Category: Adventures in the Writing Life

Shopping for the Writer in Your Life

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It’s that time of year again.   If you’ve got a writer in your life, here are some places to shop:

Levenger’s, home of desktop porn writer’s and reader’s furniture and accessories in wood and leather and other high-end materials.  Check out their portable editor’s desk, or their cast iron combination ruler and paperweight, just for starters.

Or there’s Museumize, for all sorts of replica artwork, jewelry, and knick-knacks.   If you want a gargoyle or a pair of New York Public Library lions, this is the place to go.

Or you could get him or her the world’s best fruitcake, which comes from the Collin Street Bakery in Corsicana, Texas.

If all else fails, there’s always a gift certificate from the brick-and-mortar or online bookstore of your choice.  It won’t win points for originality, but — writers being, almost invariably, insatiable readers — it will almost certainly be appreciated.

What the Eye Takes Note Of

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You can’t describe everything — everything has too much stuff in it.  And even if you could describe everything, your readers wouldn’t stand for it; their minds would buckle under the weight of all the stuff there is in the world.  So you have to pick and choose.  Give your readers not all that there is about something, but two or three things about it to hang their mental image on.

But how are you going to decide what those things are?

Start by thinking about your readers.  They’re going to assume that if you’re directing their attention toward something, then it has to be something important, something that they’re either supposed to be using now or saving for later.  So don’t let them down by wasting their attention on something that isn’t one of those things.

Stuff that they’re supposed to be using for the scene they’re reading right now would include:  a detail that conveys important information about a major character (this one is left-handed; that one is carrying a pistol in a shoulder holster; the other one has one brown eye and one blue eye; and so on); details that help to establish the setting (the floor of the grand hall is polished black marble and the ceiling is painted with a fresco of the apotheosis of King Egbert the Eighteenth); a detail that moves the plot forward (the golden apple has a tag on it saying “for the fairest”; the third red lozenge from the left on the lid of the enameled jewel-box opens the secret compartment.)

Stuff that they’re going to want to save for later might be:  the left-handed man’s ebony walking-stick (which he will use for self-defense in a later chapter); the velvet-lined secret compartment in the jewel-box (which will be used in the next chapter to hide the forged identification papers); the polished black marble floor of the grand hall (where the character with the one brown eye and the one blue eye will slip and fall while running to escape the character who’s carrying the pistol in a shoulder holster.)

You’ll note that some of the details up above are doing double duty — they’re establishing something about the “now” of the story and at the same time planting something that will be useful later.  Good writing is economical like that.

(And no, I have no idea what the story might be that would involve pistols and walking-sticks and forged papers and an odd-eyed fugitive in a land ruled by the descendants of King Egbert the Eighteenth.  But I’ll bet it’s a lively one.)

A Truth Universally Acknowledged

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Thanksgiving dinner is essentially a Pie Delivery System.

This year we’re having apple streusel, cherry streusel, and pumpkin.

Things I’m thankful for, as a writer:

Word processing technology, because it hands over most of the mechanical drudgery to mechanical drudges.

The internet, and in particular the web, because it lets me do research without having to travel many miles over hedges and stiles in order to be physically present in the same room as the text, or on the same hillside as the view.

Editors, because they work to make my books not just better, but as good as possible.

Publishers, because they do all the hard work of production and distribution so I don’t have to.

And readers, because without them I’d just be talking to an empty room.

Have a happy Thanksgiving, if you’re celebrating; and have a good day anyhow, if you’re not.

The Dreariest Part of the Year

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In my opinion, at this and higher latitudes it’s the stretch from mid-November through the winter solstice. Right now, in other words. The days don’t just get shorter, they spiral down into darkness, with twilight arriving at 3:30 or 4 in the afternoon.

On the positive side, when the solstice comes around, it’s a real pleasure to see the days getting perceptibly longer right away — it’s obvious, in that context, why so many high-latitude cultures have got a “Hey! Wow! The sun came back!” holiday scheduled for that time of year.

(The coldest time of the year is something else. Around here it’s mid-January through mid-February, and I don’t associate that season with darkness, I associate it with the kind of bright, cold sunshine that you only get when there’s snow on the ground and the temperature is somewhere well below zero Fahrenheit. Beautiful weather, but absolutely pitiless.)

..what does this have to do with writing?  Not very much.  Except that I find it hard to concentrate on fiction when my feet are cold.

You Never Forget Your First Time

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First publication, that is.

My first publication ever was a three-sentence paragraph on tadpoles.  No, I’m not making this up . . . I wrote it in first grade, because when I was six years old I thought that the whole egg-tadpole-frog thing was fascinating.  And my mother thought the paragraph was cute enough to send in to the “By Our Readers” page of Jack and Jill Magazine, which accepted it.  And then didn’t print it until I was in the fifth grade.

