The Guide to Literary Agents blog has a succinct rundown of the book publishing process in 25 steps. You think writing the manuscript is long and arduous? Just wait till it’s finished.
A writer's thoughts on books, games, design, and zombies.
Yearly Archives: 2010
James Frey’s fiction sweatshop.
This week’s literary scandal involves our very own mustachioed villain, James Frey, and his book-packaging company Full Fathom Five. Frey has been mentioned on this blog before as writing pseudonymously under the name Pittacus Lore in the YA sci-fi book I AM NUMBER FOUR
Frey’s company Full Fathom Five offers astonishingly bad publishing contracts to naive writers in MFA programs at Columbia, Princeton, and other esteemed universities.
The fact that Full Fathom Five is profiled on industry watchdog site Writer Beware speaks for itself.
What I find particularly repugnant about the whole fiasco is that Columbia University invited Frey to speak to its MFA students about the writing business and, with ineffable irony, “truth in fiction.” These same MFA students receive virtually no instruction or guidance about the writing biz—about what a legitimate and fair book contract should look like, about the function literary agents serve, any of it. Creative writing programs at most US universities focus wholly on the art of writing. When students’ first school-sanctioned exposure to a “published author” is a shark like Frey, it’s no surprise they sign away their souls without reading the fine print.
It’s too easy to say “shame on Frey,” who’s made his lucre as a literary con man. The real blame rests on Columbia and other MFA programs that invite wolves into the henhouse under a veneer of legitimacy.
Pantsers vs. plotters.
Writers tend to fall to one side of the plotting dichotomy: either they “pants” it, that is, write without an outline, by the seat of their pants; or they “plot,” which is pretty much what it sounds like. Author J.N. Duncan offers a succinct description of the difference between pantsers and plotters, which comes down to what drives a writer’s creativity: reaching the summit that’s in clear view from the foothills, or hacking through dense jungle full of mystery and surprise.
In retrospect, I started off my Zombie Novel as a plotter: the contour of the book was there, with the first act mapped out clearly and the following two more vaguely sketched. I knew my goals, if not the precise path I’d take to get to them. I started in the foothills, and I could make out the blurry summit in the distance, but I couldn’t always see the road ahead as it dipped and twisted.
As I wrote, I grew pantsier. The plotter mindset helped me set things in motion, but character drove events forward—character emotions, interactions, reactions. I found myself in heavy undergrowth, hacking blindly and blithely through the darkness. I knew of certain landmarks that lay along the route, certain events that had to happen, but most of it was a surprise to me. It’s amazing how it all fits together when you scramble out of the thickets of raw imagination. It may have been driven by nebulous, emotional processes, but some part of my brain retained a logistical vision of events and ensured we stuck to the course.
The pants approach has its drawbacks. I’ve had to revise sections where I was too deeply in pants-mode during key exposition sequences. Pantsing sucks when it comes to exposition, which is probably part of the reason many writers fall into the trap of cramming exposition into dialogue and infodump.
What I’ve learned is that I have to start with structure, abandon it as I work, but ultimately keep it in the back of my mind and always return to it. Neither a pantser nor a plotter be, but some hybrid, alternately inspired by limitation and specificity, and by blank canvas.
How brain tumors affect writers.
A beautiful, bittersweet piece by art critic Tom Lubbock, who was diagnosed with glioblastoma multiforme, a rare, aggressive brain tumor, in 2008. Lubbock’s tumor lies in the language processing center of his brain, and he experiences the slow loss of different “registers” of speech and language, which reveal the intricate way that language, speech, and writing are connected:
Now suppose that my speaking also encounters a small snag. Normally, I could assist myself by calling up, by envisaging, the letters or the phonemes of the words and spelling out more carefully and consciously the pronunciation. Now I can’t. And I become aware of this. I try, but I cannot visualise a letter.
Illiterates would never be able to do this. Their speech would never be assisted by this knowledge. The conclusion is that speaking and reading are not distinct capacities. Nor is writing simply an add-on, nor is it merely a matter of letters; it involves sound recognition and naming. The literate speaking is different from the illiterate speaking.
