Tag Archives: Advice

4 Soul-Crushing Realities Indie Writers Must Learn to Face

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The Sauron comparison makes sense: I’m about one more rejection letter away from trying to enslave the human race.

I’ve actually been sitting on this article for several months now, but I never published it because it came from a pretty dark place.  This piece was sort of like Sauron’s ring for me.  I was content to let it sit in the shadows and never speak of it and at one point I even considered destroying it.  How did it come into being?  Well, I was pretty damn disheartened when I could not find an agent or publisher for my first book The Notice.  I spent months slaving away on that book and every person who read it told me it was wonderful.  Maybe that was part of the problem.  My mother cried like four times while reading it.  I was 99% certain I had a bestseller in my hands and you can probably guess what happened:  Not one agent wanted to read it.  I could have written the next Crime & Punishment but it was irrelevant—seemingly because it featured ghosts and Eastern European ethnic tension instead of vampires and/or zombies.

I was defeated.  I was dejected.  I thought about giving up.

Instead, I moved on to Naked in Korea and The Last Cup and wrote this article as an outlet for my frustrations.  For the purposes of including it on my website, I’ve cleaned up its content quite a bit.  I’ve humbled my language and padded out the content.  It’s long, but also funny and, well, mostly TRUE.  I wouldn’t be posting this if I didn’t feel like readers could benefit from it and I want you all to take my advice with a grain of salt.  The 4 points I’m about to lay out will not be 100% true for all of you but they ARE all obstacles that every indie writer must be prepared to face.  You’ve been warned.

Now…enjoy.

4 Soul-Crushing Realities Indie Writers Must Learn to Face

January 26th, 2012:  When deciding that you want to become a writer, you’re probably sure of one thing:  All you have to do is actually sit down and write your book and you will be famous in at least a week—two weeks TOPS.  Within a month, you will be playing epic games of squash with a surprisingly spry Stephen King and drinking champagne out of J.K. Rowling’s navel at author parties while Daft Punk spin the turntables.    DAFT PUNK!  You have probably known for years that this is the kind of life that is out there for you; all you have to do is put in the time and wait for your membership card.

“Yep, good ol’ J.R.R. Tolkien… still in his prime, no less!”

So you write your first novel—an epic fantasy tale that ends up totaling 300,000 words spanning 38 chapters of convoluted history and realms so awesome that Tolkien himself visits you in a dream just to high-five you like Maverick from Top Gun (come to think of it…he even looked an awful lot like Tom Cruise, but you’re still almost positive it was Tolkien).

Okay, you may have overshot that first attempt at a novel.  A little too ambitious, right?  No takers?  Fine.  You can scale it back.  You can reel this in.  You broke the book up into two separate novels, cut out tons of fluff and crafted a perfectly good standalone masterpiece that would set up the next great fantasy series for all ages.  You shipped it off to agents and publishers and waited for the letters to come rolling in.  You eagerly imagined clichés like “breath-taking”, “stunning”, and “a landmark achievement” being hurled in your direction in such volume you’d have to swim through the praise like Scrooge McDuck in coins.

But, of course, nothing happened.  Now it’s time to reevaluate your perception of the publishing world with 4 soul-crushing realities.

“We can wait all day if we have to.”

1.  Agents/Publishers Don’t ALWAYS Know Quality When They See It:  First, I see a need to qualify that the definition of “quality” here refers to “this is a best-seller” and not “this is a very well-written book”.  The distinction is important because this piece is about to refer to Stephanie Meyer as a—grimace—“quality writer” and any literary/English scholars who might be reading this are going to s*** a collective brick at that statement.  No, the point is not that literary agents are idiots.  Agents are usually pretty adept at spotting decent writing.  Of course, they’re better at spotting lousy writing.  But the truth is that agents have no choice but to seek the next best-seller despite the fact that, sadly, predicting popular trends when it comes to literature is kind of like guessing which pigeon in a tree is suddenly going to drop a bomb in your convertible.

If you don’t believe that, just ask J.K. Rowling or Stephanie Meyer.  Both women are two of the highest-grossing authors of our time, but both had to shop their books around almost as much as I did before someone finally rolled the dice on a multi-billion-dollar franchise.  It makes you wonder how many other billion-dollar franchises never found that one agent who took a chance on something others considered “risky” or “derivative”.  The problem is not necessarily with the quality of your work; the problem is that, as a result of being hopelessly jaded by the industry, any given agent may be going into your book with a number of ill-conceived assumptions, including that you have an awful idea, your characters are stereotypes, your grammar is horrendous, your story is cliché, and YOU are an imbecile who scribbled half of your chapters on Arby’s napkins.  And (unfortunately) 95% of what they receive probably fits that bill.

I couldn’t find a funny picture for this paragraph, but my pursuit of one led me to some awesome Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles fan art. You have GOT to click this link, guys.

Even more frustrating is that in this global age of communication—with wealthy foreign markets on the rise and endless volumes of earthshaking ideas constantly at our fingertips—you would think that there ought to be a hungry mass of people out there looking to give almost any topic a chance.  And that is perfectly true—if you’re wealthy.  The fact is that there is a market for everything, because the only thing that needs to happen for a market to be born is for someone like Oprah Winfrey to say “Buy this book.”  Suddenly, a billion people will buy “Mutant Caveman Summer Vacation Attack Squad!” tomorrow and dub you the next J.D. Salinger.  The first time you picked up “The Kite Runner”, was your first thought “Holy crap!  A book about children in Afghanistan?  I’ve been waiting for this novel my whole life!  This book is so marketable.”  Of course not.  Now there’s a movie and probably a prequel in the works: The Kite Maker.

Looking at Michael Crichton is like staring into the cobalt eyes and reassuring smile of an angel. R.I.P., Sir.

2.  “Write What You Know” Isn’t a Free Pass to a Book Deal:  There may be no more “tried and true” cliché in the whole publishing world than this little gem that you will find in exactly 100% of books offering advice on how to write that first great novel.  It seems like sage advice.  If you’re writing some kind of medical thriller, you had damn well better know your science and medicine—just ask Dr. Michael Crichton, author of The Andromeda Strain and Congo and Jurassic Park.  Clearly his medical degree gave him expertise in pissed-off apes, space viruses, and making giant dinosaurs.  He was an expert!

The trick here is that writing about what you know can only get you so far if part of what you know doesn’t include how to write a freaking marketable novel!  You could be writing your fourth book on a topic in which you have two degrees, years of fairly immersive personal experience, and a prior history of conducted research, and you still may not get a single person in the industry to read a word of what you cranked out.

When it comes to writing a novel, writing about what you know only works if A) you are a vampire or zombie, B) already marginally famous or rich, or C) you lived through something absolutely horrendous and the literary world kind of feels like they owe it to you.  Basically, if your book tells the story of your CPR-certified, firefighting, Vietnam-veteran, Holocaust-survivor uncle who died on 9/11 after plummeting from one of the Trade Centers like Hans Gruber while strangling a terrorist and saving a family of kittens, you are set for life.  Honest, how many of you are thinking back through your family trees right now searching for an obscure relative who nearly fits that bill?  I know I would.  The real problem is that, in writing a book, you may only discover how agonizingly boring you are.

I’m like 99% sure that Aron Ralston deliberately rolled a boulder onto himself and cut half of his arm off just because it was a less painful way of getting published than trying to write a great book and going through the proper channels.

This is what a published author looks like. Yes, it’s okay to start crying hysterically. I would judge you if you didn’t.

3.  Being Professional Is Not a Surefire Way to Get Published:  Another piece of absolutely garbage advice that you’re going to hear from experts who write books about how to get published is that professionalism is the key to getting published.  Okay, that’s being unfair.  Don’t get me wrong; being professional can’t hurt your chances as much as being insanely unprofessional.  But if being professional or respectable were the only way to get published, you wouldn’t have books by Paris Hilton and the Kardashians lining shelves across the country.  The fact is that you can do absolutely everything right and get rejected 30 out of 30 times because your book is not about Justin Bieber or what it’s like having 23 children.

