Every year I get asked what I think about
NaNoWriMo, and I don’t
know how to answer, because I don’t want to say, “I think it makes
you write a bad novel.”
This is kind of the point. You’re supposed to churn out 50,000 words
in one month, and by the end you have a goddamn novel, one you wouldn’t
have otherwise. If it’s not Shakespeare, it’s still a goddamn novel.
The NaNoWriMo FAQ
says: “Aiming low is the best way to succeed,”
where “succeed” means “write a goddamn novel.”
I find it hard to write a goddamn novel. I can do it, but it’s not very
fun. The end product is not much fun to read, either. I have
different techniques. I thought I should
wait until the end of November, when a few alternatives
might be of interest to those people who, like me, found it really
hard to write a goddamn novel, and those people who found it worked
for them could happily ignore me.
Some of these methods I use a lot, some only when
I’m stuck. Some I never use, but maybe they’ll work for you. If there were
a single method of writing great books, we’d all be doing it.
The Word Target
What: You don’t let yourself leave the keyboard
each day until you’ve hit 2,000
words.
Why: It gets you started. You stop fretting over whether your words
are perfect, which you shouldn’t be doing in a first draft. It
captures your initial burst of creative energy. It gets you to the end
of a first draft in only two or three months. If you can consistently
hit your daily target, you feel awesome and motivated.
Why Not: It can leave you too exhausted to spend any non-writing
time thinking about your story. It encourages you to pounce
on adequate ideas rather than give them time to turn
into great ones. It encourages you to use many words instead of few.
If you take a wrong turn, you can go a long way before you
realize it. It can make you feel like a failure as a writer when the problem is
that you’re trying to animate a corpse. It can make you dread writing.
The Word Ceiling
What: You write no more than 500 words per day.
Why: You force yourself to finish before you really want to, which makes
you spend the rest of the day thinking about getting back to the story, which
often produces good new ideas. You feel good about yourself even if you only
produced a few hundred words that day. You don’t beat yourself up about
one or two bad writing days. You give yourself time to turn good ideas
into great ones. Writing feels less like hard work.
(More on this.)
Why Not: It takes longer (six months or more). It can be difficult to work on the same
idea for a very long time. It may take so long that you give up.
The Coffee Shop
What: You take your laptop, order a coffee, and compose your
masterpiece in public.
Why: It gets you out of the house, which may help to break a funk.
You’re less likely to goof off if people are watching. It feels kind of cool.
Why Not: It’s extremely distracting. You look like a dick. You lose a deceptively large
amount of time to non-writing activities (getting there, setting up, ordering
coffees, considering bagels…).
The Quiet Place
What: You go to your own particular writing place and close the door on
the world.
Why: It removes distractions. It can feel like a special, magical
retreat, where you compose great fictions (particularly if it’s somewhere you
only use for writing, not checking email, doing your taxes, and leveling
your Warlock).
Why Not: You may not have one. You may find it depressing
if you’ve had a tough time writing lately. You can end up fussing over making
your Writing Place perfect instead of writing.
The Burst
What: You write in patches of 30-60 minutes. When you feel your concentration
flag, you go do something else for 30 minutes, then return.
Why: It freshens you up. You find solutions to difficult story
problems pop into your head after a breather.
You can find time to write more easily, knowing you’re only sitting down for a
short while. When you’re “running out of time,” you can feel energized and
write very quickly.
Why Not: It’s more difficult to sink into the zone if you know another activity
is just around the corner. It can encourage you to look for excuses to stop writing.
It discourages more thoughtful writing.
The Immersion
What: You pull out the network cord, turn off the phone, and write
in blocks of four hours.
Why: It eliminates distractions. You can relax knowing that you
have plenty of time to write. It encourages thoughtful writing.
Why Not: You can wind up grinding. You can feel reluctant to start
writing, knowing that such a huge block of time awaits.
The Intoxicant
What: You consume alcohol, narcotic, or caffeine before writing.
Why: Dude, those words just gush.
Why Not: You may be part of the 99.9% of the population that writes self-indulgent
gibberish.
Sidenote: There is no case of writer’s block that can’t be cured with enough
caffeine.
The Headphones
What: You strap on headphones and crank up the volume.
Why: It’s inspiring. It can quickly put you in the right frame of mind for a scene.
