Posts by John Vorhaus
Recently a friend asked me to write a short call to action for her high school English class, to help them break out of the arrogant insecurity of youth and into the freewheeling creative writing process that you and I know so well. Below you will find, more or less, what I shared with them. Can I prevail upon you to share it with young writers you know? Because after all, hey, why should we adults have all the fun?
The problem with high school writing, it seems to me, is that much of it is boring (The Lonely Voyage of Vasco da Gama) or lame (Why I Love Gravity in 500 to 750 words) or pointlessly self-evident (In the book THE TIME MACHINE, name the apparatus the hero invents). There’s so much more to writing than that.
Writing is a joy.
Writing is a thrill.
Writing is a big, exciting adventure!
Oops, but writing is also a big, scary problem.
Why? Because any time writers write, they face two tough challenges:
1) “I don’t know how to do this.”
B) “It might not be any good.”
And by the way, these problems are not limited to new writers or young writers. Every writer, from you to me to Charles Frickin’ Dickens, has at one time or another wondered, How can I make this work? and Gosh, what if I can’t? But what if you could enjoy the big, thrilling adventure without wiping out against the big, scary problem. What if…
A) You knew how to do stuff, and
2) You didn’t care if it was good?
Sounds impossible? Let’s find out – and let’s start really small.
Read MoreFor the several years that I’ve been writing this column, I’ve tried to keep my whimsy in check and stay focused on the goal of helping you advance your craft and live your writer’s life. But every now and then, as you know, my whimsy bursts through like a hernia in the body of my work and all sorts of nonsense spews forth. This would be one of those times, for I’ve just been sorting through a trove of more than 700 words that I’ve invented, and damned if I don’t feel constrained to share some of them with you.
For you see, as much as I try always to smarticulate (that is, to speak both wisely and well) I have to admit that I get carried away with words. I do. I’m a fan of the snatchphrase – language exported to a new context – and of nonomatopoeia, which sounds like nothing at all. Adlibi. Panicdote. Overaverage. Yes, and bewilderness. When I see or conceive words like these, I have to have them. I kind of have to have them all.
And that’s how you build a collection of 700 new words. You start by being a moxiemoron, too brave for your own good. You subtract sticktoitivelessness, the God-given ability to quit, and you engage in quite a lot of microstasking (the work that gets done between visits to Facebook). You stay out of procrastinationary states, where moving forward slowly slowly turns into standing still. In short, you chose not to be omniabsent, which is to say nowhere, man.
Mostly you have a passion for it. I do. I have a ridiculous passion for new words – but honestly, how can we hope to survive in these modern times without heteroschedule, when Mommy and Daddy make time to make love, or farrightitis AKA Fox News Disease?
Read MoreJoin me now as we travel back in time to our high school graduations. There we all stand in our caps and gowns, waiting for our names to be called. The future stands before us, and all the world lies at our feet. So many possibilities…so much uncertainty…so much fear. Whether you graduated back in the day (like I did – back before the advent of the phrase “back in the day”) or just last year, the feeling remains the same: Gulp…now what?
Suddenly, a tiny traveler from your own future materializes before you and gives you a comprehensive list of everything you’ve done from high school graduation until today. Some items on this list don’t surprise you much. (Which ones?) Others astound you. (Again, which ones?) On my list it says that I went on to graduate from college and bum around Europe for a summer. Given who I was in that time and that place, these things were to be expected. On the other hand, I also learn that in 1990 I’m going to win a world gold medal in the sport of Ultimate Frisbee. That would certainly have surprised me on graduation day. After all, I was voted in high school least likely to complete the fifty-yard dash. I became a gold-medal athlete? In a sport I’d never heard of? How did that happen?
