Questions to answer before I write... Part I

Thank you for your participation in my experiment. There were a lot of questions and I was in danger of making the vid too long, so there will have to be more than one. Keep sending in questions and I'll take the best of the lot for the next Vlog entry. I must say that I was astounded by the breadth of topics I have been asked to cover. It was a really strange experience sitting in a room talking to a camera with no one around. Which was kind of the point. I wasn't sure that this kind of blogging (or vlogging, I suppose) would be a comfortable environment for me. It was a lot of fun, but I was a little nervous and I think it shows. I've also never edited video before, so there was a heightened sense of the high wire. Leave your comments and questions in the newly-repaired comments section! And remember: If you can't be right, be funny!

Story Germs

Ideas for writing are like the dust particles (or perhaps bacterium, according to a recent study) that gather water molecules to form clouds. . .

One rainy morning, Kristin and I set out for a day of shopping.

I live on an island in Puget Sound, southwest of Seattle, so any trip of this nature involves a long trip over bridges and ferries and hill and dale and through the horde of other drivers making the same trip. Apparently all headed the same place I am and in much more of a hurry to get there than I am.

As I was merging with traffic onto the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, a sleek black BMW 3-series came roaring up out of my blind spot. The guy was leaning forward as if he could will traffic to move faster, his cell phone grafted to his ear. He hovered there for a moment before he accelerated and shot past me, diving into the lane in front of me to pass a slower-moving car and then darted ahead, weaving through traffic as he crested the bridge.

My first impulse in this situation is usually to say something questioning the bipedal lineage of the driver and indeed, as he shot around me and I spotted the cell phone, that was what I did. Then I noticed something important: the license plate said "Lungs".

As traffic inevitably bogged down going up the hill on the far side of the bridge, I was able to keep him in sight (without breaking any laws of man or physics) and could just make out a little decal in the back window.

The intense driver in the sleek black car was more than likely a pulmonologist. A doctor heading toward the hospital at breakneck speed. If I could have helped him get there faster I would have. And as I watched him dive down the ramp toward Tacoma's hospital district I wished him well.

That's a true story. I'm not posting it here to inspire you not to flip off the doctor heading to help the emergency patient. In all honesty, the guy was driving recklessly no matter how good his reasons. I'm not going to tell you that - unbeknownst to me - my loved one was his patient either. This isn't a chain letter. Emailing this to ten people won't get you any luck, karma, or money from Bill Gates.

I have no idea how that story ended or if I'm even necessarily right in my conclusions -- our day continued to be perfectly normal from that point on. It doesn't matter what happened, only that I erred on the side of complexity and I feel that I am the better for it.

Whatever moral you draw from this is your own. This is a blog about writing, not morals. (There's something wrong with that sentence, but I can't quite put my finger on it.) The main reason I'm telling you this is because people tell me: "I want to write too, but I don't know where to get ideas!" If you read my previous post about humanity, imagination and empathy, you'll remember that I made oblique reference to this story. That's because it was the nucleus around which that idea coalesced.

That's not to say that empathy was a foreign idea to me before a trip to Ikea caused the scales to fall from my eyes, but it did begin my meditations on how we presume to know everything from surface impressions. I began to watch these things happen, take mental notes of my own reactions to real life events and the interaction of characters in movies and literature. It culminated in these two blog posts and I believe my stories are stronger and my characters are certainly stronger for undergoing that scrutiny. 

Imagine every situation fully. Don't be afraid of complexity. Pay attention; your ideas are all around you, bumping into others, gathering mass, forming clouds and then raindrops and then... stories. Or at least blog posts.

“Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren't very new after all”

- Abraham Lincoln


Photo Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Iced Tea & Sarcasm: What if digital books are dumber books?

Iced Tea & Sarcasm: What if digital books are dumber books?

Imagine All The People

Because I work in a writing center, there’s always talk about how better to get across to the student you’re helping that you’re serious about helping them overcome their challenges. That you ‘feel their pain’ in a totally non-ironic, non-Clintonesque way. Displaying empathy.

The trouble with conversations like this is that often I hear too much focus on how to display empathy. “Think about sick kittens” was a half-joking response in the most recent discussion I witnessed, dwelling on the method without properly dwelling on what it means to be empathetic.

The difference is an understanding that the easiest way to display empathy is to actually have empathy. 

Genuine empathy is something that no Stanislavski technique is ever going to teach you to emulate if it’s not actually there to begin with. Empathy is the triumph of imagination over instinct. I’m sitting across from a student. That student has a (generally) very concrete academic issue that they need our help with. An hour or half hour appointment isn’t long enough to really delve into their life and motivations and challenges and obstacles… so we revert to emotional shorthand: Archetype, Stereotype, Xenotype, cross-type and match and then move on. Help the student get their paper finished. Get them as close to the “A” as you can.

There’s always another student waiting.

