Musings Of An Indie Writer

Literary Blinders

2012-02-22T13:50:00.000-08:00

Quoth veteran cultural commentator Roger Kimball:

It was before my time, but not I think much before my time, that a cultivated person would await the publication of an important new novel with an anticipation whose motivation was as much existential as diversionary. This, I believe, is mostly not the case now, and the reasons have only partly to do with the character and quality of the novels on offer. At least as important is the character and quality of our culture. . . .
It has often been observed that the novel is the bourgeois art form par excellence: that in its primary focus on domestic manners and morals, its anatomy of private vices and exercise of private virtues, it answered the spiritual needs of a specific historical epoch.
With the passing or maturation of that epoch, perhaps the novel, too, has matured or even graduated to the second infancy of senility. That theory would account for a good deal of what gets published and praised today, but I don’t think it tells the real story. It does seem as if there have been important alterations in the relation between life and literature—between life and the world of culture generally—and this is as much due to changes in the character of life as to changes in the character of culture.
My point is that even if a new Melville or Twain, Faulkner or Fitzgerald were to appear in our midst, his work would fail to achieve the critical traction and existential weight of those earlier masters. We lack the requisite community of readers, and the ambient shared cultural assumptions, to provide what we might call the responsorial friction that underwrites the traction of publicly acknowledged significance. The novel in its highest forms requires a certain level of cultural definiteness and identity against which it can perform its magic. The diffusion or dispersion of culture brings with it a diffusion of manners and erosion of shared moral assumptions. Whatever we think of that process—love it as a sign of social liberation or loathe it as a token of cultural breakdown—it has robbed the novel, and the novel’s audience, of a primary resource: an authoritative tradition to react against. Affirm it; subvert it; praise it; criticize it: The chief virtue of a well-defined cultural tradition for a novelist (for any artist) is not that it be beneficent but that it be widely acknowledged and authoritative.

Look at all the offhand assertions in there:

Contemporary novels are less worthy than those of earlier times;
That's partly because our culture has deteriorated;
"Cultivated persons" would anticipate the release of "important" new novels;
The novel's proper focus is on "domestic manners and morals;"
The novel's "primary resource" is "an authoritative tradition to react against."

I've seldom been more irritated by an opinion column -- and I like Roger Kimball; I own several of his books. But in the essay above, he's gone seriously off the rails, perhaps because of his detachment from the modern readers' environment into which new fiction is cast.

My sense for Kimball's referential anchor is that it's sunk in the years before World War II. If "cultivated persons" of that epoch really did wait with bated breath for a new novel from Hemingway, Faulkner, Steinbeck, or any of the other writers celebrated in those years, the significance of their tenterhooked-ness was solely to themselves, and perhaps (for those not completely self-absorbed) to one another. But let it be plainly noted that the "cultivated persons" of whom Kimball speaks were few in number, were persons with far more money and leisure time than the average American, and tended toward a group myopia about what mattered to persons outside their circles.

Let it also be noted that genre fiction was considered innately dismissible by those "cultured persons." Not a good word would be heard in any college literature class about Willkie Collins, or Isaac Asimov, or Mervyn Peake, or E.R. Eddison. Hardcover publishers disdained genre fiction; it appeared solely in pulp magazines and cheap paperbacks. "Cultured persons" might read Conan Doyle, Verne, or Poe in private, but as a "guilty pleasure" at best. Yet some of the best, most imaginative, and most moving fiction of our era appears in the genres: Diana Gabaldon's unique romances; P.D. James's mysteries; Tolkien's medieval fantasy; the science fiction of Ray Bradbury, Ursula LeGuin, and Vernor Vinge; and the supernatural fantasies of Stephen King.

The "mainstream novel" appears to be Kimball's touchstone. Granted that most such fiction is mediocre at best. But mediocrity is the norm in any field of endeavor; excellence by definition leaves the pack behind. Worse for Kimball's purposes, the thematic hollowness -- or worse, thematic repellence -- of the "foremost" mainstream novelists of today has come near to invalidating their category. Their masturbatory stylistic excesses render them unreadable for anyone but their colleagues on the various literary prize juries, a "revolving door" arrangement if ever there was one.

These facts are not culturally determined. They are "top-down:" imposed on the culture (such as it is) by a supercilious literary elite that writes essentially for itself. Their effusions are passionless when they're not obsessive or vile. It's a natural consequence of the sort of cloister in which the contemporary "literary" writer has immured himself.

My suggestion to Kimball is to broaden his reading. He need not remain within the cloister. Of course, such a course would expose him to the sneers of those still within it, but all things have their price, including the discovery of well written fiction that expresses wholesome, life-affirming themes and values.

Discouragement and Inspiration...

2012-02-17T07:18:00.000-08:00

...are available from the same source -- at least, if you're a writer.

Mired in a terrible, months-long slump, my Muse absolutely not speaking to me, I've toyed with several previously unthinkable ideas, including "going Harlequin" and ceasing to write altogether. No, so far I haven't taken a step down either of those one-way paths. But the temptation has been there.

In part, the problem is because of something I'm only just beginning to grasp: the singularity of the experience of artistic creation.

I've pondered the problem of stalled creativity at great length. Inasmuch as we're talking about a human undertaking, I've assumed that the act of creation, and the state in which it occurs, are things a human intellect can grasp, even if we haven't yet done so. But all my attempts at analyzing it have failed, so I've decided to set the assumption aside...and I think I have a new insight as a result.

When you're immersed in the creation of a new thing, you're not what you usually are. You've been augmented; you're something more. The experience can't be studied from the inside without sundering it, so we'll never understand it perfectly. But it displays a qualitative difference from the more usual run of human life.

It's not exactly flow, though the ecstatic serenity that one experiences in a flow state is much like it. It has -- secularist readers will pardon me for saying this, I hope -- religious overtones: a sense of having been possessed, used as an instrument for a purpose of which you're not wholly conscious. The hands are yours; the eyes and brain are yours; the point of origination, from which the concepts descend into that brain, the images into those eyes, and the words into and through those hands might just lie outside you entirely.

If you're being used, it's in the most benign conceivable fashion. Your Employer demands nothing from it. What emerges from the motions of your fingers will bear your name. It's up to you to say anything more about it, pertinent or not.

On the dedication page of the paperback editions of each of my novels, I've included:

And to the greater glory of God

Don't think that's just a pro forma statement. Everything I write has that, at the very least, as a subtextual intention. What I've begun to suspect is that the conscious acceptance of that intention, and the willed incorporation of its implications into one's creative work, is essential to raising the product above the level of hackery.

Just now you might be telling yourself something like "Yeah, yeah, but Porretto's religious, so his other beliefs have predisposed him toward this one." Yet even a thoroughgoing atheist will often feel, at the completion of a successful stint of creation, that a hand was guiding him that was not his own. If my supposition is correct, then the creative state draws massively upon the ultimate Power over our universe. (No, not the Death Star.)

One of the open secrets of human life is how tragically limited we are. We aren't really capable of creation -- that is, of bringing something completely new into the universe. Everything we make starts from something provided to us ab initio. Those of us excessively proud of our skills and products posture otherwise, but the facts remain as they are: human labor alone "creates" nothing. The word "creation" is a misnomer for what we really do.

The one arguable exception is the work of art -- or rather, the idea from which such a work springs, and which it's intended to express. But where do ideas come from? Can we be quite certain that they originate within us?

I've decided to assume otherwise. I've decided to assume that, for any of my stories to be worth reading, they must be divinely inspired. And by implication, I've decided that it's not my place to chivvy God into filling me with fresh tales.

I must wait upon His pleasure.

But to wait successfully is as difficult a thing as I know. It's especially hard to wait upon the decisions of another...or Another. To wait successfully in such circumstances is to submit: to accept that one's own priorities are not the determinants of the moment, nor of any particular moment to come.

He will use me as He wills. In His own time, and to His own purposes. My part is to remain serene, attentive...and ready.

Praise God, from Whom all blessings flow.

Stories I'd Like To Read...

2012-02-14T04:30:00.001-08:00

...but can't, because they haven't been written yet:

The infrastructural transition: American industry and commerce shift entirely toward the Internet. Telecommuting becomes the default mode of employment. Only the rarest purchases require the customer to leave his home; in nearly all cases, his goods are delivered to him. America's use of gasoline dwindles sharply, causing a true retrenchment in the requirement for fossil fuels. Convenience and economy accustom most people to staying at home all the time. But this evokes a plague of agoraphobia, such that the great majority of Americans no longer meet anyone outside their nuclear families in the flesh. What would happen to romance in such a society? How would new families form? Worse, what would the consequences be for the prevalence of incest?

The greeter wars: In their frenzy to attract more trade, the brick-and-mortar stores greatly extend and amplify their use of greeters. The greeter transitions from a mere hello-waver to something more like a madam in a bordello: responsible for making the customer enter the store in the first place, making him feel at home, getting him any minor conveniences he might want, and generally making his shopping experience carefree, even sybaritic. But this is not enough, as the supply of adequately attractive and accommodating greeters is limited. That touches off actual combat, wherein special strike forces attack competitors' greeters if they can't buy them away from their current employers. ("I went to Macy's last night and a hockey game broke out!")

"In the noise:" Digital methods of payment become universal, such that the use of physical currency is exceedingly rare. Such a commercial environment elicits a new breed of hacker: one who specializes in changing payment records in a fashion that defrauds the customer. The trick is to conceal the thefts "in the noise" of the transaction: perhaps a penny or two of overage added to sales-tax amounts. What sort of occurrence would serve to bring such a fraud to light? What sort of investigative skills would be required to pursue the criminal to his apprehension and conviction?

Have a few pot-stirrers on me, fellow indie writers. Let me know when you've got a story to show me!

Science Fiction Finagles

2012-02-11T05:58:00.000-08:00

If you enjoy science fiction (which I do), but have a good grasp of physical law (which I also do, having been educated as a physicist), it's likely that you've entertained the occasional qualm about some of the more prominent SF technological motifs: superluminal (faster-than-light) travel; inertialess and reactionless space drives; psi powers; teleportation; and so forth. If you write SF (which I do), but would like to keep it on solid ground to the extent possible (which I do, being the sort who can never break completely free from his "upbringing"), you've probably had the sort of interior struggle that frequently afflicts me: How can I bring myself to use this idea, since I know it violates physical law?

Be not afraid. Even the great ones are torn about such things. For example, Alastair Reynolds, who has as much right to the title of king of hard SF as anyone, deliberately avoided the introduction of superluminal travel through the first five of his novels. Reynolds is yet another emigre from physics, which gives me a better than average sympathy for his decisions...but I note that, in his employment of the superpowerful "Conjoiner drives," which he posited as necessary to practical near-lightspeed travel, he omitted to cope with the equally difficult problem of Newton's Third Law: a body accelerating through space must eject reaction mass to do so.

In writing Which Art In Hope, I fought with myself over just what violations of known physical law I'd indulge. I managed not to commit any in getting the Spoonerites to Hope, but immediately thereafter found myself obliged to ignore the physical properties of the human brain in crafting the major conflict of the story. The brain is a direct-current device of extremely low potentials and currents, and could under no circumstances harness or generate the sort of power required for the psionic feats demonstrated by Armand Morelon and Victoria Peterson throughout the novel.

It gets worse. I've been at work on a sequel to Which Art In Hope, tentatively titled Liberty's Torch. Protagonist Althea Morelon, nominally the granddaughter of Armand and Teresza Morelon, has been charged with a special commission: To voyage to Earth and discover what has become of Mankind's ancestral home, from which there have been no radio-frequency transmissions in hundreds of years. But to accomplish that task, she must find a way around the lightspeed barrier, as Earth is twenty-six light years distant and Althea does not want to spend a millennium on the round trip. So I've resolved upon a "finagle" that will allow me some peace from my conscience: Althea, a high genius, will discover a way to alter lightspeed itself -- for the better, of course.

What's that you say? How dare I? Shouldn't that be quite as disallowed as any other finesse of Einstein's speed limit? Well, it depends. Sometimes a writer can get away with this sort of thing if he pays the right amount of attention to plausibility. In this case, the key for me was my knowledge of what determines the speed of light in a vacuum. It derives from two physical properties: the electric permittivity and the magnetic permeability of the vacuum. The assumption has long been that these properties are fixed and cannot be altered...but it's only an assumption, and I've chosen to set it aside to get Althea and her companions to Earth and back in a reasonable amount of time.

(As for the reaction-mass problem, I've decided to follow Alastair Reynolds's example and ignore it. So sue me!)

This sort of finagle is just about unavoidable by a writer determined to write science fiction. It hardly matters whether he's intent upon "hard" (technologically heavy) or "soft" (technologically light, sociologically oriented) SF. The irony, of course, is in the term science fiction itself: the "science" is as fictional as any other aspect of the story, and the reader's central challenge is to suspend his disbelief long enough to enjoy it. But seldom does the reader contemplate the writer's difficulties with such departures from reality. They can be more trying than anyone realizes, for which reason I have resolved upon the founding of a home for SF writers driven so completely insane by their science-finagles that they need round-the-clock supervision and an unending supply of non-SF reading matter. It's not an entirely altruistic idea, as I expect that I'll be one of the first residents.

Wish-Fulfillment Fiction

2012-02-08T04:41:00.001-08:00

I've recently encountered an interesting variation on the "Mary-Sue" character, who by definition is inserted into a story as a fantasy object. Such a character, in his departure from human norms, is particularly implausible; he requires the most determined suspension of disbelief. The author's supposition is that his readers will grant him that level of suspension, for the pleasures the Mary-Sue character offers his imagination.

But a writer can go well beyond a Mary-Sue. He can craft an entire wish-fulfillment novel, for instance: a novel in which the protagonist succeeds in indulging himself in endless gratifications of some kind as the main plot thread of the story. I'd put the majority of "pink and purple" books into that category. And beyond that, of course, would lie the wish-fulfillment novel-series, possibly one sculpted around a single, too-good-to-be-true protagonist living a too-good-to-be-true fantasy life.

(I'd rather not speculate on what might lie beyond that.)

I've just stumbled onto such a novel-series: John Ringo's "Kildar" books:

Ghost
Kildar
Choosers Of The Slain
Unto The Breach
A Deeper Blue

Ringo is a well-traveled writer who has written in just about every imaginable genre. With the "Kildar" series he appears to have resolved upon a mating of military-adventure fiction and middle-grade porn. The novels are composed almost exclusively of wish-fulfillment material -- for an American man with an interest in sex and bloodshed, at least.

Consider:

Series protagonist Mike Harmon is a retired SEAL, code-named "Ghost."
He's apparently fearless, superbly competent as a warrior, and possesses an omnivoracious sexual appetite.
His adventures are almost all high-octane military action, interspersed with polygamous sexual indulgence with too many women to believe.
In Kildar, he purchases a de facto barony over a close-knit tribe called the Keldara, which appears to be composed exclusively of brawny young men of gung-ho disposition, fantastically beautiful young women all of whom think Harmon is the supreme example of masculine attractiveness (and sexual prowess), and older women who make extraordinary beer.
He turns the Keldara into a fighting force comparable to any national commando team, and uses them to fight off Chechen-Islamic terrorists who've been serially invading the Republic of Georgia.

(Excuse me? I can hear you thinking. What are you, Francis W. Porretto, Certified Galactic Intellect, Curmudgeon Emeritus to the World Wide Web, and author of such deeply Christian fiction as Chosen One, On Broken Wings, and Shadow Of A Sword doing reading such books? Well, I've been greatly entertained by Ringo's "Maple Syrup War" SF novels, and by the "Posleen" series he's co-authored with fellow military-fiction specialist Tom Kratman. I stumbled into the "Kildar" books while looking for a new diversion. And now that I've paid for them, I have to read them, don't I? I mean, anything else would be wasteful!)

The "Kildar" series is pretty obvious in its orientation. It strips away any pretense that the reader is there for the craftsmanship, the characterization, or the overarching theme. It's a fictional wallow in a combination of male fantasies. Imagine! My own castle! My own army! My own harem! And all the full-auto weapons a boy's heart could desire!

Gentle Reader who Writes, do not attempt this sort of fiction. Read it if you must...for whatever value of "must" will salve your conscience...but please, please don't write it. The reading world simply doesn't need this sort of fiction. It panders to all the worst characteristics of Man. I mean, the sexual encounters alone, especially after Harmon acquires his "harem" of nubile Georgian and Russian teenagers, are enough to get these books onto the Index Expurgatorius. Now if you'll excuse me, I do believe my NOOK Color has been satisfactorily recharged, and I'd like to get back to my, ah, analysis of these terrible, terrible books.

(I wonder if Ringo plans a sixth novel?)

Indie Traps

2012-02-04T05:43:00.000-08:00

With the explosion of interest in independent publishing (among writers) and independently published works (among readers), it was inevitable that the major powers in Web retailing would cast a covetous eye on this new channel of distribution. Their pitch: We'll help you with your promotion and marketing. Their price: Sell exclusively through us. One such, Amazon's KDP Select program, has already reeled in a number of indie writers who were previously unfettered.

Here there be tygers, Gentle Reader. Such an arrangement reproduces the worst features of Pub World's baronies. Signing up for it puts the writer's fate into hands other than his own.

The monopolist of distribution, like a monopolist of any other sort, has a stranglehold on any product marketed solely through him. Neither his producers nor his consumers have any alternative to dealing with him. He can dictate terms to both sides of the transaction, and walk away with the lion's share of the revenues.

Even if we omit consideration of the ethical aspects of such a relationship, a practical calculation tends to cast monopoly-distribution agreements in a dubious light. The increase in units of sale that some writers will experience -- the earliest adopters will do best, as the arrival of each new participant will dilute the monopoly-distributor's attention to all of them -- must be factored against the diminution of their revenues per unit, and the loss of their sales potential through other channels. A properly broad comparison won't show all participants gaining a clear advantage from their participation.

For the typical indie writer, who's never "enjoyed" the acceptance of Pub World, the most profitable form of promotion remains good word-of-mouth. If he can induce his happy readers to recommend his book to their reading friends, he'll prosper. The effect, at least in the world of electronically distributed fiction, outweighs any other form of marketing or promotion...if the book is good, and generally well regarded by its consumers.

A vignette from Jim Bouton's marvelous baseball autobiography Ball Four comes to mind. A pitcher on the mound is chatting with his manager, in one of those breaks in the action whose utility so many of us fans of the game have questioned. As the meeting is about to break up, the pitcher asks his manager, "Any particular way you want me to pitch to this next guy, Joe?" The manager replies, "Nah, fuck him. Just give him good stuff."

That's the eternal bottom line, isn't it? Give 'em good stuff. But to give it, you have to have it. And if you do, then pitching, the writing (and selling) of fiction, and life itself just aren't that difficult.

The Novel Of Episodic Structure

2012-02-02T04:54:00.001-08:00

In my musings over my current, maddeningly resistant novel projects, I've been thinking quite a lot about unitary versus episodic structure. Of my six novels, three (Chosen One, The Sledgehammer Concerto, and Priestesses) have an episodic structure. That is, they're composed of stories separated in space and time, continuity among which derives from common characters and themes. They appear to be at least as popular with my readers as my three unitary novels (On Broken Wings, Shadow Of A Sword, and Which Art In Hope).

But supposedly, episodic structure causes dramatic unity to suffer. The literati are uniformly opposed to it.

I can't accept that. Dramatic unity is about theme: the overarching idea the author is straining to express with his fiction. I'm a fanatic about the need for a clear, conscious theme. If you don't have one, why are you writing? Also, what are you writing? An unillustrated comic book?

Your theme can be consistent across a group of stories. If those stories share a common protagonist, it's not even hard to pull off. So why are critics and commentators so opposed to the episodic structure?

I couldn't say for certain, not being an admittee to those circles. (Can't afford the tweed jackets with the leather elbow patches.) But it might have something to do with the simmering animosity between novelists and short-story writers.

William Faulkner once said that every novelist is a failed short-story writer, and every short-story writer is a failed poet. (Notably, Faulkner's stylistic opposite and principal contemporary rival, Ernest Hemingway, was accomplished and widely praised in all three forms.) The statement carries a lot of truth. The short story is a far harder feat to pull off than the novel. You can make quite a few mistakes in a novel and still produce an enjoyable, salable product. The short story demands a far higher degree of discipline. It has no tolerance for:

Technical mistakes in grammar, spelling, or punctuation;
Inept characterization;
Self-indulgent arabesques of description or device;
Muddy theme.

This has been clear ever since men began to write fiction. The discipline and finely honed craft required by the short story is a point of pride with those of us who can produce them. More, novelists are aware of it, even if they'd only admit it under torture. But the novelist has traditionally had a huge advantage over the short-story writer in a critical field: income.

Novels have always been easier than short stories to parlay into a living income. The production of short stories, however fulfilling the may be to write, has always been an avocation.

That's changing today, albeit slowly, with the explosion of digital publishing and Web distribution. Twenty years ago and more, the difficulty of marketing the short story arose from physical constraints. It had to be bundled with other material to produce an artifact of sufficient mass. Thus, short stories had very few outlets: periodicals, single-author collections, and anthologies. Periodicals' expiration dates guaranteed that any particular story would reach only a narrow slice of potential readers; collections are only marketable once the writer has established a readership by other means; and anthologies are few and hit-or-miss.

Today, a short story vended for a modest price through a digital publisher can sell quickly and profitably, and to a wider audience than any of the pre-digital forms would allow. Thus, the short-story specialist of today finds his income potential rising, though not yet to a point that would allow him to live well on that alone. More, at this time there appears to be a readership preference for short, inexpensive works. Cost is a factor, as is the risk of spending several bucks on a "turkey" of a novel. Also, our time for reading is more finely chopped up than ever before. These considerations give the short-story writer an edge in the world of digitally published fiction -- and novelists are aware of it.

So it stands to reason that for a writer to stitch together a credible, thematically unified novel-length work out of short stories is viewed by "traditional" novelists' as an infringement on their last bastion: the long work of fiction, which requires several hours to consume and digest. Worse yet, the episodic novel offers the reader convenient break points: places where he can put the book down and turn to other chores without the risk of losing the thread of the narrative. Perhaps worst of all, the episodic novel lends itself to serialization far better than the unitary work. Horrors!

This isn't an argument for eschewing unitary novel structure altogether. There are many plot ideas and associated themes that require 50,000 words or more for an adequate treatment. But the writer who's inhibited from attempting a long work because he thinks and writes best in the short-story form shouldn't automatically disqualify himself. There are rich possibilities in the episodic form, including some that cannot be addressed within a unitary structure -- and readers are proving far more open to the episodic approach than the literati would have us believe.

Food for thought.

An Underappreciated Pleasure

2012-01-30T17:36:00.000-08:00

Americans who read a great deal often find themselves short of their preferred reading matter. It certainly happens to me often enough. At such times, I'm torn between the urge to go immediately to Barnes & Noble and the lure of the large online libraries, such as Bartleby Classics Online, OpenLibrary and Project Gutenberg. Ever more often of late, the online repositories -- usually either OpenLibrary or Project Gutenberg -- have won the tug of war.

OpenLibrary is explicitly an online lending institution. Its catalog is large, but you're not guaranteed to be able to have what you want on the instant; someone else might have checked it out. All the same, it's a resource of great value, where many books no longer easily acquired in physical form can be found in electronic form.

Project Gutenberg is a repository of works whose copyright has expired, and which are therefore freely copyable and distributable without legal consequences. As the author's copyright expires 50 years after his death, no item in Project Gutenberg will have been written more recently than fifty years ago. Nevertheless, it's a treasure trove of inestimable value, where a dedicated reader can spend far more time than he originally allowed.

To my mind, the underappreciated value of these sites is not that they'll have exactly what you the reader currently and consciously crave, but that they can introduce you to writers you've never previously encountered -- indeed, whose names you might never have heard before. And of course, there are many classics (Classic: A book everyone wants to have read, but no one wants to read) in both repositories, from which you can furbish up your knowledge of the great literature of the past.

Quite recently, it was my great delight to make the acquaintance, through OpenLibrary and entirely accidentally, of the late Sigrid Undset.

Sigrid Undset was a Norwegian author of the early Twentieth Century, whose greatest works, The Master of Hestviken and Kristin Lavransdatter, were set in medieval Norway, during those years when, though Christianity had taken root in that kingdom, the older pagan creed and associated beliefs about the supernatural had not yet been completely extinguished. Her great strength is her ability to transport the reader into that long-forgotten place and time, in no small part through the eyes and thoughts of her viewpoint characters.

Among the things that distinguish this Nobel Prize-winning writer is the simplicity of her style. Undset's style would never pass muster among the literati of our time. Her prose is smooth, undecorated, seemingly artless -- but she leaves the reader with the most vivid sense of place, character, and high emotion I've ever encountered, in more than half a century of avid reading. In her simple yet compelling way, she exemplifies the very best of the classical storytelling tradition: a narrative style distilled of everything unnecessary, and thus brought to maximum sincerity and potency.

There is much value in the fictional landmarks of the past. We are all too often deprived of their riches by our own prejudices, or by unwisely heeding supercilious self-appointed judges of fictional worth. It's as great a tragedy as the prejudicing of the young reader against the great books by having them forced upon him in school. But the Internet, and sites such as those mentioned above, offer us the opportunity to repair our earlier errors, painlessly and greatly to our betterment...if we have the time and humility.

A Few Toots On The Old Horn

2012-01-27T13:42:00.001-08:00

I can't quite resist when I get reviews this complimentary:

Thankyou SO much for sharing this wonderful novel. Sci-fi is not my usual read, but I may now be converted. The story flowed so easily, the characters become real and the plot was unique with the details and futuristic differences well thought out. The ending, although not what I expected (or wanted) was realistic and as it should have been. After all, not everything in the "real world" turns out the way we would like :)
I especially enjoyed the biblical similarities. Very clever and thought provoking.
You are an exceptional author and I am extremely keen to read anything and everything else you have written.

And:

Superb Story with a surprise ending, Keep writing Francis... You have a God given gift.

And:

I couldn't put it down! This is a well written book; the plot makes sense and is well developed. However, the final part of the ending was a bit disappointing. It ended more or less as expected but sort of left things hanging... Anyway, it was a great read and a book that I will reread.
If this is typical of his work I would certainly read more of Franks books!

Thank you, my friends. Thank you most sincerely.

Of Sex And Polarizations

2012-01-25T04:59:00.000-08:00

Way back when we were just considering descending from the trees and I was still pursuing conventional publication, I noticed an interesting cleavage (don't laugh) among publishers. There seemed to be a fairly sharp partition between houses that wanted absolutely no mention of sex or any sex act in their publications, and houses that insisted on at least one fairly explicit "skin scene" per book. Houses in the gray area between them were few and far between.

It's been many years since then, so I have no idea how Pub World regards sex today. But the indie-writers community, to which I belong today, seems to be acquiring a partition on the subject. Somehow I doubt that we inherited that characteristic from the publishing houses that have spurned us, though it does make for an interesting speculation.

I read a great deal, both conventionally published works and books issued by independents. On one side are writers who seem absolutely unwilling to cope with sex, despite its centrality in the most important human relationships and their development. On the other are writers who are apparently obsessed with sex, such that everything they write contains at least one excessively explicit depiction of sexual intimacy. Not many live in the no-man's-land between them.

In recent years, a new factor has intruded, which an old friend calls the political issue: the treatment of same-sex relationships. There's no denying that homosexuality is now more broadly accepted than it was half a century ago. There's no denying that some fraction of the reading public is interested in reading about it, whatever the reason. But among indie writers are few who cope with the challenge at all smoothly.

Quite a few writers are absolutely unwilling to deal with homosex. Others seem to want to wallow in it. It's almost a Puritans-versus-pornographers divide. For my part, I find homosex repugnant. Even so, I cannot deny the extraordinary power the homosexual orientation has to shape a character: to stress him with its tensions; to place him emotionally outside the human mainstream; and to lead him to defy other constraints and conventions of normal society. A force that potent is something a writer can't completely ignore.

There are, of course, other tensions pertinent to writing about sex and sexual relationships. Probably the most obvious is the question of how explicit you can afford to be about a sexual encounter without crossing the bounds of good taste. There will always be some publishers to whom the merest whiff of sex is enough to reject a submission. Indies will never have that problem. (It's nice to have one less thing to worry about!) But we'll always have another one: In describing, depicting, or alluding to a sexual encounter between my characters, to what extent am I serving the principles and goals of good storytelling, and to what extent am I pandering, whether to my own sensitivities and desires, or to those of an imagined reader?

Food for thought.

Cliches

2012-01-23T05:11:00.001-08:00

Avoid cliches like the plague. (They're old hat.)

The above is a classic "fumblerule," which violates the rule it expresses specifically to illustrate it. But quite a lot of people, including no few writers, lack a grasp of what constitutes a cliche. Even more people are numb to the notion that the concept of a cliche extends beyond the typeset phrase.

Cliches of expression seem simple enough. The common sense of them -- an overused phrase with a stock application -- isn't far off, but it omits the mechanism that causes a phrase to become a cliche.

Every cliche of expression begins life as a metaphor -- an attempt to evoke an emotional reaction from the reader by making reference to some strong image or concept common to his culture. A metaphor becomes a cliche through overuse -- but not because frequency of use alone will do so. What kills the metaphor and leaves a cliche for its corpse is the loss of effectiveness of the underlying image or concept.

"Avoid cliches like the plague." Why is "like the plague" a cliche? Quite simply, because the reader doesn't derive any impact from the image of a plague-stricken land, carbuncle-covered corpses everywhere, terrified survivors running to and fro in search of a countermeasure for the affliction or protection against it. He merely sees the phrase "like the plague" and leaps immediately to the understanding that the back-referent is something to be avoided. There's no emotional impact.

Cliches of expression are easily understood in this light. But even better, cliches of motif make sense when viewed this way, as well.

The motif-cliche is a plot or setting element that's lost its impact through overuse. Take the drearily common science-fiction plot motif of a "galactic empire." This notion has been trite since Asimov's Foundation novels. The Star Wars movies merely shoveled a few more clods onto its grave. The reader doesn't get the sense of expanse and grandeur that once came from the motif. So setting an SF tale in such an empire is a cliched way to frame one's story.

Here's another one: the "zombie apocalypse." Surely we've read enough, and seen enough movies, about communities and nations overrun by zombies. They were good fun for a while. But the giveaway that the motif had been overused to death was its incorporation into innumerable jokes and satires, of which the wonderfully funny movie Zombieland is probably the capstone. Unlike the creatures to which it refers, the zombie apocalypse will not rise from the grave to feed on the fears of any more readers. Not effectively, at any rate.

We don't avoid cliches -- of either type -- because of some formal rule. We do so because we want our stories to be effective: to evoke the reader's most powerful emotions, to pull him to the edge of his seat as the climax approaches, and to conclude in a fashion that simultaneously wrings him dry and assures him that regardless of the cost to the hero, "it's all been worthwhile."

