Category Archives: Writing

When good enough — isn’t

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Miss Snark fields a question from a writer whose novel has been rejected repeatedly as “not competitive.” The writing is good, the story interesting, and yet the novel doesn’t seem to have what it takes to make the cut.

Here’s a portion of Miss Snark’s response:

I see quite a few books as partials or fulls that are pretty darn good but there’s nothing there that makes me say “aha!” I have to be able to answer the questions “what makes this stand out from the crowd” “what is going to surprise me” when I send this to editors. Business as usual will not do that.

The bar for becoming a fiction writer is, on the one hand, ridiculously low. You like words, you like stories, you own a computer or at least a bit of charcoal and the back of a shovel, and you’re there.

So it’s disquieting to discover that what you’re writing may not be good enough to get published. (Of, if you get a little further, not good enough to sell out your print run. Or, a little further along yet, not good enough to make you a living.)

Miss Snark’s advice:

I suggest stepping back from the project for a bit. Work on something else for awhile. Then go back and really look at your characters and plot. You have to be able to look at your work with an objective eye. That’s the single biggest weakness in writers: they can’t see how their own work looks on the literary buffet.

But (and I’m making an oblique confession, here) maybe that’s not it. Maybe we can see. Maybe the problem is that we don’t want to see. Because seeing means we have to rewrite, and not just smoothing-up-those-awkward-sentences rewriting, but the sort of rewriting that involves dismantling plot or rethinking characters — the kind of rewriting that takes us almost back to the beginning, and that, with a novel we’ve lived with for so many months already that we’re frankly sick to death of it.

But maybe that’s what it takes.

In the Introduction to Writing the Breakout Novel, Donald Maass has this to say:

Great novels–ones in which lightening seems to strike on every page–result from their authors’ refusal to settle for ‘good.’ Great novelists . . . push themselves to find original turns of phrase, extra levels of feeling, unusual depths of character, plots that veer in unexpected directions . . . Is that magic?

Not at all. It is aiming high.

I have to believe “aiming high” is what gets you to the place Miss Snark references — to the novel that “stands out from the crowd,” that is more than “business as usual.”

New review on the block

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In Slate, Meghan O’Rourke has a piece about Virginia Quarterly Review, a literary magazine that received six nominations for this years National Magazine Awards.

This made the Virginia Quarterly Review the second-most-nominated magazine, behind the Atlantic, which received eight, and ahead of The New Yorker, Harper’s, New York, and National Geographic, all of which received five. It was as if a scrappy farm team had demolished the Yankees in an exhibition game.

Click the link for the how’s.

Dog book news

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Over the weekend, I finished reviewing the page proofs for 101 Dog Training Tips, which is coming out in June.

The book is substantially different from Outwitting Dogs, which I co-wrote with Terry Ryan, a professional trainer. Tips is shorter — 12,000 words — and includes 50 photos, most of which I took myself. Outwitting Dogs came in at around 90,000 words, if I remember correctly.

So I was a bit taken aback when I read my publisher’s description of the new book. They’ve made it sound like it’s a comprehensive training book. It’s not. It’s . . . tips. Sigh. Outwitting Dogs is a comprehensive training book. Tips, on the other hand, is something you’d pick up when you need just a quick idea, or to brush up on your training. It’s more like a checklist. A good checklist, mind you ;-)

It’s funny to feel uneasy and excited at the same time. I’ll be awfully happy when I am actually holding a bound copy in my hand. I remember the thrill when my copies of Outwitting Dogs got here, and somehow, I don’t think that thrill ever goes away.

The best advice

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. . . comes from people who have been there, done that.

A few weeks ago, I put up a post about a discussion at Booksquare on whether writers would be better off producing books as work-for-hire (as opposed to the way it’s typically done today: writers receive an advance against royalties, and then later additional royalties should the advance earn out).

Now Tess Gerritsen weighs in with her experience. After publishing nine romantic suspense novels for Harlequin, she hit the NYT bestseller list with another book, Harvest. Reprints of her old titles, she writes,

started appearing in bookstores. Not just here in the U.S., but around the world. These were titles that I thought had long since finished earning out, and would never be seen again. And suddenly, they were selling again, and selling well, and now I’m being paid royalties that add up to many times the original advances I was first paid.

