How E-Books Will Change Reading And Writing

I would have titled this "How E-Books Might Change Reading & Writing". Mainly because I don't think you could have looked at the early output of Gutenberg's presses (Bibles, indulgences and religious tracts) and seen an accurate view of what would be happening once writers stopped playing with the new toy and really started to create. Of course in that time, artists labored in relative isolation, without a mass media culture to feed them lines. For better or worse, it took almost three hundred years for the presses to move from what they began doing (religious works) to printing the endless Do it Yourself books of the Elizabethan era (yes, really) and eventually the surrealist adventures of Gargantua and Pantagruel, Machiavelli's political advice column and eventually the exploits of Don Quixote and the printing of the Shakespearean canon. Even though we will undoubtedly move the same relative distance a hundred times as quickly as the renaissance writers did, I sincerely doubt we're out of the early stages of curiousity and exploration that meet a new medium. And I'm not sure anyone can say with any assurance that we've achieved any level of sophistication or seen more than the leading edge of what e-Books will really mean for the writer and the reader... not to mention their medium.

The Janus Conundrum: Choosing Your Point of View

I don't use first-person point of view, and I don't very often find anyone else who does it well. Why this is true is difficult to explain... unless you have a kitchen accident to use to illustrate the problem.

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Chopping_Board.jpg

A couple of months ago, I bought a bunch of red bell peppers with the intent of making stuffed peppers. I had six more than I ended up using and rather than letting them go to waste, I threw them in the freezer as I often do. Flash forward a couple of weeks. Frozen bell peppers are fine in any application that doesn't rely upon them retaining a crisp texture. So when I decided to make chicken salad for dinner, I pulled one of them out of the freezer, took out my largest, heaviest chef's knife and set to work.

Angle of incidence equals angle of deflection, solve for finger.

When the frozen pepper rocked under the knife blade and the edge sliced into my left ring finger instead of the pepper, I simultaneously went in two different mental directions. I immediately applied pressure to the wound and raised in above my heart to minimize blood loss (a rational move). I also picked the knife back up and stabbed it repeatedly into the cutting board while I screamed (not quite so rational).

Then I sat down on the floor and went away for awhile.

Next thing I remember is sitting in the bathroom giving my wife instructions she didn't need on how best to apply gauze and tape. An hour later, as I was picking at the bandages and reflecting on my clumsiness, it occurred to me that what had just happened would be very difficult to write accurately from the first person. (Yes, this really is what I was thinking. These are the mental tricks I pursue when I'm trying not to think about the throbbing pain and stupidity of my current predicament.)

During moments like these, my attention splits and the part of me dealing with the issue has another part of me watching and commenting and giving notes. In other words, I begin to operate simultaneously on at least two levels, one of them rational and one of them very much not. How much control I have over the irrational side seems to correspond directly to whether or not I'm the one who is bleeding and if so, how much. So at the end of the day, I'd lost a hunk of finger and had a writing problem to noodle with in order to keep me from picking at the bandage. (Actually I had two writing problems, since typing without using your ring finger or wearing-out the backspace keys is a problem of its own.)

I find problems easier to deal with if I name them, so I shall call this one The Janus Conundrum. Partly because Janus is the two-faced god of Roman mythology, handy for expressing duality, and partly because I'll never get to write a Robert Ludlum novel, so where else will I have an opportunity to use a term like "Janus Conundrum"?

I've seen writers try to deal with this duality in various ways and with various levels of success, but I think that ultimately there are some things you simply cannot express fully in words. Recreating the scene at the cutting board accurately would require two concurrent narratives. One of them would be collating biological processes of coagulation, knitting epithelial cells and plotting wound care. The other more akin to a beat poet describing an angry chef with a grudge against frozen fruit.

Both are correct, but the two simply don't blend well. So how do you unite the two narratives? 

You don't. At least I don't. This is part of why most of the first-person narrators in the literary world aren't multi-track thinkers.  Direct, plain-speaking noir detectives, menschy and affable, but generally writers don't put you in the heads of physicists or writers. Throwing two viewpoints for one character involved into a tense moment is jarring and tends to break the narrative flow.

In the last letter I wrote to my nephew I discussed the way that point of view dictates how you introduce characters and how much you tell the reader about them. That same lessons pays forward through the whole of the narrative. How much we see of the action and how the characters react depends greatly upon the point of view we're using to view the kitchen accident (or gunfight, or blimp disaster, or earthquake or whathaveyou...) and how much we know of the duality of their actions will depend upon how much it would be apparent to an observer.

Which brings us back to how we choose our POV. In the first person narrative, I would have to find a way to deal with the Janus Conundrum. This is one of the stumbling blocks of first person narratives. Someone else watching me waling on the cutting board and screaming while holding my bleeding hand aloft would relate the incident very differently than I would. They might react to a normally rational and even-tempered man freaking out at the sight of his own blood or reacting to his own stupidity, or they might not know me well enough to do so and wisely run away from the nut with the knife.

I would be prone to call this the inherent superiority of a third person omniscient viewpoint. I can show duality without confusing the audience. Because the audience is watching rather than living inside the nut's head. Not that it gets you entirely out of the knotty problem of telling a story with multi-track thinkers as your characters.

But here my kitchen accident solves the problem as well as illustrating it. It's far better to reflect upon the mental gymnastics after the fact rather than trying to show all of them in real time. Instead of uniting multiple simultaneous mental tracks in a single narrative in 'real time', I prefer to reunite them after the fact. Reflective characters picking at their bandages and contemplating their previous stupidity/heroism. With the able assistance of an eccentric doctor just begging to be written into a future novel, my finger is mostly healed now.

All that remains is the lesson (cut the peppers before you freeze them), the scar and the conundrum.

Scott Walker Perkins writes literary thrillers and novels of historical suspense. His current novel is The Palimpsest and he is working on revising his NaNoWriMo novel, tentatively titled 42 Lines.

Contact Me

The Digital Divide... Is it separating readers and publishers?

From today's Washington Post.

E-books spark battle inside the publishing industry

By Marion Maneker

Washington Post Staff Writer Sunday, December 27, 2009 "The evolution of publishing from print to digital has caused a schism in the reading world. There are now two constituencies: readers (and writers) on the one hand, and the publishing world on the other. And they don't want to hear each other. . ."

Happy Holidays

Phew! Maintaining a regular blogging schedule is difficult this time of year. My family and I are celebrating Christmas, but no matter which of the many concurrent holidays you are celebrating, stay safe and happy and warm this season. And remember to take some time to curl up with a good book in a comfy corner and report back on what you read.

Mightier than the sword...

