Location, Location, Location

It's not just a real-estate motto.

I was thinking this last night as we watched As Good As It Gets (1998) and the "gift" doctor makes a joke about how he couldn't find [the Helen Hunt character]'s house because it's in Brooklyn. The subtext there is class consciousness, and the only reason that Arizonans like me can get that is because so many other movies take place in New York. In You've Got Mail (I'm showing my 1998 vibe), the Heather Burns character says she doesn't want to lose her job at the bookstore because she'll lose her apartment, "and then I'll have to move to Brooklyn."

Intentionally or not, the Americans that have never been to New York "know" things about it. Movies and TV tell you that it's the only place to be, and isn't it great, and let me know you all these things like the flower district and the book district (You've Got Mail), Washington Square Park with autumn leaves (When Harry Met Sally, Friends, August Rush), movie theaters and restaurants (Annie Hall, almost every Woody Allen film except a few in recent years, and No Reservations), where to work (Devil Wears Prada and Working Girl), publishers (The Proposal, Funny Farm, The Ghost Writer, Her Alibi) --and I could really go on. I don't doubt that it's a great place, and I don't doubt that there's plenty to see and experience, especially if you're tenacious --but what about the adventure and tenacity that you can see outside of New York?

Shouldn't there be other places to write about?

My students claim that this is my biggest teacher rant. I'm not sure that it is (I rant about adverbs, exclamation points, telling words, slow pacing... okay, a lot of things). But of this I am sure: write about where you live. You know it, unless you just moved there, and in that case, you should have the curiosity to explore it.

Here are some things to consider in regards to setting:

1. Why do you live where you live?
2. Did you choose it or was it chosen for you?
3. What about your location speaks to your personality?
4. If you could change one thing about the place you live, what would it be?
5. How does that one thing speak to your personality?

Here are some things to consider in regard to setting in fiction:

1. Just as your setting speaks to who you are, how does your character's setting speak to who he/she is?
2. If your character could change one thing about his/her setting, what would it be?
3. What does this one thing say about your character's personality?
4. How would your character change if he/she were put into a different city?
5. Think about the scene you're writing right now: how would this scene change if the weather changed? What if it was sunny at a funeral? What if a windy day disrupted something that your character wants?

Don't underestimate your setting. You're not on a studio backlot in the 1950s forcefully giving the illusion that your character is someplace he/she isn't with projected backdrops.

No, your character is in a real place reacting to real things in a real way. Make your character alive based on where you put him/her.

Read Bad Books

I’m assembling a reading list for one of my classes when I had that moment that every writer fears –okay, every writer who teaches fears: I have only read a few books in the last few months. How disappointing.

This comes on the same day that I actually stopped reading a book. I have -or had- this firm belief that a writer should always finish reading every book that he/she starts. After all, a writer empathizes with another writer. A writer can devote 300 pages to seeing where another writer came from, and a writer can have the commitment to supporting another writer by respecting what the other writer sacrificed for and struggled with.

I’ve changed my mind.

I knew it was going to be a trashy novel when I started it, and that’s exactly what I wanted to start the semester with, considering that as a colleague and I just said yesterday, we’re still “stunned” by the ending of the semester. I wanted to read trash. But apparently I have limits. 

I don’t really want to tell you what book was trash because my goal isn’t to destroy another writer. Another firm belief of mine is that you should make up your own mind regarding what you read.

But I do want to convey this to you: read bad books, especially if you’re a writer. While I’m taking this book off of my Steampunk reading list for the semester (I don’t want my students to read this and think that it’s an example of what they should be doing), I think it’s great for writers to read books with bad writing. You can catch every adverb, every moment of sensationalized overreaction, every moment of slow pacing, and so much more. You can see that what your creative writing teachers and mentor said is true.

Do it. Go and read a good bad book. And learn something.

Dear Hemmy, I'm Sorry

(Sorry, Hemmy.)