I think that loss of speech, and of understanding of speech, and of understanding of writing, and of coherent writing—these losses will amount to the loss of my mind. I know what this feels like and it has no insides, no internal echo. Mind means talking to oneself. There wouldn’t be any secret mind surviving in me.
Followup: What NaNo is really about.
After reading this comment on Carolyn Kellogg’s pro-NaNoWriMo piece yesterday, I had to quote it. The following comes from sixteen-year-old writer Moira:
As a sixteen year old girl who loves writing but rarely finishes anything she starts, I’m surprised that three days into my first NaNo I have 12,000 words and no intention of quitting. I don’t care if I fall into a coma tomorrow, wake up on the twenty-ninth and finish with 12,010 words: I’m doing my best, and I’m seeing this through. Already this has been a life-changing experience for me. I’ve never just written to write before. I’ve never gone a paragraph without deciding whether that pesky comma should be a semi-colon (I left it a comma). I’ve never written a character, knowing he wasn’t acting harsh enough, and just left it. I’ve never, ever in my writing “career” said: I’ll fix it when it’s done. And there’s something incredibly freeing about that.
I’m not stupid, and not that many of NaNoers are. I’m writing a trashy “romance with deep characterization” that I know will never in it’s lifetime get published. And I know next year’s will be just as bad, and the year after that. But it’s fun for me, as a teenager with hormones and guys on her mind, to write about hot guys falling for average girls like me, and it’s fun for my best friend to read, since I fill it chock full of inside jokes and I based it off actual stuff we do. Plus, it’s a stepping stone. I’ve always known that I would have to be extremely lucky to live off of writing, my favorite thing to do, and I have no intention of resting my hopes and dreams on it. If I ever get published—many, many years and writing seminars from now—I’d be on cloud nine. But I love it, and if NaNo makes me—or anyone else—a better writer for it, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that.
This girl gets it. Rock on, Moira.
To NaNo or not to NaNo?
November is the month of NaNoWriMo—National Novel Writing Month—a writers’ marathon where participants challenge themselves to write a 50,000-word novel in thirty days. Like a runners’ marathon, the event is geared to writers of diverse proficiency levels, but the resources and community primarily aim to encourage new or unfocused writers who are struggling to just get the raw words down.
The event tells writers to ignore their inner editor, to write with abandon, to not be afraid of churning out crap. Revision and polishing are for after; NaNoWriMo is all about breaking through inhibitions and getting the damn words out.
But as NaNoWriMo has gained publicity and legitimacy over the past decade—being endorsed by literary luminaries like Neil Gaiman—the naysayers have crawled out of their caves to prick at the bubble of NaNo excitement.
Salon contributor Laura Miller delivered this tirade against NaNoWriMo:
Frankly, there are already more than enough novels out there—more than those of us who still read novels could ever get around to poking our noses into, even when it’s our job to do so. This is not to say that I don’t hope that more novels will be written, particularly by the two dozen-odd authors whose new books I invariably snatch up with a suppressed squeal of excitement. … But I’m confident those novels would still get written even if NaNoWriMo should vanish from the earth.
The crux of Miller’s argument seems centered on the how-to-write industry, not so much NaNoWriMo itself. And in many ways, I agree with Ms. Miller, though my conclusions are different. There is certainly a surfeit of books, blogs, forums, workshops, and self-appointed experts on writing out there, all trying to sell you the magic secret that will enable you to write the next great novel and win a six-figure publishing contract in your spare time on weekends. These resources offer untested, unproven, and often conflicting advice. They prey on people’s dreams, like the dream of becoming a published author.
But is NaNoWriMo actually a part of the dubious how-to-write industry? Carolyn Kellogg, a Los Angeles Times contributor to the Jacket Copy book blog, responds to Miller:
Miller writes: “I say ‘commerce’ because far more money can be made out of people who want to write novels than out of people who want to read them.”
True. It’s called an MFA in creative writing. I’ll be paying off my loans for a long time.
So what is Miller really angry at here? The free, non-profit, community-driven event that encourages aspiring writers to discipline themselves and support their peers—or the mammon machine that sells dreams to dewy-eyed hopefuls?
Japanese kids fend off zombie.