Start by reading this short post in the New York Times sent to me by my friend Denny:  
Why Handwriting is History
http://ideas.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/12/23/why-handwriting-is-history/?partner=rss&emc=rss

This is today's "Big Idea"? Handwriting is dead, long live the Blackberry! Stop teaching kids to write things by hand, man, that crap's old hat. Teaching handwriting skills is clinging to a romantic and Luddite notion of things best allowed to die. “Thus for monks, print was capricious and script reliable..." and all attachment to handwriting is romantic nonsense. Sentimentality that just slows us down, impedes our thoughts.

Next you'll tell me that painting is "dead" because the sable brush is inferior to the brush tool in Adobe Illustrator.

To begin with, I can only assume that the scholar being quoted knows that the monks purported distrust of the printing press is is much the same as auto workers distrust of robots. It's not about sentimental attachment or reliability, it's about being replaced by a machine. Gutenberg's press was the death knell of the monastic scriptorium. The printing press turned books from a rich man's plaything into an exchange of ideas accessible to the burgeoning middle class.

I'm sure that on the level of the scribes themselves, there was a great deal of sniffing about how fast a Bible could be produced debasing the meditative act of carefully crafting each page, etcetera. But on the macro level, the ecclesiastic objections to the printing press wasn't about speed or a misplaced sentimentality about handwriting, it was mostly about losing their monopoly on the transmission of ideas. It was about a loss of control.

Speed wasn't the enemy of the scribe. Shorthand has been around as long as writing itself. It seems that no sooner was the first alphabet codified than some jerk was figuring out a way to make it quicker. Formal texts have always been beautiful creations just as the books on the shelves behind me bear little semblance to the notebooks of the writers that created them. The workaday writings of the early scribes were likewise utilitarian in nature. Early scribes used wax tablets as notebooks because the wax could be 'erased' by rubbing out the marks. Cuneiform arose out of a need to create account books and receipts. The mental image of writing as a mystical act played into the power dynamics of the Babylonians and Egyptians and on down through the ages to the advent of Gutenberg's press. But in truth, it was a largely utilitarian affair. Carolingian court documents are almost illegible because each monk had his own peculiar blend of ligature, ideogram and symbol to get him from the top of the page to the bottom. Medieval monks weren't nearly so prissy about scripts as the article implies. They weren't skeptical of speed, they were skeptical about the idea of teaching the common people to read and write at all. To say otherwise is to betray an ignorance of history or far worse in my mind, to be misrepresenting history in hopes no one will notice.

As a rule, I hate sweeping generalizations. Many notable writers today (including the futurist Neal Stephenson, mind you) hand-write entire manuscripts before they're ever committed to a computer. Dismissing the practice as worthless sentimentality is absurd. The faster road is not inherently superior to the slower. Cormac McCarthy chooses to write his award-winning novels on a typewriter. There's something that happens in the writing process that binds the creator with his or her work, and making any sweeping claim that one method of creation is better than all others just because it's newer and faster is an unsupportable thesis. And the idea that transmission of thought into text should never slow you down ignores the fact that this is part of its function and benefit. The additional conceit that teaching legibility is somehow wrong is also anathema to me.

Nevertheless, I say you should write your stories on a Blackberry, typing with your thumbs, or carve it into a clay tablet or scribble it in a Moleskine with a pencil or type it in the usual fashion on typewriter or laptop as most of us do. If you're creating words from electrical impulses jumping around your cerebrum, no one gets to tell that you are doing it wrong. The writing should never be an obstacle to expression of ideas. That much we agree on. But likewise it should not be an obstacle to understanding the idea. Any thought that is encoded in illegible gibberish will be an idea wasted. Legibility at a faster rate -- that was what Parker wanted for his students. Typing can give us that. But to cease teaching handwriting altogether is to remove a valuable tool from the table, and that we should never do.

We should learn from the artists who may add tools without taking the old ones away. Pens, pencils, brushes, palette knives, fingertips, pastels, charcoal and even the brush tool on their computer's drawing program are equally valuable as they search for the one that best suits their personal expression. No one is inherently better than the other and the artist who uses canvas and brush is not a romantic sentimentalist, inferior to the computer animator. Whatever tool you choose, wield it wisely and well. And if you get a chance, use it to poke people who tell you it's just so much romantic nonsense.

Scott Walker Perkins writes literary thrillers and novels of historical suspense. His current novel is The Palimpsest and is working on a new project tentatively titled 42 Lines.

Contact Me

Googlebooks News - French Court Objects

A French Court has declared Google's goal of creating an online library by digitizing all the world's books and posting them online is illegal under French copyright law. Presumably unless they pay to play. From MSNBC.com

The smoke of digital battle...

Voting in a hidden election...

Seattle's legendary independent bookstore Elliot Bay is moving from the location in Pioneer Square it has occupied for almost forty years.

This is perhaps not so momentous for those bookhounds who live beyond the Puget Sound, but for those of us close-by it's a bit like hearing that the Space Needle is going to be relocated. The legendarily creaky plank floors of the Elliot Bay book store really are that much of an icon to the literate denizens of Western Washington.

Thankfully, they're just moving up Capitol Hill (which puts them closer to my brother-in-law's place, come to think of it) rather than closing as previously feared. But the economic necessity that drove them to seek less-expensive digs is an eye-opener on the state of bookselling in America. If even the most iconic bookstore in a city that has been the most literate city in America for many years is endangered, what does that say about our buying habits?

I hope they install some creaks and squeaks in their new location.

I've been a manager for both of the major chains and my brother in law used to work for Amazon. I have a better appreciation than most for what large bookstores bring to the party, and for all the complaints people have about them, they have been largely responsible for the integration of reading into modern American culture. Many books and authors may never have found an audience without the big-box chains needing to fill shelf space and selecting them out of the dustbin of the backlist. Many publishers would not have survived into the new millenium without their broad avenue of distribution.

But the independent bookstores embody the culture of their cities, and to cavalierly throw that away is a travesty. This is a hard sell in tough economic times, believe me, I know there are genuine economic reasons to shop the chain stores or online for your books. Not every city or town has - or ever had - a thriving independent bookstore. But the price wars like the recent one between Amazon and WalMart are unsustainable.

The dollars you throw into the kitty of one or the other of those rivals won't be a vote to preserve those prices. Price wars are fleeting, but the damage they do to those who cannot participate (and to some who do) is permanent. And once closed, an independent bookstore in your area is gone, likely never to return.

Witness the towns across America who now lack a grocery store because they threw their business to WalMart until that was all they had left. Every dollar you spend on books this holiday season is a vote in a hidden election. And like any election, the consideration cannot be wholly economic. Because while money cannot buy culture, it can preserve it.

