize essential character information, but instead to reveal character through a plethora of details — and then you turn around insist that too many details are the kiss of death. How will I know when my manuscript has reached the right balance between detail and summary?”

Great question, raised hacklers, and one that richly deserves an answer. Unfortunately (and contrary to some writing guides out there promoting the {show, don’t tell} path of righteousness}, there isn’t a magic formula that can be applied to every manuscript.

Time to call in the first readers, in other words.

That advice didn’t sooth all that many savage breasts, did it? “Okay, Anne,” my former questioners continue through gritted teeth, “I can try to accept that. But when I gave my manuscript to my mother/sister/best friend/husband/some total stranger I happened to meet at the café down the street, I noticed that s/he didn’t seem to have all that great a memory for the details you told me to use to reveal character. Why, it says very plainly in Ch. 2 that Dorothea is my protagonist’s lover’s cousin’s au pair, but without exception, all of my feedback-givers wrote, “Who’s this?” in the margin when Dorothea appeared again in Ch. 27.”

Oh, honeys, I hope you’re sitting down, because I have some potentially disturbing news for you: most people don’t actually read every single syllable of a book, much less absorb the impact of every single sentence.

Or, to put it another way, just because a writer mentions something on a page doesn’t mean that any given reader — even a very good one who takes notes as she reads, like yours truly — will necessarily remember it all the way through the reading process.

I hope that didn’t make anyone out there faint.

Seriously, few aspiring writers seem aware of this phenomenon — come to think of it, plenty of published authors are apparently unaware of it as well. The overwhelming writerly tendency is to assume that reader is absorbing every word — otherwise, observations like what do you mean, you don’t know who Dorothea is? She was mentioned in passing 117 pages ago! simply wouldn’t make any sense, right?

You know me — I’m pretty much always on the writer’s side, right? As much as I love creative souls, I must admit that I tend to attribute this attitude to writerly ego: I wrote it, therefore it’s important.

But this isn’t always the message a manuscript is sending to the reader. One of the reasons that summaries make for less effective character development because readers are (for the most part, anyway) quite good at picking up authorial signals about what is and isn’t significant in a text.

Take, for example, the following passage from John Irving’s THE CIDER HOUSE RULES — which should be required reading, I think, for anyone who has fallen in love with 19th-century narrative styles and is trying to implement them now. It’s as jam-packed a sample of character development as you’re ever likely to see in print. Read it over, please:

You had only to know her to know that she was not a Candy; she was lovely, but never falsely sweet; she was a great and natural beauty, but no crowd-pleaser. She had daily reliability written all over her, she was at once friendly and practical — she was courteous, energetic, and substantial in an argument without ever being shrill. She complained only about her name, and she was always good-humored about it (she would never hurt her father’s feelings — or any one else’s feelings, willingly. She appeared to combine her father’s enraptured embrace of the work ethic with the education and the refinements he had allowed her — she took to both labor and sophistication with ease.

Based upon the style here, just how important a role would you expect Candy to play in the rest of the book?

Usually, a character whose traits are introduced in summary is a minor one — but Candy’s actually the most important female character in the book. Leaving aside for the moment the fact that mentioning that a female character speaks without ever being shrill or without ever sounding strident is usually code for her not holding radical feminist views like expecting to be paid for her work or be allowed to vote — or at least not holding them strongly enough to make an issue of them — what message do you think Mssr. Irving is sending the reader here by summarizing so much character development that he could easily have shown through action?

Okay, so maybe that’s not really a fair question to ask folks who may not have read the entire book, but as I have, I’ll hazard a guess: to give the reader a heads-up that Candy is going to be a fairly passive (if complex) character, acted-upon rather than acting.

Of course, that could just be my bias. But I did notice that in the movie version — based upon a screenplay by Mssr. Irving himself — virtually all of Candy’s complexity had been stripped away, her motivation for a life-changing affair with the protagonist reduced to a single line of dialogue thrice repeated in the script: “I’m not good at being alone.”

In other words, the character prefers to be acted-upon than act.

I intend no disrespect to Mssr. Irving (whose work I have loved for years, including this book), but even in a screenplay, wouldn’t it have been pretty easy to show this particular personal preference rather than simply tell about it — say, by placing the character in situations where she chooses to let others act for her?

In a manuscript, the answer is an unequivocal YES — or at any rate, should be, because it’s significantly easier for the reader to envision — and thus remember — characteristics based upon telling details than upon flat assertions.

Allow me to illustrate.

When I was a teaching fellow at a major football school that shall remain nameless (go, Huskies!), the professor whose discussion sections I was leading saw fit to assign a simply dreadful (and dreadfully simple-minded) article about how the great strength of American capitalism was that everybody could find personal fulfillment, because the market was so complex that whatever each of us wanted to sell, there would be someone out there willing to buy.

Not altogether surprisingly, my students were rather confused by this argument; it was my job to come up with a practical example to illustrate the principle. So I told them about a certain distant cousin of mine who, thanks to quite a nice singing voice, an unusual personal preference to appear in public with very little on, and the career-extending blessings of silicone implants, managed to carve out a niche for herself for many years as arguably the world’s most famous topless singer.

Think my students had any trouble remembering THAT example? Heck, when I bump into one of them on the street now, years later, there’s a better than even chance that s/he will mention it.

More to the point, every single one of them used Cousin Carol as an argumentative example on the final exam — even, amusingly enough, the students who evidently misremembered the point of the article.

Now THAT’s a telling set of details.

But that doesn’t really address the question of balance, does it? Do you still have that hard copy of your manuscript handy?

Here’s a radical revision idea: flip through it until you find a scene where it’s imperative that the reader understand that the character(s) involved has certain personality traits. Better yet, identify several scenes. At the top of each page, write a single sentence — no cheating; just one — about what you would like the reader to take away from it.

Not EVERYTHING the reader COULD take away from it, mind you — just the most important single point. (Hint: if you favor summary statements, you may already have a sentence per page that serves this function.)

Whip out your trusty highlighter pen and mark all of the character-revealing sentences. Go back through the pages, underlining all of the summary statements and circling the details.

Now read the scene(s), skipping the summary statements. Is the vital information for each page still coming across? If not, could you add a few telling details that would help bolster your point better than reinstating the summaries?

Next, take a look at the details. Are all of them necessary to make the crucial point? Or would adding a few more clarify the conclusions the reader should be drawing at that point of the text?

Stop right there: part of your brain is still trying to figure out what a topless singer would actually DO in her act, isn’t it? (And to forestall your next question: no, I never caught the act — I was in diapers at the height of my cousin’s fame — so I can’t provide satisfactory answers about it. Believe me, my students asked ALL THE TIME.)

That’s the power of a really good illustration of character, my friends: it sticks in the reader’s mind long after s/he has read it, and thus is easy to recall even 25 chapters later. But if every detail were as vivid, or if there were too many of them, the reader might have difficulty remembering necessary information throughout an entire storyline.

Be selective. Provide killer details that paint an indelible picture. And, of course, keep up the good work!

Posted on - No Comments on Book out TODAY from one of our own — and a writing contest!

Book out TODAY from one of our own — and a writing contest!

Another post on craft follows soon, of course, but I wanted to get the trumpets blowing as soon as possible: the ever-fabulous Joel Derfner, better known to those of us here at Author! Author! as the prolific commenter and blogger extraordinaire Faustus, M.D. has a hilarious memoir coming out today from Random House’s Broadway Books!

Congratulations, Dr. F! Please join me, everyone, in a great big round of applause.

If you live in or around New York, Joel will be reading TONIGHT at 7:30 pm at the Barnes & Noble at 396 Avenue of the Americas . (if you’re like me and rely upon the kindness of strangers to navigate the isle of Manhattan, tell the cabbie that you’d like to go to 6th Avenue and 8th Street.) I have it on pretty good authority that in addition to being a hilarious reader, he also bakes a mean brownie; there may be some baked goods in evidence.

SWISH (which may be purchased from today onward from Amazon, Powell’s, and other fine book emporia) is Joel’s second book, following hard upon the heels of the must-be-experienced-first-hand GAY HAIKU.

Take a gander at the publisher’s blurb for SWISH:

Joel Derfner is gayer than you.

Don’t feel too bad about it, though, because he has made being gayer than you his life’s work. At summer day camp, when he was six, Derfner tried to sign up for needlepoint and flower arranging, but the camp counselors wouldn’t let him, because, they said, those activities were for girls only. Derfner, just to be contrary, embarked that very day on a solemn and sacred quest: to become the gayest person ever. Along the way he has become a fierce knitter, an even fiercer musical theater composer, and so totally the fiercest step aerobics instructor (just ask him—he’ll tell you himself).

In SWISH, Derfner takes his readers on a flamboyant adventure along the glitter-strewn road from fabulous to divine. Whether he’s confronting the demons of his past at a GLBT summer camp, using the Internet to “meet” men—many, many men—or plunging headfirst (and nearly naked) into the shady world of go-go dancing, he reveals himself with every gayer-than-thou flourish to be not just a stylish explorer but also a fearless one. So fearless, in fact, that when he sneaks into a conference for people who want to cure themselves of their homosexuality, he turns the experience into one of the most fascinating, deeply moving chapters of the book. Derfner, like King Arthur, Christopher Columbus, and Indiana Jones—but with a better haircut and a much deeper commitment to fad diets—is a hero destined for legend.

Written with wicked humor and keen insight, Swish is at once a hilarious look at contemporary ideas about gay culture and a poignant exploration of identity that will speak to all readers—gay, straight, and in between.

I don’t generally review books here, but I am going to bend my own rules a little in this instance to recommend this book to any of you out there who aspire to write either comedy or memoir, as well as to those enamored of a good laugh. Rarely have I seen a memoirist’s personality emerge so charmingly on the printed page — or so honestly. Over and above Joel’s talent with an outrageous turn of phrase and genuine gift for humor (which is, alas, granted less often by the muse Thalia than those of us who like to read comedy might like), this is a darned fine piece of memoir writing.

So fair warning, Dr. F: I’m going to be blandishing you mercilessly for a guest post on the subject. After your book tour, of course.

In the meantime, I promised you a writing contest, didn’t I? And a contest you shall have. Quoth Joel:

The First Annual Gay-Off

In the introduction to SWISH, I explain that my quest to become the gayest person ever did not turn out to be an unqualified success—which means that the position of the Gayest Person Ever is still open. So I’m having a Gay-Off.

If you’re interested in competing, log onto my website and send me a brief explanation (up to 100 words) of why you should be crowned this year’s Gayest Person Ever. Note, please, that in order to enter you do not have to be gay or even, I suppose, a person. The Gayest Person Ever describes an existential state, irrespective of plumbing and flavor.

The last day to send in entries is Tuesday, June 10. On Friday the 13th, I’ll post the top five entries (as determined by an independent panel of judges) on my website, and from then through the end of Gay Pride (Sunday, June 29) you can vote for your favorite.

At the moment I’m planning prizes as follows: the grand prize is a signed copy of Swish, a signed copy of my first book, Gay Haiku, a Swish T-shirt, a gay haiku written for the winner, and, depending on geographic location, a tin of homemade brownies made with loving care by me. Second prize a signed copy of Swish, a Swish T-shirt, a gay haiku written for the winner, and a tin of brownies slightly inferior to the tin the Grand Prize winner gets. Third prize is a Swish T-shirt, a gay haiku written for the winner, and a tin of brownies slightly inferior to the tin the Second Prize winner gets. However, the actual prizes may be different from this, like if I eat the brownies or something.

Good luck, and may the Gayest Person win!

See, I wasn’t kidding about the brownies. Should be a lot of fun — and it’s never a bad idea to run your work under the eyes of folks who already have agents, even if it’s just 100 words.

Congratulations, Dr. F, and please keep all of us here at Author! Author! posted on your book’s success!

Posted on - 5 Comments on Still more on contest entries: the ins and outs of category selection

Still more on contest entries: the ins and outs of category selection

magnifying-glass.jpg

After yesterday’s epic post on the various means contest entries tend to annoy the average judge, I’m going to try to limit myself to merely waxing mildly poetic today. It’s going to be hard, though, because I’m continuing the seldom-discussed but vitriol-stained topic of finding the right category in which to enter your work.

I hear some snickering out there already. “Vitriol-stained?” some head-shakers out there are murmuring. “Just a tad melodramatic, isn’t it?”

Actually, it isn’t — at least, not from the perspective of a conscientious contest judge, the kind who volunteers because gosh darn it, s/he wants to be there when the next Great American Novel is first discovered.

Wipe that smirk off your face. Being a contest judge, particularly for the first round, is typically a great big time commitment, and the stalwart souls who embrace it often do it for the love of literature, community, and humanity. Or an unvarnished affection for jumping upon those who mangle the English language.

Either way, there’s usually a passion for the written word smoldering under those judges’ robes. Which is precisely why it’s so darned disappointing when a beautifully-written entry knocks itself out of finalist consideration by being submitted to the wrong category.

Now, I’m the first to admit that it’s not unheard-of for judges to harbor some kind of squirrelly ideas of what does and doesn’t belong in a particular contest category. This is not altogether surprising, particularly for fiction, as it’s far from unusual for even the pros to disagree upon what book category would most comfortable house a particular book.

If you doubt this, you probably haven’t tried to establish a book category for your opus. For those of you who don’t know, book categories are how the industry thinks of potentially publishable work, the conceptual containers into which it is sorted — or, to put it another way, the shelf where the book would rest in a local bookstore. (For how to tell which is which, as well as where this information is likely to be found on a published book, please see the BOOK CATEGORIES listing at right.)

Due to this pervasive mindset, a writer needs to be able to say up front into what category her book would logically fall in order to query, pitch, or submit successfully in the U.S. market.

Why? Well, since generalist agents are very rare — it would be flatly too time-consuming to establish connections for more than a few types of book — book categories enable them to avoid wasting time upon submissions they do not already have the connections to place successfully.

If an agent represents only mysteries and SF/Fantasy, it would be a waste of good stationary to send him a query for literary fiction, wouldn’t it?

While contest categories tend to be far broader than the industry’s, lumping a handful together, that doesn’t mean that they don’t have the publishing world’s standards in mind. There’s an awfully good reason for this: final-round contest judges (the ones who read only the finalists’ entries) are often agents, editors, or authors who work on a daily basis with a particular category. The early-round judges, aware of this, tend to weed out entries that don’t fit neatly into the applicable book categories long before the finalist round.

That way, the logic goes, the final-round judges will be presented only with works that stand a fighting chance of getting published as sterling representatives of the best current writing in their respective categories.

If the contest of your choice does not actually list the book categories that belong within each of its contest categories, contact the organization and ask for such a list. Or — if you have already firmly categorized your work in industry terms, give your category and ask which part of the contest would best fit for it.