(If I’d known then what I know now about slush piles and backlogs, I wouldn’t have been so surprised.  But what does a fifth-grader know about publishing?)

My first paid publication was also my mother’s idea.  I was in the eighth grade, and prone to writing dreadful poetry.  She sent in one of the slightly-less-dreadful pieces to the “By Our Readers” page of our church denomination’s national youth magazine, and they accepted it.  They also sent me a check for three dollars and seventy-five cents (which at that point in time was three-and-a-bit times the cost of a paperback novel), and I was so deliriously happy that I ran barefoot to our next-door neighbor’s house to share the good news.

It was high summer in Texas and my feet got stuck full of sand-spurs, but I didn’t care.  Somebody who wasn’t related to me had liked something I’d written well enough to pay me actual, spendable money for it.

My fate was sealed.

Another Thing Not to Do

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Suppose you’ve got a character who’s a poet.  This is dangerous territory, because readers are wary of characters who are poets or playwrights or novelists or artistic sorts in general, because the readers have a well-founded suspicion that any  artistic character is liable to be the author him-or-herself in a thin disguise . . . but let’s say that you’ve got good and sufficient reasons for doing it anyway.

And suppose, then, that your poet-character at some point has to write, and possibly even to recite (or sing, if this is a fantasy story and your poet-character is not just a poet, but a bard) a poem.

And suppose, further, that this poem is supposed to be a masterwork, something so profound and affecting that it moves the villain to mercy, or the populace to revolution, or the poet’s beloved to bestow love in return.

If that’s the case, then do not write that poem.  Do not give your readers the chance to read it and say, “Huh.  That poem isn’t really anything to write home about.”  Because if that happens, your reader will not believe in the villain’s mercy, or the people’s revolution, or the beloved’s affection — all those things that were supposed to have been caused by this masterwork of poetry will fail when it falls short.

What to do instead:  Don’t show the work of art.  Instead, show the other characters reacting to it.  Show the villain weeping, the crowd picking up paving stones and chair legs and broken bits of pipe, the beloved person meeting the poet’s eyes and smiling at last . . . that sort of thing.  The readers will believe in your great fictional work of art, because they will have seen your other characters behaving as though they were in the presence of greatness.

(Yes.  I know that Shakespeare actually did a Great and Moving Oration live on-stage in Julius Caesar, but he was Shakespeare and the rest of us aren’t.  And Tolkien crammed The Lord of the Rings chock-full of his own poetry, but point one, while he wasn’t William Shakespeare he was a competent versifier in his own right, and point two, his characters never asserted that their poems and songs were great works of art.)

Rejection is Your Friend (Sometimes, Anyhow)

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There are a lot of small press start-ups these days — the rise of electronic and print-on-demand publishing has lowered the bar for entering the business by quite a bit.  This is, I think, a good thing; small presses can take on books that have small (but dedicated) audiences, books that the major publishers might not want to take on.  But it’s an unhappy truth that if you have a lot of small press start-ups happening, not all of them are going to succeed.  In fact, a lot of them are going to fail spectacularly.

Unsurprisingly, this does not make life easier for writers.  Sure, once you’ve finished your book, you’ve got a lot more places to send it than writers did just a couple of decades ago.  But now you can’t just ask, “Is this publisher likely to accept my manuscript?”; you also have to ask, “Is this publisher likely to stay in business long enough to publish my book and pay me what it earns?”

This requires research, and listening to the industry chatter, and watching which way the wind blows.

One thing that you can listen for, when publisher-shopping: Does the publisher in question reject more manuscripts than it publishes?  If so, that’s a good sign.  One of the things publishers are for is rejecting manuscripts — they do it so the readers don’t have to.  Readers trust the publishers to have sorted through the vast piles of truly dreadful material and pulled out the good stuff.

“Truly dreadful” isn’t an exaggeration, by the way.  The industry term for unsolicited manuscripts is “slush,” and it’s exactly as uncomplimentary as it sounds.   Probably 99% of it is absolutely dreadful. Anybody in the world who can afford the price of a ream of paper and some postage can send in an unsolicited manuscript, and on a bad day at the publisher’s office, it can seem like most of them do.

