Category Archives: Writing

book reviews, Writing

Book Review – One Writer’s Beginning by Eudora Welty

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Eudora Welty is one writer I don’t remember reading. Possibly in an English class somewhere we were assigned one of her stories and I read it. I know I haven’t read any of her novels. Yet, when I saw the small paperback One Writer’s Beginning at a thrift store for 50 cents, I bought it. I was pretty sure I would gain something from it.

The book was assembled from lectures Welty gave at Harvard University in 1983. She was from Jackson, Mississippi, to parents who moved there from Ohio and West Virginia when they were married in 1904. Welty was born the next year, to be joined by two brothers over the next five years. In the first part of the book, titled “Listening”, Welty tells how her earliest childhood years, and how they fed her imagination. She doesn’t talk about writing at all.

In the next section, “Learning To See”, she tells of family vacations back to Ohio and West Virginia, and spending time with the extended family. Train trips and road trips are part of this section. A road trip in 1917 was quite an adventure. Each set of grandparents, uncles, aunts, and cousins had an impact on Eudora. From abundant story telling on her mom’s side to an absolute ignoring of the past for sake of looking toward the future on her dad’s, she learned to look to the past and the future.

The third section, “Finding A Voice,” is where Welty tells how the events of her life became scenes in stories, and neighbors and teachers became characters. Welty even says how she put some of herself into one character.

All in all, the book didn’t give a lot of information for writing help. It was not inspirational, or motivational. It didn’t really provide hints on the writing craft. it’s a straight memoir. If it had anything to help a writer it was: Use the events and people in your life to populate your stories. That’s not exactly an earth-shattering revelation. Despite the lack of immediate benefit, I’m going to keep the book, and possibly re-read it in a few years.

The previous owner of this book made a note here and there. Inside the back was written, “Purchased at University of Arkansas Fayetteville, Ark June 1987”. Most of the marginalia was a single word, such as “genealogy,” “scenes,” “library,” “Latin”. Many words or phrases are underlined. But, what caught my eye was the single word written on the introductory page: “Interesting”. Ah ha, Dr. Farina, former high school English classmate. I’m not the only one who find that an acceptable word to characterize reaction to a composition.

Doctor Luke's Assistant, Fifty Thousand Screaming People, Writing

Editorial Silence

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In the seven (almost eight, actually) years I’ve been trying to be published, I think my biggest gripe against the publishing industry is what I call editorial silence. Let me think, though, if you include submittals to literary magazines I’ve actually been submitting for about ten years. There’s always a time lag between submittal and answer. Magazines, agents, and book acquisitions editors almost all state what their response time is: 6 weeks, 2 months, 3 months, 6 months, whatever. It’s a little different if you meet an agent or editor at a conference and they ask you to submit something. That’s a little less formal, though I suspect their posted response times could be considered to apply.

From my perspective, I don’t mind the slow response. What I mind is non-response, or responses so long after the stated response time that it might as well be a non-response. That’s the way this business works. A non-response most likely means a no. Most editors say to send them a reminder e-mail once you’re a little past their stated response time. When you do you’ll get a no.

Some examples. I met with an agent at a conference in Kansas City in November 2007. He asked me to send him the complete manuscript of Doctor Luke’s Assistant, as he was planning to represent more fiction in the coming years. I did so about a week later, and heard nothing. The following April I learned this same agent was going to be at a conference I was hoping to attend the next month in North Carolina. I thought we could meet then to discuss my manuscript, if warranted, so I e-mailed him, now five months after he requested the material, and asked for a status report. He said he couldn’t find my mss and would I send it again. I did, and talked to him briefly at the next conference. He said, “Your writing is strong, but I don’t know if I can sell it. I’m still reading it. Send me a reminder e-mail every week until I respond.”

That sounded strange, but I did as he asked. About two weeks later he passed on my book. Looking back, I now suspect he hadn’t even looked at the book when I saw him the second time, and he was just giving me “agent-speak”.

Another example. At that same North Carolina conference in May 2008, I met with another agent and pitched In Front of Fifty Thousand Screaming People. She asked me to send her a partial (30 or so pages) and a proposal. I did so promptly, and heard nothing for four months. I sent a reminder e-mail, and heard nothing for two months. I sent another reminder e-mail, and she responded, passing on my book because she already represented something similar.

