Writing, Editing & Journalism

A Year-Long "Get Fit to Print" Program for Aspiring Authors

No Comments

I’ve recently been spending more time at home looking at ideal strength-training approaches. As I enter my middle years, accompanied by a (regrettably) soft middle, it occurs to me that I need to do some course correcting if I’m to avoid a slow, painful death from multiple chronic conditions. So refreshing myself on techniques like “couch-to-5K” and “building strength 101” has proven salutary.
People really like structured programs as a jumping-off point for their own growth, and evolving as a writer is no exception. Although you simply cannot distill creative writing into a proscriptive algorithm — people start in different places, and they learn in different ways — a review of the literature suggests that there’s perhaps too little scaffolding offered to new writers. Experienced authors and editors offer trite slogans, which is fine, but those slogans are damned difficult to turn into concrete action.
So, in the interest of providing some scaffolding, I’m pleased to introduce Jason’s “Get Fit to Print”™ program to take you from zero to literary hero in 12 months flat.*
*Your mileage may vary. Tax, title and license separate. The FDA has not approved these statements. Consult your doctor before taking Cialis. Batteries not included. Potential choking hazard. May contain nuts. Blah, blah.

Month Activities Rationale
January No matter how good of a writer you think you are, you aren’t as good as you think. None of us are! The most common reason we at Caffeinated Press reject submissions is because the technical quality of the writing is substandard. So refresh your grammar skills. Buy some reference books and actually read them. It’ll be a dry exercise, but reading stylebooks is like looking at maps: Not fun, but unless you do it, you don’t know what you don’t know about getting from Point A to Point B.
February Write one of each of the following: a poem of at least 20 lines, a flash story between 500 and 1,000 words, a creative non-fiction essay between 1,000 and 2,500 words, and a short story between 2,500 and 5,000 words. Write them in this order. Start on 2/1 and be done by 2/28. These pieces will likely be crap. That’s OK. The point is to do the writing. You’ll use these pieces later, as you hone your skills. Until then, however, you have to have something on paper. You’ll also learn a little bit about how you write: Morning or evening? PC or paper? Notes first or dive “write” in? Don’t overthink it. Let it feel natural. There’s no correct way to do this.
March
  •  Attend a literary event in your community — a book signing, a poetry reading, whatever. Better yet, attend more than one. And when you’re there, talk to people. Be social!
  • Also, go back to your February works and revise them. Don’t show them to anyone else yet. Not even Aunt Ethel.
  Start to build connections with the literary community. You will need a network of fellow literary travelers if you want to be successful as a published writer — so connect with fellow authors, readers, publishers, editors, booksellers, etc. This networking component is a major contributor to the financial viability of first-time authors.
April
  •  Find or join a critique group. Aim for a group that’s open, focused and diverse in terms of experience. Maybe think about the folks you met in March.
  • Pick your toolset. Some people like sitting with a laptop and Microsoft Word. Others prefer planning in Scrivener. Still others favor plain-text Markdown. And while some folks love early-morning scribbling, others need the evening and a martini to thrive. Or a jaunt to the coffee shop. Regardless, prepare your planned times for writing with the tools you find most useful. Make this combination of tools, time and setting a habit.
  •  Without beta readers — i.e., a trusted critique group — you are almost surely guaranteed to fail as a writer. Writing may be a solitary exercise, but polishing the written word is a community event. You’ll be expected to submit stuff for review. The results will probably be painful. And you’ll be expected to reciprocate.
  • Regarding tools — don’t overthink it, or you might find you’re spending more time planning to write, than actually writing. Optimization of one’s writing environment can, if taken to extremes, prevent writing altogether.
May  Start building a business and social platform.  Now’s the time to “come out” as an author. Build a blog. Establish a Twitter account and a Facebook fan page for yourself as an author. Create a Goodreads account. Think about your author’s identity: Do you use a pseudonym? Have a different email address or a PO Box for your literary endeavors? Do you establish an LLC or a DBA to legally and financially separate your author-related work from your personal life? Do you need your own logo or Web domain? Author-branded business cards? This might be a good time to look for something like a Business of Writing or Author Media Toolbox seminar.
June
  •  Edit your February works in light of feedback from your critique group.
  • Build your social platform by blogging at least once per week and growing your Facebook likes and Twitter followers. Aim for slow, organic growth. Keep doing this network-acquisition work, from now until the day you die.
  You’ll probably be embarrassed by what your critique partners catch. Good. Learn from the experience. And if you disagree with their observations, don’t just dismiss the comments—study them. You have to grow a certain amount of skin thickness as a writer, and lose a degree of emotional attachment to your work, to survive in a tough literary market. Some people can’t take feedback well. If you’re one of those folks, re-consider your aspiration to write for publication.
July  Write a novelette.  Longer-form works (aim for 14k to 16k words) require more complex plotting, character development and narrative arcs. You’ll build on the lessons you learned with shorter works, earlier in the year, to voyage into more complicated waters.
August
  •  Attend one writing-related event each week.
  • Don’t write much. Instead, read the stuff your local peers have published. Your talent as a writer must be honed, in part, by being a voracious reader. Writers who don’t read are like electricians who live in a candle-lit house.
  Continue to build your network. Pass out your business cards, buy local authors’ books, show up at readings. Meet people. Learn from their stories and read their books. Get to know the names of well-known local writers and artists. One day, when you need a blurb for a book cover, these are the folks to whom you’ll turn.
September
  •  Edit your novelette in light of feedback from your critique group.
  • Keep growing your social network.
  Learn from critique feedback. Assess where you have gaps (descriptions, point of view, narrative voice, setting, conflict, etc.) and go back to your reference materials to study up on ideal solutions.
October
  •  Plan a novel. Target 85k words for the completed product. Do not start writing it yet, but do think about plot, characters, conflict, setting, etc.
  • Also, write two short stories of less than 8k words each.
  •  Long-form plotting without writing makes you think about what you’re doing before you do it. You might enjoy “pantsing” (writing without prep), but you should at least once try the discipline of planning.
  • Even when you’re in plotting/revising modes, still find the time to write short pieces. Build your own slush pile. It’ll come in handy when you come across a great submission opportunity on deadline day!
November Participate in National Novel Writing Month. Your goal is to start 11/1, and by 11/30, be “done” with a manuscript of at least 50k words. (The novel doesn’t technically need to be done, you just need to have incurred the minimum word count by 11:59 p.m. on the 30th.) This novel is considered a “zero draft” — it’s not even a first draft. That’s OK. Don’t spend time self-editing as you go. And don’t aim to write a 50k-word story; most first-time novels are closer to 80k-90k. Your goal, really, is to just get the words down. You’ll fix them later.
December
  • Pick at least two of your completed, peer-reviewed short-form pieces. Send each to at least one contest. Check Poets & Writers for an excellent, current list of opportunities.
  • Finish your NaNo novel.
  • Polish your October stories in light of feedback from your critique group.
  • Celebrate your work by shopping some of your well-curated slush pile. You are likely to get a lot of silence, or a lot of form rejections — but we all do. It’s a badge of honor. Keep writing, keep submitting. Learn from your feedback. After all: You’ve just spent the year going from zero to a literary hero. Own that victory.
  • Oh, and about that NaNo novel — it’s probably going to be garbage. Your next two or three are likely to also be garbage. You learn by doing. Most experienced authors have several early, complete manuscripts tucked in a drawer somewhere, where they will never see the light of day. These training manuscripts are painful, but necessary. You’ll probably be better positioned to sell a novel on the market by the time you hit manuscript four, five, six — unless you self-publish. Which may or may not be wise, depending on your career goals.

Will this approach guarantee you financial success as an author? Nope. But I get enough questions from people who say, “I literally do not know where to start,” that I think there’s some value in the construct I’ve outlined above.
The key points for getting started as a writer are:

  • Plug your gaps in grammar, syntax and style.
  • Sit your butt in a chair and write stuff.
  • Find a critique group and make heavy use of it.
  • Network with your peers in your local literary scene.
  • Build a platform/identity as an author — a blog, social media, custom domain name, biz cards, etc.
  • Submit your polished work to carefully selected venues.

You nail these six points, you’re in good shape. miss any of them, and you’re not. So whether you prefer a lot of structure, or a succinct list of rules, you’ve now been given a framework. Make the best of it!

Writing, Editing & Journalism

A Year-Long “Get Fit to Print” Program for Aspiring Authors

No Comments

I’ve recently been spending more time at home looking at ideal strength-training approaches. As I enter my middle years, accompanied by a (regrettably) soft middle, it occurs to me that I need to do some course correcting if I’m to avoid a slow, painful death from multiple chronic conditions. So refreshing myself on techniques like “couch-to-5K” and “building strength 101” has proven salutary.