It bears repeating that literary agents ARE NOT IDIOTS, but they can be tremendously unfair and cynical.  I don’t feel like that’s a secret anyone is rushing to cover up.  Deep Throat in a trench coat didn’t whisper that to me between cars in a shadowy parking complex through a haze of cigarette smoke.  Agents are oftentimes overworked, depressing people who are terrified of taking a genuine risk on the high-concept idea of a first-time writer.  That’s bad for us, but probably not bad for business, strictly speaking.  But I once read an advice column from an agent who proudly said he rejected “any book that came with a prologue” and (GRAPHIC VISUAL ALERT) my testicles slammed into each other like the moon colliding with the Earth.  That’s like saying, “I don’t adopt orphans if I know where they come from”.

How dare you, Mr. Indie Author, for having a prologue!  Your audacity ASTOUNDS ME.

This is your best friend. He loves that you wrote a book. He has no intent to actually read it.

4.  “At Least My Friends and Family Will Read It” – If you think this is a given, you should probably go ahead and click this link.  Go on, I promise it’s safe.  This can be a very painful truth but your friends are probably lying to you when they say that the idea for your book sounds “really interesting”.  Your friends are lying to you and maybe even looking you in the eyes while they do it.  Some might even have their hand awkwardly positioned on your inner thigh.  Why?   Because they love you.  That’s right, your friends know how much this means to you and they care enough about the hours you put into your book that they are absolutely scared s***less by the idea of dashing your hope or giving you any gleaming of the reality-check you so desperately need in order to find some semblance of a life and make up for the hundreds of days you may have wasted researching your “masterwork” or “manifesto”.  Ay, caramba!

Of course, another possibility is that your closest friends don’t care at all that you wrote a book because society now takes for granted what were once considered lofty accomplishments.  It used to be considered bragging rights to know someone who had published a book or made a video or recorded a song, but nowadays even your roommate’s little sister is dropping an entire album’s worth of nasally Rhianna covers on her Myspace page.  Thanks to pages like YouTube, every other jackass in your apartment building has probably put out at least one video that scored over a million hits which means your own friends can no longer be held responsible for separating the very real achievements of people they know from the superficial ones of those they don’t.

Besides, your friends and family are the last people on Earth who you’re going to trick into buying your crappy novel.  They’ve read your clumsy Facebook notes about how awesome the new Ke$ha album is.  They’ve seen you mercilessly confuse words like “their”, “there”, and “they’re” in your Facebook statuses or Tweets with such animosity that you could almost be brought before a UN criminal tribunal and accused of war crimes.  Now you expect them to suffer 200 pages of garbage tinged with all the inane banter, political or religious rhetoric, shallow social commentary, and terrible jokes with which you annoy them on a daily basis??  If your closest friend randomly comes up to you tomorrow and punches you as hard as he can in the face, you are obligated to let it go.  You probably earned it.

If you’re reading this, I’m not saying your writing is automatically that awful.  I’m just speaking in hyperbole.  But I guarantee that at least one person who happens across this entry is writing a book his or her friends and family will hate.  If I hurt someone’s feelings with this post, here’s a nice cartoon I found on the Internet to make it all better :)

It’s a Trap! Admiral Ackbar’s 6 Indie Author Traps to Avoid

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If my most recent post (“Sean’s Top 7 Indie Author Annoyances”) is any indication, my fine readers seem to love when I vent about the frustrations we indie authors endure.  And why not?  After all, we face so many of them—everything from agents rejecting our masterpieces to critics telling us our masterpieces aren’t actually even masterpieces in the first place to Microsoft Word telling us a green-underlined portion of our manuscript is a “fragment” when we’ve double-checked it a million damn times and it’s not a bloody fragment, MS Word!!!  Whew.  Yes, on any given day we indie authors are probably given a million reasons encouraging us to jump ship on this whole adventure, and these reasons can leave us susceptible to falling into a handful of indie author traps.

Oh, and if you don’t know who Admiral Ackbar is, he’s that character from Star Wars: Return of the Jedi who looks like a cross between a catfish and the actor Peter Lorre (at least he does to me).  It’s not really all that important from here on out.  Let’s continue:

1.  Falling Into Query Limbo – No, this isn’t what happens when you’re querying potential agents/editors in Jamaica (although maybe it should be…).  This is what happens when you get sucked into the black hole of query submission, during which you are not working on other projects.   You send out the first slew of query letters, you hear nothing.  You work a little more on your book, tweaking and editing a few things, and then you send out another batch of letters.  You hear nothing.  This cycle could go on and on, for all you know, and this is a LONG process:  Some agencies require up to 6 weeks to review queries and that’s a long time to wait!

I know as well as anyone that it can be difficult to admit defeat on a project, but if you have sent out 20 query letters without a single response or request for material, you should really reevaluate your project.  Why?  Because it seems evident that you have a fatal flaw with one of the following:  Your query letter, your story, your writing, your genre, or the agencies to whom you are submitting.  I will elaborate on some of the finer points of this bullet below, but the point is to be exploring other projects and writing outlets even while you’re shopping agents/editors for a completed manuscript.  For all you know, the NEXT book you write will actually sell!

Disclaimer: I do not know Dean Koontz.

2.  Period Publishing – When I say “Period Publishing”, I’m not talking about trying to publish a period piece; I’m talking about shipping sample chapters off to agencies and editors the second you type the final period at the end of your manuscript.  I don’t care if you’re Indie-author Jones or Dean F***in’ Koontz (Mr. Koontz and I go way back; he insists that I call him that), your book is not ready to be dropped in the lap of someone in the industry the moment you finish it.  Your book should be treated with all the delicacy and scrutiny as if a friend told you a burglar broke into your house one night, sat down at your computer, opened up your manuscript, and dropped “1-3” absolutely unutterable racial slurs somewhere in your 300 page manuscript and they aren’t ones you’ll be able to find just by hitting CTRL+F.

3.  Refusing to Sell Out – As much as I hate to say it, you also should not be afraid to just sell out.  Maybe you have an absolutely fantastic idea for a vampire, werewolf, zombie book, but you don’t want to write it because the genre is so tired.  Pump the brakes!  Are those genres still marketable/popular?  Yes?  Is your idea really a great one?  Yes?  Then WRITE THAT BOOK.  Write it now!  If there is one thing the YA market has taught us it’s that the world always has room for one more vampire love-triangle.  Is it awesome that you have the integrity to not want to write something that’s already been done?  You betcha, but I would rather pet myself on the back all the way to a paycheck than keep living in squalor with the knowledge that I could have written a book that sold a million copies.  That’s what sucks about integrity:  You can’t purchase things at Best Buy with it.

I’ve tried.

If you’re concerned about selling out, might I point you to the landmark case of Furtado v. Music.  Nelly Furtado burst onto the music scene in 2000 with her popular album Woah, Nelly! which sold a ton of records, had a couple of hot singles, and made her like a bazillion dollars.  Her follow-up to that album?  A more folky, stripped down album that, I’ve always heard, was more of a passion project in keeping with her roots and values but didn’t sell very well.  After THAT album?  A sexed-up, hip-hop album that made her another bazillion dollars, which she ALSO followed up with a more independent, Spanish-language album that didn’t bring her mainstream success but was also probably more in keeping with what she wanted to do, like her folky sophomore effort.  The point is that sometimes you have to sell out in order to write the books that YOU want to write.  Focus on the market first and if you have a passion project in mind, develop that separately.  DON’T ABANDON IT!  Just wait for the right time to release it.

4.  Devoting Too Much Time to Social Media Promotion – I’ve had quite a few fun conversations in the talkback on this site about social media.  Everyone wants to know how to use social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter to increase sells, promote new projects, and establish a market for one’s work independently.  Am I an expert?  Hell no!  Twitter has been invaluable for helping me attract interest in this blog and in my books, but this has been a LONG process and not one that has been extremely beneficial to me in any financial sense.

However, there is one thing that I know for certain:  When I’m screwing around on Twitter or Facebook, I am absolutely NOT writing anything worthwhile.  When I’m tweeting, I’m not editing.  When I’m bookin’, I’m not working on my actual books.  That is a problem for writers!  I have come to realize that, for all my efforts in social media, I will probably never be as successful at promoting my own books as those in the publishing industry, so my incentive turns back to writing something good enough to be formally published.  Unless I get extremely lucky and happen to write the next 50 Shades of Grey (that seems highly unlikely), I will never be able to make a living doing everything on my own.

