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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 :)

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.

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.

10 Probably Pointless Things I Do to Help Me Write

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How do I know I’ve watched too much of The Olympics? Because I now know what dressage is.

Writing entries for this blog has been almost impossible this week.  It’s bad enough that my motivation is lacking from a combination of heat and too much work, but The Olympics are on!!!  How am I supposed to focus on this when Olympic skeet shooting is on TV, followed by table tennis, and dressage?  I think I’ve watched more of The Olympics this year than I ever have before.  I’ve watched about a dozen soccer games, hours of gymnastics (my fiancée doesn’t give me a choice), swimming, archery, water polo.  I think I’ve seen a little of every event except for those in track & field, but I’m not sure those have started yet.  I also haven’t gotten to watch the Men’s Basketball Team play yet because of stupid NBC, which is kind of irritating me.

 

But enough about the games.  I’m also finding it really hard to focus on the blog because I’ve begun editing The Last Cup.  I love the editing process and I usually get completely caught up in it.  Sometimes it only takes me a couple of days to get through the book the first time.  Each round of editing usually takes longer than the one before it.  I think The Last Cup is my most mainstream work to date, with memorable characters and a blockbuster ending, but I’m in that jaded stage of the book where I start to question just how good it really is.  I’m in dire need of a fresh pair of eyes to read it and tell me their thoughts, and I should have that by next week or the week after.  Regardless of the more critical opinions of the book, I believe I’ve written the War & Peace of soccer-themed dystopian literature.

The theme of today’s post is the 10 Probably Pointless Things I Do to Help Me Write.  That title is sort of tongue in cheek, of course.  Why?  Because anything you do that helps you write is not pointless.  What I’m trying to get people to do, however, is to consider the peculiar or eccentric activities that make up our writing process.  What makes you feel ready to write?  What gets your fingers typing?  Some of my Top 10 will probably sound fairly outrageous to you.  Some of them might sound startlingly close to something that you do.  That’s great!  If you do something completely bizarre to help get the juices going, let me know!  I love to steal stuff from people J

So here’s my Top 10:

1.  Grow a Beard – Call me crazy, but sometimes I scale back on my shaving big time during the editing process.  I find that I am more critical as an editor when I have a scratchy beard pestering me.  It feels like Ernest Hemingway has me in a sleeper hold, and he won’t let go unless I cut more out of my book.  Obviously my female readers are going to have some trouble with this strategy.  My secondary recommendation?  Um, maybe pass on shaving the armpits.  Your call!  A hairy writer is a happy writer.

2.  Browse “Weird News” on the Internet – Sometimes I also like to scan the Internet for bizarre articles from around the web just to get my imagination going.  MSNBC used to have a “Weird News” section pretty far down their page.  Usually these articles are good for a laugh going into your writing.  I also enjoy looking up really awesome science articles, like stuff about the Hadron Collider or Super Earths located hundreds of light years away.  If it gets the geek in me going, it’s probably good for my writing.

3.  Eat Applesauce – Go figure.  I’ve eaten a whole half-gallon jar of applesauce before while writing a chapter.  I’m not sure it actually helps me write, but it’s delicious.  For you romance writers, maybe you should consider keeping it saucy.

What they don’t know, can’t hurt you.

4.  Eavesdrop on People – Whenever I bring this up, I feel obligated to reinforce that you should never be obvious when you are doing this.  Nor should you focus heavily on what is being said.  I like to eavesdrop on people more to hear how it is being said.  Eavesdropping helps me pick up on minute nuances of language, including turns of phrase, dialect, rhythm, etc.  Having a solid grasp of the elasticity of language is a wonderful tool for penning dialogue and, personally, the more outlandish the better.  I love listening to people speak who I’m not even immediately positive are speaking English.

5.  Drink a Beer – Having a beer or a glass of wine, I find, helps settle the mind, calm the body, and lower just enough inhibition.  I don’t recommend overdoing it, though, because you still want what you write to be coherent.  I also don’t recommend combining copious amounts of this with #3 and #1.  If you do that, we might have the first indication of a serious problem.

6.  Stretch/Take a Hot Bath/Exercise –  I have long been a fan of stretching before you write.  As with any job or task, why go in tense when you could go in relaxed and limber.  A hot bath might be a more enticing and soothing option for some of you.  Exercise, especially jogging, has the double advantage of keeping you and shape and putting you in a sound state of mind, while ALSO giving you a nice 45 minutes to an hour to just contemplate your plot, characters, dialogue, etc.  Keep a notepad handy while you’re on the treadmill; there’s no harm in it.  I just hope you can read the sweat-stained scribbles.

180 degrees’ orientation is the only thing separating a Snuggie from a Jedi robe.

7.  Wear a Snuggie™ – What have you to lose?  I wear a Snuggie™ and I feel like Gandalf when I write.  Especially when it’s late at night, something about wearing a blanket with sleeves puts me in the zone.