It can block out other noise that would otherwise be distracting.
Why Not: You can’t think as clearly. You can be misled
into thinking you’re writing a powerful/exciting/tragic scene when in fact it’s
just the music.
The Break of Dawn
What: You wake, walk directly to your computer, and write.
Why: Your mind is at its clearest and most creative. You haven’t started
thinking about the real world yet. Your body is not fuzzing your mind
with digestion. If you write for a while, you develop a hunger dizziness that’s
mildly stimulating. (This can be combined with coffee.)
Why Not: You may not be a morning person. You may only be able to write
for a short while before becoming too hungry to continue. Your lifestyle
may not permit it.
The Dead of Night
What: You write at night, after everyone’s gone to sleep.
Why: It feels kind of cool. It’s often a reliable distraction-free time. You can
often be in a fairly clear, creative frame of mind.
Why Not: You may only be able to write for a short while before becoming too
tired to write coherently. You may be too tired to repeat the process regularly.
You may not be a night person.
The Jigsaw
What: You start writing the scenes (or pieces of scenes) that interest you the
most, and don’t worry about connecting them until later.
Why: You capture the initial energy of ideas. You can avoid becoming derailed
by detail. You make sure your novel revolves around your big ideas.
Why Not: It can be difficult to figure out how to connect the scenes after the fact.
You need to rewrite heavily in order to incorporate ideas you had later
for earlier sections. Your characters can be shakier because you wrote scenes
for them before you knew the journey they’d make to get there.
The End-to-End
What: You start at the beginning and write the entire thing in sequence.
Why: You see the story as a reader will. You feel more confident about your
characterizations, pacing, and logical progression of plot. It’s simpler.
Why Not: You can become bogged down in boring sections you think
are necessary to set-up good stuff (not realizing yet that you don’t need
those boring sections, or that they can be far shorter than you think). You
can wind up far from where you intended to go, never finding a place for those
initial ideas. (This may not be a bad thing.)
The Outline
What: You sketch out plot, characters, and turning points before you start
writing.
Why: You feel like you know what you’re doing. You can feel excited because you
know big stuff is coming. You tend to produce a better structure, with larger
character arcs and clearer plot twists.
Why Not: What seems like a brilliant idea for an ending on day 1 can seem trite
on day 150, when you understand the characters and story better. You feel pressure
to make your characters do implausible things in order to fit your outline.
You can close yourself off to better ideas. You can become bored because you
already know what’s going to happen.
The Journey
What: You start writing with no real idea of where you’ll wind up.
Why: It’s exciting. Discovering a story as you write it is one of life’s great joys.
Your characters have freedom to act more naturally and drive the story,
rather than be bumped around by plot.
Why Not: You can end up nowhere very interesting. You tend to write smaller,
more realistic stories, which may not be what you want.
The Restart
What: You abandon the story you’re working on, even though you know
it’s brilliant and the idea is perfect but GODDAMN it is driving you insane
for some reason
Why: It’s a bad idea. There might be a good idea inside it somewhere, but
you’ve surrounded it with bad characters or plot or setting or something
and the only way to salvage it is to let all that other stuff go.
Why Not: While loss of motivation is always, always, always because the story
isn’t good enough, and some part of you knows it, you rarely need to throw away the
whole thing. Often deleting the last sentence, paragraph, or scene is enough to
spark ideas about new directions. Sometimes you only need to give up a plan
for the future. Changing your mind about where you’re going can allow you to
write the story you really want.
(More on this.)
Some people think it must be cool to have a famous friend. You’re
imagining hanging with someone like, say, Keanu, and Keanu
telling you things he doesn’t tell anyone else, and you ragging on him
for sucking at PlayStation. That would be cool. But what it’s
actually like is one of your friends—your real friends, say your best
friend—and he’s exactly the same only everyone thinks he’s wonderful.
Do you see how annoying that is? Because, sure, he’s
a good guy, but he’s not perfect. He’s not God. But now everyone
fawns over him and tells you how lucky you are to know him. That’s
why they pay attention to you: because you might help them get closer
to him. And
whenever you spend time with him, just the two of you, you both know he could
be somewhere else, listening to people flatter him or take him cool
places for free or sleep with him, because he’s famous.