Mr. E.L. Hutton

Hometown Magazine

4962 Sky Lane Terrace

Indianapolis, Indiana 46204

 February 16, 1920

Dear Mr. Hemingway,

Thank you for thinking of us for your short story, “Up in Michigan.” We were intrigued by your

submission, and I’m happy to say that our mutual friend, Paul Dunning of the Toronto Star, was

right in referring you to us. We would be happy to publish your work if you would just make a few

minor corrections.

The editors and I all agree that you need to add a few more illuminating aphorisms. After all, Mr.

Hemingway, we live in a time of grand ideals and our readers would be interested in the advise of

an honored veteran. As you served our country in the Great War, so you are a symbol yourself.

These readers could be lost in the mire of classic literature, or they could find their bearing through

our own humble publication, educating and directing the American Ideal through literature. Our

kind and passionate readers need only the sage advise from patriots that have American

viewpoints. I’m sure you agree.

We also believe that adding a few more adjectives and adverbs will make the prose a little easier to

read. Have you ever read from The Mississippian? There was a story published in it last November

titled “Landing on Luck” from a young writer named Faulkner. Mayhaps you could take a look at

it and his use of description. We believe this is more in keeping with our publication and with what

is happening in the literary world. Your minimalistic approach is a good start, but we need you to

fill in the blanks with a bit more flowery language.

Also, may I add that you put the ending back (if there was one)? There doesn’t seem to be any

obvious conclusion, and instead it somewhat drops off. Just give us a paragraph or two that seems

to wrap everything up and I’m sure we’ll be in good shape.

Please make these recommended changes and mail them back to the publisher with my name in

“Care Of” underneath. I’m very pleased to be working with you. I think your writing is

straightforward and earnest, and we thank you for your service abroad.

Sincerely,

Mr. E. L. Hutton

Miss Amy Kyle

How to Keep Suspense and Tension Alive in Rising Action

Hello readers,

Have you ever gotten to the middle of the book you're writing and realize you don't know how to do it? You know how to write the beginning, and you know how to write the end, you just haven't figured out the middle.

We've got the answers.

I guest-wrote a blog for my friend Icess Fernandez Rojas, which you can read on her site here.

Happy writing :)

5 Things to Remember When Writing Creative Non-fiction (or Autobiographical Fiction)

TIP 1: There's no such thing as 100% fiction or 100% non-fiction. (More on this in a second.)

This last week, The New York Times featured Francine Prose and Leslie Jamison as they discussed whether it was okay to mine real relationships for literary material. Francine Prose said, "Obviously it's different if one is writing fiction or a memoir" ---but doesn't prose blur those lines, even a bit?

Back to my tip, there's no such thing as 100% fiction or non-fiction. James Frey really fueled this conversation, didn't he? (If you're not aware, you can read about the controversy here.) Now bookstores have a section called "autobiographical fiction," and in this section are such titles as: A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway (the passages with Fitzgerald are known as revisionist history, and other parts are speculated to be as well);  A Death in the Family by James Agee (the Pulitzer Prize winner whose author was a toddler when his dad passed away, so understandably much is imagined); and the classic The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath (a girl with a mental disorder is understandably allowed to fill in the blanks of what she doesn't remember).

On this same idea, how many of you have sat down to write something as simple as a journal entry and you think to yourself, "Now, did I say the thing after she said the thing or before she said the thing?" You might skip over that line and you continue along just to find another stumbling block. "Now, I know I went to the bank that day, but was that the day I ran into Jeffery and later saw The Grand Budapest Hotel?"

It's so easy to ask yourself, "Does it matter?" But as a writer, your responsibility is to tell as close to the truth as you can.

TIP 2: Tell as close to the truth as you can, but don't choose to not write if you don't exactly remember how something went. 

We all suffer from fallible memory. All of us. (Especially those of us who read long packets of student work every other week.) Because of this fallible human memory, some writers choose not to write. They're so close to the memory that they still feel the need to write it out, but they're distanced enough from it that they block themselves because they don't know who said what when.