Bookselling is a peculiar world, a meeting place of art and culture and commerce. A place where the boundless thoughts and ideas and dreams of our culture are exchanged, and as consumers we get to vote on the venue we think best suits that exchange. I posit that this sort of activity thrives best in a marketplace with as many competing voices as possible given as much room to run as we have to offer. Don't know your local Indie bookseller? Find them online using this handy tool provided by IndieBound.

---

Update:  The new Elliot Bay is in a beautiful new location, in the sort of permanently up & coming neighborhoods Seattle is famous for. Sadly, they didn't bring the creaky floors with them, but they did salvage their iconic stained glass...

Wordplay

The other day I was talking to someone (who shall remain nameless) about language. They told me that they felt English was effectively dead. This was followed by a lengthy rant about how our language has no life, no humor, nothing bright and how it only stifles creativity.

I suggested that they write in Spanish or French, but they didn't like that suggestion.

Now, the reason I'm not going to mock that person by name or post their photo and email address so as not to hog the mockery all for my very own, is that I've been there. That person's in a bad spot in their writing.

Let me not cast that first stone, for I've certainly had moments when my optimism fades and I'm left staring at that hated blinking Microsoft finger flipping me off, casting its little shadow across a blank screen. Mocking me. Oh, how I hate that little cursor.

There are a lot ways I get unstuck and we've talked about those before. Unfortunately, most of them only really work if you're writing fiction. Fiction's a lot easier for unsticking, traction can be invented out of whole cloth. If you're writing nonfiction, what do you do? What if it's a school paper or an annual report?

I do a lot of copywriting and business writing and so forth and don't talk about it much because it's not as fun as talking about literature and mystery novels. So one of the things I haven't mentioned yet is this: Get silly. Play around. Noodle with it. Find the absurdities. Find the fun in your topic.

English isn't dead and absurdity abounds. Go looking for it. Nothing is more absurd than a business report, go find it and have fun with it. English isn't dead, it's borderline crazy. This is why there's no coffee in coffee cake and there are no fairies in fairy cake. Girl Scout cookies contain no Girl Scouts, butterflies are blissfully butter-free. Because truth, you see really is more surreal than fiction and there's room to play. Linguistically, at least, the rules are malleable and the potential for whimsy abounds... especially in a business setting. So maximize those synergies.

I have very little advice for non-fiction, so this is the best I can do -- remind you to play with your language. If it's not fun, you're not going to want to do it and you're going to get stuck sitting at your desk trying to look busy. Make everything fun. Irreverence is fun. So remember that a new vice president isn't a "paradigm shift" and it doesn't get much funnier than a bunch of execs talking about moving cheese. And while we're at it, coffee beans aren't beans and English horns are neither English nor are they horns, which is somehow overshadowed by the fact that French horns are really German. So be a little nuts if you need the boost. It's okay, you can always delete the whimsy later if it doesn't fit the desired tenor of the piece. (There's only so much room for knock-knock jokes in your annual reports.)

Play with your language. And if anyone has a problem with it, tell them I sent you. (And while their trying to figure out who I am, make your escape under cover of their confusion.)

e-Books for the Blind

Because I suppose the publishing industry needed more bad publicity this holiday season. Copyright Owners Fight Plan to Release E-Books for the Blind

"A broad swath of American enterprise ranging from major software makers to motion picture and music companies are joining forces to oppose a new international treaty that would make books more accessible to the blind." - 'Threat Level' at WIRED.com.

Of course, nothing is ever that simple, but the lede pretty much sums it up. We've been here before. Back when the Kindle II came out and publishers freaked out when they realized it could read to you. A tornado of Brooks Brothers suits descended on Seattle and when it all fell out, the app operated only at the publisher and/or author's discretion. Opposition to the treaty is stiff and seems to mainly gravitate to copyright issues (Audio Books are big business) and the cost of producing machines that do what the blind need them to do in order to make them accessible. And let's be honest, requirements under an international treaty to provide accessibility would indeed incur additional costs for producers. (That's assuming you want to sell internationally or if the US ratifies the treaty and passes domestic laws forcing domestic producers to comply.) Requirements add cost to development. Requirements for accessibility and safety always do. I can't speak for the rest of the world, but as a nation we've generally accepted that some things are worth paying for. Nevertheless, in the US, the cost of most accommodations for the disabled (ramps, lifts, vehicle modifications, braille texts, &c.) has been borne by the individual with some help from national and local government programs. Some private assistance through NPO's and faith-based organizations help out, but in reality, the bulk of it falls on the individual. So why shouldn't the costs of a speaking e-Book reader? Or a braille monitor like David Strathairn used in Sneakers? Or any one of a thousand other things that allow the blind to operate in a world geared for the sighted? For the same reason I'm so vehemently against banning books. And for the same reason you can't charge sales tax on newspapers in the state of Washington. Because access to information is the basis of freedom and anything that imposes itself between you and that access is anathema to free thought. No one in a free society should have to rely upon the goodwill of others to give them the information they need in order to fully-participate as a citizen. As the ADA has aged and become set in our culture, a lot of manufacturers of hardgoods have begun building-in some accessibility requirements and have been able to amortize the cost of developing and producing these items over the whole consumer base rather than making them bespoke items costing the end-user thousands. It would appear that electronics such as e-Book readers are especially good candidates for working-in this sort of accessibility. (But I'm not the engineer in this family, so I could be wrong.) Kudos to Amazon for bringing out a blind-accessible Kindle with an audible menu, etc. But considering the explosion last time Amazon wanted to make the Kindle talk, we'll see how many publishers let you put out accessible books for it. Any way I look at it, this is a disheartening patch in the ongoing story of the transition from paper books to electronic ones. Posted using ShareThis

Gore Vidal in the NBA

National Book Award, that is. (I once posted something about the NBA on Twitter and got tagged by a hundred folks who quickly realized that I wasn't going to be talking about basketball...) The videos and speeches from the National Book Awards gala are up on the website. The highlight is Gore Vidal's delightfully rambling speech when accepting his medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.

vidal dcal 09 from National Book Foundation on Vimeo.

Quote of the moment...

"Drama is life with the dull bits cut out."
  -Alfred Hitchcock

 --- 


Photo from Wikimedia Commons and is used under Creative Commons license

There's a Monster At the End of This Post

A mixed bag post, because I haven't done one in awhile... 


 Lost & Found I don't usually report on the whereabouts of missing library books or the people reluctant to return them and pony up the fine. Neither does the Times of London. Nevertheless, the Times reports that Harold Pinter's overdue library book was finally returned after 59 years. It wouldn't be that big a story, even considering the Nobel laureate status of the borrower, except that it happened to be a rare first edition of Samuel Beckett's Murphy and apparently Pinter had no intention of ever returning it. At that point, I think a man of lesser celebrity would be accused of stealing it rather than borrowing it. 