How strange that these two agents, who I met with and who requested me to send them some material, should totally fail to respond. Add to that about thirty magazine submittals where I’ve either never heard back or heard back up to a year after submittal, and I’ve concluded that the submittal process is broken across the board. Some writers call it the “query-go-round”. Others have a less complimentary term for it.

It’s enough to drive an unpublished author to self-publishing. For now, I guess I’ll go do something that will make me some money.

self-publishing, Writing

Self-publishing Study: Defining the Task

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As I reported in my last blog post, I’m embarking on a study of self-publishing, to see if that is an acceptable and attractive alternative to traditional publishing (i.e. with a print based, royalty publisher). The last couple of days I’ve been trying to define the problem. It is complicated in that now, as compared to say ten years ago, self-publishing has become more complicated. Now there is e-book self-publishing in addition to print.

Print self-publishing hasn’t changed all that much. You plunk down a chunk of money, give the e-publisher your manuscript, and they make a book out of it. You buy some number of books required by the publisher, and you sell you books yourself with no help from the publisher.

Changes have happened in print self-publishing. Print-on-demand machines have brought down the up-front costs, as well as reduced the amount of inventory the writer needs to carry. Of course, the cost for this is the higher cost per book printed. It used to be that self-published books were of dubious quality, both the writing and the printing. Paper quality was low; binding quality was low; cover art quality was low.

The publisher did nothing in terms of line editing and copy editing. So if the writer couldn’t do that, or didn’t pay a freelance editor to do that, the quality of the finished writing was poor. And, let’s face it. The gatekeepers in the publishing industry (acquisitions editors and agents), filtered out most of the poor material, the writing that was just plain bad. Lots of these manuscripts became self-published books. That part of the print self-publishing industry doesn’t seem to have changed.

Now comes e-book self-publishing. E-books have been around for a few years, and sales have been soaring while sales of hardback books and paperbacks are pretty flat. Recent changes in pricing structure and royalty share from Amazon and some other sellers, as well as improved platforms to allow authors easier production, have made this much more attractive route to self-publishing. Cheaper too.

But this has spawned a whole new language, it seems. And a whole new list of things to learn. I’ve been reading back posts on Joe Konrath’s blog, and following links from there to other e-self-published writers or related services. Looks as if I’ll have to learn what Smashwords is and how it related to e-self-published. And PubIt. And learn how to work with the Kindle and Nook formats. And the iPad.

This research is going to be harder than I thought. Stay tuned.

self-publishing, Writing

Strategic Thinking for 2011

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In previous posts on this blog, I’ve written about my journey into the writing life. The idea for Doctor Luke’s Assistant came to me. I wrote the novel, began looking into how to get it published, and learned publishers don’t want to publish someones book—they want to publish career writers. That was in 2003, and that was okay, for as I wrote the first novel, ideas for many other novels began to occupy gray cells.

Then I learned that the desire to be a career writer was not enough. You needed a platform (i.e. a ready made audience) or almost no publisher would touch you. So I switched to freelancing for platform building. That was in 2009, and was okay, since I enjoyed that type of writing and have seen a little success with it. I also worked on Bible studies, and enjoyed writing them.

During this time, my primary writing goal was to have a book, preferably a novel, published by a royalty paying publisher, the type of publisher who pays an advance against royalties. This, to me, was a sign that my writing was good. An alternate route was always open: self-publishing. I have resisted that for a number of reasons. First, it can be expensive, both to pay the set-up fees and to purchase a quantity of books that may or may not sell. Second, self-publishing carries a stigma, a statement that this writer is not good enough to make it with a real writer so he publishes himself with a vanity press. Third, the conventional wisdom is that no royalty publisher will ever touch someone who first self-publishes. Fourth, the quality of self-published books is often very poor. So why would I want to self-publish?

However, several things are changing in the self-publishers. Availability of print on demand (POD) type printing machines have brought down the cost of set-up (although often with the requirement that books cost more). The quality of many self-published books (cover art, paper quality, binding) has greatly improved. There are still lots of lousy self-published books added to the market due to bad writing, but good ones can rise above the chaff.