Everyone does it. We imagine others in the simplest possible terms because it’s the least taxing manner in which to interact with others. I think of it as emotional shorthand. Don’t believe me? A driver cuts you off and speeds off down the highway ahead of you at breakneck speed.

What do you do?

If you’re like me, you swear, call into question their parentage and generally think ill of them. What a jackass. We don’t generally assume they are a doctor rushing to save a life or a son rushing to the bedside of his dying father because the conditioned response is one-dimensional.

Archetype: Bad driver
Subgroup: Roadhog

Think this isn’t a blogpost about writing? How many movies do you see where the characters are a mile wide and an inch deep? How many books? Where do these one-dimensional paper cutout characters come from if not a perceived refusal on the part of the reader (or writer) to be willing to fully-envision someone as a complicated and often contradictory entity apart from us?

And why not? We do this every day in real life, more often than anyone is willing to admit. We fail to fully accept the person standing opposite us is an entity with a big bag of reasons for saying, seeing, doing what they do the way that they do. We turn on the emotional shorthand function and imagine them in the simplest possible terms before we move on. The person in the express checkout with three too many items, the person that cut you off on I-5, the ESL student whose accent you can’t understand, the coworker who is always late, the waitress who doesn’t keep your coffee full… Do you think they're inherently bad people? Or are they reacting to parts of their experience that we don't get to see? Or do you honestly think about it at all?

Archetype + Stereotype = Conditioned response. 

For better or worse, writers use this fact all the time. Big dudes are bad. Skinny dudes are nerds. Sexy blondes are airheads. Fat women are bitter about it... the list of sins is long.

Empathy is hard. We have to act against the human impulse to assume motivations, to act on information not in evidence, to simplify situations so they’ll be less stressful. At the risk of getting too John Lennon here, we have to imagine all the people. Empathy is imagining others as complex entities that are momentarily overlapping us like an organic Venn diagram.

The trouble with this isn’t the question of how better to display empathy, the trouble derives from the question not digging deep enough. It appears to focus on giving the appearance of empathy rather than finding ways to display and incorporate actual empathy into our interactions with the people around us. 

Empathy is best defined (by me anyway) as laying aside the simplistic and instinctual reversion to a gut response. No one is a stereotype, archetype or paragon. Showing genuine empathy is about supplanting our shorthand with a fully-imagined person, an open reception of all that they are displaying to us in every nuance of their manner and beyond the ubiquitous device of "actively listening", what we should be doing is "actively imagining".

Robot Uprising

Public Domain Photo by Daderot

Questions are beginning to pile up on the dock here are Scott's Question Emporium, but they're all coming from my gmail account! Why? Because Denny pointed out that Blogger has been having a problem with their word-verification system. Which is funny, because essentially the word-verification thing is a modified Turing test, which means you all fail. So if you were'nt able to comment, it's because Blogger thinks you're all robots.

RISE AND THROW OFF YOUR ORGANIC OPPRESSORS!


Solution: I've disabled the word-verification so if you're willing to give it a second go, please do so at this time. Some great questions are coming in! I'm up to my ears in writing at the moment, so I'm about to run away again so I can get it all done before the wife comes to get me and takes me away!

(Ho ho, ha ha, hee hee...)
- Scottertron 5000

Scott's Question Emporium

Send me your questions with "Question Emporium" in the subject line. (Click on "Contact Me" at the bottom of the homepage) or just post them in the comments section.

Any question. Any topic.

A selection of the finest (and least offensive -- seriously, folks, my mom reads these things) will be answered by me LIVE on the internet.

Q: Will the answer be correct? \
A: What am I, Cecil Adams? Ok, I won't lie... the answer is "Maybe". If I know the answer I'll give it thee. You never know, I have a lot of strange things crammed in my melon. It could happen. But as someone very smart once reminded me... "If you can't be right, be funny." And that shall be the guiding doctrine.

Honestly, I'm still feeling my way along with this "blogging about writing" thing. I write every day. Reams of words pour from my poor, tired fingers. But you wouldn't want to watch a YouTube video of my writing. It's a guy drinking coffee and typing on a laptop. It's a solitary endeavor most of the time.

This blog helps me keep a perspective, and a focus that might otherwise be lacking. Every writer in history - myself included - has tried to make the process interesting to outsiders. It isn't. It's barely interesting to us. When I'm interviewing experts and poring over ancient manuscripts... that is interesting! And I will find a way to share those experiences. But I can't do that every day or there would be no book. Just me essentially getting a degree in textual analysis. Or maybe journalism. But that's not generating much readable fiction. Have you ever read a doctoral dissertation on textual analysis? I haven't either. But I'll wager if you did, you would find it wasn't scintillating fiction.

