Magical Words

Becoming a published writer isn’t complicated. The writer writes a brilliant manuscript. He sends it to a literary agent he has researched carefully, following all the guidelines that agent requires. The agent loves the manuscript, and starts shopping it to all the editors she knows. One of those editors sees the brilliance in the manuscript and makes an offer. See? Published!

Okay, settle down all of you. I didn’t say it was easy - I said it wasn’t complicated. There’s a difference. Most of the time publishers and agents make their guidelines easy to find and simple to follow. The difficulty comes when writers decide the rules just do not apply to them. Susie handwrites her manuscript on pink scented paper, even though it clearly says “typed, double-spaced on white paper.” Jarod sends his 980 page novel to an editor who prefers lengths of 110K to 120K words. Maria mails a paper copy to an agent who only takes emailed submissions. Hubert sends the entire manuscript when the agent only asked for three chapters. Angela writes one draft, then refuses to listen to anyone’s suggestions for making it better. I attended a writing conference years ago, during which an agent was meeting with each writer individually for a manuscript critique. We’d been instructed to send the first thirty pages of our manuscript ahead of time. The first evening, a woman was railing to the group about the epidemic of agents stealing people’s work by doing these critiques. She, however, had worked out a way to foil the agent. She’d sent in thirty random, nonconsecutive pages from her book. Writers can sabotage themselves so effectively, it’s a bit of a surprise anything gets published at all.

If you’re sure I have no idea what I’m talking about, and that the rules truly do NOT apply to you, great. There are people who’re just dying to make money off of your dreams and desires. They dress themselves up as publishers, create websites that assure you your writing is fantastic and it’s just that good-old-boy mentality in New York that’s keeping you down, and for only $1295, they will make sure your book sees the light of day. Pink paper? Handwritten manuscript? It’s all good. They’ll accept whatever you send as long as a check is attached.

Money should always flow TOWARD the writer, never away. Paying someone to print your book is merely that - printing. It’s not publishing. The worst part is so many people have gone this route that it’s almost expected. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard, “Gosh, you must have paid a lot to get this done!” There’s nothing wrong with paying someone to print your book, if that’s all you want. Say you’ve written a family memoir that only 40 or 50 of your relatives will want. Pay the company and receive a nice product. But if you’ve written a fantasy blockbuster that you hope will put you in the same company with George R R Martin or Stephen King, paying someone to print it won’t get you very far. Distributors don’t usually carry those books, and bookstores don’t want to stock books they can’t return. You’ll be stuck selling your books from your garage. Not to mention the stigma such books acquire. They’re almost never properly edited. The covers are usually created with Photoshop, so they look amateurish. They’re priced ridiculously high because the print run is low and the company doesn’t expect to sell many copies (except to you.) What’s that? Christopher Paolini did it? Well, not exactly. What he did accomplish took an extraordinary amount of hard work combined with a stroke of pure luck, not to mention a lot of his parents’ money.

If you want to base your book’s success on luck, I wish you well. If you want to pay for a book so you can put it on your shelf and show it off to visitors, knock yourself out. Write the check and enjoy your shiny book. But if you want to tell stories to lots of people, sell books from coast to coast and maybe build yourself a career, then do it right. Write a brilliant story. Rewrite it. Make it the best you can make it, and accept criticism when it comes your way. Follow the rules.

It’s not complicated.

Tags: Misty Massey by Misty Massey
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Some of you may have noticed that I didn’t post last week. It was a tough week. I spent most of it sleepless, working third shift, sitting by Mom’s hospital bedside (again sleepless) and crying my eyeballs out – for two very different reasons. Mom’s is fine, BTW. We finally discovered yesterday that it was skeletal, not heart. Her chiropractor fixed her. Sigh… The crying part was because my beloved dog Delta died. We’d had her (and she’d had our hearts) for nearly 15 years. The following portion of this post notwithstanding, Delta had been a big part of my (Gwen Hunter’s) writing for her whole life. She was Big Dog in the Rhea Lynch novels and is Butchie in Rapid Descent coming in 09. So…on to my topic and you’ll see how the subject of Delta blends in to what I wanted to talk about today.

Fans often ask, how much are your characters like you? The answer, except for animals, always being … um … not so much. For me, the best part of writing is discovering who the characters are, what the plot and conflict reveal about the main character, how said character acts when the conflict spirals down and things get dangerous and dirty. I can plan the plot line out pretty well in advance, especially when writing mystery (as Gwen Hunter), but the characters are always a mystery when I first start writing, even to me.

I have author friends who work out everything about a character, create whole entire histories and backstories about them, and know everything, sometimes even a family line back numerous generations (I think David fits into this category). One mystery writer friend, Tamar Myers, even draws pictures of her characters and keeps the notebook open when writing. When I first sit down to write, I know very little beyond what I need to actually *start* the book.