The big change, however, is the emergence of the e-book as an alternative means of distributing books to readers. This takes care of much of the cost. The writer gets a bigger share of the price paid; there’s no inventory; cover art can be just as good as with printed books. There are lots of e-book mediums, from the Sony Reader to Amazon Kindle to B&N Nook, and even more. And, perhaps most importantly, many writers seem to be having success with it. Joe Konrath reports on his blog about these successes.

So maybe I need to rethink my previous decision. I’m going to take at least two months, maybe longer, to consider what to do. I’ve had these sorts of inspirations before, and don’t want to make a quick decision. Don’t mind me if I discuss this out loud on the blog.

goals, Writing

New Year, Old Goals Revised

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We arrived home about 8 PM last night, after 10 days and 9 nights on the road. How nice to have time last night in my own reading chair, and at my familiar work station in The Dungeon. How nice to sit up till 1:30 AM reading. Today is the day our company decided to have for New Year holiday, so I’m home. My wife and mother-in-law are still in bed as I begin to write this, though both have stirred at times in the last four hours.

I was up at 8:30 AM, tired of the prone position, and ready to drink some coffee and read. So I’ve been doing that. My mind thought to the new year. I’m not one to make resolutions, though goal setting is always possible. I thought about my writing career, and what I would like to accomplish. So I wrote some goals, quickly, without giving a lot of thought to exactly how achievable these are. I used to post monthly goals on this blog, but gave that up early last year. I will, however, post the goals I wrote on the last page of my current journal notebook.

  • Finish In Front of Fifty Thousand Screaming People. Currently at 15,000 on its way to 85,000 words, it’s well along but far from done. I will consider finished to mean having the book completely written and having gone through one round of edits.
  • Finish A Harmony of the Gospels. The harmony is done, and I’m working on passage notes and appendixes. This goal is definitely achievable.
  • Write 100 articles for Suite101.com. This might be a stretch. I have 116 written and three started. This is a good goal, one I should try very hard to meet.
  • Continue writing for Buildipedia.com, with a goal of earning at least $2000 from articles there.
  • Finish the Bible study I’m currently researching, To Exile and Back. This has turned out to be more involved than I originally expected. In a vacuum it would be easily achievable, but with other writing to do I’m not sure.
  • Plan, research, and write a small group study Essential John Wesley. This has been on my mind for some time. I’ve been mulling over what I would consider to be essential of his writings, and may even have a few notes somewhere.
  • Work on my small group study book Screwtape’s Good Advice. I began this three years ago because I had a publisher in mind for it, and prepared a detailed outline and four sample chapters before meeting with that publisher at a conference. When, after a considerable delay, the publisher said he wasn’t interested, I let it lapse. But it’s a good idea (if I say so myself), and so would like to follow-through with some more of the chapters.
  • Develop the Bible study Good King, Bad King. I began this a year or two ago, doing two lessons in it, but then didn’t find time to work on it further. I’d like to at least know the length of the lesson series, have an outline of the lessons, and know the research needed prior to writing. The actual writing, if the planning proves there’s really something worth doing here, is most likely a 2012 project.
  • Blog at least 120 times. Only 119 to go.

So there they are: 2011 writing goals, with some justification added and some thoughts on how achievable they are. I may check in from time to time on what I’m doing on them.

Christmas, Genealogy, Writing

Holiday Withdrawals

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That’s one good thing about the holidays: They give you a chance to withdraw from life, if only for a brief time, and forget the normal things and think of and do different things.

This Christmas we left home on the 23rd and drove to Meade, Kansas. A little more than 7 hour drive, north to Joplin then across southern Kansas to the beginning of the high plains. The route is beautiful, through quaint little towns like Baxter Springs (on old Route 66), Chepota, Wellington, Medicine Lodge, and Coldwater. The landforms are varied, with the vegetation gradually thinning the farther west you get, along with the houses, and grain elevators becoming the dominant man made feature, other than the asphalt our tires hum on. Ranch land and farmland alternate. The winter wheat looks good this year. We saw lots of evidence of harvested cotton, which is a crop changes from years past.