Even more astounding, I turned out to be a writer. What? No way? I’d never be that brave. I could never take that risk. Sure, I’d fooled around with creative writing in high school, and yeah people thought I was pretty funny and clever, but making a living with words was about a million miles away from my thinking back then. I thought I’d end up as a lawyer or some other sort of white-collar professional. That’s what my script seemed to call for, and I hadn’t yet lived long enough to know how far from the script I could – or would – eventually veer. If I had seen on this list, “You will write seven novels,” or even “You will write one novel,” I would have dismissed the idea as a beguiling fantasy. I mean, it sounds good, but seriously, no way.
What was beyond the realm of your comprehension that you’ve since gone on to achieve?
Read MoreIf you visit my Amazon author page, home of Bafflegab Books, you’ll see some pretty crazy titles in my indy-pub product line. Decide to Play Drunk Poker… A Million Random Words… I’ve gone to some lengths to extend the whimsical end of my brand, because there’s no telling what nonsense I might like to publish later, and I want there to be an established place for it in my oeuvre. The silly books sell almost not at all, but that’s okay because they defend that end of my brand and, more crucially, my precedent right to throw anything out the window and see if it lands.
My writing books sell best. Always have, always will. We’ll get to why that breaks my heart in a minute, but first let’s look at which ones are my workhorses and why. The two strongest sellers in the Bafflegab line are, far and away, the little book of SITCOM and Comedy Writing 4 Life. Like their granddaddy, The Comic Toolbox, they’re the right book at the right time for comedy writers (or any writers) at a certain stage of their development. Since there are always writers passing through stages, there’s an ongoing market for those books.
These are not big books, nor are they expensive. I make them short and I price them attractively for three reasons. First, I want to make it easy for any reader to discover my brand. Second, writers don’t often have a ton of money, and I don’t want to price-gouge. Third, it fulfills my deep purpose to be read by readers all around the world; more readers buying more books for less money is of greater value to me than fewer readers buying fewer books, even for more money.
To tell you the truth, I have no way of knowing if I’m maximizing my earn on these earners. Probably not. I sell through Amazon and Amazon only, and I know I can do better than that. But my hustle – getting the books where people can see them – well, that’s not a strength of my game. I need readers to find their way to my books because I’m just never going to be their broadcasting agent as I should be.
So I don’t price my products scientifically and I don’t market them strategically. Yet I seem to be doing okay. Every month, Amazon sends me money – some hundreds of dollars if I may be frank – and it’s money I don’t have to work for: The writing is long done, and the bookkeeping is Amazon’s hassle. The key to my (modest) success has been building a (modest) catalog in which no one title is more than a revenue trickle, but taken all together they add up to a revenue stream. That’s why I keep writing new books. That’s why I keep throwing them out the window to see if they land. Because one under-performing book isn’t such a much, but ten under-performing books is a product line.
Read MoreI’m addressing the kids today, and if you’re not one, but know someone who is, won’t you please pass this along? (If you find it worthy, I mean.) I’m hoping to help your young peers understand what to expect as they walk the writer’s road.
I was a pack rat of words long before computers came along. I filled journal after journal with tiny, tense, Bic-penned attempts to master the mere act of putting words on the page. What I wrote was so stupid! So self-absorbed and questiony. Why am I here? What is my purpose? What do I have to do to get laid? I hated almost everything I wrote almost as soon as I wrote it. I didn’t know the first thing about story, and that’s what galled me most of all. My writing went nowhere, and I knew it. But I didn’t stop for the same reason you don’t stop; for the same reason junkies don’t stop. We’ve chosen our art, or it’s chosen us, and now we have to deal.
So I kept filling the pages of the horrible journals (filling, primarily, unlined black hardbound books that, because I am a pack rat of words, rest in the eaves of my very garage even as we speak). I discovered my first rule of writing: Write what you can write, or, more broadly, make the art you can make. And don’t lament the art that lies presently beyond your grasp. Presently that will change.
I had to write the horrible journals to write myself out of the horrible journals.
I had to start somewhere.