Can I just tell you something? Write what you remember first. Do whatever you need to do to give yourself permission to leave the holes. You might need to put a row of x's to keep your place, or you may use whatever word processor at your fingertips (Word, Scrivener, etc) to highlight or mark the areas you need to come back.

TIP 3: Allow yourself to imagine. 

Some of you (I include myself here) can't leave a hole in the narrative to move on to another part. Don't let this become your stumbling block. Give yourself permission to imagine. What could have happened, not in a "what if" kind of way, but in a way that allows you to tell as close to the truth as possible.

Some legalistic, linear writers have a hard time with this one: "But I don't know that he was sipping coffee in the office when he fired me." First of all, if you're writing a memory that involves tension (as you should be, if you want a good story), you're most definitely not going to be remembering every finite detail. But if you're describing an office setting, and if it was in the morning (even the late morning), and your boss is the kind of person that has to have coffee going even until 2pm when the secretaries are tired of making it, it's a safe bet that he was drinking coffee when he fired you. Use reason and logic in all areas like this. If you're writing about the time you lost the diamond in your engagement ring in a parking lot, you can easily describe the pavement as having gum spots. Do you 100% remember the gum spots? No, but a parking lot without them is rare. See how this works? Use your writerly imagination to fill in details that will make the scene come alive. Trust me: it harms no one.

TIP 4: Don't get caught up in details, but communicate the underlying truth.

But writing isn't about coffee and gum spots, is it? It's about people (characters) talking (dialogue), sometimes in direct conflict with what they think or feel (narrative, conflict, POV, voice), and what consequences a person (character) has from choices that he or she has made (plot). That, my friends, is how you tell a story.

Don't get caught up in who said what at what time and who they were with and what year they moved there and what job they had at the time and who was their neighbor and what that neighbor said in gossip about them. Can you see how trivial that can get? No, start with the underlying tension of a scene -with conflict. You might avoid conflict in "real life" and that's okay, but a story must have conflict to be interesting. If you're writing a memory, don't start with chronology, but instead write the strongest part of the memory. For example, I remember when my mom would take my brother and I shopping as toddlers, and the clothing racks were in circles and my brother would hide in the middle of the circle. Cute, but not interesting, right? Well, it gets more interesting because once mom and I left the store with Sean still inside one of the racks. That's interesting because of the conflict. After that, I can go back and describe my memory of the dominant 80's oranges and reds, the rockstar hot pinks and faux black leather, the geometric prints that I grew up hating, some of which as an adult I now wear. See how that works? The details come in after, not before.

When Sylvia Plath wrote The Bell Jar, she started the autobiographical novel about a girl in New York City studying fashion. Did Sylvia Plath study fashion? No, but she wrote for a fashion magazine. The essence of her memory is there -car accidents, associations with characters, parties- it's just that the details are a little different.

TIP 5: Decide if what you're writing is fiction or non-fiction.

Sylvia Plath published The Bell Jar under a pseudonym (Victoria Lucas), and one of the reasons for changing the details of the story was because she wanted to tell a true story without everyone knowing that it was her.

Sometimes writers want to keep good relationships with their friends and family members by claiming these goings on to be fiction, thus changing the names. And sometimes the friends and family members can already see that the characters are based on themselves and get mad anyway. So what is in a name? This could be the moment when you ask yourself if what you're writing is fiction or if what you're writing is non-fiction. Here are a few questions to ask yourself:

-Is there enough plot? Sometimes you see something that has happened in "real life" and you think that it makes a good story on its own. That's non-fiction. But sometimes something has happened in "real life" and you think that it's a good start to a story, and you change some actions. That's fiction.

-Why are you writing? Sometimes something has happened in your life and the only way to deal with it is to write about it. If you are writing it as it happened scene-by-scene, that's non-fiction. If you are writing about the idea (theme) of what happened in a different character's life, that's fiction. (And, by the way, you should never write to destroy a person that you know. That's libel. You should write non-fiction to explore your own story.)

