Here There Be Dragons...

I'm currently at loose ends and as I look through my "seedlings" file for what I want to work on next, I've uncovered a trove of some fun stuff I did awhile ago.  

For instance...

Way back in 2006 someone foolishly left me alone with a little stuffed dragon, a camera and some miscellaneous props.

The result was a strange little picture book. 
The Adventures of Snap the Dragon.

I thought you might enjoy it.

Feeding Our Pet Peeves

This NPR op/ed is fantastic! 
But for the record, it's a different Scott.  Honest.

Bibliomane

Referenced

I can pick a lock or repair a watch.  I can conduct surgeries, examine corpses for forensic evidence, bind a book, dress a deer, identify or concoct poisons, and reproduce Lord Nelson's flagship down to the last knot and nail.  If necessary, I can also conduct a Latin Mass, reproduce the scripts of Carolingian scribes, shoe a horse, summon Cthulhu, or swear like a WWII soldier.  I can walk the streets of forgotten cities in lost kingdoms and navigate the alleys of Calcutta in the year 2010.  And I can do it all from the safety and convenience of my writing chair.

Some of these things I can do because I'm weird that way.  For the rest of it, I have reference books.

If there are any writers who don't have a personal library of research materials, I haven't met them yet.  If you want to be a writer, I swear that the first order of business is to nail down a handy and reliable source of research material.  Whether it's a colonnaded building built with a Carnegie grant or an impressive list of websites and online journals or a room in your house (apartment, condo, whatever) an eccentric collection of research materials grows as a result of the curiosity that made you become a writer in the first place

I never studied medicine but one of my main characters in the last novel I wrote was an MD.  I could go online, of course, and get a lot of information and some of it would even be accurate.  But far better for me to be able to reach over and pulling my Manual of Surgery or PDR, or Mosby's Manual of Diagnostic Tests off the shelf and getting on with the writing.

For most writers I know, research is our drug of choice.  Putting a slumgullion of random yet curiously interrelated websites and blogs at my fingertips just ups the danger of losing my workday down the rabbit hole.  I can spend hours hopping from topic to topic, following a chain of links down a questionable path of lies and truth spun together into a strange blend that even William Gibson's Neuromancer failed to adequately predict.  How easy it is to get lost on the information superhighway, tumbling in the slipstream of bits and bytes as I bounce from website to website, digging up one quirky fact after another like a hyperactive two year old shoveling candy into his mouth.

Far better to bind my search between boards.  Paper is safer and there are no pop-up ads or viruses.

Your public library is a good start and will always and forever supplement your home library.  In fact, the aspiring writer needs to first and foremost make friends with the reference librarians at their local branch library.  A first name basis is best, and you might even want to learn how to bake their favorite cookie because odds are good that you're going to put their library sciences degree to work.  You're going to be the story they tell around the supper table that night when they get home; embrace the fact. 

"So that writer guy Scott came in again today and asked me to help him calculate the amount of whalebone harvested by Basque whaling fleets before 1610."   The answer is approximately 24 million pieces.  Academic libraries are the best and if it wasn't for the able assistance of Becky, Kendall and Rachel, I would never have discovered the various academic journals that allowed me to piece that together.

Which reminds me.  I need to bake some snickerdoodles.

Even straight literature requires at least a modicum of research.  One story idea I'm developing would feature nary a single mysterious element or unexplained death.  But it still required me to pick up an old pocket watch repair manual and another on the history of the American athletic shoe industry.  In any story, for any market, it is the job of the writer to create the verisimilitude of background and character that allows you to accept the setting and concentrate on the story.  Unless you are an acknowledged expert in every field your writing will touch on or uncommonly skilled at lying... you're going to need some help at some point.

I'm not suggesting that you have to become a Crichton or Clancy, but it's important to get stuff right or know how to lie convincingly.  I swear that half of fiction writing is getting a feel for when you have to know what you're talking about and when I can make stuff up.  (Yes, we lie to you all the time; the sign overhead in the bookstore says 'fiction' for a reason.)

My dad taught me that a personal library largely exists to supplement the public libraries I frequent.  Duplicate books you want to collect, but save your money if you're not filling the gaps.  It has since grown to encompass books that I reference often enough that I don't want need to get in the car to go consult them.  My dad wasn't a writer, but it's worth noting that at his funeral, the local librarians were among the mourners.

