Metrics

I can’t believe people keep getting surprised by Facebook. They use your personal information to make money. They have no financial interest in your privacy but a huge one in eroding it. It’s been like that since forever. I saw a guy post that he was “continuously shocked” by Facebook’s privacy invasions. How can you be continuously shocked? At some point, don’t you realize this is simply the way it is?

Anyway. I didn’t mean to write about Facebook. I meant to write about technology. I’m allowed to do more geeky blogs this year, because I have a book coming out about cyborgs. So check this out. This is Amazon’s AuthorCentral Metrics. It shows how many of my books are being sold and where:

This is a free service to authors. There’s also a history:

Last time I had a book published, I had to wait ten months for a royalty statement to find out whether anyone bought it. Machine Man I’ll be able to follow in almost-real-time. I’m not sure whether that’s useful for anything, other than satisfying impatience. But still.

Here’s what I really want. The screenshot below is from YouTube. A while back I uploaded a video of my daughter being incredibly cute. YouTube tracks whether people watch all the way to the end, and, if not, where they give up, to create a graph of “attention.”

I want this for books. I would kill for it. I want to know at which point people are putting my books down, or giving up on them, so I can write better ones next time. I want to know which parts they re-read. It’s got to be possible now, with e-readers. Get on that, Amazon.

Copyedits

Look at me! I’m clinging to life here. I’ve been so sick I couldn’t even reach the razor. That was for the first few days. Then I started to like it. I have about twelve hours of this Man Grizzly look left before Jen realizes it’s voluntary.

Copyedits off to Vintage today. I pity the fool who has to typeset this mess. I went nuts. And I don’t even know what most copyediting symbols mean. I had to guess.

It’s 2011 and publishers still print out manuscripts, manually scribble on them, and type the whole thing in again.

Fifteen Ways to Write a Novel

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.

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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…).

4. 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.

5. 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.

6. 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.

7. 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.

8. 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.

9. 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.

10. 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.

11. 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.

12. 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.)

13. 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.

14. 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.

15. 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.)

Famous Friend

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.

Ayn Rand and a Hint

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.

Darren Aronofsky to Direct Machine Man

You know how I feel about film deals. At first, sure, everyone’s excited. It’s going to be the greatest movie ever made. You’ll be walking down the red carpet in no time, Max. You’ll be doing blow off the naked backs of strung-out starlets. But a few years later, and you know what? No starlets. Not one.

Not that it’s all about the starlets. I’m happily married. I’m just saying, it would be nice to be offered starlets. The point is, I have discovered that there’s a lot that can derail a project between sign-on and starlets. In fact, starlets seem to be the exception. Most of the time, the movie never happens.

So when the Machine Man deal happened, I tried to steel myself. “Meh,” I told people. “Not as glamorous as it sounds. Probably never go anywhere.” A few months ago, I heard Darren Aronofsky was interested in directing. “Yeah, there’s always a big name who’s interested,” I said. “Everyone’s always interested.” Then he signed on. And today it’s public, being reported in Hollywood Reporter and Variety.

Now, Aronofsky is possibly the greatest director in the world. By which I mean, if you wrote a book or a screenplay, and you wanted someone to make it into a film, you would choose him. Because many people can do smart and unsettling and entertaining, but not usually all at once.

His newest film is “Black Swan,” which premieres in the US on December 3. It’s written by Mark Heyman, who is also on board for Machine Man. So I’m basically hoping Black Swan is the best movie of all time.

It is getting harder to stay cool about this.

By the way, Aronofsky was involved with the Robocop remake before the studio imploded. So do you think he walked away with a head full of unrealized ideas about bioaugmentation or what?