People really like structured programs as a jumping-off point for their own growth, and evolving as a writer is no exception. Although you simply cannot distill creative writing into a proscriptive algorithm — people start in different places, and they learn in different ways — a review of the literature suggests that there’s perhaps too little scaffolding offered to new writers. Experienced authors and editors offer trite slogans, which is fine, but those slogans are damned difficult to turn into concrete action.

So, in the interest of providing some scaffolding, I’m pleased to introduce Jason’s “Get Fit to Print”™ program to take you from zero to literary hero in 12 months flat.*

*Your mileage may vary. Tax, title and license separate. The FDA has not approved these statements. Consult your doctor before taking Cialis. Batteries not included. Potential choking hazard. May contain nuts. Blah, blah.

Month Activities Rationale
January No matter how good of a writer you think you are, you aren’t as good as you think. None of us are! The most common reason we at Caffeinated Press reject submissions is because the technical quality of the writing is substandard. So refresh your grammar skills. Buy some reference books and actually read them. It’ll be a dry exercise, but reading stylebooks is like looking at maps: Not fun, but unless you do it, you don’t know what you don’t know about getting from Point A to Point B.
February Write one of each of the following: a poem of at least 20 lines, a flash story between 500 and 1,000 words, a creative non-fiction essay between 1,000 and 2,500 words, and a short story between 2,500 and 5,000 words. Write them in this order. Start on 2/1 and be done by 2/28. These pieces will likely be crap. That’s OK. The point is to do the writing. You’ll use these pieces later, as you hone your skills. Until then, however, you have to have something on paper. You’ll also learn a little bit about how you write: Morning or evening? PC or paper? Notes first or dive “write” in? Don’t overthink it. Let it feel natural. There’s no correct way to do this.
March
  •  Attend a literary event in your community — a book signing, a poetry reading, whatever. Better yet, attend more than one. And when you’re there, talk to people. Be social!
  • Also, go back to your February works and revise them. Don’t show them to anyone else yet. Not even Aunt Ethel.
  Start to build connections with the literary community. You will need a network of fellow literary travelers if you want to be successful as a published writer — so connect with fellow authors, readers, publishers, editors, booksellers, etc. This networking component is a major contributor to the financial viability of first-time authors.
April
  •  Find or join a critique group. Aim for a group that’s open, focused and diverse in terms of experience. Maybe think about the folks you met in March.
  • Pick your toolset. Some people like sitting with a laptop and Microsoft Word. Others prefer planning in Scrivener. Still others favor plain-text Markdown. And while some folks love early-morning scribbling, others need the evening and a martini to thrive. Or a jaunt to the coffee shop. Regardless, prepare your planned times for writing with the tools you find most useful. Make this combination of tools, time and setting a habit.
  •  Without beta readers — i.e., a trusted critique group — you are almost surely guaranteed to fail as a writer. Writing may be a solitary exercise, but polishing the written word is a community event. You’ll be expected to submit stuff for review. The results will probably be painful. And you’ll be expected to reciprocate.
  • Regarding tools — don’t overthink it, or you might find you’re spending more time planning to write, than actually writing. Optimization of one’s writing environment can, if taken to extremes, prevent writing altogether.
May  Start building a business and social platform.  Now’s the time to “come out” as an author. Build a blog. Establish a Twitter account and a Facebook fan page for yourself as an author. Create a Goodreads account. Think about your author’s identity: Do you use a pseudonym? Have a different email address or a PO Box for your literary endeavors? Do you establish an LLC or a DBA to legally and financially separate your author-related work from your personal life? Do you need your own logo or Web domain? Author-branded business cards? This might be a good time to look for something like a Business of Writing or Author Media Toolbox seminar.
June
  •  Edit your February works in light of feedback from your critique group.
  • Build your social platform by blogging at least once per week and growing your Facebook likes and Twitter followers. Aim for slow, organic growth. Keep doing this network-acquisition work, from now until the day you die.
  You’ll probably be embarrassed by what your critique partners catch. Good. Learn from the experience. And if you disagree with their observations, don’t just dismiss the comments—study them. You have to grow a certain amount of skin thickness as a writer, and lose a degree of emotional attachment to your work, to survive in a tough literary market. Some people can’t take feedback well. If you’re one of those folks, re-consider your aspiration to write for publication.
July  Write a novelette.  Longer-form works (aim for 14k to 16k words) require more complex plotting, character development and narrative arcs. You’ll build on the lessons you learned with shorter works, earlier in the year, to voyage into more complicated waters.
August
  •  Attend one writing-related event each week.
  • Don’t write much. Instead, read the stuff your local peers have published. Your talent as a writer must be honed, in part, by being a voracious reader. Writers who don’t read are like electricians who live in a candle-lit house.
  Continue to build your network. Pass out your business cards, buy local authors’ books, show up at readings. Meet people. Learn from their stories and read their books. Get to know the names of well-known local writers and artists. One day, when you need a blurb for a book cover, these are the folks to whom you’ll turn.
September
  •  Edit your novelette in light of feedback from your critique group.
  • Keep growing your social network.
  Learn from critique feedback. Assess where you have gaps (descriptions, point of view, narrative voice, setting, conflict, etc.) and go back to your reference materials to study up on ideal solutions.
October
  •  Plan a novel. Target 85k words for the completed product. Do not start writing it yet, but do think about plot, characters, conflict, setting, etc.
  • Also, write two short stories of less than 8k words each.
  •  Long-form plotting without writing makes you think about what you’re doing before you do it. You might enjoy “pantsing” (writing without prep), but you should at least once try the discipline of planning.
  • Even when you’re in plotting/revising modes, still find the time to write short pieces. Build your own slush pile. It’ll come in handy when you come across a great submission opportunity on deadline day!
November Participate in National Novel Writing Month. Your goal is to start 11/1, and by 11/30, be “done” with a manuscript of at least 50k words. (The novel doesn’t technically need to be done, you just need to have incurred the minimum word count by 11:59 p.m. on the 30th.) This novel is considered a “zero draft” — it’s not even a first draft. That’s OK. Don’t spend time self-editing as you go. And don’t aim to write a 50k-word story; most first-time novels are closer to 80k-90k. Your goal, really, is to just get the words down. You’ll fix them later.
December
  • Pick at least two of your completed, peer-reviewed short-form pieces. Send each to at least one contest. Check Poets & Writers for an excellent, current list of opportunities.
  • Finish your NaNo novel.
  • Polish your October stories in light of feedback from your critique group.
  • Celebrate your work by shopping some of your well-curated slush pile. You are likely to get a lot of silence, or a lot of form rejections — but we all do. It’s a badge of honor. Keep writing, keep submitting. Learn from your feedback. After all: You’ve just spent the year going from zero to a literary hero. Own that victory.
  • Oh, and about that NaNo novel — it’s probably going to be garbage. Your next two or three are likely to also be garbage. You learn by doing. Most experienced authors have several early, complete manuscripts tucked in a drawer somewhere, where they will never see the light of day. These training manuscripts are painful, but necessary. You’ll probably be better positioned to sell a novel on the market by the time you hit manuscript four, five, six — unless you self-publish. Which may or may not be wise, depending on your career goals.

Will this approach guarantee you financial success as an author? Nope. But I get enough questions from people who say, “I literally do not know where to start,” that I think there’s some value in the construct I’ve outlined above.

The key points for getting started as a writer are:

  • Plug your gaps in grammar, syntax and style.
  • Sit your butt in a chair and write stuff.
  • Find a critique group and make heavy use of it.
  • Network with your peers in your local literary scene.
  • Build a platform/identity as an author — a blog, social media, custom domain name, biz cards, etc.
  • Submit your polished work to carefully selected venues.

You nail these six points, you’re in good shape. miss any of them, and you’re not. So whether you prefer a lot of structure, or a succinct list of rules, you’ve now been given a framework. Make the best of it!