(Hint: you’ll probably get a substantially friendlier response to this question if you DON’T give a three-minute summary of your book — and DON’T ask it four days before the entry deadline. This is research best done well in advance, and armed in advance with a one- or two-word category description.)

It may seem pushy to ask for this information, but if a contest-throwing organization is serious about seeing its winners get published, this is an important question. After all, from the entrant’s point of view, a contest win is only as valuable as the connections it can bring.

What do I mean by that, you ask? Ideally, you want to win a contest that is recognized in the industry as a stellar judge of writing in your chosen book category. If, for instance, the organization’s definition of genre fiction doesn’t include Action/Adventure, not only is even the best Action/Adventure entry unlikely to win — agents and editors who sell that book category are not likely to be aware of the contest, either.

Think about it: which credential is going to do your book more good on your query letter, being a semifinalist in a contest that any agent in your book’s category would have known about for years, or in a contest of which the agent of your dreams has never even heard?

Trust me, if a contest has a good track record for identifying wonderful work within a particular book category, the agents and editors who handle that kind of book WILL have heard of it.

“But Anne,” I hear some of you with complex books offer timidly, “I thought you said just a couple of minutes ago that there’s often disagreement amongst the pros about the right category for a particular book. If a contest category is nebulous, isn’t there likely to be even greater disagreement?”

In a word, yes. In five words: it happens all the time. Let’s face it, category standards along the lines of we accept good fiction of every type aren’t that helpful to the writer trying to determine which contest to enter, are they?

Most contests are more specific than this, thank goodness — but it does pay to be aware that when a description refers to a particular book category, it’s seldom doing it idly. Don’t be mislead by a general category heading like Genre Fiction into thinking that any genre is welcome; this is seldom the case.

Again, read the description underneath that heading very carefully: it will probably mention the book categories that the contest organizers are expecting to see.

Because, frankly, in most cases of poor category fits, it’s not a near miss so much as trying to cram a size 14 foot into a size 6 shoe. You would be astonished — at least, I hope you would — at how often writers send work in apparently willy-nilly, trying to force their pages into a category where, by definition, their chances of winning are close to zero.

This is just an inefficient use of an entry fee.

To put it another way, this is not a situation where playing rules lawyer — “But Category 5 was entitled FICTION! How was I to know that didn’t include haiku? Both came out of my imagination!” — is at all likely to help you. As I mentioned a few days ago, there isn’t a court of appeal here: if a judge thinks that your entry doesn’t fit into the category where you entered it, you’re just out of luck.

So, once again: read every syllable of a contest’s literature very, very carefully. Particularly those category definitions.

I’m not just talking about those ultra-brief definitions that tend to grace entry forms, either. Take the time to read EVERYTHING that a contest’s website or literature says about your chosen category, to make sure that your book is, in fact, admissible.

Fair warning: what I am about to say next is extremely likely to drive literal-minded readers completely nuts, but why not consider the possibility that the category you had envisioned for your work after publication — i.e., where YOU had envisioned its being shelved in a bookstore or library after you are famous — might not be the best category in any given contest for you?

Did I just hear a collective gasp out there? “Who are you?” I hear the hyper-literal cry, “and what have you done with Anne? Haven’t you been the long-time advocate of labeling your work as accurately as possible AND in the industry’s favorite terms? Should we check your basement for pods?”

Well, yes — and defining your book with precision still the best strategy when you’re approaching an agent or editor.

However, as I mentioned above, contests often divide the literary world differently than publishing professionals do. Frequently, they use categories that have not been current since Edith Wharton won the Pulitzer. (Quick, tell me: if it were being marketed now, would THE AGE OF INNOCENCE be mainstream fiction, literary fiction, or women’s fiction?)

Here’s a radical idea: pick the CONTEST category that makes the most strategic sense, regardless of your book’s MARKETING category.

Honestly, this prospect should not make you hyperventilate; agents do this to their clients’ work all the time. Remember, the label you give the entry today is not necessarily going to stick with the book for the rest of its life, and there’s absolutely no reason that you should send agents precisely the same pages that you enter in a contest.

Take a little time, and be imaginative about it. The line between memoir and first-person narrative, for instance, can be notoriously thin. Heck, even the fine folks at Random House didn’t seem to be able to tell the difference with A MILLION LITTLE PIECES, did they? (A book that was, as I understand it, originally marketed as a novel, not a memoir.)

And there can be a very good reason to consider other categories for your work. Not to tell tales out of school, but in most contests that accept book-length works, the fiction categories tend to get more entries than the nonfiction ones.

As in SUBTANTIALLY more entries. Sometimes as in five or ten times as many, which obviously has a direct bearing on any individual entry’s chances of making the finalist round.

But mum’s the word, okay?

So why not take a good, hard look at your first chapter of your novel or memoir and ask yourself: how much would I have to change this to enter it in the other category as well? What about the nonfiction short piece category?

Is your novel really mainstream, or is it actually romance? Could it be entered as both?

If the contest offers a novel-in-progress category (as the Wisdom/Faulkner competition does, incidentally; they also have a novella category, in case you’re interested), would your barely-finished book do better there, or against the fully polished novels?

And so forth. The goal here is to gain a win to put on your writing resume and in your query letters, not to force your work into the category you have pre-selected for it.

Yes, there is usually more prestige attached to book-length categories, but, frankly, in major contests, that’s where the competition tends to be the fiercest. If a shorter-length category seems to offer you a better conceptual fit or better odds, it’s sometimes worth switching. Or multiply submitting.

In a word, be flexible. Get the win on your résumé however you can.

One of the best memoirs I have ever read, Barbara Robinette Moss’ astonishing CHANGE ME INTO ZEUS’ DAUGHTER, found its publisher because its downright lyrical first chapter won in the personal essay category in the Faulkner competition.

That was smart contest selection — and a well-deserved win. (Seriously, this is one of the books that made me long to write memoir in the first place. I certainly did not fully appreciate the art form until I read it. It’s gorgeous and painful and brilliant in a way few books manage to be.)

This is not to say that you should rush out and enter exactly the same piece in, say, both the mainstream novel and novel-in-progress categories of the same competition, or in both the genre novel and mystery short story categories.

Again, READ THE RULES. Most contests will not allow you to enter the same work in multiple categories, but some will, so check the contest rules carefully before you spend the extra entrance fee.

You didn’t hear it from me, of course, but it is not unheard-of for authors to get away with this sort of double-dipping even when it’s forbidden, if the pieces have different titles. Of course, this is terribly, terribly immoral even to consider, but often, it works.

Why? Well, most of the time, the bureaucratic part of accepting an entry entails merely noting the author’s name and title, assigning numbers so the judges don’t know who wrote what, sending the entry to the appropriate category chair, and cashing the check. So until the pieces land on the various category judges’ desks, it’s possible that no one will have read them. And it’s not as though the judges in one category discuss the entries they are reading with the judges in another.

The utterly despicable result: when an unscrupulous author is bright enough to give different titles to remarkably similar entries and perhaps mail them in separate envelopes, it is highly unlikely that anyone in the front office will have the opportunity to notice that the two distinct entries are, in fact, the same work.

Totally unethical, of course; I would have to scold anyone who did that. Or anyone clever enough to revise the work just enough between entries that, say, there weren’t more than 50 consecutive words in a row that were identical. That’s maybe one word per paragraph.

Ooh, I would have to wag my finger over anyone who went that route, boy oh boy. Really, I would. That would be just a shade too professional to be merely clever.

Well, darn: it doesn’t look as though I could manage to be brief on the subject today, either. Keep up the good work!

Posted on - 4 Comments on So you’re considering self-publishing, part II: how does one go about it, anyway?

So you’re considering self-publishing, part II: how does one go about it, anyway?

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Yesterday, I began a discussion about self-publishing with two authors who have taken the plunge this year, fellow blogger and memoirist Beren deMotier and novelist Mary Hutchings Reed. Both are prolific, award-winning writers who have been fighting the good fight along with the rest of us for many years, so who better to ask the question that has been on so many writers’ minds over the last couple of years: what precisely is it like to self-publish?

Today, we’re going to discuss the practicalities of self-publishing, particularly how one goes about finding a reputable press. But before we get started, please help me welcome back our panelists. And because they are, after all, doing us a great big favor here, let’s recap what they have published and where one might conceivably go to buy it.

Beren deMotier is the author of THE BRIDES OF MARCH. It’s available on Amazon, of course, but because I always like to plug a good independent bookstore, here’s a link to the book’s page at Powell’s, too.

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The Brides of March: Memoir of a Same-Sex Marriage is a lesbian bride’s eye view of marriage at a moment’s notice, with a bevy of brides, their coterie of children, donuts, newspaper reporters, screaming protesters, mothers of the brides who never thought they’d see the day, white wedding cake, and a houseful of happy heterosexuals toasting the marriage. But that was only the beginning as these private declarations of love became public fodder, fueling social commentary, letters to the editor, and the fires of political debate, when all the brides wanted was the opportunity to say “I do” in this candid, poignant, and frequently funny tale of lesbian moms getting to the church on time in Multnomah County.

In addition to her fine memoir, Beren also has written humor/social commentary for Curve, And Baby, Pride Parenting, Greenlight.com, www.ehow.com, as well as for GLBT newspapers across the nation. She’s written about same-sex marriage for over a decade, and couldn’t resist writing the bride’s eye view after marrying in Multnomah County. She lives in Portland, Oregon, with her spouse of twenty-one years, their three children, and a Labrador the size of a small horse.

Mary Hutchings Reed, if you’ll recall, is the author of COURTING KATHLEEN HANNIGAN, which is being described as ONE L for women lawyers:

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Courting Kathleen Hannigan tells the story of an ambitious woman lawyer, one of the first to join a male-dominated national law firm in the late seventies, whose rise to the top is threatened by a sex discrimination suit brought against the firm by a junior woman lawyer who is passed over for partnership because she doesn’t wear make-up or jewelry. When Kathleen Hannigan is called to testify, she is faced with a choice between her feminist principles and her own career success. Courting Kathleen Hannigan is a story for women and minorities everywhere who are curious about the social history of women in law, business and the professions, institutional firm cultures, and the sexual politics of businesses and law firms.

In addition to a writing schedule that would make most of our heads spin, Mary has spent the last thirty-one years of practicing law, first with Sidley & Austin and then with Winston & Strawn, two of the largest firms in Chicago. She was a partner at both in the advertising, trademark, copyright, entertainment and sports law areas, and now is Of counsel to Winston, which gives her time to write, do community service (BUCKETS of it) and pursue hobbies such as golf, sailing, tennis, and bridge.

In short, in addition to being good writers brave enough to publish their own work, these are two incredibly busy people, so many thanks to both for taking the time to let me pepper them with questions. Let’s leap right into the nitty-gritty:

Anne: Last time, we talked a little bit about why each of you chose to pursue the self-publishing route, and what kinds of specialized obstacles your unusual subject matter placed in your books’ paths. Since so many of our community here at Author! Author! can identify with the experience of sending out query after query, let’s take a moment to talk about how you went about marketing the book to agents before you made the choice to self-publish.

You’re both very experienced, professional-minded writers — is it fair to assume that you went about it in the traditional way? I always like to ask this, just in case some brilliant soul has found a clever way to bypass this often drawn-out process. You’re shaking your heads and laughing — no such luck?

Beren: I used the Guide or Writers Market…

Anne: Ah, the sacred texts.

Beren: …after checking online to see if the information was still accurate. If they wanted a one-page query letter, I sent that; if they wanted a book proposal, I sent that. Often, a query would lead to chapters and chapters to the whole manuscript, but not to a book contract.

Mary: I went to workshops and learned how to meet agents; I sent a lot of queries.

Anne: So you both went about it the right way. Given the original nature of your story and how evident it was that your book was going to stir up some pretty strong emotions in readers, were you were you surprised at the responses you received from agents and editors?

Mary: I was surprised more agents didn’t see right away that career women in book clubs would love Courting Kathleen Hannigan. But I didn’t get much advice from them, and not useful. The comment “in the end I failed to connect to the material” isn’t very helpful.

And don’t forget I did have an agent for Courting Kathleen Hannigan (here in Chicago), who worked with me all of 2002 to get it where she wanted it for publication, and then she died in early 2003.

Anne: I remember when it happened: one day, you had a great agent, and the next day, you didn’t have one at all, and had to start the whole process over again. You bounced back really well, though, as I recall.

Mary: It was a shock, and I put the whole selling thing on hold for a while. I got involved with other projects and only gradually got back into trying to interest an agent in this work, and then moved on to trying to sell my next works.

Anne: That’s one reason I really wanted to interview you here; we writers are so conditioned to believe that once we land an agent, we don’t need a Plan B. But that’s not necessarily the case, no matter how talented a writer you are — so much of this process is out of our control.

Before we talk about Plan B, though, I want to ask a follow-up about submitting to agents. How much feedback did you actually get, and was any of it helpful?

Beren: There was a wonderful agent who gave my book three chances—she looked at and read three incarnations, which is a lot of time to give a project, but ultimately her comment was, ”You’d have a better time selling this project if you were an alcoholic single mother.”

Anne: Oh, that’s very helpful. I know perfectly well that agents usually say things like this not intending them to be taken seriously as revision suggestions, but to excuse their passing on a well-written book, but don’t statements like this just set your mind whirring with the possibilities? Surely, she wasn’t actually suggesting that you add false memories to your memoir to make it easier to sell, any more than she was suggesting that you should look into alcoholism as a career-enhancing move, but I have to say, those comebacks certainly would have occurred to me.

Beren: She felt that there wasn’t a big enough “problem” in the story—no one died, no one went to jail—and so she couldn’t sell it. I had some similar reactions from others, and it was shocking to me that being denied one’s civil rights and getting constitutionally designated as unworthy of marriage (and all the bitter pain that involved) wasn’t a big enough “problem.” I wonder if they had read the whole book, because the ups and downs aren’t apparent in the beginning—perhaps that was a mistake—but I wanted to tell it as it was experienced.

Anne: In other words, as a memoir; as a memoirist myself, I completely get wanting to tell the story from the inside-out, to place the reader inside a world s/he has never experienced before.

What about you, Mary? Any useful feedback?

Mary: The most helpful advice from any agent, of course, was from Jane Jordan Brown before she died. That was to get it down to 300 pages.

I got a ton of feedback from Enid Powell, from my workshop fellows, from a couple different paid services (as I recall) and then from my non-writing, women-lawyer friends. All feedback is helpful, either to confirm your confidence in your own work or to give you insight into what can be done better or more clearly.

Anne: I’m about to ask a totally insensitive question, but one that I’m sure many of my readers are going to be too polite to write in and ask. Did you ever consider just giving up on this project, when it did not receive the response from agents and editors that it deserved?

Beren: Oh yes, I did consider just giving up. Especially since writing about same-sex marriage for a couple of years kept the pain of having the marriage annulled alive, and kept me conscious of every mean letter to the editor or hopeful legislation. Partially what kept me going was a stubborn streak and pride, to give up would have been to admit that I thought the project was unworthy of publication or readership.