Kids, you have to start somewhere. What can you do right now that will make you feel artistically fulfilled? Do that. If it is within your capacity to make a creative choice, and within your desire to do so, then do so. Make whatever choice you can make; you will feel so good when you do, simply for having made the attempt. And don’t worry about the results. The thing you want to think about is serving your apprenticeship. No one expects an apprentice to be that skilled; it’s an apprentice’s job to acquire skill. As an apprentice, you can fail all over the place and nobody cares. As an apprentice, failure is part of your brief.
Write what you can write. Make the music you make; everything else flows from that. [pullquote]Write what you can write. Make the music you make; everything else flows from that.[/pullquote]
The whole story of my career is a story of writing what I could write. I wrote ads when I wrote ads because copywriting was the best of my ability. I graduated to songs, and for a long time that’s all I could manage: a song’s worth of words. I tackled sitcom next, then hour dramas, screenplays, non-fiction, and novels, in an escalating set of challenges. At each stage I did my best to work at, and extend, the limit of my skill. At a certain point I was a novice no more. I became a journeyman, a professional writer. I could walk into a place and say, “Yeah, I can do that job.” It’s amazing what builds up, just over time, and that’s both your skill set and […]
Read MoreAs someone who straddles both sides of the publishing paradigm – I release books through traditional publishers and also publish my own – I have found that the straddle model really makes sense for me. Let’s see if it makes sense for you, too.
Broadly speaking, I publish two types of books, novels and how-to non-fiction. The novels are more suited to the traditional publishing model because they need the boost of reviews, national media marketing, and (even in this day and age) bookstore distribution. With my novels, then, I make common cause with a boutique publisher, sharing revenues 50/50 and using the combined clout of our marketing, publicity, and social media efforts to grow and build my fiction brand.
On the how-to side, though, I find that it’s much more effective to indy-pub, because the kind of how-to books I write are the kind of books that people go looking for. It’s a rare reader who wakes up one day and says, “I wonder if John Vorhaus has written any new novels.” But it happens every day that someone wakes up and says, “I need to learn how to write better,” and her internet searches lead her to me. In the case of the novels, then, I’m pushing content toward the reader. In the case of the how-to books, the reader is pulling content to herself. Since such a reader will come looking for my books, I don’t have to work so hard to market them, and I don’t need the marketing muscle, or the distribution functionality, that a traditional publisher offers. Thus I indy-pub and keep most of the revenue for myself.
Note that I use the phrase “indy-pub” instead of “self publishing” to describe my efforts. This is by design because, for better or worse, the latter phrase still carries the stench of vanity press, at least to people of my generation. When you say, “I self-publish,” people (well, some people) will think, “Ah, you’re not good enough to get a ‘real’ publisher.” Annoying, right? But if you say you indy-pub, suddenly you’re as cool as any alternative rock band. And not for nothing, but I hope you’ll join me in my campaign to remove “self publishing” from the zeitgeist. It isn’t helping us, and we would all be better off if we were perceived to be as cool as rock bands, yeah?
With that said, there is still a strong prejudice among writers for going with a so-called “legitimate” publisher. But consider this: a publisher, at the end of the day, is nothing but a content delivery system.
Read MoreHere’s a question for you. Why do you write? Possible answers include:
If you answered 1 – easy money – you’re either inexperienced, deluded or perverse…all treatable conditions. If you answered 2 – can’t hold a real job – at least you’re being honest. If you answered 3 – just want my voice to be heard – you deserve honor and respect, sympathy and prayers. If you answered 4 – just sort of feel like I have to – you’re in the big fat majority here.
Many writers feel like they have no choice. We write because something named or nameless inside them makes us write. We often feel frustration because nothing we write seems to quell or quench the urge within. So we answer 4 – just sort of feel like I have to – but we’re not necessarily thrilled with their selection.
And that’s the war, the writer’s war, the constant struggle between the urge to write and the dread that it won’t go well.
And war, as we know, is hell.
But writing isn’t hell, not always. Sometimes there are moments of pure glory, without which moments we’d certainly walk away, no matter how much have to we had inside. Those moments are the addiction condition of writing; they make us act like rats in a subtle and devious laboratory experiment: press bar, get treat. We don’t try to quit. We have no real desire to quit. We just want to keep pressing that bar and getting that treat.