Personal, Writing, Editing & Journalism

Laborin' on Labor Day

No Comments

I took off Friday, and this coming Tuesday, from the day job to focus on stuff at Caffeinated Press. Making hella-good progress, too.
Some updates:

  • Book Projects Complete.  Yesterday, in an all-day marathon, I performed my finishing touches on the Brewed Awakenings 2 anthology. The project is overdue by almost exactly a year. Yesterday evening, I sent full/complete proofs of the interior and cover to all 14 authors; so far, three have responded, all positively. Except in the highly unlikely scenario of a major edit request, this collection will be released in about three weeks. Today, keeping the theme alive, I did final wrap up on Grayson Rising — also horribly overdue — and sent the proofs of this delightful YA novel to the author. And I finished the first-pass cut of the interior of Ladri, although I have about another hour or two of work on the cover, which I’ll complete when the author gives me a few pieces of info I need. And, John advises that he’ll wrap up the initial layout of Vol. 2, Issue 1 of The 3288 Review this weekend. So September looks like we’ll be wrapped up with four major projects. Which is a relief — the rest of the stuff in the production queue doesn’t hit until winter-ish. I’ll be able to head into November’s NaNo-fueled writing frenzy with a clean conscience that at least I’m not delayed on anything else.
  • Kerrytown Book Festival.  In a few weeks, I’m headed to Ann Arbor for the day to shop our wares at the KBF. Should be a good time. I’ll put the sales education I got from AmyJo to good use. If any of my peeps from East Mitten feel like stopping by ….
  • Submissions. I pulled a few more items from my vetted personal slush pile to submit to a pair of writing contests. I’ve got another submission due tomorrow, then a few more sprinkling through September. It’d be nice to win something, or to at least grow my publication list for fiction/poetry stuff. The current flash piece I’m shopping, Regret, is fairly strong thanks to the workshop I attended in July at the GLCL.
  • Birthday Lunch with Mom. Three weeks and a reschedule later, I finally took my mom out for lunch for her mid-August birthday. It was fun. But it’s funny that it took so long. We’re actually closer to my birthday than we were to hers. And I got to see Gunner, the happy-go-lucky but health-challenged German Shepherd.
  • WriteOn! Flash Critique. Last month, our illustrious writing-group leader, JCBAH, was gallivanting around Ireland and Scotland, so I offered the group an assignment: Prepare a flash piece of no more than 800 words for vetting by the group. As if by magic, eight of the nine participated (and the lone holdout has a really good excuse). The event went well. It’s good for the group to feel the pressure of critiques. We do really good on the pizza-and-socializing part, not always so good on the writing part.
  • National Novel Writing Month. Speaking of writing, I’m looking forward to the frenzy of NaNoWriMo again. I don’t have a fully fleshed idea yet, but some concepts are rollin’ round my noggin. I’m hosting, again, a kickoff Halloween event at Caffeinated Press: Show up after 6p on 10/31, bring a dish to pass, wear a costume if you want, and prep — with a word war to follow at 12:01 a.m. on 11/1. Should be a good time.
  • VLO on Schedule. Tony and I are back on track for weekly podcast releases. We went to every other week in July and August.
  • VIMFP.  I had discussed it briefly with Roux a while back, but it’s looking increasingly likely (odds now above 75 percent) that I’ll be attending the Vegas Internet Mafia Family Picnic in October in Las Vegas. Tony, however, cannot attend. Which means the VIMFPers get an upgrade. 🙂
  • Outside Stuff. Jen (and her husband) and I have rescheduled our diving trip to Gilboa, Ohio for later this fall. And I think I’m going to take a late-September weekend — because I have some free time — to do an overnight backpacking trek near Cadillac. Neither of these are set in stone, but if I can do both, this marks the first year I’ve hit the diving/hiking/kayaking trifecta in a single season. Which will be nice.
  • Ye Olde Catholic Church. Last week I had the chance to meet a new friend, Jane, who’s an author we’ve worked with at Caffeinated Press. She and I enjoyed several beers and nachos at The Cottage one night. She and I spent the bulk of our time talking religion. Reminds me of the value of having a church home, but also reminds me of how painful the state of homiletics remains within Mother Church. No matter where I go — St. Anthony, St. Andrew, St. Robert, St. Mary — I’m struck by how superficial things feel. Perhaps a self-directed renewal during Advent will help.
  • Virtual Desktop. I created an account at PaperSpace.io — the company offers cheap but robust virtual Windows desktops. I picked a Pro offering and created a surprisingly awesome experience out of it. When I need to run the full Adobe Creative Suite on my Surface 3, it’s no problem. As long as I have Wi-Fi, that is.

I’m looking forward to the next few months. September — besides being my birth month — marks a pivot from summer into autumn. So far, the month looks to be fairly sedate, now that I’m fundamentally caught up at Caffeinated Press and the outlook for the next year does not include massive boluses of work I have to handle. October sees the transition into a glorious #PureMichigan autumn, with prep for NaNoWriMo and (presumably) VIMFP on the docket, leading toward my family’s kickoff of the holiday season with Halloween. November is a busy writing month, culminating with Thanksgiving and another five-day weekend. Then December, with a NAHQ board event in Orlando (I know, rough) and then two weeks’ holiday at the end of the month.
I think my anticipating is growing because more and more things are firing on all cylinders. The norovirus-induced weight loss continues. I feel better. Less stress at the day job and at Caffeinated Press, one vexing writer notwithstanding. My writing is solidifying. My financial situation is stable and healthy. I plan to get my Christmas shopping done by the end of this month. Life with the feline overlords remains pleasant. The podcast is doing well. The governance transition within the NAHQ board is starting to gel.
A couple of things are missing — a tighter degree of spiritual centeredness, perhaps acquiring a Significant Other — but those are solvable problems, and they’re not immediately pressing.
The Starks remind us that Winter Is Coming. I say, bring it on.

Personal, Writing, Editing & Journalism

Laborin’ on Labor Day

No Comments

I took off Friday, and this coming Tuesday, from the day job to focus on stuff at Caffeinated Press. Making hella-good progress, too.

Some updates:

  • Book Projects Complete.  Yesterday, in an all-day marathon, I performed my finishing touches on the Brewed Awakenings 2 anthology. The project is overdue by almost exactly a year. Yesterday evening, I sent full/complete proofs of the interior and cover to all 14 authors; so far, three have responded, all positively. Except in the highly unlikely scenario of a major edit request, this collection will be released in about three weeks. Today, keeping the theme alive, I did final wrap up on Grayson Rising — also horribly overdue — and sent the proofs of this delightful YA novel to the author. And I finished the first-pass cut of the interior of Ladri, although I have about another hour or two of work on the cover, which I’ll complete when the author gives me a few pieces of info I need. And, John advises that he’ll wrap up the initial layout of Vol. 2, Issue 1 of The 3288 Review this weekend. So September looks like we’ll be wrapped up with four major projects. Which is a relief — the rest of the stuff in the production queue doesn’t hit until winter-ish. I’ll be able to head into November’s NaNo-fueled writing frenzy with a clean conscience that at least I’m not delayed on anything else.
  • Kerrytown Book Festival.  In a few weeks, I’m headed to Ann Arbor for the day to shop our wares at the KBF. Should be a good time. I’ll put the sales education I got from AmyJo to good use. If any of my peeps from East Mitten feel like stopping by ….
  • Submissions. I pulled a few more items from my vetted personal slush pile to submit to a pair of writing contests. I’ve got another submission due tomorrow, then a few more sprinkling through September. It’d be nice to win something, or to at least grow my publication list for fiction/poetry stuff. The current flash piece I’m shopping, Regret, is fairly strong thanks to the workshop I attended in July at the GLCL.
  • Birthday Lunch with Mom. Three weeks and a reschedule later, I finally took my mom out for lunch for her mid-August birthday. It was fun. But it’s funny that it took so long. We’re actually closer to my birthday than we were to hers. And I got to see Gunner, the happy-go-lucky but health-challenged German Shepherd.
  • WriteOn! Flash Critique. Last month, our illustrious writing-group leader, JCBAH, was gallivanting around Ireland and Scotland, so I offered the group an assignment: Prepare a flash piece of no more than 800 words for vetting by the group. As if by magic, eight of the nine participated (and the lone holdout has a really good excuse). The event went well. It’s good for the group to feel the pressure of critiques. We do really good on the pizza-and-socializing part, not always so good on the writing part.
  • National Novel Writing Month. Speaking of writing, I’m looking forward to the frenzy of NaNoWriMo again. I don’t have a fully fleshed idea yet, but some concepts are rollin’ round my noggin. I’m hosting, again, a kickoff Halloween event at Caffeinated Press: Show up after 6p on 10/31, bring a dish to pass, wear a costume if you want, and prep — with a word war to follow at 12:01 a.m. on 11/1. Should be a good time.
  • VLO on Schedule. Tony and I are back on track for weekly podcast releases. We went to every other week in July and August.
  • VIMFP.  I had discussed it briefly with Roux a while back, but it’s looking increasingly likely (odds now above 75 percent) that I’ll be attending the Vegas Internet Mafia Family Picnic in October in Las Vegas. Tony, however, cannot attend. Which means the VIMFPers get an upgrade. 🙂
  • Outside Stuff. Jen (and her husband) and I have rescheduled our diving trip to Gilboa, Ohio for later this fall. And I think I’m going to take a late-September weekend — because I have some free time — to do an overnight backpacking trek near Cadillac. Neither of these are set in stone, but if I can do both, this marks the first year I’ve hit the diving/hiking/kayaking trifecta in a single season. Which will be nice.
  • Ye Olde Catholic Church. Last week I had the chance to meet a new friend, Jane, who’s an author we’ve worked with at Caffeinated Press. She and I enjoyed several beers and nachos at The Cottage one night. She and I spent the bulk of our time talking religion. Reminds me of the value of having a church home, but also reminds me of how painful the state of homiletics remains within Mother Church. No matter where I go — St. Anthony, St. Andrew, St. Robert, St. Mary — I’m struck by how superficial things feel. Perhaps a self-directed renewal during Advent will help.
  • Virtual Desktop. I created an account at PaperSpace.io — the company offers cheap but robust virtual Windows desktops. I picked a Pro offering and created a surprisingly awesome experience out of it. When I need to run the full Adobe Creative Suite on my Surface 3, it’s no problem. As long as I have Wi-Fi, that is.

