Evolve or Die?
First thing this morning I read an article on Huffpost Books titled: With Traditional Publishing Dies The Passive Writer-Victim by Leonce Gaiter
And now I can't sleep.
I first started writing on an old Mac Powerbook I picked up at a garage sale for thirty bucks. Back in the wild days when I first started I had little skill and big dreams. I would pass out face down on the keyboard in the wee hours of the morning after writing garbage that I thought was surely going to land me on the best sellers list.
Years pass, the skill changes, but the dream stays the same. I will be at home when I get a call from an agent at a major agency. They will fawn over my manuscript immediately sending me the details of a lucrative contract. Publishers will be having bid wars over me while I decline six figure offers in lieu of higher royalties. Signings and book tours with clog my schedule and Charlie Sheen will follow me on Twitter.
Yes, that's right, I was a victim of traditional publishing. And a part of me is sad to see the dream die. Even if it is for the better. In this day and age the publishing world is faced with the same peril as many other antiquated business models, evolve or die. And in a time when it is easier than ever to get published and start selling, it was about damn time the ball has been thrown into our court. Now you can write what you want, design it how you want, sell it where you want and all while retaining your profits. Now the market truly determines what is popular literature, not the suits. And I think to myself, what a wonderful world.
Welcome to the new way of pursuing art as your dream. If you're talented and can market yourself, I think you will enjoy your stay.
The Official Blog of Author Dan DeVeronica
Showing posts with label book. Show all posts
Showing posts with label book. Show all posts
I took a small break from updating my blog this month. Actually I took a small break from writing all together. I realized that if I am to have any semblance of a writer's life it can't be lived confined to the four walls of my office. That and I wanted to quit smoking.
Everything was fine until I started thinking of writing. Then I started thinking of this blog. And it all made me wonder when is enough enough? Some of the greatest writers in history are built of off epic lives. Fighting in wars, drugs, partying and enduring societal abuse are common. The drive to write becomes an outlet, a way of coping with these lives. But when we sit and write we are channeling these experiences not creating more. And it is inevitable that the creative well will go dry after enough draining.
So I pose a question; where is the middle ground? How do you find balance in your life between living it and writing it?
On a side note it has been 432 hours since I smoked a cigarette.
If you were to map out how much time you spend on research and writing; would it be worth it? In truth I probably make around $0.10 an hour if I am lucky. I spend a lot of time both researching and polishing my material. This makes writing for dollars somewhat frustrating. But we didn't get into this to become billionaires did we? No writing is a passion. Writers don't choose to write, it chooses them. I write to survive, get the voices out of my head and be heard. Why do you write?
A Carrot On A Stick
It's time to talk about having goals. Having day dreams of crowded book signings and readings is great. But how will you get there without laying out a path for yourself? Goals. When your career path specifically goes through the dark woods of creativity it is easy to get lost along the way. Unless you give yourself clear cut goals both short term and long term you will not succeed in this field. So where should you start mapping your path to success?
Word Count - This is a very basic starting point. Pick a word count for yourself to hit every day. I try never to write any less than 250 words per day. Now for me that is a relatively low number and very easy to hit. But that is the point. If I set it at 3000 words and have a fully stacked schedule that prevents me from hitting my goal I will feel like a failure. Negativity is counter productive to creativity. Start small and remember slow and steady wins the race.
Literary Magazines - Both online and small press literary magazines publish on a monthly and sometimes weekly basis. These make for great short term publishing goals and also allow you to gauge the quality of your writing. I try and submit to at least one magazine a month and shoot for at least 4-5 publications a year.
Now remember every good system of goals has an even better system of rewards. In a career where you work largely alone you need to reward yourself for meeting goals. If you make your word count every day for a month treat yourself to a movie or dinner. Just don't ever reward yourself by taking the day off of writing. This is a seven day a week 365 day a year job you chose and you can't risk taking time off. If you can help cut a path for yourself with small goals you will reach your larger ones. And in the end seeing that book on a store shelf will be a greater reward than anything you can give yourself.
A Few Commonly Misused Words
The following is a selection of words that are commonly misused. They are pet peeves of mine when I see them in professional writing; especially mine. Lists like these are very common this one being prepared by Iowa Experiment Station Publications at Iowa State University. This leads me to a favorite editing technique of my own. Pick any of these words then take your longest most recently edited piece of writing and do a word search. See where it pops up and in what way it is used. Was it used correctly? Were you trying to sound more colloquial? Was it dialog? Then once you have determined its usage cut the little bastard out or substitute him for the proper word.
ACCURATE - (an accurate estimate) - accurate implies complete freedom from error or absolute exactness. Anestimate is an approximation. Try "a reliable estimate."
AND/OR - use one or the other. AND THEN - use one or the other.
CHECKED - (The traps were checked). imprecise. use 'examined' or another more precise word.
HOWEVER - do not use with another conjunction at the beginning of a sentence or independent clause ('However, because...' or 'However, since...').
IN ORDER TO - 'To' will suffice.
LESS(ER), FEW(ER) - 'less' refers to quantity, 'few' refers to number.
Now the original list is longer so I will include a link. But when you read through it remember that you don't necessarily have to edit out the words or usages. This is meant as a broad guide to clean up your writing. But strictly adhering to these lists as if they are unbreakable laws will lead to you sounding unreal. It is important to use information like this as guidelines that will let your own personal style emerge.
Some great advice in a letter from John Steinbeck written to writers who are just getting started.