Verbum sat sapienti -- and no, that's not a cliche; it's just a highbrow way of saying "watch your step."

The Outer Limits...Of Perseverance

2012-01-21T08:57:00.000-08:00

When you're stopped -- literally unable to proceed with any of your 2317 fiction projects, frustrated to the max and mad as hell at yourself -- what then?

Yes, yes, I did say I wasn't about to prescribe some panacea for writer's block. I don't have one. If I did, I wouldn't just give it away; I'd patent it and sell it at an immense profit. But I'm badly hung up at the moment, and if there's any value to this state, it's that it gets me thinking along paths I don't travel very often.

I continue to think it's a mistake for me to compel myself to sit at the computer in defiance of the block. There are other things to do, always, and to good effect. Time spent sitting here with clenched fists and teeth gritted can't possibly be time spent to good effect.

But that doesn't preclude thinking about the problem of writer's block. If you're a generalist, which I am at least some of the time, you might try to address it in general terms: as a universal problem with unified genesis and symptomology.

Therein lies the trap. Your writer's block, unless I'm badly mistaken, isn't a problem with a unified genesis, or a unified symptomology, or a unified anything. There's no entry in the diagnostic manuals for it. It's your problem: specific to you, the context in which you live and work, and the project you're straining to advance. If it were otherwise, you and I could get together, research the hell out of it, formulate a cure, and become unspeakably rich.

It's quite possible that there is no cure, nor a palliative, nor even a way to assuage the frustration. No one understands how artistic creation occurs. That understanding is the prerequisite to compounding a cure for when it fails.

The one and only good thing I find about my episodes of writer's block is that the malady doesn't touch my opinion-editorial efforts. I've never yet felt blocked about those. I can just about always come up with something to write about at Eternity Road, and if time and other obligations permit, I can always come up with a few hundred words of commentary about it. That's a function of engagement with the real world, which persists in continuing even when the worlds of my imagination completely cease to turn.

There's a potential common factor: Writer's block seems only to affect fiction writing. If there are exceptions, I have yet to learn of them. So it might be a failure of imagination, rather than of any of the other components to the creation of fiction.

But our imaginations -- what lubricates and fuels them, what causes them to choose a particular route to travel, and what causes them to slam on the brakes -- are as little understood as the creative impulse itself. It might profit me as little to muse over the nature of the imagination as it has to ponder the mechanics of the creative process and into which gears a monkey wrench can intrude to halt it.

Still, as my sainted father once said, it beats separating the fly shit out of pepper. (He said a lot of neat things, most of them considerably more offensive than that, so consider yourself spared.) And it calls to mind the climactic exchange from Isaac Asimov's classic short story "Why do they call them Olympics?"

"It won’t do to say to a man, 'You can create. Do so.' It is much safer to wait for a man to say, 'I can create, and I will do so whether you wish it or not.'"

There's a lot of truth in there. Perhaps if I recite it to myself a few hundred times, it will jump-start me. Alternately, it could make me yearn for a nice nap. We shall see.

The Tough Parts

2012-01-19T03:17:00.001-08:00

One of the most instructive exercises I experienced in a critique group was the challenge to write a single paragraph in which characters are depicted experiencing frustration, anger, fear, and desire -- without using those words or any obvious synonyms for them. It brought home to me, most vividly, just what a complex and difficult thing it is to portray emotions with no instrument other than words.

Actors do it with facial expressions, body language, and tone of voice: four tools to the writer's one. Our reader can't see the expressions or postures we imagine onto our characters, nor can they hear them speak as we imagine them to speak. Words are all we have.

One of the consequences of the difficulty is the overuse of adverbial tags in dialogue. We want the reader to hear the character speak, so we tag his statements: "he said heatedly," "she said lovingly," and so on. That isn't always a mistake, but it is in the majority of cases. Dialogue should carry its own intonations; the guideline about sticking to "he said" and "she said" should be respected far more often than not.

Another consequence is the proliferation of as if clauses: "He stood rigid, as if paralyzed by the news." Again, this isn't always a mistake, but one must take care not to make a habit of it. Remember always that repetition is the enemy of entertainment. If your reader begins to anticipate your moves, there will come a point where he'll decide he can do without you.

Probably the smoothest and least disturbing way to convey a character's emotions to the reader, apart from having him act them out or express them in dialogue, is to have another character evaluate them in an internal monologue. Note: This is markedly different from having Smith say to Jones, "You seem very upset." Rather, it would go somewhat like this:

     Conway was scanning the halls and any offices with open doors for Louis and Tanya. He was about to head to the second floor when Louis charged around the corner and seized on him.

    "Kevin! You're looking for Tanya, right?" Louis's hands closed on Conway's forearms like twin vises. He was flushed and struggling for breath.

    "Yeah, where did the two of you disappear to? Louis, are you all right?"

    A spasm crossed Louis's face. "I'm fine. But someone should be with Tanya. I left her in Ted Morelon's office. She's...not right, Kev." He hunched momentarily, as if from a blow to the gut. "Go look after her, would you please?"

    "Okay, sure, but where are you headed?"

    Louis spun Conway around and propelled him several yards down the hall with a mighty shove. "Just get down there!"

    Conway halted himself and turned to call after the other engineer, but Louis was already gone.

    Kee-rist.

Tanya was in Ted Morelon's office, slumped over in his guest chair.

    She raised hollow eyes rimmed in crimson as Conway entered. Without a word he shut the door and dropped to a squat before her.

    I've seen that face. In a mirror, when Dot left me.

    "Tanya...?"

    "Am I so bad, Kevin?" The words were slurred by tears.

    "Huh?"

    "Am I so bad? Look at me." She straightened her body in the metal chair. "I take care of myself. I work out. I stay on top of my weight. I look after my hair and skin. I make up whenever I go out. I don't have any moles or scars or anything." A shudder passed over her and shook bright droplets from her carefully thickened lashes. "I'm not bad, I'm not, I'm not!"

    "Calm down, Tanya." He pitched the words as low as he could. "Of course you aren't. You're a great gal, gorgeous, smart, lively..."

    The hopeless look remained.

    "Then why have three guys pissed on me in just half an hour?"

    "What?"

    She nodded. "First Jake. Then Eric. Now..." Her voice cracked, her eyes filled with new tears, and she slumped back into a posture of despair.

    She must have thrown herself at Louis.

    For an instant his skull was filled with the green ice of envy.

    "Tanya, Louis is, a, a little different. He's, well, no one's ever seen him with a girl on his arm."

    She looked up at him from under sodden lids. "Queer?"

    He recoiled internally. "Shit, no! Excuse me, I mean...no. But not, uh, not available."

    Not like me.

    She waited for further explanation. He cast about for a way to explain the little software wizard who stood higher in his esteem than anyone else in the world, and found that he could not.

    "Do you think I offended him?" she said.

    He thought about it a moment, then shook his head. It seemed to relieve her. They held the silence between them for several minutes. In the distance, little squirts of music and laughter from the party spoke of revelry that the scene with Eric Lazear had not managed to quench.

    "Kevin," she murmured at last, "can I go home with you?"

    It took him by surprise. He sputtered and stalled, caught without a graceful response.

    "Please, Kevin?" She pushed herself up out of the chair, and he rose with her. "I don't want to be alone tonight."

    He breathed deeply. "Of course."

    Her nod was almost a formal bow. "Thank you."

[From Chosen One]

Kevin Conway, the viewpoint character, is continuously evaluating and reacting to the emotional storm Tanya Taliaferro is experiencing before him. Pitching the scene from his viewpoint was a compromise: a violation of one rule -- make the viewpoint character the one who gets the biggest emotional impact from the scene -- to respect another -- avoid excessive tonal and emotional attributions. It seemed to me to work better than the previous version, which had Tanya as the viewpoint character; among other things, it struck me as less maudlin. But it reinforced my conviction that the accurate, sincere depiction of emotion is just about the toughest challenge we face.

What about you, Gentle Reader? What passages, in your own fiction or others', have struck you as either singularly well done in this regard, or horribly inept?

Cannibals: The Auto-Da-Fe of "Literature"

2012-01-15T06:22:00.001-08:00

Every now and then, an important point I've striven to make will be made for me, though not always by someone who has that as his intention. Regardless of how it was intended, it’s always a pleasant experience, as I’m no more desirous of being a voice crying in the wilderness than anyone else.

Today, my unknowing benefactor is a certain Garth Risk Hallberg. I know, I know: "Who?" Bear with me for a moment as I acquaint you with some of his, ah, thoughts:

[1] The central question driving literary aesthetics in the age of the iPad is no longer "How should novels be?" but "Why write novels at all?"...

[2] The scarcer or more difficult to access an aesthetic experience is -- the novel very much included -- the greater its ability to set us apart from those further down the social ladder. This kind of value is, in [sociologist Pierre Bourdieu's] analysis, the only real value that "refined" tastes have.

It’s hard to overstate how revolutionary this riposte to the aesthetics of "transcendence" must have seemed 30 years ago....

[3] We who curate our Twitter feeds and Facebook walls understand that at least part of what we're doing publicly, "like"-ing what we like, is trying to separate ourselves from the herd....

[4] Writers since at least the heyday of Gore Vidal have bemoaned their audience's defection to other forms of entertainment. But pop-Bourdieuvianism deprives them of the sense of high-canonical purity with which they've traditionally consoled themselves....

[5] To hell with style, then; the novelist now has to confront the larger problem of what the novel is even for -- assuming it’s not just another cultural widget....

[6] This is where "The Marriage Plot"'s titular enjambment of literature and love -- those two beleaguered institutions -- is so clarifying....

[7] This isn’t to say that, measured in terms of cultural capital or sheer entertainment, the delights to which most contemporary "literary fiction" aims to treat us aren’t an awful lot. It's just that, if the art is to endure, they won't be quite enough.

Yes, Gentle Reader: Those sentences actually occur in a column in the New York Times. My wife stumbled onto it, beckoned me over, and asked most plaintively, "Can you make sense of this?" (I refrained from repeating my exhortation that she seek a more wholesome source for her Sunday crossword puzzle.)

Mr. Hallberg isn’t entirely incorrect in thinking that his pretentious obscurity will strike many readers as profound: "Gee, if I can’t make sense of it, it must be really deep." However, those who react that way will be persons already captivated by the plot-averse, virtue-defying, author-centric garbage that Mr. Hallberg regards as high literature. The average American is aware that though the genuinely profound might at times seem obscure, deliberate obscurity -- perhaps I should say deliberate obfuscation -- does not, of itself, indicate profundity.

This sort of commentary on fiction, which in its pretensions and its sonorous impenetrability closely resembles typical commentary on many other arts, is a culmination of sorts. Ever since the deconstructionists came to vogue, critics and commentators on fiction have practiced a sort of cannibalism: as deconstructionism has slaughtered the literary virtues honored in better times -- clarity; consistency; loyalty to truth and virtue -- critics and "literary" writers have feasted on the offal. That they should finally have turned on their vocation as such comes as no surprise; after all, what's left of it?

If you're not quite following me, consider:

In citation 1: Just what does the iPad have to do with the point of writing novels?
In citation 2: What makes it "revolutionary" to posit that "refined" tastes have as one function distinguishing the holder from others who don't share them? And what does Mr. Hallberg mean by "the aesthetics of 'transcendence'" -- ?
In citation 3: What does Mr. Hallberg mean by "curate?"
In citation 4: What does he mean by "the sense of high-canonical purity," if not merely that the writers to whom he applies the phrase think themselves above the rest of us?
In citation 5: Why is it the novelist's task to determine "what the novel is even for" -- ? Isn't that the reader's job?
In citation 6: An "enjambment" is "the continuation of a syntactic unit from one line of verse into the next line without a pause." What conceivable connection does this have to the "beleaguered institutions" of "literature and love" -- ? By the way, just how is "love" an institution, "beleaguered" or otherwise?
Is citation 7 anything but a deliberately obscure, supercilious closing -- an attempt to imply to those of us who read fiction for entertainment and (in some cases) edification that Mr. Hallberg sees more widely and more deeply into "literary fiction" and its next metamorphosis than we are capable of doing?

This is typical of contemporary literary criticism. And it's a perfect example of why persons with a sense of self-respect and a clear idea of what they enjoy have turned away from both the critics and the writers and works they champion.

The Beauty Of Ugly

2012-01-13T03:53:00.001-08:00

Not a lot of thought goes into what constitutes beauty -- physical beauty -- in a fictional character. Beauty in the human face and form is something we have solidly pre-formed conceptions about, and a smart writer refrains from messing with them. Accordingly, when a writer designates a character as handsome or beautiful, he seldom says anything more about him.

Ugly is a different subject altogether. An old saying runs that "all happy families are alike, but every unhappy family is unhappy in its own unique way." Replace "happy family" with "beautiful character," and the statement remains accurate.

That suggests a large range of possibilities for varying one's characters, especially one's Supporting Cast characters, starting with a simple rule: don't make them beautiful or handsome.

The ugly protagonist is a rare species. Indeed, the template for protagonists seems to demand physical attractiveness. I got quite a bit of static from my test readers when I decided to ignore that pattern in Chosen One and On Broken Wings. But I didn't make Louis or Christine ugly. Not exactly, anyway. I made Louis shorter than average, and I afflicted Christine with a faceful of scars from the motorcycle accident through which she escaped the Butchers. Even those relatively mild deviations from the template earned criticism.

There's information here:

The typical reader wants to see the hero as attractive, in the conventional sense for his gender.
Once a character has been described, however sketchily, as handsome or beautiful, the writer need say nothing more about his appearance.
The unattractive character, by contrast, affords the writer an opportunity to indulge in detailed description (hopefully, in a fashion and at times complementary to the story).

These concepts would also apply to the able-bodied versus handicapped dichotomy. Indeed, some clever writers will deliberately afflict a Supporting Cast character with a minor handicap as a tag through which to distinguish him from the others around him. However, a handicapped protagonist is an exceedingly rare creature, perhaps rarer than an ugly one.

Needless to say, there are implications for the correlation between character virtue and character attractiveness. Whatever we might say to miscellaneous survey-takers, we appear to believe that good, smart, courageous persons are more likely than not to be good-looking. We're especially sensitive to that linkage in the case of female protagonists. Rosanne Barr cannot play and will not be cast as Christine in the movie versions of On Broken Wings or Shadow Of A Sword.

This comes to mind because of a minor deviation from the rules: Tanya Huff's "Valor" novels featuring protagonist Torin Kerr, a tough, battle-hardened, ever-ready-to-act sergeant of Space Marines in a future Confederation. Huff never describes Kerr's appearance in any way, except to mention her height (1.8 meters, or approximately 6 feet). But over the course of the five novels, Kerr becomes as much a romantic hero as a military one, leaving the reader to wonder: does her lover Craig Ryder find her physically attractive, or is he mainly impressed by her courage, dedication, and martial skills?

Incidentally, the "Valor" novels are good military SF adventures. I recommend them strongly, as much for their excitement value as for the unusual social matrix in which Huff embeds the stories. Good stuff -- and I predict that you'll find yourself imagining grizzled combat veteran Torin Kerr as a beauty. I did!

Societal Atomizations And Trends In Fiction

2012-01-11T04:12:00.001-08:00

There's a trend afoot. Perhaps it's been in motion for a long time; I couldn't say. At the very least, it's become noticeable, if not immediate and palpable in all our lives.

Have you noticed how little taste people have, in general, for one another's company?

(All right, so I buried the lede. Sue me.)

The manifestations are well distributed and quite definite. Our socializing is way down from a few decades ago. The number of Americans who claim to have a substantial number of friends is also down. Even informal socializing, such as the sort that used to prevail in the neighborhood tavern, is seriously down.

When we have a choice between doing something in company or alone, we tend ever more often to choose solitude. It doesn't matter whether the something is obligatory or elective. Consider family meals as a test case.

Come to think of it, families are getting smaller. Their members are getting less involved with one another. Groups of grown siblings have less contact with one another than in previous decades. There's progressively less resistance to letting the young'uns "leave the nest," and ever more resistance to allowing them to return. Of course, there could be more than one reason for that, but all the same...

Married couples are spending less time involved with one another than ever before. He'll be at his pursuits, and she'll be at hers, until the time comes to retire for the evening. That's often the case even when the two are sitting next to one another on the sofa. It's unpleasantly often the case even in the marital bed.

The old practice of the discussion salon, organized around a common interest, is essentially dead. Church groups, whether for prayer, or charitable work, or mutual edification, are shrinking as well. Charity in general seems to be a matter of writing checks.

Whether it's the pressure of our busy lives, or the attractions of solitary alternatives, or a decreasing tolerance for the idiosyncrasies and preferences of others, we're spending less time with others than ever before. The time we do spend in others' company tends to be ever less involved with them.

And in tandem with this, we have the fictional trend toward the hero as isolate.

Some of the most popular figures in contemporary fiction are isolates by design. For whatever reason, they eschew intimate human attachments. Their adventures often require coincidence or compulsion to force them into acting for their fellow men.

It's not about individualism per se. Individualism is the assertion of one's right to do as one pleases, with no requirement for the approval of others; it has nothing to do with a desire to separate oneself from the rest of Mankind.

Loner heroes avoid intimacy for many reasons. Some are simply exercising a preference for solitude. Others have a defect of some kind, often one that plays an important part in their responses to events. Still others are isolated by circumstances they don't control.

One way or another, there are more of them than ever before, and they're among the most popular figures in fiction in our time.

Yes, it's a strange topic for this site. But when I notice a pattern, I feel an obligation to note it where others will see it, and possibly refute it, elaborate on it, or exploit it.

Why is it on my mind this morning? Well, my wife made a strange request a few days ago. She wanted a PlayStation 3 with the "Move" add-on, so she could get her exercise at home rather than at a gym. Just this morning, I asked her why she'd decided to go that route. She told me that gym memberships are too expensive these days, and anyway, the gyms themselves aren't up to the cleanliness and helpfulness standards of years ago. The thing is, gym memberships are less expensive (measured in constant dollars) than they were two decades ago. And the last time I went to my gym, the help practically wouldn't let me be.

After a little prodding, she mentioned that her professional organization has been losing membership. Its conventions are getting shorter, and further between. That's not an isolated data point.

Her favorite fictional hero is Lee Child's Jack Reacher: the ultimate loner hero. That's not an isolated data point, either.

Thoughts?

Writerly Reminiscences

2012-01-07T04:22:00.000-08:00

I've spent quite a great deal of time and a great many pixels on how-tos and thou-shalt-nots in this stream of mini-essays. But it would be a mistake, Gentle Reader, to assume that all my thoughts about writing and the writer's life focus on technique -- that is, on better and worse ways to achieve some effect. Nothing worth doing can be accomplished solely by the exercise of technique.

Technique is merely how. Before you address the how of an undertaking, you have to have the why.

For many a writer, the why of a project never enters his consciousness. A plot idea occurs to him; it bonds subconsciously with some theme he holds dear; he adds setting and characters, and some time later a story is born. But there's a why even if he never allows it space in his conscious thoughts. It's usually connected to his moral or ethical values -- his convictions about how men ought to live, and ought to treat one another.

Sometimes, if the writer is lucky, his story will tell him things about himself that he didn't know before -- "know" in the conscious, thought-through-to-a-conclusion sense.

***

Before I'd written On Broken Wings, I didn't realize the strength of my own convictions about various things. I didn't realize how passionate I am about justice, or moral courage, or the absolute necessity for each man to defend justice personally. I learned those things about myself through my Marquee characters, Louis and Christine, with both of whom I fell in love in the process of writing the novel.

When I set out to write Chosen One, the "prequel" to On Broken Wings, it was largely because the majority of my early readers wanted to know more about Louis. But in the process of assembling that book -- yes, "assembling" is the right word; it's a collection of episodes rather than a unitary drama -- I learned still more: why I admire those whom I admire, and by extension, what I find unworthy or insufficient about myself. When readers wrote to ask whether I'd based Louis on myself -- a highly complimentary thing to ask, really -- the embarrassment I felt at having to reply in the negative eclipsed anything I'd ever felt before.

Those books were definitely learning experiences. But above both of them stood a slenderer volume: The Sledgehammer Concerto. Andrew, Devin, and Rachel MacLachlan taught me just how greatly I value defiance, especially the willingness to flip the bird at what appears to be an overwhelming and implacable enemy. Not all of us triumph over our enemies; indeed, not all of us "go down fighting." But great or small, hopeful of victory or doomed to defeat, we can all hurl defiance into our foes' faces as they advance on us. Sometimes, the willingness to do so is the genesis of a miracle.

***

I could go on. Shadow Of A Sword, Which Art In Hope, and Priestesses all had their lessons for me. I am more than I was for having written them. But the overarching theme is what I want to emphasize:

It's what the writer cares about most passionately, whether he realizes it or not, that will power his best fiction.

And when some as-yet-unarticulated aspect of my most passionate convictions rises within me, perhaps another novel will emerge with it. At any rate, I can hope.

Thoughts On Series Characters

2012-01-05T05:34:00.001-08:00

The series character -- a protagonist who appears in one novel after another, sometimes without end -- is rising toward dominance in popular fiction. The trend has brought considerable change to the rules that have traditionally applied to the construction of good fiction...but those changes are evolutionary rather than revolutionary.

Probably the first major rule change I noticed was to the one about "closure." Time was, your novel supposedly had an obligation to provide its protagonist with a definite end to his travails. The reader was supposed to see him walk off into the proverbial sunset, his adventures firmly behind him, and nothing but normal life ahead. Series characters don't do that; indeed, they can't.

The second major change I noticed was a seeming modification to Brunner's Second Law of Fiction: The essence of story is change. A series protagonist needn't experience significant personal changes in any single book; what's required of him is that he change from one novel to the next. The experiences of one novel's-worth of adventures must transform him for the next batch, but within an individual novel, he can remain characterologically relatively static. His adventures, of course, must vary, as must the complement of Marquee characters he will oppose.

Third, and perhaps most important, is the power some series characters have to "stop the clock." A good series character is a precious commodity; his "owner" is unlikely to want him to "age out." There are several approaches to this. Sue Grafton froze her detective Kinsey Milhone in the Eighties. Robert B. Parker simply ceased to let the flutter of the calendar's leaves affect his perennial tough-guy Spenser -- a necessity in the last couple of decades of Spenser's "career," as he'd been described early in his fictional life as a Korean War veteran. Current thriller king Lee Child occasionally makes reference to his hero Jack Reacher's past as a military cop, but with diminishing frequency and emphasis as the novels accumulate. Some readers might consider this not quite cricket, but those who are devoted to the series character will contrive to overlook Time's beneficence toward their favorite hero.

But with the above exemptions from traditional constraints goes a new responsibility: The stakes must go up for the series protagonist from each novel to the next. He cannot face a series of challenges of equal or (God forbid) diminishing difficulty and import. If anything can put an end to the tales of a series protagonist, this can. Once the crises reach the stage of imminent nuclear war, there isn't much further one can go, unless God Himself should open the skies and promote the hero to Supreme Commander of the forces of light at Armageddon. To this point, no writer has dared to undertake that particular challenge.

Of course, writers whose fortunes are built on series characters have occasionally tired of them and have tried to terminate them. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle attempted to kill off Sherlock Holmes rather early in the Great Detective's career; popular demand forced Conan Doyle to bring him back none the worse for wear. More recently, Tom Clancy apparently wanted to retire Jack Ryan after The Sum Of All Fears. He must have had a change of heart or some big bills to pay: two years later, Ryan was back, in fine fettle, in Debt Of Honor.

As matters stand, we may expect to see more, not fewer, novel-series based on a series protagonist. The trend has proved far more popular than any writer of the pre-war era would have guessed; it might be. At any rate, it's ultimately in the hands of readers, as the pressures that mounted on Conan Doyle should make plain. Only "literary" writers would dare to disagree with them, and who bothers with their crap, anyway?

First-Person: Its Privileges And Restrictions

2012-01-03T05:00:00.000-08:00

The conventional wisdom is that new fiction writers mostly find it easiest to write in first-person. That, after all, is the "person" through whom we live our regular lives. There's some truth to the supposition, but it's seldom explored in any detail.

First-person narration is easier on the writer whose grammatical skills are a bit off. The line between narration and dialogue isn't as firm as in third-person, and the reader is more inclined to forgive eccentric and idiosyncratic treatment of the language. A writer of skill and daring can even invent a semi-artificial language for his characters, as Anthony Burgess did in A Clockwork Orange and Russell Hoban did in Riddley Walker. However, that lays a considerable burden on the reader, so the writer who tries it on had better know what he's doing!

First-person also insulates the writer against one of the mortal sins of narration: head-hopping. It's impossible to plead innocence of this crime when you've begun your narrative in first-person and suddenly switch the viewpoint to some other character. However, that property also serves as a limitation: when some character other than your protagonist is getting a larger impact from the events of the current scene, there's nothing to be done about it.

First-person forbids you to kill your protagonist. He must survive to the end of the story, win, lose, or draw. In no other form is Main Character Immunity so strong a principle. That's not an important consideration in most stories, but there are exceptions.

The most interesting uses of first-person narration are its two principal hybridizations: first-person-multiple, and first-person and third-person in alternation. Time was, both those approaches were deemed literarily illegal. No longer.

Some brilliant fiction has been written in first-person multiple. Ursula Leguin's The Left Hand of Darkness and Robert Silverberg's The Book of Skulls come to mind at once. Indeed, it's difficult to imagine how those two stories could have been told in any other way. But this is not a form for the writer who doubts his chops. The narrators must have perceptibly different viewpoints and styles: different enough that the reader can tell who's narrating at any instant, without having to look back at the chapter heading. Leguin limited herself to two narrators, one of whom was Terran and the other an indigene of Gethen, which assisted in differentiating between them. Silverberg made use of four narrators, all young college men; his achievement in keeping their styles and streams of thought distinct from one another cannot be over-praised.

First-person / third-person alternation has its devotees as well. Robert B. Parker has experimented with that form, as has Steven Brust. The hazard here is obvious: the writer must observe the rules of each form in the segment written in that form. "Crosstalk" is forbidden, despite any and all temptations. This is especially important if the first-person narrator knows a great deal more, or has a substantially different timeline, than the Marquee characters of the third-person segments, a problem that gave me considerable difficulty in Chosen One.

Writer and critic David Lodge has said of current trends in fiction that "everything is in, and nothing is forbidden." That's not perfectly true; the rules of good narration remain in force. The reader enforces them. Nothing will cause potential readers to dismiss your offerings faster than violating them. It's insufficient to say that you're "experimenting," or "innovating." Coherence in narration is far too important for that. In any case, the veto power remains where it's always been: your reader's inclination, or lack thereof, to reach for his wallet.

Know the rules, whatever form you choose, and abide by them.

"Mary Sue"

2012-01-01T05:50:00.000-08:00

I can tell it's going to be a good year when I learn something significant on New Year's Day.

According to WikiPedia, a "Mary Sue" character is:

a fictional character with overly idealized and hackneyed mannerisms, lacking noteworthy flaws, and primarily functioning as a wish-fulfillment fantasy for the author or reader. It is generally accepted as a character whose positive aspects overwhelm their other traits until they become one-dimensional.

The article goes on to discuss the origins of the idea and variations on it, but the essence of it is captured above. It's a warning sign to a writer of my inclinations.

I write for a number of reasons, but high on the list is to portray truly good people and worthy heroes. The term hero, in reference to characters in fiction, was once reserved for truly good people. Such a hero would have flaws, of course; all men do. However, his moral basis would be sound; whenever he recurred to it consciously, it would steer his actions according to time-tested, well-proven conceptions of right and wrong. Thou shalt not murder. Thou shalt not steal. Thou shalt not bear false witness.

Compare that template to the "anti-hero" prevalent in popular entertainment in our time.

The "Mary Sue" character is a caricature of a hero, perhaps with an extra gloss for romantic attractiveness. Such a character has no flaws, no drawbacks, no important weaknesses or vulnerabilities. Think of Superman, but immune to Kryptonite.

Superman himself was a wish-fulfillment character. He was concocted in the bowels of the Great Depression, when it seemed that ordinary human strength and virtue had at last been proved insufficient to the trials of the day. We might call him the original "Mary Sue" and not be far wrong if at all. Indeed, in the original conception he had no vulnerabilities. Kryptonite was conceived because the original, utterly invulnerable Superman was boring for that very reason.

A couple of my heroes have edged close to Mary-Sueness. One of them got so close that I had to invoke the ultimate resource of the fiction writer: I had to torture him to death while the reader watched. The process was sufficiently painful to serve as a warning I would not forget.

One of the distinguishing marks of bad fiction is the Mary Sue protagonist: he whose superiority to all around him is undeniable, and whose ultimate triumph is guaranteed. The classical writers were not immune to this malady. The Aeneid offers us a Mary-Sue hero, described repeatedly by Virgil as superhuman, almost Godlike. The Odyssey's portrayal of Odysseus is comparable; the wandering warrior seems always to have the resources with which to withstand any trial and conquer any adversary. His reunion with Penelope expresses his flagrant superiority in an undisguised fashion, as he bends the bow none of the suitors who collected around her had managed to bend, and slays the lot of them with ridiculous ease.

Yes, men seek heroes to admire and to emulate. But a plausible hero must have some connection to men of human scale: he cannot be perfect, and he cannot be utterly indefeasible. The reader must see some of himself in a plausible hero, including one or more of the failings to which human flesh is prone, and which we all, to some extent, must share.

Critics

2011-12-30T11:26:00.000-08:00

A "critic" is a man who creates nothing and thereby feels qualified to judge the work of creative men. There is logic in this; he is unbiased - he hates all creative people equally. - Robert A. Heinlein

The self-nominated critic can be a considerable pain in the ass: say, about like being raped by a herd of hippopotami. Moreover, the world is full of them:

There are critics who'll deride your choice of genre, as if they'd been compelled at gunpoint to read something in which they had no interest.
There are critics who'll lambaste you for your heroes, calling them "implausible" and "overdone," whether for their qualities or for the motivations that send them into battle.
There are critics who'll vilify you for your values, as expressed in the conflicts in which you enmesh your heroes and what they're willing to do to uphold them.
There are critics who'll demand that you abandon your natural style and ape some writer of whom they're fond, regardless of whether your style is a good fit to your plots and themes.
There are critics who'll say you use too many adverbs, or adjectives, or ablative absolutes, or semicolons, or images and devices -- or, in each of the cases enumerated, too few.
There are critics who'll give you hell for writing in a straight, story-respecting narrative style, because that's just not "in" with the literati and the prize juries.
There are critics who'll abrade you for allowing a character to express a complete thought, just because it requires more than one sentence to complete it.
There are critics who have no reasonable objections to your stuff, but who'll drip contempt on it nevertheless, because it's not what they want to see people reading.