There were times I closed up my files and left my desk to collect dust between query waves, but even one positive thing kept me going—a compliment from a friend on the book, a nice note at the end of a rejection letter, the publication of one of my editorials on the subject. Keeping a lot of balls in the air about the book kept it a live project, even when I thought I was done with the actual writing.

Anne: It’s SO important to keep moving forward. If I hadn’t had a novel to revise and a blog to write after my memoir was hit with the lawsuit threats, I can’t imagine how I would have coped. Work can be a positive blessing in the midst of book turmoil. That, and reminding oneself that a setback on the road to publication doesn’t necessarily mean that the book doesn’t have an audience waiting out there to be moved or helped by it.

Mary: What keeps me going is the pure enjoyment and satisfaction I get from writing. It is, for me, soul-making.

Anne: What a nice way to put it. That scratching sound you hear is me writing that down, very possibly to steal it for my next class.

Mary:In a sense, I did give up on finding a commercial publisher. I published it privately because I finally got my own ego out of the way and the time felt right. Some part of me also wanted to be able to give it to my librarian-mother, who was losing her memory. Even though we published it in about a 75-day turnaround, she unfortunately didn’t quite get it, even with my picture on the back. But the nurses in her Alzheimer’s unit loved it!!

Which was a gift—convincing me that there was an audience way beyond just “lady lawyers.”

Anne: Which to my eye, it very clearly does. I don’t understand why it wasn’t obvious to agents in both your cases that people like me — who read a great deal by living writers, but who are neither likely to be practicing law in a high-powered firm or marrying people of the same sex — would be the audience for these books. I already know about people whose experiences are just like mine — I want books that will introduce me to points of view other than my own.

Somehow, I doubt I’m the only habitual book-buyer in North America who fosters that preference.

Let’s talk about your segue into Plan B. What were your feelings about self-publication prior to this project? Had you ever considered it before, and do you think your advance impression of it was accurate?

Beren: I did think of self-publishing as vanity publishing until recently. And to vanity publish would have been a shameful thing to me, an admission that I couldn’t cut it. So yeah, I had baggage.

Mary: My impression was that–as they say in the books—it’s all about the writing, and if the writing is good, you’ll get published—so I thought of self-publishing as a failure. That good writing will always get published commercially just isn’t true. I got lots of compliments on my writing, from lots of highly-regarded agents and publishers—but they didn’t know how they would “sell” my work. They apparently don’t find it all that easy to sell plain old “good writing.“

Anne: There have been plenty of periods in publishing history when it has been pretty darned hard to sell plain old good writing. Just ask anyone who tried to sell a memoir just after the A MILLION LITTLE PIECES scandal. It’s just one of the facts of the business.

Beren: I’ve wanted to be published since I was ten; my grandfather was a successful novelist and screenwriter, so I’ve been aware of the business side of writing from an early age. This wasn’t the first book I queried, and with those others I considered self-publication, but wisely knew it wasn’t the right time or the right project. They weren’t good enough.

Mary: Several friends of mine self-published and had fun with it. One sold 4000 copies by hand in less than two years.

Anne: Wow — that’s practically unheard-of. I’ve always heard that most self-published books sell under 500 copies ever. You’re talking about Erin Goseer Mitchell, right?

Mary: Yes. Her book, Born Colored. is about growing up in Selma before Bloody Sunday—she knew her audience, and wanted to tell the story of the strength and dignity of the black community which made the civil rights movement possible.

In the same way, I thought I knew my audience, and that I should be able to sell a couple thousand copies. If I don’t believe I can, why would a publisher believe they could?

Anne: That’s an interesting way to think of self-publishing.

Mary: I don’t exactly use the words “self-publishing.” While I financed the publication and am primarily responsible for marketing, my publisher, Ampersand, Inc., doesn’t publish everything they are asked to publish. She picks and chooses the products to which she will lend the Ampersand name. We’ve coined the term “privately published.”

Anne: I like that; it sounds very Edwardian.

Let’s talk about how one goes about getting a book privately published, then. How did you go about finding a press to use, and why did you pick your press? What did it offer you that others didn’t?

Beren: I did quite a lot of research on self-publishing before committing. Looking at writing books and online reviews of publishing companies, it was clear there were some that rose to the top of the list, including iUniverse and Infinity Publishing. Amazon.com had just started publishing books, too, through Booksurge, and it had a lot to offer—it was a hard decision between iUniverse and them.

Ultimately, iUniverse offered the chance to have a book distributed on standard wholesale terms basis if you sold 500 copies, and I was pretty sure I could do that, plus the initial cost was much lower. Booksurge is astoundingly expensive compared to some POD publishers, but they have a lot to offer.

Mary: My friend founded Ampersand. She’d been in publishing all her life (as president of an educational publishing company), and had turned out highly professional projects for a couple other people I know. It’s more expensive than publishing on demand, but the product itself and the marketing materials have very high production values. I may have been able to figure out how to put together a book, and go to a printer and get my own ISBN and all that, but the physical product would not have been nearly as professional and classy as the one Ampersand produced. Plus, it’s a better use of my time to do what I do—practice law—and pay her to do what she does.

Anne: It’s great that you had someone you already knew you could trust.

Mary: I’m suggesting it’s not a matter of printing or finding a good press or the right print-on-demand. I think it’s finding a publishing professional, like Susie Isaacs at Ampersand here in Chicago to make the product indistinguishable from a commercially-published book.

Anne: Not having that advantage going in, Beren, what criteria did you use to decide which press to select?

Beren: I looked at how the books were distributed (wholesalers and online stores), author discounts (very important if you plan on selling books at conferences, library events and directly to local bookstores), the “look” of the books that press had produced—did they look professional, could you pick them out as a self-published book?—and the timeline from submission to publication. I needed the book out sooner, and not at an outrageous price.

Anne: It’s SO interesting that you both mention the importance of the end product being indistinguishable from a traditionally published book — it hadn’t occurred to me to think about in those terms, but now that you mention it and I look at the volumes in front of me, I wouldn’t have been able to tell the difference without looking at the press’ name.

Which makes me doubly eager to ask my next question, because you’re both so well-versed in this: What questions should someone thinking about going this route ask a potential press up front?

Beren: I think it is worth finding out how many of their books actually sell more than five hundred copies. I use that number because that is the number by which iUniverse decides it is worth investing its own money in a book, by redesigning the cover, any additional editing services free and by selling it at standard wholesale terms.

Anne: I wasn’t aware that they did that. I’m so glad that I asked.

Beren: Of the thousands of books iUniverse publishes every year, only about twenty sell over five hundred copies. I think that Infinity has returnability, and for a fee, the Amazon company, Booksurge, has returnability, but it doesn’t advertise that fee. Booksurge has the highest royalties for online sales, which might work brilliantly for some kinds of books. Their turnaround is quick, too.

Anne: Are there pitfalls writers looking into it should avoid?

Beren: Beware of editing costs—iUniverse has a reputation for suggesting huge edits before awarding a book Editor’s Choice designation, which it must have to eventually become available at standard wholesale terms.

The recommended services for my book would have cost about $1400, far more than the $695 original price for a publishing package. The edits weren’t that extensive, either (and the recommendations were done very well by a professional who really liked the book) so I did them in a twelve-hour editing spree and was able to get the Editor’s Choice designation after receiving two positive reviews post-publication.

Mary: I know some of the self-publishing or print-on-demand companies have packages that offer listings in ads they place in media like the New York Times. I can’t imagine that most fiction benefits from that. So, I’d say, don’t pay for mass marketing. Do invest in good cover design and bookmarks, but don’t pay for advertising that’s not highly, highly targeted. (I bought ads in my Brown alumni magazine and in the Chicago Bar Record.)

Don’t think that the publisher will do your marketing for you, though. They won’t.

Beren: One thing you must do as a self-published author (if you don’t want to pay big bucks to someone else) is to write your own promotional materials. It is hard enough for most of us to write a query letter or a proposal, writing book jacket copy, getting blurbs, and providing advertising copy is a different type of writing for most of us. I worked really hard on mine, and it was a good education.

Anne: I’m glad you both brought that up. What do you think are the biggest differences in authorial responsibility between a self-published book and one handled by a traditional publisher?

Mary: My responsibility is to turn out the best book I can.

Anne: But isn’t that always the case, no matter who publishes our work?

Mary: I fantasize that I would have more confidence that I’d done that if a traditional publisher gave the book its imprimatur.

Anne: I suppose I have an unusual view on that, having sold a book to a traditional publisher that didn’t come out. I can’t say that experience exactly bathed me in self-confidence.

Let me turn the question around for you, Beren. What did you have responsibility for that you wouldn’t have if you’d gone with a traditional publisher?

Beren: I did a lot in creating the look of the book. My spouse took the photo on the cover, and I was able to influence the design, font, and colors used in the final product. It became a group project when we shared the photo and necessary copy with friends who all had an opinion on how it should look.

Anne: That was a great day, opening my e-mail and finding the photo of the cover there.

Beren: I’m happy with the outcome. The questions iUniverse asked me about the book provided their designers with enough to make it look right. I did pay extra for this option; self-publishing with all your own design work is much less money if you have the expertise, which I do not.

Anne: One hears that a significant advantage of self-publishing lies in not having to revise a book to match — how shall I put this? — the sometimes arbitrary or misguided editorial standards authors sometimes encounter at traditional publishing houses, where the writer doesn’t have much say, if any, over title and book cover design, not to mention issues of content and style. Did you enjoy that freedom? How much control did you have over the final product?

Beren: I had a lot of control over the final product. If it had gone to a traditional house, I would have had to write it as fiction and have an alcoholic single mother as the main character! Or gotten divorced and developed a drinking problem!

I did have a lot of control, and iUniverse provided a lot of information on the book publication process. They send all prospective authors their book, Getting Published, which is a comprehensive guide to traditional publication and getting published through them. I used it a lot.

Mary: I’d be happy to revise if Simon & Schuster or Random House wanted me to. With an advance in hand, I could probably see my way clear to making changes…

Anne: Okay, okay, you have a point — and I don’t think I could hope for a better exit line than that, so let’s stop for today. Thank you both again for being generous enough to share your experiences with us.

Happy holidays, everyone, and keep up the good work!

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Posted on - No Comments on So you’re considering self-publishing: some words of wisdom from those who have been there

So you’re considering self-publishing: some words of wisdom from those who have been there

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Last time, after I took one more romp through the well-ordered fields of standard format, I concluded with a sentiment very familiar to long-term readers of this blog, and certainly to those who regularly peruse the comments: one of the perennial frustrations of the aspiring writer’s life is the paradoxical necessity of bringing one’s submissions into conformity with what an unknown agent (or agency screener, editor, editorial assistant, contest judge, etc.) expects to see on the page without unduly compromising one’s authorial voice and artistic vision. The vast majority of my blog posts are, in fact, either direct or indirect discussions of various nuances of this balancing act.

Last time, I brought up an increasingly attractive way out of this dilemma: self-publishing. Everywhere I go, I meet aspiring writers who, exasperated by the ever-increasing difficulty of breaking into the world of traditional publishing, are at least toying with this increasingly attractive option.

And with good reason: self-publishing has come a long way in the last few years. The rise of print-on-demand (POD) and Internet-based booksellers’ increasing openness to featuring POD books has rendered the self-publishing route a viable option for those who balk at the — let’s face facts here — often glacial pace of bringing a book to publication via the usual means.

Yet if you ask representatives of the traditional publishing houses about self-publishing at writers’ conferences, you’re likely to receive a dismissive answer, as though nothing much had changed — unless, of course, the book about which you are inquiring happened to sell exceptionally well and ultimately got picked up by a major publisher as a result.

Despite some notable recent successes, agents and editors still remain, at least overtly relatively indifferent to the achievements of self-published books, to the extent that not all of them even make the decades-old distinction between so-called vanity presses (who print short runs of books, often at inflated prices, solely at the author’s expense, so the author may distribute them), subsidy presses (who ask authors to contribute some portion of the printing expenses; the press often handles distribution and promotion), and desktop publishing (where the author handles the whole shebang herself).

Rather than just tell you what I think about the benefits and challenges of self-publishing, I thought it would be a good idea to ask authors who have first-hand knowledge — and recent first-hand knowledge at that. Intrepid on your behalf, I tracked down our guests for the next few days, both of whom have successfully self-published their books this year and have graciously agreed to share their insights with all of us here at Author! Author!

First, on the fiction side, please welcome Mary Hutchings Reed, author of COURTING KATHLEEN HANNIGAN, a kind of ONE L for women lawyers:

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Courting Kathleen Hannigan tells the story of an ambitious woman lawyer, one of the first to join a male-dominated national law firm in the late seventies, whose rise to the top is threatened by a sex discrimination suit brought against the firm by a junior woman lawyer who is passed over for partnership because she doesn’t wear make-up or jewelry. When Kathleen Hannigan is called to testify, she is faced with a choice between her feminist principles and her own career success. Courting Kathleen Hannigan is a story for women and minorities everywhere who are curious about the social history of women in law, business and the professions, institutional firm cultures, and the sexual politics of businesses and law firms.

Oh, and it’s a great read, too.

On the nonfiction side, please welcome memoirist Beren deMotier, author of THE BRIDES OF MARCH, who has quite a true-life tale to tell:

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The Brides of March: Memoir of a Same-Sex Marriage is a lesbian bride’s eye view of marriage at a moment’s notice, with a bevy of brides, their coterie of children, donuts, newspaper reporters, screaming protesters, mothers of the brides who never thought they’d see the day, white wedding cake, and a houseful of happy heterosexuals toasting the marriage. But that was only the beginning as these private declarations of love became public fodder, fueling social commentary, letters to the editor, and the fires of political debate, when all the brides wanted was the opportunity to say “I do” in this candid, poignant, and frequently funny tale of lesbian moms getting to the church on time in Multnomah County.

Couldn’t put it down, either.

As my long-term readers know, I am definitely not one to convey praise lightly; I don’t recommend books here unless I feel quite passionate about them, and believe that they should be widely read. For my money, these are two of the best self-published books to have come out this year — and what’s more, books that I was genuinely surprised were not embraced by the traditional publishing market, in light of the exceptionally quality of the writing and the obvious timeliness of the stories (of which more below).

These books, in short, are best-case examples of the fiction and nonfiction (respectively) being self-published today. Let’s hear what their authors have to say about the process.

Anne: Many thanks to both of you for being here today. Let’s start with the question every writer faces about her own work: what made you burn to tell THIS story? Did it jump up and down in your head, demanding, “Write me now!”