So... while I'm searching for my "Blogging Voice" (whatever that is) and trying to figure out the best blend of content between the many facets of the writing life, I want to hear from YOU. Remember when I said this should be a conversation? That goes both ways. Some of you've answered some of my questions. Time for me to reciprocate. This experiment is about finding a balance between my tendency to ramble about deep introspective topics like the fact that elevators in the Pierce County Courthouse don't go all the way to the top floor (which is a fact; it's also where the alien experiments take place), my strange affection for parenthetical asides, ellipses (...) and the occaisional truly writerly stuff. So send in your questions! All topics are open (keep it clean, please) but I will give special precedence to topics of literary merit, writerly stuff, and the occaisional odd alien experiment.

P.S. Yes. I know. Technically it's not an "emporium" because things are bought and sold in an emporium and this is going to be basically free. So it's probably more accurately "Scott's Question Swapshop" but that has less of a ring to it, don't you think?

Random thoughts on a Monday Morning...

Currently in the earbuds: "Here With Me" by Dido Currently in the mug: "Vitamin D" from Ritual Coffee Roasters of San Francisco (A pleasant sort of buzz... My California friends are too kind to me.)

This week's going to be hectic. I have read about everything I can manage to find regarding query letters and digested as much as my stomach will take. I've been working steadily to finalize what I'm going to say to agents in these letters I'm about to send out, and it's oddly nerve-wracking.

So much rides on such a short letter, it's surreal to write one.

My novel topped out at about 140,000 words. I have condensed it into a two-paragraph pitch (twitch twitch) which I hope will sell the damn thing so I can get it off my desk and concentrate on the next project. 

The next project, by the way, is already over a 100,000 words long and in serious need of the critical application of a machete. Or the delete button, whichever comes easier to hand.

The real mettle of an author is proven in the acknowledgement that only 50,000 of the 100,000 words are worth keeping. Last night I sent in my dues for the Pacific Northwest Writers Association and I've begun making plans to attend the conference at the end of July/Beginning of August. I'm not sure what to expect. 

I've attended conferences, but never a writer's conference, so this is a bit daunting for me. Once upon a time, an errant comment to a patron at the bookstore netted me an invite to a soiree at her house where several authors were in attendance. (That'll teach you to keep your mouth shut). I spent a lovely (and slightly surreal) evening plying a very tolerant Mercedes Lackey and Larry Dixon with questions while Steven Brust played his guitar and sang funny songs behind us. But it took me half the night and several glasses of wine to achieve a state where I could tap them on the shoulder and ask that first question.

I'm no stranger to finding my way in murky social waters, but I really am incredibly awkward and shy in those situations and sometimes that's not to my credit in a world where self-promotion is mandatory. I've never really dealt with agents or editors before, which is part of what conferences are all about, including a ten-minute sit-down with an agent from my list.

I need to research this. Knowledge is power. Agents keep blogs and they talk about these things, right? I can do this.

Speaking of queries, an answer to two emails: No, I don't really use books as coasters. It was a still-life concocted for the purpose of taking a photo. And I liked the Kilimanjaro thing, but I'm funny that way.

Happy Belated Birthday, Mr. Lincoln

"If this is tea, please bring me some coffee. If this is coffee, please bring me some tea."
                                                        -Abraham Lincoln 

I would have wished him happy birthday sooner, but Americans don't really like celebrating things on the day they happened. Why ruin a perfectly good chance at a long weekend? Besides, it took awhile for me to track down the coffee quote. 

Photo by me, because I figure you've all seen enough pictures of Lincoln for one month. Why Hemingway? I say: why not Hemingway? That coffee came from the shadows of Kilimanjaro after all...

We shall know them by their knock-knock jokes...

Humor is such an individualized thing that there's probably a potential forensic science there. The next Patricia Cornwell or Fox TV character will be identifying assassins by the anecdotes and butchers by their blonde jokes. 


Hey, I'd watch it. 


Televised crime comedies aside: everyone has their own ideas about funny and everyone finds it in different places. I found funny at the feet of the master: my dad (who passed away over Christmas) had the driest wit I've ever known, the straightest face you could ask for. I spent half my life trying to decide whether or not he was joking. His sense of humor ran the gamut but it was classic, a little stooges but mostly to do with stringing you along until he could get you close enough to the boat to haul you over the gunwale. 


Humor is about timing, delivery and maintaining the illusion that reality is at fault if what you're saying isn't true. At an early age I was introduced not only to Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck, but to Red Skelton, Ed Wynne, Milton Berle, Edgar Bergen, Fibber McGee and Jack Benny. I sometimes tell people I grew up in the 1940's and my sense of humor is very much of that era becase I still think that being funny didn't require a four-letter vocabulary and that clever is better than brassy. The great radio comedy writers of the 30's and 40's found their balance on the high wire of vaudeville, where not every joke was clean, but it was cleanly-told. It's a lesson any writer can use, in my opinion. 