8.  Write While Standing Up – From time to time, I do get a little antsy and sitting in a chair writing just feels like Hell to me.  Don’t be afraid to stand up and move about the room to gather your thoughts.  Sometimes you just need to get the blood moving again and you might be surprised how much more spry your mind is while you’re on your feet.  I like to pace the living room floor and when I have a good thought, I just pop my computer to type it out.

9.  Try Writing Outside – This is kind of an extension of #8.  Sometimes standing up isn’t enough; you actually need a complete change of scenery.  When I’m outside, my rule is “No Laptops”, but don’t feel beholden to that rule.  It only originated from the fact that I have a terrible time reading my computer outside because of the glare.  However, I have rediscovered the joys of writing stuff out by hand and doing this outside… I don’t know, it just makes me feel so much closer to the long legacy of literature over the centuries.  Chaucer and Cervantes never used a Mac.

Close enough, right?

10.  Perform a Rain Dance – Obviously I’m joking at this point, but if I could prove that doing a crazy aboriginal dance would make the words come pouring down, I would adopt this in a heartbeat.  I call dibs on “Toxic” by Britney Spears.  That’s my writing rain dance song.  Thinking about using it?  Get your own!  Pro Tip:  Whatever you do, do not combine this recommendation with #1, #3, #5, #7, and #9.  Now you just look like a crazy person and the second anyone sees you, you can probably expect a visit from the police.  “Yes, Officer.  The bearded man/unshaved woman is now dancing in the middle of the park wearing what appears to be a cheetah-print Snuggie™ eating applesauce out of a jar while downing a Colt 45.” Officer:  “Don’t worry, Ma’am.  It’s probably just a writer.”

Be careful out there, fellow indie authors!

Writing Yourself to Nowhere: Observations on Bad Writing from Around the Web

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Commenting on bad writing is easy and safe for me as a blogger.  It allows me to make flippant remarks about the prose and style of others without throwing myself on the sword or putting any of my own work up for the same criticism.  So before I get into the meat of this article, I want to make clear that I do not see myself as a flawless writer.  I am constantly in search of ways to improve.  I am constantly in search of ways to remedy my own flaws.  So the observations I’m about to make are based largely on the comments of others, with hope that my readers might find them useful.  I’m making no accusations here; I’m only looking to stir the pot a bit by pointing out some interesting flaws you may not have considered.

A Wall Street Journal article was actually the catalyst that sat me down to write this.  Simply titled, “What Makes Bad Writing”, the article begins with an excerpt from People Who Eat Darkness by Richard Lloyd Parry that reads as follows:  “Exhausted tubes of toothpaste curl on the edges of the sink, sodden lumps of soap drool in the floor of the shower.”  At a glance, this might seem like wonderful writing to some of you.  It certainly conveys a veritable smorgasbord of imagery and sensations.  I’m particularly fond of the phrase “sodden lumps of soap drool in the floor of the shower”.

However, the point the author of the article makes is that such descriptive, “strained, anthropomorphic” prose can actually be more laborious than interesting to a reader.  I bring up this article not to critique Richard Lloyd Parry, but to remark on my own early endeavors as a writer.  If you’ve been following this blog for some time, you’ve no doubt heard my remarks about my earnest but naïve attempts to publish a 300,000-word fantasy novel back when I was 23 years old.  I’ll be honest:  I thought I had knocked that book out of the park and many of my sentences read something akin to the excerpt identified in that WSJ article.  But my good friend Jeff, who was one of the first to try to read the book, gave me the brutally honest advice I needed when he told me I had explained and detailed almost every scene into the grave.

My epic fantasy yarn was a trial to read and that was not a good thing for a first book.

Description serves a very profound purpose for writers:  It makes worlds richer, it shapes pages of black & white letters into people and creatures (magic, indeed!), and, if you’re reading fantasy, it should help strap a sword to your belt, lace boots on your feet, and set you on the trail alongside all those charming characters.  But a story does not consist solely of description.  Ultimately a book is defined by the things that happen.  Although we may speak of the details later—for instance, we may spend hours conjuring up images of Shelob or giant elephants or trolls, orcs, goblins, or the feared Balrog, when reading Tolkien—we are invested in the quest.  We are invested in the characters.  Don’t write yourself to nowhere and risk alienating your reader.

This is a delicate give and take, of course.  I would be lying if I said it were easy.  But here is a nice Sean Chandler quote I’m going to pass on to you and it is yours to keep, simply because chances are that I’m not the first person to say this:  Let your descriptions paint the story and not the other way around.

As that same article goes on to observe, many would agree that the best definition of bad writing is any writing which cannot be understood.  If a television shows you no picture, you should consider it broken, and a book is the same, in my opinion.  But such sentences are not automatically rendered unintelligible simply because of length of structure.  It is also so that not all such sentences are the elaborately lyrical or poetic variety.  The author of the article brilliantly identified the following brief sentence as an example of her meaning:  “The lure of imaginary totality is momentarily frozen before the dialectic of desire hastens on within symbolic chains.”  If this sentence makes sense to you, please explain it to me.