When I first came up with Thorn St. Claire, I knew physical descriptions because she is a sword fighter and her small stature correlates into the type of weapons she uses. A long-bladed knife in the hands of her fighting mentor becomes a short-sword for Thorn. So, I knew height, weight (sorta), hair color, skin color both as a mage and when glamoured to look human, musculature, speed, and stamina. Eye color was unimportant. I knew she was an orphan, but not how her parents died. I knew she was a stone mage in hiding, and why she was in hiding, and what would happen to her if she was discovered (nothing good). After that, well, nothing much mattered. Her personality was a total unknown.

Age was important – only because I needed her to have been in hiding a certain number of years but have been with others of her kind long enough to get a tiny bit of magical training. Education in the human school system was unimportant. Her foster parents were unimportant. A lot of this extra stuff was revealed to me as BloodRing, the first book in the Rogue Mage series, was written, but starting out, was unknown. I wanted the character to tell me about herself. I wanted to get to know her, just like the reader would, at the same time and speed as the reader did. I wanted her faults to be things she kept hidden, like most of us keep them under wraps, often from ourselves. I wanted her strengths to be the little things, like, the fact that she made friends of the life-long variety and was loyal, to be fairly obvious. But I wanted the bigger strengths to be revealed as the story unfolded. The same way I’d get to know a new friend. And I wanted Thorn to never have pets. Why? Because all my characters have animals in their lives and I wanted Thorn to have none. In fact, none of my fantasy characters (so far) have pets or animals. All of my mystery characters do.

For me, character development (or character revelation) is the most personal part of the creative process. Are they like me? Not so much. Like someone I know? Not so much either. In fact, I have based a character on a person exactly twice, both times in the next Gwen Hunter book, Rapid Descent, to be released in February 09. Jedi Mike Kren, the Old Man of the River, is based on Jedi Mike Kolenburger, a river rafting guide. Elton, a paddler and the head of the rescue team, and parts of the hero, Orson Lennox, are based on David Crawford, owner of Rapid Expeditions on the Pigeon River. Why? Because both men are bigger than life. The characters just glommed onto them, and became more and more like them, especially Jedi.

But few character are much like me. The new character, Jane Yellowrock, of the novel Skinwalker (July 09) is less like me than most, with the exception of how she handled being picked on so called “friends” in her teens. That was similar. But Jane is a Cherokee Skinwalker. By definition she is way different. Way way way different. What she has revealed to me has been so much fun!

As for Delta, we miss her. And she will continue to be a part of my books.

How do you guys work when creating a character?

Faith

Tags: Faith Hunter by faithhunter
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This one’s long, and represents a lot of the flutter that goes on in my head while trying to write. My stats this week are all screwed up thanks to stuff explained in the Letter, so I’ll just forego them and let you read what’s been up…

[Read more →]

Tags: C E Murphy by cemurphy
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As some of you may know, I have a new short story out. It’s called “Cassie’s Story,” and it appears in the new online issue of Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show. (IGMS is edited by Edmund Schubert, who guest blogged here on magicalwords.net a couple of weeks ago. Also, coincidently, there’s a story in this same issue by Alethea Kontis, who was one of our earliest guest bloggers.) I’ve written a bit about the story on my own blogs and there should be a piece on Ed’s blog about it in the next week or two. That’s beside the point really. This isn’t a post about my story, per se.

Ever since the story went up on Tuesday, I’ve been having anxiety dreams about it. In the first one, I dreamt that Kirkus Reviews had done a piece on the issue and had praised all the other stories to the heavens, but had totally trashed mine. I mean savaged it. They called it the worst piece of crap they’d ever seen and said that they couldn’t believe a publication with Scott Card’s name on it had published such tripe. Woke up from that one feeling like I’d been run over by a truck.

Last night I dreamt about it again. This time in my dream all the stories had numbers next to them that indicated the number of times visitors to the IGMS site had clicked on the links to read them. Everybody’s story had a couple of hundred hits. Except mine, of course. Mine had, like, three. Waking up from that one was no picnic either.

I meet so many writers who are just starting out who have stories or novels that they like and feel are good, but who can’t bring themselves to send anything out. They fear rejection, as all of us do. They think that the story or book is really, really close, and that one more editorial pass ought to do the trick. Problem is, that editorial pass leads to the discovery of something that needs changing and then before you know it they’re rewriting the beginning, which forces them to rework the middle, which makes the ending a bit disjointed, and well, that means the piece needs some more work….

And so the story remains on their hard drive or in a drawer — some place no one else can see it.