Pardon my German, but fuck 'em sideways with a rusty trombone.

A man's good will can easily be stretched to the breaking point by some kinds of critical attacks. A writer who's strained to produce something worthy of others' time, attention, and money can find himself wondering what's wrong with that sort of critic. The effect is intensified when his book is eagerly snapped up by a clearly appreciative readership.

Historically, the most popular writers in the English-speaking world have been the targets of the most vicious critical attacks. For example, John Galsworthy, author of the immortal Forsyte Chronicles, came in for denunciations that would have been more appropriate to a child-murderer -- a great many of them from writers who never attained a tenth of his popular acceptance or admiration. Today, American writers who please tens of thousands are more stridently and viciously criticized than men who write the lowest varieties of pornography. Ironically, at least one widely read critical article has called thriller fiction, the most popular of today's fictional genres, inherently pornographic:

Eva Brann cares.
Brann teaches at St. John's College in Annapolis, where the curriculum is driven by the classics and professors are known as tutors.
Years ago she read one of Stephen King's books. She was greatly disappointed. "It was mere plot," she says. "Everything was geared to stimulation by way of action."
Asked if she could recall the name of the King novel, she says, "It left no impression. It left no impression whatsoever." That, she says, is a characteristic of popular fiction.
"There's a pornography of sex and a pornography of the nerves," she continues. The No-Stylists, she says, are penning the latter type of porn. "Things happen -- crude, wild, exciting things. They have no human depth. They're just occurrences."

I am compelled to ask: What is the point of a work of fiction? Is it to entertain, and perhaps to edify through its theme, or to impress the critics?

Don't know about you, Bubba, but I write to entertain -- and the parties entertained had damned well better include yours truly. That's not going to happen if my first concern is to please some gaggle of critics.

Perhaps the most pungent dismissal of the critical world I've ever encountered came from the writer who is generally held responsible for making science fiction a genre worthy of the intelligent adult reader:

What I write is intended to reach the customer - and affect him, if possible with pity and terror… or at least divert the tedium of his hours. I never hide from him in a private language, nor am I seeking praise from other writers for ‘technique’ or other balderdash. I want praise from the customer, given in cash because I’ve reached him -- or I don’t want anything. Support for the arts -- merde! A government-supported artist is an incompetent whore!—Robert A. Heinlein

Not coincidentally, throughout his active career, which spanned forty-five years, Heinlein was one of the most popular writers in the world. If that doesn't immunize you to the barbs of the critics, what could?

Patterns

2011-12-28T04:10:00.000-08:00

I recently had a brief, pleasant exchange with a fellow indie author -- not quite as indie as I am; her novels are published by a recognized publishing house -- in the course of which we agreed to sample one another's works. I do this as often as possible, for two reasons. First, I think it important that indies support one another. Second, I read so compulsively and so rapidly that I'm almost never adequately supplied with fresh material. So far, the practice has served me well.

It's also taught me a few things about the patterns a writer can embrace, usually without realizing it.

Patterns in one's fiction are to be avoided. Their effect upon the reader, though often subliminal, is never good. He builds up a sense of "been here before" that, at the very least, will induce him to skip ever-larger segments of your prose. At the worst, he'll spy your new title in his shopping, start to reach for it, pause, and say to himself, "No, I've grown bored with him. He's too repetitive. I think I've seen everything he has to offer."

I've developed that degree of distance from several writers; Orson Scott Card and Dean Koontz come to mind at once. If it can happen to them, Gentle Reader, it can happen to you.

Patterns in fiction are of several varieties. There are plot patterns: the writer tells essentially the same story over and over. There are characterization patterns: the names and faces of the writer's Marquee characters may change, but their personalities, motivations, powers and limitations stay the same. There are style patterns: the over-frequent use of certain devices, words, phrases, or syntactic templates. No doubt there are others.

My new acquaintance's books display an irritating syntactic pattern. Dozens of her sentences fit perfectly into the following template:

[Participial phrase implying concurrence], [the subject] [did something else].

There are several things wrong with this, but the one of principal import for this tirade is the pattern itself. Her readers will be affected by it even if they don't register it consciously. It will have the same effect on them as a verbal "tic" in a friend's speech would have: Whatever meaning it was once intended to convey will have bled out of it, and what remains will be pure noise.

If fiction has an overriding commandment, from which all the other rules and guidelines depend, it would be this:

Don't waste your reader's time!

Any scene, paragraph, sentence, word, or punctuation mark that doesn't carry its own weight -- i.e., that doesn't somehow improve the reader's experience, whether by building his excitement, bonding him to the hero(es), or intensifying his curiosity -- must and should be cut. It doesn't matter how proud of it you, the author, might be. You're not there to display your writerly chops, nor is your reader there to applaud you for your devastatingly deft employment of metonymy, synecdoche, and litotes. You're creating entertainment; make sure it will entertain!

Patterns are the death of entertainment. We don't sit up at night watching the test patterns on the television, do we? Why bother, when there's perfectly good wallpaper that would serve the same function without elevating the electric bill?

One of the greatest services a good editor can do for you is noting your patterns and chiding you for them. Indeed, that duty is an order of magnitude above correcting your spelling and punctuation errors. If you're pursuing conventional publication, your odds of acceptance will be greatly increased by the avoidance of patterns, especially patterns of style. If you're an indie, your readership could easily level off and start to dwindle once those you've originally seduced into buying your work become bored by your patterns.

Keep it fresh.

Blurbing It Out II: Judgment Day

2011-12-26T09:46:00.000-08:00

WHEREAS, this writer finds that the state of indie-writer promotion is desperately low and needs all the help it can get;

AND WHEREAS, this writer believes in filling those needs he finds before him for which he is:

Equipped; and:
Capable of turning a modest profit;

BE IT THEREFORE RESOLVED THAT the publication of:

Blurbing It Out: A Tirade on the Writer's Craft

...free to all free folk, shall be noised abroad with trumpets!

(tee hee)

Blurbing It Out

2011-12-26T05:48:00.000-08:00

Maybe I shouldn't be so cranky on Saint Stephen's Day, but I have to say something about this.

I've written before that a promotional blurb is like a job interview for writers. If you mess up at this stage, the odds are poor that a cruising reader will bother with your book or story. You'd think it wouldn't be a hard lesson to absorb, neither for its significance nor for ease of correction. At least, I'd have thought most of us can edit our own blurbs with some facility.

Yet the clinkers keep on coming. A great many of them are errors in spelling or punctuation -- and no fault reveals a lack of skill with the English language more swiftly or luridly than those.

Spelling errors of the "usual sort" -- i.e., the simple mangling of a word -- are easily corrected by the spellcheckers built into programs such as Microsoft Word. I can only conclude that too many would-be-writers have far too much confidence in their spelling skills to use those checkers. This is, to put it as gently as possible, a mistake.

Spelling errors of the second order -- i.e., the use of the wrong word, possibly due to homonym confusion -- require the use of a second pair of eyes. Do not assume that just because your blurb passed the spellchecker that it must therefore be correct in all regards. Get someone else to read it and ask about your use of "there" where you clearly meant "their."

Finally, we have punctuation errors. Lynne Truss's magnificent little book Eats, Shoots and Leaves is invaluable in this regard: at once entertaining and instructive. Read the damned thing. I cannot overstress the importance of this step, as punctuation errors can make even the best-crafted blurb illegible or fatally confusing. Worse, a serious punctuation error will evoke the disdain of an educated reader more swiftly than any other kind of misstep.

If you don't have a friend, wife, or child to review your blurb before you post it, you're unlikely to find such errors yourself. So I'm going to make a one-time-only offer:

SEND YOUR BLURB TO ME!

I'll correct your crap for you. Indeed, I'll edit your blurb to professional quality, and thus conceal your linguistic ineptitude from all and sundry until they've plunked their cash on the barrelhead for your book.

My fee for this service: $1.00 U.S., payable through PayPal. Send your blurb to me at this email address. If I find it unsalvageable for any reason, I'll tell you so before you pay me, so you're risking very little.

Inasmuch as even writers wise enough to hire professional editors for their books seem not to understand how desperately they need the same kind of oversight for their promotional stuff, I expect this offer to be spurned. But there it is: use it or not, as suits you, and live with the consequences of your decision.

Oh, and by the way, Merry Christmas, and may the joy of His Coming be yours throughout the New Year -- no matter how badly you punctuate or spell!

What You Can And What You Can't

2011-12-22T07:45:00.001-08:00

In our attempts to create unusual, striking characters, we often find ourselves straining to imagine how someone more intelligent, or more compassionate, or more courageous would act in some context. There are obvious problems involved in the undertaking.

(In a recent movie, Heist, the protagonist, a well-traveled, highly successful professional thief played by Gene Hackman, is asked by a colleague to explain how he formulates his plans. Hackman's response is both amusing and apt. "I imagine someone much smarter than I am, and I ask myself, 'What would he do?'" Pretty good trick, if you can pull it off.)

Our qualities and capacities are what they are. We can't change them quickly or easily; indeed, the extent to which we can change them with great effort over a protracted interval is open to question. So if we write our characters from "inside ourselves," it's inevitable that either they'll share our qualities and capacities to a considerable degree, or they'll be implausibly artificial.

That's not to say that it's impossible for a writer to write plausibly about characters far better and more able than he. But it does take extra effort, of two kinds:

Humility;
Consultation.

As Clint Eastwood said to Hal Holbrook in Magnum Force, "A man's got to know his limitations." Fiction is difficult enough if you know yourself and are honest about your own abilities and character. It gets one hell of a lot harder if you deny yourself, preferring to live in a world of pretense.

In reflecting on this for the first time in a long time, it occurs to me that it presents a good case for keeping your characters scaled to ordinary human scale. Heroes and heroics are all very well, but plausibility has its own demands. Some of us are a few percent brighter, or kinder, or braver than average; very few of us are orders of magnitude beyond the norm.

This has been a particular problem for me, as some of my heroes are so brilliant, so variously gifted, and so courageous that I don't belong in the same species with them. Yet they're quite popular, and are generally taken as plausible. One in particular, Louis Redmond, has caused some readers to ask if I know someone like that personally, or if I'm writing about myself. Talk about an occasion for a swift, firm demurrer!

All the same, a hero that really gets his hooks into the reader tends to be more than a few percent beyond the norms. He tends to be, in the classic phrase, larger than life.

If you're going to tread that road, it helps to have a few friends and acquaintances that "push the outside of the envelope" in those dimensions you want to inculcate in your hero. If you know someone who's particularly brilliant, or courageous, or otherwise gifted, you can use him as a model for characters that exceed the average in his way. But it's not wise to rely on a passive sort of modeling. As frequently, indirectly, and courteously as possible, you should ask him what he would do in situations of the sort with which you expect to confront your hero.

(Pardon my cheek, Gentle Reader. It's not quite fair of me to assume that you're not a brute of fantastic strength and a cheetah's speed, with a supergenius's intellect, stainless ethics, and the courage of Theseus, Beowulf, and Audie Murphy rolled into one. But the odds tend to favor that assumption.)

Yet paradoxes abound. I know of one writer, who specializes in adventure fiction featuring stronger-than-strong, harder-than-hard heroes and has grown quite popular in recent years, who's afraid to leave his house. Another writer, whose protagonists are exemplars of compassion and good will, is among the most callous individuals I've ever met. And I have this habit of writing about polymathic geniuses, whereas I...oops, wait just a moment while I check...so sorry! Skip that last part, if you please!

(tee hee)

Villains

2011-12-17T03:35:00.000-08:00

How long has it been, Gentle Reader, since you last confronted a genuine, purely black hearted villain in a work of fiction? For myself, it's been a couple of years at least. They seem to be an endangered species.

Of course, that would be a good thing, in real life. But there’s a curious implausibility about completely evil characters. They never seem quite human, which makes them tough for a writer to flesh out. How many have there been, really, in all the great works of fiction you've read?

Consider this: In Greg Bear’s masterpiece Anvil of Stars, the villain, responsible for the destruction of the Earth and the deaths of nearly all of Mankind, proves to be a collection of species that’s apparently been doing such things for a long time. Why? We’re never told. As for the individual members of those species, Bear's depiction of them certainly makes them seem a lot less than wholly evil. Sauron they’re not, except perhaps collectively.

Bear is a thoughtful man. At one point he has one of his human characters tell the others that evil never presents itself to us in pure form: "No villain comes in black, screaming obscenities. All evil has children, homes, regard for self, fear of enemies." And indeed, it is so. Even persons we're inclined to judge absolutely evil are likely to have values of their own, and affectionate attachments quite like anyone else's. As the saying goes, Hitler liked dogs.

This isn’t a brief for moral relativism; it's a reminder that no individual is purely one, all-consuming characteristic or passion. To make a villain believable, it's necessary to make his villainy an integral part of a human persona. When we confront various sorts of limited evil, we see this plainly. The bully is at heart a coward who’s straining to deny that bit of self-knowledge. The thief can usually produce several elaborate rationales according to which he must steal. And the murderer more often than not sees himself as an instrument of justice.

A recent movie, Shoot 'Em Up, starring Clive Owen, Monica Bellucci, and Paul Giamatti, does handsome work in this regard. Giamatti's character is a contract killer. Some people have decided that someone else has to die; he’s merely the instrument by which that decision is effectuated. He sees his work as nothing more than an obligation undertaken for money, and he's determined to do it thoroughly and well. More, he has a wife to whom he’s devoted, and whom he makes repeated attempts to soothe about his absence on his latest "job." There's no question that for the good guy (Owen) to win, Giamatti's character has to die. But the viewer can't help feeling a twinge of pity for him when, as he lies on the floor gasping out his life, he receives a final phone call from his wife -- to announce that she's leaving him.

(The movie is also notable for its innovative use of carrots.)

So in crafting a believable villain, embedding his villainy in an otherwise human persona seems all but obligatory. The world simply isn't filled with Hannibal Lecters or Idi Amins. Indeed, the most recent real-life personification of evil we've known, the late, unlamented Osama bin Laden, was apparently powered by the conviction that he was doing God's will -- a motivation that's hardly unknown to history.

What fictional villains have you found especially believable and three-dimensional?

Promoters

2011-12-15T02:06:00.001-08:00

Now the rovin' gambler he was very bored
He was tryin' to create our next world war
He found a promoter who nearly fell off the floor
He said "I never engaged in this kind of thing before,
"But yes I think it can be very easily done:
"We'll just put some bleachers out in the sun
"And have it out on Highway 61."

(Bob Dylan, of course.)

Anything can be promoted. Anything can be picked up, pumped full of glitz, and pressed on the public until Hell wouldn't have it for the clamor. A quick look at the many odious books, fiction and "non-fiction," that have been sold in mass quantities to a receptive, well-propagandized audience, should convince anyone.

So how should you promote your eBook?

(You knew we'd get to that question, didn't you?)

At this time, promotional strategies and tactics are in a state of flux. Many of those au courant were borrowed from successfully promoted material products. Some of those seem utterly inapplicable to eBooks, both because of their immateriality and because the eBook marketplace is a unique thing. Others are quite new, and therefore essentially experimental.

A few of the most heavily promoted (!) promotional techniques seem a bit myopic. For example, the idea that using the "social networks" -- Facebook and its close cousins -- as one's tool for pimping one's eBook requires one to believe that those networks are packed chock full of readers. Well, they're surely packed full, though of exactly what I'm reluctant to speculate. But the experiences indie authors have had with that approach haven't been terribly encouraging.

The online retailers are trying their damnedest to help. Every online retailer prefers selling eBooks to selling paper books: infinite inventory, no shipping, no purchase order to a vendor, higher profit margins, and no refunds. Since those retailers are the current princes of promotion, their techniques are worthy of close study.

The most important of those techniques is association: "If you liked X, you might also like this."

For decades, Pub World editors have pleaded with American writers to give them "the same, only different." The marketing of fiction is among the most difficult, error-prone undertakings in the commercial world, because when it comes to the arts, no one can tell what will sell. We can only know what has sold well in the recent past. Therefore, the marketing department's job is made far easier if it can describe a new book as "like the best of [popular writer X]."

The online retailers have noticed. The AI components of their engines strain to find associations between products, particularly best-sellers and newly released products. Indie authors may have far lesser resources, but we can emulate the core of the associational strategy in our more modest way, for example when plying our "word of mouth" efforts:

"My new book is moving pretty well. A couple of readers have written to me to tell me it resembles Stephen King in his early years."

This is chancy. Resemblances of the useful sort will always be disputable -- and you most assuredly do not want to get a contrary word-of-mouth chain started, talking about how you're promoting your book dishonestly. So any associations you claim should be a product of your most honest, open-eyed assessment.

Of course, you can always try to get Amazon or Barnes & Noble to do it for you. They'll try, principally through those AI association-finding engines. There's no shame in "borrowing" their discoveries and using them yourself. And remember: as long as you don't steal someone else's original work and claim it's your own, original creation:

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. -- Author unknown

Verbum sat sapienti.

Cats And Dogs

2011-12-12T05:17:00.001-08:00

Way back in the Stone Age, when I submitted my novel On Broken Wings to my critique group, I braced for a barrage of harsh reactions of unimaginable kinds. I knew the book to be unusual in its themes and its construction, and I feared greatly that its deviations from what was then considered the norm in contemporary fantasy might prove unpalatable to my reviewers. It was a pleasant surprise that most of them liked the book. It was even more pleasant that several reviewers made genuinely valuable suggestions for improving it.

However, one bit of commentary has stuck with me particularly tightly. It was a general observation that had the ring of unassailable truth. That reviewer noted that by inserting a dog into the narrative, and by making that dog the object of my protagonist's affections, I had humanized the protagonist far better than any other simple motif could have accomplished. Nothing, he said, more effectively brings out the humanity of a character than showing him caring for an animal, particularly a wounded animal.

This is actually a special case of a general principle, the one writers most detest and which they most need to remember: Show, Don't Tell. If you want the reader to think a character affectionate, you must show him acting affectionately. If you want the reader to think a character compassionate, you must show him acting compassionately. These things require objects: foci for the emotion-based actions of the character being characterized.

Animals are particularly well suited for those roles. Our domesticated animals -- dogs, cats, and to a lesser extent, pet birds -- are good objects for the demonstration of tender emotions. (They're also well suited for the demonstration of viciousness; see Stephen King's novel The Dead Zone, specifically the early scene in which villain Greg Stillson kicks a dog to death for the unforgivable crime of slightly ripping his trousers.)

Boomer, the dog in On Broken Wings, had been seriously injured while defending his mistress, my protagonist Christine D'Alessandro. In the scene my reviewer praised, Christine, who has a more urgent and bloodier task to attend to, hands a large sum of money to her mentor Malcolm and tells him to take Boomer to the local veterinary hospital and to tell the vet to "do whatever they have to to save my dog's life, and that I don't expect change." I've seen similar uses of this motif in the works of other writers -- Robert B. Parker comes to mind -- and it has never failed to tug at my heartstrings.

Am I a sentimental old fool? Of course; surely that's well established by now. But I'd bet a pretty penny that such scenes would affect you the same way. Dogs and cats aren't exact equivalents for human infants, but in their vulnerability and dependency they elicit the same sorts of emotions from humans, albeit slightly lessened in intensity. It's a useful tool to keep in a fiction writer's toolbox -- but beware: there's a fine line between simpatico and maudlin, and you don't want to step over it!

Sequels And Their Travails

2011-12-09T05:21:00.000-08:00

Some days, it seems that every experience in a writer's life is bittersweet.

The great success of the Realm of Essences series:

...has brought with it a pressure I never would have expected: pressure for a fourth book in the series. No, in all honesty I didn't expect it; I'm an unknown without marketing support and only the vaguest idea of how to go about promoting my books. But here we are: the first three books have sold, in aggregate, over 100,000 copies, and I've received several hundred emails pleading for new adventures in the Realm oeuvre. Those readers' emphases fall on two characters in particular: presidential candidate Stephen Graham Sumner, and his superwoman guardian Christine Marie D'Alessandro.

(Allow me to pass, tearfully but firmly, over the many requests for further stories about Louis Redmond. Sorry, folks: he's dead, gone to his just reward, and will remain that way.)

I'd love to oblige. I'm trying to oblige! But I have a problem: I tied off too many of the key themes and plot motifs of the series in Shadow, such that coming up with a plausible yet satisfying new plot is proving immensely difficult.

To make me happy to write it -- and energized about writing it -- a plot has to have certain features:

One or more serious, dramatic conflicts within and among the Marquee characters;
A plausible good-versus-evil climax;
Strong support for pro-freedom and pro-Christian themes.

All three of those requirements have proved elusive to this point, which has left me incapable of proceeding at a satisfying pace. But wait: there's more! You see, the Realm sequel isn't the only thing on my plate; I've also received quite a number of emails requesting a sequel to Which Art In Hope. The tone of those emails is just as ardent, and the difficulty of finding a solid, plausible plot suitable for a novel-length adventure is just as great.

I can't speak for other novelists, but for myself, this is an embarrassment of riches. Two equally appealing, equally desired things are causing me to ping-pong non-productively between them. I'd imagine that my frustration is as great as that of my readers, if not greater; they, at least, should be able to find other things to read.

Still, as the saying goes, it should be my worst problem. Part of writerly discipline is the cultivated ability to concentrate: in particular, to concentrate on a single storyline for long enough to get it to the point of self-sustaining momentum. It might be a bit late in the game for me to learn how to do that, but you can't schedule this stuff like a visit to the dentist. At least, I've never been able to do it.

Historically -- i.e., before the e-publishing revolution got fully into motion -- it was very difficult to communicate with the author of a book. Publishers were scrupulous about protecting a writer's privacy, for good and sufficient reasons. With ePub, all that has changed. It's routine to include your email address on your "About the Author" page. Most indies are eager to receive reader feedback...well, nice reader feedback, at any rate. So when a writer strikes a chord with his readers, a deluge of emails "in return" is to be expected...and respected. They who've loved his books are telling him how to keep the romance hot.

As I said at the outset: bittersweet. I have a day job, and a family, and a home to tend to, and animals to love and care for, and much else besides. But I'd be kidding you -- and myself -- to say that the desires of my readers are far less important than any of that. No one who could say such a thing would sink thousands of hours into the creation of fiction in the first place.

I suppose this is how an indie writer moves through the stages of his career development. Sigh. Time to get out my "Oh, No! Not Another Learning Experience!" lapel button again.

Humanizing The Alien

2011-12-07T05:13:00.001-08:00

(This one is for writers of science fiction, or of fantasies that include non-human characters.)

Among my favorite maxims of fiction are Brunner's Laws:

The raw material of fiction is people;
The essence of story is change.

Thus, a good story must involve changes in people, brought on by the events they precipitate and to which they must react. In other words, your Marquee characters must develop as characters, whether positively or negatively, over the course of your plot. But what if among your Marquee characters are people that aren't...quite..."people?"

I maundered over that one for quite some time in plotting out Shadow Of A Sword. Among the most important of that book's characters were "Essences" about as far removed from Mankind as an intelligent creature could possibly get. But their importance to the story required that they, too, experience internal change. Figuring out how to handle that need was quite a struggle.

The key to the puzzle was simple. Stumbling upon it brought about one of those "kick yourself" moments: the sort of experience that has you asking yourself, "How could I have overlooked that all this time?" But it was enormously enlightening all the same.

To be a "people" of the sort consistent with fiction's requirement for change, a character must possess the following characteristics:

He must be bounded. That is, he must be conscious of his own identity, and therefore, that he "ends" at a definite point. He does not encompass the entire universe, even in his fancies.
He must be of limited power. That is, the satisfaction of his desires and needs must not be a trivial matter, at or beneath the level of a whim.
He must have unmet desires and / or needs. He must at some point become aware of those desires / needs, and must take an active role in the attempt to satisfy them.

That doesn't make a sentient pentapodal lizardoid who metabolizes tungsten and can lift boulders with his eyelashes human, but it's enough to make him "people." He can be a Marquee character, as long as he wants or needs something he hasn't yet acquired and must engage in some personal trial in order to get it.

A number of great SF writers have avoided populating their works with aliens. Isaac Asimov was notable in this regard. The closest he came to alien characters were his famous robots, which tended to be even more human in their characters and personalities than many of his explicitly human characters. Robert A. Heinlein made extremely limited use of sentient aliens; as far as I can recall, he never made an alien into a Marquee character. There are others of similar proclivities.

This makes the "Posleen" novels of Tom Kratman and the "Confederation of Valor" novels of Tanya Huff somewhat notable. These military-SF adventures frequently feature non-human Marquee characters: some good, some bad. Those characters are quite as intriguing, and their trials and travails quite as striking, as those of any human in those books. Clearly, those writers have penetrated to the Three Laws Of People enumerated above, whether consciously or otherwise; they show no hesitation in delving into the motivations and emotions of their alien protagonists and antagonists, and they handle the challenges smoothly.

The moral of the story isn't that "We're all human;" clearly, some of us aren't. Nor is it that "We're all connected;" that, too, is a canard. Rather, it's that sentience itself must come at a price: finitude of identity, limitations of capability, and needs and desires one cannot guarantee will always be met. A creature that satisfies those three criteria, regardless of how many limbs he has, what he eats and breathes, or how far out his eyestalks protrude, can be made engaging to the reader. Emotionally engaging; in fiction, everything else is just scaffolding.

The YA Explosion

2011-12-05T14:18:00.000-08:00

It seems there's been a great increase in the number of writers and the amount of material -- and some pretty good material, at that -- aimed at the "young adult" segment of American readers. That's not entirely surprising, given the immense successes scored in recent years by J.K. Rowling, Stephenie Meyer, and others who target that segment. But it's slightly counter-intuitive on the basis of "prestige."

Never imagine that writers aren't motivated by prestige. We might harbor secret reservations about the objective skills of this or that popular writer -- I've lost track of the number of writers who've oh-so-quietly told me how little they think of Tom Clancy or Stephen King -- but that doesn't alter their prestige factor. Any military-fiction writer would sell both his kidneys for an endorsement from Clancy; any horror writer would do the same for an endorsement from King. Moreover, the value of praise from a highly prominent and successful writer isn't confined to its probable effect on your book sales.

That's the counter-intuitive aspect of the YA explosion. The segment has low prestige. Very few writers who make it their focus become icons of the fiction world, no matter how many books they sell.

I'm not arguing against targeting the YA segment, mind you. I'm merely trying to understand the trend toward it.

Well, thirty years ago, before The Hunt For Red October, I probably would have said the same things about military-adventure fiction. Perhaps prestige isn't all that important to an aspiring writer. All the same, most writers, regardless of the genre or segment they target as their "entry point," seem to want recognition and adulation quite as much as money -- and the non-material payoffs are a lot harder to get for work in the YA segment.

All the same, there really is some good stuff being put out for that age bracket -- good enough that adults will find it quite as enjoyable as the teens toward whom it's slanted. I've mentioned my admiration for Jalex Hansen before. Allow me to add two other names alongside hers: M.T. McGuire, whose delightful and uplifting fantasy Few Are Chosen about the improbable adventures of the Pan of Hamgee demands the sequel I was promised; and Jaron Lee Knuth, whose YA near-future science fiction adventure Level Zero I found original and exciting.

Gentle Reader, if you have kids in the YA age bracket -- roughly 12 through 17 years old -- you could do worse for stocking stuffers than those books. If you don't have kids in that bracket, perhaps you might try them yourself. Along with a few of my titles, of course!

Marketing or Discovery?

2011-12-01T04:39:00.001-08:00

Mark Coker, founding genius of SmashWords, has written a provocative and quite important article on book selling tactics for indie writers:

Marketing isn’t as important as people think it is. I know this statement might strike some as sacrilegious.

Here’s the problem: Great marketing will raise awareness about your book and motivate readers to buy it. But great marketing is expensive and extremely difficult to pull off. We all know authors who invested thousands of dollars in marketing, never to earn the money back in book sales....

Marketing is merely a catalyst for sales. Like any true catalyst, catalysts help start the fire but they can’t sustain it. The word-of-mouth spawned by passionate readers is what propels books to go on to become best-sellers....

In this new age of the immortal book, marketing will take a back seat to discovery.

Please read the entire article, which is packed with both information and insight. Coker has penetrated to the significance of the essential difference between the era of eBooks and the paper-dominant milieu that preceded it: The eBook need never, ever go out of print.

Traditional marketing -- an advertising-based promotional approach designed to get potential buyers thinking about whether they want to buy the book now or soon -- is both expensive and time-limited in its efficacy. Such campaigns seldom last more than a month. Their effectiveness at increasing book sales is less than that of word-of-mouth and readers' loyalty to their favored writers.

The strategy that would most benefit the indie writer is a "compounding" approach:

Get your book into a few readers' hands, hopefully, including one or more reviewers.
Encourage those that like it to commend it to others.
Thank those readers who do so and ask them to pass your name around.
Use favorable reviews in your own promotional activities, however limited.

Such an approach won't sell thousands of copies of a book within the first month of its availability. But to the extent that your happy readers recommend the book to others who share their tastes, it will "earn compound interest." The longer you can keep it going, the greater your sales, aggregated over time, will be.

Consider this: One of the best-selling novels of all time, Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, is currently selling at a rate that exceeds any previous clip. No one is out there "marketing" the book; it's simply being recommended by each favorable reader to one or more others who might enjoy it. In consequence, it's out-selling many a newly-released "blockbuster novel." (Of course, it doesn't hurt that Rand's ideas are highly applicable to the current national and world political mess.)

If your books have enduring value -- that is, if they're capable of entertaining and edifying more than one time-limited batch of readers -- a discovery-oriented promotional approach is the way to go. Indeed, it would be just as applicable to old-style paper books as to eBooks. However, for those of us who've gone indie, it could be the magic route to popularity, influence, and -- who knows? -- a little money on the side.

Give it some thought.

Dialogue And "Character Voice"

2011-11-29T05:49:00.001-08:00

There's that word again. Away with it! It summons up notions of volume, timbre, and pitch that have exactly no place in a discussion of dialogue. Nevertheless, it's become prominent in discussions of dialogue, which many young writers regard as the toughest of the storyteller's challenges.

Allow me an early tangent, if you will: Much of the frustration here is self-inflicted, but it's powerfully reinforced by the prevalent trend toward trying to reduce the greater part of the storyteller's art to technique. Granted that there are a few useful techniques -- that is, patterns of story construction that can be followed in a formula-like fashion -- in fiction writing; they're not nearly as many as some writers-on-writing would have you believe. This is a particular irritant in this matter of "character voice."

The underlying assumption in any discussion of "character voice" is that different characters should speak differently. That is: two characters should use different words, phrasings, and emphases to express themselves, even if the events they're relating or the ideas they're expressing are identical.