Mary: They say “write what you know.” I didn’t know much of much interest to very many, but I knew law firms and I knew the experience of trailblazing women in that field, and that gave me authentic background for the story while I figured out how to write a novel. In many ways, writing this novel was a way of organizing for myself how I felt about my own experience. At the time, the “glass ceiling” was a big topic, and feeling the bump was depressing for many of us who realized that all the changes we’d worked for couldn’t be accomplished in a single generation of women entering the legal profession.

Beren: It kind of bit me on the leg and didn’t let go. After getting married at a moment’s notice, I wrote a column about it called “They Can’t Take This Away From Me”, which ran in about a dozen GLBT newspapers across the country. As the story continued, and I wanted to document it for our families (our own and the friends who also married that day alongside us), I wrote a longer story about it, which was also published and reprinted on the Internet. Around that time I heard that a local activist (and fellow Bride of March) was planning on writing a book about the Multnomah County marriages, and I said to myself, “Wait a minute, I should be writing a book!” I’d been wavering on the edge of a longer project for some time, unsure if it was the right time to leap into one with a one-year-old at home, and articles to write, and then this happened and I couldn’t stop myself.

Anne: So in both cases, it was a story that deeply needed telling — and yet, if you don’t mind my putting it this way, there aren’t all that many good books out there on either of these topics. While one does hear theoretical discussions about hostile work environments and same-sex marriage, the average reader is unlikely to stumble accidentally upon a book on the subject upon walking into the bookstore down the block. With such meaty material, that seems odd to me from a writer’s point of view. Why do you think there are so few books on your respective topics?

Mary: One, there aren’t that many of us who know that world — my class of lawyers at Yale was a whopping 20% (24 women, as I recall) and not even half of us went to large firms; fewer yet stayed there. Two, not everyone is crazy enough to want to write a novel!

Anne: So it’s more a case of writers not writing what they didn’t know, eh? What about you, Beren?

Beren: I think partially it is exactly why editors and agents kept telling me why my book wasn’t “right” for them: money. There was an article in Writer’s Digest recently on the state of gay & lesbian publishing, and places to publish books by GLBT authors, and while the writer of the piece considered the current state positive, I have to disagree. As small publishers of gay & lesbian material folded in the eighties, there was a feeling that the mainstream publishers were picking up the ball, and there have been many successful and not-so-successful gay oriented books put out by mainstream publishers — but the formula became more rigid. There is a large market for gay and lesbian romance and mystery, novels, porn, and a small flourishing academic market, but there is little room for non-fiction unless it is by a famous sports star or a highly public figure.

Anne: One hears that about memoirs in general right now.

Beren: Lesbian non-fiction in particular is hard to place. Most lesbian publishers want fiction, and mainstream publishers will say openly that there is not enough money to be made publishing a book that will likely appeal to lesbian readers — though I hope that my book will be read by a wide audience.

Anne: Which brings me to a question vital to both of you: timing. Since you took the vital step of self-publication, you clearly felt that the world needed this story NOW. Having read both books, I have to say that I think you were both right about that, but for the benefit of those who haven’t yet had the pleasure, can you tell us why this story just couldn’t wait to come out?

Beren: Yes, I felt it couldn’t wait. Same-sex marriage is an extremely current issue, and it seemed like I could miss the moment if publication took too long, and the public had either had enough of hearing about the fight for civil rights, or society had changed enough that the issues in the book had become moot (that would have been a happy ending!). There were at least four books published about same-sex marriage while I was writing The Brides of March, but none of them were from a really personal point of view — the human factor — and I felt that was an important missing element in the debate that I could offer, as well as making people laugh.

Anne: Which is largely what had been missing from the public debate on the subject: a human face. I think there’s an immense difference between an abstract discussion of principle and a down-to-earth, practical understanding about how the issues of the day affect real people’s quotidian lives. I remember reading the passage where you talk about what it means to a person — any person — to be married in her own home town, and feeling very shaken, because it had never occurred to me to think of the issue in those terms.

That sense of taking a political issue down to the concrete, personal level so the reader can feel it from the inside comes across very clearly in your book, too, Mary: Kathleen’s dilemma feels very real and complex. But you had an even more specific reason for wanting the book to be out this year, didn’t you?

Mary: The time was right in part because this is the story of women like Hillary Clinton and Michelle Obama. Kathleen Hannigan’s world is the world Hillary would’ve entered had she come home to Chicago to practice law straight out of Yale. (She was class of ’73, I was ’76.) Michelle Obama worked for me in her first legal job, when I was a young partner. Courting Kathleen Hannigan covers that time period as well, when Ann Rose is trying to make partner and is denied based on her “unfeminine” style. Women of my generation are beginning to think about retiring or taking early retirement. They’ve worked exceedingly hard. Courting Kathleen Hannigan is, in part, an homage to them.

And — I just thought of this — there are so many women lawyers on TV these days, and some of the images are just so unreal! Their lives are unreal! Their behavior is unreal. It bugs me to see cleavage in the office. I hate to see young women throwing away the progress we “elders” think we’ve made!

Anne: I feel that way when I see super-sultry grad students and professors in movies and on television. I can’t imagine having strutted into class in 4-inch heels and a miniskirt as a student, much less as the professor. Yet the pop conception of a woman working in a traditionally male profession is so simple: either put up with discrimination without seeming to notice it (which is miraculously supposed to exempt oneself from it), fall in love with a co-worker, or (as always seems to be the magic solution in the movies) slug the offending party. None of these strategies ever seem to have any repercussions in the fantasy versions, but that’s certainly not how it plays out in real life.

Okay, off my soapbox and back to practicalities. Since traditionally-published books hit the shelves at least a year after the author signs the book contract, and agents often spend years marketing their clients’ books (that roar you just heard was my readership’s collective sigh of recognition), did having a book with such current events appeal render it harder or easier to pitch to agents? Did they seem to understand the window of opportunity for your book?

Mary: Agents didn’t seem to think that people cared much about women lawyers (unless they were in thrillers, à la Scott Turow or John Grisham).

Anne: Funny, I know a lot of women lawyers who are people. And almost without exception, they have a lot of friends who might conceivably feel the same. It’s strange how many relatively large segments of the reading population are commonly dismissed as niche markets.

Did you encounter a similar reaction, Beren?

Beren: I think both agents and editors appreciated the timeliness of the topic; it was an easy pitch, not only because I believed in it totally, but because there was clearly a need. I had agents and editors take the manuscript, and received lovely personal letters about the manuscript and a lot of encouragement — but it wasn’t “right” for their house or agency.

Anne: Ah, that never-failing industry conviction that a really great book will always find a home SOMEWHERE — just not in my house. And yet it is almost invariably meant as a compliment to the book in question.

Okay, we’re running a little long, and I still have a million and twelve questions in front of me. Since I’m going to be milking your wisdom for my readers over the next few days, I suppose I don’t need to toss them all at you right off the bat. But to whet everyone’s appetite for tomorrow’s post, I’m going to leap straight to the jackpot question: why did you decide to self-publish, rather than go the traditional agent + publisher route?

Beren: Two reasons: while I believed that I could get the book traditionally published eventually, I wanted it to take part in the public debate NOW, and then my spouse told me she was going to write a technological manual and self-publish it. I thought, “The hell you’re going to have a book out before me,” and immediately started researching presses. Incidentally, her book never came to fruition and she has admitted this was a clever ploy to get me moving.

Mary: The combination of factors — lack of success finding an agent for this particular work, feeling the timing was right, having a personally compelling reason to want to have a book for my mother, believing that the book had an audience and something important to say.

Anne: I’m going to want to come back to all of those issues next time, when we will start to get into the nitty-gritty of how one goes about self-publishing intelligently. For today, let’s thank our guests and sign off.

Keep up the good work, everyone, and happy holidays!

Posted on - 6 Comments on Steering between the Scylla of over-confidence and the Charybdis of under-confidence, or, a Thanksgiving meditation on the blessings of interactive gratitude

Steering between the Scylla of over-confidence and the Charybdis of under-confidence, or, a Thanksgiving meditation on the blessings of interactive gratitude

Yes, yes, I know: this is a national holiday, and by all that is right, patriotic, and holy, I ought to be lying prone on some big, well-upholstered piece of furniture, moaning about how much turkey I managed to stuff down my gullet over the course of the day, rather than posting here. But I’m still convalescing, thank you very much, a state not very conducive to reveling with pie.

This is also the first Thanksgiving within the span of my memory when I haven’t at least helped with the cooking, so I burn to be useful. Don’t get up off the couch; I’ll just lecture you from afar.

My charming SO has spent the last hour telling me that I can — and, presumably, should — take at least a few days off a year from burning to be useful, lest I find myself reduced to a Joan of Arc-style pile of cinders (which, frankly, didn’t look awfully good on her, and probably wouldn’t look any better on me). But one of the first things any editor learns upon getting into the advice-giving business is that writerly angst doesn’t take holidays.

Lest you doubt this: when I sat down to write tonight, I found no fewer than three e-mails from writer friends in my inbox, asking for advice. (I knew that they must be from friends, because mere acquaintances would have waited to send them until tomorrow.)

So: back to business. For those of you just joining us after a long winter’s nap, I’ve been yammering for the last couple of days about the desirability of SIOA — Send It Out, Already! — when one is faced with a request for pages, rather than revising and revising the manuscript for so long that the window of opportunity closes on the agent’s request.

Yesterday, I gave a pep talk to those good writers who find themselves currently in the painful throes of SIOA-avoidance, as well as laying the conceptual groundwork so writers who have not yet encountered “But is it REALLY ready?” turmoil will be prepared for it when it comes. Because, frankly, at one time or another, fear of submission has struck every successful writer I have ever known.

Okay, not EVERY: some are blessed with a superabundance of self-confidence, but in the publishing industry as in so many others, the hugely confident tend to be the folks who leave the air in their wake positively blackened with the smoke of their burning bridges.

Give me a worried nail-biter any day, I say. (Well, perhaps not on Christmas… or my birthday… but I can walk away from my e-mail any time, I tell you.)

The most confident writer I have encountered was a cookbook author who blandished me a couple of years ago (around Christmas, as a matter of fact) into introducing her to my agent and helping her with her book proposal practically to the point of co-authorship, only to pretend that she didn’t know me as soon as the ink dried on her book contract. She never seemed to doubt for an instant that the world needed her book — and apparently, a publisher agreed with her, because it’s out now.

For some reason, the agented encounter this stripe of bizarre super-confidence amongst favor-askers all the time: evidently, the shy, self-effacing, and polite are substantially less likely to approach us. (Which is one reason, in case you’re curious, that I respond so enthusiastically to those of you who post questions as comments here — here, I can answer a question once for the benefit of many, rather than one at a time privately.)

The persistence of the over-persistent ought to annoy the polite a little, because the boundary-pushers make it harder for everyone in the long run. For instance, one of the reasons that published authors tend to be reluctant to give feedback to hopeful strangers is that such a favor so often engenders not the gratitude it should, alas, but a detailed (and not always courteous) explanation from the overly-confident about how the kind author’s advice could not possibly be anywhere near the ballpark of correct.

Why, just the other day, the excellent and hilarious Bob Tarte, FAAB (Friend of Author! Author! blog) and animal life memoirist extraordinaire, sent me this illuminating anecdote on the subject:

A writer who had read Enslaved by Ducks and Fowl Weather emailed and asked me questions about how to write her query, attaching a copy of the query. I answered the questions and made suggestions about re-writing the query. The response from the writer: a detailed argument about my suggestions. Now, I’ll be the first to admit that I’m no authority on queries, but it seems to me that if you ask an author for input, then you should probably accept or dismiss the suggestions — and ask additional questions if you need to — but don’t argue with a person who is trying to help you out.

I’m with you, Bob: I can’t even count the number of times that writers have asked for my advice on a particular point — not infrequently by buttonholing me at a social event to ask me to summarize, essentially, an entire category’s worth of blog posts — and then came back to tell me with evident glee that they decided that it wasn’t worth taking, for the following fourteen reasons…

If I’m the only habitual advice-giver who doesn’t find it especially satisfying to be thanked this way… well, I won’t complete that thought, because I know for a fact that I’m not.

And how do I know that? Because spend an hour at any gathering of established authors, agents, editors, writing teachers, and the like (at, say, the bar at a writers’ conference), and you will almost certainly hear at least three complaints (often in the form of hilariously-embellished anecdotes, complete with mimicked voices) about this kind of behavior.

Here’s a good rule of thumb: while it’s perfectly fine to ask an author you admire for advice — because, after all, s/he always has the option of saying no — if the author is generous enough to respond, recognize that granting you a one-time favor does not imply an invitation to a lifetime of debate.

Simple thanks would do. Flowers would be nice, of course, but not strictly speaking necessary.

Sometimes, though, the super-confident camouflage argument under the cover of thanks. I once had a writer friend hit me up for detailed advice on a contest entry. After I gave it, he was so good as not only to explain to me in vivid Technicolor why my advice was misguided, but go on to hit up my mother (also a writer and editor) for feedback on his entire manuscript.

Wait — there’s more. Over my gasps of disapproval, my dear old white-headed mother was generous enough to ignore the fact that the book was half again as long as novels in that genre generally were and gave it some gentle analysis.

Need I even tell you that the writer responded promptly by sending her an EXTENSIVE letter, ostensibly thanking her for her trouble, but also meticulously addressing each point she had raised to demonstrate that she didn’t know what she was talking about? Or that many of the issues he raised there were ones for which I had already established well-defined categories here on the blog?

I’m bringing this up not to complain (okay, not ONLY to complain), but because over-confident writers often extend this type of behavior to agents and editors at publishing houses as well. Calling an agent to pitch on the phone, for instance. Or e-mailing a flame-mail response to a thoughtful rejection letter. Walking up to a rejecting agent or editor at a conference and demanding, “Why did you reject that manuscript I sent you six months ago?”

Or, the engenderer of many an embellished cocktail party anecdote, shooting back a letter to a rejecting agent jumping on one of the standard industry euphemisms: “What do you mean, you just didn’t fall in love with it? HOW doesn’t my book fit our needs at this time?”

This just isn’t good long-term career strategy.

Why am I harping upon the outrages upon etiquette committed by the tiny fraction of aspiring writers who happen to be blessed (or cursed, depending upon how you look at it) with complete confidence that they are so extraordinarily talented that everyone in the publishing industry not only should be delighted to help them — and that within seconds of having formed the acquaintance, or even before — but should confine their critique to Gee, your query letter/pitch/manuscript is magnificent. Don’t change a thing?

Because it doesn’t take very many such approaches to render the approached wary of ALL aspiring writers, including the 80% who would never dream of being so rude. Bombarded with many such approaches, as agents are, often from aspiring writers who have not learned enough about the industry to be aware that there IS any other way to try to market a book, wariness can turn fairly quickly to standoffishness toward the hopeful.