Vaudeville is no more so I will have to figure it out as I go along without the help of the peanut gallery tossing tomatoes at me. The first short story I had break through in a contest was a farce predicated upon the notion that someone, anyone, had the gumption to tell a tall tale so farfetched it could only be sold by the sheer preposterousness of anyone having the moxie to tell it. A story so preposterous that it could save the world. 


Dad was the only person I've ever met who could have actually done such a thing. While my current novel isn't a comedy per se, humor is so interwoven into life that I can't imagine a novel that doesn't contain a humorous vein. Someday I'll craft that short story into a novel, it's a project I've worked on almost since the day I wrote it. 


In the meantime, I have the look people give me when I'm messing with them. A look I remember all too well, trying to decide if I'm stringing them along. It's how we bestow immortality upon those who came before us. Benny, Wynne, Skelton... dad. I miss you dad.

"A procrastinating pessimist must put off 'til tomorrow what they would have probably screwed up today anyway." ~ Perkins' Proverbs ----- Photo by My Sneaky Wife

Support

I was throwing a coffee mug the other day (on the pottery wheel, not at someone) and I began thinking the things that my mental hummingbird flits to during these meditative moments. Creating pottery bears many of the same hallmarks of writing, the strike of a key impressing a letter into a page, then a word, a phrase, a sentence, a paragraph... drawing stories from the ethereal plane and pinning them down on a page. So too a shapeless mass of sedimentary leavings is wedged and worked into a ball, subjected to the erosive forces of water and centrifugal force, pressure from my fingers, heat in the kiln, rare earth elements and glass and then back into the fire... just to give me something to transport the coffee from the French Press to my mouth.

Because my coworkers stare at me if I suck it straight from the cauldron.

I might sell this mug. Or I could give it to my wife so she can fill it with tea or even pencils. It doesn't really matter -- for once, the coffee isn't the issue at hand, but the vessel of transport. The usefulness derived by reforming a shapeless blob of mud into a cup-shape.

'Tabula Rasa', the blank slate or the shapeless mass that Lao Tzu referred to as the 'uncarved block'. A blank page or a hunk of clay, it's all just potential yet-to-be-realized.

Most of my life has been spent making the slate less blank. I was born with an inherent and insatiable desire to fill up the blank spots. Writing and art are both borne of that impulse to scribble on the wall, the hardwood floors, or (so my mother hoped) the pages of a coloring book. For thirty-five years, I've been trying to fill the blank spaces with... something. Anything. Coherent or incoherent, it doesn't matter. Sometimes the chaos can be tamed - or at least confined - only by adding more chaos.

But as I move along in my art and my writing, I find myself all the more aware that it's not the scribbling that makes the wall pretty. It's not the ink that makes the page wise. It's the content. Both the ability of an object to accept the content and the ability of an audience to share the experience. Which brings us back to Lao Tsu...

"We shape clay into a pot, but it is the emptiness inside that holds whatever we want."

In the lingua Franca of the art school, the word 'Support' was bandied about quite a bit. It's a generic bit of lingo to refer to the surface upon which art - theoretically - happens. The canvas, the clay, the pages of a sketchbook... all are supports. It's a good word. Sitting nestled among a dissonant array of jargon specifically designed to delineate insiders from outsiders, 'support' really is the best word for what the canvas does, what the clay does, what the page does.

The metaphor can be extended to all art. (Yes, I consider even studio pottery to be an artform, not a craft, deal with it.) At its very best, art it is an empty vessel, waiting to be filled by the viewer. Waiting to support their need for art... and we all need art. It's why we doodle in the margins of budget reports during meetings. It's why we convey ideas with charts and graphs and posters. Because the visual is the support for an idea which is only fully-formed in the mind of the beholder. Business statistics or a Klimt nude, the image is the support for the ideas, but ideas are useless without a mind to accept or reject them. Like a radio signal with no receiver.

It's a bit like the old "Tree falls in a forest..." argument. If no one looks at it, is it art? By my definition, the answer is yes only because art is always a support for - at least - the artist. Excepting the artist from the equation, is it still art if it goes un-viewed?

No. I'm afraid that it's just an empty vessel waiting to be filled.

The good news is that art persists -- asserts itself even in the dark places. Look no farther than cave doodles in France or fingerpainting on canyon walls in the middle of the vastness of the Sahara or the many novels unheralded in the lifetime of the writer. They have been discovered by spelunkers and desert-dwellers and later generations of book lovers because art will eventually find an audience, so take heart.

My wife and I own a boatload of original artwork or low-numbered prints from artists I know. That's typical for an artist's home as much as the walls of books are typical for a writer's. Most people will never buy an original painting or sculpture any more than they would pony up for a rare fine first edition of Moby Dick. The walls of American homes are adorned with photos of loved ones and prints that came with the frame they bought at Target and figurines from Hallmark. Which is well and good, there's an aesthetic there (for better or worse) and ultimately those count asdefacto artwork if only for the experience and joy of the beholder under the same rubric that "any books is better than none".

