Category: On Writing

How to Take All The Fun Out of Writing and End Up With Something Soulless and Soul-Crushing

Here’s an article over on The Book Designer that had me shaking my head today:

When you decide to write and publish a book, you want to be confident you will bring a book to market that has never before been written—or read—and that your target readers want and need.

To write that book, tell that tale or fill that hole, do some work before you start your manuscript. As part of your initial planning process, study other previously published books and use this research to help you develop the confidence to write and publish a singular book …

[Read the rest of “How to Fill a ‘Hole’ on the Bookstore Shelf’ at the TheBookDesigner.com]

A singular book? I don’t often link to articles on publishing that don’t resonate with me, simply because there’s too much stuff that does resonate for me to share with you those things that don’t (and there’s little objective truth in this business), but this one, wow . . . It so goes against what I’ve learned about the actual creative process that I can’t believe that people really write this way.  Does anyone?  

When I was at the Oregon Book Awards a couple weeks ago, a young writer asked me what I would tell her if I had only one piece of advice to give.  Essentially, I said this: “Write for you. Don’t worry about everybody else.  Write what makes you happy, or angry, or sad. Make yourself laugh or cry or cheer. If you can do that, there’s a good chance your manuscript will do the same for other people, because we’re all made from the same basic stuff. And at the end of the day, at least you’ll have that.”

And that’s what I believe.  I wouldn’t worry too much about being original.  I’d focus on being authentic.  If you’re authentic, as any kind of artist, whether you’re penning a song, writing a novel, or painting a water color, if what you’re writing comes from deep within you, then you won’t need to “fill a hole” on the bookstore shelf.  You’ll create your own space.  

That’s how art works.  There’s always room for another authentic voice.

About Luck and Goals

Yesterday on the way to work, I heard a great piece on NPR about the power of chance as it relates to success.  You can read the article, “Good Art Is Popular Because It’s Good. Right?” on NPR’s website, or even better, listen to the audio as I did.  Here’s the crux of it:

To test how much of success should be attributed to chance and how much to quality, Salganik created a website that randomly funneled the 30,000 teenagers he recruited online into nine identical worlds.

Each of these worlds exposed the teens to 48 songs from emerging artists — bands that hadn’t yet been signed so were totally unknown to the teens. The deal was that after listening to the songs, the teens could download the ones they liked best for free.

Now in one world — the control world — they couldn’t see which songs their peers were downloading so there was no social influence. But in the other eight, the teens could see which songs had been downloaded before, so they knew what other people thought was good.

“So we had the exact same 48 songs competing against each other, we had the exact same initial conditions, everything starts with zero downloads, and we have indistinguishable groups of participants, because they were randomly placed into the world,” Salganik says.

And what did he find?

Different songs become popular in different histories — and not in small ways, either.

[Read the rest.]

I’ve written about the power of luck in publishing before.  The truth is, I think indie publishing in the age of ebooks is much closer to a meritocracy than traditional publishing ever was, but it’s only closer. Like all forms of success, luck plays a big part.  All we can do is work harder and smarter, giving ourselves the best chance to find an audience.  Nobody is entitled to a huge audience and big bank accounts, and no matter how hard you work, you aren’t guaranteed it.  Joe Konrath and Barry Eisler have a great post up right now about this very subject, where they take on an anonymous “Big Bestseller” who challenges their claim that publishing is much more of a lottery than a meritocracy.  While I agree with them in substance, I don’t think a lottery, which is entirely about chance, is a very useful analogy.  How about poker?  Luck definitely plays a part in poker, but so does skill. And over time, as long as that poker player gives herself the best chances to succeed, by playing a lot and striving to get better, quality will play a bigger and bigger role in her success.

That’s the issue I have with Salganik’s experiment. As far as I can tell, the musician only had one song. The less you work at something, the less work you produce, the less you get better, and the more it’s like a lottery and less it’s like poker.

But chance is a huge influence and always will be.  That’s why the longer I’ve been writing, the more I’ve tried to stop focusing on goals that hinge in any fashion on luck.  I’ve always been a proponent of focusing on what you can control and not on the things you can’t — how well books sell, money, awards, reader response — but lately I’ve taken it farther.  This may sound a bit radical to those of you steeped in the Napoleon Hill way of looking at the world, as I once was, but I’ve tried to remove results from the equation at all.  Instead I focus entirely on  process. Not just a little, but entirely. I mean I’ve tried to remove all “destination goals” from my mind. It’s much closer to a Zen approach, taking a page from Ray Bradbury.  The crux of it is this: It is possible to be a writer who is driven by the work itself and not the world’s response to it.  It is possible to make your goals entirely about pages written, books read, other writers studied, etc, without attaching other destination goals to the back end– and yet still sit at the same poker table along with all the other players, because that is part of the process.  The actual results won’t change, but man, you’ll be a lot happier.