5.  Falling into Editing Limbo – One aspect of my site that I’m trying to remedy is that I speak mostly to prospective authors like myself who plan to make a long living writing multiple books.  However, I do not wish to alienate the many writers I’ve met through this website who confess to having the noble goal of writing only one book.  Sometimes I downplay what an accomplishment it is to write a book.  Most people do not have the discipline to embark on this journey and anyone who does should be commended.

But why am I mentioning this here, under the headline “Blah blah blah Editing Limbo”?  Because it has been my experience that indie authors who are focusing all their energy on one book are also those who tend to fall into the black hole of editing.  Maybe this isn’t true for you; I only came to this conclusion based on the writers who I met at my most recent conference.  Most of those writers were older than myself and had fallen into the limbo of either endlessly editing their manuscripts or throwing out and rewriting chapters they had already written.  Let’s just lump that ALL together under the same “Limbo”.

If you have fallen into this trap, the best advice I can give you is to seek out a writer’s group.  It sounds like you don’t have confidence in what you’ve written.  The feedback of a writer’s group should give you a better understanding of whether or not you have been right all along to throw out your material and how you might improve going forward.  Such a group might also help bolster your confidence so that you can move forward and write new material or finally wrap up your edits and begin the querying process.  I could keep going for another 5,000 words on this issue, but I need to wrap up this article.

6.  Avoiding Networking – Whatever you do, do not alienate the writers around you.  The writing community can be your greatest resource in pointing you to agencies, editors, peer reviews, writing groups, conferences, theme parks, best hot dogs in town, etc.  If you’ve ever applied for a job in the U.S. in this economy, you have probably learned that 90% of success is who you know.  The same can be true in the publishing industry.  Make a name for yourself, be friendly, and become your own brand.  I have yet to find an industry that has no place for kindness and honesty.

Earlier in this piece, I remarked that on any given day we indie authors are probably given a million reasons encouraging us to jump ship on this whole adventure.  You might agree with that or you might reject it.  Maybe you’re thinking, “Well, I only receive about 400,750 reasons a day…”  Whatever.  There is only one thing I can tell you as reassurance:  In spite of all the frustrations we face, all it takes is one perfectly-chosen word, one startlingly clever piece of dialogue, one period at the end of a newly completed chapter to remind us why we do this.  If every sentence you’ve written throws some fuel on your fire—some burning desire to want to reread that sentence a hundred times and make it better and better and BETTER—then you have the passion and that passion is a gift you should cherish.  If you can look yourself in the mirror and see, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that you have such conviction, never abandon that passion.  Just try to refine that passion and, with any luck, some day you will reach your goal.

Sean’s Top 7 Indie Author Annoyances

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A mass of writhing arms and desperate fingers all outstretched and grasping for lifeforce clamors around me.  The lights are blinding and all we can hear is the incessant droning of some pacifying music in the distance.  I hear orders being spouted left and right from the void.  It is impossibly hot in the crowd.  Every surging movement of the horde ripples across me and I feel like I am trapped within the hull of some ancient ship churning on the darkest seas.  Black liquid pours through tubes on the walls across from us and, though I know its foul taste well, I feel drawn to it in my despair.  The world around me is fading.  The black fluid is the only substance that might sustain me…

No, that’s not an excerpt from my upcoming dystopian novel.  I’m just at Starbucks.

Starbucks is one of those places that reminds me why I might have picked the wrong hobby.  There are few things on Earth that I enjoy more than sitting peacefully—usually with my fiancée—enjoying a cup of coffee and just talking for hours on end.  When I’m trying to write, I usually seek the sweet, silent refuge of my local public library, but just for today I ventured over to Starbucks to enjoy a different atmosphere.  Here, everything is loud and tense—a loudness and tenseness ironically soundtracked by the soothing serenade of some laid back indie group I’ve never heard of.  People keep giving me scathing looks because here I am sitting alone in the madness just enjoying a cup of coffee by myself.  Most of these folks who look so annoyed haven’t even purchased anything; they’re just staring at me, laptops in hand, waiting to see if I’ll finally move so that they can have the outlet next to me.  Oh, I’m sorry!  Am I in your office???  Excuse me for drinking coffee…at a Starbucks.

And, before you say anything, yes I realize that I’m obviously writing this on my own laptop and, yes, I’m still at Starbucks.  I’m not that clueless.  I actually did give up my original spot so that someone could have the outlet.  I’m now typing in one of the cushy chairs by myself.  The point is I BOUGHT COFFEE.  Also, it would appear that everyone’s just looking for an outlet.  That’s kind of profound, right?

But since I’m at Starbucks and since I’m quite annoyed by the vibe here, I thought I’d weigh in on a few of my indie author annoyances and see what others have to say.  This list could (and probably should) go on and on and on.  Tell me your annoyances in the comments!  I’ll bet I share most of them :)

1.  Facebook – Facebook has probably cost me more time as a writer than any other force on the planet.  Why?  Because every single author my age does this:  Sit down, prepare to write, pause, check Facebook just one last time, keep checking Facebook, Facebook stalk, play random Facebook game, make note to write tomorrow, go to work.  Okay, I’m not that bad.  But you know why Shakespeare was so damn prolific?  Because he didn’t have to worry about Facebook!  As writers, we have to learn to resist that temptation to check our email or Facebook “one last time” before we start writing. I say, reverse your state of mind.  “Today, I think I’ll write just one more page before I check Facebook”.

“AGENTS, WHY YOU NO GIVE ME HONESTY?”

2.  Form Rejections – We all receive rejection letters.  If you aren’t enduring rejection, you’re doing something wrong.  Rejection is not failure; it is only a divot on the road to success.  That might sound pretty contrived but I actually just thought of it and I stand by my statement.  Believe me, I get the need for rejection letters from agents.  I even understand the need for form rejection letters.  No one is more sympathetic to the amount of work that falls into agencies’ laps every day than I am.

It’s the lack of accountability and bulls*** that irritates me in form rejection letters.  I only want to hear one thing from an agent who doesn’t want my book and doesn’t have time to tell me why:  “No.”  I’ll be annoyed by that, too, believe me, but I’ll understand and respect the agent’s terseness.  It’s the following statements that I hate hearing from agencies:  “It’s just not a good fit for us.” “It’s not right for us at this time.” “Our rejection should not be taken as an indictment of your work or ability.”  That last one always gets me.  Oh, I’m sorry for interpreting your rejection as rejection.  And what is “not a good fit for us” supposed to mean?  “We aren’t currently accepting good writing”?  I would rather receive a form rejection telling me my book is “absolutely terrible”.  At least that would tell me to regroup and start from scratch instead of leaving me to tread water because an agency could not afford to take accountability for its own dismissal of my book.  Finally, that brings us to “not a good fit for us at this time”, which implies to me that an agency is basically telling me “We could conceive of a future or parallel universe where perhaps your work would be considered publishable.  We advise you to seek out a time machine or the device from Sliders.”  I’ll get right on that, agents.

Four shots of espresso and I start talking like him, too.

3.  This Chick’s Voice at Starbucks:  This wasn’t originally going to be on this list but in the twenty minutes now that I’ve been writing this entry, her voice has climbed to #3.  This barista’s voice is somewhere between Bill Cosby, Gollum, and Rosanne, I s*** you not.  It would almost be impressive if it weren’t so damn grating.  And for some reason she keeps shouting German and giggling.  Thank you, Starbucks, for hiring only America’s finest.   On the bright side, sitting at Starbucks actually reminds me of a funny thing a friend of mine said a few months ago.  I told her one of my friends was studying to become a “barrister”.  My friend pauses for a second and looks me square in the eye before saying, “She’s studying to work at Starbucks?” (rimshot)

4.  Writer’s Block – It had to be on the list somewhere, right?  I did a whole entry on WB a few weeks ago so I’m not going to dwell on it all over again.  One thing is certain:  There is nothing more annoying than being in the middle of penning a great novel and suddenly not knowing what happens next.  When you have two really exciting scenes, but you don’t know how to connect them, your instinct might be to just throw up a bridge and hope for the best.  If you’re like me, though, doing this is usually what brings your narrative to a screeching halt because the bridge is built on a solid foundation of boring.  Never settle for a rickety wooden bridge when your mind is capable of The Golden Gate Bridge.  Sometimes all you need is patience, but the experience itself can be quite annoying for sure.