"Dear Writer:
Although it must be a thousand years ago that I sat in a class in story writing at Stanford, I remember the experience very clearly. I was bright-eyes and bushy-brained and prepared to absorb the secret formula for writing good short stories, even great short stories. This illusion was canceled very quickly. The only way to write a good short story, we were told, is to write a good short story. Only after it is written can it be taken apart to see how it was done. It is a most difficult form, as we were told, and the proof lies in how very few great short stories there are in the world.
The basic rule given us was simple and heartbreaking. A story to be effective had to convey something from the writer to the reader, and the power of its offering was the measure of its excellence. Outside of that, there were no rules. A story could be about anything and could use any means and any technique at all – so long as it was effective. As a subhead to this rule, it seemed to be necessary for the writer to know what he wanted to say, in short, what he was talking about. As an exercise we were to try reducing the meat of our story to one sentence, for only then could we know it well enough to enlarge it to three- or six- or ten-thousand words.
So there went the magic formula, the secret ingredient. With no more than that, we were set on the desolate, lonely path of the writer. And we must have turned in some abysmally bad stories. If I had expected to be discovered in a full bloom of excellence, the grades given my efforts quickly disillusioned me. And if I felt unjustly criticized, the judgments of editors for many years afterward upheld my teacher’s side, not mine. The low grades on my college stories were echoed in the rejection slips, in the hundreds of rejection slips.
It seemed unfair. I could read a fine story and could even know how it was done. Why could I not then do it myself? Well, I couldn’t, and maybe it’s because no two stories dare be alike. Over the years I have written a great many stories and I still don’t know how to go about it except to write it and take my chances.
If there is a magic in story writing, and I am convinced there is, no one has ever been able to reduce it to a recipe that can be passed from one person to another. The formula seems to lie solely in the aching urge of the writer to convey something he feels important to the reader. If the writer has that urge, he may sometimes, but by no means always, find the way to do it. You must perceive the excellence that makes a good story good or the errors that makes a bad story. For a bad story is only an ineffective story.
It is not so very hard to judge a story after it is written, but, after many years, to start a story still scares me to death. I will go so far as to say that the writer who not scared is happily unaware of the remote and tantalizing majesty of the medium.
I remember one last piece of advice given me. It was during the exuberance of the rich and frantic ’20s, and I was going out into that world to try and to be a writer.
I was told, “It’s going to take a long time, and you haven’t got any money. Maybe it would be better if you could go to Europe.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Because in Europe poverty is a misfortune, but in America it is shameful. I wonder whether or not you can stand the shame of being poor.”
It wasn’t too long afterward that the depression came. Then everyone was poor and it was no shame anymore. And so I will never know whether or not I could have stood it. But surely my teacher was right about one thing. It took a long time – a very long time. And it is still going on, and it has never got easier.
She told me it wouldn't.
1963
John Steinbeck"
"Dear Writer:
Although it must be a thousand years ago that I sat in a class in story writing at Stanford, I remember the experience very clearly. I was bright-eyes and bushy-brained and prepared to absorb the secret formula for writing good short stories, even great short stories. This illusion was canceled very quickly. The only way to write a good short story, we were told, is to write a good short story. Only after it is written can it be taken apart to see how it was done. It is a most difficult form, as we were told, and the proof lies in how very few great short stories there are in the world.
The basic rule given us was simple and heartbreaking. A story to be effective had to convey something from the writer to the reader, and the power of its offering was the measure of its excellence. Outside of that, there were no rules. A story could be about anything and could use any means and any technique at all – so long as it was effective. As a subhead to this rule, it seemed to be necessary for the writer to know what he wanted to say, in short, what he was talking about. As an exercise we were to try reducing the meat of our story to one sentence, for only then could we know it well enough to enlarge it to three- or six- or ten-thousand words.
So there went the magic formula, the secret ingredient. With no more than that, we were set on the desolate, lonely path of the writer. And we must have turned in some abysmally bad stories. If I had expected to be discovered in a full bloom of excellence, the grades given my efforts quickly disillusioned me. And if I felt unjustly criticized, the judgments of editors for many years afterward upheld my teacher’s side, not mine. The low grades on my college stories were echoed in the rejection slips, in the hundreds of rejection slips.
It seemed unfair. I could read a fine story and could even know how it was done. Why could I not then do it myself? Well, I couldn’t, and maybe it’s because no two stories dare be alike. Over the years I have written a great many stories and I still don’t know how to go about it except to write it and take my chances.
If there is a magic in story writing, and I am convinced there is, no one has ever been able to reduce it to a recipe that can be passed from one person to another. The formula seems to lie solely in the aching urge of the writer to convey something he feels important to the reader. If the writer has that urge, he may sometimes, but by no means always, find the way to do it. You must perceive the excellence that makes a good story good or the errors that makes a bad story. For a bad story is only an ineffective story.
It is not so very hard to judge a story after it is written, but, after many years, to start a story still scares me to death. I will go so far as to say that the writer who not scared is happily unaware of the remote and tantalizing majesty of the medium.
I remember one last piece of advice given me. It was during the exuberance of the rich and frantic ’20s, and I was going out into that world to try and to be a writer.
I was told, “It’s going to take a long time, and you haven’t got any money. Maybe it would be better if you could go to Europe.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Because in Europe poverty is a misfortune, but in America it is shameful. I wonder whether or not you can stand the shame of being poor.”
It wasn’t too long afterward that the depression came. Then everyone was poor and it was no shame anymore. And so I will never know whether or not I could have stood it. But surely my teacher was right about one thing. It took a long time – a very long time. And it is still going on, and it has never got easier.
She told me it wouldn't.
1963
John Steinbeck"
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