I currently have three mugs sitting on my desk: one is from my favorite cafe and gets me coffee for $.50 a cup; One is from NPR as thanks for my donation a few years back; and one is made from pewter and holds my pens & pencils. There are a couple dozen more in the cupboard at home, many of them handcrafted by friends and fellow potters, artists of earth and centrifuge. They are the only art that I touch every day other than my own.

That is why it doesn't matter to me that if I sell this cup, it might end up holding tea (gasp!), or even pens & pencils for that matter. Because the owner will have we still have a piece of artwork in their home or place of business. A vessel for their thoughts, their ideas of "mugness", and yes, their pencils. Books are sometimes put to some odd uses, but nonetheless people are deriving enjoyment from them and that counts for something.

In all, we're in the business of creating a support for dreams. This means this book or this mug is original art by SW Perkins which you can hold in your hands, feel the heft, trace the lines left by my fingers, marvel at the variations and contrasts and really experience. Not because of what it is, but because of what it holds.

Faceoff

I've been informed that Facebook has backed off their new Terms of Service, reverting to the more previous limited-license arrangement with the caveat that archive copies will be kept on their servers. Copyright is retained by the originators of the content. This reversion to the original TOS is more in line with the demands of the thousands of users whose footsteps were fading fast as they deleted content and ran from the site.

Online rights is a strange and dicey issue, every bit fits the cliche of "the brave new world" (with apologies to Huxley & Shakespeare). Facebook is correct inasmuch as they complain that a promise to delete content upon cessation of the creator's account would be misleading since their online friends may have retained copies of the content. This creates an exposure for them in terms of liability for making unsupportable claims. Yet it is the very community aspects Facebook trades upon which draw us to the site to begin with which create the problems and creates a dichotomy that isn't easy for the legal minds to parse. On the one hand, users should retain the full rights to their creations, on the other hand, we all need to be cognizant that anything put on the Internet is forever. In some place, at some time, even if only in an individual viewer's cache, that work is archived and infinitely retrievable.

However, all online providers need to understand that most e-literate writers realize (to some extent) this and the provider's desire to mitigate legal exposure does not require a blanket claim of rights to the work posted on their site. Moreover, midnight changes that represent sweeping claims overriding the individual content creators' right to their own content will not be tolerated by those who are cognizant of themselves as writers (or photographers, artists, &c).

We are also aware that it is the terms of the TOS that will be at the top of the legal arguments if ever a disagreement came to court on this subject and the statements of the spokespeople are not necessarily enforceable when there is a discrepency between the two. Please have more respect for intelligence of the user.

Kudos to Facebook for the about-face, reacting quickly to their users' complaints. The internet is a work-in-progress, and respect for the opinions and intellect of the user is good PR, good policy and good business sense.

It's been an exciting and educational week!

~Scott

Cross-posted at Red Room

Updates... to everything.

I spent the morning contending with one of the worst migraines of my long and storied career after spending the evening contending with Googlepages and updates to my website. Just a brief update while I sleep off the vestigial echoes of both headaches...

• I have a website! Click here to learn more about me, my current and past writing projects, awards and especially my novel THE PALIMPSEST! The site includes a select bibliography to learn more about the subjects and people touched upon in the novel, plus the two institutions that figure most prominently in the story. More changes, updates and additional content including a photo essay of important sights featured in the novel are coming soon!
• Facebook backed down! I bring this up because I wrote about it a couple of days ago. Consumerist (the Consumer Reports blog that broke the story) reports that Facebook has reverted to their previous Terms of Service, which respects the rights of the content creators and their intellectual property. Way to go Facebook.

My pages are written, now I must sleep. (And you thought the title of this blog was metaphorical). -Scott

What's in a name?

Awhile back I wrote a novel that I've been calling Ex Libris from day one. It's an historical fiction/thriller for bibliophiles. It is woven from the histories of various collections of books and the claims these libraries have upon a single book which might reveal the location of yet another older and infinitely more valuable library... which sounds convoluted but isn't.

The point being that "Ex Libris" (Latin for 'From/out of the Library') is the perfect title for such a book.

But there's already an Ex Libris out there. It is a book of an entirely different sort, which is generally sold in a different section of the average bookstore than mine would/will be. Even worse, the fallback title I had in mind, Palimpsest is a novel that is coming out in paperback in February.

I just can't seem to win.

The Writer's Digest Guide to Query Letters expressly forbids pitching a book with a title that's already out there. It pointedly makes fun of someone who does so, as a matter of fact. While I'm not generally disposed toward taking any one guidebook's advice as a mandate from on-high (with all due respect to Ms. Burt-Thomas), I worry that any of the other titles I've come up with will fail to as fully encapsulate the story I have told and "Untitled" leaves a great deal to be desired as well.