"I like books. I was born and bred among them, and have the easy feeling, when I get in their presence, that a stable-boy has among horses."

- Oliver Wendell Holmes

Buy the books you need to touch more than once a  week.  The collection will grow of its own accord, so devote some space to the books you love and the books you need.  Cicero said that to add a library to your home was to give it a soul.   Your relationships with your books and those who purvey them will extend that feeling to your words, imbuing them with soul as well.

Bibliogenesis

I find myself in the unusual position of being without pages to type before I sleep. Well, it's unusual for me anyway.  At any given moment, I have several novel ideas in various stages of completion.  There's two mostly-complete first drafts sitting on the footstool next to my slippers as I type this, in fact.  Either or neither of which could be my next project depending on whether I feel up to writing about the Library of Congress or Shakespeare next... or starting something completely new.

I tend to both savor and fear these moments.  The blank page is a terrible void to fill, casting word after word into the white nothingness in hopes that it will return with a story in tow.  So I thought I'd take a moment to reflect on how I get from that idea jotted on a napkin to something that I feel strong enough to devote a hundred thousand words to and eventually like enough that I feel it's ready to hand to an agent.

Bibliogenesis: n. 1. The act or process of creating books or literature. From Greek: βιβλίον, 'a book', + γένεσις, generation. (via Wordnik)

Every time I have an idea or a random thought that might make a good story, I jot it down.  In a notebook, on a napkin, on my hand, in the margins of a book, whatever happens to be handy becomes the keeper of that idea until I can get it home and type them into my computer.

Somewhere on the hard drive of every computer I own is a file folder titled "Seedlings".  It's into this folder that I toss all the random nonsense that appears in my head.  In these surroundings, those half-formed notions are given time to germinate and cross-pollinate with other ideas and eventually mature into stories.  Regardless of content or craziness, into the folder they go so that I don't forget them (even if I may want to).  Bizarre names like "Yenta Bill" stand cheek-by-jowl with "WWII Spy Story - Possible Novel". 

There is another file that all of my computers share titled "Character Cocktail Party".  This is the holding cell where I keep all of the characters that spring to life when I'm not looking.  It's quite literally a digital cocktail party where these fragments of my imagination can swap lies, tell stories, form alliances, and sometimes hook up.  A metaphorical melting pot from which only the strongest characters emerge.

As each character develops, they get his or her (or its in some cases) own file folder for the research notes specific to that character.  A folder currently on this hard drive is labeled "AJ MacLeod", a character from the novel I just put in the mail.  Inside can be found files related to gardening, education and Washington State history, all topics immediately relevant to that character.  Another file is more nebulously labeled "WWII Spy", an idea without a name, but full of random information ranging from snippets of stories my grandfather told me to details of OSS operations, along with any random tidbits about the period that I stumble across in books I've read.

As you can imagine, at some point the seedling file "WWII Spy Story" and the character "WWII Spy" will meet.  But my spy isn't ready to leave the cocktail party yet.  He has to mingle and make connections and decide what his name is going to be and who he will bring with him... or if it's even a him for that matter.

In the fullness of time, stories and characters meld and merge and get combined with other ideas and characters in sometimes unexpected ways.  The best of them reach a point where they deserve to get leave the party for a bit -- get out and stretch their legs.  (No character is ever completely freed from the cocktail party, of course.  When I'm done with them, back to the party they go to help the next generation along.)

When I feel that they're ready to break into the real world, the key tidbits of information are culled and printed and organized into a binder.  There are shelves of them in my studio, filled with notes and maps and ideas that are still ripening, waiting for a day like today when I'm at the end of one project and looking for the next one.

On days like today when I'm trying to find my fictional bearings, I get to take one of the binders down and read through it.  Poke it, read it, gnaw on the covers, see if it's ripe yet, ready to bear the scrutiny of a hard year's writing, strong enough to support 100,000 carefully-chosen words.  In short, decide if it's ready to be the genesis of my next novel.

Unfinishing

The line between being an artist and being mentally unbalanced is sometimes blurry.  I'm told that if you hear voices and talk back to them, you are schizophrenic; but if you hear voices and write down what they tell you, you are a writer.  

Likewise, if you fret and obsess over every detail and cannot move on if even one small thing is wrong... well, then you're still a writer. 