That sounds like a "but of course" notion, doesn't it? Different characters, different "voices." So why can't I persuade myself that different real world people speak differently? Why do all the English-speakers around me -- quite a diverse bunch, at that -- seem to use essentially the same words, phrasings, and emphases?

I can't be perfectly sure of this, but I rather suspect that the range of variations in modes of spoken expression is less than we've been led to believe. (Written expression is a completely different subject.) If that's the case, then perhaps attempts to make different characters "sound" markedly different are misplaced. Perhaps our attention should be on other things.

I prefer to concentrate on my characters' drives and values, which determine their responses to events. When I write their lines, I usually just "let it happen." My premise is that a character is far more strongly colored by deeds than words. Therefore, if his deeds are consistent with his drives and values, the things he says about them, and about the actions of others, will tend to reflect his nature and motives adequately well no matter what words I put his mouth.

(There is an embellishment your can add to your dialogue, even while continuing to write naturally. If you equip a character with a verbal "tic," which he can be counted upon to use in certain situations, it can help to distinguish his utterances from those of the characters around him. It can also become an irritation to those other characters -- a plot element you can exploit for other purposes if you need it. For an example, in Greg Bear's masterpiece Anvil of Stars, Hans Eagle habitually tags "Am I right?" onto the end of his statements. Note the way Martin, Ariel, and other characters react to that verbal tic.)

Here's an example of what I consider natural dialogue that flows from the characters' individual attributes and experiences, from one of my favorite stories:

Marti laid five places at their table. Luisa brought the stew, a collation of pared roots in broth, and set the pot at the center of the table. Laella set a loaf of brown hardbread next to the pot and gestured to Gregor to sit.

"Marti, will you fetch Karine, or shall I?" she said.

"I'll get her." The small blonde woman scurried down the hallway.

A minute later Marti returned, urging pale, trembling Karine before her. In the firelight, the freshly scourged girl looked barely able to stand. Laella waited until they sat, reached for the ladle and offered it to Karine, who stared at it, uncomprehending.

"You must eat, dear. The cuts won't heal otherwise."

Karine took the ladle. They served themselves in turn. There was no conversation.

The fire had burned low when they were done. Luisa collected their bowls in silence. Marti attended to the leftover stew and tossed the end of the loaf to the dog, who settled by the hearth to gnaw it.

Karine sat slumped forward, eyes fixed on the table. Her color was returning, but she was clearly apprehensive about her place in Laella's household. Gregor watched Laella discreetly, as if waiting for instructions. Laella caught Luisa's and Marti's eyes, and nodded.

With a murmur and a touch, Marti urged Karine to rise and come with her. Luisa excused herself and followed them, leaving Laella and Gregor alone at the table in the flickering firelight. His expression was solemn.

"You have a hard life," he said.

"It's not that hard. We're used to being apart."

"I see."

"You've told us nothing about yourself. Where do you come from? Surely not the wastes?"

"No." He shifted in his seat. "I've traveled a great deal."

She examined him in the dim light. "You don't look old enough to have traveled much."

He smiled faintly. "Perhaps the marks are on the inside. Tell me of your baron."

The swerve halted her. She considered. "He is a strong ruler, and brooks no disorder. His men are well disciplined and properly under his command. He takes a tithe, but he does not meddle with trade or trifle with the women. The people fear him, but in the main they don't dislike him."

"Not even you?" His eyes compelled her to candor.

Her mouth twitched. "Not most of the time."

"Ah. There are worse rulers, then."

"There are. We've known a few."

They sat in agreeable silence.

His scars were few. The roughness of his face and hands was already fading. In their few hours' acquaintance, he had displayed strength, insight, compassion and fiber. He said little, but omitted nothing needful.

She could not imagine what impelled him to wander the wastes, but neither could she imagine a community that would drive him from its bosom.

"Are you weary?" she said, her voice husky.

He nodded.

"Might I persuade you to stay with us a while, address some... other tasks? Or are you anxious to be off?"

Something moved behind his eyes. She waited an anxious interval before the corners of his mouth rose. "I am only just arrived. I need not hurry away. I will stay gladly, if I'm welcome." He looked about for his pack. "Where shall I sleep?"

She rose. "Come with me."

She led him down the hall, past Luisa's and Marti's rooms, their doors discreetly closed, and opened her own. She drew a slender candle from her dwindling cache of luxuries, lit it and set it by her pallet. He had halted at the threshold.

"Is something the matter?" she said.

His eyes were uncertain. "This is your room."

She nodded. "And yours." She gestured at the pallet. Luisa had set his pack next to it. "To share with me, if you will. For as long as you will." She stared at the floor. "I am a virgin, Gregor, not another man's cast-off."

In the candlelight, his eyes looked as if they might fall from their sockets.

"Wouldn't you rather remain a virgin, Laella?"

She barked a laugh. "Three years after bearing an unhallowed child?"

"The others --"

She flailed the air in sudden impatience. "What of them?"

He fell silent. After a moment, he approached her. As if of their own desire, her hands caught and drew him closer. He did not resist.

"You have a great strength in you," he said.

"You have a great kindness in you," she said. "Shall we share what we have?"

He bent and touched his lips to hers.

Traveling sorcerer Gregor and village-shunned Laella were so vivid to me that I didn't hesitate over their words even once. My awareness of the kinds of persons they were dictated the way they would speak and respond to one another: Laella, the mistress of her household of outcasts, is inquisitive and cautious, while Gregor, who spends most of his time completely alone, who expects to depart fairly soon, and whose conscience bears the weight of a necessary but dreadful deed, is naturally laconic. Even as I put them through the formation of a love-bond, who they are and what they've been through conditioned how they would speak to one another. Yet the words they use are commonplace.

I suppose the ultimate mandate here is to know your characters, and immerse yourself in their experiences. This is obviously important when narrating from a particular character's viewpoint. It's just as valuable when writing their lines -- and it will save you quite a bit of agony over how to "voice" them.

Genre, Category, and "Formula"

2011-11-27T06:35:00.000-08:00

Martin McPhillips, author of the extraordinary thriller Corpse In Armor, is an unusual fellow in several respects: a scholar, a firm political conservative, a devout Catholic, a New Paltz resident, and an extremely affable and sociable guy. He'll gladly share any of his opinions on any subject under the Sun with anyone who engages him...including his views about fiction:

...I don’t really even believe in the idea of genre (and I mean believe in it the way a kennel club believes that individual dogs must conform to the standards of their breed to attain recognition, and certainly must produce the papers of pedigree to even be considered). So genre, I speak for myself, ain’t got nothin’ to do with it.

Genre isn't a new idea, of course. Upon entering their neighborhood bookstores, shoppers habitually head toward the sections that feature "their" genres, so most of us, whether rightly or not, do draw some meaning from the term. All the same, Martin has a point, especially in these days of rampant -- one might even say promiscuous -- cross-breeding among the "recognized" genres.

Genre is most important to publishers and marketers. To be able to say, "this book belongs in genre X" is to allocate it a place among "others of its kind." If the classification is accurate, it helps a publisher to decide whether or not to buy a manuscript, helps the marketing department in deciding how to promote it, helps the retailer in placing it on the store's shelves, and helps the reader to find it and relate it to what he prefers to read.

Book marketers also use another term, category, to create special divisions within a broadly recognized genre. For example, your local Barnes & Noble probably divides the Science Fiction / Fantasy shelves into two segments, one of which is marked "Series." The Series category within SF / fantasy is used to classify novels that follow a specific instigating event, character, or item. For example, the many novels derivative of the "Star Wars" oeuvre are members of the Series category, as are novels that proceed from the conditions and assumptions of a television show, video game, or a for-grabs character. (A "for-grabs character" is one who's serially licensed to writers who want to write about him. A good example is the long series of Rogue Angel novels about Annja Creed, a modern-day inheritor of Joan of Arc, to which many writers have contributed one or more volumes.)

Clearly, a category will have more confining requirements for its elements than works outside that category but within its enveloping genre. Some writers who are willing to ghostwrite when not engaged in their own adventures -- the bills have to be paid, y'know -- disdain category work as too stifling. Others do quite a lot of it, and reap substantial financial rewards over the years even if their names never appear upon a spine.

Still more confining is formula fiction. A writer who undertakes a formula novel starts from a plot line written by someone else -- a plot line that pertains to every book written in that niche. The characters may change; the settings may change; the timelines may change. What doesn't change is the fundamental plot. Such a book is often produced for a very brief marketing period; it might not spend more than a single month on bookstores' shelves. Much paperback romance is considered formula fiction.

For discussion, Gentle Readers:

What's your opinion of the prevailing system of genres under which books are sold in the English-speaking world?
Would you add any genres that you feel are real but not yet properly recognized?
Do you ever read category novels? If so, have you found any of which you'd think the writer, whether you know his real name or not, can be justly proud?
If you're a writer, would you ever consider accepting a contract to produce category or formula fiction? What inducements would you require?

"Going Commercial"

2011-11-26T07:24:00.000-08:00

She asks me why,
I'm just a hairy guy
I'm hairy noon and night,
Hair that's a fright
I'm hairy high and low,
Don't ask me why, I don't know
It's not for lack of bread,
Like the Grateful Dead...

(Opening lyrics to the song "Hair," from the unlamented musical of the same name)

It's tough to make writing fiction into your principal income. I know, I know: a number of writers have done it. And we have Dean Wesley Smith -- who? -- telling us that more writers have managed to do it than we've been led to believe. All the same, there's a hellish amount of work involved, and not all of it is congenial to someone who just likes to tell a good story.

There's also a temptation lurking in the shadows: the lure of "what's hot right now."

For example, if we judge from the evidence available, there's a lot of fiction about vampires being written -- and bought -- right now. The most famous excrescence of this abominably banal trend is Stephenie Meyer's "Twilight" series. The books have sold appallingly well, despite being unoriginal, poorly written, and repetitive in the extreme. Still, there's no denying that Miss Meyer is making a chamber-pot-full of money. Given the breadth of the tie-ins being marketed alongside the books and the movies made from them, she'll probably continue to rake it in for some time to come.

Now, not everyone who writes vampire fiction has been fueling his furnace with hundred-dollar bills. As the power law suggests, there are a few "top" earners in that subgenre of urban fiction, and one hell of a lot of hopefuls writing feverishly and praying to be "discovered" while pulling in painfully thin dribbles of valuta. Of that latter group, I'd bet that many of them have no personal desire to write vampire fiction, but that they were seduced into the vampire trend by the success of Miss Meyer, the "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" phenomenon, or some other of the more visibly successful bloodsucker-suckers.

I contend that this is a danger to the writer with a significant storyteller's gift.

Storytelling is the point of the enterprise...well, unless you're a "literary" writer, but I severely doubt that there are many of those reading Musings. By corollary, he who decides to tell someone else's story is betraying his own fund of stories -- and you wouldn't believe just how easy it is, once you've decided to "go for the bucks," to slip into something akin to plagiarism.

Allow me to expand on that a wee bit further. Yes, it is possible to confine oneself to a subgenre such as vampire fiction or zombie fiction without becoming utterly derivative and unoriginal. Yes, it is possible to put your own preferred stories "on hold" while you pursue an income stream sufficient to keep the wolf away from the door. But it is dangerous -- quite as dangerous as any other case of choosing a course of action not for its intrinsic satisfactions but in hope of a particular result.

Storytelling is not welding. It's a personal gift to be shared with others. It should not be treated as a means to a "more important" end.

(To any welders in the audience that took umbrage at the previous paragraph's implied denigration of the creativity and artistry inherent in their trade: You're welcome. Now go sit on a railroad spike.)

Please, fellow storytellers and storytellers-in-embryo: Tell your own tales, and tell them from the heart:

Do not treat your gift as something to be beaten into submission for the sake of money.
Do not allow the great success of other writers to prejudice you against your preferred genres and themes.
Do not permit your spouse, your friends, or any of the professional parasites of the writer's trade to persuade you that "you could be big if you'd just write a nice romance / Western / bodice ripper / techno-thriller / vampire romance / mystery / police procedural / rutabaga adventure."

Storytelling is inherently an act of love: love of theme, of plot, of character, and above all of your audience. If you must labor at something you don't love to put beans in the pot, make it something other than what you do love.

(NB: This article was not written because I'm sick to death of looking for fantasy to read that isn't about vampires. Well, not exclusively.)

Style, Confidence, and Conviction

2011-11-24T03:56:00.000-08:00

Quite a number of younger writers seem to "tiptoe" into the field. Perhaps out of a desire to maximize their chance of acceptance, they suppress their natural styles and strive to imitate the styles of well-known, established writers. Their products are seldom mistaken for the "real thing," and even less frequently purchased by paying publications.

It's a confidence problem, of course. The irony of it is that a lack of confidence practically guarantees defeat. You have to believe in your own chops. No singer or guitarist has ever won over an audience by being hesitant or apologetic about his talent. That would get him booed off the stage faster than any number of cracked high notes.

Sarah Hoyt has something to say about her own struggles in this direction:

See, I’d had people tell me before “voice, you iz doing it wrong” – yes, all my editors are Lolcats. (No. I don’t mean it. It’s a joke. For heaven’s sake, Toni W., don’t aim there. Don’t aim there. I type with those!) – but no one had explained what voice was. And books on how to find your voice were worse than useless. One of them advised removing all adjectives and adverbs and all “not strictly needed” description and stage setting. As far as that goes, it’s not a bad style necessarily, though a bit outdated and reading a little like a stage play.

Weber’s comment made it all clear. It’s the confidence of the voice and – if I may say so – the appropriateness to the story. (Something I only found later.)

The best way to put this in perspective is to think of someone telling a joke at a party. Even if they get the wording a little wrong, and it was three sheep and an Anglican Bishop instead of two goats and a Catholic Monk, it doesn’t matter, provided they do the right expressions, put in the right pacing, and make you SURE they know how they’re telling the story, and even that the story is funny. (Seriously. Some people just by the tone of voice and bullying through can make you laugh even if they forget the punchline.) OTOH is there anything more nerve wracking than the person who stands there and goes “and then he says, are you horny or… No, wait. It was he says the hornier you are. Then… No.” Or even someone who delivers the absolutely perfect line in an apologetic tone and cringes? (Unless that’s appropriate.)

For the uninitiate, what Miss Hoyt calls "voice" in the above is actually the writer's natural style; the term "voice" is a relatively recent pseudo-sophisticated synonym for what would otherwise be a perfectly obvious aspect of the writing trade.

What, you didn't know that you have a natural style? Of course you do! It's the way you speak and write when you're not being critiqued, or are unaware that you're being critiqued. When you attempt to suppress your natural style in favor of some other mode of expression, you immediately become so self-critical that your storytelling gift -- I assume you have one -- is seriously hobbled, sometimes completely crippled. When you allow that style free rein, your writing is far smoother and less strenuous.

Your natural style is intimately connected to your linguistic development. It arises mainly from what you've read and sincerely loved, in the years before you took up writing yourself. The styles that characterize your fictional favorites will have seeped into your own style without having to be snatched and inserted there like a stolen transplant organ. Note that at that point in your life, you're highly unlikely to be massively concerned about selling your own stuff.

Your confidence in your own style is thus likely to be founded on your belief in the worth of the books you've read and loved. Your favorite writers' confidence will have been transferred, in part, to you.

Confidence can be a magic elixir. It improves everything that's not utterly hopeless. (You'll know which stuff is “utterly hopeless” when it doesn’t improve.) But confidence touches upon matters beyond style.

Confidence without conviction is pointless.

Every salesman who achieves even the least success does so because he believes in his product, and conveys that to his customers. Fiction is no exception. But just as many young writers are timid about their natural styles, quite a lot of young writers are afraid to express any strong conviction in their stories. Thus, their stories have little or no theme to them. Even if the pacing and plotting keep the reader glued to the book to the very last page, his reaction when he finishes it is more likely than not to be "What was the point of that?"

Another term for writing with conviction is "writing from the heart."

What's really important to you? Faith? Romance? Family? Compassion? Freedom? Infuse whatever value it may be into your plots. Craft Marquee characters around that value, both for and against it. Let the triumph or defeat your protagonists suffer lead to the consequences you believe would flow from them. Leave your reader in no doubt where you stand.

If you haven't read any of my tripe, my animating convictions are about the supreme importance of the Christian faith and individual freedom. I can't write a coherent paragraph that isn't imbued with one or both of those themes. But early in my writer's odyssey, I tried. Oh, how I tried. And no matter how hard I labored over it, what I produced was unpalatable even to me.

Robert M. Pirsig, in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, wrote: "You say you want to paint a perfect painting? Make yourself perfect and then just paint naturally. That's the way all the experts do it." That was a trifle facile, but it's essentially about this very subject. The more confidence you have, both in yourself and in your convictions, the better storyteller you'll be...and the more likely it is that those who read your work will cherish it, return to it, and press it upon their friends and loved ones.

What's that? Will it make you rich? Gentle Reader, if I knew that, I wouldn't still have a day job, now would I?

The Large And The Small

2011-11-22T05:18:00.001-08:00

The techno-thriller sub-genre of military adventure fiction owes Tom Clancy more than any other writer. Were it not for Clancy's "Jack Ryan" series of novels, the techno-thriller might have continued to be neglected by the major publishers, and millions of male readers would have remained bereft of a reading experience they find uniquely satisfying.

It's worth a few moments' reflection on why Clancy attained mass popularity when several of his military-fiction colleagues, both before him and after him, failed to do so. It wasn't all Clancy's ability to provide fascinating descriptions of weapon systems or convincingly narrate military engagements. Indeed, that might have been the lesser part of his approach. Rather, Clancy proved adept at humanizing military adventure. He gave us characters, both of heroic and lesser stature, whom we could care about. Some we loved and rooted for; some we hated and hoped to see them fall. In all his successful books, Clancy's ability to induce interest in his characters was at the heart of the achievement.

This is subtly different from routine characterization. The difference is especially vivid in the high-intensity world of armed combat. When the world around Smith is at war, Smith's personal concerns would normally seem petty, dwarfed by the combat and its possible consequences. It takes quite a bit of thought and care to elevate an individual -- at least, one whose personal heroics aren't instrumental in winning a large battle -- to a position of importance in such a tale.

More than that: If you can pull it off, you can provide the reader with one of the most intriguing and ultimately satisfying contrasts fiction can offer him.

Sometimes, in grooming your hero for his ultimate heroics, you can produce this sort of contrast "spread out over time." In other words, you can show him grappling with difficult personal problems, or perhaps the small-scale problems of other people, before he gets busy with the solution of the story's larger conflict. There's a compelling logic in that: Before a man heads out to save the world, he ought to have practiced his moves a few times in less consequential situations.

Probably the hardest approach is the one Clancy took in Red Storm Rising, his World War III novel. In that novel, Clancy spends quite a bit of time following the trials of Air Force meteorologist Mike Edwards, whose assignment to Keflavik Airport on Iceland involves him in a harrowing trek across the island, in support of American attempts to retake the island and toward personal rescue. Edwards supports the recapture effort as an observer and reporter of intelligence, but he's not critical to it in an objective sense. Even so, his adventure is both touching and arresting; it provides a human dimension to a military conflagration that has embraced the entire Northern Hemisphere.

Of course, compounding a coherent story that embraces both world-girdling events and human-scale dramas isn't exactly easy. The reader who comes for the "big" action might regard the parts that focus on individuals as distractions, intermezzi at best, and skip over them. All the same, creating a story-canvas that depicts both the large and the small in distinct relief is among the most absorbing of fictional pursuits. When it works, it reminds us, reader and writer both, that even a hero has to eat, sleep, shower, and have the occasional argument with his Significant Other. When it doesn't...well, perhaps we should leave that for another screed.

Symbolism

2011-11-19T21:05:00.000-08:00

EICHMANN'S ISRAELI PROSECUTOR relates this tale, and how it becomes personal through symbols.

A survivor of Auschwitz tells -- in preparation to testify against Eichmann during his trial for crimes against humanity -- of the moment in time when he and his family arrived at the camp. There were four of them: the man, his wife, their preteen son and their toddler daughter. When prisoners arrived at the camp, they were parsed, segregated, and dispatched according to criteria that suited the purposes of the Reich. There was always a need for slave labor, and so men with skills were sometimes sent to that task, rather than merely being warehoused in the camps until they were killed. So there was a kind of triage performed at the gates. Camp survivors' stories tell of this myriad times over.

This particular man was an engineer. His wife was sent off in one direction, their daughter in tow, while the man was sent in another. The son, in temporary limbo was finally sent to run after his mother.

That was the last time he saw any of them, he said. As they receded in the distance, he could no longer pick them out from among the multitude. But their daughter -- the precious little girl -- was wearing a red coat. That he could see for a very long time after all else of them was lost in the distance.

The prosecutor relates how that detail hit home for him, because he had a daughter that age at the time of the trial, and had just bought her a red coat.

...

Someone telling a story should properly stop right there. The point of this kind of symbolism is to bury the image in the reader's mind and let it linger there -- seemingly forever -- and have a continuing effect. I'm writing about this storytelling technique, so I go on to point this out. And then I stop.

Cross-posted at BabyTrollBlog.

Overwriting

2011-11-18T04:31:00.000-08:00

Night falls swiftly and silently in the Kern County corner of the Mojave Desert, the sky shimmering a pale orange as the sun sets toward the Pacific Ocean, glowing faintly to the south from Los Angeles light pollution, turning ink black to the east with only the faintest hint of Las Vegas burning like an ember in the distance.

Gentle Reader, words don't exist that possess sufficient intensity or color to articulate the paroxysm of aesthetic ambivalence I experienced upon encountering the above, the first sentence from a recent indie science fiction novel of captivating premise: luminous, original, evocative, and inarguably deserving of a much, much better bit of prose for its introduction.

And now you're invited to judge whose first sentence is more overwritten: the block-quoted one, or mine that immediately follows it.

Overwriting is a commonplace sin among "literary" writers. Of course, "literary" writers also disdain plot and plausibility, which is why so many readers disdain to read their effluvia. But the two syndromes go together, for obvious reasons: if you haven't got storytelling skills, or worse, if you have no story to tell, you have to fill the space between the covers of your book somehow.

Yet many indies appear to think that overwriting is the key to fictional sophistication -- that unless they pack several irrelevant, action-and-characterization-postponing images into a sentence, it's unworthy to be called "writing." This is, to put it gently, not the case.

Possibly the best writing advice I've ever received came in the form of a single brief sentence from a professional editor: "You want every word to carry weight." George Orwell said this in a slightly more active style: "If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out." Professor Will Strunk was even more severe: "Omit needless words! Forcible writing is concise." Overwriting is the exact negation of this maxim of good prose.

Granted that concision can be overdone. We're only allowed one Hemingway per century. Setting matters, and imagery is essential to establishing setting. But a sentence that contains two images invariably contains one too many. A paragraph that contains two imagistic sentences contains one such sentence too many. A scene that overloads on images -- and you might be surprised, Gentle Reader, by how easy it is to overload a scene with images -- will seldom contribute anything to the forward motion of the story.

If you disdain plot, as the "literary" writers do, that might seem quite all right to you. But without plot, you don't have a story. Indeed, without a sufficient density of events and causal tissue to link them, you don't have much of anything. But there's actually worse: If you do have a story to tell, overwriting can prejudice a potential reader against it, as the block-quoted sentence at the start of this tirade prejudiced me.

Overwriting can be used to produce a comedic effect:

Snow, tenderly caught by eddying breezes, swirled and spun into and out of bright, lustrous shapes that gleamed against the emerald-blazoned black drape of sky and sparkled there for moment, hanging, before settling gently to the soft, green-tufted plain with all the sickly sweetness of an over-written sentence.

...but how often is that what you really want to do?

If you make it a rule to favor the telling of the story over all else, overwriting will be easy to avoid:

Prefer action to description.
Prefer to characterize by depicting your characters in action, whenever possible.
Prefer to describe physical settings through the viewpoint character's perception of them -- and remember that that character will only take conscious note of those elements of his surroundings that are unusual or out of place.
Go sparely on images and other literary devices.

Above all, know when to end a sentence...or a tirade about overwriting.

Symbolism

2011-11-16T05:14:00.001-08:00

The use of objects and images partially disconnected from a story's events to symbolize important concepts or emotions is a common practice in fiction. However, like the other "literary" devices and motifs, it can be abused or over-used. Indeed, some writers exploit it so relentlessly that it's hard to follow the storyline buried beneath all those symbolic objects and images. Annie Proulx, Dom De Lillo, Paul Auster and Cormac McCarthy have been cited for this particular sin.

So the question arises: How much symbolism is too much? Behind that one lurks another: Why use symbols at all?

At its base, a symbol in fiction is a variety of metaphor. The writer intends the symbol to evoke a particular idea or mood through the symbol's associations in the reader's mind. Whether it "works" depends on the uniformity and reliability of those associations.

A bridge has been used frequently as a symbol for the human need for connection to others. It works pretty well because we understand the bridge's function: making otherwise unavailable places available. But a bridge would be a poor symbol for lust, or for hunger; its function simply has nothing to do with those motivations.

An open fire has been used frequently as a symbol for romantic passion. This, too, works well; fire and passion both conduce to heat in the body. But no sensible writer would use a fire as a symbol for despair; it's too dynamic in nature.

Corpses, both human and animal, have been used as symbols for futility, or for aridity of spirit. Here, it's the lack of function that matters: there isn't much good to be had from a corpse. But imagine trying to get a mood of optimism or dynamism out of a corpse; you'd be beaten before you could start.

From the above, it should be clear how symbols work and why they sometimes fail. And in those circumstances where the writer actively wishes not to speak explicitly of the idea or emotion he wants to conjure, inserting an appropriate symbol is often the right way to go. But what circumstances are those?

Probably the most important application of symbols is in those circumstances where the viewpoint character is in the grip of a powerful emotion, and the writer wants or needs to avoid expressing it in words. Consider the following passage, from this story:

I swung back the stable door and slipped inside. No one noticed.

There were only the three: man, woman, and child. A single frail candle burned against the back wall of the stable, casting their silhouettes at me like inverted shadows. The woman had wrapped the baby in a loose cocoon of white muslin, leaving only its head exposed, and was laying it in the feed-trough that stood between the rows of stalls. She straightened, stepped back, and wordlessly collapsed into the man’s arms.

Around the little tableau, the horses were silent.

I stepped forward, started to address the couple, and stopped. He cradled her in his lap, his arms tight about her, his face ablaze with uxorious devotion. Her eyes, large and luminous, were fixed upon her new child.

It took all my strength to produce a voice. “Do you… require anything?”

Her gaze remained locked upon her child. He assessed me with a glance and nodded with a certainty I could not help but envy.

“Some water, perhaps.”

I nodded and started for the inn, but something held me. I bent to the feed-trough, pulled the muslin back from the tiny face and looked into it, not knowing why or what I hoped to see.

The baby’s eyes were open.

The eyes of the newborn are never open.

There are two symbols of importance in that snippet: the silent horses, which lend the scene an air of portent; and the baby's open eyes, connoting a supernatural degree of awareness in the newborn Child. They wouldn't work for a reader who doesn't know that horses are seldom still or silent in the presence of human activity, or for a reader who hasn't recognized the Story being told. However, our cultural commonalities are strong enough that the typical reader will know those things -- and the symbols made the explicit description of the viewpoint character's emotions unnecessary.

Would that passage have been strengthened or weakened by inserting still more symbols? Obviously, I refrained from doing so. What would you have done -- and if you're partial to heavily symbolic storytelling, what symbols would you have used that I didn't?

As with the other fictional devices, more symbols don't always mean better storytelling. For that matter, they don't always conduce to better symbolism. But you'd hardly know that from the practices prevalent among the "literary" writers of our day.

Naming Your Characters

2011-11-14T08:05:00.001-08:00

Quite a number of the indie writers I know have expressed a substantial degree of frustration at choosing character names. When I first started writing fiction, I had some trouble with it, myself. It's one of the few areas in fiction where there are few if any rules.

One of the very few rules that pertain to character names is that they should be as easy to remember as the characters are important. A Marquee character must not have a name that runs to six or seven syllables or looks like an explosion in an alphabet-block factory. A Supporting Cast character can be named more casually, but there's still a need to take some care about legibility and pronunciation. A Spear Shaker need not be named at all, the poor soul.

Another rule is that a character's name should not evoke some sort of cognitive dissonance. For example, it's a very bad idea to give a character the name of a popular entertainer or political figure: the popular figure's image and nature will eclipse your character in your readers' minds. Similarly, it's a bad idea to give a character a name that conjures up an image of that character at odds with what you want him to look like or be: an alley-dwelling junkie probably shouldn't be named Whittington Choate Smythe-Carstairs. (This latter rule can be broken for comedic effect, as for example R. A. Lafferty did in his classic story "Nine Hundred Grandmothers.")

Finally, if your character is supposed to be of a particular ethnicity, his name should reflect that ethnicity. An Argentinean should not be named Chantelle Myszciewicz; nor should a Polish immigrant be named Simba Ngoungau-tshombe. (No doubt, given the variety of Mankind, there are, or someday will be Argentineans named Myszciewicz and Poles named Ngoungau-tshombe, but fiction has its own demands.)

But beyond those mild thou-shalt-nots, the writer is free...which many writers would prefer not to be. Yet there's no formula upon which you can rely to produce a set of plausible, adequately memorable names for your characters.

I've had some luck with character names. When I chose names for my Realm Of Essences series's Marquee characters Louis Redmond and Christine D'Alessandro, I did so unconsciously; indeed, with more than a little irritation at the chore. It proved serendipitous: Louis Redmond is approximate medieval French for "Warrior-king of the world," and D'Alessandro means, roughly, "of the excellences" in old Italian. I was able to exploit those happy coincidences in several ways.

If all else fails, you can sometimes let the character name himself. Give him a placeholder name -- maybe something like "#47" -- and just start writing about him. It's a rare character of consequence who won't eventually demand a "real" name, and provide you with all manner of usable suggestions for it. But by no means should you let mere namelessness prevent you from writing. I mean, look at what Bill Pronzini has achieved!

So What's with the Flood of Content, Alger?

2011-11-12T06:42:00.000-08:00

IF YOU, GENTLE READER are not asking, I'm dead certain Our Curmudgeonly Host is. I'm actually surprised I haven't gotten testy emails this week wondering when I was going to post all the Good Stuff here instead of at my own blog.

Well, here's the what.

I went nuts.

At the last minute, I decided to participate in NaNoWriMo. No, if you don't know what that is, google it. I don't have time to explain it AGAIN. But, for the incurious among us, it distills down to this: it's taking up all my <sarc>copious</sarc> spare time, which means the few minutes a day it takes to cross-post between my blog and several others just strains the bag to bursting.

But it also means you get a feast -- a veritable church social -- of free ice cream today.

EN. Joy.