I’ve read slush. Publishers who accept unsolicited manuscripts tend to put off reading them for as long as possible, just because most of them are so very very bad; as a result, sometimes the editorial department will declare a “slush kill” and draft all the editors and editorial assistants and — sometimes — visiting writers and just about anybody else in the office who’s known to be literate and in possession of a pulse, and there will be a massive effort to go through as many manuscripts as possible and sort out the utterly at-first-glance unpublishables from the ones that might merit a longer look by somebody a rung or so higher up the ladder.  A lot of things get thrown out at this stage: obvious plagiarism; blatant insanity; sheer incompetent prose; stuff meant to be taken seriously that nevertheless has the first reader giggling insanely; stuff so utterly dull from the very start that going on to the next page is a chore.  Most of what’s left still isn’t going to get published; not being actively dreadful isn’t the same thing as being good.

None of this is fair. Publishers aren’t in the business of being fair to aspiring writers. If they’re in the business of being fair to anyone, it’s to the readers, who are trusting them not to provide a bad product.

So if the small press where you’re interested in submitting has a track record of rejecting manuscripts that don’t meet its standards, that should count as a point in its favor.

An Amazing Lack of Accomplishment

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Some days are like that.  Today was one of them.

In my defense, it was grey and rainy outside all day.

Doesn’t make any difference, though.  I still need to get some words done before I go to bed.

Deadline Dinners Redux

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Yet another dead-simple crockpot recipe for writers (and other people) on a deadline who aren’t yet ready to break out the emergency frozen pizza stash:

Crockpot Orange Chicken

For the chicken:

  • 1 1/2 pounds boneless skinless chicken thighs, cut into 2-inch chunks
  • 1/2 cup flour
  • olive oil

For the sauce:

  • 1 tablespoon kosher salt (actually, regular salt would undoubtedly do just fine.  But recipe writers love their kosher salt, and we have a box of it in the kitchen, so . . . .)
  • 6 ounces of frozen no-pulp orange juice concentrate, thawed.  (If, like me, you couldn’t find a 6-ounce can, use half of a 12-ounce can and make orange juice out of the rest.  Vitamin C for the win.)
  • 3 tablespoons brown sugar
  • 1 teaspoon balsamic vinegar
  • 3 tablespoons ketchup

Put the flour and the chicken pieces into a ziploc bag and shake it to coat the chicken all over.
Put 3 or 4 tablespoons of olive oil into a large skillet and heat it up.
Add the chicken and brown it on all sides, just enough to get the flour coating all cooked.  (Don’t worry about the chicken itself; you’re going to be cooking it in the crockpot for hours, anyhow.)
Put the chicken pieces into the crockpot.
Mix up the sauce ingredients in a small bowl and pour the sauce over the chicken.  Use a wooden spoon to mix up the sauce and chicken pieces until all the chicken is coated with the sauce.
Put the lid on the crockpot and cook the chicken on low for 6 hours, or on high for 3-4.
Serve over rice.

This feeds six people once around with lots of rice, or three people if they all have seconds/large helpings.

Plot Device Obsolescence

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Technology changes all the time, and writers have to keep up with it.  This need for change doesn’t just affect our tools and our paths to publication — every so often a change comes along that wipes out or revises entire categories of plot devices and developments.

There was a time when characters could leave town, or leave the country, and effectively drop off the edge of the world as far as the folks back home were concerned.  Twenty miles was a long way, a hundred miles was even longer, and across the ocean (or the continent) was gone-for-good-and-never-seen-again.  Which was good for sad plots, with lost true loves and all, and good for suspenseful plots, with mysteriously returning missing heirs, and good for providing characters in need of escape with a place to go.

Then transportation got faster, and we got the telegraph and the telephone and the transAtlantic cable, and writers had to deal with the fact that it was now a lot easier for their characters to stay in touch, and a lot harder for them to hide.

The status quo rattled along for a few decades, as far as plots and technology went.  There were a lot of technological advances, but most of them weren’t in areas that would require massive retooling of existing plot machinery.  Even personal computers opened up more plot possibilities than they closed off.

Then along came cell phones and social media.  All of a sudden, it became a lot harder for writers to put their characters in that state of fear and isolation that’s so productive of interesting plot developments.  So long as your protagonist has a cell phone — and your readers will assume that he or she does have one — then at least in theory help is just a phone call away.  If you want your character to be truly alone and forced to rely only on his or her own resources, you’re going to have to deal with the cell phone problem:  lose it, leave it behind, drain its battery, break it, or make sure your readers know in advance that the character’s potential location has cell phone dead areas.  (They do still exist, especially in rural or wilderness areas; and even in cities there are some places where reception is at best spotty.)

It’s enough to make a writer turn to historical fiction, it is.  Just don’t turn to near-past historical fiction, because then you’re stuck with figuring out the point at which — for example — cell phones went from becoming large, expensive, and rare to being small, cheap, and ubiquitous.  (At some point during the run of The X-Files, is my guess; check out the differences between the phones Mulder and Scully use in the first couple of season with the ones they were using by the end.)