-Who are your characters? It's natural for characters to be drafted after people we know. In fact, it's really hard to draft good characters if they don't share any qualities of people we know. If your characters are carbon-copied into your draft and they associate with a main character that is really you, that's non-fiction. If your characters are mostly real with a few invented qualities and you play the "what if" game, that's fiction. (And if you write carbon-copied characters with the intention of showing their flaws, that's libel. But if you write these carbon-copied characters to show how they acted in your own story, that's memoir.)

So what now?

The writer's curse is that we have these great ideas but not enough time to record them. Start today, my friends. Don't start by deciding if you're going to write a memoir or an autobiographical fiction. Instead, follow the story. Write it down a piece at a time, and only when you're done with your first draft should you decide what it is exactly. By the way, give yourself permission to experiment, because the first draft is supposed to be bad. Give yourself permission to be courageous, and give yourself permission to write the story you need to write.

Writer Fail

It's the last week of school, my friends. Do you know what that means? You all are thinking finals, but this is creative writing, silly, tricks are for kids.

I'm having writer fail.

Fortunately, all of my freelance jobs have wrapped up this week, otherwise I would be saying really dumb things (not like "Tips on How to Wear a Classic Black Jumpsuit" is eloquent, per se).

Here is the list of things I've caught myself doing in the last week when I should have been writing:
-Google: What do Tina Fey's kids look like?
-test my cup of pens to make sure they all work
-Link: 16 Different Pictures of Underwater Aquariums
-Google: Are apples good for dogs?
-change the hardware on my desk while my Microsoft Word patiently blinks
-Link: Baby bump pictures of Mila Kunis
-reorganize the box of sticky notes by color

This is true, my friends. Does this mean that I am not a writer? Nope. This just means that I am a tired and honest writer.

What are some things that you've caught yourself doing instead of writing?

The Time I Found a Body...

The day started off weird, unless it's normal for your friend to pick up his shirt and have kiwi-sized spiders to boil out.

The trip had already been going differently than we'd planned. We had been camping at the top of Mingus Mountain over a weekend in July last year, Saturday afternoon through Monday morning. The spot we selected had a fantastic view and it's always fun to get away to camp with your friends. But with the fire restrictions what they were, we had gone all weekend without one of the quintessential elements of camping: the crackling of embers that you can't not look at, or the lazy, stinging smoke. I adapted all of our campfire recipes into recipes that could cook on a propane stove (so cooking meals turned into a 6 hour affair), and we spiced things up by going swimming in the Verde River on Sunday afternoon.  On Monday morning, we began clean-up, and Dan picked up his shirt from the rock that he'd tossed it onto the day before to dry. The shirt was dry, alright, but as he picked it up, a countless number of the biggest Daddy Longlegs spiders I had ever seen boiled out of the arms and neck of the shirt in a fashion that could only be compared with Harry Potter. (They had nestled in it overnight to drink the water, and I may or may not still have nightmares about that image.)
And as if screaming and sitting on top of the cement forest service table wasn't exciting enough, we discovered that my car wouldn't start.

All of these things aren't nearly as weird as finding a body.

When we left Mingus Mountain Campground, we drove downhill for a while on highway 89a, characterized by it's steepness and hairpin turns. It was at one of these hairpin turns that we stopped at the pull over spot, because Sean wanted to take us across the highway for a hike to look at petroglyphs. I was tired from 3 days of camping so I asked him how long the hike would be. "Oh, it's about fifteen minutes." Sure, it was about fifteen minutes, if we jumped into a time-warp and fifteen minutes turned into an hour. Exhausted, we finally made it back to the cars.

And then my car wouldn't start. Again.

As Michael hooked up the jumper cables and began to repeat what we had done earlier, Sean kicked around in the wash alongside the highway. He found the routine garbage, and nothing you would really consider out of the ordinary. But then something was out of the ordinary: a broken piece of sandstone with a man's name on it and the image of crossed tomahawks with the years of his life underneath. You would think finding a headstone would make finding a body less unusual.

