Month: May 2013
Generally speaking, I’m not big on podcasts (because I have a hard time focusing on and retaining audio-only information) but there is one that I make sure to tune into every week: Scriptnotes by screenwriters John August and Craig Mazin. John and Craig are funny, irreverent, and informative, and most of their insights apply to writing in general, not just writing for Hollywood.
A few episodes ago, they talked about “taking notes” – i.e., accepting feedback – and there were 2 points that really stuck out to me.
1. Deny, Defend, Debate
These are the normal human reactions to criticism. We reject what we don’t like; we justify what we do like; we argue about it all. These instincts are very human, yes – but they’re not all that helpful when it comes to improving our work (or ourselves).
For this reason, in many workshops, the author of a story being critiqued is not permitted to speak until after everyone else has shared their feedback. (Sometimes the author isn’t allowed to speak at all!) This forced silence keeps the deny-defend-debate monster waiting… and waiting… and waiting some more… so that by the time the writer finally gets a chance to open their mouth, that 3-D ogre may have given up and left altogether! At the very least, it should be lethargic or off-guard, allowing everyone’s feedback to slip by and reach the writer’s (hopefully open) mind.
Another technique I use to combat my own 3-D monster is to just say yes. No matter how much I hate a suggestion, or disagree with an edit, I force myself to accept it, to sit with it for a while, and then to reevaluate. After a few hours (or a few days), if it still doesn’t feel right, then I’m allowed to go back to what I had before. But more often than not, I find myself sticking with the changes my crit partners suggest.
All that being said, no matter how open-minded you try to be, sometimes feedback can be hard to swallow simply because of how it’s being delivered. Which leads me to…
Read MoreToday’s guest is Erica Verrillo. Erica is the coauthor, with Lauren Gellman, of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome: A Treatment Guide (St. Martin’s) and author of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome: A Treatment Guide, 2nd Edition. Her short stories have appeared in Million Stories, Front Porch Review, THEMA Literary Magazine, 580 Split and Nine. Ms. Verrillo’s first screenplay, The Treehouse, was completed in 2011.
Erica says, “Although creativity is the chief concern of writers, I know from experience that the publishing world demands that writers also be businessmen – that is, if they want to become authors. It is very easy these days to simply self-publish, but in order to become a successful author a good working knowledge of how the publishing world works is essential.”
Follow Erica on Twitter or visit her Facebook page to learn more. Enjoy!
Are You Ready to Contact an Agent? Take This Short Quiz and Find Out
You’ve finally completed your book. You’ve had it critiqued – brutally – and done more revisions than you care to count. Your proofreader has made sure there’s not a single error in the entire manuscript, and now you are confident that your work is ready to be published. What next? Obviously, you need an agent. So, after searching AgentQuery for agents representing your genre, and consulting Jeff Herman’s Guide and the most recent Writer’s Digest, you are sitting down to compose the perfect query letter.
Stop. You’ve skipped some steps.
Before you can even think about contacting an agent, there are several important questions you must be able to answer. Why? Because, if an agent calls you, she or he will ask them. (I know this from painful personal experience.) You must be prepared to reply with compelling answers.
This short quiz will tell you if you are ready to take on the publishing industry.
I turned in my third novel on April 12th after a six-month extension that required nights, weekends, and workdays that often began at 4AM. To say I was burned out would be putting it mildly. Fried, torched, or incinerated were better words for my condition. This one got me, on every level and to my core. The morning after I turned in the manuscript, I stood at the mirror brushing my teeth and barely recognizing the exhausted woman who stared back at me.
And two questions came to mind: Do you really want to do this again? Why do you write?
I had no answers. Instead, I saw a fleeting image within the reflection, a glimpse of one of the characters from my just finished manuscript. Rose is a schizophrenic homeless woman who “sees” music. She isn’t my protagonist, but she is the character who has stayed with me, the one who has most touched my soul.
I often joke that I am a “method writer,” and that was truer with this book than with any other. To get into the head of my characters, I try to become them, to walk in their shoes, sometimes for many days at a time. A writer friend has called this “empathy taken to the extreme,” implying that it might not be an entirely healthy practice. In the case of Rose, I cannot disagree. But each writer has a process, and this is mine. Generally, I like becoming my characters. When a story is finished, I want them to remain. They have become friends.
To which even I would reply, “You really have to get out more, Brunonia.” True enough. And I’m trying to do just that. But when I go out into the world after finishing a book, at least at first, my characters go with me. Rose certainly did. I have found her to be one of the most compelling and authentic characters I’ve yet written, and I not only want to keep parts of her with me always, but I realize that it is inevitable that she will stay. Rose isn’t going anywhere. She has been internalized. The results have left me with the residual appearance of a woman who has seen too much of the street for people to be entirely comfortable around.