On Assignment

2011-11-12T06:40:00.000-08:00

TIME TO INSTALL A "PASSIVE GUY posts" macro. The guy is just a one-man clearinghouse for the indie-author-publisher revolution.

Passive Guy posts on a contractual object called an Assignment Clause. This apparently makes your work, your future, and your career an asset of a corporation when it is sold. That your contract with Corporation A automatically becomes -- willy nilly -- a contract with Corporation B, when the latter purchases the former.

I have long been of the opinion that this ought to be unlawful. Or illegal, if you prefer. It ought not be allowed. When a corporation is sold, all of its contracts must be re-negotiated, and the parties thereto offered the option to walk away from the agreement.

I can hear the objections already -- that you'd never be able to sell a corporation so encumbered, that this would make public financing virtually impossible, and blah-blah-blah. Sorry. Being an absolutist as to the supremacy of the rights of the human individual (and seeing no reason to alter that stance), I see that not as a bug, but as a feature. Deal.

The corporate shield should not protect the owners or the managers from their own incompetence or foul-dealing. If selling the company to save it means losing half its assets when creatives under contract jump ship, let that be an incentive to manage your assets better.

Previously posted at BabyTrollBlog.

I'm Usually Down on Political Excumenism

2011-11-12T06:37:00.000-08:00

AS BEING WEAK ON THE ISSUES and not having the courage of your convictions. Politics is war with different methods, and to win at war, you have to drive your enemies before you, hear the laminations of the women and all that bumpf.

But commerce isn't war, which is something it has going for it, in my opinion, nor is it politics -- except to the extent that some people just can't keep politics out of every crack the sand gets into when you're underdressed on the beach.

Bob Mayer href="http://writeitforward.wordpress.com/2011/11/10/writers-for-traditional-publishers-slave-indie-authors-fck-wad-come-on/" target="_blank">posts a request for a little less rhetoric and a little more civility in the whole indie-vs-tradpub debate. I have to agree. There's little point and a lot of idiocy in a policy that has Tobias Buckell blathering on as he did the other day. (Of course, it's just Tobias blathering on as he does, so I pay it a little less heed than I might otherwise.) But still. Joe Konrath doesn't come off much better in that regard. You start calling people potty-mouth names and some of it inevitably splashes back on you. Shit be like that.

The bottom line is you should just let people go their own way. Me, I'd urge anyone seeking publication to at least consider indie publishing (though, as a lot of people have pointed out lately, how much independence there's going to remain anywhere is debatable). At the same time, I'm not going to kick over the rice bowl of an author who's happy with her agent and her three-book contract with a perfectly reputable house. I'm just not. And I don't think it's very mensch-ly of you to do it, either.

Previously posted at BabyTrollBlog.

Happy Dance

2011-11-12T06:32:00.000-08:00

A DEAR FRIEND, fellow OWW-er, and beloved step-mother to Dolly (practically my first reader, if only she'd make it official).

There's a reason for that, Alger.

And what's that?

You never asked.

Think so?

Whyn' ya ask and see?

Um...

Terminal diffidence?

Uh... yeah?

God, you're hopeless!"

Anyway. Jaime has sold her first novel to Tor. And it's one of a series. (I have some of a WIP (the second book) on my Kindle and hope to get to it later this week. I plan to enjoy it. And you don't get to -- yet. Nya-nya-nya.)

Her name is Jaime Lee Moyer. Note it down; you will be hearing a lot from her. The first book is titled Delia's Shadow and is due from Tor in (if memory serves) February of 2013. It's already getting notice, which I suspect is a sign of an agent doing her job.

Back when we were both little baby wannabes on OWW, (which I still am, I hasten to admit, albeit not so active on the 'shop), I likened her voice to Zenna Henderson's. By which I meant the sound of her narration in my head put me in mind of ZH's. And I meant it as a compliment.

So should you.

Previously posted at BabyTrollBlog.

On Pantsing and Lining

2011-11-12T06:29:00.000-08:00

KAT PAULK HAS BEEN POSTING over at Mad Genius Club (that is Kate, right?) [Yes -- GFD] an Extreme Pantser's Guide -- or How to Fly a Ficton by the Seat of Your Pants. Thursday's episode, Kate advises pantsers (and this advice actually is even more important to 'liners) to WRITE IT ALL DOWN. The best idea in the world won't do you any good if it's gone in the night. The trick is to A) know where to put it and 2) to remember you've got it when you need it.

So. Do I have anything to add?

A plug. For Scrivener.

Before I start, I'm not claiming this property is exclusive to Scrivener, but it's there, and it works brilliantly for exactly this purpose (rather than it was designed for something else and you have to warp it into service for this purpose, like you'll find in, e.g. word processors).

Lemme 'splain how I see this. Say you have a collection of printed cards. Doesn't matter what's printed on them, except that they have to be sorted in some order -- alphabetical or numerical would be two possibilities, but not the only ones. And say you have to get them into order. Somebody played 52 Pickup with them (or, if it's Obama, 57 Pickup, but whatever), and you have to get them back in order for some urgent reason.

One method -- and I think the easiest, but I could be wrong (Yes, it happens, albeit rarely.) -- is to lay the cards out in grid pattern, rows and columns, to allow you to quickly sort them without having to sort the entire stack in your hands.

For example, if your stack were a deck of playing cards (and you knew it), you could lay it out in four rows for the suits and 13 columns for 2 through Ace.

But, if you didn't know the limits (four suits of 13 cards each), such a matrix wouldn't make so much sense, because you don't know the dimensions So you might lay them out in a single row. Or start in one row and go until you run out of room and start another one. And you might have to guess at intermediate dimensions and keep sliding cards or stacks of cards around as you get into the problem and come to understand what you're dealing with better.

For example, say you're working in a foreign alphabet. And you have to figure out what order the letters come in from context. There's enough there to tell you that, but it's not immediately obvious as you turn the cards up seriatim -- rather only once you get a large enough sample to see and guess at the pattern. And you have to reiterate your sort several times as you gain more context and understand the dimensions of the system better each time.

And this last is a pretty close analog to ordering random fragments in a story. You may not be able to tell from the fragment as it occurs to you -- in a dream, or (as has happened to me twice in the past week) while you're washing the dishes. But, once you line up several of these, a pattern will slowly emerge. And, eventually, there will be a whole story, with only a few bits and pieces missing, which you can then fill in "by hand" as it were, connecting your previously disconnected fragments.

And, just as pieces of a jigsaw puzzle can, with a change of orientation, or the filling in of a seemingly unrelated portion of the whole, suddenly reveal where they go -- and surprise you doing so -- so, too, can the pieces of your story reveal where they belong and how they connect to the larger story (if at all).

And as for why Scrivener aids in all of this, it is in two ways: first, that it is trivially easy to move parts around. You can either drag-and-drop any given fragment as though it were a discret object (which, to the program, it is), or you can follow menu options -- either from the menu bar or from right-click context menus. (This is, obviously, the Windows version. Macs can be problematic with right-click operations and I really don't know how Scrivener behaves in this wise on OS-X.) Second, there are a good many ways for you to identify a fragment. You can tag it according to its fundamental nature -- note, scene, chapter -- and you can include notes and descriptions at all levels of organizations.

All of which aid in making each fragment into a building block you can A) find and 2) manipulate to serve the needs of your story.

At another level of abstraction, Scrivener provides tools for building a "scaffold," if you will, that lets you hang unconnected fragments on it and move them around as on a bulletin board. (In fact, there is a piece of the program's UI that follows the cork board metaphor for just this purpose.) It makes it very easy to move story parts around and try their various arrangements, letting the author come to a conclusion on a story's organization surprisingly quickly.

And, if you're not sure whether this fragment goes in Chapter 13 or Chapter 19, then put a folder in between the two and call it a Part and give it an ordinal that puts it between the two. Then plunk your orphan fragment down there until you figure out the sequence and where it all goes.

Which is a rather roundabout way of saying, "Get this thing. It'll make your life so much better in so many ways."

Previously posted at BabyTrollBlog.

In a Comment at Joe Konrath's

2011-11-12T06:23:00.000-08:00

BLAKE CROUCH writes...

I think what's not been said succinctly is what this has all been pointing toward:

Taking a midlist deal from a traditional publisher is dumb-ass thing to do. The "average" advance for a first novel is about $6,000.

How sad to be a good enough writer to get a book deal, but with such poor business sense and such a potent need for a stamp of approval that you squander the money you could be making.

People say but taking that midlist deal is a career builder. Yes, it is. A career of being repeatedly fucked that culminates with getting dropped. The odds are overwhelmingly in favor of that scenario. I've been in this business since 2004, and the number of people who were first published when I was and still are being published is a fraction.

Do you think it's easier now than it was then?

With the rarest of exceptions, publishers support books they pay lots and lots of $$ for. And only some of those are successful. If you get big money for a book up front, take it and run. No one's saying that's not a smart thing to do. I think Amanda Hocking was masterful in leveraging her ebook sales into a killer major print deal.

But midlist, for the most part, stays midlist. And considering the current royalty structure for ebooks, midlist is an even worse place to be now than it was a few years ago.

I haven't heard anyone here say that all legacy-published authors are morons. Because no one believes that. Some are making fat bank. Good for them. Ride it out. But if you have a first novel, or are considering publishing again, and you're taking less than $25,000, I think it's safe to say that's a stupid, stupid thing to do.

Some people would say that number should be way higher.

You want some numbers?

On my first novel, Desert Places, which was published in 2004, I have earned a total of $13,114 from my publisher. That took six years, and I was paid an advance of $6,000.

Since I re-published it myself one year ago, I have made $17,677, on Amazon US alone. That doesn't include Kobo, Apple, Smashwords, Createspace, Barnes & Noble, Amazon UK, Amazon DE, Amazon Fr.

And this isn't my top seller. It's only cracked the top 1000 once. This is a 7-year-old novel.

Now, there's been a lot of talk about tone. So if this comment just hurt your feelings. I apologize. Go to this website, and have one on me:

http://www.freehugscampaign.org/

I think that characterizing acceptance of a trad-pub contract as dumb is wrong. Ill-informed, perhaps, but, after all, it has been the prevailing model for near on a century. And self-publishing is a risk -- a crap-shoot -- and more especially for a new writer with a first novel. Nor is it a given that said author finds the terms of the contract amenable. More likely, I'd say, that she finds it a Hobson's, and may seek another route to publication next time.

There's been a lot of commentary on the subject of the abrasive tone of Konrath's posts on the subject. I can't say as I have an opinion either way on that. If you can't see the plan facts in front of your nose, maybe it's a "if the foo shits..." situation. But, at the same time, people can get their backs up if they perceive that they're being insulted -- whether with reason or not -- and the emotion can cloud their judgement or their receptivity to the message. That is, however, not really the messenger's problem, now, is it?

Previously posted at BabyTrollBlog.

Parallelism in Series

2011-11-12T06:21:00.000-08:00

BOB LEFZETZ might as well be talking about pop literature and the future of publishing when he writes We Live In An On-Demand World.

First and foremost, the window is forever. Used to be you were selling the product, now you're selling yourself. What I mean by this is don't organize your career around deadlines and marketing campaigns. Something great lies in wait for the listener to discover it online. You read in traditional media about new releases which come out and instantly tank. You want to drop land mines, that people will discover when ready. And not everything you have to do is great, as long as enough of it is, as long as you can separate the wheat from the chaff.

Sound like anybody we've been hearing lately?

Previously posted at BabyTrollBlog.

Michael Stackpole

2011-11-12T06:19:00.000-08:00

ON HOW THE legacy publishing environment fails midlist writers -- and, by extension, ALL writers.

(Hat tip: Passive Guy.)

Previously posted at BabyTrollBlog.

Too Pertinent?

2011-11-11T06:13:00.000-08:00

Is there any temptation more powerful than the temptation to write fiction that recasts the political and / or international crises of the day? It would be so easy. The headlines practically plot your book for you. You can sculpt your characters around the public figures involved. And everyone who reads your book would know immediately "what you really mean."

This is yet another "here there be dragons" idea, I think!

It should be obvious that a book that narrates crises greatly similar to those of the moment will be both polemic and time-bound. You can't have your heroes address a political crisis without offering your preferred solutions, however indirectly. Worse, strong binding to the crises of an era inherently pins your book to that era. It becomes "historical fiction" within just a few years; those who lived through the period will dismiss it as such.

But it would be pertinent, wouldn't it? People with an interest in contemporary politics, who are never few in number, would recognize the scenarios you sketch and become immediately immersed in your approach to them. It might even be a way to popularize your political opinions while making a few bucks.

That's actually an additional strike against the notion. Fiction that strives to be contemporarily pertinent will strike many readers as pertinacious, especially if your opinions are already well known from some other venue. (No, the two words don't mean the same thing; look 'em up.) Besides, just how likely is it that your fictional heroes can plausibly solve the problems of the day when so many real-worlders have tried and failed, eh, genius?

This is much on my mind just now because I've been feeling the temptation myself. Shadow Of A Sword featured Stephen Graham Sumner, a candidate for the presidency whose candor and Constitutional fidelity made a huge positive impact on the electorate. Many readers of that novel have written to plead for a sequel about Sumner's time in office. And I, being as susceptible to readers' requests as any writer, had been toying with writing one.

Bad idea. I can write individual stories about Sumner's confrontation with individual opponents and crises. Indeed, I've already written a few; they can be found in my collection Caucuses, Cabals, Assignations, And Trysts. But to make the Sumner Administration the central aspect of a novel-length work would try both plausibility and reader patience; take my word for it.

Never fear; Stephen Sumner will return. But I'm not going to write a detailed political travelogue about his administration, or his stature as a world-historical figure.

Not yet, at any rate.

Gender Shift

2011-11-09T05:55:00.000-08:00

In my maunderings over the story for the novel I'm currently planning, a kinda-sorta-sequel to the Realm of Essences series, I've returned time and again to the problem of sameness. I'm crafting a plot around Marquee characters made popular in that earlier series of novels, and even though the readers of those earlier books have encouraged me in that direction, the idea has a strange flavor. Yet I must admit that what strikes me as a problem to be addressed would probably appear to many other writers as an asset.

Other writers make whole careers out of stories about a consistent group of characters -- in the most usual case, about one single character. Their fans look forward to more tales about those heroes, which reinforces those writers' inclination to return to the well over and over. But I don't like to repeat myself. Given the larger-than-life natures of the Marquee characters from Shadow Of A Sword, repeating myself in critical ways seems appallingly likely.

Just this morning, a twist occurred to me that would allow me to recycle my Marquee characters while minimizing the probability that they'd run away with the story in a fashion contrary to my desires. It was an idea I'd never before entertained, which makes it likely that a lot of other indie writers would find it refreshing and useful. Here it is:

Focus on the spouses and spousal-equivalents.

One of the distinguishing marks of a Marquee character is that he usually gets a lot of time as the viewpoint character, through whose eyes and thoughts the reader experiences large swathes of the story. But that's not a hard and fast requirement: for example, in Chosen One, Louis Redmond gets the viewpoint only once, at the very end of the book, and only for a single scene of about five hundred words. Yet the book is explicitly about Louis, and nearly nothing else.

So: Instead of giving the viewpoint exclusively to the Big Guys this time around, I'll give it, as far as possible, to their Significant Others. That will require some careful re-engineering of a few contemplated scenes, one new romantic relationship, and in two cases the introduction of brand new characters: enough innovation to keep me from feeling as if I've written the story for the second time.

I can see from here how that will change the emotional texture of the story. Though I hope it will be fresh and involving, there's no way to be certain of that until the thing is complete and in the hands of a few test readers. Well, what's life without a little adventure, eh? But atop that, it's something I haven't tried previously, which is almost reason enough to attempt it. If it works, I'll have learned something new about this craft; if it doesn't, with luck I'll know better than to try it a second time.

And if you read the result, you might learn something too! Though what that would be, I cannot say. So, perhaps a year from now I'll be asking you, in the words of Dirty Harry Callahan: Do you feel lucky? Well, do ya, Gentle Reader?

The Action Fraction

2011-11-07T05:25:00.001-08:00

As has often been said, there are two kinds of people: those who believe there are two kinds of people, and those who don't.

All right, all right: there are really three kinds of people: those who can count and those who can't. But more relevant to today's point is that there are two kinds of readers: those who enjoy action fiction and those who don't. If you write action fiction -- loosely speaking, stories that include important segments that depict violence or extreme danger -- the action-fiction reader is your audience...and your most important stumbling block.

Writers who denigrate action fiction imply that it's simplistic of construction and therefore easy to write. They couldn't be more wrong. The proof is in how many action writers do it badly and how few do it genuinely well.

One of the reasons Lee Child stands today at the pinnacle of thriller writers is that he handles the action segments of his novels exceptionally well. The late Robert B. Parker was equally skilled at depicting scenes of violence, especially those involving hand to hand combat. But for each such specialist, there are many writers in the various action-oriented genres who deal with it tentatively, even clumsily, and therefore cause the very reason an action-oriented reader bought their books to be a detriment to his enjoyment.

Whether he's good or bad at it, the action-fiction writer probably has had very few personal experiences -- if any -- of the kind he's attempting to describe. There are occasional exceptions, but there's no correlation between such a history and the writer's ability to convey the pace and tension of mortal combat to his readers. It seems to be a special skill, which might not be teachable or reducible to a set of key principles.

There are many approaches, no one of which seems to invalidate any of the others. All I can say about them is that some writers make them work while others fumble with them unconvincingly. Yet despite the difficulties, more writers head into the thickets of action fiction than address the more sedate provinces of the literary or psychological novel...probably because more readers buy and read action fiction than the more contemplative sorts.

Allow me to repeat an old joke: the [in]famous "tandem story" of Laurie and Carl.

***

Rebecca and Gary
English 44A
SMU
Creative Writing
Prof Miller

In-class Assignment for Wednesday
Today we will experiment with a new form called the tandem story. The process is simple. Each person will pair off with the person sitting to his or her immediate right. One of you will then write the first paragraph of a short story. The partner will read the first paragraph and then add another paragraph to the story. The first person will then add a third paragraph, and so on back and forth. Remember to reread what has been written each time in order to keep the story coherent. The story is over when both agree a conclusion has been reached.

---

At first, Laurie couldn't decide which kind of tea she wanted. The camomile, which used to be her favorite for lazy evenings at home, now reminded her too much of Carl, who once said, in happier times, that he liked camomile. But she felt she must now, at all costs, keep her mind off Carl. His possessiveness was suffocating, and if she thought about him too much her asthma started acting up again. So camomile was out of the question.

Meanwhile, Advance Sergeant Carl Harris, leader of the attack squadron now in orbit over Skylon 4, had more important things to think about than the neuroses of an air-headed asthmatic bimbo named Laurie with whom he had spent one sweaty night over a year ago. "A.S. Harris to Geostation 17," he said into his transgalactic communicator. "Polar orbit established. No sign of resistance so far..." But before he could sign off a bluish particle beam flashed out of nowhere and blasted a hole through his ship's cargo bay. The jolt from the direct hit sent him flying out of his seat and across the cockpit.

He bumped his head and died almost immediately, but not before he felt one last pang of regret for psychically brutalizing the one woman who had ever had feelings for him. Soon afterwards, Earth stopped its pointless hostilities towards the peaceful farmers of Skylon 4. "Congress Passes Law Permanently Abolishing War and Space Travel." Laurie read in her newspaper one morning. The news simultaneously excited her and bored her. She stared out the window, dreaming of her youth -- when the days had passed unhurriedly and carefree, with no newspapers to read, no television to distract her from her sense of innocent wonder at all the beautiful things around her. "Why must one lose one's innocence to become a woman?" she pondered wistfully.

Little did she know, but she had less than 10 seconds to live. Thousands of miles above the city, the Anu'udrian mothership launched the first of its lithium fusion missiles. The dim-witted wimpy peaceniks who pushed the Unilateral Aerospace Disarmament Treaty through Congress had left Earth a defenseless target for the hostile alien empires who were determined to destroy the human race. Within two hours after the passage of the treaty the Anu'udrian ships were on course for Earth, carrying enough firepower to pulverize the entire planet. With no one to stop them they swiftly initiated their diabolical plan. The lithium fusion missile entered the atmosphere unimpeded. The President, in his top-secret mobile submarine headquarters on the ocean floor off the coast of Guam, felt the inconceivably massive explosion which vaporized Laurie and 85 million other Americans. The President slammed his fist on the conference table. "We can't allow this! I'm going to veto that treaty! Let's blow 'em out of the sky!"

This is absurd. I refuse to continue this mockery of literature. My writing partner is a violent, chauvinistic, semi-literate adolescent.

Yeah? Well, you're a self-centered tedious neurotic whose attempts at writing are the literary equivalent of Valium.
You total $*&.

Stupid %&#$!.

[Professor Miller: A+ I really liked this one!]

***

Plainly, Rebecca is uninterested in writing action fiction. She almost certainly doesn't read it, wouldn't enjoy it if it were pressed upon her, and would probably make a terrible hash out of it if she were to try to write it. Gary, in contrast, plainly prefers the drive and drama of combat to the introspective, contemplative sort of story Rebecca wants to write. He strives for a swift pace, events of terrible power and import, and the high emotions that attend such things. (Whether he displays any skill at the matter is open to discussion.)

I am of the opinion that writers, including writers of action fiction, treat this sheaf of skills and techniques too casually. It's not enough to have opponents struggling to batter one another into submission. It's not enougn for opposing groups to fire rivers of high-velocity lead at one another. It's not enough to have bombs falling in bunches, wildfires consuming whole city blocks, women screaming and dogs barking at the tops of their lungs. More is required to lasso the reader's emotions and get his pulse pounding to the beat of the punches, the hammering of the fusillades, and the staccato of the bombardments.

But it's not always clear what that "something more" must be. At any rate, it varies from writer to writer, and from genre to genre. And the writer who masters its intricacies in his chosen venue will acquire a legion of devoted reading fans.

Characterization

2011-11-05T05:12:00.000-07:00

If you've ever taught in a grammar school or a high school, no doubt you've known the despair that comes from the realization that little Johnny isn't learning because he just isn't listening. In the argot of our time, Johnny "has another agenda." Whatever is on his mind, it's not the carefully organized mass of fact and reasoning you've been so painfully ladling out.

Quite a few indie writers are weak on characterization. I can't help but think they weren't listening in tenth and eleventh grade English class, for characterization, despite the amount of effort it can demand, is one of the few aspects of fiction writing that's truly teachable.

The key to characterization is the oldest and most resented of all writerly maxims:

SHOW, DON'T TELL!

As my good deed for today, I shall unpack that maxim for you all. Those of you who think you already grasp it: STAY IN YOUR !@#$%^&* SEATS! The probability that you really, truly do is vanishingly small, and anyway, who doesn't benefit from a refresher course, now and then?

***

When is a writer "showing" and when is he "telling," and why does it matter?

The easiest approach to "telling" is embedded in the phrase "tell a story." Why, that's what storytellers do, isn't it? So what could be wrong with it?

Plenty, if you do it wrong.

If a story has a narrator, as most do -- yes, that includes stories told in the first person -- what the narrator says directly to the reader is "telling." Some aspects of telling are quite all right:

Descriptions of setting;
Descriptions of the appearances of people and things;
Descriptions of things in motion and people in action.

Note the word "description" at the start of all those exemptions. Description is not characterization and must not be substituted for it. When the narrator tells the reader about a character -- that is, when he narrates the character's motivations, values, priorities, virtues, and vices directly to the reader, rather than demonstrating them through the events of the story -- he's doing it wrong.

Take heart. Even the great geniuses of fiction get it wrong now and then:

But though [Frodo's] fear was so great that it seemed to be part of the very darkness that was round him, he found himself as he lay thinking about Bilbo Baggins and his stories, of their jogging along together in the lanes of the Shire and talking about roads and adventures. There is a seed of courage hidden (often deeply, it is true) in the heart of the fattest and most timid hobbit, waiting for some final and desperate danger to make it grow. Frodo was neither very fat nor very timid; indeed, though he did not know it, Bilbo (and Gandalf) had thought him the best hobbit in the Shire. He thought he had come to the end of his adventure, and a terrible end, but the thought hardened him. He found himself stiffening, as if for a final spring; he no longer felt limp like a helpless prey. [Emphasis added]

The emphasized sentence is a characterization blunder. J.R.R. Tolkien, one of the finest storytellers of all time, is telling you what to think of Frodo's reserves of courage, rather than showing them in action. The irony of this is compounded by what follows: a textbook demonstration of Frodo's courage in action, that makes it plain that the above error was unnecessary.

***

There are three ways to show a character:

What the character does;
What the character says;
What other characters say about him.

Those are in descending order of impact on the reader. Smith can say whatever he likes about what he would or will do in some situation. Similarly, other characters might well be mistaken about Smith in discussing him. What Smith does when he's compelled to make a choice freighted with import is the best avenue by which to reveal him to the reader.

Some examples:

"You asked Louis Redmond out?" The furrows on Katie Guynemer's forehead threatened to crack her foundation makeup.
Celeste Holmgren nodded. "For Friday evening."
"And he said yes?"
Celeste looked from side to side, to see if anyone else in the cafeteria were listening. "Yes, he did." After he got over being thunderstruck. "Why?"
Katie shook her head in disbelief. Her long brown curls rippled like willow branches in a breeze. "Silly, the man is unapproachable. There are women here who are afraid even to speak to him...men, too."
[From Chosen One]

---

[Christine] picked up her fork and was about to dig in when she noticed his gaze fixed upon her face. His eyes were liquid and luminous.
"What's the matter, Louis?"
Again he produced the grin, accompanied by a tiny shrug. "Nothing. I was just enjoying the sight of you."
She smirked. "I'm just a carved-up former cycle slut who's learned a lot about clothes and makeup."
His expression shattered like a mirror struck by a thrown rock. He reached for her hand and clutched it.
"Don't ever say that, Chris. There has never been a more beautiful creature on this earth than you, with or without the clothes and makeup. It's a privilege just to be in the same room with you."
Something's happening here.
She tried to make light of it.
"Come on, Louis. What I am is what you and Helen have made me, that's all. All you see is your own achievements." She made a show of looking herself over. "Not bad, I guess, but you could have done a lot better if you hadn't insisted on starting from scrap."
He shot out of his chair and yanked her from her own. In an instant he had pressed her against the wall of the kitchen, his grip rough upon her shoulders, shaking her and shouting into her face.
"How dare you say such a thing? The one thing you absolutely can't do without is self-respect. What good will any of what we've taught you be if you don't see yourself as worthy of it, damn you? Have we wasted our time after all?"
[From On Broken Wings]

---

[Christine] was idle for the first time that evening when the commotion arose.
“My, my. What a fine looking covey of quail. And they say there ain’t no wildlife left in New York.”
The basso voice was loud enough to be heard in Westchester. It pulled Christine’s head around at once. A tall, broad figure swayed gently over a table of five women, all attractively dressed and made up. The intruder was dressed like a corporate executive, but carried himself like a thug. He was plainly deep in his cups. Christine edged closer.
Is he wearing a gunbelt?
One of the diners had risen. “I don’t believe I’ve had the pleasure.”
The intruder flashed teeth like piano keys. “We can fix that any time you like.” He reached down and took a seated woman’s chin in his hand. “Sisters don’t come any hotter than you, sister. Maybe you’d like a little special attention tonight, ‘stead of just hanging with your girlfriends?”
The first woman’s eyes went wide. “Sir, we’re trying to have a pleasant evening by ourselves, if you don’t mind.”
Christine waved to the maitre d’hotel, but instead of coming toward them he began to talk animatedly to the barman.
What’s wrong with the menfolk here?
The boor put his hands on his hips and looked the diner up and down. “Pleasant’s my specialty, sugar. I was just gettin’ pleasant with this miss, but I can start with you if you like.” He swept his eyes back and forth across the table, grinning carnivorously. “Just how many of you wanna get pleasant tonight, and how pleasant do you wanna get?”
The room had fallen silent. The other patrons were hypnotized by the scene.
“Sir, this is insupportable. If you’d kindly allow us–”
“Allow you anything you want, sweet thing, if you come along quietly and get cozy with me.”
Christine strode forward.
Christine–
Shove it, Nag.
“Excuse me.”
The enormous cad swiveled to face her, tottering only slightly.
“You want to get in on this too, mama?”
“It’s time to go home, Mr. Lawrence,” Christine said. These ladies are entitled to finish their dinners in peace.”
The lout blinked.
“Where’d you get my name, sugar?”
She smiled. “It’s carved into the butt of that Browning you’re wearing. Nice gun. I prefer a Beretta, but then, my hand isn’t as large as yours. Now will you please make it easy on everyone and go home?”
Lawrence’s mouth dropped open.
“Be goin’ home when I’ve had my fill an’ not before.” He reached for Christine’s hair, apparently intending to yank her off balance and onto her knees.
She caught Lawrence’s thumb and twisted. In an instant he was on his knees, howling in pain.
“You’ve had your fill, Mr. Lawrence.” She kept her voice even and calm, and her gentle smile fixed in place. “You’ve had about a month’s fill, according to Tony at the bar. He said thanks for not tipping him, by the way. He’s glad he didn’t have to feel indebted to you.”
Lawrence tried to rise and failed. She increased her pressure, and he hissed in renewed pain.
“Grucci’s doesn’t like to have its patrons disturbed at their meals.” They’d gained the attention of everyone in the restaurant. “You’re creating a large disturbance. Some of us feel rather strongly about that. So I’m going to see you out.” She bared her teeth. “Right now.”
She yanked him off his knees, twirled his arm around him, creating a half-Nelson from her previous hold, and propelled him toward the entrance. A channel opened before them. The maitre d’hotel opened the door, held it while she shoved her staggering captive through it, and quickly slammed it shut.
She returned to the affected table, striving to carry herself as if nothing untoward had occurred. Five beautifully made-up faces stared up at her in astonishment.
“Our deepest apologies, ladies. Grucci’s regrets the intrusion on your privacy and dining pleasure. A waiter will be here in a moment to take complimentary cocktail orders from all of you, as a token of our appreciation for your patience. Have a pleasant evening.”
The woman the boor had first addressed whispered, “Thank you.”
Christine smiled, turned, and glided away.
[From Shadow Of A Sword]

As you can see from the above examples, using words, whether spoken by the character himself or by others about him, is easier and faster than using actions -- but actions display character far more vividly, and far more reliably.

***

Perhaps the best thing ever said on the subject of characterization is from Maya Angelou: "When a man shows you who he is, believe him." Besides, haven't we been told, when words and actions contradict one another, to disregard the words and put our credence in the actions?

If you let your narrator tell the reader about your characters, you're doing it wrong. Learn to show them instead.

Danger!