An attitude that, alas, is very discouraging for the shy. Having witnessed it in action– as a coldly-worded form rejection letter, perhaps, a slow response to a submission, or a “Well, that kind of book just isn’t selling right now” response to a pitch — the sensitive writer can fall prey to frightening fantasies about, say, how nasty the next rejection may be.

Or how mad that agent is going to be that three months have passed, and I haven’t sent those requested materials yet. Oh, it’s going to be terrible; maybe I’d better not send them out at all.

Starting to sound familiar? The over-confident’s dream transforms into the under-confident’s nightmare: the pushiness of the former feeds the environment that in turn feeds the fear of the latter.

Perhaps I’m overly-optimistic, but I believe that if more writers took the time to express gratitude for the help we DO get — and no, I’m not fishing — there would, in time, be more help available. I’ve met plenty of folks involved in publishing who honestly do like to lend a hand — and would do so happily, if not for the fear that the extended hand was going to be used as a ladder.

But this is a change that’s going to happen incrementally, through a lot of small acts of kindness in return for kindness.

Case in point: Bob Tarte sent me a really helpful anecdote to use here on the blog, and I’m grateful. So not only am I going to mention that I REALLY admire his writing — he is genuinely funny, not praise I bestow lightly — but I’m going to go ahead and post his book jackets here, for ease of recognition in a bookstore:

/snapshot-2007-11-23-00-24-39.tiff /snapshot-2007-11-23-00-26-24.tiff

Heck, I’m even going to add a plug for his new project, a weekly 30-minute podcast on exotic pets (anything other than cats, dogs, and livestock) on the aptly-named PetLifeRadio.com. The show is called, much to my amusement, What Were You Thinking? and he co-hosts it with his lovely wife, Linda.

Okay, so it’s a small thing, but it gets the ball rolling.

And illustrates perhaps the best argument I can possibly give to the super-confident about why their tactics may not serve them in the long term: you don’t see me plugging the work of that forgetful cookbook author here, do you?

As my beloved first writing teacher, Philip K. Dick, liked to say: “Never screw over a living writer. You’ll only end up as material.”

Keep up the good work!

Posted on - No Comments on Book marketing 101: the scourge of the dull author bio, or, what to do if you are attacked by carnivorous toads

Book marketing 101: the scourge of the dull author bio, or, what to do if you are attacked by carnivorous toads

Earlier this year, I found what may perhaps be the Platonic bad author bio, the one that most effectively discourages the prospective reader from perusing what is within. And to render it an even better example for my purposes here, this peerless bio belongs to one of my all-time favorite authors, Rachel Ingalls. Her work is brilliant, magical, genuinely one-of-a-kind.

And as I have read every syllable she has ever published, I can state with confidence: never have I seen an author bio less indicative of the quality of the actual writing.

Yes, dear readers, that is what writing this blog for the last two years has done to my psyche: discovering a specimen that might do you good, even if it disappoints me personally, now makes me cackle with glee.

I don’t feel bad about using her bio as an example here, because honestly, I think everyone on earth should rush right out and read Ingalls’ BINSTEAD’S SAFARI before they get a minute older. (In fact, if you want to open a new window, search for the Powell’s website, and order it before you finish reading this, I won’t be offended at all. Feel free. I don’t mind waiting.)

But my God, her bios make her sound… well, I’ll let you see for yourself. This bio is lifted from the back of her newest book, TIMES LIKE THESE:

Rachel Ingalls grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She has lived in London since 1965 and is the author of several works of fiction — most notably MRS. CALIBAN — published both in the United States and United Kingdom.

Just this, accompanied by a very frightening author photo, one that looks as though she might take a bite out of the photographer.

I have no problem with the photo — after all, this is a writer who gave the world a very beautiful story in which the protagonists are consumed by carnivorous toads, so a sense of menace seems downright appropriate. But have you ever seen a piece of prose less revealing of personality?

Admittedly, U.K. author bios tend to be on the terse side, compared to their American brethren (as H.G. Wells wrote, “the aim of all British biography is to conceal”), but even so, why bother to have a bio at all, if it is not going to reveal something interesting about the author?

I have particular issues with this bio, too, because of the offhand way in which it mentions MRS. CALIBAN (1983), which was named one of America’s best postwar novels by the British Book Marketing Council. Don’t you think that little tidbit was worth at least a PASSING mention in her bio?

In fact, I learned about Rachel Ingalls’ work in the first place because of the BBMC award. We’re both alumnae of the same college (which is to say: we both applied to Harvard because we had good grades, and both were admitted to Radcliffe, because we were girls), and during my junior and senior years, I worked in the Alumnae Records office. Part of my job was filing news clippings about alumnae. In the mid-1980s, the TIMES of London ran an article about the best American novels published since WWII, using the BBMC’s list as a guide.

Rachel Ingalls’ MRS. CALIBAN was on it, and the American mainstream press reaction was universal: Who?

Really, a novel about a housewife who has an affair with a six-foot salamander is not VERY likely to slip your mind, is it? The fact is, at the time, her work was almost entirely unknown — and undeservedly so — on this side of the pond.

Naturally, I rushed right out and bought MRS. CALIBAN, followed by everything else I could find. Stunned, I made all of my friends read her; my mother and I started vying for who could grab each new publication first. She became my standard for how to handle day-to-day life in a magical manner.

The TIMES story was picked up all over North America, so I ended up filing literally hundreds of clippings about it. And, I have to confess: being a novelist at heart in a position of unbearable temptation, I did read her alumnae file cover to cover. So I have it on pretty good authority that she had more than enough material for a truly stellar author bio — if not a memoir — and that was almost 20 years ago.

And yet I see, as I go through the shelf in my library devoted to housing her literary output, that she has ALWAYS had very minimal author bios. Check out the doozy on 1992’s BE MY GUEST:

Rachel Ingalls was brought up and educated in Massachusetts. She has lived in London since 1965.

I’ve seen passports with more information on them. Occasionally, the travelogue motif has varied a little. Here’s a gem from a 1988 paperback edition of THE PEARLKILLERS:

Rachel Ingalls, also the author of I SEE A LONG JOURNEY and BINSTEAD’S SAFARI, has been cited by the British Book Marketing Council as one of America’s best postwar novelists.

Better, right? But would it prepare you even vaguely for the series of four scintillating novellas within that book jacket, one about an apparently cursed Vietnam widow, one about a long-secret dorm murder, one about a failed Latin American exploratory journey turned sexual spree, and one about a recent divorcée discovering that she is the ultimate heiress of a plantation full of lobotomized near-slaves?

No: from the bio alone, I would expect her to write pretty mainstream stuff.

Once, some determined soul in her publisher’s marketing department seems to have wrested from her some modicum of biographical detail, for the 1990 Penguin edition of SOMETHING TO WRITE HOME ABOUT:

Rachel Ingalls grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts. At the age of seventeen, she dropped out of high school and subsequently spent two years in Germany: one living with a family, the second auditing classes at the universities of Göttingen, Munich, Erlangen, and Cologne. After her return to the United States, she entered Radcliffe College, where she earned a degree in English. She has had six books published, including BINSTEAD’S SAFARI and THE PEARL KILLERS (sic). In 1964 (sic) she moved to England, where she has been living ever since.

Now, typos aside, that’s a pretty engaging personal story, isn’t it? (And doesn’t it just haunt you, after having read the other bios: why does this one say she moved to London a year earlier than the others? What is she hiding? WHAT HAPPENED DURING THAT MYSTERIOUS YEAR?) Doesn’t it, in fact, illustrate how a much more interesting author bio could be constructed from the same material as the information-begrudging others were?

I was intrigued by why this bio was so much more self-revealing than the others, so I started checking on the publication history of this book. Guess what? The original 1988 edition of this book had been released by the Harvard Common Press, located easy walking distance from Radcliffe Alumnae Records. Could it be that I was not the only fan of her writing who had gone file-diving?

“Talent is a kind of intelligence,” Jeffrey Eugenides tells us in MIDDLESEX, but all too often, writers’ faith in their talent’s ability to sell itself is overblown. Good writing does not sell itself anymore; when marketing even the best writing, talent, alas, is usually not enough. Especially not in the eyes of North American agents and editors, who expect to see some evidence of personality in prospective writers’ bios. If they didn’t want the information, they wouldn’t ask for it.

Think of the bio as another marketing tool for your work. They want to know not just if you can write, but also if you would make a good interview. And, not entirely selflessly, whether you are a person they could stand to spend much time around. Because, honestly, throughout the publication process, it’s you they are going to have to keep phoning and e-mailing, not your book.

Meet ’em halfway. Produce an interesting author bio to accompany your submissions. Because, honestly, readers like me can only push your work on everyone within shouting distance AFTER your books get published.

Speaking of which, if I have not already made myself clear: if you are even remotely interested in prose in the English language, you really should get ahold of some of Rachel Ingalls’ work immediately. You don’t want to be the last on your block to learn how to avoid the carnivorous toads, do you?

Practical hints on sounding fascinating follow tomorrow. Keep up the good work!

Posted on - 7 Comments on Okay, I’m flattered

Okay, I’m flattered

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What is this shiny logo floating above today’s post, you ask? The excellent blogger Sean Ferrell has tagged my site for a Thinking Blogger Award, and I must say, I am extremely flattered. It’s a prize given to bloggers by other bloggers — specifically, by those who have won it before — writers who know from personal experience the joys and tribulations of opening oneself up in this unique way.

What makes me particularly happy about this is that the award is not merely given to well-written blogs willy-nilly: the rules specify that it should be bestowed upon blogs that made the nominator THINK. I couldn’t be more tickled, really, because I try very hard to make my posts thought-provoking, and it’s nice to know that a writer of Sean’s caliber recognized that.

Part of the award certainly belongs to the readers who have written in with comments — which I encourage everyone to do. You have helped expand this space from one person’s spouting off into a community for writers; thank you. Especially those of you who have suggested topics for posts or who have challenged me. I believe — and I hope the blog consistently illustrates this — that one of the primary gifts of the Internet is its ability to bring people together to share opinions.

Okay, enough of the Oscars™ speech; on to the nominations. In addition to getting to display this nifty little virtual plaque, recipients of the Thinking Blog Award are allowed to select 5 future winners. Only five! Where to begin?

I have been agonizing over the choice for the past week.

Seriously, it’s hard — there are a LOT of great blogs out there. First, I thought I would stick entirely to bloggers who, like myself, write on writing. But part of the purpose of this process is to introduce my readers to other blogs, and I know (via that most reliable of sources, a little bird) that many of those of you kind enough to visit here also visit other writing sites. Time to set my sites wider.

So I sat down and made a list of blogs that gave great practical advice, and another list of those whose writers made the mouth water with great writing packed with sensual details, and another of ones that stood out to me as being especially good at generating reader response…

97 nominees later, I decided I needed to simplify my criteria just a bit.

The list below represents a cross-section of blogs that I think deserve a wider readership. Thought-provoking and well-written, they cover a broad array of subject matter, from the ultra-practical matter of feeding oneself to the philosophical questions of everyday life. Best of all, each has changed my mind about something, big or small, through a post. Here they are:

Jordan’s Muse: those of you who were reading Author! Author! last summer probably remember Jordan Rosenfeld’s guest blogs; she’s the upbeat writer, editor, and writing teacher who cheers us up when the road to publication gets long, urging us to concentrate upon what we want to achieve, rather than the slings and arrows of rejection. We could all use more cheerleaders for the art like this.

Orangette: I’m a HUGE fan of good food writing; having done it (under a nom de plume), I know from experience how difficult it is to convey the sensations of taste, aroma, and texture well on the page. Orangette’s writing is delightful, of course, but for me, what makes her blog stand above the many other excellent food blogs out there is how well she writes about the recipes that DON’T work out — this is definitely not a blog written by someone pretending to be the perfect chef. She makes me laugh, cook, AND think, a potent combination.

Greentime: technically, Rhett Aultman and Amy Hale’s provocative (and relatively new) site is a vlog, but it includes enough good writing that I feel justified in including it. Concentrating upon practical environmentalism, Greentime combines great discussions with solid research. I can honestly say that this site has made a difference in how I live my life on a day-to-day basis.

Dude, Why Do You Have a Winnowing Fork? After my save-the-world last choice, I wanted my next nominee to be pure joy — and given my comic predilections, I could hardly not have included a funny blog, could I? Polly Tropia’s site is in many ways the Platonic blog: it ranges all over the place; it’s thoughtful, and it’s often laugh-out-loud funny. (Her post “No Atheists in Bed” is a particular favorite of mine.)

Lifehack: is a reliably thought-provoking blog devoted to the practicalities of organizing one’s life and time, always a big issue for every writer. While it is a trifle visually busy, if you have ever found yourself procrastinating for more than a day or two on a big writing project, you should run, not walk, to this helpful Australian site. Although Lifehack does regularly take on the big self-help books’ myths on productivity, it primarily concentrates upon pointed, hands-on particulars that actually can help you clear time and desk space to work on your next book.

Congratulations, all 5: you have been tagged for a Thinking Blogger Award. If you find your site on this list, here’s what you should do:

1. If (and ONLY) if, you get tagged, write a post with links to 5 blogs that make you think. Please, remember to tag blogs with real merits (i.e., relative content) and above all – blogs that really get you thinking!

2. In that post, link the award site so that people can easily find the exact origin of the meme.

3. Optional: Proudly display the Thinking Blogger Award. It’s also nice if you post a comment on the Thinking Blog’s site with a link to the post that you wrote, so its list of winners can remain current.

To all of these bloggers, to all of my readers, and especially to Sean Ferrell, keep up the good work!

Posted on - No Comments on Good-bye, Unk, and thanks

Good-bye, Unk, and thanks

By the hushed tone of my mother’s voice last night, I knew that someone close to us both had died. Barely audible through a crackling cell connection that has to run through a series of Pacific-carved cliffs to get to me, it took her five tries to convey whose passing had so depressed her: Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

Suddenly, the world felt smaller.

Not that either of us had ever met the great writer personally — a trifle surprising, in my mother’s case, as she spent the 1950s married to a fairly prominent science fiction writer who certainly shared many readers with Vonnegut. At the time, SF was a small, close-knit world; my late Uncle Alec regularly published short stories in GALAXY. Like Vonnegut, most of the members of that early SF community were prone to complain bitterly about how the literary establishment ignored the fact that some great writing came out in genre form.

Anybody who has read more than one of Kurt Vonnegut’s novels is already familiar with the lament, I suspect. Suffice it to say that those of us who write now have every reason to be grateful to Kurt Vonnegut, Philip K. Dick, Ursula LeGuin, Ray Bradbury, and scores of other great toilers in the SF and fantasy genres, for proving once and for all that genre and smart, literate writing are not mutually exclusive.