I’m looking forward to the next few months. September — besides being my birth month — marks a pivot from summer into autumn. So far, the month looks to be fairly sedate, now that I’m fundamentally caught up at Caffeinated Press and the outlook for the next year does not include massive boluses of work I have to handle. October sees the transition into a glorious #PureMichigan autumn, with prep for NaNoWriMo and (presumably) VIMFP on the docket, leading toward my family’s kickoff of the holiday season with Halloween. November is a busy writing month, culminating with Thanksgiving and another five-day weekend. Then December, with a NAHQ board event in Orlando (I know, rough) and then two weeks’ holiday at the end of the month.

I think my anticipating is growing because more and more things are firing on all cylinders. The norovirus-induced weight loss continues. I feel better. Less stress at the day job and at Caffeinated Press, one vexing writer notwithstanding. My writing is solidifying. My financial situation is stable and healthy. I plan to get my Christmas shopping done by the end of this month. Life with the feline overlords remains pleasant. The podcast is doing well. The governance transition within the NAHQ board is starting to gel.

A couple of things are missing — a tighter degree of spiritual centeredness, perhaps acquiring a Significant Other — but those are solvable problems, and they’re not immediately pressing.

The Starks remind us that Winter Is Coming. I say, bring it on.

Writing, Editing & Journalism

Jason’s 36 Rules of Fiction Writing

No Comments

As part of a larger creative-writing exercise in drafting my own “rules of writing,” I started with a blank sheet of paper and just kept going until I thought I had exhausted the most significant guidance I could offer. Ended up at 36 points. These three-dozen little maxims are the “big ideas” I share with early-career authors eager for advice about the craft of fiction writing.

In no particular order:

  1. Critique groups are your friend. No author is as good in real life as he is in his own mind. Get a peer-review team. Use it. Respect beta readers’ guidance. If other people haven’t weighed in on your story, then you’re not yet done with it.
  2. Write your story, instead of the Cliff’s Notes abridgement of it. Particularly in short fiction, some authors are so eager to stuff a novel’s worth of content into a novelette that the end result is a story synopsis instead of a real story. Slow down. Write your stories and let them flow as long or short as necessary. The slogan “show, don’t tell” gets drilled into workshop participants, and the dictum can be extended to the point of purple-prose ridiculousness, but the concept is sound: It’s better to reveal something happening than to simply assert that it did, and it’s more respectful to the reader to hint or imply behaviors instead of definitively ascribing emotions. Speaking of which:
  3. Embrace the reader as a co-creator of your universe. The best stories invite the reader to play along in her own mind. As such, over-prescribing the content — with too much concrete description or mental narration, mostly — deprives the reader the right to participate in your creative endeavor. You need not affix every detail in an attempt to clarify “authorial intent.” Be vague, sometimes. Let the reader figure things out on her own. When you hint and suggest, you allow for a richer diversity of emotional engagement than when you assert facts definitively. For example, it’s better to describe an old man as slumped in a chair absently stroking a dog-curled photograph and staring into the sunset, than to just stipulate that the man is sad. We readers know that he’s sad. But we can also infer wistfulness or melancholy or denial in the stroking and staring; however, when we’re told he’s sad, that’s it. One emotion, and we’re not allowed to draw any other conclusion. How depressing for a reader! Authors plant seeds in the minds of their readers; the readers water those seeds and let their own little gardens bloom. Respect the garden, and the reader will remain loyal to the author. If you dictate the shape and size and smell of each flower — then why should the reader bother with tending the garden in the first place?
  4. Villains aren’t always ugly. A novice writer reveals herself through heroic main characters who are perfect in every way; those beautiful heroes are opposed by villians who are very obviously physically or emotionally deformed. Stop it. Some of the most beautiful people in the world can be villains (see: Justin Bieber) and the most humdrum can be saints (see: Bl. Theresa of Calcutta). Virtue and vice are not correlated with beauty or emotional stability.
  5. Writing is a discipline. It’s not a hobby. It’s not something you do when you have free time. It’s something you do.
  6. Read your archive. Instead of tossing your old material and misguided drafts, save them. Then, every so often, pull those notes and deleted scenes from the file drawer and read them. You may be surprised to see how you’ve grown — or how you’ve backslid. Deletion is for the weak.
  7. Write with cats and martinis. This point should be self-evident.
  8. One perfect word is better than a litany of pedestrian phrases. Although writing with a thesaurus leads, almost inevitably, to purple prose, writing solely with ESL words and their attendant circumlocutions is almost as ineffective. Rare words are fine as long as they’re rare; they need not be entirely absent.
  9. .“Just Say No” to rape as a plot device. Rape is serious; it’s not a cheap ploy you can trot out when you write yourself into a plot hole. Also: People don’t magically “get over” having been raped.
  10. Produce content, not manuscripts. Compelling stories with clean prose, rendered simply on the page, far outshine humdrum stories with weak prose presented on the page with graphical elegance. In other words: No one cares about your font choice or drop caps or embedded tables. Just write the damn story. If it gets published, it will not be published in Microsoft Word.
  11. Drink deeply from your own well before appropriating others’ experiences. Your life is too precious to ignore it as a source of inspiration. Write what you know and avoid trying to build pseudo-literary street cred by writing what you don’t know. If I had a nickel for every upper-middle-class author writing gritty first-person stories about drug culture, when it’s obvious that the author couldn’t tell the difference between marijuana and oregano ….
  12. Strong writers develop strong plots; weak writers develop plot twists. Twists work in certain genres, but as a general rule, if you have to twist then you didn’t plot it right in the first place.
  13. People rarely do things for just one reason. Avoid suggesting that characters have just one all-encompassing, obvious, well-understood and transparent reason for doing things. The ocean of motivation is filled from a thousand different streams. The exploration of a tributary or two often leads to fruitful sharpening of conflict or enrichment of plot arcs.
  14. You probably shouldn’t discover your characters as you write them. I hear writers say things like, “By the time I got to the middle of the story, I learned that my character likes cheddar cheese.” Bollocks! If you don’t know a character until the middle of the story, then what the heck was the character doing at the beginning of the story? Clearly, the beginning of the story requires a 100-percent rewrite — now that you know your characters.
  15. Ellipses are the devil. Ellipses are, of course, a valid form of punctuation. But used too often — i.e., more than once every 50,000 words or so — they signify over-prescription (see #3, above). You don’t need to explicitly tell the reader about every pause or trail-off a character experiences in dialogue. Mentally, the reader will fill that gap — and even if the reader doesn’t, it’s not important enough of a detail to belabor. If the trail-off is absolutely relevant to the plot, and it probably isn’t, indicate it with narration instead of through punctuation.
  16. You should probably be ashamed of your first five manuscripts. If you don’t turn cherry-tomato red at the thought of publicly reading your early work, then either you’re a literary genius or you have a strongly underdeveloped sense of introspection. Writing isn’t like a switch you flip on and off — it’s a discipline (see #5) that improves with practice. In a sense, writing is like learning karate. You can’t master black-belt forms until you’ve looked like an idiot tripping over basic white-belt stances. But you should learn from your early work. Let it serve as a living testament to how your discipline has honed your craft over the years. The corollary: Don’t expect your first work to be worth publishing. Or even your second or third. Unless you’re an absolute genius (and you aren’t, statistically speaking) you’ll have to put in your time on the practice mat before you’ve earned your master status. The other corollary: Keep writing. It gets better and easier and faster the more you maintain your discipline. Honest.
  17. Remember thy cloud drive and keep it synced. There is never an excuse to lose your work. Keep your stuff on your hard drive (don’t bother with flash drives) and keep that folder synced to the cloud using Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive, Dropbox, Box, OwnCloud or whatever service you prefer. Local copy + folder sync = bliss.
  18. If your last paragraph renders all preceding paragraphs moot, you’re doing it wrong. Attention flash writers: The whole “I’m going to shock you with a final sentence that completely changes the story” trope is old, tired and damned irritating. Bait-and-switch is just as disreputable for writers as it is for advertisers. If you go to the effort to create characters and a plot and a clear arc, let that work culminate in closure for the reader.
  19. You can’t sleep with your main character. As with #4, avoid developing a main character who’s basically the best-case respondent to your Tinder or Grindr ad. No one’s perfect, not even a hero, and sometimes the savvy reader can sense when an author has fallen in love or lust with a favored character.
  20. “Said” is your best friend. No need to declaim or exclaim or shout or whisper orsuggest or whatever. Just say. The word blends into the background as a train conductor, so your reader doesn’t get derailed from the story by means of unfortunate synonym-hopping.
  21. If you torture an animal, you deserve to be punched in the genitals. If I read another submission to The 388 Review that explains in excruciating detail how horrible it was to have shot a deer without immediately killing it–argh. As with rape, the torture or mutilation of animals offends many readers and signifies a writer who cannot understand the difference between gratuitous shock and plot pivot point. I understand that sometimes people like to write about how they learned the nobility of nature or bonded with their father or whatnot over a weekend spent at the hunting blind. Fine. Then shoot the animal and give it a fitting, quick death. But to dive into excruciating detail about how it bleeds and moans and labors to stand and breathe — that kind of writing borders on the sociopathic.
  22. The more you try to sound transgressive, the more you sound like a fool. Experimental styles are extremely difficult to pull off and typically work well only with experienced MFA-prepared authors. A lot of the stream-of-consciousness approaches, with myriad mental asides interspersed with first-person narration and inconsistent punctuation and italics, doesn’t come off as trendy, it comes off as tedious. It’s difficult to read and it tends to take the reader out of the story, forcing her to be a meta-reader instead. Master Standard English before moving on to advanced case studies.
  23. Good editors check facts. Your editor will verify universal truths about the world, so it pays to get the details correct during the drafting process. Even in an invented world, the world itself must be internally self-consistent, and a good editor will spot inconsistencies. It’s usually better if those flaws don’t make it to the editor in the first place.
  24. Semicolons are your friend only if you know how to use them properly. Colons andsemicolons aren’t interchangeable, and a semicolon cannot set off a sentence fragment.
  25. A character’s inner voice probably shouldn’t sound like MST3K commentary. Contemporary fiction, alas, seems to favor first-person points of view with ample internal dialogue. Fine. But the risk for the author arises when that the interior dialogue starts to sound like either the author himself, or the sarcastic overdub à la“Mystery Science Theater 3000.” The sarcastic inner dialogue (and it’s almost always sarcasm that’s the offender) often stands at stark contrast with the character’s overall nature and outward demeanor. Inner and outer dialogue should at least cohere in terms of tone and voice. Outwardly meek souls, for example, rarely run a simultaneous witty monologue in their own heads during a group conversation.
  26. Let descriptions evolve over time. There’s probably no need to lard 274 descriptors into a paragraph. Sometimes doling out little bits of information over time helps the reader co-create the world while minimizing the narrative disruption that attends to explicit scenery info-dumps.
  27. Only masochists enjoy lectures about morals or politics. Especially in fiction, overt didacticism may prove off-putting to readers who would rather be entertained instead of harangued. Certain genres admit to didactic works (sci-fi, in particular) but in general, think twice before using a work of fiction as a vehicle for proselytizing some moral, religious or political conviction.
  28. Almost no one “suddenly realizes” things. Avoid the crutch of introducing some fact that a character “suddenly noticed” or “quickly remembered.” This approach suffers from two flaws. First, it tends to support a poor-man’s transition into unnecessary backstory, and second, it suggests some sort of perceptual schizophrenia wherein voices (i.e., the narrator or the author) insert data relevant mostly to the reader, in the form of memory or perception experienced by the character. Stuff like “Jane slipped on the rug, then she suddenly realized that her ankle had given out” or “Bob quickly remembered that three weeks ago, Sally had given him the combination to the lock” comes off as amateurish writing.
  29. Journal frequently. Even though you should read your archive (see #6), you should also keep a writer’s diary. Record the stuff you do. Your blocks. Your insights. Your ideas. Your submissions and their responses. Just as you cannot become a master scuba diver without a logbook justifying your diving history, you cannot become a master author without a journal justifying your writing history. A writer without a journal is like a clown without a van filled with candy parked down by the river a plumber without a wrench.
  30. Excessive parentheticals suggest a disorganized writer. Parentheticals in blog posts or non-fiction work are one thing; adding them to fiction is a different thing altogether. People can write with em dashes and parentheses, but we don’t speak with those marks, so interspersing them in dialogue or narration suggests a rewrite opportunity.
  31. Adverbs aren’t your friend. Slash every modifier that’s not essential to the story. Draw the broad, simple outlines of the story and allow the reader supply his own baroque ornamentation.
  32. Seinfeld rarely translates effectively to print. A story about nothing offers very little payback for the reader’s time. Slice-of-life vignettes can be pretty, but unless they’re sublime, they tend to lack resonance because they don’t feature well-defined conflict arcs. A typical story features a plot with characters, setting, conflict and conflict resolution. Subtract any of those elements and you arrive at stories that are fundamentally about nothing at all. So why should the reader care? Why should the reader invest her time?
  33. No one cares about the backstory, including your characters. Authors who take great care in the creation of their fictional world often want to share their labor of love with the reader. The reader, by and large, doesn’t give a damn. Many stories, including some short stories, clock in with so much backstory that the plot arc gets fundamentally twisted. Rule of thumb: You don’t need backstory. If it’s relevant, it’s not backstory and should be interspersed like normal. Avoid data dumps, including dumps cleverly disguised as reminiscences — because people really don’t spend a lot of time discussing or thinking about specific truths about the past that ever-so-conveniently happen to dovetail with a yet-to-be-revealed near-term future.
  34. Respect the eye in the sky. The narrator — the “eye in the sky” — has a specific tone and voice and background knowledge based on the major mode of the story’s point of view. Keeping POV straight can be a real challenge, especially within stories with several POV characters.
  35. Punctuation goes inside the quotes. Use double quotes to set off spoken dialogue but italics without punctuation to render mental dialogue. Punctuation goes inside the quotes. There is never a circumstance in standard fiction writing wherein a period or comma will fall on the outside of a closing quotation mark.
  36. People control their bodies. A person looks around a room; a person’s eyes may be the instrument of that vision, but they eyes themselves aren’t doing the looking as if they’re autonomous agents in their own right. Constructs like “his eyes scanned the room” are common as a literary device but when used to excess, they suggest a sloppiness that confuses whole-vs-part agency. Body parts generally function under the jurisdiction of a person and rarely act of their own volition.

So. Thirty-six rules. What do you have to add? With which points might you quibble? It’s worth sharing, as a disclaimer, that the points reflected above are my own and do not reflect Caffeinated Press policy.

Writing, Editing & Journalism

Conflict Resolution 101: An Author’s Guide

No Comments

No author is immune to conflict. Whether the disagreement is sourced in a contractual dispute, or concerns about edits, or in the misinterpretation of a social-media post, authors will inevitably have to engage in some classic dispute-resolution activities.

The Thomas-Kilmann instrument provides five different conflict modes for assessing conflict resolution:

  • Competing — win/lose
  • Collaborating — win/win
  • Compromising — minimally acceptable without damaging relationships
  • Avoiding — withdrawal and neutrality
  • Accommodating — conceding to the other to maintain harmony

In general, you’ll find that collaborating or compromising makes for the best strategy. Locking into a win/lose paradigm, or hiding from the conflict, will serve no one well; those strategies encourage escalation or bullying behaviors.

Authors experience conflict from one of two points of view — when the author is the victim of bad behavior by a publisher, editor or agent (author as hero); or when the author is the person who’s engaged in the bad behavior (author as villain). Let’s explore both scenarios.