BRAIN, WHY YOU NO WORK WHEN I NEEDS YOU NOW???

5.  Forgetting to Write Down a Great Idea – I think this is the twentieth time I’ve mentioned on this blog that I get most of my really good ideas just as I’m laying down to sleep, which is terrible for sleep, but great for productivity.  A few years ago, when I was just embarking on my first attempt at writing a novel, I used to just let those ideas sit until morning.  Usually, I would remember the really great ideas and forget some of the smaller detail stuff at about 65% success.  But let’s just say I forgot to write down five great ideas in my lifetime.  Well, that’s FIVE great ideas that I’ll never get to see blossom.  That could be FIVE opportunities that I missed—FIVE books I failed to publish.  Nobody likes to linger on the one that got away, but the best way to keep those ideas from falling into that oblivion where you keep “that one guy’s name from high school”, “the place with that awesome cheeseburger”, and “the name of that one movie…you know which one I’m talking about…it had the guy doing the thing,” is to WRITE DOWN EVERYTHING.  Here, I’ll get you a pen.  You should probably write that down.

6.  Cardigans – Don’t act like you don’t know what I’m talking about.

7.  Other Indie Authors – Oh, don’t get indignant.  We’re supposed to be laughing WITH each other.  There is no question that this article would not be complete without us.  If you’re following me on Twitter, you’ve probably been annoyed by the like 180 comments that my Tweet Bot posts every day.  Trust me, I wouldn’t be insulted if you told me that.  I’m annoyed that I have to do that to you folks, but it’s the only way I know to consistently promote this website and my books and make money.  I’m 26 years old and I have bills to pay.  I know for a fact that I annoy some people.  It can also be annoying for some of us to receive constant questions from other writers regarding fairly mundane things like “how do I format an e-book?” or “what’s the best way to get published?” There are HUNDREDS of books and websites on both of these EXTREMELY COMPLICATED issues and, as for the second one, I pretty much devote a whole freaking website to it so WHY ARE YOU ASKING ME DIRECTLY???  I love aspiring writers and I love sharing battle stories and lessons, but I do get annoyed by people who act like they expect me to do their homework for them.  Fortunately, 98% of you don’t meet that description.  Why?  Because 75% of you are awesome (!!!)…and the other 23% of you are spambots trying to sell me hair products.

Sean Quote:  “Landing a literary agent is not about catching the biggest fish; it’s about making sure your paddle is big enough to knock out whatever you happen to reel in.”

 

The Summary of All Fears: A Few More Points on Writing Your Synopsis

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UPDATE: I fixed the title.  I meant to play on “Sum of all fears”, not evils.  Guess I had it confused with “Root of all evil”.  I’m not sure what a “Sum of all evils” is, however (in keeping with the tone of the article), I’m fairly sure it has something to do with the Kardashians.

Readers, you’ll have to excuse me this morning if my writing bounces around a lot.  My Bosnian Editor Girlfriend made me some authentic Yugoslavian coffee this morning—I dubbed it “Bosnian Motor Oil”—and now I feel like The Flash.  I swear to Krishna that time is moving at about half-speed and I think I probably look like a hairy orange blur to everyone else around me (I’m wearing an orange shirt and I’m especially hairy).  However, I want to do my best to focus on one topic this morning:  The infamous synopsis.

I know some people absolutely hate the process of writing a synopsis; I actually quite enjoy it.  For me, writing a synopsis is like fondly remembering the book I’ve just written.  I get to pay tribute to the crux of my book’s story, I get to clearly outline the best attributes of my protagonist, and also paint a simple portrait of my antagonist/conflict.  While I will admit that this is no easy feat, it is becoming an easier process with experience.

Nevertheless, I’ve always wondered about the synopses written by some of our greatest authors to describe some of their classics.  Does anyone else agonize over this?  Anybody else ever wonder how Tolstoy could have summed up War and Peace in a page?  Or, for example, I’m reading 1984 right now (I know, I know…should’ve read it when I was like 17 or 18 but the opportunity never came along) and I can’t imagine Orwell writing a synopsis for what I’ve read so far.  The book is so dense and “Big Picture” that it would be a challenge for me to summarize the challenges faced by Winston—how do you characterize a conflict/antagonist when the conflict is the very system itself?  I know how I probably would have written that synopsis, but I would be much more interested in Orwell’s characterization of it.

Also, I can’t help but wonder what Orwell would think about pop media today.  I wish I could sit down with him and enjoy Jersey Shore and Kardashians.  I believe he’d probably think he painted too rosy a picture with 1984.  I wonder if he would also get a kick out of us having a reality show called Big Brother or if his head would implode from the irony.  I apologize to any of my readers who love reality TV but, to me, watching TLC or MTV nowadays is kind of like looking at the Ark of the Covenant.  End of rant.

Where was I?  Oh yeah, the synopsis thing!  (Damn you, coffee!) Some people recommend that you have two versions of a synopsis—a short one-page version and a longer 3-5 page version.  I say, why not—better safe than sorry—but I’ll also admit that I have yet to find a single agency that requests the longer version.  I have never submitted a synopsis that wasn’t of the one-page variety.  This makes sense because in this Go-Go-Go economy that finds agencies understaffed, overworked, and inundated with (let’s face it) more pyrite and coal than gold, agents need to hear your story Now-Now-Now so that, not unlike Jay-Z, they can move on to the next one.  Personally, I find the short synopsis easier to write because of the limitation.  If I can be a little bit graphic, the process of writing a short synopsis is kind of like deboning a chicken, whereas with the longer version, you have to decide which meat to keep, how to cook it, and which meat to throw out.  If that analogy doesn’t make sense, keep in mind that I don’t cook very often.  Most of my meat comes deboned.

…Then again, some agents would probably say the synopses they receive do, too. (rimshot)

So you need to do everything in your power to keep the bones of your story intact.  Never forget the rules of query letter writing.  You need to mention your most important character first, as well as the antagonist.  You should outline a very brief description of the attributes of your character that are important to your story, but don’t dwell on things like hair or eye color.  The next part is absolutely essential:  Clearly describe the challenges and conflict that your protagonist will face.  This is not as easy as it sounds.  I know from experience that many people think they are doing this when they actually aren’t.  An agent needs some idea of why a challenge is of profound importance to your main character and how that character’s arc will be influenced by said challenge/obstacle over the course of your book.  This is the most important aspect of your query letter and of your synopsis, and it should be complemented by a characterization of your protagonist’s emotions, motivations, outlook, etc.

Usually, we see these sorts of qualities in a great movie trailer.  Think back to every Harrison Ford or Liam Neeson movie of the past decade.  The trailer begins with a shot of the protagonist sharing a happy moment with a daughter or wife—a token “loved one”.  What happens next?  Cue ambiguously ethnic criminal or terrorist mastermind to kidnap that loved one, followed immediately by a close-up of the emotional response on the protagonist’s face.  Uh-oh!  They exchange some sort of one-liners with each other:

Neeson: “I will find you.  I will kill you.”

Terrorist: “Good luck.”

Neeson: “No, really.  I’m serious.”

Terrorist: “Oh, I know.”

Neeson:  “Really.”

Terrorist: “I believe you.”

You would not believe how hard it was to find a picture of a villain talking on a phone.

Neeson: “…(Silence)”

Terrorist: “…Are you still there?”

Neeson: “Oh, yeah…Sorry, I dropped the phone…Damn thing…(fumbling, scratching noise in background)…Just charged the battery, but it’s beeping.”

Terrorist:  “You shouldn’t leave it plugged into the charger overnight.  It really drains the battery.”

Neeson: “Oh.  Thanks.  Recap:  Give me back my daughter or I’ll kill you.”

And we all know what happens after that:  Frantic, brief shots of Liam Neeson kicking all sorts of ass (if Liam Neeson were a country,  his number one export would be the amount of ass that he kicks, resulting in the most robust economy on Earth), interspersed with explosions, death-defying leaps, some indication that things will go bad for him, etc.