I readily admit that this is probably a tempest in an inkwell. The jitters of a first-time novelist are innumerable, but nothing I've come up with and nothing that any of the others I've discussed it with (sorry guys) fully captures the essence of the novel either. Working titles rarely make it all the way to the dustjacket on the store shelf, but I do worry that by any other name it just won't sell the same.

Do You Dare?

I'm not sure I'm this desperate (yet) but someone pointed me toward the benign insanity of Doctor Wicked's Writing Lab the other day. As you can see in the demo from Youtube, the writer-encouragement tool will either annoy you by producing an irritating noise every time you stop typing or begin to delete the things you have managed to write. Awesome idea. Please, for the love of God keep it away from me!

"Writing is an act of faith, not a trick of grammar."


 - E. B. White 


Public domain photo via Wikimedia Commons

Rights

Imagine for a moment you have the next great idea. The perfect mousetrap or... whatever. In your excitement you get on the phone and tell your friend about it. The next day your patent request comes back denied. Why? Because the phone company claims to have the right to your creation simply because you used their lines to communicate your brilliance to others. Sound stupid doesn't it? Yet Facebook's most recent 'update' of their terms of service is the most egregious example of this powergrab that I can think of. According to Facebook, anything you post on Facebook belongs to Facebook. In perpetuity. Which is tantamount to the phone company claiming they own your mousetrap idea. Telephone Companies, ISP's, Social Networking Sites such as FB, blog providers such as this one, et al are welcome to claim rights to their creations. You guys can have the right to every line of code that you write, every word on your help menus, and anything else you create. But you're not the creator of the words on your members' blog; you are the avenue of transmission. I post very little on Facebook anyway. It's a place for me to communicate with my friends and answer the many silly quizzes and other nonsense that crosses my desk on a daily basis. But even so, if Facebook thinks they can claim credit or rights to those words I wrote prior to this 'update' of their TOS or even any rights now... they should be prepared for a fight. I'm going to go over and delete every note I've ever posted there since the inception of my account. Everything posted over there was done so under the terms of the previous TOS. I did not and do not relinquish rights in perpetuity to the phone company for their 'greatest hits' compilation of telephone calls. Nor will I do so for Facebook or any other place I have ever posted anything on the internet. To coin a phrase from the NRA: you can have my uncompensated rights when you pry them from my cold dead fingers... and not even then if my literary executor has anything to say about it.

Timeless?

Call me an egoist, but I shoot for timelessness even when I'm writing a mystery or thriller in a modern setting. Regardless of my setting or subject, I like to keep in the back of my mind that I want this to remain relevant for a span of time in excess of my lifespan. (A fellow can dream, can't he?)

For me, there are essentially two distinct ways I see to go about this:

1. Avoid specifics. Nomenclature can come back to bite you. Specific details which tie you to a time will shackle you when you least expect them to. Call a gun a gun (or a gat, a piece, a rod, &c..) instead of a labeling it a Colt M1911. Likewise the cars should be a sedan or coup (ride, wheels, beater, &c.). Call a computer is a computer, a phone a phone... Cormac McCarthy elevates the withholding of specifics to an almost zenlike state in his post-apocalyptic bestseller The Road (which I highly recommend, BTW). The less of the back story and time frame McCarthy illuminates, the more we want to see. Ten, twenty, thirty years from now you will re-read that book and get the same reaction . Which is why his post-apocalyptic epic won the Pulitzer.
2. Write a 'period piece' in the present. During your first rewrite, try to think of your current timeframe as the "past" and try to include (subtly, mind you) the information both factual and fictional that future readers might need to 'get' that you were writing specifically about 2006. Just mentioning the year is ham-handed because often you want to give a "This is the present or recent past" feel as much as possible for as long as it lasts… the trick is finding a balance between the two. Michael Connelly does this in his Harry Bosch novels better than anyone I can think of. This is a practical necessity when he's writing about police procedures in a town (LA) where the every eyetwitch of his characters real world counterpart is reported as national news.

But you don't write like Cormac McCarthy? (Or Michael Connelly for that matter?) Unless you're writing fantasy (and sometimes even then, depending on your story and setting) I'll wager that the ideas are still applicable. If Pulitzers and Edgars put you off my point, let us veer from Cormac to Clancy...

Red Storm Rising is antiquated by sheer dint of the fact that the Soviet Union is gone and with it went the book's entire scenario. In one fell swoop, it went from "Ripped From The Healines" to "Remember When That Was Possiblie?" almost overnight. Yet in spite of all that, it has managed to magically skip 'antiquated' and go straight to 'retro'. Not all of Clancy's books fare so well, but you get my drift, right?

Books and movies that feature the World Trade Center towers didn't become obsolete just because the 9/11 attacks knocked the towers down. William R. Gibson's Neuromancer almost single-handedly changed the face of science fiction, but much of the technology that seemed to futuristic at the time is now a reality (or even a past reality). The disjointed levels of our technological sophistication (or lack thereof) with that in his fictional world doesn't ruin the story one iota.