But signs that finding a body is unusual:
1. It's off the side of the highway.
2. Not only is it off the side of the highway, it's buried in an unseen wash off the highway, seen now only because an animal clearly dug up part of it.
3. Not only is it buried in a wash off of the highway, but it's in a black plastic bag.
4. And the bones were cut with intention.
5. And now I want to throw up. Or investigate. Whatever comes first.

(Warning: Images are closer than they appear.)

So, I would by lying if I said I wasn't excited about the find. I would also be lying if I said I didn't think of every crime show or movie that featured CSI-like people excavating similar bodies with brushes and tools that look strangely familiar to my dentist's. 

Yes, I continued to have car trouble, and at one point I was coasting down the steep 89a with no power steering and no power brakes, but even then I couldn't get my mind off the find. When I contacted the Sheriff's Department to report the found evidence via email (so that I could attach the picture), I offered to take the responding officer to the location, whereafter I actually popped onto ABC's shop website to see if they sold the bullet-proof vest that says WRITER.

Alas, the officer's reply said that he would go out there himself to check it out, and could I please provide a mile marker or a detailed description of the location? Because I didn't know the mile marker (dumb automotive distraction), I described the pull-off location, something that he later described as "shockingly detailed and accurate." He also said that the spine of what he now called the carcass was cut with a band saw (something a butcher would have done) and the size of the scapula (shoulder blade) was so large that the carcass couldn't have been anything other than an elk. The fact that the body was in a trash bag and thrown off the side of the highway was not only common in this area, but evident that it was poaching or unapproved hunting. In other words, thank you, ma'am for overreacting at garbage, but we have it under control. 

My questions:

1. If elk are at minimum two hours away and to the north or the east, why would the bones show up on Mingus Mountain?
Assessment: Either dumb poachers who don't plan ahead, or an elaborate method of disposal.

2. If the body as I still call it were evidence of poaching, why would it be buried off of the highway, and not merely thrown out of the back of the truck onto the side of the highway as is the more common poaching disposal?
Assessment: You may have something there, Watson.

3. Maybe the body wasn't buried, you say, but flooded or covered by mud due to natural sediment in the wash? Okay, we'll play your game: even if the entire wash flooded with mud in Noah-level proportions, do you really think all of that mud could cover an animal that normally weighs 700 pounds and stands up to 5.5 feet at the shoulder? Even if you take all of the meat off of those bones, and even if the poachers were to take a couple of souvenirs like the skull and the rack, there would still easily be a volume that is way too large to merely assume that the mud would naturally cover the whole thing. Maybe it's only half of the bones? Still, it's in a wash, which means the volume of Noah-level flooding automatically has a current to it, something that a wash is naturally designed to redirect. Therefore, the entire wash would have to be filled in with mud for the bag to completely submerge, whereby filling said wash. It would take years worth of rainstorms to erode that mud back out to create the wash again, and it's unlikely that the bag would not likewise be uncovered in those multi-year monsoons. It took an animal to dig into the mud and carve the bag and the pieces out -not 1 million years and a paleontologist.
Assessment: Weather-related burial ruled out.

4. If the elk was cut with a band saw commonly used by butchers, you would naturally assume that the lying poachers would have taken the carcass (okay, I give in) to said butcher, thus displaying not only their non-repentance but also a lack of fear of getting caught, right? So if they weren't afraid of getting caught, why would they have buried the bag?
Assessment: Burial doesn't match the behavior of other poachers.

5. Here's a what-if for ya: What if the bag contains not only the remains of an animal such as an elk, but also the remains of a human? After all, wouldn't a sociopath know that the cops would identify the large scapula and thus decide that investigating the bag wasn't worth his/her time? After all, doesn't it take taxpayer's money to deeply investigate such things in a time when each expense needs to be justified? Wouldn't the killer -yes, killer- know this?
Assessment: I watch too much Sherlock Holmes.