2011-11-03T04:44:00.001-07:00

Ours is a time fraught with hazards...and those hazards reach even those of us who merely write from our convictions:

The author of an online novel cited by four Georgia men who allegedly sought to kill U.S. law enforcement officials and federal judges said his work has been misinterpreted.

Mike Vanderboegh, of Pinson, Ala., said his novel, "Absolved," which is set to be published in book form later this year, was "intended to communicate the fact that another Civil War is possible" in the United States.

"The federal government has been pushing the limits of liberty back in this country for many, many years, and my point was, at some undetermined moment in the future, someone is going to determine that they're not going to be pushed around anymore," Vanderboegh told FoxNews.com. "It is what it is … it's a terrible description of what might happen if people continue to be victimized in this country."

Federal authorities say members of the fringe militia group said they intended to model their actions on Vanderboegh's work, although the author's name is not listed in indictments charging the four men. The suspects, Frederick Thomas, 73, Dan Roberts, 67, Ray Adams, 65, and Samuel Crump, 68, all live in the north Georgia towns of Cleveland and Toccoa....

Vanderboegh said he has not been contacted by law enforcement authorities in connection to Tuesday's arrests, and he characterized the matter as a "misinterpretation of a piece of fiction."

Citing department policy, a Department of Justice source declined to indicate whether authorities had interviewed Vanderboegh or plan to do so.

"If we begin to treat fiction as grounds for legal action against the author because someone misinterprets it or uses a tactic from the book," Vanderboegh said, "then the First Amendment no longer exists."

So four elderly men took Vanderboegh's book as a script for action, and as a result Vanderboegh might himself be under investigation. Bizarre! How long will it be before some bureaucrat gets the bright idea to blame John Ross for the assassination of a federal hireling, or Tom Clancy for September 11, 2001?

Vanderboegh is quite correct about the threat to freedom of expression. We allow the state to ban "incitement to riot" on the grounds that it's easily distinguished from other sorts of speech and leads all too often to actual riots. We allow defamed persons to sue their defamers for libel or slander on the grounds that detectable financial harm done to a targeted individual with malice aforethought should be legally redressed. But the notion that a work of fiction, which probably says "Fiction" on the spine and "This is a work of fiction" on the flyleaf, might be held legally responsible for some lunatic's destructive acts goes well beyond the bounds of rationality.

I don't normally "go political" here at Musings -- I save those rants for my opinion-editorial site -- but this is a subject anyone who ever sets words down on paper or in pixels should take maximally seriously. There is nothing, nothing more destructive of freedom than potential-consequence laws: laws that ban some wholly non-violent, non-destructive act because "it will lead to bad things." When the subject is free expression -- the notion that a speaker's or writer's words can and should be regulated by law because persons inclined toward violence, theft, or fraud might be moved to action by them -- you're staring down the barrel of totalitarianism on the march.

Lucky for you, Gentle Reader, that I have a lot on my agenda this morning. Else I could go from here into a tirade about the madness of "sexual harassment" charges based on "inappropriate comments." Such notions are a major stepping-stone toward the infantilization of America. But all subjects to their proper times and places.

Approaches To Plotting

2011-11-01T04:51:00.001-07:00

My esteemed co-contributor Mark Alger has a brief piece up today about the two poles of plotting technique:

It's a touchstone of the craft that there are generally two types of writers -- as regards plot and how she is made in fiction. There are those who plan every detail meticulously to the last tit and jottle -- hight Outliners -- and there are those who just sort of wing it, or (as the saying goes) fly by the seat of their pants -- called Pantsers.

And it occurred to me that I do a little of both. I wing it at first, then try to organize what I've got into an outline, then hare off in a new direction entirely once I think I've got it nailed down.

Mark's approach strikes me as the most natural one, for several reasons.

First must come the germ of an idea: an inspiration, if you will. It must be substantial enough to strike the writer as an adequate reason to write at all. That is, it must illustrate some aspect of the nature of life in a time-bound, resource-finite universe each of us must share with many others like and yet unlike ourselves. Moreover, it must make it possible to entertain as well as edify, for entertainment is the reason the greater number of us read fiction. And of course, it must impress the writer as a suitable foundation on which to construct "my sort of story."

Except in the case of the very shortest works, virtually no writer goes straight from inspiration to verbiage. We try to scope the thing out, at least in terms of the major events of the story and the interactions of the Marquee characters. The result might be a precis, or a synopsis, or merely a few words jotted onto a paper napkin, but whatever its form, it will attempt to capture the outline of the story's action: its plot line.

Plot line is not plot. To go from plot line to plot, we must add causal relations: why this event was followed by that one. But a story must be about people; therefore, the causal relations that really matter will be about the reactions of the Marquee characters to one another and to the world around them. Since each of us reacts to events in a unique fashion, the writer's next step is to envision the sort of characters his story idea will require to be acted out.

Characters good enough to be principals in a sound story will have a tendency to pull the writer away from his original conception. They do this through the force of their individual capacities and motivations, which are the core of their fictional identities. Thus, as soon as the writer begins imagining Marquee characters, he'll start to revisit his original plot line, and the process of tailoring plot to character will begin.

This procedure may be repeated several times in the course of story construction. It extends easily into the actual writing of the story -- especially in these days of electronic word processing, wherein no word, sentence, or paragraph is deemed finished, or permanently placed, until the writer declares himself satisfied and sends the story out to the world.

The modern tendency toward series built around an enduring Marquee character streamlines the process somewhat, but it does not and cannot make it formulaic. (Sorry, no matter how good Word's macro capability gets, it will never write your book for you from a 200-word summary of plot line and theme.) Even dragging a complete cast of Marquee characters from book to book won't remove the jags and switchbacks from this undertaking. Your principals must interact, not merely with one another, but with the world around them -- and that world had better be changing from book to book, or why bother to keep writing? Also, it's inevitable that good characters will continue to develop as you put them through adventure after adventure.

In my "day job" as an engineer and supervisor of others, I must often counsel my subordinates not to get "hung up" on planning documents, such as design specifications. One cannot know whether an abstract, uninstantiated design is actually buildable until one starts to build it. The disappointments that occur as one moves from stage to stage often outweigh the pleasures. Younger engineers, filled with the idealistic fire they brought from college course on engineering theory, can experience great anguish over such things...until they've got a decade or so of experience with the stubbornness of reality.

It's the same with writing fiction, really. Sure, go ahead and write a 5000-word synopsis of your novel-to-be. Draw up character sketches of your Marquee characters, including extensive backstories that explain their more important limitations and quirks. But treat these things as a starting point, a backdrop against which to recognize necessary changes as they arrive. It's the only way to keep your blood pressure down and your enjoyment factor up.

The Undiscussed Promotional Powerhouse

2011-10-30T06:21:00.000-07:00

There's an attribute that helps to enhance all of an indie writer's promotional efforts, regardless of their nature. However, it appears to be unknown, or at least unacknowledged, by the greater number of indies; at any rate, I have no other explanation for promo blurbs that begin: "A terrifying tale of fantastic adventures," or "A profound exploration of the human heart," or "Buy my superwonderful, badly underpriced book, you unappreciative, semi-literate clod!"

All right, yes, I made up that last one. But I think you get the idea.

No matter how proud he is of his achievement, or satisfied with its treatment of his cherished themes, the author of a book must not praise his own work. I can think of nothing that would more swiftly or firmly turn me away from a book than such self-adulation, and I doubt I'm unusual in that regard. Indeed, another promotional blurb I mentioned recently:

A novel of improbable proportions, 'Dancing the River Lightly' takes you on a nonstop ride through the magical world of the Pacific Northwest, where dreams unfold, friendships are forged, and lives are changed forever.

...earned my ire for that reason as much as for any other.

No one reacts positively to vanity. No, not even persons who are themselves vain. Praising one's own work is the quintessence of vanity in action. As we mathematical types like to say, quod erat demonstrandum.

Abraham Lincoln supposedly said: "You can catch more flies with a drop of honey than you can with a gallon of gall." Had he lived a bit longer, he might have added: "No item of garb more becomes a man than a habit of modesty." It's so, at any rate.

We tend to transfer our opinions of men onto their works. A fellow who continuously preens himself for his craft is likely to have far more detractors than one who submits it humbly to its audience, without first festooning it with superlatives. This tends to be so even when the vainglorious craftsman is objectively the better of the two. The moral should be obvious...but as I keep reminding myself, the Latin roots of obvious mean overlooked.

Modesty in presentation, gratitude for appreciation, and graciousness in response to praise are tremendously powerful elements in a promotional campaign. Yes, the flyleaves of books by conventionally published writers are heavy with adulatory quotes...from other persons. Publishers would be daft to omit such praise; it indicates that those who've already read it -- including persons who write similar sorts of stories -- think well of it. If you recognize any of their names, your opinion of their books will likely transfer, at least conditionally, to the work they've complimented.

A struggling horror writer would sell his soul for a praiseful blurb from Stephen King. Similarly, a few admiring words from Alastair Reynolds would be of immense value to a writer of science fiction. A promotional blurb from J.R.R. Tolkien would be the Holy Grail for a writer of high fantasy...well, if Professor Tolkien were not already among the angels. But we cannot replicate the effect by presenting our evaluations of our own works to potential readers; that will merely elicit sneers and disdain.

Be modest. Let others praise your works. Be gracious about making use of such praise, rather than blatting it out in an I-deserve-it sort of tone. The rewards are quite definite. God Himself --Who, by the way, really loved Which Art In Hope, so don't you think you should read it, you unlettered Philistine? -- has sent me here to tell you.

Temptations Dept.

2011-10-28T03:47:00.000-07:00

Every writer must learn to recognize the whisperings of the devil. They come in many venues, and even more forms. Resisting them is necessary, not to saving your soul, but to something almost as important: staying focused and productive. Today we will examine:

The Seductive "Finger Exercise."

It's not really fair, but a lot of novelists consider short stories to be exactly that: minor exercises of imagination and technique. And just about all of us will eventually face the associated temptation: to turn aside from the bogged-down novel in favor of a neat little idea that would make a sweet short story. "Where's the harm?" we ask ourselves. "It'll take a day, two at most, and it would be a shame to let it go to waste...especially as I'm getting nowhere with the Big Book just now."

Resist!

First of all, short stories are not mere "finger exercises." They're actually harder to do well than novel-length stories. Every word of a short story must be the exactly right one in its place; every utterance from a character must be utterly perfect. You have no room for digressions, elaborate descriptions, or extensive characterizations, and your errors will stand out like a cow in a cathedral.

Second, when you yield to the urge to shove your main work onto the back burner, the temptations to do so again become more numerous and stronger. This is especially the case when you can say to yourself, "Hey, I'm writing, am I not? So where's the harm?"

Third...ahhh, third. The kicker is always in third place, don't y'know. It slipstreams in behind a couple of outriders, to allow them time to soften you up for the knockout punch.

Third, that attractive-looking short-story concept will mutate into a grand concept deserving of its own novel. You'll go from having one unfinished novel on your workbench to two -- each of which will beckon to you from the sidelines while you're trying to work on the other one.

Why? Because you're a novelist. It's what you do, the form and length you prefer, in which your personal writerly chops are deployed to best advantage. Besides, who buys short stories? Where's the profit in spending your time on them? And anyway, the idea is just too nifty to waste that way. Who knows when an idea this neat will come around again?

Beware, my friend. That's Satan in his most dulcet tones.

File that nifty idea away somewhere safe. Make sure it's properly synopsized and classified. Then get back to that damned frustrating book! As management guru Peter Drucker has said:

Concentration is the key to economic results...no other principle of effectiveness is violated as constantly today as the basic principle of concentration...Our motto seems to be, "Let's do a little bit of everything." [From Managing For Results]

Verbum sat sapienti.

ZZZZZombies!

2011-10-26T05:11:00.001-07:00

Fiction, like other forms of entertainment, is frequently afflicted by fads. Readers of contemporary fantasy are already aware of the fads for vampire and werewolf-oriented stories. Science fiction recently experienced a fad for stories about the extremely far future, and before that, what a friend called the "my artifact is bigger than your artifact" trend. And of course, "high" (medieval) fantasy often seems like one enormous, decades-long fad for quest adventures.

Many a writer will hop onto a fad in the hope of gathering a little of the gravy while it's still flowing copiously. Being a devout capitalist (among other things), I cannot and shall not condemn such writers; they're following the star most important to them. But the samenesses of faddish currents in fiction don't speak well to the creativity of the participating writers.

Of course, a genre can experience two or more fads concurrently. Right now, contemporary (a.k.a. "urban") fantasy is enduring trends for zombie-oriented stories, along with all the dreck about werewolves and vampires. Possibly it started with the "Resident Evil" series of video games, which were enormously popular and spawned an equally popular movie series starring the beautiful and talented Milla Jovovich. One way or another, we're being overrun with zombie fiction. It's become a campy motif: We have parodies such as Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, the hilariously funny movie Zombieland, op-ed essays that use a plague of zombies as one pole of a sociopolitical comparison, and assorted bits of humor such as the bar that posted, as a reason to drink there, that it's well prepared for the "Zombie Apocalypse."

Okay, I get it. We all get it: Zombies are both scary and funny. But how many stories about zombies can the reading public absorb before the whole thing transitions from camp to kitsch? And that's to say nothing of the deleterious effects on a writer's creativity from writing repeatedly in that one groove?

Among the things a writer must do with a faddish motif is vary the terms enough to "make it his own." Writers of zombie fiction have done a fairly good job at that. The first zombie fiction was based in the voudoun myths of the walking dead, created by black magic to function as slave labor. Today's zombie stories are more frequently founded on a science-gone-bad motif: "Resident Evil's" bioengineered T-virus, the conditioning-induced-but-still-infectious zombieism in the movie 28 Days Later, and so forth. But such inventions have a natural limit...and I think, as with the "vampires and werewolves as good guys" fad, we've reached the end of the line.

This is more a personal plea than advice to my fellow indies about how to maximize their market potential. I've grown weary from slapping the stacks in the Fantasy section, vainly searching for something in urban fantasy that isn't about vampires, werewolves, or zombies. I read a great deal, and the few writers determined to stay out of those grooves don't produce enough to keep me supplied. There are days I hunger so greatly for fresh, original contemporary fantasy that I almost feel I'm becoming a zombie myself.

Write something else. PLEASE!

Covering This Topic

2011-10-24T21:58:00.000-07:00

(I REALIZE) MOST slowly. It's been some time since I lay down my first marker that I was intending to write about covers. I've hesitated to move ahead, for a variety of issues.

But Monday, Passive Guy posted a provocative, if not entirely informative, item -- linking to a deeper article at Author Marketing Experts. The title of PG's post is "Bad Cover = Dead Book," while the article at AME is headed "8 Mistakes That Will Absolutely Kill Your Book." I was piqued to compose this post.

While the advice offered is good, (Better be; these people depend for their livings on their judgement being accurate.), I tend to want to expand on one point.

Penny Sansevieri, at AME, instructs that, when you ask for opinions on your book's cover, you should not mention design. That's true, and so very, very wise. But that's not to say you should not consider it when you're art directing your cover before you expose it to the view of a focus group. In fact, you should consider nothing but the best in design. As Ms Sansevieri observes, if you buy cover art from a cookie-cutter factory, or do it yourself in PowerPoint from stock photos, you're going to get something worth almost exactly what you paid for it.

And, as pointed out, an online buyer spends very few seconds on the buying decision. So your cover has to connect immediately and with great impact or you don't have much of a chance for a sale.

So, without getting into specifics of typefaces, composition, source imagery, and the like, how is a poor, bottom-rung indie author to get good cover art? By looking for the very things your high school art teacher taught you about image composition: balance, unity, shape, flow, clarity (or readability), interest (or intrigue), negative space, and color.

Now, I could explain all those terms and concepts and offer illustrations of my meanings. But the bottom line is that, if you don't understand them bone-deep, my explanation will not help you understand the subject any better. So, for the moment, trust me you need to know about these things, and that you should educate yourself on them. And, yes, it's hard and a pain in the ass, but that's what it means to be an independent businessman publishing your own work. Consider it a cost of freedom.

What all of this adds up to is that you must consider the "production values" of your design. Production values will determine the overall strength and impact of your design. Paying attention to them implies that you must look at quality of execution, to be sure, but also that you must not get so ambitious in your concept that you set your sights on something you can't execute. Unless you have a lot of practice at pulling off experimental techniques, and are good at faking the killer dismount and the extra-points-for-style flourishes, don't try them. People like me get paid to make it look easy, but doing it wrong can make you look like a chump. Worse, it can kill the sales of your book.

For an example of what production values can do or mean to an image, compare the movie Serenity with the television series Firefly. Same actors. Same writers, director, producer, and the rest. But the movie has ineffably superior production values, and it shows. The visual experience is just... sexier. And, while readers browsing a book store may not be able to articulate it, they do know quality production values when they see them, and will respond accordingly -- and in the negative if the values are not there and are not high.

Look at the covers of the Top 100 new releases in science fiction and fantasy at Amazon. While it would be fun to go through them one at a time and comment, I suspect it could also be tedious, so let us pass on that. But you should study them yourself. They vary within a fairly narrow range of aesthetic choices taken for idiosyncratic reasons in each case. Observe both what has been done -- and figure out why -- as well as what has NOT been done.

Not all of these books will succeed. Just so, a good cover does not guarantee success. Nor does a bad cover assure failure. In either case, the cover -- like DNA -- is not destiny so much as it indicates a tendency -- a probability. When a reader looks at your cover, he will take his 6 or 8 seconds to judge the tendency of your book. Whether the judgement is valid or not is immaterial -- the judgement will be rendered, and on it hangs your fortune.

Now go and study your cover(s) and assess where they go right. Or wrong.

Cross-posted at BabyTrollBlog.

Indies And Print-On-Demand

2011-10-24T04:46:00.001-07:00

For a long, long time, the writer who couldn't persuade an established publishing house to accept his work faced a pitifully small set of options:

He could "file the book in the trunk."
He could start his own publishing house.
He could purchase publication from a vanity press.

Option 1 is unappealing to a man proud of his work, but options 2 and 3 are quite expensive. So with the advent of print-on-demand publication, many indie writers flocked to houses that offered it as the preferred answer to their desire for some degree of circulation and readership.

That wave has thinned considerably in recent years. Print-on-demand publication has steadily gotten better and more flexible, to be sure -- the books can be made in ever more formats and sizes; their appearances have become ever more appealing; and their unit prices drop ever closer to the prices of conventionally printed books -- but the advance of electronic publication has cut into POD's desirability in a big way.The trends in progress suggest that POD books are likely to have essentially no influence on fiction indies in the foreseeable future, though they'll remain important to technical and scholastic fields.

Of course, POD publication will always retain some allure for an indie fiction writer. Who among us hasn't yearned to see his name on the spine of a book? For that reason alone, services such as Amazon's CreateSpace subsidiary will continue to do business for years to come...but the volume of sales an indie writer can expect for his POD books will remain small, probably two to three digits in the overwhelming majority of cases.

That's not to say e-pub has no problems of its own. We're still in the early stages of the development and refinement of this channel of distribution. Format incompatibilities among the most popular eReaders continue to limit our opportunities. There are problems of copyright protection and theft prevention that will probably take years to solve. And of course, e-pub's extremely low barrier to entry has attracted a huge number of "writers" into the field whose sole qualification for that title is the ownership of a word processing program.

Still, it remains the case that e-pub is waxing and POD is waning. Newer technologies tend to do that to older ones. Given the still-surging popularity of eReaders, the smart money is on e-pub to become the dominant means of fiction circulation within the next decade, while paper books, including POD books, are relegated to small specialty markets.

I know, I know: "a blinding flash of the obvious," right? But the implications are clear: If you're not yet on the e-pub train, get on it. Also, if you really, really need to see your name on the spine of a book, by all means go ahead and make it happen, but don't imagine that thousands of others will experience the same desire, at least not at a magnitude sufficient to extend to the price of a POD volume. (I omit close relatives and debtors from that last.)

Pub World's major powers are jockeying for a place in the e-pub parade. They have worse problems from e-pub's vulnerabilities than we indies do. Therefore, this is our chance to steal a march on them -- perhaps the best chance we'll ever have. Don't let it slip away!

Feanor's Syndrome

2011-10-22T04:19:00.000-07:00

If you haven't read The Silmarillion, J.R.R. Tolkien's Old-Testament-like prequel to The Lord Of The Rings, you might not recognize the snippet I'm about to cite, so here's a little background:

Before the Elves came to Middle-Earth, they resided in the blessed city of Aman in Valinor, along with the Valar, rough equivalents of Christian archangels. One Vala, Melkor, was evil, just as is one archangel, Lucifer. Feanor, the greatest of the craftsmen of the Elves, had made three magnificent jewels, the Silmarils, which were filled with the light that illuminated Valinor. The Silmarils were universally regarded as Feanor's greatest work, and the most beautiful of all the artifacts of the Elves. When Melkor made his move against Valinor, his first act was to poison the Two Trees, Laurelin and Telperion, that provided that light to the Blessed Isles. Then followed:

    Yavanna spoke before the Valar, saying: "The Light of the Trees has passed away, and lives now only in the Silmarils of Feanor. Foresighted was he! Even for those who are mightiest under Iluvatar there is some work that they may accomplish once, and once only. The Light of the Trees I brought into being, and within Ea I can do so never again. Yet had I but a little of that light I could recall light to the Trees, ere their roots decay; and then our hurt should be healed, and the malice of Melkor be confounded."

    Then Manwe spoke and said: "Hearest thou, Feanor son of Finwe, the words of Yavanna? And did not the light of the Silmarils come from her work in the beginning?"

    But Aule the Maker said: "Be not hasty! We ask a greater thing than thou knowest. Let him have peace yet awhile."

    But Feanor spoke then, and cried bitterly: "For the less even as for the greater there is some deed that he may accomplish but once only; and in that deed his heart shall rest. It may be that I can unlock my jewels, but never again shall I make their like; and if I must break them, I shall break my heart, and I shall be slain, first of all the Eldar in Aman." [Emphasis added.]

This is a good capsule description of a malady that overcomes many a writer, particularly in the months just after he's completed a protracted work that demanded total concentration and great effort. No doubt it applies equally well to artists and craftsmen of other sorts.

I'm in the grip of Feanor's Syndrome just now. Having at long last released Shadow Of A Sword, which completes the Realm of Essences trilogy begun fifteen years ago, I'm without the strength or the courage required to set out on another novel. It doesn't help that Shadow Of A Sword has garnered high praise from its readers, some of whose plaudits are well beyond any I ever hoped to receive. I have a hard time facing the possibility that my next book, if any, might not be as good...or as well received.

Feanor's Syndrome has its roots in reality. There's no guarantee that a creator will improve monotonically from the beginning of his career to the end. A writer's highest achievement isn't always the last thing he writes. Indeed, some excellent writers have deteriorated badly toward the end of their spans; I'm sure you can name a few. No one, be he an artist, a craftsman, or a ditch-digger, likes to face his own decline.

But a writer who isn't writing is no longer a writer. That's about equally hard to face.

Some writers do "retire," though in an unconventional sense. Whatever their reasons, they cease to publish while years remain to them -- and often despite loud cries their readerships clamoring for more. But "retired writer" is synonymous with "former writer." It has a bittersweet taste to it. However much his courtiers and attendants may protest to the contrary, a king in exile is no longer truly a king.

"And this, too, shall pass away." I keep saying that to myself. But while my strength has always returned after a lapse into lassitude, I can't be equally certain that my courage -- my willingness to present a work of the imagination to the world and listen to others' opinions of it, whether expressed in words or dollars and cents -- will accompany it.

Thoughts, fellow indies? Have any of you ever suffered from Feanor's Syndrome?

Niches Continued: The Crossover Morass

2011-10-21T04:29:00.000-07:00

If there's any single thing that most impedes the indie author when he goes a-marketing, it's our pervasive tendency to cross-breed the established genres.

Mind you, this isn't a slap at the considerable originality indies often display in their Burbanking of the categories. After all, some of the more recent sub-genres, such as Vampire Romance, are making their creators quite a lot of money. But it's important to remember that for every writer who breaks through with such an innovation, there are probably 999 others who've been turned aside -- and all of them for the same reason: an editor saying to himself, "can't imagine how to market it."

An adventurous, innovative writer must collide with an adventurous, innovative publisher's editor to break through in this fashion. To put it most gently, the likelihood of such a collision is poor.

This is a big part of the reason so many of us go indie in the first place. Pub World is highly resistant to bold innovations, with good reason: Most of them are impossible to market successfully. The publishing industry is under terrible pressure, and can't afford a lot of low-probability sorties. Even in the best of times, the marketing of fiction is very chancy, which is the main reason for editors' famous maxim: "Give us the same, only different."

If you're determined to cross genres in your work, you have to have the resolve of George Washington and the patience of Job. There are some exceptions: for example, the Resident Evil series of books and movies, which combine Zombie Horror with near-future Science Fiction. But cross-breeds whose elements contrast more sharply than that will have a tougher time finding an audience.

This is a particular thorn in my flesh: I write mainly contemporary supernatural-fantasy fiction laced with Christian motifs and themes. Promoting such fiction, even among persons willing to read indie work, is unspeakably difficult. I've had more editors than I can remember tell me that they love what I've written but "can't imagine how to market it."

(So what am I working on now? Why, a near-future Science Fiction saga with magical, political, Christian, and philosophical elements! Always up for an impossible challenge, that's me.)

One of our needs is to find a way to introduce our more radical cross-breedings to an audience -- an audience that might be no readier for them than is Pub World. Once again, everything counts and every little bit helps:

Clever blurbs,
Video trailers,
Loss-leaders and free excerpts,
Endorsements from better-known writers,
Glowing reviews.

But all of these things are already in play, at least among indies with a sense for the difficulties involved in marketing innovative work. What tactics are there that have yet to be pressed into service, and what would it cost to adopt them?

I yield the floor to my indie-writer colleagues!

Yet Another Reason to Take

2011-10-19T21:14:00.000-07:00

WHAT CRITTERS SAY (as opposed to betas -- critters are other writers; betas are readers; vast difference) with a grain of salt.

Back in ought-four or so, I was shopping Geppetto's Log, and there was a scene in which the Walkers met Drummond's then-and-soon-to-be-ex girlfriend, Semiramis East. And I wrote that Witchlet (who is a lipstick lesbian and GUG (Gay Until Graduation, except that she's a post-doc)) gets turned on and ogles Semi's hot body. Subtly, of course.

Since there's supposed to be sexual tension and love/hate/love attraction between Witchlet and Drummond, I figured, this is a good way to heighten all of that tension.

One of the critters came down with a "no woman would ever do/say/think that." Which, even then, I knew not to give much credence. The bit stayed in.

I do, however, feel vindicated.

Hat tip: Insty.

Cross-posted at BabyTrollBlog.

Niches And Style

2011-10-19T05:21:00.001-07:00

If you're a reader -- and I devoutly hope that you are, or what business would you have writing? -- you've surely noticed the multiplication of genres and sub-genres these past few years. Examples: Once upon a time there was just "Horror." Today we have several sub-genres of "Horror," including such gems as "Traditional Vampire," "Vampire Romance," "Traditional Werewolf," "Werewolf Romance," and "Zombie." (No, there's no "Zombie Romance"...yet.) In "Fantasy," we have "Medieval (High) Fantasy," "Urban Fantasy," "Horror Fantasy," and "Paranormal." (That last subdivides further into "Paranormal Thriller" and "Paranormal Romance.") In "Erotica," we have "Men's Erotica," "Women's Erotica," "Couples' Erotica," "BDSM Erotica," "Homosexual Erotica" (2 kinds), "Historical Erotica," and so on.

A genre is a marketing category -- a niche. Everyone in this avocation is looking for a niche in which he can gain acceptance. But each niche comes with its own requirements.

Yes, of course: You must have an appropriate sort of story for your niche, populated by the appropriate sort of characters and set in the appropriate sort of setting. But beyond that, you must have some facility with the niche's preferred style.

Some years ago, I wrote:

One of the oldest maxims of the fiction world is that one should write about what one knows. This applies broadly: to situations, to physical settings, to varieties of people and systems of belief, and so forth. It also applies to style. In fact, a strong corollary of that maxim is that, if a writer's style seems inadequate to the material he wants to write about, he should probably be writing about something else.
Do not attempt gothic fiction if you can't bring yourself to deal in macabre metaphors about shadow-infested settings and intimations of doom looming in the gloom.
Do not attempt "advanced" romance if you can't deal with suggestive looks and fleeting but meaningful brushes of hands or feet, or write indirectly but evocatively about sexual desire.
Do not attempt fantasy if the depiction of suffering, honor, or the clash of good and evil makes you cringe with embarrassment.
Do not attempt science fiction if you're a technophobe incapable of bringing a sense of wonder to the description of an imagined device.
Do not attempt "high literature" -- at all.

Style might not be "the man himself," as the Comte de Buffon said, but it's certainly relevant to what a writer ought to write -- i.e., toward what niche(s) he ought to steer his efforts.

A counterexample might help to clarify this. I have a certain weakness for thrillers of the sort written by Vince Flynn. (Mind you, I'm not proud of that; it's just germane to the topic.) Yet Flynn is one of the worst writers currently being published. He's grammatically inept. He almost never makes the appropriate choice between direct and indirect narration. He has no respect for viewpoint; he head-hops constantly, from paragraph to paragraph. His characters, apart from his beloved Mitch Rapp, are two-dimensional or worse. When he deigns to employ a device of any sort, it invariably proves to be the wrong sort for what he's describing. I could go on, but I believe the point has been made. And this is a man being published by a major publishing house! How could it be?

But I read his books. He's a few dollars better off because of me, despite his abominable style. Because in the niche Vince Flynn has made his own, considerations of style are almost irrelevant. Moreover, his publisher knows it.

This is demonstrably not the case in other genres. Most other genres do have a kind of style-requirement. Publishers who handle books in those genres are sensitive to such requirements, and will look askance at manuscripts that violate them. Vince Flynn could not succeed in fantasy or horror with the low-grade style he brings to his thrillers.

If you're a reader -- reread the first sentence of this tirade -- you already know this, even if you haven't yet articulated the knowledge. Incorporating the implication into your own writing is important, perhaps even critical, to the marketability of your work...whether you've gone indie or are pursuing conventional publication.

A few closing observations:

The style that characterizes a "parent" genre is not guaranteed to predominate in its sub-genres. At any rate, it's risky to assume the reverse.
The younger a genre is, the more fluid its stylistic demands will be. Inversely, a well-established genre is likely to be most inhospitable to those who deviate from its traditional style.
A genre that's dominated by a particular writer will also be dominated by his style. Therefore, absorbing as much of that writer's style as one can hold is probably the approach best suited to a writer who hopes to succeed in that genre.
Spelling and punctuation will always count.

Onward!