Being friends with a famous person is the worst. And that’s why when
the magazines come sniffing around, asking just off the record,
just for background, is he really happy, and does he drink or ever do
drugs, and did he really hit that girl, you tell them everything.
The
New Yorker
published
one of my short stories
in full without even asking. That’s
a gross copyright violation. I’m thinking of suing. Admittedly, the story is
only 25 words long. But still. They broke the ten percent rule. Two and a half words would
have been okay. “She walks i.” I’d have no problem with that.
So now The New Yorker has stolen my livelihood, there’s no reason for you to buy
the book it’s published in,
Hint Fiction.
Unless you would like to read 150 or so
stories by the other contributors. I guess that’s a good reason. The deal is they are all hints: 25
words or fewer, not self-contained stories but rather suggestions of larger tales. There are
some more examples, by which I mean copyright violations, in
The New Yorker article, and you can pick up the book, published today in the US
& Canada,
here
or
here.
If you are in Australia,
I’m on TV tonight, talking about Ayn Rand’s
Atlas Shrugged. Actually, I’m doing that no matter where you are. You can’t
affect it. I’m also discussing Freedom by Jonathan Franzen. I mention the
Rand book first because it’s the one people will send me emails about.
Here’s the thing with Atlas Shrugged. It’s eleven hundred pages of
brilliant, beautiful, go-getter industrialists talking to stupid, grasping, corrupt collectivists, set in a
world where only half the laws of economics apply. The character names change but nothing else.
Otherwise, it’s not bad. No, I lie. Even setting that aside, it’s terrible. I felt like Ayn Rand
cornered me at a party, and three minutes in I found my first objection to what she was saying,
but she kept talking without interruption for ten more days.
It’s not a novel so much as a manifesto, and, I think, impossible to enjoy unless you’re
at least a little on board for the philosophy, and it’s hard to be on board for the philosophy if
you understand economics or see a
moral problem with starving poor people.
I realize many believe fervently in the philosophy. They email me.
And I don’t think it’s one hundred percent bogus. But it demands that you choose between
no government or total government, and I think all such extremes have similarly extreme
problems.
Freedom is good, though.
Here is a short story!
Not by me. Oh. Sorry. You thought… you’re
right, that was confusing. No, this is by Sean Silleck.
He’s nobody. I say that with the deepest respect. I mean he’s only
had one thing published and this is it. But check it out: it’s like
something I would write, if I was having a really good day.
I mean, eerily so. It’s like the guy is hanging around my house after
dark, going through my trash. I’m not saying he is. I’m not saying
anything until the police have finished their investigation. But really.
Eerie.
I swapped a few emails with Sean and it turns out he’s never heard of
me in his life. That was kind of disappointing. I was all excited that I
had inspired a bright young talent. But no. Apparently I’m just working
with ideas so obvious that anyone can have them.
Speaking of shorts,
I’m judging a short story contest!
You can win $1,500 just by writing the kind of thing you already know I like. It’s
practically rigged in your favor. Although you do have to be Australian. I suppose
that’s the catch.
If you’re not Australian, I still have something for you. Wait. No, this
is local, too. Wow. This blog is just getting more and more pointless for you.
But anyway, I’m rocking out the Wheeler Centre in Melbourne next week
with the
Writer’s Mix Tape.
The idea is I bring along a CD of significant/pumping tunes and play them
and talk about why what they mean and finish with an awesome breakdance.
It’s something like that. I’m there with Rob Jan of RRR radio. You should be, too.
Unless you live thousands of miles away. In which case I’m very sorry
for wasting your time. As you were.
I remember when I was desperate to find a girl but had no idea what
they wanted. I knew what I wanted. I wanted them to take delivery
of my package. But how to convince them? What did they want from me?
Where could I find one with a good reputation, who didn’t charge
fees?
Wait, did I say girl? I meant literary agent. I couldn’t find a
literary agent.
Now there are tons of sites about literary agents. Some are by
agents. My favorite is
Nathan Bransford of
Curtis Brown, but there
are plenty to choose from. There’s no longer any excuse for not
knowing at least a little about how an agent’s mind works: what
they’re looking for, how to approach them.