How to Handle a Hit-and-Run as an Amateur Detective

Someone has hit your car. There it was, the yellow plastic from the other person's taillight housing, the fragment of yellow plastic embedded into the bumper from his/her apparently severe velocity, and a witness -Nick, the mail guy, who said that when the car was "tagged," the whole thing rocked. What happened to the perpetrator? He/she vanished -no note, no admission, not even a suspect in a somewhat vacant lot.

Did I mention that you signed up for Introduction to Forensics on Coursera this week?



Even though your most secret dreams involve becoming Sherlock Holmes's best Watson, you hate to admit that you're a little excited. Does this make you certifiable, you wonder, the enjoyment that comes from your car having just been hit, this thrill of a case to be solved?

You decide to:
a) Check your taillight housings.
b) Pick up the fragments of the perpetrator's taillights and keep them for investigation.
c) Assess the damage, including approximate size of vehicle, color, velocity, and clues from the fragments.
d) Call the college Campus Police.

Answer:
Everything but d. After all, why should you call Campus Police when you want to solve the mystery yourself?



You finally call Campus Police the day after the event only after you've written a short story about a somewhat psychopathic college instructor sitting on the hood of the car of the perpetrator. (True story.) The officer on duty recommends stopping by the next time you're in town, which ends up being Saturday morning. You take Officer Loyd out to your car in the parking lot and you show her the damage.

Do you:
a) Tell her about the plastic from the perpetrator's taillight that you kept, but not show it to her?
b) Tell her about the plastic from the perpetrator's taillight, and then show them to her for photographing?
c) Keep the taillight fragments secret from her so that you can continue your own investigation.

Answer:
Though c is tempting, you go with b.



Officer Loyd doesn't seem to think there's much of a report to make (she doesn't say so but she doesn't object when you verbalize it). You want to prove that you're not just a fuddy-duddy adjunct instructor but instead someone with crime-solving superpowers, so you tell her about the size of the vehicle in proximity to the ground, the approximate velocity of the vehicle for the plastic to be embedded into the fender, and when she wonders about the color of the other vehicle, you say, "Well, it could be a black vehicle considering that the speed of the collision would have rendered paint transfer." You hold out the plastic fragments (thankfully allowed to remain in your possession), "And the smoothness of the taillights indicates that this was a somewhat new vehicle because the plastic doesn't indicate much outdoor weathering."

She looks at you with somewhat amazement. "Wow. Were you a cop before?"

You blush. "No, I just watch too much Sherlock Holmes."

Now you're both embarrassed.



When you get somewhere with the case, your story will continue. In the meantime, you can just take comfort knowing that you're a mystery novelist that has just been confused as a cop.

Banagrams Revision

You know how sometimes when you're playing Bananagrams, there's only three tiles left that don't fit in anywhere, the clock is ticking, your competition is getting closer to figuring out his/her own crossword, and you make that brave choice -you know, the one where you choose to dismantle a few words so that you can make new words out of them?

I hate that feeling.

It does have its purpose: I've won games that way. But the risk of dismantling words makes your skin crawl as those seconds tick by, as your opponent's eyes flit from one word to the next, and you ask yourself, "Is this really worth it?"

Welcome, my friends, to the feeling of revision.

I'm currently revising a part of my novel for the Amtrak Residency. It's a perfectly okay scene where Constantine walks to Denny's after finding a dead girl by the dumpster at the Outback in the middle of the day. After he gets to Denny's, he meets Kimy, who will be come -as she says- "the Sherlock to his Watson."

But I don't want a scene that's just okay. Publishers don't publish okay. Readers don't do okay. So here I am dismantling paragraphs that I liked, paragraphs that were amusing and now are falling "to the cutting room floor," as it were.

 Kill your darlings.

Mars, My Muse

Is it weird that I watch something contemporary and think, "This could make for an excellent noir mystery."