Furthermore, do yourself a favor and browse the following website,
http://www.bulwer-lytton.com/2011win.html
, which identifies the worst sentences in various genres from a variety of writers the world over.  Personally, I don’t find all of them to be terrible (granted, I lack the proper context in which these sentences were used).  In fact, I’m pretty sure they’re all deliberate submissions, which makes them all quite brilliant, in my opinion.  Take the 2011 winner, for example:  “Cheryl’s mind turned like the vanes of a wind-powered turbine, chopping her sparrow-like thoughts into bloody pieces that fell onto a growing pile of forgotten memories.”  I find that sentence hilarious, but it strangely conveys, I think, exactly the meaning that it was after.  I don’t think anyone would call it unintelligible and, furthermore, based on that sentence, I would have no trouble reading the next sentence, which seems to me to be the whole freaking point!

The sci-fi winner, however, is a far more worthy contender for worst sentence of the year:  “Morgan “Bamboo” Barnes, Star Pilot of the Galaxia (flagship of the Solar Brigade), accepted an hors d’oeuvre from the triangular-shaped platter offered to him from the Princess Qwillia – lavender-skinned she was and busty, with two of her four eyes what Barnes called “bedroom eyes” – and marveled at how on her planet, Chlamydia-5, these snacks were called “Hi-Dee-Hoes” but on Earth they were simply called Ritz Crackers with Velveeta.”  Not only is there enough information in this sentence to clearly merit a whole paragraph, I cannot tell how seriously I’m supposed to take it (based on Chlamydia-5, this sentence was scribbled down as a gag and there is no actual book associated with it).

I would underline “triangular-shaped platter”, however, as something that stands out to me.   It’s science fiction, but why should we care what shape the platter is?  Unnecessary adjectives are like speed bumps on the road to comprehension.  Every time your reader hits one, he or she is more likely to lose speed and run the risk of doubling back for a second pass.  And every time you drive a reader to reread a sentence, the less likely that person is to continue to do so.

Okay, let’s end on a high note: “As the dark and mysterious stranger approached, Angela bit her lip anxiously, hoping with every nerve, cell, and fiber of her being that this would be the one man who would understand – who would take her away from all this – and who would not just squeeze her boob and make a loud honking noise, as all the others had.”  That sentence still has me laughing.

The Best Advice I Can Give: 4 Surefire Ways to Get Published

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I recently achieved 20,000 Twitter followers and, as I’m writing this, my website is approaching 10,000 views in its first 7 weeks.  In terms of fame, I would liken myself to the reporter in that viral video who accidentally had a bird crap in his mouth?  Have you seen the video?  No?  Well, eventually someone who wanders across this site may have, and that’s about where I am.  Let me tell you how well my fame pays:  It doesn’t.  I make about as much money off my Twitter account as that aforementioned bird makes every time someone watches it crap in that guy’s mouth.  The sad thing is, despite the fact that my writing career has made me just about enough money to be homeless person once you take away my other expenses, I still sometimes find my ego getting away from me.  That’s an easy thing to have happen when Sam f***ing Neill is following you on Twitter.

This guy…I think.

The guy from “Jurassic Park”?  No?  “Event Horizon”?  The original TV “Merlin” miniseries?  You’ve still never heard of him?  “Jurassic Park 3”?  “Daybreakers”, for Pete’s sake!

Nevermind.  Anyway, the direction I was going with this conversation was that with my newfound fame (or lack thereof), more and more people have been asking me for “the best advice I can give on getting published”.  Unimpressed with my earnest shrug, they inevitably ask again.  Then dismayed by my “write a really, really, really, really good book” response, they always ask a THIRD time.  So here it is, ladies and germs:  Here are my four can’t miss tips to absolutely ensuring that your book will get published, presented in my typical dry and sarcastic manner.  Warning!  These answers, though quite true, are not to be taken seriously.  For actual advice, please see my other articles.

1.  Be Famous:  Want to be guaranteed a book deal that will pay you millions and make millions more in return?  I want you to pay close attention:  Be famous.  What?  You mean you’re NOT famous?  Well, you really need to work on that.

So right now, I want you to look at your life and ask yourself:  Am I famous?  There are a few ways to tell if you are, so I’ll guide you through the process.  Turn on your television and flip through the channels.  Do you see yourself?  Okay, now open the magazine nearest to you, and comb through the pages.  Any luck there?  What about the last time you went to a movie theater; did the movie you saw star YOU in any significant capacity?  Try this:  Go to your window and let me know if you see any flashing lights similar to the kinds that cameras might make.  We’re done.  Now, if you said “Yes” to any of those scenarios, please proceed to the next paragraph.  If you said “No” to all of those examples, skip to the paragraph after that.  Understand?  Good.

A) CONGRATULATIONS!  It appears that you are probably famous!  The good news is that you barely have to spend any time at all on your book and you’re all but guaranteed an instant book contract that will make you even wealthier.  You’ll be required to put the minimal effort into your book and, most likely, you will make a complete mockery of the years of labor that “normal” writers put into trying to find an agent or publisher.  Hell, you may not even have to actually write the book YOURSELF!  Pat yourself on the back, famous person; although you’ve probably done nothing to deserve it, you’ve found an opportunity to make yourself even more famous.  The world hates you.