For Brave Indies Only

2011-10-17T05:51:00.001-07:00

If you seek an original slant for your fiction, I have one for you, but beware: you must be unusually brave to adopt it. Indeed, you have to be unusual in several ways.

That shouldn't be too hard a criterion to meet, should it? After all, going indie requires a fair amount of courage all by itself. No publisher; no marketing support; no squadrons of accountants and lawyers to steal from you, make your life a mess, and...hm, maybe we should let that subject pass. But still, an indie writer should be more courageous than the common herd, shouldn't he?

Maybe. But the evidence isn't accumulating very quickly. Of the fifty-plus indie novels I've read since I embarked on this adventure, I've encountered only one that was willing to deal with a genuinely controversial idea. All the same, here it is:

Write about the Undistributed Moral Middle.

It's not terribly clear when I put it that concisely, is it? Well, Mondays are tough on all of us. But explication follows.

There's a deep cleavage between moral judgment and legal judgment. However, most persons who hold specific moral views seem to think that what's morally wrong ought to be legally punishable, as well. For example: a writer who writes about the drug plague will usually take a legal position that "matches" his moral position, to wit:

Drug abuse is morally wrong; therefore, recreational drugs should be illegal; or:
Taking drugs recreationally is morally indifferent; therefore, it should be legal.

But there are two more combinations possible -- and they get very little attention from writers of fiction:

Drug abuse is morally wrong; but it should nevertheless be legal; or:
Taking drugs recreationally is morally indifferent, but it should remain illegal.

("And that completes our exploration of the 2 x 2 Cartesian product for today, class.")

You could get a lot of mileage out of a high-octane adventure featuring a hero who despises drug abuse and abusers, but finds himself compelled by his convictions about the proper reach of the law to defend them against the War on Drugs. Alternately, a hero who sees drug abusers as morally no worse than alcoholics, but prosecutes them relentlessly "for the good of society" could be a fascinating Marquee character in a legal drama. But these are not undertakings for the faint of heart -- especially since too many readers assume that the author's convictions must match those of his protagonist.

What's that? A drug-based conflict is too banal a plot element for you? Well, there are others. How about an anti-homosexuality preacher who becomes involved in protecting homosexuals from legal harassment and social opprobrium? How about an opponent of cross-racial adoptions who fights to protect a white couple that's raising a black child? Or if you're really brave, how about a pro-life activist who agrees to help protect an abortionist against physical assault, or a civil-rights campaigner who becomes emotionally involved with a devoted segregationist?

You'll need the ability to set aside your own strongly held moral convictions long enough to write sympathetically about someone with greatly different ones. You'll also need cojones the size of basketballs. But then, fiction is not an avocation for the pusillanimous!

How Long Will It Last

2011-10-15T06:46:00.000-07:00

I'VE WRITTEN SOME here and there that people make a serious mistake when they assume that current trends will continue straight-line. This is especially true when you consider that most trends are built from a single data point -- or two at best -- and a ruler. You don't know if that one data point is accurate, and with two, you don't know if either of them is accurate. To build a trend prediction on such thin data is arrant foolishness.

Bob Mayer writes with some countervailing thought to the current optimism that the current trend favoring independent publisher-authors cannot continue straight-line on its apparent path.

He reasons that there is no sense in assuming that the current players in these waters will stand thus amazed by the brilliance of the independent movement and not act to recover their previously (and current) dominant position in the market. Why should they?

Now, individuals and companies may make stupid moves and fall away. The die-off may make the extinction of the dinosaurs look like a mild flu epidemic, but there will be survivors among the current players, and they will more-than-likely dominate the market. They will embrace those parts of the independent movement that make sense to their business models, and they will co-opt those independents who look to be making good money, and the rest will either fall away or adapt.

Makes sense to me. The field will look differently in January, and will look differently in a year, two, and ten. But it's like a scene. If you write a scene in which your protagonist blows in, has his way with the antagonist, and the antagonist has nothing to say about it, no motivation to resist, no agenda of his own, you are going to tell yourself that's a stupid way to write a scene. So why would you assume that people would act like that in real life?

It's beginning to look as though there's a brief window of opportunity for pure-indie authors, that will last until next summer at the longest. Then the reaction of the New York houses will begin to take hold. I guess you could count that as a prediction, which looks like it might overestimate the intelligence and nimbleness of the traditional publishsing world. It'll be interesting to look back in June and see how wrong or right I was.

Cross-posted at BabyTrollBlog.

Writing Tool

2011-10-15T06:32:00.000-07:00

IF YOU'VE BEEN WRITING for long, seriously, or as a hobby, you've played with more than one application for getting the words out of your head. Text editors. Word processors. Page layout apps. Publishing apps.

And none of them were all that. For the most part, they were tools made for other purposes that you tried to make your projects fit into. Like an octagonal 9/16" peg in a pentagonal 3/32" hole. Or worse -- peg had 64 threads to the inch and the hole was threaded the opposite hand and, like, four to the inch.

And, if you followed the scene, you've probably heard of a bunch of apps that were supposedly meant for writers. One I looked at was meant for screen writers. Square peg; round hole. I figured. "Hey! I could use to be more like a teleplay and less like a set of those nesting Russian dolls with multiple layers of exposition."

Right?

And, if you really, really followed the scene, you've heard of this thing called Scrivener. And thought it would be the bees knees. And were absolutely crushed -- I mean ripped out your heart and stomped that sucker flat -- when you learned it was Mac-only.

Me, too. I know Macs. I've worked on them. I just never figured I could afford one for my home machine.

And, really, I'd be happy if all I had to write on was a DOS 3 box.

OK. I'm lying. I'd rather have the Mac. But -- seriously? The price?

So I stayed outside the candy store and drooled on the outside of the window, staring at this nirvana machine I'd never have.

But... about a year ago, they announced they were going to develop it for Windows. Then, a few months back, they announced they'd be releasing it RSN.

Like... November 7.

And it's available for a limited time free download in beta.(Expires November 7.) So you'll have to buy the real thing when it comes out. But, then, it's not that pricey, really.

And, yes, it is the bees knees.

I've been playing with it for a couple of days, now, and working my way through the manual -- which the publishers, Literature and Latte, freely admit is a bit of a dog's breakfast at the moment -- and have fallen in like with a fistful of the features.

First, there's the corkboard metaphor. Think of it as a storyboard with hyperlinks. I haven't worked with it extensively, but even at first glance, its utility -- having a means for tracking the meta-story that is tightly linked with the story itselef -- is just huge.

Same goes for the binder metaphor, wherein all of the documents associated with a project are arranged and interrelated to suit the author's fancy. Picture this: grab a scene as a discrete object and move it to a different place in the story, go read it, and edit the seque.

Space is made available for research.

A whole raft of input formats are supported -- all text and document formats, of course, but also .pdf, html, and e-reader formats. Same goes for output. Just imagine the possibilities. I have research scattered around my Dolly folder on my hard drive (and backups). It's in .doc format. It's captured Web pages -- some of which I've managed to keep the images, some not so much. But I can picture being able to suck a whole page off the Web into Scrivener and turning it into an eBook that you can read at leisure on your eReader, all while keeping it ready-for-reference in the project folder for your story.

Now I want to get a listing of the Dewey Decimal system. Purely for subject organization, mind.

Heard About But Never Seen

2011-10-14T05:35:00.000-07:00

Fictional characters, like the characters in a play, divide into three categories:

Marquee: These characters are the ones "whom the story is about." It's their challenges and responses we're mainly there to read about. Usually few in number.
Supporting Cast: Somewhat less important than the Marquee characters, their lives and deeds impinge significantly on one or more of the Marquee set, but they're normally only tangentially involved in the main plot thread. More likely to die in the course of the story than a Marquee character.
Spear Shakers: Gotta have a body there, that's all. No importance other than to fill a position that must be occupied by a human being. They usually have no lines and often are slaughtered in large numbers.

In the usual case, the reader doesn't trouble himself about the Spear Shakers, and will seldom become much concerned with the Supporting Cast. But recently I've become aware of a hybrid between those two categories: the character of limited but non-zero significance that never "appears on-stage."

An excellent example of such a character appears in Martin McPhillips's extraordinary thriller Corpse In Armor:

No one understood the potential of that disaster [federal involvement in a NYC terrorism investigation] better than the [NYPD police] commissioner, who didn't resent federal interference so much as he feared it. He saw their bull-in-china-shop ways as a danger to New York City. Everything he had done to strengthen NYPD's anti-terrorism capability was done with an eye to keeping the Feds at a safe distance. He intended to leave that as part of his legacy.
The term Rob used to summarize the style of his boss was "no bullshit." It would take fifty years, Rob said, before the story could be told of what the commissioner had done to protect the city from the next attack after 9/11. The insights, the strategies, and the tactical angles he developed were astonishing. He thought five or ten moves ahead, and always challenged conventional thinking.

The commissioner never appears in the immediate action of Corpse In Armor. He's heard about, and fairly frequently at that, but never seen, yet his significance is considerable: a key element in the terror plot under way requires his death or incapacitation. For the first half of the book, he looms over the action in a uniquely silent manner.

At one time, I would have said that to invent a character of any importance without allowing him to be glimpsed, at least, by the reader isn't quite cricket. But it appears that I've stumbled into the phenomenon myself:

Ernest wasn’t drunk. Not by his standards. He was just lubricated enough to be feeling good. When he set out to get drunk, he did a thorough job of it. Such occasions normally resulted in his waking up in one of his brother Raymond’s holding cells, after which Ray would give him a lecture about the importance of maintaining appearances and then send him home to Coretta. Ernest had learned how to shrug off the lectures long ago. He’d been ignoring Coretta for longer still.
Ray had thought to keep him on good behavior with that nonsense about calling him every night between eight and midnight, then had called him at eight-thirty. He’d probably gone to bed straight after. At forty-six, Ray acted like a dried-out stump of a man. All that money, power and position, and he couldn’t bring himself to enjoy it. No boozing. No gambling. No whores. Spent every night at home with his wife! Worse, he tried to impose his ways on Ernest at every opportunity.

The unseen wives of Raymond and Ernest Lawrence, though of less importance to the plot of Shadow Of A Sword than McPhillips's unseen NYPD police commissioner, do have an influence on the story, That influence is mainly on Raymond, who eventually takes action in a fashion that, shall we say, changes Ernest's fortunes rather radically.

I have no doubt that, were I to revisit any of the thousands of novels I've read, I'd find further examples of the "heard about but never seen" figure whose existence constrains or warps the actions of persons more visible to the reader. But are such characters "mistakes" in any sense, or are they an implicit acknowledgement that no story can hope to encompass the whole of the lives of its characters exhaustively and definitively?

Let's have some thoughts.

Grammar In Fiction

2011-10-12T05:51:00.001-07:00

Since World War II at least, the notion that the prescriptive rules of grammar, including those of spelling and punctuation, apply with full force to fiction writing has been derided at best, completely ignored at worst. The rationale seems to be that one who is attempting to depict fictional places, people, and events need not consider himself bound by rules that pertain only to the "real world." At any rate, that's the substance of the argument I get when I gig a fellow indie writer for a grammatical sin.

Now, I try not to be a martinet about it. There are clearly aspects of fictional prose, dialogue most prominent of all, where insisting on strict prescriptive grammar would make a story read poorly. It would strike a reader as absurd to confront modern American characters speaking as if they were grammarians from Tudor England. But that's not the whole story.

First: I cannot imagine an exculpation for bad spelling. Spell the word properly; if you're unsure of the proper spelling, look it up. Above all: Choose the right homonym. Your is not you're, their is neither there nor they're, and for God's sake, learn the differences between its and it's, and among to, too, and two! If your reader notes an error of this sort, it will diminish you seriously in his eyes, reducing the probability that he'll buy another book from you.

Good punctuation is almost as important as good spelling. Consider the following sentence as a demonstration of why this is so:

Sentences of a complexity that would have choked William Faulkner, involute as the general theory of relativity and twice as opaque, festooned with terms of that obfuscatory anfractuosity that characterizes the inferior mind struggling to pass itself off as a temple of erudition, wrap themselves around the reader's forebrain in braids of simulated profundity seldom properly equipped with the appropriate punctuation marks which after all are supports to both reading rhythm and comprehension and really shouldn't be dispensed with no matter what the effect the writer is striving to create.

Draw the moral. If you get my point, I need say no more; if you don't, I can't imagine how any further hectoring could make it clearer. For those who could use a refresher course in punctuation, Lynne Truss's delightful Eats, Shoots, and Leaves is quite as entertaining as it is instructive.

As for the rules of grammar in sentence construction, I must admit that strict grammar is both a very large study and a trap for the fiction writer. There are some rules of strict grammar that idiomatic American English has discarded, such as the rule against ending a sentence with a preposition. There are others that were never valid in the first place, such as the "anti-Star Trek rule" against splitting an infinitive, and the related rule against splitting a compound verb. But there is a core of rules of good grammar that are both imperative for the fiction writer and easy to obey. These are best illustrated with fumblerules: individual sentences that illustrate the importance of the rule by violating it. My preferred set of ten follows:

Avoid run-on sentences they are hard to read.
A writer mustn't shift your point of view.
No sentence fragments.
A pronoun should agree with their antecedent.
Verbs has to agree with their subjects.
And don't start a sentence with a conjunction.
Its very important that you use apostrophe's right.
Join clauses good, like a conjunction should.
Just between you and I case is important.
Eschew ampersands & abbreviations, etc.

Locate the errors in each sentence and you'll have the meat of the rule it expresses.

There are other "low-level" guidelines to composing good prose, of course, but the subject here is grammar in fiction, so I shall restrain myself from going off on any tangents, which are lines that intersect a curve at only one point and were discovered by Euclid, who lived in the sixth century, which was an era dominated by the Goths, who lived in what we now know as Poland...well, anyway. Why should I stand here asking rhetorical questions? And don't forget to kill all exclamation points!!!

You get the idea.

Cheaping It Out

2011-10-10T06:16:00.001-07:00

If indie writers have a common, characteristic sin, it would be the tendency to eschew certain supports to professionalism and marketing because they're "too expensive." The supports most often sloughed in this fashion are high-quality cover artwork, professional editing, and a first-rate promotional blurb.

No, a cover designer's services are not free. No, you can't expect a sharp-eyed editor to labor over your manuscript for love alone. Yes, it takes time and hard thought to create an intriguing, winning promo blurb, assuming you can do it at all. But just how many books can you expect to sell without these things? What hooks will pull a prospective purchaser toward your tome, if you can't catch his eye with your cover and his imagination with your blurb?

The typical purchaser spends no more than one minute on his decision to buy a particular book. Of those precious 60 seconds, the critical ones are the first 20, during which he's reacting to your cover art and absorbing your blurb. You'll only get his next 40 seconds if he regards the first 20 as well spent. His next 40 seconds will go to the first two pages of your book -- and may God help you if he spots a badly misspelled word or an egregious grammatical error.

The conventional publishing houses, which I've collectively nicknamed Pub World, understand these things from long and bitter experience. A significant fraction of their operating expenses go to cover, editing, and blurb composition. That's part of their rationale for glomming the lion's share of the revenues from your book. (And that little Pub World practice was one of the reasons you decided to go independent, wasn't it?)

There are freelance cover designers who'll do a cover painting for you, usually from a synopsis of your book. Some, such as my preferred cover artist, are quite inexpensive; these tend to work from a large portfolio of stock images, adding custom touches with a program such as Adobe's PhotoShop. Others, who start from a blank canvas and create a wholly original painting for each book, can cost hundreds or thousands of dollars. Similarly, there are freelance editors, available through sites such as this one, that will do a creditable job on just about any sort of manuscript. Some of those editors are relatively economical, while others who have longer and more impressive resumes will cost you heavily. They'll also do a blurb for you, sometimes for a few dollars more. But no matter where your cover art and blurb come from and no matter what they cost you, they are the critical front-line troops of your marketing campaign. They must not be stinted.

Therefore, when you decide to set out on the adventure of independent publishing, one of your mandatory first steps is deciding how much you're willing to spend on such things and then setting that amount aside, in cash. Trust me: You don't want to give birth to your novel, seriously out of breath and at the leading edge of post-partum depression, with that decision still unmade. Neither should you leave your choice of an editor to that point, but that's a topic for another tirade.

What's that you say? Good cover art and editing would run you $500 or $1000, and you just can't afford to set that much aside? It would deplete your pile of fun-chips just too tragically for you to bear, leaving you at home on Friday night while all your rowdy friends are living it up? Okay, stipulate it. But can you afford the terrible letdown from publishing a book that garners no readership? The odds of that outcome are increased sharply by parsimony about the elements of book marketing that you, the author, are ill-equipped to execute unaided.

Independent marketing and publishing can be a terrific experience, a true thrill ride. However, by going indie, you've substituted your skills and resources for those of a professional publishing house. That includes some measure of capital investment. It's not guaranteed that casting your bread upon the waters will gain you a sevenfold profit, but it's damned close to guaranteed that if you venture nothing beyond your words, you'll draw few readers and very little revenue.

Take it from a repentant sinner.

"Best-Selling"

2011-10-09T03:23:00.000-07:00

Continuing from the essay below, we must debunk the promotional motif of the "best-selling" writer. Cruising SmashWords for reading material -- hey, I can't spend all my time writing these sententious pieces -- I've noted about two dozen writers who've described themselves as "best-selling." Inasmuch as I read four or five books per week and I'd never heard of any of them before, it occurred to me that others might find this appellation as mysterious as "award-winning," and as worthy of explication.

Many, many periodicals maintain "best-seller lists." Which organ you read will determine which of them you're familiar with. New Yorkers tend to think of the New York Times and the list that appears in its Sunday Book Review section, and indeed, for a considerable spate of years I was unaware that other "best-seller lists" existed anywhere. But there are many; pick up the regional dailies from other cities and you'll find one in each -- and the books listed there aren't guaranteed to match those listed in the Times.

It's legitimate, albeit barely, to deem oneself a "best-selling writer" if one has ever-so-briefly occupied the #20 slot on the best-seller list of the Rat's-Ass, Nebraska Rumor and Stink, circulation 23, motto: "Road Kill Pics Page One Above-The-Fold." After all, the Rumor and Stink -- a fine publication, really; their coverage of homosexual necrophiliac bestiality scandals is unequaled by any periodical outside Zimbabwe -- has a perfect right to publish whatever sort of nonsense it deems "newsworthy," guaranteed by the First Amendment to the Constitution of these United States. But to grasp the full significance of being one of the R&S's "best-selling writers" requires a bit more information:

How is the list composed? Does the publication solicit sales figures nationally, regionally, or only from very local sellers? Does it include books sold over the Internet, and books distributed in electronic form? Does it even bother with sales figures? "Best-selling" doesn't have to mean "Most-selling."
Does the list deliberately exclude certain categories of books? It's been the case since Gutenberg that if all category restrictions are removed, the best-selling book is the Bible, and in places 2 though 10 are various cookbooks.
How often is the list updated? A list updated once per week will show results quite different from those of a list updated once per year -- especially since most booksellers don't keep sales figures around for that long.
Does the list have an agenda? That is, does it exist primarily to promote the works of certain writers, or of writers in the publication's area of circulation? Does it exist to push works with a particular social, cultural, or political slant? Oftentimes these little qualifications won't be mentioned even in the small print.

Being an honest man, I refrain from mentioning in my promotional forays that I was once mentioned in the "best-sellers" list of a very local paper. That paper was a shopping circular: a coupon-laden giveaway publication distributed for free at supermarkets and shopping centers in my area. It had a very specific agenda: to promote generally unknown and unheralded local writers to local readers. I wouldn't want anyone to draw the wrong conclusion about the popularity of my writing -- but that wrong conclusion is exactly what a lot of "best-selling writers" would like you to draw.

For the reader, it remains the case that the genre in which the writer labors and a sample of his work are better guides to whether you'll enjoy his stuff than any nonsense about awards or "best-selling" status. For the writer, here as in the business about awards, honesty is the best policy. Even the "award-winners" and "best-sellers" among us should display enough humility not to puff up their images beyond what's genuinely relevant to the readership we all seek.

"Award-Winning"

2011-10-08T06:17:00.001-07:00

Unless he has a large cadre of friends, family, and people who owe him money, an indie writer normally has to be his own promoter. For a one-man band who does his own publishing and marketing, that means grasping at any advantage he can find, however slight it might seem, and pushing it until all the nap has worn off.

One of the motifs I see frequently is that of the award-winning writer. A fair percentage of my fellow indie writers claim that status. Now, this isn't inherently illegitimate, but in the usual case, it raises important questions that are seldom answered, to wit:

What was the award?
Who decides on who or what wins it?
For which of his works did the writer win it?
Does the award-winning item bear any relation to the one being promoted?

For example, if I chose to do so, I could claim to be an "award-winning writer." I've won two short-story contests held by low-circulation magazines that cater to semi-pro writers. But I have more pride than to flaunt those "awards," as they were as minor as minor can get and have no imaginable relation to the novels I've written. So this is the one and only mention of them I've ever made, and probably will ever make.

It's hard to determine what value any promotional motif might possess. Maybe "award-winning" is more potent than I realize; I can only say that it's never had an effect on me...well, except for my immediate reaction of aversion to "literary works" awarded prizes by supercilious prize juries composed of previous "award-winning" writers. But then, most "literary" fiction strikes me as verbal masturbation, whose writer should have the decency to keep it to himself.

I tend to select indie works to read by the same criteria I've always used in choosing reading material:

Do I know anyone who knows of this writer? What was his opinion of the man's work?
Has a writer whom I regard favorably endorsed this book?
What does the promotional precis -- the equivalent of a dust-jacket or back-cover blurb -- do for me?
Is there an online sample by which I can get a sense for the book's pace, tone, and the skill level of its execution?
Can I afford the price requested and the reading time required?

Once in a great while, I'll read a book because it's won a particular award with which I'm familiar. The Hugos and Nebulas, awarded to works of science fiction, and the World Fantasy Award, which is bestowed on works of fantasy, will sometimes influence me positively. But in the main, the considerations bulleted above are the ones that will govern my decisions...and I have little doubt that most readers who aren't writers use criteria very similar to them.

In time, there will arise awards, and committees to administer them, relevant to the indie writer. Hopefully, some will be awarded by readers, and others by indie writers, the better to accommodate a spread of tastes. But it will take time. In the meantime, any of y'all who claim to be "award winners" should be a mite more specific about those awards -- and don't neglect to craft good promotional blurbs, offer substantial free samples, and maybe a few "loss leaders" to whet our appetites!

Everything counts. Even for "award winners!"

Over the Past

2011-10-08T05:14:00.000-07:00

COUPLE OF WHATEVERS (weeks, months, years -- whatever), there's been a whole tank-car full of pixels expended on the death throes of the traditional, New York publishing houses. I'm not certain that all of those houses will be going away in the near future -- only the ones who aren't smart and nimble enough to adapt to new realities. (I'm betting on Baen's making the transition handily, inter-unnamed-alia.)

David Gaughran has a take on some of it.

Here's an illustration of how easy it is to do some of the mechanics of this.

I got a late start on my dinner Wednesday night. It was coming down on eight-thirty, and I'd just thrown some sirloin cubes on to brown. Figure five minutes per turn/stir. I picked up my Kindle and realized I'd finished the book I was reading. I wanted to read the sequel, but knew it wasn't available on Amazon, so googled for another edition. What I found was in Word .doc format. So I dl'd it. At the same time, I googled, dl'd, and installed Calibre. That's just by way of telling you I had no experience or practice in the process. While I was at it, I found the third book in the series in .doc format. (These are all out of copyright, BTW, by a long-dead author so I'm not ripping off the author or anything.)

I loaded the .doc formats into Calibre. Tried a conversion. Got told I needed Open Office format. Fair enough. Fire up OOO Writer. Text is unbroken. Go through and put hard page breaks before all the chapter starts. Save. Re-load in Calibre.

In between this, I'm popping downstairs every five minutes to stir my beef.

By 9:00, I was eating my own idiosyncratic steak-and-eggs, reading the sequel to the book I'd finished at 8:30 -- having, in essence, self-published the book.

Food for, as they say, thought.

Cross-posted at BabyTrollBlog.

Musings on Learning Your Craft

2011-10-08T05:11:00.000-07:00

SCIENCE FICTION author Sarah Hoyt posts on a text on writing called The Art of War for Writers. And her take on it seems spot-on.

But I want to jump off from that to this: If you're anything like me, and have any history at all of trying to break into the publishing game, you have a shelf -- heck, several shelves -- of fiction writing how-to texts. If you're anything like me, you even have special edition sets of how-to texts, such as the one from Writers Digest Books on writing fantasy and science fiction.

I'm here to at least get you to think about throwing them away. Or taking them to Half Price Books or some-such. Or, at least (probably) half of them -- the ones that purport to tell you how to write a story or novel to fit a particular market or market segment.

Why?

Because the market is in a state of flux. Entropy. Change. Chaos and opportunity abound. Nobody knows, and everybody thinks they know, what the market will look like tomorrow, next week, or next year. Truth be told, nobody ever did, they just faked it better in the old days.

No. What the future of the market looks like will have to wait until it gets here. But there is one thing for certain that the winners in it will all have in common: quality of story.

And THAT, grasshopper, is where you should concentrate your study: not seeking shortcuts to fame and fortune in sci-fi techno thriller murder horror mystery, but in honing your craft at telling good, compelling, and affecting stories.

And dump the rest as excess baggage.

Cross-posted at BabyTrollBlog.

By the Way, I Have

2011-10-08T05:09:00.000-07:00

RECENTLY BEEN PUSHING as a source of authority author/publisher/editor Dean Wesley Smith. I have to admit, before I read of him in Sarah Hoyt's blog posts, I'd never heard of him. However, once referred, I went and saw for myself. (So should you.) And I got sucked in.

Part of it, I'm sure is due to confirmation bias. DWS is saying things -- and dissecting old publishing shibboleths -- that I have thought for years.

Back when I was involved as a sysop on CompuServe, I worked with the science fiction author Jack L. Chalker, who filled me up with a lot of lore about the writing and publishing game, including the canard that there were no more than 3,000 (number varies) fiction writers in the U.S. who earned a full-time living at it. I've heard that one retailed many, many times since.

This myth "You can't make a living writing fiction" is so clearly hogwash, I shouldn't have to include it as a chapter in this book. All anyone has to do is look at a certain fantasy writer in England being richer than the Queen. And the number of fiction writers on the Forbes List every year. And that's not counting all the writers publishing their sales numbers each month just from Kindle alone.

...

So what about when you hear this myth spouted by a big name bestseller? I heard a New York Times bestseller in a keynote speech once tell 500 people there were only two hundred people in the nation making a living at fiction. Kris and I almost fell out of our chairs laughing, but we were just about the only people in the room laughing. Everyone else thought he was right. As it happens, I'm sitting next to him on a panel the very next hour, so as we were talking, I turned to him and said, "You know that 200 number is totally wrong."

He look sort of stunned and said, "That's what I had always heard." (The myth hits again and is repeated by big-name writer who is making millions.)

I said, "If that's the case, then don't you find it pretty amazing that there are seven of the two hundred on this one panel?"

He looked down the panel at the seven of us, all full-time fiction writers sitting on the panel. Then I asked the 100 people in the room how many were writers making at least $80,000 per year with their fiction writing. Five more people, two of whom I recognized, raised their hands. Twelve of us in the same room at a writer's convention. That stunned the keynote speaker, let me tell you, and we ended up spending the entire panel talking about this myth. And where that 200 number came from in the myth.
- DWS, from Killing the Sacred Cows of Publishing

Which is all very well, but, since -- as I said in this post -- it's raining soup, how do you get your hands on a bucket?

And -- here's my point -- DWS is out to tell you at the very least how to figure that out. He's writing a book, and posting it free on his blog. It starts here. RTWT. Or, not -- at your own peril.

Cross-posted at BabyTrollBlog.

Do the Math

2011-10-08T05:07:00.000-07:00

DEAN WESLEY SMITH DOES SOME and explains a few facts of life in the publishing biz as she is becoming, and not as the legacy folk would have her roll.

Pay particular attention to both the actual numbers and the calculus used to derive them. It should prove to be of value to you, do you desire to make money at this game we call writing independently.

Cross-posted at BabyTrollBlog.

Stylin'

2011-10-08T05:06:00.001-07:00

PASSIVE GUY on Thursday took note of an item at The Book Designer on styles. A.K.A. Named Styles.

Learn it. Live it. Love it.

Strong discipline in using Styles and NOT -- EVER -- using what Joel is calling Local Formatting has long been the hallmark of a professional. This is why standard manuscript format specifies a plain, serif, monospaced typewriter face, certain line length and spacing rules, no double-word-spacing after periods, etc. Why? Because it makes it possible for a typesetter simply pour text into a page layout program -- such as PageMaker, Ventura Publisher, QuarkXPress, or -- latterly -- InDesign -- and get on with the job, without having to comb through the MS-becoming-a-book ONE MORE time to fix errant styles.

Now that you're an indie, you are your own publisher. This also means you are your own typesetter and book designer. There are major and minor arcana of book design, some of which you must learn -- fail at your peril -- and some you may ignore. But know this: no matter which class an item falls into, following a disciplined workflow -- of which standard MS format and the use of Named Styles are the first steps -- will help to ensure that your output is professional in appearance and function.

Why does it matter? Does the appearance of your work matter? Does neatness count? Do you even have to ask? Take a samizdat book that's typeset in Courier, with uneven line spacing, pages all wibberty-jobberty, inconsistent styling of various page elements. Compare it to a book that's professional in design and appearance. Which are you more likely to plunk down good money for? Or, having bought both, from which author are you likely to buy a second book?

Yes, poseurs and hacks like to poke fun at "slick" production values. But, as a professional, allow me to assure you, those production values exist for a very good reason. And, if you want your book to look like samizdat, or a Xeroxed MS, passed form hand-to-hand in the underground, well, that's a style, too, and it takes a great deal more artifice to produce than the "slick" standard production values take.

But, if you want to make money -- or even your living -- as a self-published writer, then it behooves you to follow a disciplined workflow that delivers consistently professional results to your ultime customers -- the readers.

Update: In illustration (and an example of why I HATE-HATE-HATE Blogger), I just had to go back through all of the blog posts I made today and take out extra paragraph spaces that were leaving unseemly vertical gaps in my text. Now, browsers are supposed to remove excess space in text, so the Blogger algorithms have to be egregiously stupid to insert extra space, that is left in the HTML code to enhance human-readability, into what is displayed in a browser window. But you encounter these little glitches all the time. Each instance of your work's appearance in public -- different e-readers, different Web browsers, different reader preferencs -- will affect how your text is displayed, and you MUST pay attention to the details. People will notice. They may not be able to articulate WHY they hated that book layout, but they will. And it will reflect on the author, not the publisher. Which means they will be less willing to spend money on your books NEXT time.