I only mention this because yesterday I tore my hands away from the keyboard and decided that my book was 'finished'.  Ever since, I've been fighting the urge to break it open and fix Just One More Thing.  Because who am I kidding?  It's not finished!  I can change this, and tweak that and...

and...

and...

And I feel a deep and abiding kinship with George Lucas right now.  His deep need to go back and futz with a film that was considered 'finished' thirty years ago is perfectly understandable... and just as bad an idea as me re-opening that document file to add the scene I just thought of.

"Finished" is a myth.  In the mind of a creator, it's never finished.  Stories, once they enter our minds, evolve and transform and grow.  An idea joins another idea and they become a book.  But those ideas don't stop mutating and growing just because I've started pinning them to a page.  At some point in their evolution we just have to close the file and call it good.  Because if you don't cut it off at some point, it will never be done and before you know it, you're Grady Tripp, wandering the streets of your own private Pittsburgh with a novel that runs to several cases of paper.

You can always revisit a theme or a character or an idea at another point.  Jot it down and let it start evolving its own story on a nice blank page where it has plenty of room to romp and play with all the other ideas I didn't use this tiime.

So my novel is gloriously and definitively unfinished.  At least until some editor gets hold of it.  Such is the life of a novel.  

To commemorate the occasion I'm going to seal it in a box and ship it off to an interested agent and get on with the next project.  Because if you are forever rehashing the old, you'll never really do anything new.  Even if you are George Lucas (are you listening to me George?) you have to let go.

Maybe I just need therapy but for now, I'll settle for another cup of coffee.

3-Minute Fiction - NPR

The ultimate challenge of brevity and wit.  NPR announced this past weekend that they are breathing new life into their "Three Minute Fiction" contest...

Writing Advice from My Wife

"You cannot live on words and coffee alone."

Lessons from Lists

Last year I posted a "permanent" link to the fantastic New York Times op-ed by Elmore Leonard "Easy on the Adverbs, Exclamation Points and Especially Hooptedoodle" which was the basis of his book 10 Rules.  It's one of those articles that's worth printing out to read and re-read over and over again.  (Incidentally, if you're going to and haven't, you might want to do it soon because the NYT paywall is going up soon... unless - like me - you're planning to subscribe.)

This morning, the folks at The Guardian put up a sort of über-version of Leonard's ten rules with additional rules by other writers, including this gem from Margaret Atwood...

"...there's no free lunch. Writing is work. It's also gambling. You don't get a pension plan. Other people can help you a bit, but ­essentially you're on your own. ­Nobody is making you do this: you chose it, so don't whine."  - Margaret Atwood

That's an incredibly good piece of advice for anyone in the creative arts to keep in the forefront of their minds.  There's no pension plan for this and no one forced you to do it.  If you wanted to write, you could have finished Journalism school and had a nice secure job at a newspaper or magazine.  (ahem)

This is the sort of advice I try to give my younger friends and friends of the family who come to me in starry-eyed innocence asking me what to major in at college because they want to be writers.

Business.  I say.  Or law.  Or business law.  Or maybe engineering.  Or business engineering law... For God's sake don't major in English or literature or you're going to end up getting a degree just to teach other people who probably shouldn't be majoring in literature who will go on to teach other people who shouldn't be majoring in... Sigh.

They never really listen anyway, God bless 'em.  I've said it one and I'll say it again and again: The only real education a writer gets is the one they give to themselves by reading.

I like this bit of advice from Roddy Doyle especially:

"Do keep a thesaurus, but in the shed at the back of the garden or behind the fridge, somewhere that demands travel or effort. Chances are the words that come into your head will do fine, eg "horse", "ran", "said"."  -Roddy Doyle

The piece of advice I dispense most often is "Write with the vocabulary you have" not the vocabulary Mr. Roget had.  He was kind of a nut anyway.  Every once in awhile at the writing center, I catch someone revising their paper with a Roget's in one hand and a red pen in the other.  Looking over their shoulder, I see perfectly innocent nouns and verbs lying dead in a sea of red ink to be supplanted by their polysyllabic cousins.

Don't do this.

Your vocabulary is an organic thing, it has to grow naturally or become unwieldy.  You may be  able to graft another type of tree onto it and get kumquats and apples off the same tree, but the unnatural feel of picking a kumquat off an apple tree will never fade.  Grafting Mssr. Roget's lists of high falutin' words onto your personal list will never quite fit either.

