Month: March 2013

From the Department of Good Advice

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Billy Wilder’s tips for screenwriters.

Most of them also apply to novelists.  The only one that could be debated is #10:

10. The third act must build, build, build in tempo and action until the last event, and then – that’s it. Don’t hang around.

But that’s because movies are more like short stories, or at most novellas, than they are like novels.  That’s why Tolkien’s extended fourfold wrap-up of The Lord of the Rings works in the context of the novel, but is less effective on the big screen.

(Also, of course, it is necessary to remember that in a perfect world any writer’s advice on writing would come with a clearly-printed THIS IS HOW IT WORKS FOR ME, ANYHOW label attached.)

Another Thing it Doesn’t Pay to Worry About

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Back in the dark ages, when I was first learning to type, the Word of God as passed down from on high by the instructor (who was more interested in training 80-words-a-minute secretaries than in teaching the rudiments of touch typing to a future English major) was that you double-spaced following a period.

I never became an 80-words-a-minute typist, but those two spaces after the period were hardwired into my brain, not to mention into my spacebar-hitting thumb.

Cue the musical montage representing the passage of time, with the tappity-tappity-tappity-bing! of the typewriter fading into the musical-popcorn boop-boop-boop of the old computer keyboards, and that sound fading in turn into the near-silence of keyboards today . . . followed by the Word of God saying that it is now customary to space only once after a period.

Why is this something it doesn’t pay to worry about?  Because, one, of all the reasons an editor may have for rejecting your manuscript, the question of how many spaces you’ve put after your periods is way low on the list.  And, two, if the whole thing bothers you that much, you don’t have to sweat blood retraining your spacebar thumb — all you have to do is run a search and replace during the final edit, and change every instance of two spaces to a single space instead.

Pi Day

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That is, 3.14.

Over at the Boskone blog, they’re posting pie recipes.  Which inspires me to post one here:

Pecan Pie

  • 1 cup white Karo syrup
  • 1/2 cup sugar
  • 3 eggs, well beaten
  • 1 and 1/2 cups chopped pecans
  • 1 tsp vanilla
  • 2 T butter, melted
  • 1 uncooked 9″ pie shell

Mix syrup and sugar well.
Add eggs, butter, vanilla, and pecans.
Mix well; pour into pie shell.
Bake at 350 for 45-50 minutes or until firm.

I haven’t made this recipe for about a decade now, because the canonical version of it, in my mind, requires the pecans that grew on the three pecan trees in the yard of my family’s house in Texas.  My father would spend the autumn picking up the pecans from those trees (two Georgia papershells and one native pecan — the latter were smaller and harder to dig out of their shells, but sweeter), get the shells cracked at a pecan-packing plant across the Red River in Oklahoma, then spend the winter picking the nuts out of their shells while he watched television.  Some years, those three pecan trees would yield 70 pounds or more of pecans; every spring, most of the ones that hadn’t gotten used up over the course of the previous year would get baked into apple-nut cakes and sold at the parish bazaar.  And a lot of them found their way to me, wherever I happened to be living at the time — instead of crumpled newspaper or styrofoam packing peanuts in boxes of stuff from home, I’d get ziploc freezer bags full of fresh pecans.

I was, of course, spoiled forever for store-bought pecans.  They always tasted dry and rancid by comparison.  After my father died, nobody picked up the pecans from the yard anymore, and the house in Texas belongs to someone else now anyway . . . but I still don’t have the heart to make this recipe with any other pecans.

There’s not much connection to writing in all of this, except maybe for the principle that almost everything has a story attached to it if you look hard enough.

Tales of the Before Time: From Paper to Pixels

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Back when I first started writing, as a wee young sprat, it was all paper and pen or pencil — I wasn’t yet up to the level of actually submitting things, so the idea of a typed manuscript was unknown to me.  The family typewriter was an Underwood that weighed approximately as much as a boat anchor, with keys so stiff that my grade-school fingers would have buckled under the strain of pressing them.  I wrote my first short stories (which sucked) and my first you-could-probably-call-it-a-novel (which also sucked) in ink on narrow-ruled notebook paper.  I used a cartridge pen for preference, rather than a ball-point, and my handwriting was dreadful.

Time went by, and eventually I achieved a Smith-Corona electric typewriter, a high-school graduation present from a maiden aunt who knew me, perhaps, better than some of my other aunts (who tended to give me things like hairbrushes and pillow-slips.)  That typewriter lasted me nearly a decade, and saw the production of numerous college and graduate school papers, plus a handful of not really very good short stories and the first five or six pages of a novel that never went anywhere.

The Smith-Corona electric in time acquired a companion, an Olivetti modern Icelandic manual that I used to prepare the first draft of my dissertation.  (Previously, with the Smith-Corona, I’d had to add in the special Old English characters by hand.)

Neither of these typewriters, however, was very good for writing fiction.  My handwriting was still dreadful, but my typing wasn’t much better — I estimated at the time that it took me about thirty minutes to produce a clean page of submittable copy.

Then came the glorious day when Atari brought out a personal computer that could be had for a price that ordinary human beings could afford.  Suddenly, it didn’t matter that I was a rotten typist; the computer was a very good typist, and just as soon as I could find a letter-quality printer to hook up to it, I’d be in clover.  In the meantime, at least I had a dot-matrix printer (does anybody out there remember dot-matrix?) for the early drafts.  And when we finally did get a household letter-quality printer, shortly afterward it was manuscript-submission time.

