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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.)