Probably, the best advice I've ever come across from a writer on writing is Elmore Leonard's suggestion, "If it sounds like writing, rewrite it." Second best is Mark Twain's illustration of how to show, don't tell, followed by Margaret Atwood's close third, "Do back exercises. Pain is distracting."
Links of the week November 6 2017 (45)
Our new feature links to interesting blogs or articles posted online, which will help keep you up to date with what's going on in the book world:
13 November 2017
Whether you are a seasoned self-publisher or a first-time indie author, and whether you are writing fiction or nonfiction, chances are you agree with Hemingway, who said, "There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed." Nobody said this writing business was going to be easy. For Hemingway, the secret to effective writing was to forget about the flowery prose of the literati and keep your writing simple, short, and clear. When he went to work for the Kansas City Star in 1917, he was given four rules for effective writing, and he stuck with them his whole life.
"Seventy-seven percent of Americans, a new high, believe the nation is divided on the most important values," according to a Gallup poll in November of 2016. It is certainly no secret that our country is suffering from a plague of constant bashing and a fervent desire to "tribe-up." Is it social media's fault or is there something bigger (or smaller) at play? The answer has been staring us down almost since it began.
Today, upwards of eighty percent of Americans get their news (at least part of the time) through a digital medium, according to The Atlantic. Strangely enough, Millennials strongly prefer print textbooks. So much so, that Student Monitor found that eighty-seven percent (that's right, 87%) of all textbooks sold in 2014 were old-fashion print. In fact, Americans as a whole prefer to read paper books, be it for pleasure or pursuit of knowledge, then books in any digital format.
Why has the percentage of Americans who have read a book in the last twelve months (73% according to Pew Research) stayed mostly unchanged since 2012? A United States Post Office & Temple University study (2015) and a separate study by Bangor University & a branding agency, Millward Brown (2009), came to a similar conclusion: paper has an emotional impact.
As a literary agent, I receive roughly 500 queries, or book pitches, a month. After 11 years of doing this job, I have seen a lot of book ideas. Obviously I've noticed trends (did you know all vampires live in Seattle now?) but there are other similarities outside of pop culture or critical mass made evident by the slush pile. When an agent or editor says they are looking for something they've never seen before, these are the things we don't mean.
If what you're already writing looks like something on this list, don't panic. To misquote a friend, publishing is a rich tapestry; lots of books like these have been published (you can probably think of a bunch off the top of your head), and some are even great. Your book might be great, too! But if your gut tells you it isn't after reading this list, don't fall back on the assumption that publishing will make an exception for you just because all the other options are terrifying. Take some time to think about it and adjust your course as necessary.
In its quest to launch a hit fantasy series of the Game of Thrones caliber, Amazon has closed a massive deal - said to be close to $250 million - to acquire global TV rights to The Lord of the Rings, based on the fantasy novels by J.R.R. Tolkien. The streaming service has given a multi-season commitment to a LOTR series in the pact, which also includes a potential spinoff series.
The LOTR original series, a prequel to Tolkien's The Fellowship of the Ring, will be produced by Amazon Studios in cooperation with the Tolkien Estate and Trust; HarperCollins; and New Line Cinema, a division of Warner Bros. Entertainment, which produced the hugely successful LOTR movie franchise.
Amazon, Netflix and HBO had been approached by the Tolkien estate, who had been shopping the project. It came with an upfront rights payment said to be in the $200 million-$250 million range, and I hear Amazon landed the rights by paying close to $250 million. That is just for the rights, before any costs for development, talent and production, in proposition whose finances industry observers called "insane." It is a payment that is made sight unseen as there is no concept, and there are no creative auspices attached to the possible series. On top of that, the budget for a fantasy series of that magnitude is likely to be $100 million-$150 million a season.
Writing a book and getting it published used to be a huge endeavor. You had to pitch it to a literary agent who would then pitch it to a publisher and it could sometimes take years to get it accepted. These days, with kindle and the online world at everyone's fingertips, getting your book out to the world is quicker and easier than you might think.
If you're an entrepreneur, having a book for your business has many perks such as the added credibility, expert status and the ability to use that book to attract your ideal clients. Some even say that a book is now like a bigger, better business card.
Used correctly, your book can help you attract your tribe for years to come (so long as you continue to market it, but that's not what we're talking about today).
So first, Why self-publish?
For one, YOU KEEP ALL THE CREATIVE RIGHTS. You have the freedom to do what you want with the title, the cover and the content of your book. Why give that away?
Secondly, while it may seem enticing to use a publisher because you think they would promote your book, that%u2019s just not what happens. They don't promise to sell any copies of your book. In fact, when you pitch to them, they want to see how many people follow you on all your social media channels and they want to know how many books you think YOU'LL sell.
Lastly, self-publishing means you can get your book out faster. The exact day you're done writing, you could upload it to amazon (though I wouldn't recommend that - you might want to let it sit a couple days and do some editing. But that's totally up to you).