The next decade or so witnessed our household’s march forward through advancements in printer technology — dot-matrix to letter-quality daisy-wheel to laser to inkjet, faster and better and faster again.  And we bought paper.  Lots and lots of paper.  We bought fanfold paper in foot-high stacks; we bought 20-pound bond in ten-ream boxes.

And time kept moving on.  One day we looked around the office, and realized that it had been a year or more since the last time we’d submitted anything as a printout on paper that we sent through the US Mail.  At some point while we were busy writing, it had all switched over to electronic manuscripts submitted by e-mail, and we’d scarcely noticed.

I could spend some time at this point indulging myself in nostalgia, but the truth of the matter is that I am immensely grateful for the computer and word processor combination that types better than I ever could, and the electronic mail that doesn’t insist on proper postage and a stamped and self-addressed envelope.

Well, Well, Well.

~ drdoyleeditorial ~ 2 Comments

It appears that Random House has blinked.

The contracts for Hydra, Alibi, Loveswept, and Flirt will now come in the writer’s choice  of versions, one of them the previous “profit-sharing” arrangement, and the other a traditional advance-plus-royalties deal.

Which means that there’s even less excuse, now, for a writer to sign the unconscionable version.

Fillers and Placeholders

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When you’re hard at work on the first draft and running for daylight, you can’t afford to lose your forward momentum.  The first draft isn’t the time and place to spend fifteen minutes looking for the perfect name for that minor character who steps onto the page long enough to deliver a crucial bit of plot development before vanishing.

For the first draft, it’s often enough to have [CharacterName] appear from [NameOfPlace] with the necessary plot element in hand.  Just remember to search on the square brackets during the second-draft revisions, when you’re putting in that perfect name you finally came up with when you were drifting off to sleep the night before.

Identity Crisis

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You may be a novelist (and not a short story writer) if:

Your short stories regularly top out at 8000 words or more, even after you cut them for length.

Your short stories tend to have a half dozen or more named characters fully-equipped with backstories and personal agendas.

You find yourself amplifying your short stories with subplots and digressions.

You find yourself spending as much time on working out the details of your story’s background and milieu (what science fiction and fantasy writers call “doing the world-building”) as you do on working out the plot and the characters.

The milieu of your novel is bigger — more expansive, more full of implied consequences and further actions –than the story you’re telling in it.

Your trusted and reliable first reader gives you a look of deep sympathy and says, “I hate to tell you this, but what you’ve got here isn’t a short story.  It’s the opening chapter of a novel.”

If this happens to you, take heart.  For the natural-born novelist, novels are actually easier to write than short stories.

They just take a lot longer.

Bad Contracts and Worse Contracts

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Some contracts are bad.  They get their hooks into the author’s copyright; they have restrictive option clauses and punitive indemnity clauses; they want to grab not just world publishing rights but the right to publish in all forms everywhere forever, including Mesopotamian baked-clay tablets and electronic transmissions to the Oort Cloud.

Other contracts are worse than bad, they’re unconscionable.  They do all of the above, and they don’t do the one thing that could possibly induce a professional writer to sign them, which is to offer good money up front.

Just about every professional writer has signed at least one bad contract, and they’ve usually done it for only one reason:  they needed that up-front money, and they needed it right then.

Once in a while, in this business, you may need to sign a bad contract.  The roof may leak, your kid may need emergency orthodontia, the IRS may be demanding more blood than your normal turnip harvest can provide.  If that’s what you have to do, then do it with your eyes open and deposit the check before it can bounce.

But nobody, ever, has any reason to sign an unconscionable contract.

I Couldn’t Have Said It Better Myself

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So I’m not even going to bother.

John Scalzi has a couple of masterful takedowns of Random House’s new Hydra and Alibi imprints, and why no writer in his or her right mind should sign one of their contracts, here and here.

And if those warnings aren’t enough, here’s Writer Beware on the subject.

Furthermore, SFWA† has ruled that Hydra is not a qualifying market for membership purposes.

If all of that isn’t warning enough for the wary, then I don’t know what is.

†The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. For acronymic purposes, the second F is superimposed upon the first.

Things It Doesn’t Help to Complain to the Author About:

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The cover art for their book.  You may hate it with a passion; you may think that it misrepresents both the plot and the theme of the book in the worst way possible; you may feel that it reeks of sexism, racism, classism, and other -isms as yet unknown to social science.  Complaining to the author will not do any good, because in the hierarchy of people who have a say in a book’s cover art, the author ranks somewhere just barely above the office cleaning crew and the folks in the mail room.  With the rare exception of publishing’s 800-pound gorillas, the author’s traditional role in the selection of cover art is limited to bitching about it afterward.

Problems with the printing and typography of their book.  If your copy of the book has Chapter 27 replaced by an equivalent number of pages from Love’s Tacky Splendor, that isn’t the author’s fault.  Bad stuff can happen to good books when they go to the printer, and somewhere out there is a printing of Love’s Tacky Splendor that has Chapter 27 replaced by a chunk of impeccably-researched hard science fiction.  Those readers — and that author — aren’t going to be pleased about this either.

Problems with the sales and availability of their book.  The author’s control of these issues is approximately zero point zilch.  Finding out that there are no copies of their book to be found anywhere in the entire state of North Dakota is not going to make them any happier.

In all of these cases, as it happens, the appropriate entity to direct your complaints to is the publisher.