Case in point, Veronica Mars. I had started watching it with a friend after a conversation about mysteries and strong female detectives, and then -just as several viewers, I've learned- I became hooked. I love TV series' that use the story arc of the season to solve a mystery. It transcends a show from mundane sit-com-edy and is a little easier to believe than my beloved Miss Marple who -let's face it- must be killing the victims in these big houses because no one just happens to stumble upon murders this often -even if you are on a first name basis with the constabulary.

Taking aside for a second the Mars Detective Agency has a Raymond Chandler feel to it, I've been even more enthused with the idea of amateur detective going into places that no one would expect her to, and I love the idea that she isn't an Ice Queen (all the time, at least). And let's face it: who wouldn't want to be the quick-witted-and-occasionally-snarky girl who always has the perfect comeback?

Today is a special day: Veronica Mars is back after (as Logan put it) "nine years of radio silence." After nine years, the movie is out, it was privately funded through Kickstarter (every artist's dream), and my friend and I are off to an AMC theater to go see it. See it, my friends, and you'll see a timeless character that transcends her surroundings -a muse-worthy character, indeed.

Setting Goals, For Realsies

Do you remember human development classes in middle school? It was in that class that my frizzy-haired teacher passed around half-sheet-sized card stock paper emblazoned in Comic Sans: My Goals. When no one was quick to write any goals down (because, yes, we were in middle school), she gave us a statistic about how middle schoolers with goals were far more likely to graduate high school and not do drugs. Maybe none of us intended on (in my case) reading every Nancy Drew book that had ever been written, or intended on (in their case) skateboarding in every public park in Phoenix, but we rushed to write stuff down because we didn’t want to be seen as ne'er-do-wells (not that we would have known that word). 

Not much has changed. Aside from the fact that I graduated high school and read every Nancy Drew book up until number 40, it has become increasingly clear in the last few years that you need to have writing goals. Your frizzy-haired human development teacher isn’t going to give you half of a page of card stock, and she’s not going to call you a drug dealer if you don’t fill it out (I hyperbolize, but I seem to remember a joke like that).

A writer needs goals, and it can’t be something like, “Finish novel someday.” You need to constantly work toward putting yourself out there, constantly work with at least one project, and constantly have a goal in mind for that project. Again, this goal doesn’t count: “Publish with a big publisher and make it big with little to no effort so that I can make money like James Patterson and hog as much space on a bookshelf as possible, and also possibly afford a vacation in the Bahamas with my tanned girlfriend who only wears Gucci sunglasses that I buy her.” Okay, that may not exactly be your goal, but if we’re being honest, here, you would love it if that happened, and you would love it if you didn’t have to do much work for that to happen. Can I just say now that while dreams are important, unrealistic dreams are crippling?

At the risk of using a cliché, how do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. (Except I would never eat an elephant, but that’s not here nor there.) Start small, work big.

So in the vein of good intentions, here are my goals:

1.     Finish editing last scene of dialogue. Send finished draft out to publisher I met at AWP.

2.     Finish 3^rd prose poem. Send collection of 3 prose poems to different publisher I met at AWP.

3.     Write short piece on writing. Send to yet another publisher I met at AWP.

4.     Long term goal: Finish novel by the middle of the summer.

5.     Reading goal: Read at least one Agatha Christie for plotting, and read at least one John Green for voice.

Make some goals, my friends -and not goals that just involve you rolling in the dough.   

How a Platform Works for Writers

How a Platform Works for Writers

We’ve all pictured it: writers sitting reclusively in a cabin in the woods, sometimes handwriting a novel (yeah, right), sometimes using a typewriter (okay, it’s been a while), or sometimes using a Macbook Pro (that’s more like it). Outside of any sexism, we often picture this writer as a man with a beard and in his pajamas because we romanticize the notion of a writer who has been in seclusion for so long that it’s okay to lose a few social norms, and he’s writing in such a fury that he’s even absconded basic hygiene. Even cynic writers embrace this image because all writers –all of us- love this idea that the novel is so intense and so important that we must get it out, must get it on paper or typed before the idea fades, before the potential for the Pulitzer or the Nobel Prize for Literature gets lost into the folds of our gray matter, only later to come back as vaguely as a wisp of smoke. We love the idea that a human –bearded male or not- can be rewarded for sacrificing relationships and “real work” to the idea that he or she can write something beautiful and amazing, that this person can get a hefty advance, a spot on the New York Times Bestseller list, a promotion from Oprah, and a gaggle of awards –and then recede back to the cabin in the woods to do it all over again.