The bookseller handling the sale of the playwright's library returned it in order to buy it back so that Pinter's library would be complete and without the sort of provenance problems that crop up when one of the books in the collection didn't really belong to the man in whose home it resided. Read the whole tale, including the sort of oddly happy ending that could only occur in the bookworld at the Times website.

  Can I Make you a literary mix-tape? WIRED continued its coverage of the transition from ink to electrons with a profile of a grad student who MacGyvered his own book scanning equipment to digitize his textbooks and is now teaching others how to do the same. Now Daniel Reetz is at the eye of a copyright kerfuffle (which was inevitable) about whether or not what he's doing is a high crime or a misdemeanor. So the question is begged... since the inception of the computer, it's been possible to digitize your library either by laying the books on a scanner, photographing them or just typing them into a document file. There's even court precedent from the days of audio tapes that says you can copy your collection for personal use as long as you're not trying to profit. But those arguments got gutted in the Napster fight and are further eroded by decision after decision that creates a legal difference between the laws governing tangible copies and digital copies.

Right now, the world over, libraries are digitizing their collections, effectively turning them into e-Books. From national institutions like the Library of Congress and the British Library to the libraries of Harvard and Yale to the commercial ventures like Googlebooks and the Intenet Archive, the physical is being tranferred into a digital format. . . but who owns the bytes? Is it legal for me to copy my extensive library if I'm not doing so to turn a profit? I think it meet that we reflect on the outcome of the Pinter-Beckett affair and remember that the bookworld is a universe of its own creation where the outcomes that might be expected as we recall the chaos that surrounded the digital translation of music are not fait accompli.

  Digital Monsters There's no end of monsters on the internet. From the trolls that lurk beneath blogs and comment threads, spewing vitriol to the sort that players fight in online roleplaying games, and many others, the internet seems overrun by monsters of all sorts. So when I tell you that I am ecstatic to report one more monster on the internet, it may sound strange. That is, until I tell you that it's none other than the legendary blue monster that watched over my childhood... Grover. The Children's Television Workshop has put one of my favorite books of all time online as a free e-Book for new generations of parents and children to enjoy. There's a Monster at the End of This Book was more than a children's book, it was a watershed moment in my literary life. It's the first children's book I read (besides perhaps Where the Wild Things Are) that delivered something wholly different than everything else put in front of me. It's entry-level suspense fiction of the highest order with a twist ending sure to delight everyone. Re-reading it as an adult (or rather having Grover read it to me) was an eye-opener, and no lie.

 Now, I'm off to do some Christmas shopping. Good reading, everyone!

B&N Nook Review from WIRED.com

WIRED reviewers give the new B&N Nook e-Reader a blah rating, contending with slow lagtime to contend with and some perplexing differences from the industry leader. For instance, the WiFi support for Nook will only only be available through Barnes & Noble's in-store network, which seems an odd decision compared to Kindle's borderless approach.

One caveat to rule them all...

I create a lot of lists. Some of them are personal guidelines I follow while I'm writing. They're not rules because I firmly believe that there aren't very many hard and fast rules to writing. In fact, there's only inviolate rule I can think of... Elements are in service to the story, the story is never in service to its elements. I've stated it here before, but it's been awhile and it bears repeating. All of the suggestions I bring to the table can be summed up by that one. Cormac McCarthy taught us that even punctuation is optional under the right circumstances and Anthony Burgess and Irvine Welsh taught us that language is infinitely malleable if the story is served. Under the correct circumstances, you can and should throw it all to the wind and tell your story. And in the spirit of brevity, I find to my surprise that that's all I have to say today.

If I had a hammer... :: 8 Tips For Recognizing When You've Gone Astray

The biggest jam-ups I encounter in the course of my writing come from trying to force an idea into a hole in a story that isn't the same size and shape. My subconscious mind amuses itself by running through my current projects, poking at the thin bits and offering up suggestions, usually when I should be sleeping.

These suggestions are the bane and boon of my existance because if I'm afflicted with an idea that's just-too-cool-to-let-rest lest-I-forget-it, jotting it in the notebook on the nightstand won't do. I have to get up immediately and shoehorn it into my current story regardless of the hour.

Yes, my wife is a saint.

All too often, this requires at least some rewriting, some juggling of storylines and sometimes scrapping or changing significant parts of the narrative altogether. It's the nature of the beast, I'm afraid. The really cool idea waits for no man (or woman). But sometimes, despite all the coffee, dictionaries, source material, writing books and sage advice in the world, it doesn't always work. Cool idea or no, the dawn still finds me with a sheaf of scribbled notes and a blank screen, blood sweat and tears staining my handkerchief.

Because there are times when an idea - no matter how good it seems - just doesn't fit. You can round the peg or square the hole, but if you do either, you have to irrevocably change one of them to bring them both into harmony.

This is the moment all writers dread -- when you realize you need to either get a bigger hammer or a different peg. Usually I find myself going through a series of progressively larger hammers until I've beaten it to death and have to backtrack to a point where both are still recognizable.

Everything's easier to deal with if it has a name, and I call this the Hammer Point. 

It's not always day-dreams and cool ideas that get me into trouble. Sometimes getting out of trouble gets me into trouble. Recently, I got into a snag by following my own advice. Those seven ideas I posted awhile back can be blessing and curse. They usually work for me, but they're no panacea. Mental tricks (like envisioning the Microsoft cursor flipping you off ) are harmless enough, but if you kill off a character or send your people on a road trip, it can end up changing the story to a degree that isn't always for the best.

Sometimes the sunrise finds me with notes but no narrative because I've been pounding the idea with a succession of larger hammers until it's not a peg anymore. The Hammer Point has been passed. These are the most common flavors I've encountered on the road to the Hammer Point...

1. The Dialogue Drug -- Clever conversation is a drug and should only be used under doctor's supervision. The difference between dialogue and chitchat is that dialogue moves the plot forward and chitchat just takes up space.
   
2. Schizophrenic Much? -- When your main characters don't act like themselves in order to sell the idea, it's inherently a bad idea.
   
3. Don't Complain -- It sometimes seems funny in the dead of the night to have a character complain if the story is dragging. It's not. If the story is dragging enough that even the characters notice, you should fix it, not make fun of it.
   
4. Don't Explain -- How much expository dialogue does it take to set the scene for your oh-so-clever idea? There's an old adage that if you have to explain a joke, it's not funny. Adages generally only grow to a ripe old age because they're true.
   
5. Creator's Remorse -- If you introduce a new character for one scene, you might find you are stuck with them. Is this gag really worth the trouble of fleshing-out and then disposing of another character?
   