Author as Hero

For whatever reason, you as an author occupy the moral high ground in a dispute. The problem could be anything — maybe a publisher missed a deadline. Maybe an agent lost your manuscript. Maybe an editor introduced errors into your story. Doesn’t matter what caused it, what matters is how you deal with it. Some suggestions:

  1. Read your contract. Verify whether there are provisions that govern dispute resolution and, if there are, then follow them. Sometimes contracts extend a specific make-whole clause, or a notification-of-breach clause, that must be honored before the contract itself is in jeopardy.
  2. Reach out in good faith. It’s always better to bring something to the other party’s attention in a brief and polite way, by assuming error instead of malice. A friendly tone and a charitable approach helps set the framework for subsequent discussions about the problem. Most disputes go off the rails when one party accuses the other — implicity or explicitly — of acting in bad faith. In the publishing industry, bad-faith behavior is much less common than good-faith errors related to capacity.
  3. Don’t make it public. Never take a disagreement to social media, or a blog, or a writers’ forum. Not only are you backing the other side into a corner — opening the door to unhelpful tit-for-tat commentary — but you’re also leaving a public paper trail for subsequent partners (editors, agents, publishers) to find. No one wants to work with prima donnas. If a future partner is interested in you, but then they discover that you have no qualms airing grievances in public, your odds of receiving a contract may be substantially harmed. No publisher, agent or editor worth his salt will contract with an author who’s established his willingness to engage in public reputational assaults. In addition, “going public” exposes you to potential civil action for defamation, especially if your side of the argument isn’t proven to be as solid as you thought it was when you first typed your angry Facebook rant.
  4. Avoid going “pseudo-legal.” Terms like breach of contract and default are legal concepts that sometimes require a finding by a court of competent jurisdiction. Unless you’ve consulted with an attorney, it’s safest to avoid asserting that the other party is legally deficient in his obligations. Instead, simply point out the part of the contract you think the other party has missed and open a dialogue about how to rectify the problem. Starting your conversation with an indictment rarely promotes collaboration.
  5. Omit the 95 Theses. It’s never necessary for you to recite a litany of perceived abuses or your beliefs about the other party’s competence or integrity. Focus on one problem. Avoid blowing a molehill into a mountain by venting spleen about all the things that frustrate you. Avoid personalizing the situation or offering opinions about the other party that aren’t related to solving a specific problem.
  6. Watch the clock. With contracted authors, it’s usually safe to request a 30-day response window. Avoid putting unreasonable response deadlines in your correspondence, especially when you know that the recipient’s typical response time is much longer than what you demand.
  7. Consider whether you want to die on that hill. Not all problems necessarily require a solution. Even if you are technically in the right, think about whether the situation really needs a fix. Sometimes, just letting a process play through to its conclusion proves the wiser strategy.

Author as Villain

Maybe you screwed something up. Or writers’ block precludes timely manuscript delivery. Or you got caught introducing copyrighted material into your work. Or your just not happy about something that’s legit, but not to your preference. In any case, the publisher/agent/editor caught wind of it, and now you’re on the hot seat. Some suggestions:

  1. Read your contract. If you’ve been accused of violating the terms of your contract, read the contract to identify the relevant provisions and whether the contract offers an adequate make-whole clause that you can take advantage of. Although it can be scary to hear that you might be in breach of contract, recognize that sometimes such notification is just a formality and can be easily fixed without undue drama. If you cannot understand parts of your contract, seek guidance from a licensed attorney in your community.
  2. Negotiate a good-faith fix. If you didn’t hold up your end of the deal, offer a solution that might be mutually acceptable to both parties. For example, if you were required to submit edits within 90 days, and you got a notice at day 100 that you’re late, commit to delivering by day 120 — and stick to it. You will usually have no difficulty in minor adjustments as long as you offer a reasonable alternative. You need not be apologetic or fall on your sword, either; admitting to a default isn’t usually a good idea should the matter later be subject to litigation. But politely offering a counter-offer, without belaboring the point, can often prove a useful solution.
  3. Take a deep breath before responding. Authors are creative people, and creative people can sometimes be quick to anger. Rule of thumb: Never answer when your blood pressure is elevated.
  4. Avoid social sandbagging. If you’ve had performance challenges under a contract, or even if you’re just in general not thrilled with progress even though the contract is still being met, it’s best to not get passive-aggressive with snarky social-media posts or emails, or bad reviews on Facebook or author sites. By engaging in this kind of behavior, you risk poisoning the well should there be a need for dispute resolution later in the process.
  5. Ask for a second opinion. Sometimes authors and editors disagree about something in a manuscript. Usually, such disagreements can be negotiated away. However, occasionally a point can’t be finessed into non-existence. If your editor, agent or publisher insists on a specific change and won’t take no for an answer, it’s best to take a step back and bring that disagreement to a circle of trusted peer writers. Solicit their honest feedback. Odds are good that the “other side” has seen several different skilled professionals arrive at the same conclusion, so you’ll do yourself a favor by having your own critique group help you to determine whether you really should buckle down for a fight, or concede that the scene you love so dearly isn’t as good as you thought it was.
  6. Don’t light a forest fire. If you’ve made a mistake, own it. Don’t make matters worse by trying to find some mistake — however obscure — by the other party and thereby turn it into a tit-for-tat situation. Your goal should be to stop the fire that’s consuming a single tree, instead of seeing the fire and then spreading gas on the surrounding forest.
  7. Respect the editorial division of labor. Some things important to authors — e.g., cover designs — may not be under the author’s control. The division of labor between authors and publishers follows from each partner’s role in getting a book to market. Even if you promised Aunt Sally that she could design the cover of your debut novel, the decision about that cover is rarely at the author’s pleasure. By getting hung up on the things that aren’t the author’s responsiblity, the author can inadvertently create tension that makes dispute resolution about other problems much more difficult. Focus on doing your part of the process well, and let your parners do their part of the process well.

Ultimately, your goal as an author should be to minimize or fix problems as they occur, in a way that does not alienate the other parties to an agreement. Publishers, editors and agents should do likewise. By focusing on collaboration and compromise instead of winner-takes-all ego battles or hide-in-the-sand avoidance behavior, you can build a robust partnership with your professional colleagues that can survive the occasional bump in the road.

Writing, Editing & Journalism

5 Tips for Writing for the Literary Market

No Comments

I recently enjoyed a lovely email conversation with a local author whose book we at Caffeinated Press declined to publish. She successfully passed the first hurdle in the query chain — she had a good pitch, with a lovely sample — and on the strength of that query, we solicited the entire manuscript. Yet after reviewing her magnum opus, we concluded that the project wasn’t a good fit for us, despite that the work was well-written and certainly relevant to a West Michigan audience.

The novel included very heavy Christian Reformed themes. Too heavy for us, but not quite pure enough for the local religious publishers.

The book is worth reading. It’s worth publishing. It’s not aligned with our catalog, unfortunately. And, on reflection, I suspect the author will have a really tough time positioning the work in its current form with any publisher.

The problem that this author experiences is by no means uncommon. Writers what they write, but not everything that gets written can be positioned effectively on the open market. It’s therefore imperative for authors who intend to seek publication that their work aligns with the current market needs of publishers. (Of course, if you’re writing to self-publish, or writing for the sake of the art, this rule obviously isn’t as salient.)

Some thoughts:

  • Avoid fusion genres. A “fusion” genre is any story that mixes genres — e.g., a sci-fi/horror/romance/Western blend. The challenge with fusion is that publishers (and, much more importantly, booksellers) must pick a dominant genre category. Most retailers don’t have a separate fusion shelf, because fusion isn’t a recognized category in ISBN metadata. So if you write that sci-fi/horror/romance/Western novel, where would the book be shelved? For people interested in the genre, a mixed-metaphor novel is unlikely to attract much attention; after all, if you enjoy Westerns, do youreally want to try a Western with liberal sprinkles of sci-fi, horror and romance themes? Probably not. There’s not much of a market for fusion because people like what they like. Fusion usually works better within themed anthologies instead of stand-alone long-form publications.
  • Follow genre conventions. If you write within a genre, then respect that genre’s rules. In a romance novel, for example, the typical plot arc involves people meeting, falling in love, struggling to keep the love burning against the odds, then overcoming the barrier. A romance that consists of people meeting, falling in love, separating when the going gets rough and then agreeing to “just be friends” isn’t really that compelling. Reviews will tank, along with sales. As restrictive as genre conventions can be, for readers of genre fiction, the audience (usually) stays loyal to the genre because they expect to get something specific out of their reading experience. As a self-published author, you may deny your readers their reward at your own financial peril; as an author seeking a publisher, the publisher is unlikely to risk a contract on a potentially low-reputation, low-revenue project.
  • Didacticism is a double-edged sword. Some authors write to make a point; that point infuses whatever genre and plot/conflict matrix they elect. Didactic writing can be extremely powerful — but it can also be offputting to publishers or agents who either don’t agree with the philosophical point, or who understand that the point might poke the bear for a fairly large swathe of the potential readership.
  • Lit-fic doesn’t sell, usually. People who write poetry or literary fiction for the mass market are unlikely to see significant revenue absent criteria like being already famous, winning some sort of award or major favorable review, or publishing with a large imprint. Small- and mid-sized publishers generally don’t sell literary fiction well because there’s not a huge buyer’s market for it, like there is for throw-away romance or horror novels.
  • Biographies or memoirs of non-famous people don’t sell well, either. Your family history is interesting, but it’s unlikely to sell well with strangers. The more hyperlocal the content, the smaller the audience, until the audience gets to be so small that the project won’t even recover its production costs.

Your best against goodness-of-fit rejections? Look at what the market already supports. If you can position your work solidly within a constellation of known sellers, you’ll do a better job of convincing a hesitant agent or publisher to give you the green light.