Which brings us to my favorite advice from Geoff Dyer:

"If you use a computer, constantly refine and expand your autocorrect settings. The only reason I stay loyal to my piece-of-shit computer is that I have invested so much ingenuity into building one of the great auto­correct files in literary history. Perfectly formed and spelt words emerge from a few brief keystrokes: "Niet" becomes "Nietzsche", "phoy" becomes  ­"photography" and so on. ­Genius!"  -Geoff Dyer

He's right, it's genius.  I periodically ask other writers why they're willing to give up their native understanding of grammar and spelling to a programmer from Microsoft.  I lived in Redmond, WA for awhile and though I love my many friends who have worked for Mr. Gates, I'm not sure I'd ask any of them how best to spell a word.

I am certain that some liberal arts majors were plucked out of the fast food joints surrounding Redmond and given a decent salary for at least a summer to compile MS Word's spellcheck functions and compile their thesaurus.  But some of the quirkier things they did convince me that they weren't happy working there because how else do you explain the furious abandon with which the program inserts semicolons into every sentence?  Subtle vengeance indeed...

Be that as it may, take the time to upgrade your word processor's dictionary and auto-correct features.  My first foray into novelwriting was a fantasy novel that contained so many Gaelic words that about fifty thousand words into the novel, I got a message from Word that there were so many 'errors' that it was going on strike.  No more errors would be tabulated until I got rid of the ones I'd already made.

(In the interest of not having little paperclip people picketing my prose, I went back and started adding Gaelic words to the onboard dictionary.)

There are many many more, but this post is getting rather longer than the article that inspired it.  Go read the article and take it to heart.

Just remember that there are no humble opinions, especially among writers.  We tend to open our yaps because we think we're right. (Accepting that you might be wrong isn't humility, it's reality)  And like all advice, take what works for you and discard what does not.

And remember Anne Enhright's advice which has the benefit of being true no matter who you are or what you plan to write:. 

"The way to write a book is to actually write a book. A pen is useful, typing is also good. Keep putting words on the page."

5 Things That Will Make E-Readers Better in 2010

5 Things That Will Make E-Readers Better in 2010
Via WIRED.com

Posted using ShareThis

Sunday is Quote Day - It's a kind of love...

Life can't really defeat a writer who is in love with writing, for life itself is a writer's lover until death -- fascinating, cruel, lavish, warm, cold, treacherous and constant.  

-Edna Ferber

The Seventh Word

"Write: coffee wants to become words."

That's as far as I can get without risk of offending someone. This is why I feel that the six-word memoir is such a brilliant conceit; it's about as far as most people can get before they have to start calling loved-ones to make apologies or warn them not to read tomorrow's paper.

Actually, come to think of it, my first six-word memoir was the title for this blog.

Through the years, I've contemplated venturing into the memoir territory but never have.  In part, this is because beyond the sixth word, you're into the thicket of family history, and while my story is my story, at some point you come to the base of a cliff upon which is scrawled "Write as thought everyone you know is dead."  Not everyone can or will follow you up that wall.  When you start revealing that much about yourself, not only are you going to be displaying more of your inner world than your family (or anyone else) normally sees, you're also going to be telling stories for other people.

Each of us is the nexus of any number of overlapping stories and any attempt at writing out memories is a reflection on those tales as much as our own and at some point we're capturing other people's memories as well as our own.

So, what is your Six Word Memoir? And how far beyond six words do you think you'd get before you found yourself on the phone with your family and friends?

The Annual Report

One year ago today, this was a different place.  At the top of the screen was a sepia-toned picture of my desk.  Yes, there was a typewriter; there's always a typewriter...

From

The first post was a disclaimer that included (among other things) the warning that "Novelty is in the eye of the beholder" followed by a list of safety precautions to take in order to avoid getting novel in your eyes. (because we all know that both novels and novelty can be volatile at times and it's all fun and games until someone loses an eye).

I've talked precious little about my novel aside from a snippet here or passing mention there.  Am I superstitious of talking about a project underway?  Maybe just a teensy bit. (throws coffeegrounds over shoulder and spins widdershins in chair.)   I've expanded things a bit since those early days to include technology which means... e-Books.  It took me all of three posts to mention e-Books for the first time.  Bearing in mind that in the early days since this was just an elaborate bit of technology to aid and abet my tendency to talk to myself, so I wasn't tagging every post, there are probably more.