6. Save Gas -- I know I said "Take it on the road" but try not to change settings just because you thought up a good gag that won't work in the setting you're already inhabiting.
   
7. Alcoholism -- There's a tendency on film and in books to have the characters drink for comedic effect or as the lubricant for a social scene. I think it's a bit trite and I even made one of my characters a recovering alcoholic just to cut myself off from this particular trope.
   
8. Will It End? -- If your new Really Cool Idea forces you to change the ending you were working toward, it's probably worth reconsidering. If it moves the end beyond the standard word count for your genre, it's definitely a bad idea.

Bu-b-b-but it was really cool idea! Now what to I do with it?

These are indicators that you should bench these ideas, not delete them altogether. Well, the character complaint should be deleted, but the rest might be recycled in the right circumstances. In fact, I have a file for each project that's called "Snippets" which get moved into a common folder on my computer once I've either finished the story or feel assured I won't find a use for it later in the story. (Incidentally, another trick for getting out of a jam is to trawl the snippets folders for ideas that might fit this story even if they didn't fit the last one.)

Sometimes a good idea that changes the characters or the story entirely can be a good thing. If a story just isn't working, something's gotta give. Maybe that hole should be square. Maybe you really did just need a bigger hammer. Maybe that off-the-wall idea was just the shot of espresso your story needed in order to wake it up and get it moving. It's entirely up to you how big a hammer you're willing to try before you decide to quit swinging and save it for the sequel.

A confession of sorts...

Hello. My name is Scott and I... I am a book nerd.

It started with a prescription from Doctor Seuss and before I knew it, I needed it every day. I couldn't help it. I didn't realize I had a problem until the day I found my father's New American Collegiate Dictionary and read it cover to cover.

Before I knew it I was waking up with strange books in bed next to me. I prowled libraries and bookstores, looking for my next fix. Eventually it wasn't enough and I started doing the hard stuff... I started... yes, I started writing my own books.

Watch out, America. I'm out there somewhere, in the back alleys and bookstore basements, mainlining words until my mind can't hold any more. I'm reading dictionaries and encyclopedias looking for the next story, the next bigger better word.

Beware parents, Sam I Am is a dealer, pushing more than his suspiciously-tinted eggs and pork products.

They start out free, a gift from someone else, but soon you're buying them, working just to afford them. Doing unspeakable tasks like... like running a bookstore, just to get to your next fix.

Books are dangerous, they lead to thinking and learning and the ever-increasing desire for more. I am a junkie. Stories are my compulsion, an addictive ride on the spines of a dragon of paper and ink.

There will be no interventions and I'm afraid there is no cure.

 

Season's Readings - Some excellent gift suggestions from Indie Booksellers

Sherman Alexie on Colbert

National Book Award winner Sherman Alexie rails against the e-Book and changes to the publishing industry to Stephen Colbert. Presented for your consideration.

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Sherman Alexie
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor U.S. Speedskating

NaNoWriMo No Mo'! (a wrapup)

It's amazing how quickly you can go from "50,000 words in thirty days? Great idea! Let's do it!" to "Why didn't someone hit me with a pie when I said that?"

It's a bit like the double-dog dare. Before I knew it, I had my tongue stuck to the flagpole.

I don't know if it speaks well of me that I was so relieved to see the calendar page flip over to December, but I definitely felt a weight lift from my shoulders as it happened. I also admit that this was the impetus necessary to uncork an idea I've been unable to get down on paper for quite some time. And much like the kid in the movie cursed with a bad case of flagpole tongue, I couldn't have made it here without a bit of pressure from my friends. Dierdre Sargent, Maggie Secara and Joel Reid were the three people most active in my long-distance Facebook writing group. These three were my constant companions, challengers and cheerleaders in this endeavor and admitting defeat to them kept me stuck to the project when I wanted to throw it aside in disgust halfway through.

Gladly, I stuck with it and found paths through and around the rough patches and to these three should be apportioned a fair share of both credit and blame. Each will find their names in the acknowledgments of the book if I ever develop it from its current state into an actual publishable project. Luckily, hot coffee is good for getting tongues off of flagpoles.

Anyway, the current edition of that story is now printed-out and sitting on my desk in a folder, practically obscured by all the notes, post-its and red ink. Such is the life-cycle of the novel. If you didn't finish your NaNoWriMo, you can always join NaNoFiMo http://www.nanofimo.org/ so that you can join everyone in March for NaNoEdMo http://www.nanoedmo.net/ at which point you are at risk of slipping over the fabled Meme Event Horizon and into the black hole of the internet. As for me, I will be celebrating NaNoNapMo (National Novelist Napping Month). http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/naps/

 (No actual internet memes were harmed in the creation of this blog post. All meme activity was monitored by the American Humeme Society.)

For the Fallen

Over the weekend, a man walked into a local coffee shop where four police officers were preparing for their shift. He killed all four of them. Based upon sketchy early accounts, it's thought that one of them fought with their executioner and may have shot him before he fled.

As of this writing, the assailant remains at large and the cities of Tacoma and Lakewood are in a state of utter shock.

I've seen thousands of movies and television shows where this sort of conflict erupts, read many books where shots ring out, bad guys and good guys fall to the ground and the story continues to unfold without any indication that there was an effect on the wider community beyond the main characters. At most there is mention in passing that the events made the news. On days like this, I'm reminded how false a construct that is. No one in this community goes to work today unaffected by these events. This sort of attack affects the wives and husbands and kids of those cops. Every family of every police officer is affected from their cousins, aunts and uncles spreading into the surrounding community, a sense of loss and helplessness.

A month ago, a man who works with my wife was attacked by a disturbed coworker who remains at large. Since that day, a police officer has guarded her office, watching over her and her coworkers. Outside her office is a man or woman willing to put him or herself between my loved one and a violent attack. I cannot thank them enough.