Philosophy, Writing, Editing & Journalism

Developing Ethically Coherent Characters

No Comments

A good story usually demands a strong plot, and a strong plot is advanced through the skillful use of conflict.

Conflict, of course, starts with characters who think and act in specific ways; their patterns of behavior set the contours of how conflicts begin, progress and resolve over the narrative arc of the story.

Five introductory points about ethical consistency:

  1. At heart, ethics relates to the process by which people make value-laden choices. When there’s no choice, or no values at stake, then the question isn’t an ethical one. For example, personal preferences (e.g., “I like cashews more than brazil nuts”) aren’t a source of moral dispute.
  2. People aren’t always consistent, but they do tend to naturally fall into one of the broad ethical paradigms. No one does the right thing all the time, and always for the exact same reason; characters like Galadedrid Damodred in The Wheel of Time simply do not exist in the real world, so their presence in literary worlds proves especially jarring. Likewise, no one does the wrong thing all the time.
  3. When pressed, people can do the “right” thing for the “wrong” reason — with wrong merely suggesting a conformance to a different (i.e., non-dominant) moral paradigm.
  4. When pressed further, people can act against their moral principles. It doesn’t happen often, however. People who frequently make bad moral choices are inadvertently telegraphing that their ethical framework isn’t as straightforward as they claim.
  5. People rarely reset their default ethical worldview. Such a change can happen, but it’s not often enough in the real world to use it as a plot device. Usually these changes follow from significant trauma or long-running psychological stress.

The most common “broad moral paradigms” include:

  • Egoism. In a nutshell: Egoists do what redounds to the greatest good for the self.
  • Deontology. Duty-based ethics (i.e., Kantianism) suggests that the morally correct behavior is that which meets a generalizable duty or universal moral rule. For example, people can agree to the maxim that “It’s never okay to lie” and therefore we have a duty to avoid lying. We must do our duty, no matter the consequence.
  • Consequentialism. Consequentialism subdivides into many different groups. Utilitarians, for example, divide into “act utilitarians” (actions are judged) and “rule utilitarians” (the rules surrounding the actions are judged). Regardless of their tribe, however, consequentialists generally agree that the morally correct behavior is that which generates the greatest good or the least suffering, for the greatest number of people. Duty isn’t usually a major consideration.
  • Natural Law Theory. The natural law suggests that innate patterns in human nature — discoverable through study of universal human behavior — should govern. Popular in the Middle Ages, this approach isn’t as common anymore.
  • Divine Command Theory. The morally correct behavior is that which is willed by the supreme supernatural being(s). In other words: Do what God says.
  • Virtue Theory. The virtues rely on the development of character and follow from the ethical teachings of Aristotle. A virtue theorist balances various virtues (e.g., temperance, fortitude, bravery) to arrive at a recommended course of action. The vices (sloth, envy, etc.) should be eradicated to grow in character and thus in virtue. In a sense, the ethically correct behavior is that which the virtuous person undertakes.
  • Care Ethics. A modern innovation, care ethics seeks to preserve the relationships among those affected by an ethically difficult situation. The outcome is sometimes less relevant than maintaining amity. A special consideration is extended to people disadvantaged by the dispute.

Important non-theories include:

  • Contractarianism. The idea with contractarians is that our only moral duties are those we explicitly negotiate with others. However, this line of thinking is just a variant of selective deontology (as in, I only have a duty to those for whom I agree to incur a duty).
  • Rights Theory. Someone who emphasis rights above all other considerations is just aping a form of deontology (i.e., giving pride-of-place to the maxim that “people ought to respect the rights of others”). Depending on the justification, it’s also a variant of rule utilitarianism.
  • Honor Theory. Approaches that emphasize honor — you see it often in urban hip-hop culture that emphasizes respect — tend to loosely follow a care-ethics framework.
  • Ethical Nihilism. If you believe that there’s no such thing as morality, or that ethics can’t be universally applicable, then you’re a nihilist. But at heart, you’re really an egoist because you’re suggesting that whatever you do is, ipso facto, morally justified.
  • Hedonism. The whole “live and let live in peace and harmony, dude” mindset follows from a variant of consequentialism with a bit of egoist seasoning.
  • The Lex Talionis. The idea of “an eye for an eye” is sometimes incorrectly assumed to be a function of the natural law. In fact, natural law focuses on traits universal among humans; it’s not a surrogate for survival-of-the-fittest fetishism.

A few other points warrant mention.

First, ethical paradigms don’t relate well to the DSM-V. For example, an ethicist might classify as a “super-enlightened egoist” someone diagnosed by a psychologist as a sociopath. Many assertions of mental illness along the lines of sociopathic personality disorder or borderline personality disorder can distill into a form of ethical egoism that the psychologist simply refuses to accept as being a legitimate moral worldview. There’s long been a tension between the ethicist and the psychologist.

Second, many people mix their metaphors. They’ll follow the duty-bound approach of a Kantian for most things, but resort to consequentialist thinking when they want a free pass that Kant won’t offer. Or they’ll follow their scripture in their personal life but follow a care-ethic approach in their professional life. Again, consistency isn’t common, nor is it necessarily a desirable trait. But to the degree that people are inconsistent, they’re often consistently inconsistent.

In practice, adherents of each of these schools might come (correctly! and legitimately!) to different conclusions given the same case study. Consider the following hypothetical:

Bob arrives at work at 8 a.m. He sees his co-worker, Sally, arrive at 9 a.m. — but he discovers that she wrote 8 a.m. on her timesheet. After a bit of peeking, he concludes that she’s been faking her time card for several months, bilking her employer out of hundreds of hours of wages. Bob considers what he should do with his knowledge of Sally’s behavior.

In this situation, people can legitimately arrive at different conclusions.

THEORY CONSIDERATION OUTCOME
Egoism What’s in it for me? Bob fundamentally doesn’t care about what Sally’s doing. He briefly considers whether to extort a payment to keep quiet or to fake his own timecards; either way, he’s not terribly invested in Sally’s theft as long as it doesn’t affect him.
Deontology What’s my duty? Bob has a duty of loyalty to his employer, so he doesn’t hesitate to report Sally to their boss.
Consequentialism What’s the best outcome? Theft of wages from an employer increases the work for others and reduces the labor budget available to others. As such, Sally’s theft is (on balance) detrimental to the company and to other employees, so Bob reports her conduct to their boss.
Natural Law What would we expect a regular person to do? By reporting Sally, Bob will uphold a universal truth that crosses cultures, that people who have been injured by theft should be made whole, and that people who violate norms of conduct should not have their transgressions ignored.
Divine Command What does God will? As a devout Christian, Bob knows that stealing is wrong, so he encourages Sally to report herself and make restitution to their boss, and to repent to the Lord.
Virtue What would a good person do? Because stealing for any reason is the mark of a weak person, Bob does not hesitate to report Sally to their boss.
Care What resolution preserves our relationships? Bob approaches Sally to ask why she’s been mismarking her timecards. He suspects that if she is struggling financially, he can help her out — but fundamentally he wants to help her stop her theft so he doesn’t have to report her to their boss.

Sometimes people get confused and think that because different people can make different ethical decisions for different reasons, that therefore morality as a concept is unworkable. Untrue. The complex moral reasoning of most ordinary people resembles the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator: One or two paradigms are dominant, another one or two sometimes crop up, and others almost never make an appearance.

If your characters consistently behave as humans would behave in the real world, then not only are your characters more plausible, but the conflicts generated by their clashes are more powerful. Never underestimate the power of base moral conflict to drive tension and keep a plot advancing. When done well, these psychological studies drive powerful reader engagement and lead to more compelling stories.

Writing, Editing & Journalism

The Discipline of Writing

No Comments

Several weeks ago, after I explained Caffeinated Press to a colleague of mine in a different industry, she looked at me with a sense of awe and said: “I could never find the time to write a book.” This, from an experienced nurse leader who single-handedly re-wrote her entire organization’s clinical procedure manual. While raising teenagers!

Sometimes people who’ve never written, yet aspire to, adjudge the novel-writing process as some sort of grueling journey that involves alcoholism and cats and occasional, uncomfortable engagement with one’s inner Emo Teen. Even people who do write sometimes view long-form composition as the literary equivalent of scaling Mt. Everest in a thong whilst carrying a mesh rucksack stuffed with a dozen angry porcupines.

But fundamentally, writing the Great American Novel isn’t much different from studying a martial art or learning to scuba dive or qualifying for the Boston Marathon: You need a wee bit o’ talent, of course, but success follows from mastery, which follows from putting in the time to advance from novice to expert.