Still, the other day I received an email from a writer facing a quandary:
A Literary Agent has given me a favourable reply (ie: wants to see my entire
manuscript from a lousy query letter), so I immediately panicked and sent it
to a “professional editing” service (one listed on Australian Literary Agents
Website) for a final Mr Sheening. Do Literary Agents have a time limit before
they get miffed if you don’t send manuscript by return email? The Editing
Service assures me that I have two months (?) to submit, as they have not
started it yet, but “it is on the top of their pile”.
Help… please?
Yours in awe
Elle
Usually I can’t respond to emails, but I make an exception for
those that sign off, “Yours in awe.” So I replied, and then I thought
I might as well post my response here, because it was just that good.
Or possibly not, but what the hell, it’s not like I’m forcing you to
keep reading.
Hi Elle!
This is why you don’t query agents until your book is ready, of course.
But I know it happens. I queried a few agents with my first novel then
freaked out because what if they wanted to see it? I think I did
lightning rewrites every time someone responded.
I see two issues. The first is: Are you damaging your chances if you don’t
respond to an agent immediately? If we were talking about American agents,
I’d say, “Maybe.” Most reputable American agents receive more queries than
they can remember, and might not notice whether it’s been two weeks or two
months since they asked to see yours. But they might.
For an Australian agent I’d say, “Probably.” They deal with far fewer writers and are more likely to wonder what’s going on.
But either way, I’d send them that manuscript. Agents want reliable
clients, and if the first thing you do is delay, they’ll worry you are
one of those writers who are forever six months away from finishing their
next book. For this reason you should not reply with some pathetic story
about how you thought your book was ready but now you think about it can
you please have a few more months. Don’t do that.
You are worried that your book could be better; well, it probably could.
They all could. Do you think yours has little flaws or big ones? If they’re
minor, they’re unlikely to dissuade an editor who otherwise loves your work,
and if they’re major, you’re dead no matter what: dead if you send in that
piece of crap, dead if you wait for two months only to discover from this
editing service that you need to spend six more on rewrites.
Speaking of which. There are very fine freelance editors out there but I
don’t like the concept. In particular I think it’s bad for amateur writers
with no idea what’s good and bad about their book to consult a
freelance editor in the hope that this expert can explain it.
It’s bad because
(a) to rewrite well you need to completely believe in what you’re doing.
Receiving advice you don’t really understand or agree with but feel compelled
to follow anyway because it’s coming from an expert will crush everything
unique and valuable about your book.
And (b) some freelance editors are delusional psychopaths.
By my reckoning, about one in four pieces of literary feedback are so
wide of the mark they’re not just unhelpful but destructive. They want
your book to be more like a completely different type of book, or prostrate
itself before the altar of Strunk & White, or not imply things about
hot-button issues you never even thought of, or go into depth about things
nobody cares about, or not do this mildly felonious thing that someone tore
strips off them for at their last story workshop, or stop reminding them of
their ex-wife.
I’m talking about feedback from other writers and readers, rather than
editors; you would hope freelance editors are less delusional than writers.
But I don’t know. Why take the risk? This is why I advocate quantity: get
your ms. read by at least eight or ten people before you show it to anyone
in the industry. Enough to identify the outliers.
More on this here.
Obviously I haven’t read your manuscript (that wasn’t an invitation). I don’t
know which editing service you’ve selected, or how experienced you are, or
whether you’ve workshopped it already. But based on what I know: send it.
You’re more likely to hurt yourself by not sending it than you are to help
yourself by delaying for months in order to maybe improve it but maybe not.
Good luck!
Max.
Lately the publishing industry has been trying to commit suicide over
electronic rights. It’s funny because every time in history a
revolutionary new way to do business comes along, the first instinct of
all established players is to strangle themselves
with it. Movie studios fought the VCR. Microsoft fought the Internet.
The music industry fought MP3s. TV networks are fighting PVRs.
Eventually, these turn into important markets, fully embraced by the
companies that tried to kill them. But until then everyone spends a lot
of time throwing lawyers at anything that doesn’t
look like a traditional business model.
The first e-madness was DRM, of course. That’s the code
they wrapped around electronic books to ensure they couldn’t be
pirated. Well. “Ensure” is a big word. I’m not sure that any piece of
DRM in history has survived an interested hacker. What it did
ensure was a steady trickle of emails to my inbox from people who
couldn’t find an electronic copy of Jennifer Government
in the right format for their device, or could but after they paid their
money it didn’t work.