In fact, my top (non-random) topics were Writing Tips and eBooks on an almost even footing with the tag "Random thoughts on..." (which is essentially meaningless).  Like most writers, the eBook frightens and fascinates me because as Kettering said "Of course I'm interested in the future, it's where I intend to spend the rest of my life."

While I don't pretend to have necessarily posted daily, there have been over 365 posts in the last 365 days, which I'm a bit proud of.  Among these were 43 posts on eBooks, 41 "Random thoughts on...", 40 Writing Tips, 22 Copyright musings, and 12 posts railing against Censorship.  In compiling those numbers I realized that I'm in danger of losing my blogger cred since there were only 4 Rants and but 1 lonely post tagged as "sarcasm".

I'll try to do better next year.

I started this blog because my head tends to fill up with "stuff" that has nothing to do with what I'm trying to write.  This is where I put it because it's nice to be able to keep an eye on those things -- you never know what mischief they'll wreak if you leave them unchaperoned...

In the coming year I want to do more book reviews, focusing as always on the How To Write and related sections of the bookstore.  Most writers generate those books eventually and I think that too little attention is paid to them outside of the circle of aspiring writers.  A reader's guide would have been helpful for me at an early stage.

I'm also going to revive my YouTube account if it's still there and if not, I'll create a new one.  I talk to interesting people all the time and I have a visual arts streak a mile wide and it occurs to me that I should be carrying a camcorder with me on some of these outings.

So... Is there anything you would like to see more of?  Or see less of?  Do you have a special request or idea?  Or do you have an idea for a post and a yen to write it yourself and just need somewhere to post it?

Post a comment here or drop me a line at pages2type@gmail.com and tell me all about it!

Thanks for reading!  Thanks for a great year!

-Scott

Sunday storytime with Werner Herzog

Did you enjoy Prides & Prejudice & Zombies?  Then you'll love Curious George and the Existentialists.  Ok, it's not really Werner Herzog, but it is a brilliant deconstructionist take on a classic children's book.  I love this for its quirky sensibility... 

Sunday is Quote Day

"You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation."

- Plato

State of the eBook

It's been a tumultuous month for the ebook and it's only the sixth of February.  The fracas between Amazon and Macmillan is settling while the Googlebooks lawsuits are heating back up with the Author's Guild finally getting out there and trying to explain why they settled in they first place.  (Essentially they were trying to not become the RIAA.) 

The ripples of this thing continue to spread and the book industry is just trying to surf the wave... but really, why do we care?

Warning: If you've an aversion to statistics, you might want to find another post to read.

They get 90% of the press and actually represent just one or two percent of the actual sales. e-Books are the Prius of the publishing industry.  Nevertheless, the 2009 Consumer Electronics Show was the debutante of more and yet more e-Book Readers.  The Plastic Logic Que, the HP Tablet and the Blio (among many others) were all rushed to the podium to get out there ahead of the much anticipated advent of the Apple iPad.

If you think about it, this was probably the first time since Gutenberg started printing his Bibles that book technologies were discussed on this scale.  Certainly no futurists of the 1950's would have predicted that a new way of delivering books to readers would trump coverage of the introduction of 3D Television!

So, are we really seeing publishing turn a new page in the long journey that began with Cuneiform stamped into terra cotta tablets?  Will electronic readers like the Kindle do to paper books what Gutenberg's press did to the medieval scriptorium or more recently what CD's did to LP's?

It's impossible to say without doing a little bit of math.  

In spite of the hype, adoption of e-Books has been slow.  In 2008, e-Books accounted for an estimated 0.46% of total book sales, up 68% from the previous year (APP statistics).  Exact 2009 statistics aren't available yet, but the publishers are generally agreeing that it's risen to 1% of total sales.  While that's impressive growth in an industry that only grew on the whole by about 2.5%.  The long and the short of it is that unless something groundbreaking happens and all hell breaks loose, at the current rate of growth, we're probably looking at about 2016 before they equal the current sales of audio books.

That's not a tsunami, that's just the tide coming in.  e-Books certainly aren't going away, but without some sort of unforeseen intervention in the market to drive more readers into the arms of the e-Readers, the physical book will be with us for some time to come.  So don't go tearing out those pretty bookshelves in your living room just yet.

I see three main challenges to the e-Reader market before it can truly come into its own...