Yesterday, FSG published Susan Sontag's Debriefing, a new collection of the writer's short fiction. I'm always excited to read more of Sontag's work-which is convenient, because it seems there's always more to read. Sontag, who died in 2004, was remarkably prolific, especially if you count her journals, which I consider ecstatic texts in and of themselves. Speaking of ecstasy, Sontag is also a figure of worship for a lot of writers, in part because of the many, many opinions she had on writing, and what good writing should be. All of which, despite their occasional contradictions, are probably correct. To celebrate her new book, I have collected some of these below.
On what gets her started writing:
Reading-which is rarely related to what I'm writing, or hoping to write. I read a lot of art history, architectural history, musicology, academic books on many subjects. And poetry. Getting started is partly stalling, stalling by way of reading and of listening to music, which energizes me and also makes me restless. Feeling guilty about not writing.
RUPI KAUR made her name on Instagram by attacking Instagram, a fitting ascent for the provocative 24-year-old poet who releases her short verses onto the slippery, reactive sphere of social media. In 2015, she uploaded a picture of herself lying in bed on sheets stained with menstrual blood. The post was removed, and she promptly hit back. "I will not apologise for feeding the ego and pride of misogynist society that will have my body in underwear but will not be okay with a small leak," she wrote on Facebook and Tumblr. Vitriol and death threats came in droves, but so did followers. Today's count is 1.7m.
Ms Kaur's success is singular, but it is also a reflection of the times. Poetry is in the midst of a renaissance, and is being driven by a clutch of young, digitally-savvy "Instapoets", so-called for their ability to package their work into concise, shareable posts. Taylor Knott Gregson, a best-selling poet, boasts nearly 600,000 followers on Instagram, where he posts verse scrawled on scraps of paper or printed using a typewriter. R.M. Drake - who counts Ludacris, Nicki Minaj and the Kardashian clan as fans - has a following equal to that of Ms Kaur.
No one imagined that the Japanese translation of the book, Incidents In The Life Of A Slave Girl by Harriet Ann Jacobs (1861), would become a long-selling hit in Japan when it was first published in 2013. It is the life story of a slave girl in the United States in the 1800s, and not something one would expect to strike interest in Japan, which while struggling with its own issues of race, has a 98% ethnically Japanese population.
The book that fascinated Horikoshi has been compared to The Diary Of Anne Frank. It is considered a remarkable work in how it sheds light on the female experience of slavery, including the never-ending threat of sexual exploitation. It was thought to be a work of fiction but many believe the authenticity was definitively established in 1981.
6 November 2017
In the battle for people's attention, Nick Wells writes, we must be where our readers want to be.
The day starts with its usual cascade of free offers. I'm on my way to work, my phone pings in a variety of delightful-to-irritating siren calls. I spin through Facebook, Twitter, Google-plus, WeChat, distracted from a long-form newspiece on the New York Times app. Email notifications begin to shake at my mobile: Groupon, Amazon, HMV, Techcrunch, Runner's World, Musicnotes, YouTube, YoSushi! I'm listening to a stream of nostalgic music, suitable for blocking out the sounds of travel all around me, looking forward, tonight, to the release of the new Star Trek Discovery on Netflix, to fill the gap left by The Handmaid's Tale and The Man from the High Castle series. I've just checked my podcast app and downloaded a couple of episodes of an American SF channel for late-night listening as I potter around, before forcing myself to bed.
Free, it's all free. At least it feels like it.
In 2010, I was three years into writing my linked story collection when I took my first trip to Vermont to attend a writers' conference. My workshop was a group of seven that included our instructor, Ellen Lesser. With a couch and cushioned chairs set in an oval everyone talked around me and about my story. I remained "in the box" (that is, not allowed to speak) during my classmates' deliberations and discussions. My only additions were steady nods or pursed lips. Once I was allowed to speak, I thanked them, but bemoaned the fact that this particular piece in my collection was taking a long time. Ellen crossed her legs and met my eyes. She tucked a salt and pepper lock behind her ear and said in a kind and confident tone, "You're acting as if writing should be an efficient process, Jennifer. It's not."
Six years later, I returned from yet another conference where I workshopped another story in this same collection. The instructor in this case, Tayari Jones, recognized the character, having seen a previous iteration of a story a few years earlier. Like Ellen, she gave me the tough love stare and asked, "What's taking so long?" I had no answer.
I recently attended a literary festival, where I met a successful food author whose career had included regular appearances on popular radio shows and television networks across the U.S. Her most recent book, however, failed to get that same level of exposure, so after a falling-out with her publisher, she chose to self-publish her latest as an e-book.
The results were disappointing, she complained. There were no reviews or spots on Good Morning America. No one, it seemed, was even aware that her new book existed. "I put it out there and nothing happened," she said. "I'm a writer, not a marketer. It's not my job to do that work."
She also chose not to hire a publicist. Without one, I wondered, who but she would promote her book?
Her frustration was one that I continue to hear from authors, both commercially and self-published. In a crowded marketplace-according to Bowker, more than 300,000 books were traditionally published in 2016 - the prospect of one's book attracting critical attention can seem dauntingly slim if not downright impossible. As a small press author, I knew this intimately. Neither my publisher nor I had the resources to invest in a professionally run marketing or publicity campaign for The Hunger Saint, released earlier this year. Still, I published the book hoping it would be read.