B) Oooo, that’s gotta sting.  Tough luck there, friend, but you know what?  You gave it your all.  It turns out you just aren’t famous.  But that’s okay, because there are still several options available to you.  Let’s look at the next example and maybe you’ll have better luck.

2.  Marry a Famous Person/Have a Famous Child:  So you’re not famous, but there may be another avenue available.  I want you to turn back on the television and flip through those channels again, Friend.  Do you happen to see your wife or husband anywhere?  What about your child?  You did???  Oh, no, you didn’t; sorry, I completely misread your facial cues on that one.  That was my mistake.  Damn.  I was really hoping that would work.

You might be wondering which one is Kim, which one is Khloe, and which one is Kourtney. The answer is that it doesn’t matter, because these people are awful.

And it’s a shame your spouse or child wasn’t on television just now.  If I had to break down the easiest possible strategy for finding success as an author, it would go something like this:  Step 1) Marry a Kardashian, Step 2) Set fire to manuscript.  Step 3) See Steps 1 & 2.  Okay, it’s a little gender specific.  It’s not a perfect strategy, but it has been more successful than my attempts to woo literary agents.  Okay, AS successful.  I don’t hear back from agents, and I don’t hear back from Kim Kardashian.  She’ll break eventually, though.

They always do.

3.  Have Something Incredible Happen to You:  This is an easy alternative for those of you who aren’t famous or didn’t have the good fortune to marry someone famous or having a child who is a culinary/rock & roll prodigy.  All you have to do to get published is have something truly incredible to you.  Take the story of Ann Elizabeth Hodges, for example.  In 1954, the Alabama native had a fragment of a meteorite careen through the roof of her home and strike her while she slept on a couch.  Have you had meteorites hit you that you didn’t think were fascinating enough to tell people about?  Because goods news!  Not that many people have been struck by meteorites who lived to tell the story, so you might have a good book idea there!

When all else fails, just give up on your writing career and watch the movie “127 Hours”. It’s kind of amazing.

You could even write a book about something incredible that happened to you as the result of your own stupidity/carelessness, as was the case with Aron Ralston, who wrote his memoir Between a Rock and a Hard Place, which of course was adapted into the fantastic movie “127 Hours” starring James Franco, about a young adventurer who ended up trapped in a ravine and had to cut his own arm off with a dull pocket knife in order to save himself.  Which do you think would be easier:  Trying to publish your 200,000 word fantasy debut or cutting your own arm off and writing a book about it?  The answer…might surprise you.

4.  Win the Lottery:  Okay, here’s my failsafe.  This is what I like to call the easy way out.  Assuming that all the other options failed for you, all you have to do to get published is just win the lottery.  Then you can use the money to publish your books yourself!  So, what are you waiting for?  Go out and win that lottery!

The 7 Not-So-Deadly But Still Very Annoying & Quite Avoidable Sins of Novel Writing

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In perusing the interwebs, I have come across numerous takes on The 7 Deadly Sins, so I don’t want to take credit for the idea to riff on that in this entry.  Look around the Internet for five minutes, and you’ll find everything from The 7 Deadly Sins of Editing, The 7 Deadly Sins of Cooking, The 7 Deadly Sins of Bipolar Birdhouse Construction, and the 7 Deadly Sins of Atheism, which seems like quite the paradox in my opinion.  So there’s nothing original in my borrowing the theme for the purposes of novel advice, although I do with to point out that there are few things fatal in writing except for the very real possibility of starvation, which is why I tutor and teach on the side.  So, here are my 7 Not-So-Deadly But Still Very Annoying & Quite Avoidable Sins of Novel Writing.  Enjoy!

1.  Watching Movies Instead of Reading Books:  Guilty.  As.  Charged.  I enjoy reading, but I don’t do nearly enough of it, mainly because books are expensive and I’m on a fixed income.  I want to read, but I can’t because of the clusterf*** that is being a 26-year-old college graduate in this economy and job market.  It’s the ultimate Catch-22 (speaking of which, I ordered that and it still hasn’t arrived).  So, there are times when I find myself pondering all the books I wish to read, when suddenly I’ll find that the movie adaptation is about to premier on HBO.  Hmm…Which one would YOU choose?  I think movies can be an invaluable resource for writers in the sense that they help teach writers how to frame a scene, how to develop story narrative, how to depict characters, and how to hit the right cues in action and dialogue.  In that sense, I embrace film as a writer.  However, movies and books are not interchangeable and one medium can do things the other simply can’t.  As a writer and film geek, this is a give and take, and right now my circumstances have forced me to rely far too heavily upon cinema and not enough on the rich literary world that, though intimidatingly vast, needs to be more heavily explored.  I’m working on it now, I really am, because I have finally seen the light, but I’ve a long way to go.  If you an aspiring writer like myself and if you suffer from the same cultural and generational flaws that have pushed you towards popular media at the sacrifice of books, do yourself a favor now and climb aboard the literary train.  I’ll be there dressed like a hobo and sleeping in one of the hay carts.

Here’s Thing from F4, in case you aren’t a comic book reader.