In the bad old days, SF, like mystery, horror, romance, and other genre fiction, was officially held in contempt by the literati. Science fiction novels were almost never reviewed by the mainstream press, a fact that rendered Vonnegut’s undoubted popularity doubly impressive. Hard as it is to comprehend now, SF was treated a little like pornography those days: nice people read it voraciously in secret, in the privacy of their own homes, but they took wincing pains never to discuss their taste for it amongst the snobbish.

Those who admitted such predilections openly were odd, somehow beyond the pale of polite society. Such people held their own conventions, for heaven’s sake. They believed it was perfectly legitimate for adults to read — and even own — comic books. They dressed up as characters from Star Trek. They understood how computers worked.

Even today, one still bumps into literati who retain this old attitude, confusing snobbery with discernment. A couple of years ago, at one of those publishing world cocktail parties where everyone drinks bad wine, I told an eminence grise of literary fiction who sits on the boards of several major grant foundations about the memoir I was writing about my relationship with Philip. If the grand dame had been wearing a skirt, she would have instantly swept it aside so I would not touch it. “Well, obviously,” she intoned, curling her aged lip, “I never read science fiction.”

Back in the day, even well-established SF authors were often treated by the press as though their success were some sort of a parlor trick, a word-based scam to fool a credulous reading public. Philip used to do hilarious impressions of the reporters who came to interview him: “Are you well-known in your field?” they would ask the Hugo Award winner, whose work had been featured as a Book-of-the-Month Club alternate selection. “I wouldn’t know. Naturally, I never read it.”

Or, still more maddening: “Do you write real fiction, too?”

Genre fiction IS real fiction — and potentially important fiction, too. As my mother said, sighing unhappily into the phone, when Vonnegut’s PLAYER PIANO came out in 1952, readers went mad with joy, and with disbelief: no one else was writing anything remotely like it at the time.

Or at any rate publishing it, which as we writers know often amounts to the same thing.

Kurt Vonnegut (he dropped the Jr. very emphatically after his father died) wrote smart books on smart topics. He wrote in such a spare, economical style that I was stunned to learn that he had been John Irving’s writing teacher in graduate school. (Yes, THAT John Irving, king of the modern-day Dickensian novel.) His comic timing was flawless, and he had the temerity to insist — in print, and often — that writing was an important contribution to humankind.

Or, as he would have put it, mankind. Female characters were certainly not his strength as a writer, nor his focus — interesting, in someone who wrote so much about evolution and reproduction. I must admit, after a blazing literary love affair with his books so marked that I literally wore out three copies of CAT’S CRADLE in high school, he lost my attention after TIMEQUAKE, where it became abundantly clear that his target readership uniformly sported Y chromosomes.

Frankly, I felt a bit betrayed. For those of us XXers amongst his fans who had been waiting for decades for him to create a believable female character (JAILBIRD’s Mary Kathleen O’Looney was his closest, and certainly his funniest), who had been making excuses to our friends for his depictions of rape (especially in WELCOME TO THE MONKEY HOUSE), his blaming the decline in reading in the US on women writers came as something of a shock.

At least, it did to me. For years, I had worshipped the man as an advocate of art, a writer brave enough to speak out on political issues, and most of all, an unparalleled crafter of words. If I hadn’t respected him so much, the slap would not have hurt.

I know, I know: it’s customary to speak no ill of the dead, and the difference between the admiration one has for a favorite writer at 15 and at 40 is the realization that all of our heroes have feet of clay. That’s what makes them interesting as characters, over and above their achievements, those contradictions.

But — call me zany — I suspect that for the next week or two, there will be no shortage of articles out there calling attention to the genius, the humanity of Kurt Vonnegut. Already, I have read no fewer than three obituaries that claimed — unfairly, I think — that he essentially wrote the same novel over and over 19 times. (Um, JAILBIRD? MOTHER NIGHT?) Already, there is no dearth of print pointing out that SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE is an anti-war novel that has arguably influenced more readers than ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT.

I am all in favor of everyone in the world reading both, by the way. They’re both marvelous books.

Since we’re all writers here, however, and complex, I am not going to pretend that Vonnegut’s writing didn’t occasionally madden me. It did — but it gave me many more moments of joy, and a real glimpse growing up into the power of the intelligently-applied creative word. He was a terrific writer, and we are all diminished by his passing.

To American writers of my generation, he was the cool, wacky, Einstein-haired uncle who always said precisely what he thought. Anyone who does that throughout the span of a 55-year writing career is bound to annoy his nieces and nephews a little from time to time.

In CAT’S CRADLE, when Bokononists are about to commit suicide, they say, “Now I will destroy the whole world.” But a writer’s world, particularly one as well-peopled as Kurt Vonnegut’s, is not destroyed when he dies. His vision lives on in his books and — at the risk of invoking a standard eulogy cliché — in the readers whose lives he touched.

So good-bye, Uncle Kurt, and thank you, ten million times over, for Billy Pilgrim, Kilgore Trout, Eliot Rosewater — and yes, even that bimbo extraordinaire, Montana Wildhack. Thank you for the RAMJAC Corporation, Wilbur Daffodil-11 Swain, the last great realist painting, and the transformative power of the Galapagos Islands. Thank you for books that I wrote about on my college applications after reading until the covers fell off. Thank you for an entire shelf of tattered, well-beloved volumes, work I love enough to critique 30 years after I first read them. (Hey, I started young.)

The world is a better place because you lived, and because you wrote. That’s as fine a eulogy as any writer can hope to deserve. Best of luck in whatever alternate reality now contains you, and if you were right about the non-linearity of time, enjoy all of your planes of existence. Don’t forget to write — and thanks for all the good work.

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These foolish things… remind me of you…

Yesterday, while discussing ways to increase the tension of your submission pages, I brought up those gem-like tiny touches so beloved of editors everywhere, the telling little details that illuminate character and moment in an indirect manner. The frequency with which telling little details appear in a manuscript is — for me, at least — one of the primary factors in determining whether to keep reading.

Why? Well, more than almost any other device, they give the reader insight into the author’s worldview. A good writer sees the world around her with unique eyes, and — ideally, at least — powers of observation heightened to an extent that many non-writers would actually find painful. This requires pretty sensitive nervous tissue, as H.G. Wells pointed out: he liked to call writers Aeolian harps (that’s a fancy way of saying wind chime, in case you were wondering), responding to our perceptions of the world through our art and, he hoped, making it better in the process.

Wells is now best-known for his science fiction, of course, but in his lifetime, many of his most popular novels were about social interactions. His Mr. Britling Sees It Through, for instance, was considered at the time THE definitive work on the British home front during the First World War. My favorite of his social novels is The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman, a comedy about marriage and the establishment of decent, affordable apartment buildings for young working women. (Okay, so his political beliefs were not hidden here.) If anyone wants to see sterling examples of what I was discussing yesterday, the distinction between polite dialogue that drags and polite dialogue that sings, this novel is a great place to do it — it contains masses of both.

You’d thought I was just digressing on a favorite author and had wandered off-topic, didn’t you? I confess, I’m a bit tired, with all the furor of the last week, but I’m not THAT tired.

The tiny little details that our sensitive nervous tissue lead us to notice — the way you wear your hat, the way you sip your tea, as the song says — are a large part of what makes great writing seem almost miraculous to readers. Not everyone notices the worn-down heel of the left shoe of the man in his interview suit, after all, or the way the eyes of the president of the local charitable organization occasionally glaze with hatred while her mouth is loading the members with drippingly complimentary gushings.

Feeling special yet? You should: being aware of these telling little details is a gift, I tell you, and most writers don’t rely upon it heavily enough in constructing their narratives.

And to someone whose job it is to read manuscripts all day, every day, seeing that gift wasted can start to get pretty annoying. “Where are those delightfully unexpected little insights?” they think, running their fingertips impatiently down page 1. “Where is the evidence that this writer sees the world in a way that will change the way I see it myself?”

A tall order, yes, but — wait, do I hear some cries of distress out there? “Did you just say,” a strangled voice asks, “page ONE? As in my manuscript should produce evidence of my unique worldview and uncanny eye for telling little details THAT soon?”

Great question, strangled voice. The answer is yes, if you want to make absolutely certain that an agency screener will read PAST the first page. (If you doubt this, please take a gander at last November’s series on reasons that agents report for not reading past page 1. It’s a pretty sobering group of posts.)

Some of you may find the necessity for cajoling reading more than a few paragraphs from people who, after all, asked you to send a chapter or 50 pages or your entire book. If you’re a novelist, it can be especially galling: presumably, if your forté as a writer were brilliant single-page stories, you would be entering short-short competitions, not writing 400-page books, right?

Believe me, I’m sympathetic to this view — if I ran the universe, agents and editors would be granted an entire extra day per week, so they could read at least 10 pages into every submission they request. Writers would get an extra day, too, and lots of paid vacation time, so we could polish our work to our entire satisfaction before we sent it out. And the Easter Bunny would live in my back yard for all of April, instead of just tomorrow morning.

Unfortunately, I believe I have mentioned before, I do not run the universe. If we writers want to be successful, it behooves us to recognize that submissions are often read very, very quickly, and adapt our first few pages to that reality.

Sorry to be the one to tell you that. But before you condemn the rigors of the industry too vigorously, take a moment to consider the conditions that might lead to someone at an agency or publishing house to conclude that it would be desirable, or even necessary, to give a requested manuscript only a page to establish the author’s brilliance.

Those of you who were reading this blog last fall probably remember that old writers’ nemesis, the unpaid (or poorly-paid) agency screener. (She’s been with us long enough that I think she should have a name, don’t you? How about Millicent?) If you will recall, Millicent is the world’s most impatient reader, the one to whom you pray your manuscript will not be assigned: while some screeners and agents are looking to be wowed, Millicent is in a rush to get out the door; she’s put off her lunch date three times already this week, because she had to work through lunch, and she’s not going to miss it again.

It is now 12:10, she’s just noticed a run in her tights, and your manuscript is the next in the pile. How easy do you think it is going to be for it to impress her into reading past page 1?

I bring up Millicent not to scare you, or even to say this kind of reading situation is the norm for submissions — but since a writer has absolutely no control over the mood of the person deciding whether to accept or reject his manuscript, it is worth preparing your submission so that it would impress EVEN Millicent at her most frustrated. That’s just good submission strategy.

Actually, I have a quite a bit of sympathy for the Millicents of the agenting world, as well as Monroe, the editorial assistant who is her equivalent in publishing houses. They are expected to read reams and reams of paper very, very fast — and for this Herculean effort, they are not necessarily always paid. Often, this work is assigned to interns. If it’s the summertime, Millicent is probably on break from a good Northeastern college, someplace like Barnard, and since her parents can afford to support her while she takes an unpaid but résumé-building job, she’s probably from an upper-middle class background.

If it’s the rest of the year, or she has already graduated, she is probably paid — poorly — and lives in an apartment the size of a postage stamp with four other girls with similar jobs. Millie would not have gone into this line of work had she not liked reading — in fact, she may have writing aspirations herself, or she may want to become an agent or editor, so taking a job screening queries and submissions seemed like dandy on-the-job training at the time.

But now, after weeks on end of seeing hundreds upon hundreds of rather similar storylines, her capacity for appreciating literature has markedly dimmed. Sometimes, when she is especially cranky, a single line of awkward dialogue or two lines free of conflict can make her feel downright oppressed.

And your manuscript will have to get past Millie, and often also a senior assistant who has been screening manuscripts for even longer and has an even shorter boredom fuse, before it lands on the agent’s desk.

It had better not bore her. Especially if, as occasionally happens, your manuscript is the next on her list to read immediately after she has broken up with her loutish boyfriend, she twisted her ankle clambering up from the subway, or she’s wondering how she’s going to pay the rent. And if poor Millie has just burned her lip on her non-fat double-shot tall latte… well, let’s just say that the first few pages of your manuscript had best be tight.

And feature at least a few delightful little details that will make Millicent sit up, forgetting her bright magenta lip, and cry, “Eureka! This writer showed me something I’ve never seen before, presented in magnificent, clear prose! Forget my lunch date — I have something to READ!”

The miracle of talent, as Mme. de Staël tells us, is the ability to knock the reader out of his own egoism. Let your first pages be living proof of that.

I think you have it in you; that gift of insight is what made you want to write in the first place, isn’t it? Don’t let the difficulties of the submission process dim that mission. Millicent, and readers everywhere, will be the better for the originality of your insight.

Keep up the good work!

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A couple of announcements

Yes, I already posted today, but I wanted to add a quick interlude to revisit a couple of issues I have brought up in recent weeks, for your dining and dancing pleasure. Or, at any rate, for your edification, I hope.

First, I promised to find out the details on the Seattle-area event for the book of poetry I reviewed last week, GOD ON THE HILL: TEMPLE POEMS FROM TIRUPATI. (If you missed the review, please check it out under the Anne’s Book Picks category, at right.) This is, to the best of my knowledge, the first time Annamayya’s poetry has been available in English in this country – and this event is an extremely rare opportunity to hear some of the greatest Indian temple poetry sung by a genuine Carnatic musical star.

For free, yet. Here’s the skinny:

Introducing GOD ON THE HILL
Talks and readings by translators Velcheru Narayana Rao and David Sherman, with songs performed by All-India Radio artist Mokapati Lalitha Devi
Tuesday, October 17th, 2006
7:30 – 8:30 pm
Elliott Bay Book Company, 101 South Main Street, Seattle

Seriously, I think it’s going to be a fascinating event, and I wouldn’t miss it. Details of the program are available on the Open Field Media website, and, as always, information on a seemingly never-ending series on great book events is available on Elliott Bay Book’s site.

Second, for those of you who followed my earlier series on agencies that charge writers upfront fees (see Fee-Charging Agencies, right), I have some additional information. A reader who wrote in to say that she had direct personal experience with the New York Literary Agency has been kind enough to provide the bulk of her correspondence with them. I am posting it – backdated to October 2, so it will be most easily accessible to those who pull up the entire Fee-Charging Agencies category – so you may judge for yourselves whether this type of experience would be right for you.

Please, if you are even considering such an agency, take a look at it.

In the interests of fair play, I shall not comment on the contents beyond that, except to include here a quote from one of the relevant missives: “BBB, AAR, and other organizations of that type mainly exist for nervous writers, and frankly, we have too many applicants as it is, so we choose not to spend time and money on those organizations.”

That’s the Better Business Bureau and the Association of Authors Representatives, by the way, the first two entities with whom any writer should check if an agency seems even slightly dubious. Yes, they DO mainly exist for nervous consumers – as does Preditors and Editors — and for a very, very good reason: writers do occasionally get scammed. It really does behoove you to do your homework.

Many, many thanks to this author for being brave enough to share this – and let’s hope it helps other writers down the line!

Keep up the good work!

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Scoring Criteria, Part XI: Logic, Provoking the Genuine Laugh, and the Ta Da! Factor

Hello, readers —

Today really will be the last installment of my series on literary contest judging criteria, I promise. This topic has been hard to leave, because it really is a microcosm of how books are viewed by publishing professionals. However, I promised you blogs on how to write a bio, and those you shall have.