My heart goes out to the families and friends of Sgt. Mark Renninger and officers Tina Griswold, Ronald Owens and Greg Richards, four members of our community who made the ultimate sacrifice. We will miss them even if we don't realize it. http://police.cityoflakewood.us/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=77:city-of-lakewood-identifies-slain-police-officers&catid=2:hot-topics&Itemid=59

Neil Gaiman discusses Audio Books with David Sedaris

From NPR's Morning Edition - 30 November 2009

It's a good news/bad news thing... Other ways to consume books

Barnes & Noble's new "Nook" eReader has enjoyed so much buzz that WIRED is reporting that pre-orders of the Nook are so heavy that deliveries of stock to the stores to sell off the shelves is being delayed until early December when they will begin to trickle into the highest-volume stores. Sony is reporting similar 'problems' (if being too popular can really be referred to as a problem). WIRED's experts predict that supply chain problems for B&N and Sony plays into the hands of Kindle, which has had production up and running longer and reports no delays. I was commenting to The Engineer over the weekend that this Christmas didn't have a big Hot New Thing to anchor it. Reports are indicating that the digital transition forced most of the people that would have been buying big-ticket items like flatscreen TV's to buy early. This leaves tech stores holding the bag on Black Friday. Add to this the fact that this is the first Christmas that we have a full line of eReaders going head-to-head and we might just have found the tipping point for the e-Book. Whether the temporary sales advantage of the in-stock Kindle parlays into their continuing market domination remains to be seen. I'm put in mind of the somewhat artificial cache of finding a Wii last year and an Xbox 360 the year before and the Playstation 3 the year before that. It's possible that a supply chain kink can actually help the Nook and Sony eReaders in the long-term. For now, however, it's "Advantage: Kindle". What about you, dear readers? What's the hot new electronic widget for you this Yuletide season?

Scott Walker Perkins writes literary thrillers and novels of suspense. His current novel is The Palimpsest and he is working on another tentatively titled 42 Lines. Contact Information Email: swalkerperkins@gmail.com Blog: Pages to Type Before I Sleep

Contact Me

I won!

I officially "won" NaNoWriMo and I am enjoying my nice PDF certificate. I think the runners-up get a copy of the home game. Pages to Type returns soon. For the moment, I have to rest my weary fingers.

On The Media - On Books & Publishing...

Typically extensive and thorough coverage, featuring the likes of Neil Gaiman. Takes an interesting tack. . .

Professor Plum in the Billiard Room with a Lead Pipe

… or, How My Homework Ate My Summer Vacation. A Guest Column by Elspeth

Imagine you are writing a murder mystery. You have devised a victim, envisioned the scene of the crime, chosen a sufficiently effective method of homicide. You choose to begin the story when your protagonist is called upon to investigate the murder of Professor Plum in the Billiard Room, apparently with a Lead Pipe. It is up to you to engage the interest of the reader, to choose how much you will reveal of your characters, their histories, motivations, even physical appearance. You have three goals: make it interesting, make it make sense, and keep the reader reading to the end. If something fails to serve one of those goals, you may – indeed, should – excise that thing from your manuscript, or change it until it serves you better. 


“Fact,” I observed with some chagrin, “is slower than fiction.” 


My friend Scott replied, “I'm constantly reminded that [while] fiction has to make sense, reality is under no such imposition of plot and pacing...” 


How right he is. 


Now, imagine again that you begin with Professor Plum, lying skull-crushed in the Billiard Room, a bloodied Lead Pipe chucked in one corner. This time, you are writing a scientific doctoral dissertation. Here are some of the questions you may be called upon to consider: 


What were Plum’s age, gender, and country of origin? Had he signed willing consent to participate in this homicide? Did he have previous homicidal experience, either as perpetrator or victim? How was Plum recruited? If Plum was not randomly selected, what steps did the murderer take to ensure that Plum’s experience would be generalizable to a larger population? Or is this a case study? Or preliminary work with a prototype (in which case please describe how you would make the next iteration of this murder more efficient, effective, and user-friendly)? Was Plum limited as to the amount of time he was allowed to complete the experience of being murdered? If Plum had been allowed unlimited time to complete the experience, how might that have changed the results? 


Next, how did you choose the scene of the crime? Have murders been committed in Billiard Rooms before? If so, are there validated, peer-reviewed studies upon which you can call to hypothesize as to the results of your murder, before it has been committed. If so, please summarize in your chapter on previous work. Make sure to note any differences between your Billiard Room and previous examples of murders in Billiard Rooms, not omitting analytical conjectures as to the likely effect of variations between those venues and your own, nor your estimate of the validity and importance of any such previous murders. Be certain to provide a clear history of any and all fictional murders of relevance in similar locations, as the reader will need to clearly understand the landscape in which your murder stands with regard to choice of location. Did you consider trying this murder in each of the other rooms in the house to determine which was most effective? 


Now we move on to the method of murder. A lead pipe, you say? How many murders have been committed with lead pipes as a percentage of the murders in English literature? And what of worldwide literature (if you do not read all other world languages you may rely on survey articles for this question, provided they have been peer-reviewed)? Can you think of any other weapon you could have chosen that would have been more effective, or less expensive? In a Billiard Room, could you not simple have used a pool cue as a club? Please speculate on the likely difference in results between assault on the human cranium with a lead pipe and a pool cue. Cite references. If a pool cue was your original choice and you later replaced it with a lead pipe, make an analytical conjecture as to why the pool cue would not have worked. Describe the metallurgical composition of the lead pipe, and its density relative to the human skull, as well as to all metal pipes (lead or other) used as homicidal weapons (potential or actual) in the genre of murder mysteries. Make sure that your acknowledgements section thanks the funding agency whose grant paid for the lead pipes used in your murder and in the pilot studies.


Given the age, gender, and professional characteristics of Professor Plum, the environment provided by the Billiard Room, and the known physical properties of the Lead Pipe, how many times would you have to commit this murder to prove to a statistically significant level (α > 0.05) that this subject did not die by chance? Provide power calculations and vector diagrams. Using terms that will not antagonize your thesis committee, speculate on how this method might apply to the larger academic population. 


Finally, describe the contributions of this work to the field, and your plans for future murders to build on the results of this one. 


Oh, and don’t forget to make it interesting and keep the reader engaged and comfortable! 


Meanwhile, this morning, my father sent me this link. Considering the source, I hope it's not a suggestion!

The Writer's Wife

It has been said that the hardest part of being a writer is convincing one's spouse that staring out the window is work. Recently, a friend on Facebook asked about organizational skills everyone uses to manage large projects. She had a bunch of irons in the fire, including a major writing project and my wife responded before I could.

Living with a writer I would say set your self a certain number of pages each day to write and don't think about anything else during that time. This time will vary on a daily basis so don't stress if it takes you 1 hr one day and 5 hours another day. Just figure out about how many pages per day are needed to reach your goal. Be sure to leave yourself time to edit afterwards. Most of all, step back everyonce in a while and take a couple of deep breaths.

I was pleased to note that she didn't mention anything about the post-its on the bathroom mirror when I'm plotting a new story or any of the quirkier bits of living with a writer. Essentially she summed up my philosophy of maintaining a working relationship with my current project. 

I've known too many people who tell me how desperately they want to write a book. They pick up a book off the shelf and say "I could do that" and then continue not to, thinking that someday they'll whip out a masterpiece in a long weekend. Worse yet are those who or throw themselves into the task willy-nilly with no appreciation for the sort of work and dedication necessary to complete a book-length idea in a publishable form. Most never get anywhere with it, ending up discouraged and viewing those of us who have managed it with a suspicion bordering on torches and pitchforks. 

