Tag Archives: Writing Advice

Just tell a goddamn story

January 17, 2013 6:32 pm / 8 Comments /

Another writing post from the indefatigable Caleb J. Ross… — PJ

Just Tell a Goddamn Story

It’s been my experience that new and veteran writers alike would often do well to circumnavigate classically learned fiction processes entirely and instead focus on one universally important guideline: tell a goddamn story.

By graduation, any university-trained fiction writer will have hacked through years of jargon-infused, overwrought bramble en route the elusive Perfect Piece of Fiction, emerging from the academic experience with a portfolio a few inches fatter, but eluded still.* I’ve met graduates who were stunned, yes stunned, that their nautical themed prose poetry chapbook, despite its technical and linguistic superiority to the mass market paperback tomes filling Wal-Mart shelves, somehow evaded the throngs of avid readers and with them the six-figure advances thrust upon those “Pattersons and Evanobitches” and their knee-padded, open-throated agents. Yes, stunned.

Why the disconnect? Why, after years of studying and perfecting the mechanics of writing are would-be professional writers left to roam as hobbyists?

Two reasons: 1) a false belief that consumers need art, and 2) a false belief that the literary, and all that term implies, is meant to supplant plot.

Function first, then form. Never, for the professionally minded writer, the other way around.

Consumers don’t need art

Fiction writing students are encouraged the way any visual artist is encouraged, to create something of beauty, something with cerebral staying power. The problems is that while this mentality is great for holistic self-worth and liberation (re: liberal arts) from the hard sciences, in the all-important supply v. demand economy not many people care that you created something pretty. People can see pretty for free by looking out their windows.

What people do want is comfort, an escape from everyday life. I know what you’re thinking: “But Caleb, there are plenty of literary masterpieces that make fortunes for their authors.” First, there are fewer than you probably imagine. Second, those literary masterpieces may be technically and linguistically brilliant, but they are amazing stories as well. They sure as hell aren’t prose poems chapbooks.**

Function first, then form. Wall first, then paint. Story first, then the flourishes.

During the 2010 AWP conference in Denver, Colorado, author Tod Goldberg said something important. Very important. He revealed that he teaches writing in his classes as a trade. It’s his job (I’m paraphrasing) to ensure writing students are able to actually work as writers. What a concept, right? This concept once again came to my attention just a few weeks ago when Jan Friedman authored a blog post titled “Commodity Publishing, Self-Publishing, and The Future of Fiction” which explores the idea of story as a product, writing as a commodity. Be sure to check out the comments; to some readers, Jane’s words come across nothing less than sacrilege. ***

Calling a work literary should never be a way to mask your terrible story-telling

Most university level writing classes emphasize all else above plot—focusing on elements such as character development, empathy, metaphor, allegory, and on and on, which I will refer to as “academic elements” for the sake of simplicity—to the extent that a susceptible student might truly believe that round characters and a few footnotes (to help out all those future critics, of course) are all that a story needs. While I agree that academic elements are an extremely important component of a strong piece of literary fiction, the remaining portion—plot—cannot be forgotten.

Function first, then form.

The priority placed on academic elements may be the result of an assumed understanding and appreciation of plot. Perhaps the thought goes that since writing students have spent the first 18 years of their lives watching mainstream, plot-heavy television sitcoms and dramas that professors are basically playing catch-up, trying desperately to elevate an understanding of the academic elements. So, plot gets tossed aside in favor of what is assumed to be lacking (never mind for a moment that the best fiction professors will help students deconstruct those plot-heavy television sitcoms and dramas to help them better understand why they work).

I understand this assumption. I really do. It makes sense. Add to the assumed understanding of plot the fact that academic elements—developing a rounded character, for example—is generally more difficult than creating a plot, and you can see why university writing classes legitimize themselves by liberating students from their self-acquired storytelling knowledge. Anyone can tell you that a man is traveling through dangerous lands to rescue a princes (plot) but it’s much harder to give me a compelling reason why this particular man is traveling through these particular dangerous lands to rescue this particular princess (character development).

A commercially successful fiction writer has to fool readers into art. Feel free to elevate your language, to invert established tropes for the purpose of witty culturally commentary, to craft a page full of beautiful words, but please, don’t forget to tell a goddamn story.

*It is very important that I note how pivotal my university writing experience was. I was one of the lucky ones, instructed by a fantastic professor (Amy Sage Webb, author of the recently released story collection Save Your Own Life), who never overpromised the commercial validity of finely crafted fiction. She is a realist. But I’ve met plenty of writers who weren’t so lucky. This article is for them.

** Prose Poem is certainly a term invented by some writer to appease his own need for categorized validation; the term prose poetry surely isn’t one invented for readers.

*** I must say for the sake of full disclosure that I do not support myself and my family on my fiction writing alone. Every-once-in-a-while I make enough to pay my mortgage, but that’s a stretched every-once-in-a-while, for sure. Personally, I write for the story and the beauty of the language.

