Category Archives: Writing

Bah to book overhype

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I recently picked up a paperback because its cover sported a glowing blurb by an author whose work I enjoy.

The book was a resounding disappointment, and, no dummy, I, I made a mental note to never trust a blurb in quite the same way again.

I’m comforted to learn that I am not alone. Heck no, I’m part of a trend, according to Damian Horner on Bookseller.com, who says that readers have become cynical about the rave reviews and gushing quotes that accompany so many book launches today.

I suspect we will soon see publishers working much more closely with bloggers and reading groups. They will run ongoing focus group panels and maybe some will even follow the Miramax model and ruthlessly target awards and prizes.

They already are. In an interview with conservative blogger/radio pundit Hugh Hewitt, for instance, Robert Ferrigno talks about how the publisher of his new political thriller, Prayers for the Assassin, spent “six figures” on website and blog marketing. (The website lets fans enter, virtually, the futuristic world of the novel.) Ferrigno predicts that in five years, “publishers will not be advertising in print media, except in very rare cases.”

These tactics work by generating word-of-mouth, which has credibility because the Mouth generating the Word tends to be a peer–a reader, just like you are, who has no vested interest in praising something that’s no good.

The weakness of this tactic, however, is that an amateur’s recommendations can be worthless, as well. Fifteen minutes scanning the reviews on Amazon is all you need to convince yourself of that ;-)

More on plots

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Not to be confused with moron plots. We’ll leave that topic for another day.

This past weekend, I picked up a copy of Monkey Love, Brenda Scott Royce, Feb. 2006, Penguin, given the face-up treatment royale on the “new releases” table at my local bookstore chain.

So I’m reading it (because why not have four or five books going at once?) and as I’ve been thinking about plotting, I notice that in the first chapter (19 pages) no less than four major plotlines are introduced: a girlfriend’s unplanned pregnancy; another girlfriend’s professional shennanigans; the protagonist’s preparation for an upcoming stand-up comedy gig; and the protagonist’s first encounter with he-who-will-emerge-as-the-love-interest.

Advantages:

1. Fast pacing? You betcha. You can’t have that much going on in under 20 pages without having . . . a lot going on.

2. Major interest grabation. Take your pick, there’s so much happening here, you’re bound to want to know how at least some of it works out.

3. Comedic effect. A caught-in-the-headlights straight man is a comedy staple. Plot breaking out right and left is a useful device for propelling a hapless protagonist toward that lite, happy ending nirvana we’re all rooting for-o.*

Disadvantages:

1. There’s a thin line between “madcap” and frenetic.

2. Pacing isn’t pacing unless it’s modulated from time to time. When the balance tips too far toward “hard plot” and too far away from the protagonists interior life, things start to feel downright speedy after awhile.

So what’s the answer. Dunno. But if the pendulum has swung toward “plot ’til you’re punch-drunk” (and I’m by no means sure it has btw — I have exactly one data point upon which to base this) I hereby Predict it will Swing Back.

*The “o” is so that I won’t be using a preposition to end that sentence with-o

Stitching a contemporary plot

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I now have three partials out to agents, which puts me at a crossroads as far as my completed novel goes. I could continue to query additional agents, but my gut says to hold off. See how this goes.

Which means that now, I wait. For quite awhile, probably. Months, probably.

So, the next question becomes: what do I do in the meantime, in my “for me” writing time, while I wait?

I’ve got two other novels outlined that feature the same protagonist as my finished ms, but I am inclined to go off, right now, in a completely different direction. This is partly by choice. I want to add another basket for my eggs. But also, a new character introduced herself to me over the weekend, and tonight, I met one of her companions.

I’m going back to them in a minute. But in the meantime, I am actually feeling a bit nervous, because I don’t know where these two are going to take me.

Contemporary literary fiction, being post modernist, is often stitched together by absurdity; absurdity serves as a kind of surrogate plot. I don’t aspire to be a literary novelist, however. I want something much simpler (ah, yes, “lower,” lol): to tell stories. I want to tell stories and get out of the way in the telling.