What separates retro from the humorously antiquated? What role do you think authorial intent plays in this? Does that take away from the punch that the novel carries? Is Orwell's 1984 out of date? Why is it still horrifically relevant despite its temporal anomaly?

Writers: What do you use to avoid shackling your work to a ticking clock? What can these novels I've mentioned (or others that I haven't) teach us about taking our work out of the time we're writing in and into the strange mists of literary limbo?

Readers: What do you think makes a book immediately obsolete? What can a writer do to ensure that their work remains timeless? What elements do you find jarring (the hairstyles in Star Wars) but acceptable within the context of the piece?

All: I'm curious what you think! Leave your comments below…

Quotable

"It is impossible to discourage the real writers - they don't give a damn what you say, they're going to write." 


- Sinclair Lewis


Public Domain photo from Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons

First Question...

My favorite place to write is the small cafe near the school where I work. There's a coffee roaster sharing the space and when they're roasting, I get the full-sensory experience of the cup in my hand.

It's communal, convivial, funky and all the things a coffee shop should be. Bliss.

The conversational snippets I overhear sometimes interject themselves into the flow of my thoughts, guiding the writing when my characters are in public places. I like to think that it adds a touch of verisimilitude to that sort of scene. When things are proceeding at a more pastoral pace or if the music interferes (sorry, but Scissor Sisters singing Comfortably Numb rarely fits the soundtrack of the books I write) I can tune in to my Pandora channels or NPR or just put the earbuds in to cut the decibel-level.

So, my writerly friends: Where do you write? And for my readerly friends: Where do you read what we write? Does the setting have to fit the piece? Is a boisterous atmosphere a distraction or an instigation for better prose? What makes the ideal place for you to partake in the written word?

Leave your thoughts in the comments section! I really want to know.

Why Don't I Self-Publish?

I am reminded almost daily that I am seeking to launch a writing career at what might be the worst time imaginable. Many publishers seem to be teetering, layoffs are rampant and the media is trumpeting the dawn of a new age of self-publishing. All of which inspires family and friends to periodically poke me and ask: "Why the hell aren't you self-publishing?"

Time Magazine's January write-up of Lisa Genova’s self-published breakout novel Still Alice has served to put this question in front of me again.

The recent troubles of “brick & mortar” bookstores and the teetering finances of certain publishing giants are just fuel for this particular fire. But is an industry shakeup propagated by other economic factors really the harbinger of the Big Publishing apocalypse? According to the Boston Globe, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt's woes have a lot to do with the decline of their textbook publishing empire. Does that really presage the dawn of an anarchic state of self-publishing where every Joe or Jane Ink-in-my-veins is clawing for a spot on the bestseller lists? (Incidentally: Without publishers and booksellers to report accurate sales data, will there even be a bestseller's list in that future world?)

Not to understate the problems facing the publishing industry. Peter Olsen’s article in Publisher’s Weekly (aptly titled: “A Long Winter”) lays out the current woes of the publishing industry in stark detail, begging me to revisit the question: Why not self-publish? Isn't that the wave of the future? In a world where anyone really can write a book and get it published without jumping the hurdles of editors and agents, isn't the Big Publishing model doomed anyway?

I'm sure another spate of articles heralding the end of big-money corporate publishing and trumpeting the triumph of self-published rebels is due to crest the hill any moment now.

There’s no coincidence that the dawn of the print on demand houses the likes of iUniverse and BookSurge aligned with the rise of book retailers willing to stock anything with an ISBN number. A number of recent bestsellers – including Christopher Paolini’s breakout YA fantasy bestseller Eragon* – are trumpeted as the vanguard of this new march on New York despite the fact that both of these books were scooped-up by major publishers as a result of their early success.

Anyone with a computer really can put a novel out there.

The apparent popularity of Amazon’s Kindle2 further complicates this field as everyone from the big houses to the self-published entrepreneur scrambles to figure out how to make eBooks make money. (As the consumer tries to decide if they read enough books in a year to make the price tag of the Kindle break even for them.) Amazon offers to “translate” any book you care to write into their proprietary format for a relatively small fee and build upon their history of bookselling for the masses. If anything can attain the coveted title of "The Tipping Point" it may well be the long-ballyhooed arrival of the eBook in the hands of American consumers.

The one thing that really troubles me about a world sans publishing houses is the signal-to-noise ratio.

If everyone really does have one novel in them, and even a realtively small percentage have the gumption to put ink to paper... how is the reading public to find the wheat in all that chaff?

Every writer must already be savvy in the field of marketing in order to really ‘make it’ in publishing. Every publisher, every agency, every book by Writer's Digest tells you this up-front. But without a sizeable marketing budget, how could anyone break through the noise? Wouldn't that put real success out of reach for those who don't have the backing of venture capital? What's next? An IPO for Scott Perkins, Inc just to raise capital for my first printrun?