Writing, foremost, is a discipline. It’s a thing to do repeatedly and without public accolade, just like going to karate practice four or five times per week over three or four years is a prerequisite to earning a black belt. Or like doing your 50 logged dives to get your Master Diver rating. Or like following a year-long couch-to-marathon training program to complete a long run in a respectable time after a decade as a Netflix-binging layabout. For all these hard-to-attain goals, innate talent might make the initial effort a bit easier, but success attaches to the person who does the work, even if he started from the back of the pack. Diligence usually trumps raw talent.

If writing is important to you, you’ll make time for it. If it’s not, then you won’t. Period. You’re unlikely to be successful if you don’t consistently write; you’re almost guaranteed to be unsuccessful if you spend the time you could be writing, instead whining about how little time you have to write.

Suggestions for cultivating the discipline:

  1. Gauge your own seriousness. If you want to be a writer, then you have to write. (Sensing a message yet?) If you merely like the idea of being a writer, then you’re in a whole different bucket. Are you willing to make the “you” of your fantasy life converge with the “you” in the real world?
  2. Schedule your writing time. People dedicated to physical fitness plan their lives around their gym times. Martial-arts schools offer classes on fixed schedules. Pianists spend evenings tickling the ivory. So when are you writing? Block time early in the day, or late in the evening — or even reserve half your lunch hour to sit in a quiet place with your notebook. Frequent repetition of short scribbling periods may be more useful than intermitent but longer writing sessions.
  3. Use your downtime effectively. Take the bus to work? Bring a notebook. Stuck on I-90 during a Chicago rush hour? Dictate ideas into your phone’s voice-memo app. Waiting three hours to get through a TSA checkpoint? Cry. But also haul out your Moleskin and work out the details of your next scene. Waiting for your kidlet’s ballet class to end? Tote your laptop to the studio with you. If you keep a tablet or a notebook handy at all times, there’s really no excuse to not have at least a little creative time during your day.
  4. Maintain a journal. Sometimes it helps to get “meta” about your writing. Keep a journal wherein you reflect on your growth as a writer — record stuff like how you broke a writer’s block, how you figured out how to fix a broken scene, why you might be having a dry spell or why you found a particular anecdote or quote to be inspiring. It helps to write about your craft of writing! Just like a karate student keeps an attendance card, or a diver keeps a diving log, or a runner keeps a list of personal records — so also should a writer keep journal. Exact same principle.
  5. Read difficult material. Don’t block yourself into a literary rabbit hole. Read literary journals and anthologies. Read the classics and material outside of your genre. Consume both fiction and non-fiction, prose and poetry. If all you ever read is stuff you like, you are depriving your self of the ability to see the richness of the literary world in all its various styles and themes. Focusing on “your” genre is like wearing goggles that only let you see your favorite color: The result might be pretty, but you lose the environmental context that would otherwise have helped you avoid falling to your death through an open manhole cover.
  6. Learn from St. Augustine. My favorite quote from one of the Fathers of the Church: “Lord, make me holy — but not yet.” Put differently: “I want to write a best-selling, award-willing novel — but not yet.” Take that “not yet” time to experiment and grow your craft. Errors, failures and misdirections are inevitable. Don’t despair. Setting out to write, as a “virgin author,” the next great installment in American Lit, will disappoint you. Don’t aim high. Aim low: Pepper the ground with salvos of crap. That kind of target practice helps you improve your shot from a distance — and eventually, you’ll be ready to take down the Next Great Novel.

You have no excuse to avoid writing.

[Cross-posted to Caffeinated Press.]

Writing, Editing & Journalism

Wheat from Chaff

1 Comment

A few months ago, I downloaded several ebooks about editing and publishing as market research for a book proposal idea that’s been rollin’ ‘twixt my earholes since late last year. I’ve recently finished two: Jane Friedman’s Publishing 101: A First-Time Author’s Guide and Five Editors Tackle the 12 Fatal Flaws of Fiction Writing by C.S. Lakin, Linda S. Clare, Christy Distler, Robin Patchen and Rachel Starr Thomson. A few more related titles still await review on my Kindle.

Friedman’s treatment is spot-on; it’s one of the few books for which I had no qualms leaving five-star reviews on Amazon and Goodreads. Her approach is comprehensive, yet nuanced, and her advice is solid. Although I’ve been leading the editorial operations for a small press for more than two years, and I’ve been publishing and fiction-editing a quarterly literary journal for one year, I still learned enough stuff (and obtained some new perspectives!) that I thought my $4.99 was money well spent.

But this essay isn’t about Friedman’s advice, good as it is.

That other book — Five Editors — presents a tougher case. On the one hand, I’m a fan of C.S. Lakin in general; her name sold the ebook to me. And the “12 fatal flaws” are, in my view, a solid distillation of the various structural problems that diminish the manuscripts that these accomplished editors have reviewed. Indeed, I read the 12 and remain impressed by their curation effort.

But.

The five editors very helpfully offer a “before” and “after” passage wherein they demonstrate the fatal flaw and how it might be mitigated. In general, their efforts are solid; I agree that they correctly diagnosed the problems and offered specific, helpful advice. Although an experienced author might not find the entire book to be useful, an intermediate author will likely find the flaws and their corrections to be a good way to sharpen his saw. A novice author, however, will probably be led astray — because the “good” examples are astonishingly monochromatic.

By monochromatic I mean that the passages all seemed to have the exact same linguistic feel. Regardless of the fatal flaw under discussion, “good” overwhelmingly pointed to a very specific narrative voice as being ideal. This voice — rendered in third person subjective with narration intermingling dispassionate facts (e.g., “she opened the cabinet so the cat could hop out”) with non-italic mental asides from the point-of-view character (e.g., “This place is going to drive me bonkers”) — is fine, in some contexts. But it’s not normative despite being the only real voice presented with enthusiasm within the book.

It’s worth noting, I think, that the editors are also published, and several tend to write “women’s fiction” and YA. Those genres often admit to a narrative voice different from, for example, a horror story or detective fiction. However, a voice that may work for YA won’t work for all genres, and the specific voice advocated by these editors opens the door to myrid POV-confusion problems and the tendency for authors to insert their own personal snark into the story. This voice, I think, is much more open to a commingling of the POV character’s personality with the author’s personality, leaving a tell-tale thumbprint of the author’s own attitude that — if done to excess — inserts a competing metanarrative into the story. Significantly (because the trope permeated the “good” examples) it also encourages the use of rhetorical questions within narration; those questions serve as a not-at-all subtle attempt to kick the reader down a very specific plot or conflict pathway. This approach to writing runs the risk of over-proscribing the readers’ emotional engagement with the story.

(In fact, the editors were so consistently insistent that writers include “emotion” in their work that you can’t escape, based on their advice, the exact emotional response the reader is supposed to experience. The reader is denied a chance to co-create the world with the author and to walk away with an emotional reaction that wasn’t laid down in concrete by the author. It’s writing for a lazy audience, in my view.)

For what it’s worth, as fiction editor of The 3288 Review, I’m averse to accepting stories written in the voice deployed by the five editors. There’s just too much that can go wrong when inexperienced authors try their hand at it, and even for experienced writers, it doesn’t always work well. Some of the “good passages” — especially later in their book — left me groaning. I would not accept those snippets for publication.

For example:

“So.” Brady finished his sandwich and wiped his fingers on a napkin. “Are you going to tell me about him?”

Rae pictured Johnny sleeping soundly upstairs. How did Brady know? “Him who?”

“The man who put that ring on your finger.”

Right. Him. “What about him?”

“Where is he?”

“Paris.”

“Why isn’t he with you?”

“Work.”

Brady closed his lips in a tight line, and she recognized the look of frustration. “What?”

You get the picture. We have rhetorical questions, objective narration and POV-character mental asides (snarky ones, at that) woven seamlessly into the narration. Stuff like this, I typically route to the rejection pile, yet it’s presented as being the best way to write prose.

Like I said: The curated content is good, and the technical advice for fixing the “fatal flaws” is fine. But that voice — yikes. I’d think thrice before aping it.

Beyond a critical review of Five Editors, I think the real lesson here is that most of the current texts on the market that attempt to teach writers how to write, do so from a niche perspective that cannot translate into a universally useful construct. Notably, Friedman doesn’t offer much writing advice; she focuses on the business side of authorship. Lakin et al. bypass publishing altogether to emphasize writing technique, but from a situational bias that doesn’t speak to a very large chunk of the author spectrum.

The moral, I think, is that writing advice is a lot like fashion advice: If you like a person’s style, you’ll probably find their advice salutary; if you think they dress poorly, you’re unlikely to want to follow suit. While it may be true that certain writing rules apply broadly, or even universally, the application of those rules can vary widely as a function of genre and story length. So approach how-to-write manuals with care: Use them for advice, not as a template for your own writing.

[Cross-posted from Caffeinated Press.]