I’ve published nine books and a few short stories. I’ve been a professional writer for more than a decade. And I’m having anxiety dreams about my newest piece of short fiction. I can tell you without hesitation that the feelings of insecurity never go away. I always think that the next thing I publish will be my last, that finally the world will wake up and realize I have no business being a professional. Writing is a scary business. Not only is it a tenuous career path, not only is the work lonely and hard, but it’s also just plain frightening to pour my heart and soul into a piece and then put it out there for the world to see. Because every unkind word about my work strikes at the very core of my existence. A bad review, be it in Publisher’s Weekly or on Amazon.com, does more than denigrate my art. It confirms for me every doubt that I harbor already.

But here’s the thing. I write because I believe I have something to say. I write because I believe that other people will enjoy reading my stories. So in spite of the bad dreams, the insecurity, the fear, the absolute certainty that someone is going to hate what I’ve written, I send stuff out anyway. And if I can do it, so can you. I’m not particularly brave. I’m just arrogant. I’ve learned to say, “I don’t give a crap if Kirkus hates this. (And they’ve hated more of my books than they’ve liked.) And I don’t care if readers pan it on Amazon. (I’ve gotten plenty of bad Amazon reviews.) I’m going to put this out there because I think it deserves to be read.”

No one is going to buy that story in your drawer unless you send it out into the world to be read and, yes, judged. Yeah, rejections hurt. So what? Believe me when I tell you that the joy of one sale is enough to offset the pain of twenty rejections. The fear never really goes away, but neither does that sense of accomplishment. You write because you love it; you write because you think you have something to say. Faith has said that you’re not really a writer until you finish something: a story, a novel, something. I’ll add to that: you’re not an author until you’ve published. And you’re not going to publish until you put your words on the line and say, “Read this! Judge it! I think it’s worthy, and damnit, so should you!” So stop polishing and reworking, and take a chance.

Tags: David B. Coe by DavidBCoe
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Since it’s entirely possible a lot of you are travelling this weekend, or are just in the mood for the holiday already, I decided to share some time-killers to get you through this day before the long weekend. Have fun!

Poetry:
Introduction to Poetry
The Book of my Enemy Has Been Remaindered

World Building Help:
World Check

Need a book recommendation?
If you’re a fan of Lost, you can now read the books that are featured on the show - The Lost Book Club

Sounds from the ancient past:
Roberto Velazquez assists archaeologists in recreating sounds not heard in hundreds of years.
David Crystal, a language expert and historian, consulted on a Globe Theatre production of “Romeo and Juliet” in Early Modern English, the way Shakespeare might have said it.

Tags: Misty Massey by Misty Massey
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Have you ever read the bios that writers publish in their work?  Granted you don’t usually get to see the early job histories of your lawyer, your massage therapist or your English teacher, but it seems that writers take on some wacky jobs before they finally get published.  I don’t necessarily mean jobs that seem like they belong n a book - sometimes it’s just jobs that sound so far removed from a writing career that one has to wonder what drove the writer to even take it in the first place.  I’ve dipped ice cream, waited tables in a deli, taught math to migrant children who spoke mostly Haitian French, run a video store that we all believed was a front for money laundering, and waited tables in a Mexican restaurant that specialized in drenching everything with nacho-flavored Velveeta and paid me under the table.  I cold-called businesses to try and convince them they needed more equipment and they should lease it through our company (by far, the worst job.)  I spent a year manning the Service Desk in a mall bookstore, where I had to assist people who wanted me to tell them where “that blue book I saw on the Today Show back in the winter” might be, then moved to a college bookstore, where I had to assist professors who wanted “that blue book we saw at a conference last summer.”  I taught three-year-olds for over a decade, and finally landed in the middle school library (where the children are almost exactly the same, except for being taller.)

In every job, I was able to observe people doing all the weird, kind, tragic, hopeful, selfish, silly, bizarre things they do.  All those idiosyncrasies come from the real-time research of people-watching, and I can now use them all when creating characters in my work.  Writing is a solitary life, so having the chance to see real people behaving in all the irrational ways they do can only imbue my fiction with a reality I wouldn’t have otherwise.  As hard as some of those jobs made me work, I wouldn’t change a thing.

But I tell you, if I can go the rest of my life without smelling cheap nacho Velveeta again, that’d be just dandy.

Tags: Misty Massey by Misty Massey
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Sorry for the late update. I don’t have internet access at home right now.

Letters? What letters? This week has … not been a successful writing week. It’s nobody’s fault, just a matter of moving house, and that’s one of those things that no matter what your best intentions are, the reality is you’re probably not going to get much work done. And I haven’t.

So my stats since Tuesday last are:

words written this week: 4117
pages written this week: 19
total wordcount: 45569/100,000
total pagecount: 186/440

Pipe-dream goal for Tuesday next? To have reached 300 pages/75K. That’s 30K away. I’m probably not going to quite make it, but I’ll hang it out there as my target, just in case.

Tags: C E Murphy by cemurphy
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