2.  Being Afraid of Criticism:  I have harped on this mercilessly on this blog, so I want to go ahead and dispense with this point relatively quickly.  If you have chosen to venture down the road of professional writing, prepare for criticism.  You simply cannot make other people happy and, news flash, some people will give you scathing reviews simply out of jealousy or because they disagree with your viewpoints.  If you think every review you will receive will give your work fair consideration and approach it from the proper respectful standpoint, you have another thing coming.  Some people will have rational and useful criticisms of your work that you need to take to heart in order to improve your craft.  Others will hurl venomous insults at something you wrote for no other reason than vanity or ignorance.  The task falls on you to develop thicker skin.

We’re talking Thing from The Fantastic Four.  That’s how thick your skin needs to be.

3.  Being Lazy:  If you’re like me, being called “lazy” is about the most offensive insult that anyone could sling at you.  I loathe the term.  I would never wish to imply that you are lazy, for instance.  I’ve been in situations where I’m sitting on the couch thinking about my book, perhaps agonizing over some insignificant detail or some interaction between two characters, when someone will ask me whether or not I’m going to work on my book today, insinuating that since I’m not writing, I’m being lazy.  Let’s face it:  There are days when the words simply will not come.  There are days when I sit down at my computer and stare relatively blankly at the screen waiting for anything useful to come to mind and the magic never happens.  However, there are ways to make the most out of those temporary bouts of writer’s block.  Outline a bit.  Contemplate a future scene and try to map it out so that you won’t run into any hurdles when you get there.  Also, try reading a book—preferably a good one.  A day spent reading is never a day wasted and since reading often helps us write, you’re really not wasting a second.

4.  Fearing the Outcome:  Another aspect of the process that can be scary for young writers or even those who are just starting out later in life is the fear of the outcome.  What if I don’t get published?  What if people don’t like what I’ve written?  In short, what if I fail?  There are no easy answers for this but, in short, if you have no confidence in your abilities whatsoever, then this probably isn’t the path for you anyway.  I’d like to believe that if you’re taking this journey, you have a reason for it.  Either writing is your passion or you have a story that you think simply needs to be shared.  Those two concepts are your fuel, not the possibility of praise or awards.  Don’t write just for the theoretical admiration, in other words, because simple vanity rarely triumphs in this industry.  That’s for Hollywood.

If you do fear the outcome, however, there are things you can do to bolster your confidence.  Let friends and family read what you’ve written and encourage their honest feedback.  You may have to go back to the drawing board and take another swing at it.  You very well likely may have to start over from scratch.  I had to.  I’m about to start rewriting my fantasy series for the third time.  That’s right, I wrote a whole novel, chucked it, started over again, chucked THAT, and now I’m starting a THIRD time.  It is what it is.  You can’t fear the outcome; you can only try to do the best with the story you want to tell and hone that sword until it’s as sharp as it can be.

5.  Leaving Edits to Someone Else:  Your temptation might also be pen the final period in that novel and then just ship it off to your editors or friends or friends who are editors to let THEM handle all the edits.  My advice here is that the first person to edit a manuscript should be YOU.  I usually start editing my novels one week after the day they were finished, allowing me one week to read a good book or two and remind myself what good writing really looks like.  That way, I go into the editing process with a less biased opinion of my own writing and a mind for how a great book should read.  Ultimately, I’m harsher to my work, which makes it better and also helps ready it for a more professional editor down the road.

6.  Rushing/Stalling:  Your instinct might also be to try to rush the process along.  As much as I like to avoid unloading useless clichés on people, here’s a good one:  The book is ready when it’s ready.  Okay, that’s all well and good, but how do I know when the book is ready?  Well, it’s not ready the first time you finish it, I can tell you that.  A first draft is not publisher-ready.  It’s not even ready the first time you edit it, nor probably after the second.  Your book is ready when you can read it critically and objectively and find no flaws with it.  It is ready when your editor says it is ready.  It is ready when your mother starts weeping at the brilliant masterpiece you have written.  And even then, well, it’s only ready enough.  I’ll always remember Barbara Kingsolver confessing to us in Lexington that, were it up to her, her books would never be ready.  She would just keep editing and editing and editing.  Publishing a book is like dropping your child off at his or her first day of college.  You may not want to let go and you shouldn’t let go until you’re sure the time is right and then you just hope the world accepts and loves what you have devoted so much time to creating.

7.  Having Too Much Integrity:  Don’t get me wrong; I don’t think integrity is an awful thing to have.  It just hasn’t been what I hoped it would be.  What do I mean by integrity?  Well, it depends on the type of book you’re writing.  When I was writing The Notice, a historical fiction novel based around the war in Bosnia & Herzegovina, I felt obligated to present an even-handed and well-researched approach to the war.  This meant that my book occasionally included lengthy historical passages meant to inform the reader and given him or her a deeper understanding of the unique social and cultural factors interplaying in Bosnia during that war.  The downside?  It made parts of my book a little slower than I might have liked.  I might have been able to omit some of them and improve the “readability” of my book, but I considered it a slight to the Bosnian people for me to cash in on their tragedy without educating my readers as much as possible about their plight.  I had the integrity to be respectful to them, at the cost of making the most marketable book possible.  Perhaps your idea of integrity is not resorting to cheap gimmicks like pointlessly non-linear narratives or overly grotesque and gory first chapter murders.  That’s still integrity, but it may not sell your book.  Integrity is a broad brush, but it’s not always necessarily the one that paints the best portrait.