• Standardization: At present, there is no standard format that can be effortlessly transported from one reader to the next.  Even ePub, which is quickly rising in favor, has problem jumping from one reader that uses it to another due to some of the DRM problems.
  
• DRM: More authors have been helped than have ever been harmed by the secondary market in used books.  Trading, loaning, and sharing literature is ingrained into literary culture and readers have been significantly less inclined to accept that they won't own their books and be able to give them to friends or resell them.  The Barnes & Noble "Nook's" loan feature is a step in the right direction, but not a solution.
  
• Pricing/Valuation: The Macmillan/Amazon battle is just the tip of the iceberg. The publishing industry is only this past week finally taking steps to preserve the valuation of books.  It's a simple fact that printing and distribution of a physical book only accounts for (at most) 20% of the cover price.  Establishing the idea that a standard price of $9.99 or less for e-Books in no way reflects the reality of production.  The inclination of people to view digital content as essentially free will take a long time to reverse.

As I've said before, we have to get away from the idea that what we see now is necessarily any indication of what will be reality in ten years.  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.

I'm reading a book by literary agent Donald Maas called Writing the Breakout Novel (which I will be reviewing here in the next week or so as past of the Backlist Book Review series).  In the first chapters he gives a sort of a summary of the "State of the Industry circa 2000" (when he wrote the book).  It's interesting and I'd like to see it updated, but there is a lot there that we need to remember.  Maas has the reputation of being the agent's agent and much of what he's saying came to pass and much is still in the works.   He's especially skeptical of the predictions that were being bandied about back then of the impending ebook revolution and that "in five years print books will be finished".  It's 2010 and we're still waiting.

He is especially skeptical of the writer's fantasy that the electronic book will somehow make the publishers disappear or that such an event is even desirable.  I refer you back to  John Scalzi's play for why I think that operating without a publisher is not the panacea that many want you to believe it would be.    Check it out at Scalzi's blog "Whatever".

Verso Advertising recently compiled data gathered from 110 million internet users across 5,100 websites to compile a broad-spectrum look at the book market as it was in 2009.  There's a definite marketing slant to this information insomuch as the data is used to underline the need for publishers to advertise in order to sell books.  

The e-Book data is a mixed-bag, mostly anticipating several proposed e-Book strategies such as pricing adjustments above the $10 benchmark that Kindle used to adhere to (back in the old days) and whether they would pay a premium for a hard copy if it came 'bundled' with an electronic version.  Most interesting to me was that 29% of e-Reader afficionados admitted to downloading pirate e-Books with 8% unsure.  (Which in this case I think translates to "I don't really want to answer this question because I have enough of a conscience to feel guilty about it").  45.9% of males age 18-34 admitted to slapping the skull & crossbones sticker onto their e-Readers!

Overall, Verso concludes that a 10-12% market portion for e-Books is theoretically achievable in two years, but no promises as there is no visible tipping-point event on the horizon.  With echoes of presidential elections ringing in our ears, we are forced to conclude that the revolution still isn't here and once again the undecideds hold all the cards.

e-Books start on Slide 19

Ten More Things...

These have been a bit shorter than usually lately and for that I apologize.  I've been preparing a manuscript for submission to an agent and my attention didn't want to be split this week. 

On the bright side, this is also showing me the things that I know, but don't practice, and the things I practice without thinking about. (As an act of self-protection, I'm not going to differentiate between the two) I've been jotting them down as they occur to me and not that I have ten of them (that didn't take long), here's an incomplete list of things to keep in mind as you are editing your manuscript...

1. Adverbs are vampires that suck the life out of verbs.  Delete them.
2. Not every word in your vocabulary was meant to be used.
3. Street people and college professors should not sound the same in dialogue.
4. Don't let your POV character wander offscreen and leave the 'camera' on a non-pov character.
5. "I love this" is not a good enough reason to keep anything.
6. Violence should be succinct and brutal and death should be final.
7. "Well, (insert name of famous author here)  got away with it, so I can too" is the top of a very slippery slope.
8. You are not your characters and your characters are not you. (It's also helpful to remind your family and friends of this from time to time.)
9. Daydreaming about Dan Brown-like success will not get you any closer to Dan Brown-like success.
10. When you get too tired to concentrate, stop.

A Six Word Memoir

"People who don't write sleep more."

One of the all-time great writing challenges: summarize yourself in six words or less.  It's amazing how enforced brevity can focus things for you.  Some of the ones in the books and on the site are heartbreaking.