But these days are gone.

The extinction of the reclusive writer is something that is lamented, because writing is hard. No one tells you that when you see images of a writer sitting down and typing out “It was a dark and stormy night…” No one tells you that it doesn’t just flow from you, that it’s like a long-term relationship that you need to work at and commit to, even when it’s not interesting anymore. No one tells you that writing your novel has to happen around life –around potty training, writing assignments for school, and around the pressured, unrealistic deadlines your boss gives you. Every writer wants to be the reclusive writer because that means that you can shut out the rest of the frustrating world to do the thing that you want to do. That is a dream, my friends.

Some writers blame technology for the death of the reclusive writer. After all, because of technology, the publishing world demands more now of a group of people who would rather be left alone, thankyouverymuch. But let’s look for a second about how the market is changing: readers are busier than ever. Why do you think eBooks available on smart phones and iPads have done so well? Readers are busy people, people who –if they read at all- need to get their hands on a book fast.  There are fewer and fewer bookstores and libraries, and there are more and more technology-savvy readers who will read whatever they can get their hands on –and sometimes that isn’t just the book. Readers –just like many users in several categories- demand information immediately, which could mean lower-quality books being written faster (rare) or permission for the writer to take longer writing higher-quality books as long as the reader can indulge themselves with other information about that writer –often that writer’s life.  

You might ask how this affects the writer. Well, with the book world changing, publishers are far more selective about who they pick up as new talent and who they keep as old talent. They want their writers to have something called a “platform.” For established writers like James Patterson, a platform is Facebook, Twitter, a website, and a blog (though we’ll discuss other technological platforms here in just a minute). A platform for a big writer like James Patterson is important to keep the readers engaged between books. But that’s not all a platform is essential for: it is life-giving for the new novelist.

A new writer cannot be picked up without a technological platform. A platform is an online presence that not only engages readers, but it’s also something that the publishing houses see as (near) guaranteed buyers. For example, if you have 300 friends on Facebook, the publisher sees this as okay, but not great, because that’s only 300 books sold. It might sound like a lot, but publishers would really like to sell tens of thousands of copies of a book title, and if only your friends on Facebook buy that title (and, of course, you know that you’re not going to get all 300 to buy your book), it’s just not enough. It might be nice that a big writer like James Patterson has a Facebook, a Twitter, a blog, and a website, but the new writer must have these. Say you have 300 friends on Facebook, you have 500 followers on Twitter, you have 50 readers a week on your blog, and you have 10 readers a week on your website. That’s nearly a thousand people a week that you have potential access to –and nearly a thousand looks much better than merely 300 first time buyers.

Whether you’re a new writer or just new to the technology game, you’ll find that a blog, a website, Facebook, and Twitter are excellent engagers –and you can even throw in Instagram and Tumblr. Your readers, now, feel somehow connected to your life. You might be posting an Instagram photo of you writing at a coffee shop, share it on your Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr, and you followers will get excited. In the Information Age, your readers don’t want a prickly, reclusive writer that doesn’t connect to his or her audience: a reader wants to feel like a follower, to feel like a supporter, to feel important to a writer’s career. What many writers of today don’t realize is that those supporters really are essential to his or her career –in fact, the fate of your novel could depend on something as seemingly unrelated as how many people “like” your Facebook page.

If you're compelled to help a girl out, be sure to like my Facebook page: there's a link to it on the sidebar :)