Once in Meade, our Internet service was rather short lived, due to a computer failure of the wireless Internet service we used. So even brief checks of Facebook and e-mail became impossible. I had to delay my blog post, wasn’t able to track my page views and income on Suite101 (which, as it turned out, didn’t matter due to massive computer failures there that left the writers unable to access statistics for several days and which still isn’t fully rectified). So I just partook in family activities. Ate too much. Played lots of Rummycube. Attended church services. Talked with relatives. Drove past places of my wife’s childhood. Visited the museum. Ate even more. Talked even more. Alas, saw no football this last weekend, since neither the cousin or her mom had a sports package with their Direct TV.

Through all of this, I didn’t think too much about writing, except when Lynda’s brother kept asking me about the next version of my biography of their great-grandfather. We toured his ranch on Monday, first time I’ve been there in 35 years. We visited with the woman who now owns the spread, and she wanted to buy a copy of the book, Seth Boynton Cheney: Mystery Man of the West. Actually, she wants two (one delivered, and one to be printed). This is my first “book”, self-published on company copiers with relatively simple graphics, plastic comb binding, and lots of genealogy tables and information. But it was nice to have someone express some interest in the book. I’ve given away about 20 copies to relatives, maybe even 30 copies, and before this the only ones to express any interest in it are Lynda’s brother, one cousin in California, one cousin in England, and the local museum curator. Everyone else I’ve given it to has said absolutely nothing. Not one word of feedback.

Of course, that’s what I’ve come to expect from relatives and my writing. Almost no one is interested. One of Lynda’s cousins asks, every time I see her, if I’m still writing poetry, but never asks to see any. It seems to be more of a courtesy thing than real interest. And no relative, knowing I write novels, has ever expressed an interest in reading them. That is, until this trip. Two in-laws of that same cousin said they’d like to read Doctor Luke’s Assistant. So I’ll print and send them the latest version, and see what happens.

Well, I don’t want to exaggerate. My cousin Sue read Doctor Luke’s Assistant serially as I was writing it. She is a writer too (and a regular reader of this blog, I believe), and she expressed interest. Although, I’ve never bought a copy of her book and read it. So maybe I shouldn’t be too hard on relatives.

But it was nice to leave the pressure of office, writing, stock market, and all things regular for a few days. Here I am now, in Oklahoma City at my daughter and son-in-law’s house, where computer access is easy, checking Suite 101 and e-mail and firing off blog posts. I’m still ignoring most of my normal life, though a little football would be nice. We’ll head home more likely Saturday. Thus we’ll be on our normal Sunday schedule. I’ll be back to writing. I’ll be able to watch all the football I can stand.

But I’ll think fondly of our week away from the routine, and hope for something similar next year.

Fifty Thousand Screaming People, Writing

Hate the Villain

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Since some readers of my blog might not click on the comments, they might miss out on the discussion I’ve had with my friend Gary concerning villains. This has to do with posts I’ve made previously about what I’ve learned in writing classes (at conferences) about heroes and villains. The conventional wisdom is that fictional heroes must have faults that they overcome, and fictional villains must have some amount of virtue lest they become cardboard characters, someone who is not believable. I began this discussion because of my observations of Lord Voldemort in the Harry Potter series, a villain who seems to have no virtues, and thus successfully defies the conventional wisdom.

I have concluded that the experts are wrong. The hero does not have to have any virtues. The villain must simply be someone the reader dislikes, even hates. As Gary said in a comment to an earlier post, let his/her evil traits be very evil, exaggerated even, so that we can see our own negative traits in contrast to his/her. “Yes, I have my faults, but Voldemort is much more evil than I would ever be.”

So now, what do I do with my villains? In In Front of Fifty Thousand Screaming People I have two villains: Tony Mancini, a New York Mafia Don, and Colt Washburn, a Chicago Mafia Don. Both have their eyes and hooks into the protagonist, Chicago Cubs pitcher Robo Ronny Thompson, a naive farm boy who breaks into the Big Leagues. I have Mancini as being too nice to be a Mafia Don. He grew up with some refinement and a distaste for violence. He dislikes having to resort to killing as a business solution. Yet Thompson’s success could mean his downfall, and so he sets in motion things that are evil, while hating doing it.