A TV crew in Japan set up a fake zombie attack and lets some kids (who believe it’s real) fight the zombie off:
Notice how the polite zombie sends a letter to announce his upcoming attack, then takes his shoes off before entering the house. Japanese zombies are more genteel than your typical American zombie.
Publishing is not a crap shoot.
Author Victoria Strauss of the excellent watchdog blog for writers, Writer Beware, dishes out the straight truth on publishing that some struggling writers find hard to swallow:
Maybe 10% … of [the manuscripts] out there even approaches publishability—and of that small number, even fewer are polished, original, or interesting enough to be attractive to an agent or publisher. Granted, agents’ and editors’ decisions are at least partly subjective. But if you’ve written a marketable book, you’re not in competition with every other writer scrambling to get published—just with the publishable less-than-10%.
I’ve written on the subject of the “gatekeeper” theory of publishing before. The fact is, there really is a filter in place, and you really do have to write something good enough to pass it (exceptions made for celebrities and other cashcows, which don’t apply to the majority of us).
As Strauss explains, a well-written book has already crested 90% of the dreck that washes up against the gates of the publishing industry. If you’re not beating that 90%, then you have to ask some serious questions of yourself. Is the manuscript better than, say, 89% of the crapflood, and needs only light refinements to boost it over the gate? Or is it somewhere down in the 50th percentile, where serious work remains to be done, if not thrown out completely and started anew?
We unpublished writers also have a tendency to look at something like Twilight
Writers who dream of being published need to internalize the fact that publishing is a business. It’s not a college course where budding artists are nurtured. Business relies on fiscal projections, risk studies, marketing sleaze. There are product standards that must be met for publishers to compete with each other.
As Victoria Strauss says, it’s not a crap shoot.
Men write literary fiction and women write YA.
NPR ran a story today about the reactions of some bemused female authors to “Franzenfrenzy”—the furor from the literary establishment over FREEDOM
Author Jodi Picoult spearheaded the reaction to Franzen:
How else can the Times explain the fact that white male authors ROUTINELY are assigned reviews in both the Sunday review section AND the daily book review section (often both raves) “while so many other writers go unnoticed by their critics?”
The discussion of white male darlings of the literary establishment aside, I found it interesting when a commenter on NPR remarked about the other much-ballyhooed book release this week: Suzanne Collins’s trilogy-completing MOCKINGJAY
FREEDOM and MOCKINGJAY perfectly capture the current state of publishing: literary fiction is primarily written by white males, and white male literary fiction authors receive the lion’s share of promotion, coverage, and consequent success. Conversely, YA is primarily written by white women, who receive the lion’s share of success in that realm.
Renowned literary fiction by men is referred to as illustrative of “the way we live now.”
Renowned YA fiction by women is marveled at for how much cash it generates for its authoresses.
In many ways, this literary dynamic mirrors the struggle between genders in Western society. Implicit is the understanding that men are authoritative, worthy of being taken seriously; women are relegated to child-rearing and child-entertaining. When a man succeeds, he’s applauded for his intelligence and creativity, his masterful ability to portray modern life with wit and pathos. When a woman succeeds, we can’t stop talking about how much money she made, or how many kids (and adults) love her—imposing on her a sort of literary motherhood.
(Of course, quality YA goes far beyond children’s entertainment, but put a YA title beside a literary fiction doorstop and invite comparison by the literary establishment.)
The most overrated writers in American letters.
Anis Shivani wrote a scalding piece for The Huffington Post, ripping new stinkholes for 15 contemporary American writers he thinks are overrated. From an analysis of poet Louise Glück:
Utterly humorless—a characteristic common to the other mediocrities on this list. Adults are permanently grief-stricken (in the Creative Writing world, grief is the primary worthwhile emotion)—this obsession always comes with the paradox of trivialization of death (another characteristic common to those on this list).
This is something I’ve also noticed in modern fiction containing some degree of “literariness.” Characters wallow in their own misery, obsessed with feeling bad, but when something occurs that should incite true pathos—such as death—it’s treated with irreverence, as if the writer is admitting he doesn’t know how to handle real emotion, real loss.
Perhaps an inevitable consequence of writers churned through writing programs and workshops, taught to milk grief and misery—because pain is an easy substitute for honesty in fiction—without having experienced any of their own?