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Nobody gives a f*** that you wrote something

January 2, 2013 7:27 pm / 3 Comments /

The single most popular post I’ve written here is Ten Brutally Brutal Writing Commandments. It’s the one that brings in the most daily traffic, and I still think it represents my thinking on writing pretty accurately.

This is a follow-up post from Caleb J Ross, one of my great writing friends, whose novel Stranger Will I’ll be re-releasing in a bigger-badder versino through Perfect Edge this month now that his old publisher closed down.

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Nobody gives a fuck that you wrote something.

Every internet-savvy person writes enough text messages, emails, blog posts, or forum messages to fill out multiple books per year. Producing, in-and-of-itself, is not an accomplishment worthy of praise and monetary reward. The truth is nobody but your therapist gives a fuck that you wrote something. And in your therapist’s case, she’s getting paid to feign interest in your output.

Let’s dissect a few of the most common assumptions made by new writers.

Soul Destroying Assumption #1: “People need to read my book”

Most new writers have delusions about how successful they will become as published authors. “Sure, the odds of professional success to the level of sustaining a median lifestyle are terrible. But,” says the naive optimist, “my book is something that people need to read.”

Who the fuck cares? To make a living as an author, you have to forget what you think people need to read and instead focus on what people want to read. This basic rule of economics is precisely why Author is not my primary job title. I write what I want to read. When other people like it, I’m ecstatic. I feel like I’ve found a like-minded community. I’m connecting. All good things. But none of these things are commercially viable on the small scale. I’ve learned this hard lesson, and you should too.

Soul Destroying Assumption #2: “Everyone will love my book”

Writing a book is easy. Publishing a book is easy. When the production of a product is easy, gaining market share (ie, competing against the trillions of other authors out there) becomes incredibly hard. “But everyone,” you argue, “is going to love my book.”

If everyone loved every book ever written, consumers would gladly pay $20 for an ebook and Borders would still exist. The truth is the market simply cannot support every book.

The back-of-the-napkin math

I know that the circumstantial observations I’ve noted above are not going prevent most writers from assuming themselves as the exception. After all, people still buy lottery tickets. So let’s delve into some math.

For an author to make $50K/year, s/he would have to sell 25,000 books annually (10% royalties of a $20 cover price, no advance), using a traditional publishing model. It is commonly stated that a traditionally published book sells around 1,000 copies during its LIFETIME.

For self-publishing, the numbers still aren’t very good. Let’s ignore for now the learning curve and additional expense inherent in self-publishing (hiring editors, cover artists, and printers). If selling your book on Kindle exclusively, at say, $9.99 (which is quite high in my opinion, but I’m trying to paint a rosy picture here), the author would have to sell 7,153 copies annually ($6.99 royalty per book). The average self-published book sells 100-150 copies during its LIFETIME.

The very act of authoring a book is not special. The author, in making a conscious effort to write professionally, is essentially saying “I just invented new blood-borne disease. Who wants it? WHAT?! Nobody wants it?”

Verdict: a substantially small percentage of people give a fuck that you wrote a book.

Soul Destroying Assumption #3: “I’ll be set for life if I can write just one good book”

I’ll give you points for optimism. But as you’ll learn, you can’t feed a family with points.

Think of the publishing sales structure like a grocery store sales structure where the grocery story is equivalent to a bookstore. You approach the canned good aisle. Hundreds of varieties of cans (books) line the shelves. Del Monte (A publisher) knows that it cannot viably support itself by canning and selling only peaches (only romance fiction). So, they produce many different foods (genres), in hopes of integrating themselves into every meal a person eats. You know where the author is in this model? In the fields, picking the peaches, pears, and pineapples to fill the cans.

The publisher has the financial benefit of multiple revenue streams to keep itself alive. If Del Monte only packaged and sold peaches picked by a single picker somewhere in California they wouldn’t survive. Likewise, an author who wants to pick peaches for a single season and be financially set for life is banking on some unrealistically amazing peaches (Nobel Prize winning book).

Writing begins with the message, not with the medium

Writing a novel must be approached as a component to overall personal gratification, not unlike other selfish activities like eating donuts, taking the trash to the curb in the winter without wearing shoes, and masturbation.

The inherent difficulty is that what constitutes personal gratification literally prevents the act from being gratifying to anyone else. But this is the risk we take as authors.

My advice: determine early in your career what kind of books (yes, plural) you want to write.