Right now I don’t really have anything in Colt Washburn’s character that would mitigate his evil. But Thompson’s success would mean his success. He would win his eight figure be with Mancini, bringing about his downfall and possibly take over his turf. So Washburn, who was a Chicago street thug who worked his way up to be the head of the Chicago rackets, employs the evil powers he has to try to guarantee Thompson’s success. The twist is that the nicer Don is doing all he can to bring about an evil result, and the more evil Don is doing all he can to bring about a good result. Well, if you consider the Cubs beating the Yankees in the World Series a good result, which most of America would.

So what to do? I’m only 15,000 words in to a planned 80,000 word novel. I could easily change either Mancini or Washburn. I could find a virtue for Washburn, or I could make Mancini more evil than he is. I guess I’ll think about it some over the holidays, and maybe get back to work on the novel in the New Year.

Fifty Thousand Screaming People, Writing

Still Thinking About Literary Villains

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In response to my post about literary villains, my friend Gary left some comments. The gist of what he wrote was the people like to dislike the villain. If you give them some virtue, the reaction will be that they feel sorry for the villain. Then they won’t hate him enough. Then their enjoyment of the literary experience will be reduced, because they will not be able to hate the villain enough. At least, I think that’s an accurate summary. Gary, feel free to comment if I didn’t get that right.

Part of this all must be the role the villain plays. In fact, perhaps the word villain is part of the problem. Take Scrooge for instance. He certainly starts out as a villain, but goes through a character arc that has him come out the hero. He is the protagonist who goes through a transformation. Darth Vader is the same. He is the antagonist who goes through a transformation from bad to good—or actually from good to bad to good when all six movies are considered. He is certainly villainous, but ends up good.

Voldemort fulfills a different function. He is a villain who stays a villain throughout the seven books, and in fact seems to get more villainous as the story progresses. In the back story, it’s clear he wasn’t always a bad guy (again, I’m basing this on the movies only, since I haven’t read the books). I understand he doesn’t go through a bad to good transformation, so remains a villain to the end. We hate Voldemort in the end. We love Scrooge in the end. We sort of love Darth Vader in the end, though he has less time to make amends than Scrooge did.

This all brings me back to my beginning point: Is the conventional wisdom, as taught in the writing classes I’ve attended, correct? Must we give our villains antagonists a virtue or two, to flesh them out and not be cardboard characters? I’m still working through that. Maybe I can leave Colt Washburn, Chicago Mafia Don in In Front of Fifty Thousand Screaming People, as a bad dude and not worry about giving him any redeeming qualities.

Doctor Luke's Assistant, fiction, Fifty Thousand Screaming People, Writing

Literary Villains: Is the Conventional Wisdom Right?

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Attend any class on writing fiction and before long you will hear this mantra: Your heroes must have some faults and your villains must have some good traits. You can’t make your heroes so ooey-gooey nice and perfect that they are unbelievable. And you can’t make your villains so absolutely awful that there is nothing redeemable in them. Well, you can, but your novel will be the worse for your doing so.

This was news to me when I first heard this in a fiction writing class at a writers conference, but it kind of makes sense. Fictional characters ought to reflect real life to some extent. Few people in real life are totally good or totally bad. Actually, I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say no one is totally good or totally bad. Even if a novel is fantasy, and doesn’t include humans at all, we human readers judge the novel by our human experience, and the non-human characters must be believable and real based on our human experiences.

But in literature, is this true? Do successful writers always give their heroes faults and their villains virtues? For heroes, I think this is probably true. A big part of any heroes’ quest is to overcome obstacles, both those that the world throws at them and those that are within them. But for villains, is this so?

I’m thinking of the Harry Potter series, and of Harry and Voldemort. Now, I must preface this by saying I’ve not read the books! I intend to, and will be doing so within a year, I think. I’m basing this on the movies. I’ve seen all seven, and those who have both read the books and seen the movies indicate the movies are fairly faithful to the books. Harry has his faults. We easily see this in his movie portrayal. But does Voldemort have any virtues?