Your synopsis should go just one step forward.  Without giving away the plot, you will give some nuanced indication of how your story is resolved.  This does not mean spoiling the ending, only giving an agent some indication that there is a resolution.  I’m leading into another extremely contentious point among the agents with whom I have discussed synopses:  Should you just give away the ending?  Some agents say “Absolutely” and some say “Of course NOT”.  Since they couldn’t give me a clear answer, I can’t give you one.  All I can say is that Writers’ Digest tells you DO reveal the ending while I prefer to lay out all the ingredients to the ending and give the agent some idea of how it will taste, but I don’t actually send them the finished cake.  I want them to have some idea that Liam Neeson probably gets his daughter back, but I don’t want them to know exactly how many gravelly-voiced Persians, Saudi Arabians, Chechens, Serbians, Armenians, Somalians, etc. he had to punch in the face to get her back.

Taken is a racist, racist movie.  Fun, but racist.

A few closing points:  Your synopsis does not need dialogue.  Remember that over-the-top, confusing dialogue exchange I wrote earlier in this article?  Yeah—nothing like that has any place in your synopsis.  Also, you should write in the third-person, even if your novel is in the first-person, unless you’ve written a memoir, in which case your synopsis should read like a novel synopsis but it’s okay to go FP, based on what I’ve read from the experts.  And, of course, only highlight the most pivotal plot points in your synopsis.  “Pivotal” means anything that propels the plot forward:  Twists and turns welcome.  “Pivotal” means anything that increases the stakes or forces your character to adapt to new challenges.  “Pivotal” means “Not only does Liam Neeson discover that a ragtag team of European/Middle Eastern stereotypes have kidnapped his daughter, he also discovers she is also a robot sent from the future.”

Man, that series just writes itself:  Taken 2: Retaken, Taken 3: Retaken…AGAIN, and you could even do a prequel Taken Aback or a comedic reboot, Look Who’s Taken.  I can’t wait to see more movies set in this rich and colorful cinematic universe.  My only requirement:  Liam Neeson must star in all of them.

5 More Genre Clichés That Need a Stake Through the Heart (…Or Are They Immortal??)

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Sorry I’ve been M.I.A. for the last three or four days.  My plate is pretty swarmed at the moment with wrapping up The Last Cup (second round of edits now underway), designing artistic content for The Last Cup (more on that in the coming weeks), and studying for the GMAT in preparation for my upcoming business school applications.  I was also sidetracked by my high school’s alumni soccer game, which was a heck of a fun time for me, except it led to a rather startling revelation.  Just before the game, I was rummaging through the darkest recesses of my childhood closet in search of a bag for my equipment (I was staying at my parents’ house for the alumni game) and somewhere in the shadows my fingers scraped unblemished cardboard that had been neglected for 13 or 14 years by my estimate.  I stretched farther into the abyss and wrapped my fingers around the mysterious form and withdrew from the depths of oblivion a weapon the likes of which man, I fear, was not meant to wield:

“If you aren’t humming ‘Duel of the Fates’ in your head right now, there is something seriously wrong with you.”

If you aren’t sure what that is, it’s an unopened, plastic, dual-bladed Darth Maul light saber toy replica from Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace.  Considering that that sword was the one thing from that movie, in my opinion, that actually worked, it was kind of a big deal that I abruptly found this object which was clearly meant as some sort of Christmas gift for a happy-go-lucky 14-year-old Sean Chandler, who was HUGE into Star Wars back then.  But somehow time forgot the precious light saber that was supposed to be mine and now I demand a mulligan on my entire childhood.  I could have had a light saber???  What the f*** is that bull****?!  The one toy that my mom evidently forgot to give me was the one toy that could have erased this chronic narcissism and sardonic outlook on life that has been with me since puberty.  It was like finding out you actually did win the lottery way back when, but you never checked your numbers because you thought:  No way is there a lightsaber IN MY OWN F***ING CLOSET!

My first instinct was to assemble my closest geek friends and bring them together around a table upon which the device would be placed.  There would be Battlestar Galactica geeks, Star Wars geeks, Star Trek geeks, Dr. Who geeks…all the geek races I could assemble, and we would discuss the fate of the toy.  Inevitably, I would probably bring together a…let’s call it a “fellowship” to take the lightsaber back to its place of origin (Wal-Mart, I’m guessing) and cast it back to whence it came.  The Star Wars geeks, of course, would insist that I keep it and use it as the great chick magnet it was destined to be.  The Star Trek geeks, however, would tell me that no one geek was ever meant to wield such power.  And, of course, The Battlestar Galactica geeks would just be sitting there waiting eagerly to slip “So Say We All” or “Frak” into the conversation as soon as possible.  So say we frakking all.

I can only assume that God must have intervened to keep the weapon away from me.  College probably would have gone a lot differently for me if I had shown up freshman year with my double-bladed lightsaber in tow—carrying it to class, wielding it at fraternity parties, turning it on just before my finals.  I either would have been the most popular student at Centre College or…No, I’m pretty sure I just would have been the most popular student at Centre College.  Ever.

Anyway, I’m writing on the seat of my pants today so I’m going to weigh in on five clichés that I came up with while contemplating my dystopian clichés article.  People seem to enjoy these sorts of pieces and it also gives me an excuse to be funny and biting without actually making anyone mad.  So, hope you will enjoy this, folks!  Here are Five More Clichés That Need a Stake Through the Heart (…Or Are They Immortal??)

Also, whose bright idea was it to rename werewolves “Lycan”?   They now share their name with the cold-weather fungus primarily consumed by the terrifying caribou.

1.  Vampires vs. Werewolves – “Stake through the heart!  And you’re to blame!  You give vampirism a bad name!” Sorry, when I wrote the title to this article, it got me singing Bon Jovi for some reason.  Anyway, when did horror/tween-horror writers all come to the consensus that vampires and werewolves are like sworn enemies or something?  Do bats and wolves regularly fight each other in the wild?  It doesn’t seem likely.  First you have Twilight and the Underworld series of movies, and I’m sure there are probably a thousand knock-offs that I don’t even know about (mainly because I tend to stay away from those sorts of books), but if there is one thing even True Blood has taught us it’s that when you get a bunch of vampires around nowadays, you can bet your bloody bottom that werewolves will be joining the party sooner or later.  If you ask me, somebody needs to take one of those sticky-roller things that my mom uses to get dog/cat hair off our furniture and take it over the entire library of modern vampire fiction.  It’s nothing against werewolves.  In fact, I think every dog should have his day…just maybe in his own book.

2.  Split Personalities – How many times have you seen this scenario:  An author or detective or, let’s say, professional masseuse is trying to come up with an idea for a horrible murderer, is trying to find a horrible murderer, or, um…is trying to massage a horrible murderer (I probably should have picked a better third example…) when suddenly that person discovers he HAS BEEN THE HORRIBLE MURDERER ALL ALONG.  Oh, the humanity!  A few examples that come to mind are Chuck Palahniuk’s (who is now celebrating the twentieth time I’ve had to look up the spelling of his name on Google) Fight Club and the movies Identity, Secret Window, High Tension, Hide & Seek, Perfect Stranger, The Number 23, and, I believe, Babe: Pig in the City.  If you’ve never heard of half of those movies, it’s because most of them were deemed terrible (except for Fight Club, which still rules to this day) because of this totally exhausted twist ending, which is now viewed as the ultimate copout in murder fiction.

3.  The Damsel in Distress – Growing up, I must have played Mario Bros. for Nintendo about 3,000 times.  Maybe that’s why I have such a problem with “Damsel in Distress” narratives.  That’s just not the world I live in anymore and, frankly, I’m tired of seeing characters run from castle to castle trying to rescue princesses that probably should never have gotten themselves kidnapped in the first place.  It’s the 21st century, people!  Where are our “Mansels” in distress?  I think there’s more than enough room for strong heroines in this post-Ripley, post-Samus Aran, post-Erin Brockovich, post-Jane Eyre, post-Hermoine, post-Katniss, post-Dora the Explorer world!  If you all will take the pledge to portray more strong female characters, I promise to uphold the oath, as well.

4.  Mentor Trains Young Destined Hero – Another tried and true formula of many a genre is “Elderly sage offers free mentoring and wisdom to younger, naïve, destined hero”.  You don’t have to stretch far to find a thousand examples here:  Mr. Miyagi, Dumbledore, Gandalf, Obi-Wan Kenobi, Morpheus, Aslan, and I could keep going.  The whiter the beard, the better.  Of course, as I pointed out before, if the hero is truly “destined”, why do we even need the mentor?  I say, “Step aside, Beardy—I’ll figure it out.”  Wax on, wax off, my ass (Karate Kid, in case you don’t get the reference).