I think maybe this is where my flirtations with journalism continue to pay me dividends, because even though I write out of a love affair with the written word, I'm also able to view it as a job. I set a daily goal and work until it's done. Sometimes I stay on and do other writing-related tasks, but the writing itself is always first and foremost. By viewing it as a job, replete with often self-imposed deadlines, I can generate actual words on an actual page, despite the many distractions of the gardens, the house that's semi-permanently in a state of mid-remodel and the other myriad things that are part of home life. 

During that time, I'm in work life.  

On days when I am at home rather than in the cafe doing my writing thing, I still get up with my wife, do my morning puttering, make coffee and put on real going-out-of-the-house clothes. After the Engineer leaves for the office, I sit down in my corner of the library and work my butt off. I try to keep the staring out the window to a minimum and live by my seven rules plus a few others. 

Writing is my job. Most of the people I know who successfully work from home follow this same pattern. The inherently casual feel of knocking around in your pyjamas is fun for a couple of weeks but after awhile, you notice that it lends to a less serious approach to your work. 

I know that a lot of agents, editors and other professional writers (not the ones participating, I assume) view the NaNoWriMo phenomenon with a jaundiced eye. Fifty thousand words in a month, especially for an inexperienced writer, is a bit much and perhaps expecting one to come out of it with a literary gem is too. But by planting a hundred thousand butts in a hundred thousand chairs, the organizers of NaNoWriMo are teaching the participants how to generate work. How to set goals and how to achieve them through relentless work habits. Even if the product of all that typing is a waste of ink and paper, what we learn about our work habits in the course of the event is not a waste of anything.

eBook Update...

Always keeping an eye on the evolving eBook market (even during NaNoWriMo!) Sony says your books belong to you. Sony exec says: "Our commitment is that you bought it, you own it," Haber said. "Our hope is to see this as ubiquitous. Buy on any device, read on any device. ... We're obligated to have DRM but we don't pull content back." via BoingBoing Meanwhile, GoogleBooks is trying to thread the needle of copyright law. Anti-trust investigations and myriad lawsuits levied against its deal with the Author's Guild. Resolves some concerns about access and restrictions that will be placed upon materials in their collection that are still covered under US Copyright law. Key also was the handling of funds belonging to 'orphan works' whose authors could not be located. via Yahoo! News & Reuters Independent Booksellers in the digital frontier. IndieBound has launched version 2.0 of their ebook app for the iPhone (and presumably for the Droid as soon as it occurs to them that people are buying the things...) You can get your eBooks and support the independent bookstores in one go. via IndieBound

It Builds Character (A Letter To My Nephew)

Dear Jared, Your mom tells me that you have a story to write for school and want some advice on creating and introducing characters in a way that doesn’t detract from the storytelling. The most important thing anyone ever taught me was that stories don’t ever begin and they don’t ever end. We always join them in the middle and leave before they’re done. I know that sounds odd, bear with me for a moment. Say, for instance, that you are a character in a short story. The story is about what you did last Saturday and it begins with waking up Saturday morning and ends with you going to bed that night. Saturday is your story. But you didn’t spring into existence on Saturday morning and you won’t wink out of existence at the end of the day. Sunday morning, you will get up and do Sunday things. Your story didn’t begin with the first sentence of the story and end with the last sentence, your Saturday did. You existed before it began and you’ll go on once it’s over. The story is just a snapshot of one day. That’s probably the most important thing to keep in mind when you’re crafting any story, because you have to decide where you’re going to jump into a story that’s already in progress. There’s a name for that, by the way, it’s called “In medias res” which is Latin for “In the middle of things”. Characters are much the same. They have a beginning (they are born), the have a middle (they live) and they will eventually have an end (they die). But unless your story is ten thousand pages long, odds are you’re going to have to leave some of that out or your reader will never get to the good parts. So, we will almost always join them in medias res -- in the middle of their story. So, what do you leave out? What do you put in? Think about Harry Potter. How much do we know about Harry at the beginning of the books? He’s got messy dark hair and he wears glasses. Oh, and he has a scar on his forehead. JK Rowling takes a hundred pages to tell us that he’s a wizard with a tragic past. That he’s destined to fight Lord Voldemort has to wait another hundred pages. And we never get a complete description of the characters. We know Hermione has bushy hair and we know Ron Weasley is a freckle-faced redhead -- anything more than that is discovered later through the storytelling. For now, all the author needed us to know is that he’s a kid with glasses and a scar and that’s enough to get the story rolling. When you create a character for your story, it’s vital to keep in mind that they’re supposed to be a person, just like you or me or your brother, mom. dad, or teacher. We’re going to see a small fragment of their life in the story you’re writing and all we need to know about them is what’s important for the story you want to tell. Introduce characters quickly. Tell the audience as little about them as you can. Fill in the details as you go along. Another cardinal rule of writing is “show, don’t tell.” Rather than telling the audience all about how this kid with the scar on his head is really a wizard and has this evil enemy lurking in the shadows, just waiting to strike and he’s the chosen one… JK Rowling told us the bare minimum and let the rest of it come to light as the story progressed. She didn’t tell us, she showed us. How you show us will largely be a function of how you’re choosing to tell the story. And that means talking a little about Point of View. The key elements of storytelling and characterization will be mostly decided by how your readers are seeing the story. If the story is told through the eyes of a specific character, your readers only get to know what that character knows. This is called “first person”.

First Person: “The lady walked into my office. She had a hat the size of a super-deluxe pizza with all the trimmings. I could tell she was going to be trouble the moment I laid eyes on her.”

We only know what the guy sees, and more importantly, we only know what the guy bothers to tell us. He leaves a lot out because he’s obsessed with her wacky hat. It’s a great way to keep from having to tell your reader too much by having your character focus on the wrong thing. It’s a lot of fun to write like that and a lot of writers do it, but it gets really hard to write in first person because you can’t tell the readers anything that your main character isn’t there to witness and describe. Often this leads to some pretty preposterous stories because you have this one guy running all over the place, doing crazy and unrealistic things simply because the writer needs them to be there to tell the readers what’s happening. If you are telling your story from outside, seeing all the characters as if they’re in a movie and you’re not inside the head of any of them, that’s called “third person”.

Third Person: “Jordan dropped her cigarette as she tumbled out of the car. He took a step back and held up both hands as she glared at him with all the dignity she could muster. Now that he had her out of the car, he looked surprised rather than angry. An average-looking fellow of about thirty, bearded and tanned around the neck of the faded flannel shirt. Her gaze dropped to the dried mud on the knees of his jeans, pegging him as a gardener. “Smoking isn’t allowed on the school grounds, miss.”