Next came
e-delays,
where publishers held back electronic versions for four months following print
publication. “The right place for the e-book is after the
hardcover but before the paperback,” said Simon & Schuster CEO
Carolyn Reidy. This is a brave counterpoint to the more common wisdom
that the right place for selling something is wherever customers want
to buy it. So we were not just restricting e-books to particular
formats within particular territories, but also to particular windows of time.
But that wasn’t enough. Publishers didn’t like the fact that Amazon.com
started selling e-books for $9.99 each. (They thought that was too cheap,
if you’re wondering.) It didn’t affect publishers’ margins, nor authors’ royalties,
since
Amazon.com was selling below cost
to promote its Kindle platform. But still,
publishers were uncomfortable
with the idea of books being that cheap.
So they
went to war
and forced Amazon.com to bump up prices to $13-$15, in exchange
for taking a lower royalty on each sale.
Let’s review. Amazon.com was eating it in order to allow you to buy books
for ten bucks, instead of twenty or thirty, while paying authors the same royalty.
Publisher intervenes, and now books are more expensive for you, while the
author gets less. Also, the publisher gets less. Oh, and I didn’t mention this,
but during the war, Amazon.com took down all the “Buy” buttons for Macmillan
books, so you definitely couldn’t buy them no matter how much you wanted to
and nobody made any money at all.
I won’t say it’s impossible for an industry to push retail prices up while pushing
their own margins down and be successful. I’ll just say that’s not the way it
usually works. Also, as a general rule, when customers want to buy a product,
it usually works out best if the company lets them. I don’t think there have
been too many examples of companies making money while refusing to sell
their products in the formats their customers want while also forcing retailers
to charge more and pocketing less themselves. I’m not sure. But
that’s my feeling.
Meanwhile, rocked by the Global Calamitous Money Disappearing Event, publishers
began cutting back what they do. Ten years ago, a publisher gave hopeful authors editorial advice,
a printing service, a promotional budget, and access to bricks and mortar
bookstores. There was really no viable alternative, short of becoming a small
publisher yourself. To become a successful author, you needed a publisher.
Today, the promotional budget is more likely to involve encouragement to do
something on the internet rather than a book tour. Publishers are still fantastic
at getting you into bookstores, and physical books still comprise the vast majority of
the market: you need them for this. But in e-books, you can click “Export to EPUB”
as easily as they can, and without giving up 75% of revenue.
Also, publishers are getting less willing to make risky bets. Instead of taking
an unknown author and striving to find her an audience, they want authors
to establish their own audience in advance, via a website or similar.
Now, publishing is full of terrific, smart people who love books and want to
promote authors. I haven’t met a single person in publishing I didn’t like. I even
love my old Viking editor, who dumped me via relayed e-mail message. I
forgive you, Carolyn. I really do.
But the people in charge there are trying to sue the VCR. If publishing
gets tomorrow everything it wants today, it will be smaller and less
relevant. Imagine the world in in ten years, when e-books are 50% of the market:
What will publishers offer authors? Not the ability
to find an audience, if they’re pushing that onto authors. Not the distribution network:
anyone can get their book into an electronic store. Not promotion; or at least,
not much of it. That leaves editorial and distribution of hard copy.
Not to be sneezed at, for sure. Editorial in particular is often the
difference between a great book and a mediocre one; I can attest to that. But if I’ve got a web site
and a hundred thousand visitors, I’d think seriously about whether
editorial and print is worth giving up 90% of my income. I would, at the
least,
drive a harder bargain with a publisher than if they were providing
more services I really needed.
The publishing industry is trying to think long-term, like every industry
that faced a revolutionary change before it. But please, this time, can we not batter
ourselves to death? It’s not that complicated, Publishing. I write stories. I want
people to read them.
I want as many people to read them in whatever format they want, wherever they
want, as cheaply as possible, while I earn a living. I don’t want lower
royalties in exchange for higher retail prices. That’s the opposite of what I want.
I don’t want to get emails from people saying they wanted to buy my e-book but
they couldn’t because it wasn’t available or didn’t work. This is text. It’s not
hard to put text on an electronic device. It’s only hard because you make it.