5.  Dark, Stormy Nights – One of my favorite clichés and something has haunted literature ever since Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time.  Dark, stormy nights are a cheap and tired way to lend suspense or menace to a scene.  Imagine this: “It was a dark and stormy night when the alien spaceships descended through the clouds and began obliterating New York with their cosmic death rays, murdering thousands in one fell swoop as lightning roared throughout the sky.”  If alien spaceships wiping out humanity doesn’t lend enough menace and sinister tone to your novel, then there is some other problem with your book—and it ain’t the weather.  Your writer will not read that sentence and say, “It wasn’t enough that the aliens were invading and killing everyone, but the weather sucked too??  Boy, what a rollercoaster ride this author has crafted!”  By bringing weather into any narrative, you’re implying some sort of unnecessary link between the action and climate, as if the characters in that scenario might be thinking:  “The spaceships and aliens I can handle, but this storm?  Oy vey!  Why couldn’t the aliens have picked a nicer day to invade?”  If you’re a Seinfeld fan, this sort of writing can only make me imagine that you are George Costanza’s parents.

But Are These Clichés Immortal?  Having laid out five more clichés that frustrate me in fiction, I do want to ask the big question:  Can all of these clichés ever truly be eliminated?  Can hero stories operate without the mentor, who serves as a crucial plot device in usually providing the reader with necessary exposition and a clear explanation of what’s at stake?  Speaking of stakes, are vampires unfairly limited by operating in worlds where they are the only monsters?  Do werewolves and vampires need each other because, as tired as vampire-werewolf wars might be, those wars are still better than retreads of Dracula and The Wolfman?  Do we need the split personality cliché to continue because there are few fears more profound than the thought of losing one’s own mind?  I might be tired of these clichés but I can’t help but be drawn to the question of why they have endured, so I ask you this:  In what bold new directions can we take these exhausted gimmicks?  How does one break the cliché?

More Novel Query Letter Do’s and Don’t Do’s

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It’s been several weeks since I visited the rather sensitive issue that is “Query Letters”.  Every aspiring writer wants to know, “What’s the secret?”  Every aspiring writer, at one point or another, thinks that there must be some secret to query letters or some secret code.  Maybe you’re supposed to say the word “sassafras” or “kerfuffle” or something at some point in your letter, and that will be the point when the agent reading your letter says, “He knows the code… send him a book deal.”  I don’t know.  If you want me to be honest, the key to what makes a perfect query letter is #3 behind The Da Vinci Code and the whereabouts of The Holy Grail on the list of the world’s greatest mysteries.  How mysterious is it?  I have a strange feeling that Indiana Jones will be trying to find the perfect query letter if they ever make a fifth one of those movies:  Indiana Jones and the Query Letter of Providence!

I just hope they bring back Shia Labeouf.  What’s that, Microsoft Word?  Red squiggly lines under “Shia” and “Labeouf”??  That’s because his name is like something out of a Canadian Dr. Seuss book.

In all likelihood, though—as much as it pains me to say this—the possibility of there being a “perfect query letter” is about as remote as the likelihood that Eddie Murphy will ever star in anything watchable again.  There is no perfect query letter because there are no perfect agents.  The querying process is a give and take, and your letter is going to be subject to an impossible range of factors over which you have absolutely zero control.  An agent might pass on your project because the story of your book just happens to be close to something the agency has already taken.  Your project might be passed up because Agent #17 just spilled hot coffee on herself, she’s pissed off, and, frankly, she’s taking it out on your book because what does she care?  Your project might be passed up because it’s 2:00 in the morning in New York and Agent #31 just decided to browse your letter on her I-Phone while enjoying drinks at a bar with some girlfriends and “Party Rock” is playing for the fifth damn time and, while she really, really LOVED your idea, in her drunken stupor she accidentally hit delete and was too intoxicated to notice.  That could happen!

Or your project could be terrible.  Like really, really terrible.  Like if your book were a movie, even Eddie Murphy wouldn’t star in it.  Yes—that’s TWO Eddie Murphy slams in one post and you know what’s strange?  I love Eddie Murphy.  That’s just the way the wind is blowing today, my friends.

I think I had too much coffee this morning.

Anyway, there are some strategies you can adopt to help hedge your bets when it comes to query letters.  And for this letter, I’m not going to waste time telling you the obvious stuff that you should already know.  You should already know that a query letter should never be longer than one page.  Some agents will tell you a letter shouldn’t be longer than 250 words, although I try to keep mine between 250 and 400.  If an agent is too busy to give my project more than 250 words, I would suspect that agent is too busy to stick his or her neck out for me anyway, even I suspected I’d written the next To Kill a Mockingbird.    I shouldn’t have to tell you to research any agent you query and make sure that agent represents books in your genre and I shouldn’t have to tell you to edit the crap out of your query letter.  You should reread that bad boy no less than 10 times.  So, with all the basic stuff out of the way, let’s get to the good stuff.

Find New Agents:  I don’t divulge all of my secrets.  The point of this blog is not for me to do all the research for you but rather to point you in the right direction.  Rosters of new agents give you information about young, hip, and eager agents who have just entered the game and their appeal should be obvious to you.  New agents are probably in the process of building client lists, which means they’ll be taking on more projects.  If you’re young, there’s probably a better chance that your interests overlap with new agents.  I find that younger agents, for example, are far more likely to embrace sci-fi, dystopian fiction, urban fantasy, etc. than some of their elder counterparts because our generation has always embraced those genres.  It could be easier for you to get your foot in the door with a young agent than with someone who already has a client list chock full of prolific, skilled authors who are already established names.  I won’t tell you where these listings are, but they shouldn’t be too difficult to find.

Don’t Spend Too Much Time Selling Yourself:  This can be a surprisingly contentious issue.  I have met some agents who say you shouldn’t feel obligated to say anything about yourself in your query letter and I have met agents who say, “Well, of course, we need to know something about you!”  What I can say is that I have seen no discernible benefits from listing all my degrees, my background in journalism, my work as an English teacher, my extensive international traveling, blah, blah, blah.  You’re trying to sell your book and, assuming you’ve written a good query, that should be the highlight of your query.  Biographical information is just sort of the icing on the cake.  My advice?  See if the agency you’re considering has anything really specific to say about query letter specs.  If they tell you they want an absurdly short query letter (250 words), then your biographical info is what you put on the chopping block first.  Several agencies will specifically request that you write something about your background and credentials.  In that case, go for it, but keep it short—I’d say three sentences, unless you live a really dynamic and exciting life—and don’t mention anything that isn’t relevant to your book or your writing.

Ixnay on Ebut-Day:  Pig Latin?  Some experts claim that you should never mention that you’re a debut writer or that you’ve never been published.  I agree with most of this.  With regard to the first part, use your own discretion on whether you mention a book is your debut attempt.  My instinct is to say don’t mention it at all, because the fact that you’re a debut writer shouldn’t have any bearing on the quality of your book.  However, some agents have a soft-spot for first-time writers and, in those rare situations, mentioning that you’re young and just starting out might make them nostalgic enough to give you a chance.  If you’re uncertain how an agent feels about debut writers, don’t mention it.  As I said, the fact that you’re a debut writer isn’t terribly relevant and does seem far more likely to work against you.  You may not be a professional yet, but that doesn’t mean you should sell yourself as an amateur.

As for mentioning that you’ve never been published, failure in the industry should not be seen as an indictment against your abilities.  Who cares that you’ve never been published?  That doesn’t mean you’re out of the game.  Take my first book, The Notice, for example:  I still believe that I wrote a fantastic book and reviewers on Amazon seemed to agree, giving it 20 five-star reviews and 5 four-star reviews out of 25, however, I will admit that a ghost story set during The Bosnian War may not have been the most marketable book I could have written.  In that respect, I understand why agencies may not have wanted to take a risk on it.  However, why should I put myself on the line by referencing the books I failed to get published in any query letter regarding a new project I’m pitching?  How could that possibly help me?  Trying to get published is the process of continually looking forward.  Never put all your cards on the table and always keep your query letter focused specifically on the book you’re trying to sell now.