I don’t know.  I can’t help but feel like my thoughts on this point are not yet fully developed.  I have more profound ideas swirling around in my head but I can’t lasso them at the moment.  I’d be interested to hear your thoughts, readers.  What do you think about integrity in the publishing industry?  Is it something that we aspiring authors can afford?  Sound off below:

Enter the Imaginarium: A Few Tricks for Finding Ideas

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Forgive me, but this is going to be a very rushed entry today.  I am currently back home in Shelby County, Kentucky tending to some personal matters.  My fiancée is on her way home from Bosnia and that’s very exciting.  I’ve been running all over the place on various errands for family members and, of course, there’s work and this horrible drought in our area.  Everything is so scorched and bleak.  You would think it would be exactly the motivation I need to finish my bleak dystopian novel, but it isn’t quite panning out that way. I’m more exhausted than anything.

So, I wanted to try to pick my spirits back up by leaving a few words on imagination and where I find my ideas.

Maybe it’s the fact that I grew up in Bagdad, Kentucky—a green slice of nowhere where barns are castles and trees are dragons and a decent-sized yard becomes a fantastical kingdom—but imagination was always important to me growing up.  When you live on the outskirts of a town that most people in your own county couldn’t even place on a map, a shortage of playmates or diversions is something every kid must learn to cope with.  So I learned to create at an early age.  I created with my mind, using a tobacco stick for a sword (or light saber, once I discovered Star Wars).  I created with a paintbrush and a fresh canvas, and honed my artistic abilities.  And, of course, I created with a pencil and paper, and (somewhat later along the way) ten fingers and a keyboard.

I have tried to keep my imagination healthy.  As most young people do, I think, I neglected it perhaps a bit in high school, but I never let it fall away completely.  Books and movies were reminders to me of the way things used to be—the way things were meant to be.  I would read the likes of Ursula K. Le Guinn and Robert Heinlein and imagine faraway worlds beyond the realm of known possibility.  I would watch movies like The Dark Crystal and Willow and The Fifth Element and, of course, The Matrix, and even where the stories of those movies perhaps stumbled a bit, I would always see ideas and possibilities.

Along the way, I developed a few tricks of my own that I wanted to share.  Ideas are crucial to writers.  Without ideas, we have no words, or at least none worth writing down.  My ideas, though maybe not particularly revolutionary, have served me well enough.  Here are the strategies that have helped me pad my creative reservoir and ensure that I will have stories to tell well into my future:

The Mash-Up:  One of my favorite ideas of late is to try to imagine how I would mash up two of my favorite genres.  And I’m not just talking sci-fi vs. fantasy, although I don’t think nearly enough has been done to try to combine elements of the two.  Get weird with it.  Gothic Horror Spaghetti Western.  Fantasy Murder Mystery.  Zombie Romance.  Let your imagination run wild.  Even if you are unable to turn such an idea into a full-length manuscript, you may come up with a few smaller ideas that can be integrated into one later.  As I’ve said often before, I keep a list of almost every good idea I have and I’m constantly looking for places to make them fit.  Never be afraid to steal from yourself.  No one has to know that you stole an idea from a project you may have abandoned.

The Trailer Guess:  Another game I like to play is to watch a teaser trailer for an upcoming movie that I don’t know much about and try to guess what the story is behind it.  If you find yourself in love with the story that you’ve imagined, write it down.  Then, wait and see how close you were.  If you’re like me, chances are you came up with something that was radically different from what the movie ended up actually being.  I’ve even had a few moments where I felt that the idea I had developed was far better than the one that became a movie.

Well now you have this golden egg of an idea in your hands and it doesn’t match up with anything that has quite been done before.  What should you do with it?  That’s up to you.  Try changing the characters, and I’m not just talking about names.  Try making the protagonist more interesting or throw him out completely.  Try to find an antagonist.  Change the location around.  You’re now well on your way to developing a completely new and separate work from the glimmer of inspiration you got from watching a 90 second preview in a movie theater.

The Sequel in Reverse:  This idea is similar to the last one, but involves a little more tweaking on your part.  If I see a movie that I really like, sometimes I will try to imagine what the sequel would look like.  What’s the story?  Which characters do I keep?  What is the next logical conflict for the protagonist to endure?  Then, I set about deconstructing that story backwards.  I try to start with the ending and figure out how I got there.  Do I throw out the main character and put a character of my own creation into the story?  If I don’t find the world in which the original story took place to be of appeal, I throw it out and create a new world that is governed largely by the same rules as the first but more to my liking.  You can even pepper in a bit of the mash-up approach here, too. Maybe you imagine the sequel in your head, but you try to combine it with a different genre that would staggeringly affect its outcome.