I looked hard for Voldemort virtues in the movies, and haven’t found any. I suppose you might say he has a virtue of making an accurate assessment of his chances in a fight against Harry. He says he could not overcome Harry’s wand and that Harry has a type of wizardry, provided by Lily Potter, that he, Voldemort, needs something more to overcome. He doesn’t pump himself up by ascribing his failure to kill Harry to bad luck. But that’s a pretty small virtue, I think.

We might be able to have some sympathy for Voldemort based on the circumstances of his birth and parentage. But sympathy and virtue are not the same.

So, as I write my fiction and flesh out characters, I wonder just how much virtue I should add to the antagonists, the villains. What good characteristics should I give to Tony Mancuso, the Mafia Don who wants to prevent the success of phenom pitcher Ronny Thompson, the hero of my In Front of Fifty Thousand Screaming People? Should I add a couple of good characteristics to Claudius Aurelius, the corrupt government official who want to stop Luke from writing a biography of Jesus in Doctor Luke’s Assistant? I’ve worked hard to give these villains some redeeming qualities, but I’m wondering if it’s a waste of time. Perhaps readers like their villains to be really, really bad—to hate them thoroughly, not to feel a smidgen of sympathy for them. Certainly, if Voldemort’s abject villainy contributes to the success of the Harry Potter books, one would think that is the case.

What say you, my few readers? Do you want the villains in the novels you read to have a virtue or two? Do you want to feel some sympathy for the antagonist, and think, “Oh, if only his parents had treated him better he wouldn’t have turned out so bad.”? Or do you just want to hate the villain and love the hero?

An inquiring novelist wants to know.

Writing

Writing Stops, but the Ideas Never Do

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As I mentioned a few posts back, I’m not worrying about writing stuff for a while. My works-in-progress are on the shelf (or actually the desk, work table, or end table) until after the holidays. Oh, in the next couple of weeks if an unexpected free hour comes my way, I might work on something, but I’m not planning on it.

So the only writing I plan on doing before the end of the year is the two articles I have under contract for Buildipedia, and my share of the family collaborative Christmas letter that goes in our Christmas card every year. I’ll keep up with this blog too, hopefully at a three posts per week pace.

How can I, you ask, call myself a writer if I don’t write? How can I turn it off, leave pen on table, hands off keyboard, and do other things? Wouldn’t I burst from the inward pressure to write? Or if I don’t burst, can I really call myself a writer? Or think that I have a “call” to write.

We’ll find out. It helps that the other things I must do are important, so that I know I’m pushing writing aside, not for the urgent, but for the important. I know, too, that this time of alternative busyness will pass. This is not a tunnel without light, but with a clearly defined end. And as I said above, this is not a writing “fast” such that I must not write, but rather a well set table in life that includes many other entrees right now. I can still sample the writing if I want to, as I did yesterday. I wrote a quick sonnet to post on the Suite101 writers forums, and I began a new article for Suite101, something that came up unexpectedly but which I think I can knock out with minimal effort. And, I’m still doing research reading for the next Bible study I will write.

So in general I’m not writing. But I find that I can shut down writing, but the ideas then seems to flow faster than ever. Until this week I had four ideas rolling around in my head about on-line writing things I could try, things significantly different than what I’m writing now, things I plan to mull over a long time before really trying. Wednesday as I was driving home from church, a fifth idea of a similar nature came to mind. I began mulling that, and recalled the other four for comparison. No, wait, I could only remember three of the four! What had happened to that other one? I wracked my brain, search for sheets of paper with apt scribbles, looked through other things I’d written for a clue. Nothing. The idea was gone. I had only four when I should have had five.

But wait, last night I went back to mulling again, and the missing idea was back. I have five ideas to mull, ideas about new ventures and a new way to publish on-line. The mulling will continue for some months before I go beyond mulling.

But other ideas have come to mind. Articles for Buildipedia, that the editor has expressed interest in but which I’ve asked to be delayed till the new year. Ideas for articles for Suite101, maybe twenty of them. Ideas for scenes and dialogue for In Front of Fifty Thousand Screaming People. Ideas for putting my Bible studies into publishable form.

No, the ideas never stop. Which is one of the reasons I think of myself as a writer. I will never have a shortage of ideas in the few decades I have left to produce works of imagination, as Macaulay used to call them.

After this brief hiatus, I shall write on.