Know What an Agent Does:  Okay, I might be treading into “Obvious” territory here, but I still hear tons of stories from agents who receive letters from folks who are unclear what a literary agent does, and I am sympathetic to their plight.  Nowhere in your query letter should you ever make a request for an agent to give you feedback on your project.  You should not ask for advice or criticism.  That is not what an agent does.  You should not mention your payment expectations (probably not a good idea at any point in the publishing process) and you should not ask for advice on the promotion or marketing end.  The first step in the game is for YOU to make your manuscript and query letter as pristine as possible, then you contact an agent strictly to attract their interest in hopes that he or she will help you pitch your project to a publisher.  Leave all the business jargon and catchphrases out of your query letter.  Keep it focused on your book, first, and then your credentials, if applicable.

Raise your hand if a part of you dies every time you see a Calvin & Hobbes comic and you remember how awesome they were.

 

5 Dystopian Clichés That Could Be Holding Back Your Dystopian Novel

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What is it about dystopian fiction that so utterly fascinates us?  On the one hand, I don’t think any of us particularly wants to live in the typical future worlds we see in popular fiction, but those stories also seem to intrigue the Hell out of us.  Maybe I’m speaking for myself.  Maybe it’s the idea of mankind almost destroying itself and slowly putting itself back together again that is the allure.  I mean, if you look at literature, television, or movies that aren’t even technically dystopian fiction, you see the same motif:  A hero becomes arrogant, almost loses everything, starts again, champions over all that ruin.  That’s one of those “human condition” plots that appeals to us on an innate level and it seems to me that dystopian literature is that very theme I just described but applied to the entire human race!  Yeesh!

What’s even more crazy is that if I’m right, the movies The Shawshank Redemption, American History X, and even Gladiator all have shades of dystopian fiction in them.

But for all the moral, philosophical, and human complexities of dystopian fiction, I feel like too much dystopian fiction incorporates the same handful of tired themes.  And while there’s nothing inherently wrong with those themes, I can’t help but wish that someone would take dystopian literature and film in some different exciting directions.  Here are a few of the clichés that come to mind when I think of everything that’s wrong with dystopian fiction.

Mel Gibson in “The Road Warrior”. Most of us probably wish Mel Gibson had just stayed in the desert.

1.  The Stark, Desert Wasteland – Wait, is this one a cliché?  Let me think if any titles come to mind. “Alas, Babylon”, “The Road Warrior”, “The Book of Eli”, “A Boy and His Dog”, “Fallout 3”, “Planet of the Apes”, “Terminator Salvation”, “Zardoz”, etc.  Okay, there are a few examples.  Many portrayals of dystopian futures continue to depict the post-nuclear war imagery that originated during the height of The Cold War, when such an outcome seemed pretty damn likely.  If I adjusted this cliché to account, not just for desert wastelands, but any nigh-uninhabitable post-apocalyptic wasteland, I could easily add “Blade Runner”, “Judge Dredd”, “The Road”, “The Omega Man”, and many more titles.

For better or worse, even my own upcoming dystopian book includes an uninhabitable wasteland, but that’s not the only terrain featured in my book.  “The Last Cup” also has dying forests, thriving woodlands, marshes, mountains, etc. to at least break up the monotony of all that swirling dirt and death.  Although I’ve not read the books, what I enjoyed about “The Hunger Games” is that the movie depicted a dystopian future where much of nature still seemed to be intact.  Good for us, humanity.  Why are we always destroying nature in our post-apocalyptic scenarios?  I enjoyed seeing an alternative where society had changed, but the great outdoors still seemed to be kicking ass and taking names.

2.  Marxism – Another motif that is left over in our dystopian fiction from the middle third of the last century is that of Karl Marx’s class struggle.  There’s nothing patently wrong with this theme—frankly, it’s a great one—but it’s just become so tired, hence its cliché status.  In so many future storylines, we see the poor and oppressed overcoming some totalitarian regime, hence waging a revolution that will basically return the world to the fantastic utopia we all know and love today!  Based on the first movie of “The Hunger Games”, that’s where that series is headed.  It’s what happens in “V for Vendetta”.  It’s what happens in “1984”.  It’s what sort of (but not really?) happens in “Brazil”, which is one of my all-time favorite movies.  It’s even what happens in “The Matrix Trilogy”.  What is Big Brother’s deal?  Just once can’t we have a benevolent futuristic all-knowing, mind-reading, thought-stealing oppressive military dictatorship?

3.  The Utopia That Isn’t – So far, my new book “The Last Cup” is three for three with regard to this list of dystopian clichés I’ve concocted, and something tells me I’ll hit at least one more before I’m through penning this entry.  Utopian futures are the definitional flipside to dystopian futures, but many stories love to bait readers with portrayals of utopian societies that are anything but.   I want to think of a better example, but for some reason the only one that comes to mind is the wonderful movie “Pleasantville”, which depicts a sort of utopian future in reverse by paying homage to the idyllic lifestyle painted in 1950s television.  It’s not the example that I would have chosen, but now I can’t stop thinking about that movie and how it IS kind of a dystopian future.  It makes sense.  Even the popular video game “Fallout 3” has a segment that pays tribute to “Pleasantville” and those aforementioned themes.  If anyone else can think of a better “Faux-topia” example, let me hear it.

4.  Oppressive Military Regime – Kind of goes hand-in-hand with the Marxist themes mentioned earlier.  Here we’re talking about any kind of faceless military or thought police that basically controls a system founded on holding the little guy down.  The agents serve this role in “The Matrix”.  You’ve read something similar in “Fahrenheit 451” and “1984″.  I seem to recall “Metropolis” having something similar, but it’s been a couple of years since I watched that.  I won’t dwell on it too much here.  I think it’s human nature to have a fear of something larger than yourself—something vast, dense, and unaccountable—seize control of what you have.  Once again, this is a great theme, but it’s so… basic.

 

Neo: Stopping bullets with “Destiny” since 1999.

5.  “The Chosen One” – Yeesh.  This is easily my least favorite cliché on the entire list.  We’ve all seen this one a million times before:  Something/someone terrible threatens _________, prophecy revealed to defeat said terrible thing, young protagonist of questionable parentage learns of role in prophecy, protagonist doubts prophecy, protagonist accepts prophecy, protagonist defeats terrible thing, thus proving prophecy correct.  Snooze-fest.  Whereas I understand the fundamental need for some of the other elements on this list in order to catapult a dystopian story forward (those complex social themes I keep mentioning), the “chosen one” gimmick has never been a very profound one to me.  Doesn’t it take the punch out of the drama to know that the protagonist is “destined” to win?  I prefer stories where we don’t know if or how the protagonist will win, but what does “The Matrix” do?  It gives us Neo, whose effing name is just an anagram for “O-N-E”.  Don’t think I didn’t slap myself in the head when I finally realized that after the third or fourth viewing.

I don’t believe in chosen ones.  While I do enjoy foreshadowing and I don’t mind a little touch of prophecy here and there, I hate the idea of a “chosen one” as much as I hate using “Deus Ex Machina” as a plot device.  What’s the only thing better than having your character overcome insurmountable odds to defeat a great, futuristic evil?  Answer: Having your character overcome insurmountable odds via that character’s wit, intelligence, decisions, relationships, etc.  I’ve never understood why a “Chosen One” even bothers doing anything.  If it was destined that Neo would defeat the machines in “The Matrix”, why did Neo even bother doing anything?  I would have parked it on the couch, put on “M*A*S*H”, and just waited for the robot empire’s batteries to run out or something.  He could have defeated Agent Smith with a creamsicle, but he chose a lengthy, unrealistic fist-fight with his sworn nemesis.

The Future of Dystopian Futures:  So where do dystopian futures go from here?  Well, my friends, seeing as how the dystopian clichés we know and love originated from WWI, WWII, and The Cold War, I would say it is high time we started looking for futuristic themes in our own world.  What are the global conundrums we face?  Overpopulation, climate change, hunger, biological warfare, human displacement (refugee crises), terrorism, poor education, uninformed electorates, corrupt politicians, faceless military organizations, Big Brother, class warfare, nuclear weapons…Damn! I went straight back to the clichés I just finished criticizing!  Obviously our world still finds reason to cling to some of the things I’ve mentioned, but there are so many more complex problems out there in the world that are begging to help us subvert the formulas that have clouded dystopian literature.  We’ve already seen some of these themes in film, from “Children of Men” to “District 9”.  Explore the news.  Explore the problems we face today.  Find a way to comment on those issues and you’ll have yourself a novel.  That’s what I set out to do with “The Last Cup” and, trust me, the mushroom-clouded sky is the limit.