The last bit of imagination advice I’ll give you before I turn off and head to Louisville to see some old friends is the following list of questions.  These questions always help get my mind going when I’m desperate for something original.  I hope you’ll find them useful, as well.

1.  What do I fear most?

2.  What do I value?

3.  How do my fears affect my values?

4.  What would I do if I awoke one morning to find that one rule of nature had inexplicably changed?

5.  How would _______ (alien invasion, zombie apocalypse, etc.) affect MY life?

6.  What do I believe about human nature?

7.  Who are the people who matter most to me?

8.  What is the one thing I own with which I would never part?

9.  What could a villain do to have the upper hand on me?

10.  What is the best possible ending to a worst case scenario?

How To Ruin Your Query Letter in 6 Easy Steps

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It’s been several weeks since I posted anything about query letters on this site.  In fact, I’m not sure I’ve said anything about them since my first writer’s conference in June and even though that was only a month ago, it feels like that happened years back.  To be honest, I have spent hours (days, even) researching what makes the perfect query letter and I’ve probably written damn close to 100 of them myself.  I’ve written bad ones, I’ve written mediocre ones, and I’ve written letters that literally had me thinking, “If I don’t hear back from an agent about this letter I swear I’m throwing in the towel for good.”  Of course I never heard back anything even on those last letters and I’ve still got that towel optimistically in hand.

We’ve been through a lot together that towel and I and, while there are still far too many glaring contradictions in the industry for me to be able to say definitively what makes for a “perfect query letter”, I can say that I’ve stumbled across a few things that everyone in the industry seems to agree you should NOT do in a query letter.  Let’s have a look:

Overconfidence/Arrogance:  If there’s one thing I can say it’s that I am overconfident and arrogant about my work.  Every time I finish a book, I think it’s the greatest thing in the world and I think it can outsell any other book.  It doesn’t matter whether or not that’s actually true, but it’s what I tell myself because I am proud and secure in my abilities.  HOWEVER, I never let a drop of that overconfidence trickle into my query letter.  In fact, I never try to be anything but a humble and respectful little kitten.

And it’s gotten me absolutely nowhere, but I digress…

I don’t really have a picture to go with that, but I’ll take any opportunity I can get to use this one again.

First, just let me spell out what I mean by overconfidence.  If you have ever written some variant of the following line, then you may want to check your ego at the door:  “My forthcoming sci-fi novel has been likened to H.G. Wells by way of Hemingway if Jesus Christ had written it while roundhouse kicking a velociraptor in the face.”  Actually, if you have ever written that EXACT line in a query letter, forget everything I’m about to say because you’re almost definitely going to get published—that sounds INCREDIBLE.  But you get my point.  Don’t compare yourself to the industry’s leading writers.  You aren’t the next Stephen King.  You aren’t the next J.K. Rowling.  Become successful first and then let other people make those comparisons.

As good as I think my books are, I would never call myself “the next J.K. Rowling”, because right now being the next J.K. Rowling feels a lot like sitting at my computer in my underwear in a sweltering apartment in Kentucky ranting on a blog and eating applesauce out of a jar.

No Plot:  This was my major shortcoming with all of my early query letters.  I made an innocent mistake that probably 75% of unpublished writers make when they are sending out their first query letters:  Describing the book without actually getting into the plot.  By plot, what I mean is that you outline your important characters (especially protagonist/antagonist) and you outline their conflict.  A novel has to have some sort of conflict, Folks.  All agents seem to agree on that and I don’t think I have to linger too long on this point.

Get to the point quickly.  Don’t spend too much time talking about what your book is or isn’t.  Show what it is by digging deep into the central drive of your story.  What does your character want?  Who or what stands in his or her way?  What must he/she do to get there?  You don’t have to give away the ending (in fact, it’s best if you don’t), but you should give the agent a clear sense of what is at stake.

No Voice:  Another flaw in many query letters is that the letter does not reflect the voice of the manuscript.  Your manuscript can be the greatest thing ever, but if your query letter is full of redundancies, no confidence, sloppy editing, etc. the agent will assume that your book will just be more of the same.  Make sure that your query letter represents a concise example of your best writing and that it draws in the readers just as much as your book.  Convincing readers to come along for the ride?  That’s the easy part.  Convincing an agent?  That’s the true test.

“What is that, Arial  Size 12? This person clearly has no idea how to write.”

I’ve heard several agents say, “I can tell everything about a writer’s book from the query letter.”  That’s only partially true.  If you’re like me, writing the book was a breeze compared to trying to get it published.  I think my book is in fine shape now, but my query letters are a mess now because I’ve been told 20 different and conflicting things about how to write them.  My book has confidence.  My book has a voice.  My query letters have less confidence and less voice because the more I try to change or improve something, the more someone tells me, “Sean…I don’t really like the font you used on the date at the top of the letter” or “What is this query letter printed on, Boise X-9 Hi-Brite Multipurpose Paper?  No way in Hell am I reading this!”

I’ve only had one agent give me good feedback on query letters and I met her at a conference.  Too bad several other agents with whom I’ve spoken since have told me they disagree with her, but whatever.  At the end of the day, professionalism and persistence are key.