Read More…in the grass, at the desk, on the path, everywhere! Linda Adams left a great comment about writing in little chunks of time on Barbara O’Neal’s post about her rules for writing. I was replying there but my reply grew so long and I have a post due, so I’m moving my reply here.
I too am back at work full-time and find that I don’t have large blocks of time (when I’m not exhausted) to write or exercise or garden or read. However, I am figuring out I do have many small bits of time that I can use. As I written here before I lost weight over a year ago and in my efforts to keep it off, I am packing my lunch and grazing on it over a few hours rather than eating it all at once. It’s working.
I usually bus in and get off a few stops early so I can get in a 10-minute walk before work. Then I take a 10- or 20-minute walk (or yoga break) at lunch and a 10- or 20-minute walk on the way home and voila! Exercise is done.
Just this week, I started doing the same with writing. I’ve always been someone who thought I needed several hours at once to get any writing done, but now I’m finding that I can apply the same grazing philosophy (10 or 20 minutes in the morning and at lunch, etc.) and I can slowly but surely get some work done.
Grazing is working for me with diet, exercise (and weeding my garden). I hope it works for writing too.
Anybody else a grazer?
Read MoreGIVEAWAY: I am very excited to again give away a free book to a random commenter. The winner can choose either CREATE YOUR WRITER PLATFORM or the 2013 GUIDE TO LITERARY AGENTS. Commenters must live in the US/Canada; comment within one week to win. Good luck! (Update: jenniferkirkeby won.)
In my opinion, a good query letter is broken down into three parts – the quick intro, the pitch, and the bio. Strangely enough, the third section (the bio) often generates the most questions and uncertainty with writers. In fact, when I speak at writers’ conferences on the topic of how write a query letter, there are typically a ton of questions about this small paragraph. So with that in mind, I have tried to cobble together some notes on what to include and what not to include in a query letter at the end when you’re talking about yourself and your writing.
FICTION VS. NONFICTION
Before you read on, you need to realize that the bio section of a query letter is a completely different beast for fiction vs. nonfiction. If you’re writing nonfiction, the bio section is typically long, and of the utmost importance. This is where you list out all your credentials as well as the greatest hits of your writer platform. The importance of a nonfiction bio cannot be overstated. It has to be fat and awesome. Fiction bios, however, can be big or small or even not there at all. Most of the questions and notes I address below are discussing the murky waters of fiction query bios.
YES: INCLUDE THESE ELEMENTS IN YOUR BIO
Today’s guest is Alison Heller. Alison was a finalist in our search for a humorist columnist. We loved her submission and are pleased to share it with you today. Alison’s first novel, THE LOVE WARS, was published just this month by Penguin (NAL). Her second novel, as of yet untitled, is scheduled for 2014.
I loved The Love Wars! Heller writes with the perfect balance of razor-sharp wit, intelligence, and empathy. This book had me hooked from its earliest pages — a briskly paced and thoroughly entertaining debut.
–Meg Donohue, Author of How to Eat a Cupcake
Alison says, “I guess that for me, writing is where the sublime (those wonderful, if rare, moments of flow) meets the ridiculous (just about everything else). One day I had a few hours and ran out of the house, so excited to sit down and write, but finding space was next to impossible. I went to about three places with no luck—no seats, larges loud groups, etc. etc. I realized that over the years I’d been on an extended vagabond’s journey, like some traveling laptop minstrel, and thus this post was born.”
Follow Alison on Twitter @lalisonheller or visit her Facebook page. Enjoy!
The Quest: One Writer’s Search for The Coffee Shop Office
It happens. First once. Then, again and again until I can’t ignore it.
Tiny voices. Mommy! My door creaks open. We find you! We play computer! They read aloud the names of half-formed characters. Who that?
I don’t know, I say, it’s only a draft, but they persist. When I return from fetching the water they demand, I have forgotten what I’m writing.
I have heard others—namely Bob, of the How To Publish Panel—refer to a place. My coffee shop office, he said with his gentle chuckle, where I am from nine until eleven five days a week. Like clock work.
My home is warm, yes, with steady wifi. It is what I know. But I must assemble provisions for a quest. I must find this coffee shop office.
Day One, Early
I start my quest near my house, the temple of a woman with flowing green hair, parted in the middle. She wears a crown and offers protein plates.
It’s crowded when I arrive but against the odds, I find a seat, outlet adjacent. At the table beside me, a woman in a long skirt holds her phone to her ear. Her voice is loud; her hand is at her forehead. I don’t know, she screams, I don’t know why the contracts didn’t go through. I press in my earbuds. Write. Reread what I have typed: I do not know why the contracts didn’t go through. The phrase is compelling but does not work in my scene.