Hear more from Talk of the Nation on NPR.

Why Don't I Self-Publish? (revisited)

I get this question a lot.  I'm betting just about every person cranking out stories is asked at some time or another why they don't "cut out the middle man" (actually, most of the editors I've met are women) and go it alone?  In fact, it was the first question I answered on this blog, a year ago next week.  Re-reading that, I find that even though the technology and the market have evolved, my position hasn't changed much.

In answer to a similar question, the always-brilliant John Scalzi wrote a short (and incredibly violent) play for three actors on why a writer would be insane to want a world where publishers were thrown aside in preference of a "Do it yourself" world.  Check it out at his blog "Whatever".

His wife reminds me of a certain engineer I know.

Getting Started :: 10 Tips to Get Your Novel Going

I was reading Gretchen Rubin's blog for The Happiness Project this morning and found the list she made last Wednesday of ways to find more reading in your life. It's a fun project she has going and she came up with a great list with a lot of ideas on how to manage your time for books. 

For the past few weeks, I've been nearing the completion of one project and contemplating the beginnings of the next. Which brought to mind my own list of ten things, in this case, ten ways I've found to get from "I've got this idea..." to "So now where do I mail this completed manuscript?" 

Pursuant to my stated goal of getting you to write this year, I present to you my little list... 

Ten Tips to Get Your Novel* Started

1. Be interested in your story. Writing is hard work and before you commit to spending long hours sitting in a chair stringing tens of thousands of words together to tell your story, you'd better darn well be sure it's a story that interests you enough to make that worthwhile.
   
2. Feed your brain. Your brain generates stories from the stuff you cram in there. Give it the fodder it needs to make new and interesting stories and well fleshed-out characters. Interview everyone you meet, explore every place you go, try new things.
   
3. Everything is research. Accept it. Pay attention. Take notes and snapshots. You never know when you'll need the story about the waitress and the deep-fried Converse sneaker.
   
4. Ideas are not sacred. Don't get so attached to an idea that you're unwilling to allow it to evolve. A story idea is less like the directions from a GPS and more like finding your way through a new city with written directions scrawled on the back of a coffee-stained napkin.
   
5. Write now, edit later. Just sit you butt in the chair and put the story on the page. Editing is inevitable, but it is a stage of its own that can wait until later. Your initial goal is to get the story out of your head, everything else follows that.
   
6. Take little bites. A big idea can choke you if you try to eat it all at once. Writing anything long form is a lot like the old adage about eating an elephant: Start at one end and take it one bite at a time.
   
7. Make stuff up. Research can be a very addictive drug. It's easy to get so wrapped up in the intriguing minutiae of your subject matter that you forget to write a book about it. If it ever gets shelved in a library or bookstore, your novel will be in the fiction section, this gives you license to fake it... within reason, of course.
   
8. Keep everything. Create a file on your computer (or in your filing cabinet if you're a luddite like me) of the random ideas or characters that occur to you as you're writing. Not everything you create while writing will fit the story you're working on. Hang on to those tidbits for later use in this or another story.
   
9. Step away from the Television and/or the Internet. That might sound odd coming from me, but these mediums are specifically designed to catch your attention and hold it. I've recently begun doing my writing on a computer that is isolated from the internet to combat this. My writing output tripled when we got rid of TV and as a bonus we saved a lot of money each month.
   
10. Write with the vocabulary you have. Put away the thesaurus, it's just slowing you down and making self-conscious. Finding your authorial "voice" is about telling the story the way you tell it, not the way Roget would tell it if he were writing it. Your vocabulary will grow organically on its own and in a way that is unique to you as you research and read. Language is a fragile thing and it will break if you try to force it.

It's easy to end a list with the words "And it's as easy as that!" but it really isn't all that easy or everyone would do it.  It's not as easy as that and I think that's an important thing to keep in mind at every stage.  Writing is hard.  It's supposed to be hard.  So don't beat yourself up when you find that it isn't easy.  This is job, a task like any other -- a task that must be performed before you can enjoy the results.  Because at the end of the day, it's the person who puts their butt in the chair and puts the words on the page who will win the race.

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*I say novel because that's my chosen milieu. All the same, most of these should apply to any written fiction from plays to short stories to novels. As with anything I post here, use at your own risk and freely modify in a manner that best suits your needs. 

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.

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