Baffling or Unprofessional:  I don’t want to spend a whole lot of time here, because this is just talking about the ludicrous and absurd things that people try to pull on agents.  We’re talking about stuff that makes the rest of us look bad.  One example I heard an agent tell was a story involving some person who said in their query letter, “I have chosen you to represent my new novel” or “my novel is the first in a twelve-part series that I have written which will quickly make more money than the Harry Potter series”.  If I have to spell out for you what is wrong with both of those statements, please reconsider your writing endeavors, because ultimately these sorts of efforts only polarize agents that much more and make it that much more difficult for aspiring indie authors who are trying to play the game right to get published.

Never say things like “I worked really hard on this book” or, as Ann Rittenberg and Laura Whitcomb point out in one of my favorite publishing books Your First Novel, “I know how busy you are, so I’ll get straight to the point and not take up too much of your valuable time”.  The first quote is irrelevant and, hopefully, implied.  If you didn’t work hard on it, don’t even think about trying to get it published.  The second quote, in trying to keep from wasting time, needlessly wastes an agent’s time.  Just get to your own book, keep it focused, and try to stay confident and optimistic.

I mean, it couldn’t HURT, right?

Also, don’t include a photo of yourself unless you look like George Clooney.  Or you can just do what I do and include a photo of George Clooney with every query letter.  By the way, I don’t actually do that.  However, if I don’t start getting some interest from agents soon, I just might start doing that…

Contact Information:  If this seems like a stupid thing for an agent to get worked up over, that’s because it is, but some (I want to emphasize “SOME”) agents will still get in a tizzy if you list your contact information at the top of your letter instead of at the bottom.  I know, I know.   It is ridiculous…but I’m being serious.  I say, unless otherwise stated, always put your contact information at the bottom of the letter, ESPECIALLY IF YOU ARE QUERYING VIA EMAIL.  I guess you can completely ignore the example of a “Good Query to Agent: Novel/Memoir” listed on page 35 of the 2011 90th Anniversary Edition of the Writer’s Market, which claims to be “The Most Trusted Guide to Getting Published”.  Even though that letter comes from what is, in my opinion, one of the most reputable and trustworthy sources on the market today and even though that resource clearly shows a mock query letter with all relevant contact information in plain sight at the top of the query letter with the agent’s address directly below that, evidently you are an idiot for thinking that’s how it should be done.

Bah! What do they know? They’re just WRITER’S (freaking) DIGEST.

I hope you all are enjoying the sarcasm that is practically dripping off this blog right now.  Yeesh.

I’m not even joking about that book: 

  There’s the Amazon link.  It’s a great big helpful-looking book evidently compiled by a vast list of industry professionals and, yet, I have now had about ten agents tell me that the query letter information in it is wrong or, at the very least, unhelpful.  What the Hell?  Evidently, there was a meeting of agents in an ominous, shadowy lair somewhere miles below the Earth’s surface that involved The League of Evil Agents randomly deciding to reject query letters with contact information in the wrong place.  It happened sometime in late 2011, by my estimate.  What, you didn’t get the memo either?  How about that…

Wow, I can’t believe how much I wrote about putting contact information in the wrong place.  I just find that point to be the dumbest thing imaginable over which to reject a query letter.  It would be like me unwrapping a Big Mac and deciding to throw it away because of the placement of a cheese slice.  If the burger doesn’t have any MEAT on it, that’s a pretty big problem, but if all the ingredients are there, only SLIGHTLY out of order, I’m pretty sure I can still eat it.  And, agents, I’m pretty sure you can still read a damn query letter at least through the first sentence.

Never ever ever refer to your book as a “fiction novel”:  A novel is, by definition, a work of fiction, so claiming that you’ve written a “fiction novel” in your query letter is seen as the calling card of an amateur.  This is yet another honest mistake that I’m sure tons of writers make and, yeah, most agents will stop right there as soon as they see that in a query letter.  I wonder how they feel about someone calling his or her book “novel fiction”, though…

When all is said and done, you need to remember one thing:  Almost any agent is looking for a reason to not read your book.  Any agent who just read that sentence is probably throwing his or her hands in the air at that statement, saying, “How can Sean say that?  We make our livings off of the books we sell!”  Well, I stand by my assertion.  I have read the most asinine reasons by agents for rejecting books based on query letters.  I have read and listened to some of the most offensively stupid arguments imaginable for snubbing queries—things that don’t even have anything to do with the writing or the book itself.  Things like, “I didn’t read her letter because she wrote it in standard business letter format and put my address at the top…like I don’t know my own address!”  Yes, agents will even reject people for trying to be professional and respectful.  I had no idea that business letter format was a major turn-off for many agents, despite the fact that one of the books I purchased on writing query letters provided examples written in business letter format.

However, most agents don’t care about all the contradictions and hypocrisies that are pervasive across the gamut of “Help” literature on query letter writing.  They want everything done their way, and you have to do your best to accommodate them.  Of course as I can tell you most of the time even that won’t be enough.