Back to Presentation category problems. Another common problem in contest entries, one that affects both coherence and continuity, is skipping logical steps in arguments or plots, assuming that the reader will simply fill in the gaps for herself. This results in logic that appears from the reader’s POV to run like this:

1. Socrates was a man.

2. Socrates was wise.

3. Therefore, men who want to be wise should not wear socks.

Clearly, there is some logic missing here, right? In order to prove Proposition 3, the writer would first have to show that (a) Socrates did not wear socks (I have no idea if this is true, but hey, Greece is a warm country, so bear with me here), (b) non-sock wearing had some tangible and demonstrable effect upon his mental processes that cannot be explained by other contributing factors, such as years of study or having a yen for conversation, and (c) the bare ankle experiment’s success was not dependent upon some exogenous variable, such as the fact that socks would have looked really stupid worn with a toga. It would make sense, too, to establish that Socrates is a proper role model for modern men to emulate, as opposed to scruffy old sock-wearing moral thinkers like Jean-Jacques Rousseau or Mary Wollstonecraft. Perhaps the book could even include a compare-and-contrast of the intellectual achievements of famous sock-wearing individuals versus those of the air-blessed ankles. By the end of such a disquisition, the reader might well become converted to the author’s premise, and cast his footwear from him with a cry of liberation.

Think this seems like a ridiculous example of skipped steps, one that could not possibly occur in a real manuscript? Oh, my poor friend, bless your innocent eyes: you’ve obviously never been a judge in a nonfiction contest or advised an undergraduate thesis.

In nonfiction, I can do no better than to refer my faithful readers to Nietzsche’s THUS SPAKE ZARATHUSTRA as an illustration of this phenomenon. (I know, I know; I’m on a philosophy kick today, but it’s such a sterling example that I simply can’t resist.) Following the narrative of this book is like watching a mountain goat leap from crag to crag on a blasted mountainside; the goat may be able to get from one promontory to another with no trouble, but those of us tagging behind actually have to walk up and down the intervening gullies. The connective logic between one point and the next is frequently far from clear, or even downright wacko — and in a book that proposes that the writer and reader both might be logically superior to other people, that’s a serious coherence problem.

Okay, Nietzsche allegedly wrote the work in a three-day frenzy while confined to an insane asylum, so perhaps it is not fair to expect world-class coherence from him. The average literary contest entrant, however, does not have so good an excuse.

If a judge ever has the opportunity to write “connective logic?” in one of your margins, your presentation score is sunk. Make sure you’re filling in the relevant gullies.

Nietzsche did one thing in THUS SPAKE ZARTHUSTRA that would help him win back points in the Presentation category: include genuinely funny lines. It’s actually quite an amusing book, coherence problems aside (and not only because of them), and very, very few contest entries are funny. A funny manuscript, or even a funny joke in a serious manuscript, feels like a gift to your average tired contest judge. A deliberately-provoked laugh from a judge can result in the reward of many Presentation points, and often additional points in the Voice category as well.

Notice that I specified a DELIBERATELY-PROVOKED laugh. An unintentional laugh, what moviemakers call “a bad laugh” because it springs forth from the audience when the filmmakers do not want it to occur, will cost points. We’ve all recognize bad laughs in movies (my personal favorite was in the most recent remake of LITTLE WOMEN: Jo, played by Winona Ryder, has sold her long, lovely hair in order to help the family, and one of her sisters cries out, “Oh, Jo! Your one beauty.” The theatre positively rocked with laughter, because Ms. Ryder possesses the kind of face that artists over the centuries have willingly mortgaged their souls in order to depict accurately), but literally the only way for an author to discover them in her own book is to have someone else read it.

Do not, whatever you do, make the extremely common mistake of including guffawing onlookers to mark where the reader is supposed to laugh, as that will cost you points as well. This is another one that writers seem to have picked up from movies or television: whenever a joke appears in the dialogue, the reader is told that someone nearby laughs in response. Contrary to the author’s apparent expectation, to an experienced professional reader, this additional information detracts from the humor of the scene, rather than adds to it; the bigger the onlookers’ reaction, the less funny it seems.

Why? Well, to a judge, agent, or editor who has been around the block a few times, the onlooker’s guffaw is a flag that the author has some doubt about whether the joke is actually funny. It’s a marker of discomfort, a peek behind the scenes into the writer’s mind, distracting from the story at hand. And once the reader suspects that the writer isn’t amused, it’s only a small step to the reader’s not being amused, either.

The moral: you can lead a reader to funny, but you can’t make him laugh.

Finally, there is one more criterion that falls into the Presentation category, what I call the Ta da! factor. It’s hard to define precisely, because it’s when a manuscript exudes the sort of mercurial charisma that Elinor Glyn dubbed It when it occurs in human beings. (Thus Clara Bow, the It Girl.) Like It, the Ta da! factor makes a manuscript shine, practically demanding that the judge give the entry high marks. In fact, a healthy dose of the Ta da! factor might even prompt a judge to fudge a little in the other categories, so as to assure the entry a point total that will launch it into the finalist round.

To achieve the Ta da! factor — well, if I could tell you that, I would chuck the blogging business entirely and establish myself as the world’s most expensive writing guru. I do know that mere professionalism is not enough. Yes, all of the technical aspects of the work need to be right, as well as the execution. The writing style needs to be strong and distinct, and it helps a lot if the story is compelling. Beyond that, it’s a little hard to say how precisely the Ta da! factor gives a manuscript its sheen, just as it’s difficult to pin down just what makes a great first line of a book so great. Perhaps it’s rhythm, and a certain facility for telling detail:

“I am always drawn back to places where I have lived, the houses and their neighborhoods. For instance, there is a brownstone in the East Seventies where, during the early years of the war, I had my first New York apartment. It was one room crowded with attic furniture, a sofa and four chairs upholstered in that itchy, particular red velvet that one associates with hot days on a train.”

That’s the opening of BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY’S, Truman Capote’s masterpiece that incidentally someone really ought to make into a movie some day, because the Audrey Hepburn version bears only a passing resemblance to it. (For instance, the original novella concerns a friendship between a woman and man in their late teens; the movie is about a love story between a man and a woman in, if you look at George Peppard charitably, their late thirties. Oh, and the endings are quite different.) But just look at the use of language here. You could sing this opening; it’s positively bursting with the Ta da! factor.

Perhaps, too, a certain sense of showmanship is required. Bask in this one:

“He was a very good-looking young man indeed, shaped to be annoyed. His voice was intimate as the rustle of sheets, and he kissed easily. There was no tallying the gifts of Charvet handkerchiefs, art moderne ash-trays, monogrammed dressing-gowns, gold key-chains, and cigarette-cases of thin wood, inlaid with views of Parisian comfort stations, that were sent him by ladies too quickly confident, and were paid for with the money of unwitting husbands, which is acceptable any place in the world.”

That, my friends, is the opening to Dorothy Parker’s DUSK BEFORE FIREWORKS, and let me tell you, if a short story like that fell onto my desk as a contest judge, I would not only shower it with the highest possible marks (yes, even though I do not agree with all of Ms. Parker’s punctuation choices in this excerpt); I would nag the category chair about pushing it into the finalist round. I would go to the awards ceremony, cheer if it won, and make a point of meeting the author. I might even introduce the author to my agent. Because, my friends, it exudes the aura of the Ta da! factor as distinctly as a Buddhist temple exudes incense.

I mention this, not to cow you with examples of writing by extremely talented writers, but to fill you with hope, after this long discourse on all the technical ways you can gain or lose points in the contest judging process. Ultimately, talent does supersede almost every other consideration, as long as the work is professionally presented.

This is not to say that you should not go to great lengths to avoid making the point-costing mistakes I have pointed out in the last two weeks — you should, because genuinely talented writers’ work is knocked out of competition (and into agents’ rejection piles) all the time for technical reasons. When talent is properly presented, though, the results are magical.

A few years ago, a member of my writing group, a mystery writer, submitted a chapter, as we all did, for the group to read. In this draft (we has seen earlier ones), the first two paragraphs were gaspingly beautiful, so full of the atmosphere of the Sierra Nevada mountains that I not only to this day picture his opening in my mind as clearly as a movie — I feel that I was actually there. After reading this opening, the group grew rather quiet, so we could all chew on the imagery, the sentence structure for a while. It was so imbued with the Ta da! factor that there hardly seemed to be any point in discussing the rest of his chapter.

“One of the miracles of talent,” Mme. de Staël tells us, “is the ability to knock your readers out of their own egoism.” (Another favorite writer of mine; every woman who writes should read her brilliant novel CORINNE at some point. She wrote it in 1807, but apart from the travelogue sections, it’s still fresh as piping-hot cinnamon rolls today.) The Ta da! factor does just that, grabs the reader’s attention and simply insists upon this book’s being read, right now.

Under the sway of all of the publishing fads continually buffeting us, it’s all too easy for writers to forget what power really good writing has. If only the publication of a truly exciting book were taken up with the verve and intensity that the media has devoted to the controversy over James Frey’s A MILLION LITTLE PIECES. “But is it well written?” the commentators should cry, and then go into questions of factual accuracy.

Publishing fads, like fashions in beauty, come and go. Talent doesn’t. Just as so many of the actors held up as exemplars of beauty now would not have been considered especially attractive in, say, the Italian Renaissance, or even a hundred years ago, I believe that many of the books published today will not be considered essential reading a hundred years from now. But the work of some authors — Truman Capote, Dorothy Parker, Mme. de Staël, for instance — has something about it that elevates it above the passing fad, just as there are some actors who, it is perfectly obvious to us all, would have been considered absolutely lovely in any period of human history.

“Oh, Jo! Your one beauty!” notwithstanding.

Keep your chins up, my friends, through all the hard work of perfecting your manuscripts and contest entries; you’re toiling in a noble vineyard. Real talent is not necessarily measured in the short term. Keep up the good work.

 

– Anne Mini

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Self-plagiarization

Hello, readers –

Today, I would like to talk about the Frankenstein manuscript’s prettier and more socially-acceptable cousin, self-plagiarized repetition. Where the Frankenstein manuscript varies substantially as pages pass, the self-plagiarized text becomes redundant: scenery described the same way, for instance, or a clever line of dialogue repeated in Chapters 2, 5, and 16.

I chose to bring this up on the day of the State of the Union address self-consciously, because nowhere is the practice of self-plagiarization more prevalent than in the garden-variety political speech. Tell me – do you think people would remember that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. had a dream if he had said it only ONCE in his famous March on Washington speech?

There’s a good reason: the repetition of an idea makes it memorable. The ideas – and usually even the actual phrases – of the beginning of a political speech invariably recur throughout. And, as anyone who has listened to two consecutive State of the Union addresses can tell you, political speeches often sound the same from year to year. No matter how fiercely THE WEST WING has tried to promote the notion of presidential speechwriters as ultra-creative writers, if you look at speeches given by the same politician over time, self-plagiarization is rife.

On paper, phrase repetition is problematic, but in and of itself, it is not necessarily self-plagiarization. On paper, phrase repetition can be used for emphasis (as I have just done here). A lot of good writers choose to repeat phrases within a single paragraph for rhythmic reasons, which can bring a passage an invocative feel. Take the
St. Crispin’s Day speech from HENRY V, for instance: “We few, we happy few, we band of brothers…”

Now THAT’s a political speech.

Unfortunately, a lot of poor writers favor this device, too, so it tends to be a rather risky trick to try to pull off in a short piece, such as a synopsis, or even in the first few pages of a manuscript submitted for a contest or as part of a query packet. To professional eyes, trained to search for the repetition of a single verb within a paragraph as evidence of boring writing, “we few, we happy few” will not necessarily jump off the page for its rhythm. In an ultra-quick reading (as virtually all professional readings are), it may be mistaken for an incomplete edit: you meant to change “we few” to “we happy few,” but you forgot to delete the words you did not want.

Self-plagiarization tends to raise red flags with professional readers, too. The writer may not realize that she has reused a particularly spectacular image from Ch. 1 in Ch. 3, but believe me, if there is repetition, professional readers will catch it. Editors are notorious for remembering entire pages verbatim. I am no exception: when I was teaching at the University of Washington, I was known for noticing when term papers resubmitted in subsequent quarters, even though I read literally hundreds of papers per term. I would even remember who wrote the original.

Although it may earn you an ill-humored rebuke from a professional reader, such repetition usually will not knock you out of consideration if the self-plagiarized bits occur far apart, such as at the beginning and end of a book. However, in a shorter piece, or in those first 50 pages of your novel that nice agent asked you to send for consideration, it can cost you. Repetition sticks in the professional reader’s craw, nagging at her psyche like a pebble in a shoe, so it is best to do it as little as possible.

“Now wait a minute,” I hear some of you out there grumbling. “Oscar Wilde repeated the same quips in one play after another. It became his trademark, in fact. So why should I be punished for using a single particularly sterling line 150 pages apart in my novel?”

Quite true. And Aaron Sorkin reused not only lines and speeches from SPORTS NIGHTin THE WEST WING (my pet repetition of the evening, apparently), but entire plot lines and basic characters. Tell you what – after you make it big, I give you permission to establish a trademark phrase and use it as often as you like. Until you do – as I sincerely hope you will – all I can do is tell you what tends to annoy agents, editors, and contest judges.

All writers of book-length works have repeated themselves at one time or another; if a simile struck us as the height of cleverness last week, chances are good that we will like it next week as well. Each time we use it, it may seem fresh to us. These little forays into self-indulgence are so common, in fact, that literary critics have a name for them: tropes.

F. Scott Fitzgerald was a notorious troper in his short stories. If memory serves, a thwarted heroine’s sobbing out (usually with her face hidden by her hair), “I’m so beautiful – why can’t I be happy?” immediately before she does something self-immolatingly stupid to remove herself from the possibility of marrying the story’s protagonist occurs at least four times throughout his collected works. Why our Scott found that line so very attractive remains a mystery eternal – it’s hard to believe he ever actually heard a human female utter it – but he did, and now it’s stuck to his name for all eternity.

Usually, though, self-plagiarization is more subtle. Spread out over an entire text — or as it often appears in the case of successful writers of series, once per book – self-plagiarization may be both innocuous and unintentional on the part of the writer. For example, E.F. Benson, author of two delightful series, the Lucia books and the Dodo books, was evidently extraordinarily fond of using Artic analogies for one person suddenly grown cold to another. As in: “It was as if an iceberg had spoken,” “It was as if the North Pole had spoken,” and “icebergs passing in the North Sea” must speak to one another so.

Now, it’s not a bad analogy, if not a startlingly original one. The problem is, as a Benson enthusiast, I was able to come up with three of them without even pulling his books off the shelf. These repetitions, deliberate or not, stick with the reader, just as surely as repeated phrases stick with the audience of a political speech.