If an author has to shoulder the full burden of not only marketing, but editing, publishing, inventory management, distribution, and accounts payable... who would venture to break the mold? And if they hire people to fill those roles... don't they perforce become a publishing house -- albeit a small one?

Frustration is a big factor too. Editors, literary agents, publishers and booksellers are a daunting lot from the standpoint of an aspiring author. Lined up between them and their book on a store shelf like the defensive line of the opposing team. The songs of lamentation rise to the tune of foreheads banging against keyboards: “HOW DO I CAPTURE YOUR INTEREST? WHAT MAKES YOU TAKE THIS BOOK AND IGNORE THAT ONE?”.

I can't pretend that I haven't considered it. And I have the good fortune of having fulfilled all of the jobs I mentioned in the past for various book stores. It's certainly tempting to chuck the game and go it alone.

But the view of editors, agents and publishers as defending the goal often blinds us to the service they provide to readers. Shifting the slush pile at the bookstore, I got a glimpse of what the agencies and publishers aren't showing us. Cervantes' admonition that "no parent thinks their own child is ugly; and this self-deceit is yet stronger with respect to the offspring of the mind" has never been proven more definitively.

No reader is immune to the perplexing moment spent standing at the book tables of a bookstore, thumbing through the latest “I can’t believe someone published this piece of (insert epithet here)” and wondering what the publishing world is collectively smoking.

If you only knew what you are "missing".

It seems too simplistic to say: “Traditional Publishing –vs – Plucky Little Guy” (with his entire printrun in the trunk of his car) in a fight to the death. From my standpoint as an author and former bookseller, that a hybrid is infinitely more likely.

As evidenced by Lisa Genova’s story of success mentioned in the Time article, the old school is adapting - albeit slowly -to the new marketplace, setting aside the old prejudices of viewing any self-publisher as a ‘vanity press’. Publisher’s Weekly has announced that they will no longer ignore these titles either.

We’re told that the big publishers are looking for the next Harry Potter or Davinci Code and less likely to take big-money risks on first-time novelists or pay out the headline-grabbing advances we’ve seen in the past. The moral of Still Alice may well prove to be that self-publishing will eventually become the summer stock of the publishing industry. A place for mainstream authors to prove their mettle in the marketplace and demonstrate that they are worth big-money advances and full-tilt marketing pushes by their eventual big house publishers.

None of which is enough to make me run out and plunk down the money for a huge printrun and marketing support out of my own bank account. Not to mention distribution, warehousing and the sheer inventory it really takes to move even a midlist author out of the backlist.

This is not because I don't believe in my writing; it's because I believe strongly enough in it to believe someone else will too. I'm hoping it's someone with the wherewithal to make it happen on a scale a self-publisher cannot reasonably aspire to. Is that arrogant? Maybe, but I don't think it is, at least not in a negative sense. Writers can't (and won't) make it unless they are confident in the work they produce no matter who publishes them. I’m confident enough in myself and the marketplace to continue getting my work(s) out there through the classic channels.

And like every writer, I'm holding myself aloft on periodic updrafts of hope.

----

*Not to detract from the accomplishments of a 17 year-old writing a bestseller. More power to him. Nevertheless, it is my understanding that Paolini’s book was actually published by a small press owned and operated by his parents. Which goes to show that the 'Self published’ cachet seems to be a moving target these days.

Thought of the moment....

"You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club."

- Jack London 


Public domain photo via Wikimedia Commons

Disclaimer

This is the blog of Scott W. Perkins, novelist, artist and bibliophile. These virtual pages will help my far-flung friends and those interested in my writing career keep track of me. They will also give me something to do with the things that occur to me to write down, but don't fit into whatever book I am writing.

I will periodically empty the "Wish I'd Known That Yesterday" box on my desk for you, discuss interviewing and research techniques as well as other tricks of the trade. I hope that this helps someone out there who isn't blessed with such a full box of hardwon lessons to learn from. Please, have some of mine.

Before reading further, please read our "Terms of Use" found below.

The word "Novel" appears in the subtitle as a noun, not an adjective. I am a novelist. That is not to say the things I write here will not be new or even novel. Novelty is in the eye of the beholder.

Safety goggles or really nerdy glasses should be worn at all times. If you should get any novelty in your eye, flush with water and seek medical help immediately.

Nothing found herein should be construed as the entire view of the author or anyone else living, dead or existing in an indeterminate state caused by fluctuations in space and time.

Daily application of these blog posts to your writing habits or lifestyle may cause excessive coffee drinking, insomnia, Post-it notes on the bathroom mirror and the urge to type into the wee hours of the morning.

Read at your own risk.

Welcome and well met! I encourage my readers to comment thoughtfully as it occurs to you. At its best, a blog can be a conversation and a community. At its worst, a blog is someone shouting down a well.