Yet Another Firehose

2011-10-08T05:00:00.000-07:00

OF INFORMATION ABOUT e-pubbing and self-pubbing for you to try to drink at Writer Beware (an independent subsidiary service of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA)). (With the caveat that these are largely folk embedded in the "tradpub" range of things.)

As I look at these sources myself, I add the ones I think may be of enduring value to my blogroll on the BabyTrollBlog site.

Posted in modified form at BabyTrollBlog.

"Tough Chick Lit"

2011-10-07T04:31:00.001-07:00

Any number of writers -- mostly women, of course -- have established themselves among readers as purveyors of "chick lit:" romantically toned stories, with or without a sexual gloss, intended to appeal to the softer side of the fairer sex. The underlying theme -- in the writer's mind, not the reader's -- is that more women are interested in stories of love and romance than in adventures, speculations, mysteries, or other sorts. Though there are exceptions -- I'm married to a murder-mystery addict who disdains "pink and purple books" -- enough romance writers have prospered to lend some credence to the notion.

(Florence King, in her wonderful compendium STET, Damnit!, tells briefly of her foray into chick lit: her novel The Barbarian Princess, which apparently made her quite a lot of money but left her with several lifelong "tics" and an unshakable resolve never, ever, to do that again. It's well worth your time -- her tale of the novel's creation, not the novel itself.)

But in recent decades, we've seen an explosion of stories about a different sort of heroine: the "tough chick," capable of going mano a mano with any man and willing to do so for what she (at least) thinks a good cause. Indeed, "tough chicks" seem to dominate adventure and speculative writing today. Though "tough chick" adventures are more likely to issue from female than male writers, they're more popular with male than female readers -- and quite profitably popular at that, if the displays at Barnes & Noble are any indication. The temptation to dip a toe into those waters can overcome even the manliest man, as I should know.

The "tough chick" heroine needn't be un-feminine. When she's not duking it out with the forces of evil, she can display as much interest in traditionally feminine interests (e.g., clothing, shoes, makeup, romance, Real Housewives of New Jersey reruns) as any other gal. Her distinguishing characteristic is physical prowess; she doesn't retreat from the action while the menfolk handle it. Indeed, it's rather more likely that the menfolk will hide behind her.

But "tough chick lit" requires a lot of willing suspension of disbelief from the reader. It's not that there are no women like that in real life, but that they're very rare. Yes, we have female sports figures who approximate such characters when on the playing field, but transplanting them into tales of intrigue, combat, and bloodshed, and giving them the starring role, is a trial of the imagination. There aren't a lot of Xena types in our normal experience.

All of this compels us to confront several questions:

Does a "tough chick" heroine properly belong only in the speculative genres, or can she "work" in more mainstream settings?
Can such a heroine be adequately humanized to appeal to readers of both sexes?
Does "tough chick lit" have a future as a genre of its own, or will it ultimately prove to be a fad, such as the current, never-ending fad for fiction about vampires?

Thoughts?

"But What Does She Look Like?"

2011-10-05T14:00:00.000-07:00

Some of the most important learning a writer does comes from reading his own work, long after he's finished it.

I've always had an aversion to extensive descriptions. Most of them strike me as ballast: they weigh down a story without contributing to its plot, its characters, or the exposition of its theme. But here I speak of descriptions of the characters' surroundings, which is usually called the setting. I have no particular aversion to descriptions of the characters themselves.

At least, I didn't think I did.

But recently, I was minded by a reader's comments to go back through the "Realm of Essences" novels (Chosen One, On Broken Wings, and Shadow Of A Sword) and in the process noticed how seldom I describe the physical appearance of a Marquee character.

It happens, now and then. But in the usual case, the Marquee character in a scene has the viewpoint, which makes it awkward to describe his face, physique, or clothing. And seldom, after that character has "made his bow," do I bother to describe him through another character's eyes.

Mind you, I've gotten no -- zero -- complaints about this. One reader did mention it, but in a neutral fashion. It has me wondering: Do my readers not need such descriptions? Have they arrived at their own conceptions of my characters' appearances, such that no elaboration from me is required?

There may be some virtue in this. A writer wants his readers to identify with his protagonists; it intensifies the emotional journey they take through the novel. Part of the identification process probably involves some sort of appearance-transference. But an explicit description of a character's appearance just might get in the way of the reader's bonding, in that it would make it harder for him to see the character as himself.

Whatever the case, it was a discovery of some moment. It leaves me wondering whether I should leave well enough alone, or attempt to override my natural inclinations.

Thoughts?

Been Meaning to Address This

2011-10-03T20:46:00.000-07:00

WHOLE TOPIC OF COVERS from the perspective of an indie writer, but keep hesitating because... well... A) I'm not 100% sure of my ground, for starters, and 2) the topic seems rather large and therefor daunting.I do have relevant experience -- 30 years of it as a world-class pro -- but keep wondering just what it is they know that I don't. (They being the designers in the New York Houses.)

But it's an important topic, I think, so I'm gonna take a stab or two at it.

As I see it there are three things you can do to ensure sales, and repeat sales.

First and foremost is to write quality content. No matter what else you take away from my musings, know this: your best -- and ultimately only effective -- method of promotion and advertising is word-of-mouth. This has been demonstrated so dispositively as to be beyond dispute. The reason you get word-of-mouth is that you have so impressed readers that they can be moved to say something to other people about this book they just read.

Third is to price your book appropriately. Lowball pricing is a signal, too. Books that people have never heard of by authors they've never heard of that are being given away free -- with the possible special context of an explicitly promotional giveaway -- send a signal that potential readers will react to by asking, "What's wrong with it?" They may not say that -- or even think it -- out loud, but it will cross their minds, if only as a momentary flash of thought. Books that are priced inappropriately low betray a lack of confidence in the quality of the work, as though the publisher (that's you,
bunky: as an indie author, you are also the publisher) doesn't really believe the work is up to snuff and people won't buy it unless it's cheap. In fact, I suspect, the opposite is true: if it's not priced right, how can it be worth anything?

Now, yes, fans of authors, or readers of classics, will spend hours on the Gutenberg Project site, downloading free eBooks to their Kindles, like so many monkeys on crack. (Trust me; I've done it.) But that's like found money. If they had the money, they'd buy those books in paper in a flash. But they don't, so they go for the free stuff. But they already know that product, and just want to own it for themselves. YOU, dear reader/writer, are in an entirely other position. YOU they don't know, and the only things the have to judge you on are word of mouth from other readers, the confidence you display in pricing the thing right, and the quality of the cover art you display online.

Which is the second item in my list. More important than price, but less-so than word-of-mouth in the cosmic scheme of things.

Book covers are part of the larger topic of book design. Some points to consider, albeit not all relevant in the eBook world, appear Monday at AuthoPublisher. Not all of them are entirely relevant. It seems eBook readers, such as Kindle, take overmuch influence over style from the Web, which -- after all -- was set up by engineers and programmers, not designers, and shows it. You don't have a lot of choice in typestyle, as far as I can tell, in the .mobi format. You do in .pdf, but there are problems with that. You can't dictate line lengths without ruining text flow when your reader changes the font size, so you have to live with the reader's defaults. But there are choices you can make -- those relating to more-generic text issues, such as using "smart" quotes and proper dashes, and the like. (I think the Chicago Manual is full of it on ellipses, by the way, and I'll own that.)

All that will only be seen by your reader once the eBook is already sold. That reflects on your attitude toward quality and professionalism in the presentation of your work, and that will affect -- however subtly -- future sales to the same readers. But only that.

But the cover, now... That is your billboard, your advertisement in the prime position that Amazon and Smashwords and the rest give you when you sell through them. And, pace Dean Wesley Smith, if you produce your cover in MS PowerPoint with stock imagery, it's going to look it. And, for all the endless platitudinizing about how you can't judge a book by its cover, you can. And people do. If covers didn't affect sales, trust me: books would be sold with plain covers. In stock wallpaper patterns, maybe, but no custom graphics or embossed titles or holographic foil substrates. That stuff's expensive, and it's not there for decoration, it's there to get the browsing reader's attention on the shelf. And it serves the same function on an Amazon search page, or the item listing.

And, having gotten this far, and not touched the actual specifics of the topic, I realize I must continue another time, and so can only admonish you, Gentle Reader to Watch This Space -- More To Come.

(Hat tip: Passive Guy.

Kris Rusch

2011-10-03T20:43:00.001-07:00

CONFRONTS HEAD-ON the blinders-on approach of traditional publishing to the oncoming changes in the book market. She links to a blogger who is apparently listened to in the corridors of powah in New Yawk Citteh. The man sounds to me like he's trying to impress with his erudition to cover his lack of substance. That is to say, he can't dazzle us with brilliance, he'll try to baffle us with bullshit.

He asserts that nobody can know what's coming down the pike. Which might be true if you wanted an absolute prediction of millimetric precision for two years out, every weekly high and low. But to garner a general impression of what's up, one only need to open his eyes.

The thinking of the publishing industry -- really, of every industry threatened with obsolescence as an effect of advancing technology -- looks a lot to me like the magical thinking in other arenas: leftist statists and government "solutions" to problems and non-problems alike; warmistas and their hockey sticks; buggy-whip manufacturers... They tend to assume that trends will continue straight-line. Which trends never do. They curve down. They curve up. They curve sideways. They corkscrew. But they never continue straight-line. Why people always act as though they do is frankly beyond me.

People poo-poo the possibility that DiY authors can successfully market their own books. You need editors. You need book designers. You need cover artists. You need typesetters. If you go to press, you need expert printers who know how to not only put ink on paper, but how to bind the books. I know something about these things, and for people living in the future that started in the late '70s and devastated vast swathes of the graphic arts, they really ought to know better. People in the printing business said the same things: you're never going to get the same levels of quality; you can't get the color matches, the saturation, the clarity with halography that you can from offset lithography or rotogravure. Print-on-demand will fall down when it comes to binding books in small quantities. And so-forth.

People in entrenched positions are whistling past the graveyard. Like so many Neros, they fiddle while the burning Titanic sinks beneath the waves, the deck chairs sliding down the inclined teak. They make the same mistake so many have made in the past when faced with losing position and privileges to progress. They discount human ingenuity. And, as I say, they assume present trends will continue straight-line.

People will push. If you can't publish an illustrated book on Kindle, then people will seek out other platforms, where illustrations can be served up. And Amazon will either adapt or die. (And Wednesday's release of the Kindle Fire should provide abundant notice as to which way Amazon's management is playing things.) If publishing picture books isn't on, creators will push until it is.

I hear Kris Rusch's linked-to blogger wondering what market there will be for adult illustrated books, and wonder if this guy has been living under a rock in a Geico commercial for the last decade or so ... has he never heard of Frank Miller's Sin City or The 300? Is he familiar with the body of work by Neil Gaiman? Does the phrase Ghost in the Shell mean nothing to him? Does he know that national borders mean less and less with every passing day? Is he aware that an entire nation of hundreds of millions of people supports thriving industry of adult illustrated books? Does he think Manga in e-Book format wouldn't drive the development of e-Readers?

Does Kindle DX mean nothing?

What flabbergasts me is the seemingly deliberate obtuseness. Do these people not WANT to make money? As Heinlein said, it's raining soup! Grab a bucket!

SwearToGod

2011-10-03T20:40:00.000-07:00

I'M GONNA START writing third-person pronouns in the genetive case with interstitial apostrophes...

JUST LIKE ALL YOU SEMI-LITERATE MONKEYS DO WITH THE THIRD PERSON NEUTER!

Do you write hi's? Do you write her's? WHYOHWHYONEARTH, then, do you write it's for a third person neuter possessive pronoun?

I saw it in the Kindle User's Guide, fercrissake! Sheesh! Get a frigging editor who didn't fail second grade phonetics!

It's (NOTE: contraction from "it is".) considered declasse to correct people's spelling online. "It's a fast-paced medium," they say, "with millions of people typing trillions of words daily. You can't police them all. Save your blood pressure and bandwidth and let it slide."

"When rape is inevitable, lie back and try to enjoy it. Think of England."

And, although it does forsooth corrupt the dialectic, as it degrades the clarity of verbal communication, the error in usage represented is a small thing.

BUT! But: but...

Like a broken window in an abandoned building, poor usage in any form encourages worse crimes. And, as I say of egregiously bad drivers, the reason they get away with it is that people let them get away with it; blow your horn. So, too, here. If somebody doesn't mention it at least once a day, the notion of correct spelling, grammar, vocabulary, and syntax in written communication being a sine qua non sinks beneath the waves of those trillions of words.

Older Writers are Flocking to ePub!

2011-10-03T11:55:00.000-07:00

Legitimacy often arrives with a name tag on it. In some cases, several name tags.

In recent weeks, it's been my pleasure to notice several "big names" over at SmashWords, which is the major retail spot for my crap. I was particularly pleased to see that Lawrence Block, acclaimed suspense writer and a personal favorite of mine, has posted twelve items for sale there -- and at very modest prices, at that.

The arrival of writers whose work has already passed muster with Pub World's editors and marketers lends legitimacy to ePublishing as a medium. Needless to say, it does nothing for any particular indie writer, but it does help to dispel the fog of "Skid Row Publications" that had clung to electronic publication lo! these many moons.

If well-regarded, widely recognized writers consider ePublication to be worthy of their efforts, what's holding you back, Gentle Reader? Why not take a spin on the carousel for yourself, perhaps with a favorite short story or novelette? You might make a few bucks. Better yet -- and this is solely my personal opinion -- you might get the far greater pleasure of having readers write to you and thank you for your contribution to their worlds.

(Maybe I'll transcribe a few of the notes I've received from appreciative readers for a future post. If you haven't yet had the pleasure, you can't imagine the smile it will put on your face. Take my word for it: It beats twenty-year-old Scotch, Haagen-Dazs Coffee Ice Cream, and orgasm all hollow -- singly or in any combination you can manage!)

Experiment Concluded, Results Negative

2011-09-29T04:07:00.001-07:00

When my eBooks were $0.99 US, I sold a couple every day, typically twenty to thirty in the course of a two-week period. But, seduced by flattery and respectful of the counsel of an Esteemed Co-Conspirator, I decided to experiment with "going up-market," and pricing my stuff according to the "current 'list' pricing."

That was two weeks ago. Total eBooks sold over that interval: ZERO.

I've restored the original $0.99 US prices. In my estimation, what matters most is not that my eBooks are of "the highest professional calibre," but rather that they're the works of an indie author who's never been "vetted" by Pub World's gimlet-eyed editors and cold-hearted marketing analysts. In other words, "Who the BLEEP! are you to be asking 'regular' prices for your crap, Porretto?"

We live and we learn.

Pulling 'Em In

2011-09-27T05:48:00.001-07:00

The indie author's severest challenge remains what it's always been: persuading readers to give him a try. Few of us, no matter our skills as storytellers, approach that task with anything but trepidation.

There are a few well-known techniques, and each of them works now and then: giving away bits of your work as "loss leaders;" obtaining recommendations from better-known writers; leaving your books around where others might notice them; using blogs and Twitter as vehicles for promotion; and so on. The efficacy of these approaches varies from writer to writer, and from book to book, and from season to season.

Recently, while looking for some indie SF to read, I stumbled over young-adult writer Jalex Hansen. Miss Hansen displays a charming quirkiness in her brief SmashWords bio:

Jalex Hansen was conceived during an interplanetary war when her mother, a high ranking officer, captured and interrogated her father, a triple agent for the opposing side. She is fluent in seven ancient fighting styles and has cured cancer on her home planet. Jalex has mastered time travel and occasionally watches through your window at night for data in her human sleep study. Sometimes she writes.

The first of her offerings, Lux 1.1: Seeds, is free to all comers, so I downloaded it and read it. Though it has a few low-level problems, it's an impressive start to her Lux saga: impressive enough to impel me to purchase the next two segments at $0.99 US apiece.

Note the sequence:

An interesting "biography;"
A free introductory segment;
Each of the subsequent segments, issued at three-week intervals, at an extremely modest price.

Friends, as a reader-seduction technique, this one has considerable appeal.

Just in case you're unaware of it, the foremost storyteller of our time, the great Stephen King, issued The Green Mile, his "serial thriller" and one of his very best novels, in just about exactly the same fashion. It was a tremendous hit, and generated considerable excitement among readers precisely because of the method of issuance.

Now you might say to yourself, "Okay, it worked for Stephen King, but I'm not Stephen King." And unless King himself is one of the readers of this modest little blog, you would be indisputably correct, at least as regards technical matters of identity. But if you're struggling for recognition in a sea of independent writers, this is an approach worthy of consideration.

Of course, your book must be susceptible to serialization. Not all novel-length works can be segmented thus; I don't think mine can, with the possible exception of Which Art In Hope. But if yours can, and if you're willing to take a modest chance on your ability to hold a reader's interest through three or five or seventeen time-sequenced segments of your saga, the idea is worth some thought.

If serialization isn't for you, then perhaps a loss-leader strategy would serve as a near equivalent: Pick something to give away -- hopefully, one of your stronger stories -- and include an "Other books by" page at the front or back. If Miss Hansen's experience is any guide -- her Lux series stands among the top-rated SF offerings for the Kindle on Amazon -- the results might please you greatly.

He Said, She Said -- But How?

2011-09-23T05:48:00.001-07:00

Adverbs! They're everywhere. You simply can't get away from them. Especially in writing dialogue tags.

Breathes there an aspiring writer who hasn't been told, "Keep it to 'he said' or 'she said!'" until he reflexively cringes at the suggestion?

But...why? Why are adverbs on dialogue tags a bad idea? Because of the dreaded "Tom Swifty?" Because of editorial preferences? Because it's au courant to write like Hemingway?

There are reasons. Those three are among the most compelling, though stark, no-modifiers Hemingwayesque prose has recently suffered a downturn in popularity. But there's another reason that strikes this writer, at least, as of greater import.

The adverb attached to a dialogue tag can undermine your dialogue. Alternately, if your dialogue is already weak, the adverb might be there as a "crutch."

Good dialogue, properly assisted by the surrounding narration, carries its own weight. It expresses the speaker's emotional state clearly enough that an adverb is not required -- and as Orwell himself has told us, "If you can cut a word out, always cut it out." Consider the following passage as an example:

    Allan parked and locked his truck, immediately went around the house to the fields, and found Kate in the barn, laboring over their tractor, doing something incomprehensible to an assembly he couldn't even name.

    "Nellie not well?"

    Kate looked up, startled. "Oh!" She set her tools down delicately, ran to him and wrapped her arms around him. "No, she's okay. I was just resetting the valve gaps and the timing so we could run her on cheaper fuel. Costs about five horsepower, but for what I use her for, that's okay."

    "Why bother? We're not hurting for money."

    "So we should spend it unnecessarily? What kind of farm boy are you, sweetie?"

    He swallowed and dropped his eyes. "A sterile one."

    He heard her breath catch, felt her arms tighten spasmically.

    "No doubt about it?"

    Allan shook his head. "None. No treatments for it, either."

    She buried her face against his chest.

    She wanted babies so badly. What will this change? Will she stop wanting to be with me? Stop loving me?

    "It doesn't matter." The words were muffled against his chest.

    "Hm?"

    "It doesn't matter!" She tilted her head back to look into his eyes. "We have the farm. We have what we grow. We have each other. That's enough for me." Her jaw tightened visibly. "Is it enough for you?"

    He stroked her back and shoulders. "Kate, you are the only thing in this world I really, truly need. I'd have loved to give you children. I wanted them just as much as you. But if you can bear this, as hard as I know it must be for you, then I can do it easily." He ran his fingers through her hair and laid his palms along the sides of her face. "As long as I have you."

    She stared hard into his eyes, and he grew briefly afraid.

    "Oh, you have me, all right," she whispered. "It's a good thing that's okay by you, 'cause I'm the one thing you can't get rid of. You could burn the house down and salt the ground, and I'd stand by you. You could bring home a second wife, and I'd stand by you. This disappointment is nothing compared to how I love you."

    She nudged him out of the barn, slid the door closed, and pulled him up the incline toward their house.

    "And I mean to make you feel it right now."

[From Farm Girl]

I'm a dialogue specialist; at any rate, it's the thing I do best. I try to structure conversations between my characters so that dialogue tags are as infrequent as possible. But would any adverbial attributions of emotion do anything to make the emotions behind the conversation above clearer or more intense?

In contrast, we have dialogue too feeble to stand on its own two legs. Consider the following trivial example:

"You can't talk to me like that," she said angrily.

"Angrily"? Really? Not lovingly or boredly or thoughtfully? What an incredible surprise.

The adverb in that example is not only an unnecessary word; it's an insult to the reader's intelligence. Why is it there?

Because the writer knew his line of dialogue was cliched and weak, that's why. Because he preferred to hack it with a tonal attribution rather than give his character and his story enough thought to come up with something strong enough to carry itself. In other words, because he's a lazy bum.

Lazy bum writers don't attract a lot of readers. The ones they do get are less than penetrating.

Of course, the classical Tom Swifty, such as those celebrated at the site linked above, is the intentional use of an adverb to create a humorous clash with the dialogue, as for example:

"My girl prefers lamb's-wool sweaters," Tom said sheepishly.

"What our team needs is a man who can hit 60 homers a season," Tom said ruthlessly.

"I'll have another martini," Tom said drily.

The tonal attribution in the hands of the inept writer doesn't entertain as those do. It merely makes the reader more conscious of the weakness of the attributed dialogue. Clumsy tonal attributions are probably the most common reason for an editor to reject a submitted story without reading it to the end.

The above is not an argument for absolutely avoiding all adverbial attributions in your dialogue tags. but surely it depicts the dangers involved. This is really a special case of a general rule: In good prose of any sort, every word carries its own weight; none of them are unnecessary. In other words, Don't waste your readers' time!

More On Erotica

2011-09-21T07:31:00.001-07:00

Ever since I posted this article, I've been getting email questioning my stance on erotica. Not all of it is of the "How can a devout Catholic write erotic fiction?" variety, though there's some of that (answer to come at the end of this article). Most of it, in fact, is about how to produce erotica that isn't too obviously erotica -- in other words, how to write about sex in such a fashion that your true aim (i.e., to write about sex) is concealed behind the story you tell.

And it is a very good question indeed. In fact, it goes to the heart of the storyteller's art: what you must do to produce fiction worthy of anyone's time. The answer is charmingly paradoxical: Don't write about sex.

"I contradict myself? Very well: I contradict myself. I am large; I contain multitudes." -- Walt Whitman.

Write about human yearnings: for love; for acceptance by a beloved other; for an end to solitude; for release from the constraints of your community; for the need to know that even in your most extreme aspects you're not alone. Write about what happens to your protagonists when those yearnings incur sexual consequences. Be tasteful about those consequences; it's very easy to be far too explicit about the sex act itself. At all costs stay close to your theme: the particular truth about Mankind you've chosen to express in your story.

One of my favorite stories is a good example of what I mean. As it opens, we learn that the unnamed protagonist has done something with erotic overtones, though those overtones are anything but explicit. The deed leads her to a sex act -- masturbation -- that couples in a fairly subtle way to what she really wants. That yearning, unexpressed throughout the previous narration, is the key to her situation and her behavior. Yes, it's erotica in the technical sense...but thematically, it goes well beyond that.

Try it. The results could surprise you; you might well discover something about your own attitude toward sex that you hadn't previously known.

Now, as for how a devout Catholic can write erotica, the answer, in a sentence, is as follows: The Church has gone well beyond its Christ-given authority -- the old term is ultra vires -- in its pronouncements on matters of sex. Read the Gospels, and find a single place where the Redeemer condemns sexual pleasure, or sex between two entirely unmarried, unbetrothed persons, as sinful. If you can, we should compare notes.

Switchbacks And False Endings

2011-09-20T06:25:00.000-07:00

Far too many writers in the action-oriented genres have fallen in love with the notion that the reader should be unable to tell when the story is over.

Does that seem extreme to you? Obviously, it doesn't to me, or I wouldn't have said it. To me it sometimes seems that every high-octane writer who's emerged since Tom Clancy's glory years has labored to embed as many reversals and fake-outs as possible in his narratives. The only clue the reader gets to the proximity of the real climax is the number of pages that remain unread -- and that's only if the book contains no appendices, glossaries, or family trees.

I don't think this is a healthy trend. I think it shows a lack of imagination.

If writers are doing this to lengthen their books, on the supposition that long novels have a better shot at best-seller status than short ones, they're trading away reader satisfaction in pursuit of a superstitious notion about potential stardom. If they're doing it because it's easier than character development and the construction of a truly worthwhile conflict, it indicates an off-axis form of laziness. If they're emulating a writer they admire greatly...well, I can't speak to that, except to say that I admire writers with a more straightforward, reader-respecting vision.

The false ending isn't to be condemned outright. Occasionally surprising your reader with a climax-after-the-"climax" is good practice; it keeps him -- and you -- aware of the potential intricacies of all human interplay. But when a writer gets a reputation for incorporating false endings into every story he tells, it's just as deadly to his image as any other kind of repetition would be. It's seldom a good thing for your reader to think, "Oboyoboyoboy, I know what's coming next," even if you prove him wrong now and then.

An old favorite movie, Johnny Mnemonic, displayed a fine sense of directorial humor in evading a false ending. After the major contest is over and Johnny (Keanu Reeves) has escaped those who would kill him for the contents of his head (literally), we see him and his bodyguard (Dina Meyer) sharing a victory kiss...and the camera cuts away to the smoldering skeleton of a deadly, superpowerful cyborg, vanquished some minutes earlier, which appears to be rising for another round of action. However, an instant later, just after the tension has time to build, there's another camera cut, Ice-T says "That's just garbage. Get it out of here," and the winch that had been lifting the skeleton for disposal is shown to the viewer.

Innovation and wit! How refreshing! Better than yet another interminable series of false endings, at any rate.

Priestesses Now Available For Kindle

2011-09-19T02:05:00.001-07:00

Priestesses, my oddball erotic novel about two supernaturally gifted erotic assistants to Mankind, is now available through Amazon for your Kindle eReader.

And while I'm here...

On the advice of Mark Alger (who's much better known to me than Dean Wesley Smith or Kristine Kathryn Rusch), I have raised the prices of my eBooks to what he has called the "current 'list' pricing." Inasmuch as they haven't sold well at their previous, much lower $0.99 US prices, I figured it was a risk worth taking, despite the adverse opinion of the laws of economics. Don't be alarmed, Gentle Readers; I haven't "gone Hollywood." This is an experiment. We shall see.

Fiction And "Bundling"

2011-09-18T02:35:00.000-07:00

You know, for a Certified Galactic Intellect, I can be a bit...slow...

For a long time, short-form writers -- we who turn out short stories, novelettes, and novellas along with our novel length works -- had only two routes to a readership: publication by a periodical, or the issuance of a short-story collection long enough to be marketed as a book. (Of course, if your story became well known, it might be picked up by an anthologist for his collection of Famous Works Of Fantasy About Mackerel, but generally, it had to appear in a periodical first.) As publishers are notoriously indifferent to short-story collections -- with good reason; they don't sell well -- that limited a short-form writer's possibilities rather dramatically.

The key to the thing was the annoyingly obtrusive physical medium through which the story reached its readers: a paper volume, whether of book paper, pulp, or glossy stock. That was the one and only delivery system for fiction of any kind, up to fairly recently. It was believed, probably correctly, that to be marketable, a paper publication had to be substantial; it required a sufficient volume to make it a solid item, something that would weigh on the purchaser's hands. So short fiction had to be "bundled," either with other items of short fiction or with news, opinion, and advertising pieces, to become marketable. But that limitation is upon us no more. Therefore...why continue to act as if it were?

In publishing my short stuff as individual stories at my other Website, Eternity Road, I was making use of the flexibility inherent in the Internet delivery medium -- and readers could dip into my offerings as they pleased. But for reasons I will never be able to explain, when I got involved with SmashWords, I fell into "bundling" behavior: I released collections, rather than individual stories from which readers could pick and choose.

Plainly, this is a mistake to be unmade.

Why? Because of "footprint." An indie writer craves "footprint:" a large number of items with his name and reputation attached. The more individual works bearing his name are in the market, the greater the number of occasions of contact a reader will have with him. Collections reduce his footprint, and therefore his recognition and aggregate reputation, unnecessarily.

I've written a great many short stories and novelettes. Each of those items could have been a contribution to my footprint -- my "brand," if you prefer that term. Nor is there any compensating advantage to short-story collections to offset that lack of footprint, as readers today still shy away from collections...even when they're free.

Sigh. One does live and learn. (What the hell good is a genius-level IQ if you can't see something that's literally flapping its hands in your face?)

Who Are You?

2011-09-17T06:21:00.000-07:00

Well, OK. Who am I?

My name is Mark Alger. I write under the name of Mark Philip Alger for several reasons. First, it's my full name. And, as my mother wrote in my baby book, I'm named for myself. (Aren't young mothers precious?) Second, when they report about your crimes on the news, they always use all three of your names, so I figured I should get the jump on them, there. Third, it sounds, I don't know, OFFICIAL or something.

I write fantasy. Now, before you go assuming I mean swords and sorcery, or medieval European quest fantasy, I mean fantasy as a major genre of literature. That is to say, fiction about settings that never were, and probably never could be.

Why the pickiness? Aside from my OCD, I mean? Because I think a lot of what passes for wisdom on the subject of the fantasy and SF genres is BS. Fantasy is as I have defined it, and science fiction is a subset of fantasy in which advances in scientific knowledge plays a pivotal role in plot, character, or setting.

My particular fantasy is a long, manifold saga of a spunky, sexy, sassy grrl (as she puts it) of artificial provenance. Her name is Gabrielle Francesca East. Because at one time her anima resided in a 12" Xena:Warrior Princes action figure, she is also called Dolly. Because she is the favorite of a regiment of Trolls, albeit much smaller than they, her radio handle is Baby Troll. So the stories, collectively, are -- or will be -- called The Baby Troll Chronicles.

At the moment, I am in the process of preparing for publication the first story to be published professionally of a cycle known on the Web as the Dolly Apocrypha.

And that's my claim to fame -- why I'm posting here and messing up Fran's blog.

Back in 2002, I started a blog which had as its intent pretty much what this one here of Fran's has -- a place for a writer (or writers) to muse about writing. I quickly got distracted (SQUIRREL!)(I'm ADD, too.) by the siren song of politics, and it turned into a political blog. But, because I never abandoned that original purpose, it still bears the name BabyTrollBlog, which in turn descends from my beta-readers mailing list, Baby Troll Beta.

When Fran set this blog up, he kind of diffidently mentioned that other authors would be welcome to participate, if they would.And I kind of diffidently mentioned I might. And, so, here I am. Finally.