It’s a subtle but powerful shift in thinking I’ve had trouble explaining to people in person, and I’ll probably take another stab at it in this blog before too long, but really it boils down to making the process the goal.  In other words, the Zen archer is driven by shooting arrows as well as she can, not by hitting the target, even if in the end the former often leads to the latter.

A Novelist Who Doesn’t Read Novels Is Like a Loud-Mouthed Drunk at a Party Who Loves to Talk But Never Listens

I was once in New York, and I listened to a talk about the building of private prisons – a huge growth industry in America. The prison industry needs to plan its future growth – how many cells are they going to need? How many prisoners are there going to be, 15 years from now? And they found they could predict it very easily, using a pretty simple algorithm, based on asking what percentage of 10 and 11-year-olds couldn’t read. And certainly couldn’t read for pleasure.

It’s not one to one: you can’t say that a literate society has no criminality. But there are very real correlations.

And I think some of those correlations, the simplest, come from something very simple. Literate people read fiction.

Neil Gaiman wrote that a couple months ago in The Guardian, and it’s well worth reading the whole thing. It’s the best case for the value of reading, and reading fiction in particular, that I think I’ve seen in a long time. He also has some very nice things to say about the role that libraries and librarians are playing in a world that transformed, in short order, from one in which information was scare to one in which information was overwhelming. Really good stuff.

But when I stumbled upon this article, it got me thinking about another group of people who don’t read fiction.

Fiction writers.

Yeah, you got that right. Fiction writers. Novelists. Not all of them, of course, and certainly not even a majority, but I’ve been surprised lately at how many writers who write fiction who don’t read much fiction.  Most of them read nonfiction, of course, or, if you ask them why they don’t read novels, they often get defensive and say they get their story fix in other ways, from movies or television shows.  Which is all well and good, but it’s not the same.   You see, I think of my fiction as part of The Great Conversation of Literature.  If I’m not engaged in a two-way conversation, then I’m like a loud-mouthed drunk at a party who’s telling you all about this antics but doesn’t hear a word you say when you ask a question.  My novel, The Last Great Getaway of the Water Balloon Boys, is part of a conversation that started when I read J.D. Salinger as a teen.  My book, The Gray and Guilty Sea, is my entry into a conversation that includes Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and of course John D. MacDonald.  Heck, the title of that book is a direct homage to MacDonald.  My book, Wooden Bones, took a book that had entered the public domain, Carlos Collodi’s Pinocchio, and kept a conversation going that includes everyone from the Brothers Grimm to . . . well, Neil Gaiman himself, whose book, Coraline, and its wonderfully dark feel, inspired me to write something along the same lines.

I’m not the most voracious reader in the world, but I read a lot of novels.  I read a lot of nonfiction, too, but fiction is the coin of my realm.  It’s the ongoing conversation, the one that began long before I was born and will continue long after I’m gone.

If you’re a fiction writer who’s not reading fiction, you may have readers, and you may even have a lot of them, but I doubt you’re going to grow much as a writer.  And if you’re not growing as a writer, what’s the point?  Just paying the bills?  Sure, that’s important, and I can’t blame any writer for doing what they have to do to put bread on the table, but it’s so much more rewarding to engage in a two-way conversation rather than coming off as someone who’s just drunk on their own words.

A Free Class on Copyright

Over at Writer-in-Law, M. Scott Boone, a law professor specializing in intellectual property law, is allowing his blog readers to follow along while he teaches a course on copyright:

So, asking what is an “original work of authorship” is basically asking “What gets copyright protection?” Sure, there’s the “fixed in any tangible medium of expression” part, but that is not the difficult part to satisfy.

Accordingly, originality is often said to be “[t]he sine qua non of copyright.”

If you want the short answer, here it is. Originality includes two related concepts. First, the work must be original to the author; in other words, it cannot be copied from another. Second, it must contain at least a modicum of creativity. This is a fairly low hurdle.

If you treat your art in a professional manner, and have any interest at all in making money at what you do, then understanding how you license copyright is critical.  Well worth following Boone’s posts.