Q: There’s so much for a writer to think about: platform, query letters, agents, marketing. What’s the most important thing to focus on?
A: That’s easy. Focus on the content of your book. There’s nothing more important. (The Book Deal)
So content is [still] king! Back to work…
Pilot Handwriting demonstration (via youtube.com)
This strikes me as a great first step, but one that’s not particularly enticing to me. On the other hand, if Pilot Handwriting could leap frog forward a couple of paces, I would be extremely interested. Here’s what I mean:
How would you use a font derived from your own handwriting?
Flying Fingers (Photo credit: The Hamster Factor)
Plenty of keyboard clatter of late, but less productive than I need to be. To Do lists remain long. The “I’ll get right to that” pile is growing. The Twitter chatter is excessive. Time to knuckle down and knock out an outline, another chapter, a running commentary for 15k+ photographs. So if I vanish from the blogosphere for a few days, please celebrate. If you find me back in the banter, remind me not-so-gently to get my posterior back to work.
Like a persistent two year old throwing a tantrum, a chain saw whines and screams and subsides only to whine again a few minutes later. Angry. Testy. Persistent. Closer — outside my window — chimes cling and clong in the breeze. They dangle beneath an enormous ginkgo tree and emit pleasant music whenever the wind blows. Chain saw versus wind chimes. I try to organize my thoughts in digital scrawl, postulating, developing, concluding. Posting. Re-posting. Whine. Cling. Scream. Clong. A garbage truck thunders past, doubling (tripling?) the thirty mile per hour speed limit. Then a slow car. Another. Then quiet except for the crinkle-strain-crinkle-strain of the palm paddles on the ceiling fan above my head. Type. Click, click, click. The ferry rumbles, reversing its engines to slow its momentum as it glides into the dock where it will disgorge motorcycles, cars, trucks that will parade past my window. Think. Type. Post.
Have you ever heard of I Write Like? I stumbled upon it this morning and my curiosity was peaked. Briefly. I scribbled out these few descriptive lines and hit the analyze button.
Instantly, the page refreshed with a verdict: I write like Cory Doctorow. Really? I’ve never read anything by Cory Doctorow. Nor am I confident that this little writing sample can offer much basis for comparison.
But I am intrigued. How does the analysis work? A bunch of bookwormish gnomes under the hood reading and arguing about style?
“What? He opens with a simile? Chuck him!”
“Yeah, give him a 404 page. He ain’t got no style…”
“Wait a minute, Clyde. Not so quick. Check out the imagery. Doesn’t that remind you of somebody?”
“Yeah, and that onomatopoeic ointment reminds me of moldy Cheeze Whiz. Sort of like that guy… What’s his name?”
“Nah, you guys have got it all wrong. It’s the rhythm. That’s the key. Trust a woman! You guys don’t know rhythm from spasm.”
“Oh, yeah? ‘Twas brillig, baby, and this slithy tove did ooze some ugly prose. Just try to tell me about rhythm, Tanya”
“Mel, you’re sooo lame, and you don’t even realize it! Anyway, you know who we’re gonna say?”
“Who?”
“Who?”
“Who?”
“Cory Doctorow.”
“You mean the guy who wrote For the Win
?”
“Bingo, genius.”
“Are you kidding? Doctorow rocks! Did you ever readMakers
?”
“Totally. That was killer!”
“Right, and this slacker sho ain’t no Cory Doctorow!”
“Sorry, boys, you’re out of time. I’ve just reloaded the page for him. You snooze, you lose.”
“Oh, my gawd. Look at him. He’s all puffed up and proud. Yuck!”
“He’s probably going to go brag about it, blog about it, tweet about it… Our cred is shot!”
“What cred?”
Are you intrigued? Do you write like Michael Ondaatje? Mario Vargas Llosa? Go ahead and find out. Start a gnome fight at I Write Like.
I agonized over lines, phrases, even single word choices. Chapters were shifted, characters reworked. I climbed into dark places that hit me so hard I took showers after writing certain chapters. But it was only afterward that I realized that what I was doing was getting the manuscript in the shape it needed to be in. While it was happening, I was simply in pursuit of authenticity—a story that only I could tell and tell it in a way that only I could do it.(guidetoliteraryagents.com)
Heath Gibson’s guest blog post is titled, “If it hurts, you’re doing something right“, and he focuses on his personal experience getting his debut novel, Gigged, out of the gate on onto shelves. I’m especially drawn to the last assertion above: a great story is an authentic story, a story that can and will ONLY be told by you.