Her phone rings again. I see she says. I see i see i see i see. Not at all. I see.
It goes on like this. When her phone rings for the fifth time, I know I must move on.
Read More“You have the minimum amount of my attention.”
How does that phrase make you feel? This is a quote from the movie The Social Network, where the character of Mark Zuckerberg explains why he is not focused on the legal proceedings of those who are suing him:
When I work with writers, I am focused on helping them find their ideal audience, and develop communication and trust with them. I tend to call this “platform,” but others refer to it by other terms.
What sometimes surprises me is the missed opportunity by those who want to give their readers only the “minimum amount” of their attention. In other words: I will give you JUST ENOUGH attention to get you to buy my book, and then: nothing more.
Sometimes, these are just fearful justifications from overwhelmed authors. Someone who is:
I never want to forget that writers don’t practice their craft in a vacuum. The context of their entire lives is ever-present.
But is it okay to phone it in? To do only the minimum amount of what is expected? To show up, but just barely?
Read MoreHello to all my friends at Writer Unboxed. So happy to be back with you again this month, and particularly happy to announce the release of my new novel, The Texas Twist, which streets on June 1 from Prospect Park Books and answers the eternal question, “What happens when a con man gets conned?” As is my practice, I’m giving away e-versions of my new release to WriterUnboxed readers according to my whimsical nature. This time the quest is simple: Guess the number I’m thinking of! (You can do it, trust me; it can be done. There’s even a clue in my twitter stream.) Send an email with your guess to john.vorhaus@gmail.com. All answers will be evaluated honestly and prizes distributed accordingly.
Okay, now that the shameless self-promotion is out of the way, let’s get down to the fun stuff.
The other day I was rooting through some paper archives, and discovered, or rediscovered, the text you’ll see below. It seems I wrote this comic piece for a syndicated newspaper column called Laugh Lines, which bought a bunch of my stuff back in the mid 1990s but did not, so far as I can tell, print this one.
It’s going to make you laugh. I think I can promise you that. More than that, though, I hope it reminds you how amazing long your writing life is, and how stuff that you thought would never see the light of day may again re-emerge. I mean, this piece lay fallow for almost 20 years. I’d forgotten I even wrote it! Then I stumbled across it again, and the rest is, well, as you’ll see, a bunch of dumb jokes. The point is that nothing goes to waste. Nothing! At minimum, everything we write makes us better writers – this we know – but there’s always a potential new market or second life waiting for your work somewhere down the road.
Okay, here we go, coming to you live from 1994, it’s The King’s English Dethorned…
—-
Being a pro writer, people are always asking me how to make their prose more fine like wine like mine and I answer that the two most important things to pay attention to are spelling and grammer and I also tell them to never ever split an infinitive and I also tell them not to have run-on sentences or missing commas which are bad. Now I read where the children that are of our schools are’nt learning about good structure and puncturation these days, so as a public service I have drew up a list of all the things you need to make your English well.
Read MoreIt (finally) appears the stigmas once associated with self and indie-publishing are disappearing, or at least waning – though in some cases there are new ones arising and there will always be naysayers. Let me clarify that while I think there are pros and cons to traditional publishing, self publishing and Indie publishing alike, I have always been a supporter of each and never agreed with those stigmas. As a PR and marketing professional having helped launch several successful self and Indie published books, I knew there were high quality stories out there by talented authors that needed to be told that didn’t have a publisher for various reasons. It’s been great to see some of the national media open up and begin writing about these books and authors more. For me, it’s been great to see these authors and books find readers and success – sometimes as much so, or even more so, than books I’ve worked on that have a big publisher.
More authors, agents, and readers are embracing Indie of self-publishing. It’s even becoming a viable option for several of my very successful traditionally published authors who are seeing that success and now considering making the leap.
But thus far the media has covered the breakout stories of self-publishing that are not the norm – often leading to unrealistic expectations. The purpose of this post is to share well thought-out tips from several self-published authors who have been successful on many different levels and in their own right – not just those that have sold millions of copies. (Note: most of these authors are clients of mine. Through years of innovation and creativity working on Indie and self-published books on a case by case basis – along with our traditionally published clients – we’ve helped these authors become award-winning, bestselling – or both – and many have gone on to sign with agents, publishers and even sell film rights. Or they have continued to successfully self-publish). But hiring professional PR and marketing is only one piece of it – they have each done their own things to make their success unique. I tapped them to share the tips direct from their experiences and mouths.