So I have this woman. She’s divorced, I can see where she’s landed, I can hear her voice. But I don’t know her story. That’s what makes me nervous. It would be easy to fall back on absurdity, and it’s funny to find how tempting that is, at my age, this distant from my twenties & from college. I’m having to make myself not write, as I hunt about for the story, lest I begin filling up pages with absurdity, which will pass the time, but what good is passing time when the end of it all is a select all/delete?

Do you want Google to digitize your book?

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Here’s a Bookforum panel discussion on the implications of Google’s book scanning initiative. The participants are Nick Taylor, president of the Authors Guild; Allan R. Adler, AAP vice president for legal and governmental affairs; and Lawrence Lessig, Stanford Law School professor and public domain advocate.

I haven’t formed a clear opinion on this issue, save for one thing: I think Google should make it an opt-in process for copyright holders. IOW, don’t touch my book(s) until I tell you it’s okay to scan them. Needless to say, that would make the process much more cumbersome and expensive.

OTOH, Google is the one with the deep pockets. As one of the panelists says in this piece:

Everyone knows most authors don’t make a living as authors. They have some other job or jobs that allow them the luxury of writing. And to be denied a potential source of revenue, whether the purpose is altruistic or not, is both galling and disappointing.

The topic of making a living writing books — or, more precisely, how rare that is — was the topic of a couple of literary agent blog posts this week. So the question is, would Google’s book scanning scheme further reduce writers’ already meager returns?

What genre am I?

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To sell a novel, you’re usually best off getting an agent. To get an agent, the first step is the “query letter.”

A query letter is your mountainous labor of love distilled down into a couple of paragraphs. But not just any “couple of paragraphs.” It has to be a couple of paragraphs that grab an agent’s interest, raise the possibility that you’re a good writer, and plant the idea that your book may have a market.

Also, it can’t set off any danger bells. You can’t come across as desperate (“if this novel doesn’t sell, it’s all over, and I’m taking at least 46 people with me, right after I eat the last saltine in my cupboard”) or hopelessly amateurish (“you’ll notice a lot of spelling errors in my manuscript, but I promise I’ll clean them up in draft #2”).

Alas, some of those danger bells can’t be taught, because nobody knows what they are except the agents themselves, and although they will happily share their information with you there’s no way of ensuring you’ll stumble over it in time.

This is experience talking. About two weeks ago, after I’d sent off some eight e-queries that described my novel as “chick lit,” I came across this blog entry by agent Kristin Nelson. Turns out there’s a shake-down going down in chick lit right now. Chick lit was hot. Now it’s not. And none of those queries resulted in so much as a nibble.

Fortunately I hadn’t broadcast that query to every agent in the known universe. So I revised it to describe my novel as “commercial women’s fiction.” Also fortunately, that description isn’t a stretch. My novel has a chick litty voice, but doesn’t fit into the genre 1:1. No mentions of clothing by brand name, it’s not set in NYC or London, and my protagonist is an animal control officer, not an office employee. Oh, and her best friend isn’t a gay male. ( “Not that there’s anything wrong with that,” lol)

Since I made that revision, I’ve queried another five agents, and of those, I’ve received two requests for partials (first 40-50 pages and a synopsis). I can live with those odds :-)

That said, lest I tempt fate, let me quickly add: I’m still a long, long way away from getting an agent at all, let alone seeing this novel in print. But based on my experience, I’d say that with a query letter, you need to walk a fine line between giving specific information about your project and pigeon-holing it in a way that may work against you. If your novel fits neatly into a particular genre, by all means, say so. You don’t want to bother agents who aren’t interested in selling that type of book. But if you can stick to more general categories, you may increase the odds that you’ll at least get a few pages of your ms into the door. Which is what a query letter is supposed to do.