Even in third person, description is kept to a bare minimum because your reader wants something to happen, they don’t want to sit and read Jordan’s resume. Almost all of my books are told in this style and this is an excerpt from my most recent novel. The two characters have just met and all we know at this point is that Jordan is a woman who got caught smoking (and she's a bit clumsy) and the man who caught her is average-looking, bearded and dressed like a gardener. It’s another twenty pages before you learn his hair color. I chose the passage above for two reasons:

1. This is the only description of the main character that the reader ever gets.
2. The character isn’t a gardener. I’m using Jordan’s perception of him in his grungy clothes to mislead my audience into believing that he is. At least for the moment. This is because, even though I’m using ‘Third Person’, I’m only telling the readers what the characters know about each other.

That last part is important. When you’re introducing a character, don’t venture much beyond what the characters could see if they looked at each other. Think back to what I said about characters being like real people. How much do you know about the average customer that walks into your parent’s store? You only know what you can see and what they tell you. Even when you’re talking about a good friend, you only know so much about them. Only show your readers what they absolutely need to know. My early novels and stories were almost all fantasy novels, which is what I believe you’re currently working on. It’s difficult sometimes to get this same information across in a fantasy setting because you’re worried that your reader doesn’t know as much about your world as you do. They won’t, and that's ok. They might not know specifically what a Ranger is, but all they really need to know is that the character spends a lot of time in the woods. Any special abilities he gets from his status as a Ranger (or a rogue, thief, wizard or whatever) can be unveiled in the story. And if you don’t get to it? Don’t worry about it. If it didn’t come up, it wasn’t worth worrying about and you have something saved for the sequel. -Uncle Scott

Ain't nothin' but a family thing...

Family fascinates me endlessly. The examination of familial bonds and the burdens and joys that they bring is a theme that runs through most of my writing.

Because America is an immigrant nation, that extends back in time to the patriarchs who made the long trek across the oceans to join our squabbling and rambunctious nation, grafting themselves on to our Family. I especially like how age can wash away scandal. "Great great grandpa Morgan was a bloodthirsty pirate" sounds dashing, whereas "Uncle Bob siezed an oil tanker yesterday and is holding thirteen crewmembers hostage" might not be bragged about so loudly. Yet, they're essentially the same thing, separated only by time. Romanticized by the historical context, the pirate of yesteryear is the movie hero and the pirate of today is the blood-thirsty terrorist.

Blame Hollywood, if you like. I know a lot of people do. But that doesn't change the fact that it's equally true of "Uncle Bob ran numbers for the mob back in the forties, isn't he sweet in that funny hat?"

The most scandalous hushed-up events of the past become the badges of honor worn by the present. I think of it as a sort of psychic recycling. Relations and families are the incarnate stuff from which any story could be woven. Links to the old country, scandalous forebears, mysterious family heirlooms, vendettas handed down from father to son... these are the stuff that dreams are made of. All of them real, all of it perfectly plausible hooks to hang a story on.


On our money it says E Pluribus Unum... "From the many, one." A singular unit drawn from the plurality. One Family of diverse elements. And like our country, our families don't always get along, and aren't always cut from the same cloth, yet instantly unite against external forces.

I tend to view history as a familial connection stretching back into infinity. Every man may not be my brother, but they are my cousin. And I think it's more interesting that way, that it makes what is otherwise dry historical information grittier and more immediate. I pepper my novels with characters whose familial connections are interwoven into the plot, whose ancestors aren't always paragons of virtue, but blood is thicker than just about anything else. Which is part of why I refer to the things I write (when I'm not moving giant robots across the landscape) as "Literary thrillers" than anything else. Thrillers, because these are characters in peril and the stakes are wide-ranging, but literary because it's ultimately about the interactions between the present and the past, the familial elements that make history matter.

And if there's not a career's worth of writing to be found in that, then I don't know where else you could look.

Get Unstuck!

Especially during NaNoWriMo, I get people asking me how to deal with writer's block. I admit that used to be a real problem for me until I developed methods of dealing with it when it happens, writing around it and generally stripping it of its power to hurt my productivity. Back in April, I compiled my 7 favorite tips for breaking out of a cul de sac:

1. Kill someone. The Classic method of dealing with a roadblock - at least in mystery writing - is to "Throw another body on the floor." I generally find that about 40,000 words into any book I will hit a wall that can only be solved by killing someone. Writer's block really can be murder.
2. Give 'em the finger. One of my favorite mental tricks comes from Larry Dixon in a toast he gave at a writer's party I attended some time back. "Imagine the 'Microsoft Pointer-Finger' is giving you the finger," he said. "Unless you're writing, it's sitting there just flipping you off and you can't make it stop unless you're putting words on the page."
3. Take it on the road. Sometimes what a scene needs is a new location. If I'm having trouble with a scene or series of events, it often helps to re-set the scenery. This can either entail the characters getting in a car or just moving the location of the events to a new place.
4. Send 'em to the showers. If you've written yourself into a corner, or if you're in one of those situations where the characters seem to be running away with the story and you don't know what comes next... do what comes naturally. I find that characters become more human in my head if I allow them to do human things, like use a restroom, shave, smoke, change clothes, call their parents, answer email, cook a meal... or take a shower. It adds verisimilitude, moves the scene forward and if it's too much, you can always delete it later in the rewriting and editing stages.
5. Write the next word. It sounds so simple until you're sitting there staring at the keys, being mocked by the 26 innocent-seeming letters. But you have to get the next word out there into the aether. And then the one after that and the one after that. It may be the wrong word, they all may be the wrong words, but you're writing and that ain't nothin'. Writers have a tendency to be so self-critical that if we wake up on the wrong side of the bed, nothing we do that day is going to satisfy. There's nothing wrong with that. But you have to write anyway. Get it down on the page. Rough edges can be smoothed later, just get it out there.
6. Go get a cup of coffee. Seriously. Get up out of your chair and go do something else for a bit. Get a refill, take a walk, garden, or fill out a silly online quiz your friend sent you. The longer you sit there staring at that &%$ cursor giving you the finger, the hard it can get to write the next word. Walk it off.
7. Remember the secret... There are 26 letters on your keyboard. They're the same 26 letters used by Joyce when he wrote Ulysses and by Huxley for Brave New World, Hemingway for The Sun Also Rises, and Nora Roberts for the fifteen novels she put out last year. It's all about perspective, really.

And a bonus 8th way to get over a writing drought... Write a blog post about writer's block. Now if you'll excuse me, I have pages to write before I can sleep. --- What are your tricks for dealing with Writer's Block? Or are you immune to writer's block? I want to know! Leave your tips and tricks in the comments.