Here, yet again, is an awfully good reason to read your entire book (or requested chapters, or contest submission) out loud before you submit it. Believe it or not, just as dialogue that seemed fine on the page can suddenly seem stilted when spoken aloud, phrases, sentences, and images that your eye might not catch as repetitious are often quite obvious to the ear. (Another good reason to read aloud: to make sure that each of your major characters speaks in a different cadence. Much more readable that way. As are lines of dialogue that can actually be said in a single breath without passing out.)

Oh, and now I see that I got so carried away with my topic, I’ve missed the first half-hour of the State of the Union speech, and shall have to catch the rebroadcast. Oh, I’m so beautiful – why can’t I be happy?

Keep up the good work!

– Anne Mini

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The Frankenstein Manuscript, Part II: The monster always returns

Hello, readers —

Yesterday, I introduced you to the Frankenstein manuscript, the frightening entity that is presented as a book written by a single author, but reads as though it had been written by several, so different are the voices, perspectives, and even word choices throughout. Such meandering manuscripts are common enough that professional readers — e.g., agents, editors, contest judges — tend to become profoundly suspicious of any manuscript that changes style or voice abruptly. With the super-quick readings that manuscripts generally get in the pre-acquisition stage (and always get in the first round of contest judging), the Frankenstein manuscript and the manuscript genuinely setting out to do interesting things with perspective are easily confused.

There are many fine examples of good books where writers have adopted a Frankenstein format self-consciously, in order to make a point. If you are even vaguely interested in experiments in narrative voice, you should rush out and read Margaret Atwood’s ALIAS GRACE.

Atwood tells the story of a murder, alternating between a tight first-person POV, straightforward third-person narrative, contemporary poems about the case, letters from the parties involved, newspaper clippings and even direct quotes from the murderess’ confession. It is an enjoyable read, but for writers, it is also a rich resource on how to mix battling narrative styles and structures well; as one might expect from a stylist as gifted as she; Atwood constructs her patchwork narrative so skillfully that the reader never has to wonder for more than an instant why (or how) the perspective has just changed.

I admire Margaret Atwood tremendously as novelist, poet, and essayist; I have spent years crossing my fingers as she hovered around the short list for the Nobel Prize. However, I suspect that even she would have had terribly difficult time marketing ALIAS GRACE if it were her first novel, at least in the current market, due to its Frankenstein structure.

Ditto for the inimitable Mario Vargas Llosa’s AUNT JULIA AND THE SCRIPTWRITER, one of my favorite novels of all time, and also a must-read for any writer considering playing funny tricks with narrative voice. Vargas Llosa is something of a structural prankster, folding, spindling, and mutilating the ordinary rules of storytelling in order to keep the reader off-balance. I admire his dash; when he was running for president of Peru (yes, really), he published an erotic novel, IN PRAISE OF THE STEPMOTHER, about… well, you can probably guess. (He lost, incidentally.) He, too, has been on the short list for the Nobel Prize for an awfully long time.

The moral here is this: once you’ve gained international acclaim as a prose stylist, you have a lot more leeway to mess with the conventional rules of writing. (Heck, Alice Walker made up entirely new punctuation rules for THE COLOR PURPLE, and that won the Pulitzer Prize.) But in your first book, in the current market, you probably cannot get away with breaking more than one or two of the rules — and even those need to be IMMISTAKEABLY marked, so agents, editors, and contest judges know that you broke them for a reason, rather than out of ignorance. (Trust me, no one on the Pulitzer committee thought that Alice Walker did not know how to use a semicolon properly.)

“Wait a gosh-darned minute,” I hear some of you exclaiming. “I take some liberties with narrative style, but it becomes clear over the course of the book why I’m doing it. Do you mean to say that if it is not clear in the first 50 pages, or whatever short excerpt the agent, editor, or contest has asked to see, my innovative experiment in English prose might just get thrown into the reject pile because it will be mistaken for bad writing?”

In a word, yes.

Before you fret and fume too much about how the intense pre-screening of the current agency system prevents genuinely bold experiments in writing from reaching the desks of publishers at the major houses, think about the Frankenstein manuscript from the point of view of the agent, editor, or judge who finds it on her desk one busy morning.

When I receive a Frankenstein manuscript as a freelance editing project, I have the option of sitting down with the author, having a major discussion about what she wants the book be, and helping guide the work toward more internal stylistic consistency. Basically, the process entails gathering together all of the battling styles, making the author come up with a justification for using each, and having the justifications duke it out until one (or, rarely, two) is declared the winner by the author. It takes time, but it’s generally worth the effort.

However, when a first reader at an agency or an editor at a publishing house receives a Frankenstein manuscript — and yes, some manuscripts are so internally scattered that the problem becomes apparent in even just the first chapter or first 50 pages — she is unlikely to have the time to figure out which voice and/or style is going to end up dominating the book. Even if she absolutely loves one of the styles or voices, her hectic schedule does not allow time for equivocation. She must that she select one of two options, and quickly: either she commits to nursing the author through precisely the kind of boxing match I described above, or she can simply reject the work and move on to the next submission, in the hope of finding a writer whose book will not need as much tender loving care.

With literally hundreds of new submissions coming in each week, which option do you think she’ll select more often?

When a contest judge receives a Frankenstein manuscript, the choice is even quicker and more draconian. The judge knows that there’s no question of being able to work with the author to smooth out the presentation; in the vast majority of literary contests, the judge won’t even know who the author is. Plop! There it goes, into the no-prize-this-year file. Better luck — and first readers — next year.

If you are attempting to play with unconventional notions of structure or style, make sure that it is pellucidly clear in the manuscript exactly what you are doing. Don’t leave it to the reader to guess, because, as I’ve shown above, professional readers just don’t have the time to figure it out.

And consider making your deviations from standard structure and narrative rules bold, rather than slipping them in here and there. Experimenting with several styles within a short number of pages is decidedly risky — and perversely, the less daringly experimental you are, the riskier it is, because tentative attempts look to professional eyes like unfinished work.

To borrow E.F. Benson’s wonderful example, let’s say you were planning to paint a picture of a house down the street. The house has a crooked chimney. The novice painter would paint it exactly as is, unskillfully, and viewers of the finished painting would wonder forever after if the chimney had really looked like that, or if the novice just couldn’t paint straight lines. An intermediate painter would paint the chimney as straight, to rule out that conclusion. But an expert painter would add 10 degrees to the angle of the chimney, so there would be no doubt in the observer’s mind that he had painted it that way intentionally.

The more deliciously complex and groundbreaking your chosen style is, the more clearly you should announce it. Unless, of course, you want to wait until you’re on the short list for the Nobel Prize before you start getting wacky.

Tomorrow, I shall talk about practical measures to keep your manuscript from falling accidentally into the Frankenstein realm.

Keep up the good work!

– Anne Mini

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The Frankenstein manuscript

Hello, readers –

I’m in a terrific mood today — first, the 2005 Food Blog Awards have just come out, and my good friend and PNWA member Shauna James’ wonderful blog has just been named the best theme-oriented food blog in the world. As in: on the entire globe, in any language spoken by human beings.

So three cheers and a hat in the air for Shauna — and for all of you out there who have the guts, persistence, and determination to keep putting your writing out there for all the world to see. Whether you can eat gluten or not, if you are even vaguely interested in food or food writing, you owe it to yourself to trot on over to her site. Really luscious stuff, with some of the finest food photography you’re likely to see anywhere.

As if that weren’t enough to make me happy on this miraculously azure-skied PNW winter day, an editing client of mine has just made a major breakthrough with her book. Few writers, no matter how talented, find their voices the first time around, and we’ve been working together for months, trying to pin down how exactly to tell her story. And, as happens sometimes, it just suddenly congealed into something sharp and analytical and true.

On an artistic level, I’m thrilled that she’s found her voice, but as an editor, I know that in the short term, it means a lot more work for me. Because, you see, now we have to go back through the rest of the book with a fine-toothed comb, to make the voice that now has emerged sound consistent throughout the entire story.

Which brings me, rather neatly, to today’s topic: the Frankenstein manuscript, a book that meanders in voice, tone, perspective, structure, and/or style so much that it sounds as though it had been written by a committee, instead of an individual writer. All of these are cobbled together, like the body parts of Dr. Frankenstein’s creature, to create the illusion of a whole entity, but it lacks the spark, the true-to-life continuity of a story told from beginning to end by a sure authorial voice.

This is my personal nickname for such a book, but I assure you, every single agent and editor knows what it is, and dreads it — because they know, as I do, that its appearance heralds months and months of fine-combing to come.

The sad thing is, the Frankenstein tendency is almost always accidental, and generally goes entirely unnoticed by the writer. Writing a book takes a long time: as with my editing client, authorial voices, preferences, and even underlying philosophy can change radically over the course of a writing project. As revision is layered on top of revision, many writers become too absorbed in the details of the book to sit down and read it straight through AS A BOOK — which, unfortunately, is the only way to recognize a Frankenstein manuscript.

Even more unfortunately, for writers of Frankenstein pieces, reading a manuscript straight through, at least the first part of it, is how agents and editors determine whether they want to work with an author. If you have a Frankenstein manuscript, you are far, far better off recognizing the problem yourself before you submit it, because from the diagnosis of professionals, there is no appeal.

Sometimes, the pieced-together nature of a book is intentional, and its similarity to the standard Frankenstein tome will render it very, very easy for agents and editors to dismiss. If you are given to experimenting with multiple POV, changes in voice, or structural changes in mid-story, you need to be very, very aware that professional readers may well be mistaking your conscious choices for symptoms of a Frankenstein game plan.

I met a promising writer at a writers’ conference once, many years ago. He described his novel beautifully: a coming-of-age story about a boy so engrossed in the messages of the TV shows and movies he saw in the late 1950s that he incorporated these styles into how he viewed his life. The result, the author told me, was intended to be a picaresque account growing up from the kid’s perspective, real-life stories told as cowboys and Indians, spy thriller, spaceman adventure, etc.

Well, to be frank, I am not the best audience for works about prepubescent boys. As someone who spent her formative years sitting through sensitive European films where an earthy older woman’s charms gently coax some suspiciously attractive and precocious young boy toward manhood, I become leery every time a young protagonist goes anywhere within five miles of the town prostitute’s lair, his best friend’s older sister’s window, or anybody’s mother but his own. But that’s just me.

As an aside, I think such stories are a hard sell to experienced readers, unless they are AWFULLY well told. There are countless films about 8-to-12 year-old boys learning important life lessons the hard way; if the age is so darned important, why aren’t there as many films from the perspectives of girls in that age group? (An important exception to this: Kasi Lemmons’ excellent film EVE’S BAYOU tells such a story from a young girl’s perspective amazingly well.) I think that if you choose to tackle such a well-documented age group in a work intended for adult readers — particularly if you want to stick to the well-worn ground of white, middle- or upper-middle class boys in suburbia or in small towns with swimming holes, you really have to come up with something startling to rise above the sheer volume of competition.

But in this case, the author seemed like an interesting guy, so we exchanged work, despite my trepidations. And lo and behold, long before 50 pages had past, his intrepid wee protagonist had grabbed his fishing pole and skipped his way toward the edge of town, where the local voodoo priestess/cajoler of young boys into manhood lived.

Yet the fact that I’d seen the plot, conservatively speaking, 2700 times before was not what put me off the book. No, the problem was the fact that each stylistic switch came as a complete and utter surprise — even to me, who knew the premise of the book. Each episode was indeed presented in the style of some well-worn visual media style. Quite well, as a matter of fact. However, since the writing style changed radically every ten pages or so, pretty much any reader was guaranteed to fall into one she disliked occasionally. And since there was no overarching framework to make this junior Walter Mitty’s account of himself hang together, it read like a collection of short stories, unrelated articles of clothing hanging side-by-side on a clothesline, rather than as a cohesive book.

It read, in short, like a Frankenstein manuscript.

Because I liked the author and thought he was a pretty good writer, I wanted to help him out, so I worked up nerve to make a bold suggestion. “What if you set up very plainly in the first chapter that your protagonist sees life through a directorial lens?” (Sort of like Fellini’s 8 1/2, I added to myself.) “That way, the reader would be in on the conceit right from the beginning, and could enjoy each switch as play, rather than leaving the reader to guess after the style has changed 6 or 7 times that you have a larger purpose here.”

He, to put it mildly, did not like this advice; it sounded, he said, just like the feedback he had gotten from the agents and editors at the conference, or indeed, every agent he had queried. We all obviously, he said huffily, just didn’t like the fact that he was experimenting with narrative structure, doing something new and exciting and fresh. We were, in his considered opinion, sticks in the proverbial mud.

Well, we may have been, but we also evidently all knew a Frankenstein manuscript when we saw one, because we’ve seen so very, very many. He continued to have trouble placing his book, because, to professional eyes, such a manuscript means only one thing: the investment of a tremendous amount of editorial time and energy to make the work publishable.

My friend with ambitions to rewrite HUCK FINN had constructed his creature self-consciously, but far more often, as I said, writers are not even aware that the style shifts are visible. Particularly in first novels, the stylistic changes are often the inevitable result of the writer’s craft having improved over the years spent writing the book, or simple inexperience in carrying a late-added theme all the way through a story. In the most extreme cases, the shifts are so pronounced that the Frankenstein book can actually read as a sort of unintentional anthology.

I’m not talking about multiple-perspective pieces — although it is very easy for a book relying upon several storytelling voices to end up as a Frankenstein work, without a cohesive narrative thread tying it all together. No, in a good multiple-perspective novel, each voice and/or POV is sharp, distinct, differentiated to the extent that a reader familiar with each could open the book at any page and know within a paragraph who is speaking. THE POISONWOOD BIBLE, for instance, juggles multiple perspectives and voices beautifully, so that although the reader is treated to the overarching story in bits and pieces, the whole blends into seemingly organic coherence.

In a Frankenstein manuscript, no such organic coherence exists, even if the overall plot makes linear sense. The reader is jerked from writing style to writing style, as if the same story were being told on all available networks, but an indecisive child held the remote control, so the style of telling leaps from soap opera to broad comedy to PBS documentary. It’s tiring to read, and often, hard to follow. It also says pretty clearly to anyone who reads manuscripts for a living that the author has not yet performed a thorough, beginning-to-end edit on the book.

And this is a serious problem for the editor, as it is her job to strengthen the dominant style and muffle the rest, so the whole can stand as a unified piece of prose. It is also a serious problem for the author, since it’s hard to sell a piece that meanders stylistically.

Before I meander into my years of experience fixing Frankenstein manuscripts, I am going to stop for today. Tomorrow, I shall go into what happens to a Frankenstein manuscript when it reaches an agency or a publishing house — as well as methods you can use to catch and mend the problem before it passes under professional eyes.

Keep up the good work!

– Anne Mini