Read the full post at guidetoliteraryagents.com
via theoatmeal.com
Wow! Matthew Inman (@Oatmeal) has a fancy book deal! That’s impressive and inspiring. Find more information here:
Photo via copyblogger.com
Brian Clark (@copyblogger) had me at, “confidence is compelling and downright sexy… I’m not talking about arrogance. Arrogance is an indication of fear, not assurance.” If you agree, you might want to read another one of his postings in which he proposes three helpful hints for bloggers, writers, etc. Don’t take criticism/disagreement personally. Finish each writing project. (Get it done!) And push yourself!
“Too often, memoir seems to me an excuse to be fragmentary, incomplete, narratively non-rigorous. Lemon and Flynn’s books are guilty of all three.” ~ Taylor Antrim via The Daily Beast
Taylor Antrim considers whether Happy by Alex Lemon and The Ticking Is the Bomb by Nick Flynn wouldn’t make better novels than memoirs. Both rekindle his sense that “Memoir writing is cheating. I’ve always believed this,… And, anyway, by cheating I don’t mean exaggerating the truth. Of course memoirs contain misrepresentations, even outright lies…” What Antrim means is that they are cheating the reader out of a good story. They are cheating by compiling collection of vignettes, of sketches and passing these hodge-podges along to us without ever bothering to develop their narratives. “I kept wanting Flynn to do more, to apply his imagination to these insights, to tell me a story. But Bomb is content to be a sketchbook, a collage of ideas and scenes—a memoir.”
Antrim contends that memoir (at least these memoirs) is the lazy storyteller’s alternative, and that a novel – at least sometimes – is a more compelling vehicle to tell the same story more thoroughly, more engagingly and with a more deftly crafted narrative. It’s a provocative assertion, one that I’ve been grappling with while writing a memoir about renovating a historic property on Lake Champlain. Memoir may fall short of the novel’s narrative finesse, but there is something fascinating about traipsing through the artifacts firsthand, exploring the sketches and conversations, rather than being swept along a Disneyfied storybook interpretation. Much like the best novels, successful memoirs sweep the reader up in a story and carry the reader from beginning to end without losing them in awkward fragments, without abandoning the logical wonders that the narrative trajectory provokes, without suggesting the reader should have waited to read the final draft. And yet, the current obsession with reality storytelling does seem to shift this assertion slightly. Is there a growing wariness if/when memoir becomes too narratively slick? Is there a higher tolerance for scrapbook storytelling?
via blog.nathanbransford.com
The publishing world is awash in doomsday chatter, agonizing over the rapidly evolving packaging, distribution, retail and copyright landscape. There’s no question; the publishing world has changed, is changing and will continue to change. Bitch if you want, but we can’t go back!
Frankly, I’m with literary agent Nathan Bransford who says, “You can either be scared of the future or excited. I’m pretty excited.” His blog posting last Thursday has been swamped with comments, mostly optimistic comment from folks who are tired of the horror stories.
Bransford trumpets what’s being referred to more and more as thedemocratization of the publishing world. In the old paradigm, the filtration process (publishers, agents, retailers, etc.) dramatically limited the content that made it from creators to consumers. Probably in most cases this was a “good” thing, but it’s not hard to find fault with the top-down publishing model.
“In the e-book era, everyone will have a shot. And I refuse to believe that’s a bad thing… Yes, there’s going to be a lot of dreck out there that we’ll have to find a way to sort through. Yes, publishers will be challenged by lower price points and will have to change and adapt to the digital era. Yes, my job will probably change some too… And yes, this new era will require more of authors… It will require an entrepreneurial spirit and a whole lot of virtual elbow grease… But what better time to be an author?! All any writer wants is the chance to reach an audience and see what happens from there. Just a chance. And it’s looking like everyone’s going to get that chance.” (via blog.nathanbransford.com)
That image above is one of the “picture poems” I included in 40×41: Midlife Crisis Postponed and it combines contour drawings that I made in 1994 during my final year in college with abstractions from photographs that I took in Peru in 2011. I’ve previously posted elements of “Contours & Artifacts” in Choice (June 4, 2012) and Wonder (December […]