  • If your primary goal is to be financially sound, then write what sells the most: currently this is fast-paced, young adult, hard-genre fiction or cookbooks.
  • If your primary goal is to write life-changing literature, then do just that, but make sure you’re not burning any day job bridges.
  • If your primary goal is to be financially sound and write life-changing literature, then get a different primary goal. You might luck out and win the lottery, but counting on a lottery win is stupid.
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Ten brutally brutal writing commandments

April 23, 2012 11:09 pm / 6 Comments /

I used to have these ten writing commandments that I typed up once for some discussion, and recently I found the file in an external USB drive. Here, have them, and leave a comment if you happen to disagree, etc. (There’s also a sister-post by Caleb Ross, called Nobody Gives a **** That You Wrote Something)

THE TEN BRUTAL WRITING COMMANDMENTS

1. Temper cruelty with moral uprightness. Be cruel to the world, but kind to your characters. Be kind to your readers, but cruel to your characters. Be cruel to your readers, but have the world’s best interests at heart.

Take some responsibility for the horror of being a human being. You didn’t ask to be born, but you have asked for a fuckload of other things since then.

2. A safe guideline for rule-breaking is: For every four literary conventions you follow, break one. Too little rebellion is as boring as too much. Break this rule as well, but not just for the sake of breaking it.

Actually, don’t break this rule, just be subtle in how you follow it.

3. Try writing in response to another novel. The dialogue between the two could amount to something greater than either.

The following would be some places to start:

If you thought Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian was nihilistic to excess, try to create a response to that nihilism without mentioning cowboys or bloodshed, but also without ever forgetting that you’re responding to Blood Meridian.

If you don’t like Jane Austen’s novels because they’re “too girly” or whatever, write a Jane Austen novel as you’d like to read one.

If Homer’s Odyssey was boring in high school, reread it, then read Joyce’s Ulysses, and then rewrite the Odyssey using Joyce’s techniques. So, so, so meta.

4. Read some of the world’s great aphorists. An aphorism, when it’s well crafted, contains good lessons in writing.

Cioran, Nietzsche, Lichtenberg, Paul Valéry are my choices, but you are probably allowed to find your own.

5. If you are not arrogant enough to want to surpass your inspirations, and if you aren’t humble enough to accept the help it takes to get there, you may be boring.

And only correct someone’s spoken English when you’re willing to make an enemy for no good fucking reason. Written English, though — that’s fair game, always, because it is Important.

6. Read good literary criticism. Try your hand at the art of writing about sophisticated concepts accessibly. It helps.

Maybe the most fruitful literary criticism to read is the kind that explains a book you love in a way that you disagree with so intensely you’re almost tempted to send hate mail. Now is the time to defend your interests.

7. Recoil in horror every once in a while. Be amazed. Get your feelings hurt. Regret something new.

I recommend watching an occasional movie (I can only manage one every few weeks, but that’s usually enough to inspire me), being cruel to a dog by pretending to throw the ball even though you’re not really going to throw the ball (and then ask yourself how you’d react if you had a mentally handicapped child, and someone was doing the same thing to the child, and think about that for a while, and about the idea of intelligence in general and the idea of cruelty…) and, finally, call up an old acquaintance and try to find out what people used to think about you five years ago (it’s going to be painful, regardless, because you don’t feel like that person anymore).

8. Hate other writers but help them however you can, and love them when you aren’t doing your best to destroy them. A good degree of competition always helps, but being too eager to win rots your soul. Spread the love even as you envy the successful and mock the weak. Everything should even out.

You do have a soul, even if it’s not a soul in any meaningful religious (or “spiritual”) sense; you have a spiritual or psychological track record, even if it’s just in your own private world. Don’t rot your soul, twist it around, or hang yourself with it. Cultivate a balance between giving not even a tiny damn about being considered pretentious and obsessive, on the one hand, and being sensitive to the pain of others, even idiots, on the other. You will meet many lovely people who are writers, and many horrible writers who are people, and if your social life isn’t kind of in order, or at least if you haven’t yet found a friend, then adjust your attitude accordingly, flirt a bit with your best friend’s girlfriend (for research) or protect her depending on the circumstances. You need a social life if you’re going to retreat from your social life from time to time to change the face of literature. Also you will occasionally overhear amusing things, and place them in your fiction.

9. If you don’t write, you are not technically a writer (Proverbs 25:17). It’s not about setting routines so much as getting something done. If routines help, wonderful. If you prefer to write in the spur of the moment, do it. Nobody cares how much you fart or twiddle your thumbs in the process, as long as in the end the work gets done.

Ideas are not enough. Inspiration is not enough. Knowledge is not enough. Touch-typing skills are not enough. Dreams are not enough. Everyone having a story inside them is not enough. Being in love is not enough. Finally fucking that girl you had a crush on in high school ten years later, when you really should have moved on and stopped calling it “a crush” but that’s okay because your most powerful writing comes from that mix of resentment, lust and ambivalence toward who and what you were as a teenager — that’s not enough. You have to sit down and do your writing and neglect everyone you love, and it is your fault, and it’s worth it.

10. What does it mean to ask questions?

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