My Bosnian Girlfriend Editor: A Cautionary Tale

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Off the top of your head, who was the second person to read a book you recently finished writing?  Obviously, the first person to read your brand new novel should be YOU—maybe tweaking a few things here, swapping a few words there, taking a Vietnam-era flamethrower to an entire paragraph there—but you must have a person in mind who is your go-to for that first trial run.  That person’s eyes will be the first person to comb through the pages you spent weeks, months, or years delicately crafting and, if you’re like me, will give you one of two possible responses: A) I love it, or B) Reading your book was like poring over the unintelligible pages of a serial killer’s final journals—you know, when he stopped actually having anything to say, succumbed fully to his own delusions, and just started scribbling gibberish like the lunatic he is.

Nobody likes to hear the second of those two responses; it’s even more painful when you hear it from your Bosnian fiancée.

Fortunately, she’s never told me anything so heartbreaking with regard to an entire novel that I wrote, although she has confessed to finding a sentence or two here and there that made no sense whatsoever.  Usually she identifies those lines in her edits with a trio of question marks, which tells me I need to go back, figure out what the Hell I meant, and figure out a better way to say it OR just throw the damn thing out.  However, there are few things more nerve-racking for me than when my BGE (Bosnian Girlfriend Editor) decides to edit one of my manuscripts right there on the couch beside me.  With her characteristically Balkan mannerisms, her editing expression exhibits all the enthusiasm and enjoyment for my work that you might expect from, say, Javier Bardem in No Country for Old Men.  I’ll be nearly convinced she hates what she’s reading, only to have her tell me how much she loved it once she’s finished.

But is it a good idea to have a significant other be the first to read your book?  It could depend.  I am fortunate in that my fiancée, having learned English on her own upon coming to America in the last 1990s, probably has a better grasp of our grammar than 97% of people.  She wrote for our college newspaper (not to brag, but I was an editor), she adores the works of Jane Austen, and she generally has a very Victorian properness to her that is rare among Bosnians living in Kentucky.  So even though we sleep in the same place, I can rest assured that she will consider my work with the utmost professionalism and, seeing as how Bosnians typically carry all the social subtleties of a lobbed hand grenade, I also know beyond any shadow of a doubt that she will be honest with me.

Little known fact: Wolves travel in packs so that they can all read, review, and discuss the same books. Oh, and also something about hunting.

Of course, honesty can be a dangerous thing when loved ones are reading your work.  There are few things more satisfying than a girlfriend, mother, husband, or father reading your work and telling you earnestly that it is one of the best things you’ve ever written.  Conversely, there are few things more devastating than a loved one telling you a book over which you’ve slaved is terrible and there are few things more potentially awkward than a loved one telling you your book is great, only to find out later from a hundred other people that it’s actually terrible.  Like, really terrible.  Then you get to thank your beloved live-in editor for feeding you to the wolves, except the wolves would have been kinder in their negative reviews because wolves tend to keep their negative comments brief since the carpal pads on their paws are generally useless for hitting the space bar on a keyboard!  It’s science; I looked it up!

(Nina’s still reading my book on the couch.  On the one hand, I’m thrilled that she’s been reading it non-stop for almost an hour now, but on the other, she looks like she’s enjoying it about as much as I enjoyed watching the movie 27 Dresses.)

Uh-oh…I’d say we have a new El Greco in our midst.

So the lesson here, folks, is…hmm, I guess it’s get a Bosnian Girlfriend Editor?  Probably not an option for some of you, so let me rethink this.  I’ve got it!  Before you ask a loved one to read your book and evaluate its strengths and weaknesses (stupid auto-correct changing it to “witnesses” the first time…), to a little evaluating of your own with regard to said “loved one”.  Is that person someone whom you trust to give you honest, pointed, and (above all) useful feedback regarding your book—i.e. feedback that will help you get the book published—or is your loved one to devoted to you to possibly tell you your crude finger painting is anything but The Mona Lisa?  If your loved one is the latter kind, take heart!  There is nothing wrong with that.  In fact, I would recommend celebrating with that person at a nice restaurant to commemorate your accomplishment, but maybe you should look outside the bedroom for that first genuine opinion.

Besides, if you’re on the bubble with your book—I usually get the first draft jitters about the time I start writing the last chapter—maybe you should seek outside criticism anyway and spare your loved one the insult of having to read your sloppy first draft.  Even the corniest dystopian sci-fi novel is extremely intimate and personal to the person who wrote it, so wouldn’t you want it to be in the best possible shape before sharing it with, perhaps, one of the few people on this planet who mean more to you than your writing?

Food for thought, everyone.  Feel free to sound off in the comments.  Anybody using a neurotic but affable uncle as your second editor?  Anyone using a mail-order Eastern European bride?  Who has the weirdest non-professional editor???

Getting Past Disillusionment with the Publishing Industry in 5 Easy…

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Ah, Hell, there’s nothing easy about it.  It sucks.  The only silver lining is that 100,000 other struggling authors are right there with you.

Now, right off the bat, I want to say that my entries are not meant to unfairly and accusingly point fingers at every agent, editor, and publisher who are probably doing their best.  I’m just trying to lighten the mood for those of us who are frustrated, and let’s face it, there are enough of us that we could easily break off and form our own sovereign nation—Rejectistan.  Kind of rolls off the tongue, right?  Maybe Rejectopia?  The world doesn’t really need another “Stan”.

The first thing we have to come to terms with as writers is that for all the time and work and research we invest, our masterpieces will ultimately be pushed aside by some agent somewhere just because the illiterates from “Jersey Shore” suddenly gave him or her a manuscript for a “Snooki Cookbook” (a “Snookbook”?).  C’est la vie.  We can’t stop agents from going after something they know will give them instant gratification; all we can do is try to make our ideas more marketable—no easy task.

When my first book, “The Notice”, didn’t find an agent right off the bat, I assumed it was because the market had become abruptly inundated by 26-year-old foreign policy scholars looking to introduce the world to Bosnia & Herzegovina.  Well, Bosnia hasn’t exactly become as vogue as I was anticipating.  This leads me to another conclusion:  Either A) 99% of those agents never read a word of what I sent them—the fastest automated rejection letter I ever received was 5 minutes after emailing an agent—or B) My book didn’t sound marketable or profitable enough at a glance.

At first I thought I must be doing something wrong with my query letters.  I bought all the books documenting how to write a proper one—most of which contradicted each other, naturally—and  honed my art with Holmsian (Sherlockian?) attention to detail.  I wrote a dozen or so letters the way one book told me to write them.  I wrote another dozen letters the way a second book told me to write them.  I wrote dozens of long, detailed letters.  I wrote dozens of short, humble, honest letters.  All were met with rejection.  I was never given a single reason why my book was repeatedly ignored, only painfully polite form rejection letter after form rejection letter.

Remarkably, I never even grew the least bit bitter…heh, heh. (Menacingly shakes fist at “How to Write a Great Query Letter” books)  However, the process did give me time to read up on agents and search for what they truly look for in a project.  There are ways to make your book marketable even if you’re idea, at a glance, may not sound like a bestseller.  Find books out there similar to your own and find the agents who sold them.  It takes hours of sleuthing, but ultimately it may yield the only payoff you’ll get outside of distributing your life’s work for 99 cents on Amazon. 

In the end, my book ended up benefiting tremendously from the rejection cycle.  It gave me time to get more feedback, move around some elements, rework some chapters I wasn’t 100% happy with, and now I have the book I think I was always meant to write.  But I didn’t do it the first time.  Or the second.  Or the third.  I had to grow and learn in order to get there.

UPDATE:  Talk about irony.  The day after I wrote this post, I received my first response from an agency regarding “The Notice”.  No good may come of it, but who knows—this may be the beginning of the end to my complaining ;)