Read MoreI awoke from a nightmare last weekend and did the sensible thing. I got up and showered off the flop sweat, crawled back in with the ToolMaster, and poked him in the shoulder — firmly, since he was the cause of my distress.
“Hey,” he said with a fair degree of irritation. Then something must have shown on my face. “Another bad dream? What do you need?”
While he wrapped his arms around me, I told him the sordid tale.
Despite it being considered a huge no-no in fiction to begin with a dream, I’ll repeat myself here. I’m hoping to first illustrate some linguistic elements, then discuss how they might be intentionally used to help with world-building and characterization.
So, the dream…
On a gorgeous day in early spring, we’d gone for a family hike in the mountains. The snow was a good three feet deep but packed underfoot, so navigable, if slow going. To the right was a half-buried snow fence, and a yard beyond that, a canyon carved smooth and deep by a river.
We were alone, free to enjoy the sounds you’d expect in such a setting: from far below, the gentle shushing of meltwater. From a quarter-mile back, the voices of our kids as they argued about an episode of Dexter. Overhead, the loopy birdsong of robins that had dined on fermented mountain ash berries.
At one point, the ToolMaster turned to say something to me — knowing him, it involved some kind of Jan-ribbing — and he lost his balance. Before I could draw breath, he slipped sideways, his momentum carrying him over the snow fence and toward the canyon’s edge. At the last second, he grabbed the branch of a pine tree on the proximal side and his feet found purchase on a narrow ledge.
If he’d stayed there and waited for a rope, he might have been fine, but he looked down. Whatever he saw spooked him.
He pinwheeled backward, ended in a worse position yet — feet on that small shelf, shoulders on the opposite wall of rock, his life depending upon the strength of his core. He might have been a tree lodged at an angle, except that he was clad in layers and wearing the latest in moisture-wicking technology.
I screamed to the kids to get help and went to him, stretching out from the pine tree. Naturally, I awoke as he was risking it all to grasp my hand, and Molly and Frank were disobeying my orders, easing past the snow fence to try and haul us up. If you saw their body mass versus ours, you’d know it couldn’t end well. Without equipment or help, we’d end in a daisy-chain of doom.
Read MoreToday’s guest is Marybeth Whalen. Marybeth’s novels include THE MAILBOX, SHE MAKES IT LOOK EASY, THE GUEST BOOK, and THE WISHING TREE, and she is the founder of the website, She Reads. Marybeth says,
I’m passionate about sharing the ups and downs of the writing life with other writers and believe that building a community of fellow writers is beneficial to an otherwise isolated profession.
Follow Marybeth on Twitter and Facebook.
Without further ado, take it away, Marybeth!
Ten Ways to Torture Yourself as a Writer
1. Check your Amazon rankings. Then check the rankings for other writers.
2. If you’re feeling especially cruel, look at the rankings for some writer you’ve always envied because he/she is 1) much cuter/thinner/prettier/more fashionable than you 2) has better covers for his/her books 3) has that publisher, agent, editor you always dreamed of having or 4) all of the above.
3. Read your reviews on any bookseller site.
4. Go to various literary event websites and find the cool things that you have not been invited to.
5. Read the hip writer-type sites that you’ve never been asked to contribute to.
6. Compare your Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest or other social media followers with those of other writers.
Read MoreThe highway to publication overflows with cars: luxury behemoths; sensible hybrids; nondescript, windowless vans with strange dents that protrude from the inside. Each bears the logo of the mechanic who brought it to life. You’ve built a car, too, with good mileage and a cherry spoiler. [Author’s note: The cars are a metaphor for your books.]
But when you get your baby on the highway, you can’t ignore that a metallic paint job and tilt steering is all that differentiates your vehicle from every other car in its class, no matter what shiny-metal totem adorns its hood. How does your creation stand out? You don’t need a better insignia. You don’t even need the car metaphor. You need to remake yourself. You must become the deer sprinting headlong across the road. When your book crumples someone’s hood and cracks their windshield, rest assured you’ve got their attention. And that’s pretty much the Tab-A and Slot-B of branding.
[pullquote]You need to remake yourself. You must become the deer sprinting headlong across the road. When your book crumples someone’s hood and cracks their windshield, rest assured you’ve got their attention[/pullquote]
As a twenty-first-century author, the fulcrum of your success is your personal brand. Think Hemingway’s manliness. Neil Gaiman’s leather jacket. Harlan Ellison’s sociopathy. A lot of folks are confused about what exactly branding is. Folks like me, for example. After extensive research in the furthest corners of the internet–at great risk to my personal safety and sanity, you’re welcome–I’ve determined that branding means pretty much whatever you say it means (and since I’m the big shot with the column, when I say “you” I mean “me”). So here’s how to get started building your personal author brand:
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