This reality puts particular pressure on authors. In addition to conceiving a book and meeting a publisher's editorial demands, an author must often request blurbs and solicit reviews while functioning as a social media strategist and events coordinator. Without the backing of a large press, it's difficult to have one's book stocked in bookstores, let alone to be supported on a book tour. So it's not hard to empathize with the food writer's bewilderment.
My family has just moved house, and unpacking the endless boxes of books has reminded me of the sheer amount of fantasy we have. Guy Gavriel Kay's Fionavar trilogy. Trilogy after trilogy by Robin Hobb. Piles and piles of Steven Erikson. Joe Abercrombie. It's everywhere, there aren't enough shelves for it. We're drowning in triple-deckers.
I was mildly comforted, then, by a new graduate study of film and book trilogies: three-volume novels, it turns out, get better (at least in terms of reviews), while film trilogies get worse (ditto). Perhaps that's why our house isn't slowly collapsing under the weight of DVDs.
The study's author, statistics graduate student Kaylin Walker, took a range of book and film trilogies, and analysed their reviews on Goodreads and IMDb. "Movie trilogies get worse, losing favour with each film, while book trilogies secure higher ratings for book two and maintain them for book three," she writes.
Walker speculates as to why this might be: "It could be that book content is better. Authors have the opportunity to lay out the full arc from the start, resulting in a more cohesive story, while movie trilogies are often constructed quickly following box-office success, resulting in third-act disasters like The Matrix Revolutions or slapdash profit grabs such as Legally Blondes."
Most writers these days are advised to keep their day jobs.
The odds of earning a full-time living from writing alone are just too great to risk going without, and no one wants to worry about how they're going to pay their bills while they're trying to put together their next novel.
But staying employed while trying to manage a writing career is a challenge, to say the least. I've been hearing more and more from Writing and Wellness readers that "the job" is one of the biggest roadblocks when it comes to finding more time to write.
So what can we do to create a better balance in our lives between the work we have to do to keep a roof over our heads and the creative work that calls to our hearts?
It's no surprise that writers are feeling the squeeze. In today's technologically connected world, people in a number of countries, including America, are struggling to maintain some sense of work-life balance, say nothing of finding a way to fit in something more, like writing or another creative endeavor. According to a 2015 report, one in three employees said maintaining a healthy work-life balance had become more difficult over the past five years. Cell phones, emails, and video conferencing makes it much too easy to work after hours, to the point that there doesn't seem to be any real "quitting time" anymore.
Jeff Kinney is the author and illustrator of the beloved and bestselling Diary of a Wimpy Kid series, which is now celebrating 10 years in print. The series, which focuses on the hijinks of middle-schooler Greg Heffley and his friends, got its start on Kinney's educational gaming website, FunBrain, and has since spawned 11 sequels, four movie adaptations, and a musical. Book 12, which hit shelves today, finds the Heffley clan on a holiday vacation that is more stressful than relaxing. Kinney, having recently returned from an international tour, is currently embarking on a series of school visits across the U.S., bringing books to underserved communities. We spoke with Kinney about the global success of the series, the appeal of visual storytelling, and finding new aspects of childhood to explore.
It actually gets more and more challenging as I go along! I'm always trying to explore something I haven't explored yet. On the one hand, it's more challenging because you run out of areas to explore. On the other hand, childhood is such a big universe with an almost unlimited amount of topics to cover. I used to draw on my memories. Most of the incidents in the books happened to me in real life, but were put into the fiction blender. Now I have to generate the ideas. One technique I use is called systematic inventive thinking, to help me generate new jokes.
Since my book The Joy Plan came out a few months ago, people have been asking me a lot of questions. And surprisingly, one of the questions I'm asked most often has nothing to do with the content of the book. "How did you do you it?" people want to know, referring to everything from the actual banging out of 80,000 words to getting an agent, publisher, distribution in every Barnes & Noble in the US, making of an audiobook, and worldwide publication in Spanish.
Perhaps you have this same question. Do you dream of writing a book or have an idea so hot it's ready to burn itself through your fingertips? I feel you. I always wanted to write books. In fact, I started churning out stories (and recording my own audiobooks) when I was only five years old. But I didn't have a clue about publishing, and although writing remained a big part of my life and career, I let my dream of writing books stay asleep.
Until I had a story so compelling that I literally couldn't stop my hands from writing it, and the rest is history. I still didn't know much about becoming a published author, and because the industry is always changing, I'm sure I'll always have a lot to learn. But there are a few things I wish I would have known a long time ago. So if you're thinking about writing a book and don't know how to go about it, this is for you.
Telling is a quick, efficient way to relate lots of information to a reader in a short amount of time. It works for writing transitions or other places where you need to move the timeline ahead, or where showing mundane details would bore readers. Despite its usefulness, "show don't tell" is probably the most commonly given advice in writing. So why is it so hated?
Telling stops your story cold. Every sentence spent telling your readers about something is time not spent moving the plot along. Imagine meeting someone for the first time over coffee and the entire conversation is her talking about people you have never met and her deepest darkest life experiences? You'd probably think she needs some serious counseling, but so many of the manuscripts I see begin this way.