That’s money she never would have seen if she’d sold her early books as work-for-hire.

This is true for life, too

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In an answer to one of her blog readers, literary agent Miss Snark gave out a piece of advice that applies as well to life as it does to navigating a writing career.

The reader was worried about the chances of being published after he/she gets an agent. Here’s Miss Snark’s advice:

Right now what you are doing is the equivalent of what 15th century mapmakers in Spain did…..they drew pictures of monsters at the edge of the map. Right now you’re in Spain preparing to set sail and you’re looking at the map seeing only the unknown. Just remember that where they drew monsters is present day Hawaii.

The unknown is just that — unknown. But we do tend to populate it with scary things, don’t we?

Scoundrel Marketing

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From Booksquare, on The Da Vinci Code trial (which I blogged about previously here):

[W]e do appreciate the fact that the British taxpayers are covering the costs for the most intriguing marketing campaign of the season.

Sales of the plaintiffs’ book, Holy Blood, Holy Grail, are way up, of course.

I detect a categorical similarity to the post-Oprah James Frey bump. And I furthermore suggest all writers immediately consider ways they can grab headlines, post-publication, through a lurid public display of their baser natures.

UPATE: suit dismissed.

Handy promises

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At one point, the Jenny Craig weight loss company was running ads with the tagline “lose all the weight you can.”

All the weight you can?

How handy: a promise impossible to break!

Now here’s another: according to Damian Whitworth in the London Telegraph, lulu.com will turn unpublished writers into “potential J.K. Rowlings.”

But — unpublished writers are already potential J.K. Rowlings.

Lulu.com’s found, Bob Young, had his own brush with J.K. Rowlings potentiality.

The idea for Young’s digital publishing business came when he wrote his own book about Red Hat [the open source software developer he co-founded] to counter adverse media commentary on his company. The book sold well, about 20,000 copies, but he was disenchanted by the way it was edited, the tiny amount he was paid after the publishing house had stripped out costs and the enormous number of copies that languished unsold.

I think lulu.com is a wonderful company. If you have a niche book with a clearly identifiable market, easily and cheaply reachable through a manageable marketing campaign, lulu.com is definitely the way to go.

But does anyone really think that the only thing standing between a given writer’s obscurity and his Rowlingsesque success is the physical production of his book?

You get what you’re paid for ;-)

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Lee Gomes, technology columnist for the Wall Street Journal, does a bit of investigative journalism on one of the more charming opportunities brought to us via the world wide web.

That’s a sarcastic “charming” btw.

The opportunity: writers wanted. “To generate original content for websites. ”

Why? So the sites will rank high on search engines, earning ad dollars for their owners.

Gomes’ article focuses on the clutter aspect. “Legitimate information . . . risks being crowded out by junky, spammy imitations.”

What bothers me a lot more is that these people are scamming writers. The guy Gomes talked to, for instance, offers $100 for fifty 500-word articles. Cheap s.o.b.

25,000 words later — I bet you’d never even see your money.

Write, or buy a lottery ticket?

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In a Guardian article on POD (publish on demand) books, we find this charming side dish:

. . . 50% of all published books with an ISBN (International Standard Book Number) tag sell fewer than 250 copies and barely more than 1% of manuscripts submitted ever get published.

Interesting numbers; I don’t doubt they are true. Yeah, the odds are stacked against us.

What I don’t understand is how POD is supposed to help. Sure, by publishing yourself, you are, technically, um, “published.” But does anyone think that by self-publishing, you can improve your chances of selling more than 250 copies? Even if Amazon does list your book?

Sure, you bypass the multiple gateways of agents, editors, publishers, distributors, and booksellers. But not the readers. Ah, the readers . . .

Do you read the book, first?

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In the Washington Post, Louis Bayard considers movie adaptations of books, and remarks that he has a friend who refuses to watch an adaptation until after she’s “read the book.” He calls this an act of self-defence

because a movie adaptation, if it’s at all decent, will forever alter the way we see a literary work.

True. Yet when an adaptation is good, it gives such pleasure, doesn’t it?