The “literary assumption of victimhood”

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Wow. I swear, that phrase was on the tip of my tongue, and I discover that it’s been said. By “the British writer and psychologist Anthony Daniels” (aka Theodore Dalrymple) and quoted in a Washington Post piece by Anne Applebaum, who notes that James Frey is only the newest in a history of lying memoirists:

These fabricators reinvent themselves not as heroes but as victims, a status they sometimes attain by changing their ethnicity. Among them are Bruno Grosjean, aka Binjamin Wilkomirski, whose touching, prize-winning, “autobiographical” tale of a childhood spent in the Majdanek concentration camp turned out to be the fantasy of the adopted son of a wealthy Swiss couple. Another was Helen Darville, aka Helen Demidenko, whose touching, prize-winning “autobiographical” tale of a Ukrainian girl whose father was a former SS officer turned out to be the fantasy of a middle-class British girl living in the suburbs of Brisbane, Australia.

Applebaum next mentions Nasdijj, who was outed last week by Matthew Fleisher at LA Weekly. Nasdiff — real name, Tim Barrus — had been posing as a Navajo memoirist. To much critical aclaim.

Fleisher interviews a real Navajo who mentions that Nasdijj isn’t even a real name in the Navajo tongue of Athabaskan. It’s gibberish.

Alrighty, then, here are my questions. What would drive a writer to assume the identity of a martyr in order to attract attention? Is it a variation of Munchausen syndrome? Or are these people simply afraid to achieve excellence as an expression of personal triumph? That is, is this a way for gifted writers to avoid feeling guilty about their gifts?

More posts on James Frey here, here, and here.

Update: Esquire wrote a piece on Barrus…

Because some blog posts are damn good reading

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Best-posts-medium-static

I was a writer long before I was a blogger. Now that I do blog, I find I spend a fair amount of time polishing my posts before I hit “publish” (and sometimes after). And I also admire other bloggers who craft well-written posts, even when I don’t agree with the blogger’s position on an issue.

So, unsurprisingly, I think Mr. Snitch’s “Best Posts of 2005” concept — a compilation of posts that are compelling and well-written enough to transcend their default “thought of the day” status — is brilliant, and serves an as-yet-unmet market need:

Millions of bloggers, thousands of good posts, all statements that could describe the fabric of a year. But there’s no way to access them, because traffic alone won’t point the way. The 25 most-trafficked blogs (assuming for a moment that traffic is the standard of excellence) produced only 4 of the most-trafficked posts. (Figures from BlogPulse.) This crudely demonstrates our basic contention that compelling posts are not necessarily the product of ‘popular’ blogs.

Beyond that, quality posts don’t necessarily set off traffic alarms. They fly right under the radar, through no fault of their own. For all the self-publishing software tools we enjoy, the primary work of a publisher is not (and never has been) to get books printed. The job of a publisher is to discover, expose, elevate and promote worthwhile work. In that regard, the blogosphere is almost completely barren. Glenn Reynolds and Lucianne.com do the job day to day, but such trusted editors are in short supply. And they don’t produce a yearend archive, a wrapup – a time capsule.

Here are the posts. And here is information on how other bloggers can get involved.

Before you connect with Amazon

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Amazon Connects is a blogging service hosted by Amazon for published writers. In theory, it’s a handy publicity tool to help you leverage the site’s interactivity and build relationships with potential readers.

But before you sign up, make sure you read the fine print of the program’s Terms and Conditions:

For all Author Materials that you post or submit in connection with the Program (including any trademark or similar rights in them), you hereby grant Amazon a non-exclusive, royalty-free, perpetual and irrevocable right and license throughout the world in any media to: (1) use, reproduce, publish, translate, create derivative works from, distribute, and display all of your Works, and (2) use and display your Additional Materials in connection with your participation in the Program. Amazon may engage independent contractors to provide services in connection with the Program, and the rights you grant us in these Terms and Conditions extend to any such independent contractors.

In other words, your other words aren’t your own.

You also can’t delete your own posts after they’ve been published — only edit them.