And choice is the reason why.
Read MoreYears ago, I participated in a sub-one-act play writing competition, where the name of the game was to generate real drama, story and characters within a run-time of no more than ten minutes. I’ll spare you the suspense – I didn’t win, although if you ask me The Unbearable Lightness of Being Mr. Wacky was some kind of wonderful, but whatever. The guidelines they gave for the contest were brief but effective: Look for a moment of explosive change. Don’t worry about before, don’t worry about after, just drop your characters into the middle of something really earth-shattering in their lives and explore what happens there.
I never was much of a playwright, but I sure knew a great creative tool when I saw one, and I have since often taught from this one. The first time I used it as a teacher was in, of all places, a California state prison, where I needed an exercise that could be done in one page, right there in the room, without fear of failure.
Read MoreNote: The following is an excerpt from my new book, COMEDY WRITING 4 LIFE, which you can have a free e-copy of, just by sending your fruits of the following exercise to john.vorhaus@gmail.com.
Here’s the situation: Unfortunately, you died. Which makes your tombstone your last shot at cracking a good joke. What could you put there that would make your mourners snicker? I’m not afraid of outcomes; I’ll go first.
Now I’m really bored.
I wonder if this thing’s loaded.
As if life insurance worked.
Who turned out the lights?
Slacker.
Different jokes work with different groups. My friends in the ultimate frisbee community, for example, will wet their pants over “Slacker,” for they know how much I love that word, and how I cherish Slacker Wednesday, the mid-day, mid-week ultimate frisbee game I founded in Los Angeles and branded thus: “Slacker Wednesday: It works because you don’t!” Others will roll their eyes and wonder. They won’t have enough information to solve the puzzle of the joke.
Don’t expect any joke to work for every audience, ever. Your audience exists on a bell curve. Some people won’t laugh because they lack key information. Others won’t laugh because they have too much information – maybe they’ve heard the joke before. Your target is always the BFM, or Big Fat Middle.
Did you know that you can tune a joke? You can, just by adding or subtracting information.
Read MoreHere’s a homework assignment I have given to comedy-writing students from Nicaragua to Norway, and now I’m giving it to you. Whether you’re a comedy writer or not, I think you’ll find it useful, and fun. Here it comes. Ready?
Between now and tomorrow morning, go out and do something you’ve never done before. Anything. I don’t care what.
The great thing about this exercise is how it kicks you out of your comfort zone, or assaults the comfort zone of others, or both. When that happens, you’ll experience some powerful emotions. You’ll also find something funny. Almost guaranteed.
If you’re really gung ho, you’ll do the exercise twice: once, right now, before reading what others have done and what I think it all means; and then again, later, after we’ve had that discussion.
People predictably solve this problem either in terms of breaking personal rules of behavior or breaking social norms. One woman in Canada had a civil conversation with her ex-husband – something she had never done before. She used the excuse of “it’s homework” to unburn a certain bridge. She understood that the exercise gave her permission to do something she had long wanted to do: It changed the “rules” of her relationship with her ex-husband and provided a new way to engage him.
Here are some other things people have done.
An Irish Protestant visited his local Catholic church, a place he had always considered verboten.
A certain woman in Sydney lay down across the sidewalk to see if people would ignore her, and they did.
Occasionally there’s a wise-ass who says, “I didn’t do your homework, which is something I’ve never done before.” Which is bull, but whatever.
A lot of people kiss strangers or buy them drinks or meals. It’s liberating, it really is.
Read MoreI understand my problem exactly.
On the one hand, I have a lot of how-to books (on writing and on poker) which sell their asses off because they have just exactly the information that certain people need, just exactly when they need it. On the other hand, I have all these terrific novels that struggle to find their audience, because reading a novel is a recreational activity; in other words, it’s a want to, not a need to proposition. How-to books sell because they meet the needs of a specific need-to proposition: the need to know how to do something. Novels, however, face fierce competition, not just from other novels but from all forms of recreation, especially when we take our reading digital. I’ll read books on my iPhone all day long – once I get done with my email and twitter and the baseball scores and all the dang games app-based games I play. I know I’m not alone in this. Never in human history has the act of picking up a book had to compete so hard against the act of picking up something else.
Okay, so that’s where we are: need-to books sell easily; want-to books sell hard. How should we, as cottage-industry entrepreneurs, respond to this? One thing’s for sure: we should write a lot of need-to books. This is simply a matter of looking around, saying, “What am I good at?” and knocking out 15,000 words on that subject. Did I say 15,000? Yes, 15,000. That’s not much, nowhere near the 70,000 words that you need to call a novel a novel. Is 15,000 words enough for a how-to book? I can tell you from personal experience that the answer is an emphatic yes. Because, you see, a function of all those rapidly shrinking attention spans out there, and a function of the competition of all those games, websites, downloads, videos, and social media, is that people would rather spend less – less time and less money – even for information they know they really need. My two small reads – the little book of SITCOM and How To Write Good – routinely outsell my whole novel catalog combined. They earn. They earn consistently and reliably, month after month, year after year, and they (and titles like them) allow me to call myself a working writer – a consummation devoutly to be wished.
So why don’t I write how-to books exclusively?
Read MoreWhenever I have a problem I can’t solve, I immediately try to break it down into smaller, component problems. And I keep breaking problems down until I find one small enough to solve. This is a strategy I use over and over again when trying to get to the heart of the conflict of a story or scene I’m writing. For the sake of organizing my thoughts, and making sure that I get the most out of the moment, I don’t think of conflict as one thing, but rather as three things: global conflict, local conflict, and inner conflict. These concepts, if not these exact terms, are probably familiar to you, but let’s review them anyhow, for the sake of the eager youngsters reading over your shoulder just now.
GLOBAL CONFLICT is the character’s war against the world. This conflict is characterized by impersonality. The forces that the character is fighting against are not aware of, and have no emotional connection to, the character in question. Sources of global conflict include nature and natural forces, political or governmental structures, military or police, and “disinterested parties” such as landlords, meter maids, and surly waiters. The global conflict in the movie Twister is, you guessed it, those darn twisters. What’s the global conflict in the story you’re writing now?
Read MoreWriters often find themselves confronted by the question, “What is emotional truth?” and the further question, “How do I put it on the page?” As someone who has taught and trained writers all over the world – and of course struggled with these questions myself – I find that writers go through predictable stages in their quest to convey authentic emotional meaning in their work.
At first, many writers have no idea that such a thing as emotional truth even exists. They are focused solely on making the plot work, making the jokes funny, or advancing the action from event to event. At this stage, there is little or no thought to a work’s deeper meaning or deeper human truth. call this the “run and jump” phase of our writing careers, when all we can really see, and all we can adequately convey, are the mechanical aspects of the work; the mysteries of the human heart yet elude us.
As we mature as writers, we become aware that there’s such a thing as emotional truth, but we have no effective means of transmitting this information from brain to page. Our first efforts in this direction often seem awkward, stilted, and self-conscious. We might try to write, “I love you,” only to recoil in horror at the awful, stilted, clichéd obviousness of that thought. We hate or castigate ourselves for writing so artlessly about subjects so important. We haven’t yet made, at least to our satisfaction, the connection between simple human truths and meaningful, effective, evocative presentation on the page.
But we get better. We do. We grow and develop, deepen our awareness of the emotional truths we wish to convey, and also acquire strategies and tactics for doing so in a satisfying way. We discover tools like text and subtext, and bring our writing to the point where one character may say to another, “Would you like a cup of coffee?” and have it understood to mean, “I yearn for you to the bottom of my soul.” We become writers with sufficient insight to detect emotional truth and sufficient toolcraft to capture and preserve it in words. So we’re home and dry, right?
Maybe not. Maybe we’re still afraid.
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…
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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.
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