Tag: advice (page 15 of 25)

Advice You Should Probably Ignore

August 31, 2011 / 37 Comments

Making Sense Of Ninety-Nine Cents

Feel free to check out yesterday’s related post — 25 Things You Should Know About Self-Publishing.

Some writers can’t hack talking about price point. They void their bowels and a throbbing vein atop their forehead ruptures and spurts a jet-line of blood before they fall down to the ground, writhing as if covered with biting lizards. I get it, I do. Writers want to write; writers don’t want to think about price point.

That said, self-publishers are tasked with different work than writers, for they are — well, c’mon, do I need to say it? Shit, it’s right there in the name. Self-publishers. Thus we need to discuss it.

You may be saying, Ah, here then is another screed against the implementation of the $0.99 price point for novels, and you’re either ready to high-five me or break a vodka bottle over my head.

This will not be that post.

It can’t be. I have a book out right now for ninety-nine cents (“250 Things You Should Know About Writing“). My hypocrisy would no know bounds if I sat here, charged that price for one of my books, but then cast a handful of sand into your eyes for doing the very same thing.

No, this post is about how to use the $0.99 price point to your advantage. If you’re someone who’s business savvy, then this lesson will be a lesson you learned in like, kindergarten. I’m not saying anything revolutionary here. But, if you’re just a regular ol’ writer like me, you very possibly have the business sense of a Styrofoam cup filled with dead ants. Thus, hopefully you’ll get some value out of this.

If not, feel free to break a vodka bottle over my head. For giggles.

Caveats, Cuidado, Warning, Disclaimer, Etc.

This is all straight-up opinion. Evidence is mostly anedcotal. Be advised to not take my words as gospel but rather, to take them as a little savory info-nugget on which you may chew. Nom, nom, nom.

Spit or swallow. Your call.

Do: Conceive Of A Strategy

Going into the pricing of your e-book, have a strategy. Any strategy. Let ninety-nine cents be part of your strategy. I’ve seen a lot of folks start to shake out their own “pricing trees,” and mine fall roughly in line with that — something under 20,000 words might go for a buck, a collection or novella might go for $2.99, a novel might go for $4.99, etc. Ponder this going in.

How can you use the $0.99 price point to your advantage? Where could it fail you?

Do Not: Just Price Everything At A Dollar

The only place you should find everything for a dollar is, in fact, a Dollar Store. And even there, you’ll find shit for two dollars or five dollars at a dollar store. I consider this to be an epic deception, which is why whenever I encounter this I drive my car through the front of the establishment, then open my trunk and loose upon them a squadron of starving squirrels. Just to punish their callous lying-faced lies.

The other thing about dollar stores is, it’s not name-brand stuff. You don’t get a box of Froot Loops there. You get a box of, like, Frut Hoops. Or Fruit Schmoops. Or some other generic rip-off featuring cereal made in a Chinese sweat-shop by cigarette-addicted eight-year-olds. Point being, you don’t go to the dollar store to procure quality. You go there because you’re hungry for cheap-ass value.

Now, that being said, if you’re at the grocery store and you see a product you like on sale for a dollar — boom. That’s a deal. You snatch that up because you just got quality at a cut price.

That’s a psychology you can and should mine in terms of pricing e-books at $0.99. If you price everything you have at a buck, then you’re the equivalent of a dollar store. “Cheap-ass wordsmithy,” you’re barking from atop your soapbox. “A hot fresh bucket of words! All made by North Korean children with arthritic fingers! Nope, it’s not as good as Stephen King or even Dean Koontz, but fuck it! It’s a dollar!”

And then you do a little jig.

Because everybody likes jigs.

Ah, but: price one thing at a buck and you’ve created a steal. A deal. A gateway drug.

Pricing everything at a dollar sends up a signal and that signal tells me that you don’t value your work all that much. Further, it suggests to me that you don’t want anybody else to value it, either.

Do: Use It As An Enticement Price And Loss Leader

Like I said: price one thing at a buck? Boom. Steal and deal. Gateway drug.

These days, the word count out there for sale is forming a hard gluttonous knot of mouse bones and burger grease in the arteries of the system — every day, more and more fatty narrative cholesterol globs onto the clot and it grows bigger and more unwieldy. It’s hard to distinguish yourself in that field, hard to further get people to take a risk on your work. A low price point for a single book offers an entry. Maybe it’s an entry into your whole catalog or just the entry point to a single series, but it signals that, hey, this is a safe path. Walk this way, and if you like what you see, I’ve got more stuff to show you.

The ninety-nine cent price point serves as a loss leader. Meaning, you ultimately take a loss on the product to get people in the door. And yes, it is likely going to be a loss; I know there exists a perception that any money earned from fiction is somehow just icing on the cake. It’s not. Not unless the production of said fiction took no more effort than popping a squat in the woods. Writing fiction takes time and effort. And caffeine. And liquor! You should be paid commensurate with your effort, which is why most books at that bottom-line price will never earn out, so let it be part of a strategy to earn out with your other offerings.

Do Not: Think That It Is The Best Price For Earning Out

Like I said: don’t expect to earn out with ninety-nine cents.

Let’s do some quick math. I’ve done similar math before but it bears repeating, even though math burns my fingers as if I were typing on a keyboard made of melty gooey volcano magma.

(For the record, we will now refer to lava as “earthjaculate.” Please update any and all salient records.)

Here’s the math.

Let’s say you want to earn $35,000 a year as a writer. Not an epic salary but not poverty level, either.

If you were to price everything you’re selling at ninety-nine cents, here’s what happens: you need to sell approximately 117,000 copies of your work over the course of one year’s time.

Is that doable? Sure. I see some authors doing it, and to them I tip my hat and clink my glass and kiss them on the mouth and implant my alien egg-babies into their trachea. Uhh. Ignore that last part.

That doesn’t mean it’s likely. Or easy.

Now, let’s do some more math. I have a book out there, as noted, at a dollar. I frequently float in the top 5/10,000 sold with this book, and am often in the Top 10 list of writing books at Amazon.

To stay at that rank, I sell an average of 18 copies per day, or ~6550 per year, making me just shy of $2000 in a year. Not bad, you think, and it isn’t — of course, it presumes my sales will remain steady after only a month of sales, but I’m always a fan of big glorious assumptions, so let’s be optimistic and assume that it’ll maintain that level. To make my $35k/annual, I’d need to have 17 equivalent products out in the same year, all earning at an equal level. That’s a lot of fucking books, you ask me.

Maybe you don’t blink at that number. Some self-published authors emerge out of darkness and can offer a massive churn-and-burn catalog of work, and with that approach this becomes more feasible.

Thing is, that book of mine is around 20,000 words. A novel is easily three times that in length, and if we’re assuming the average advance on a traditionally published novel is $5000 and we assume you’ll never earn beyond your advance, then you would need to sell around 17,000 copies (or ~1400 per month) in a year to make that same amount of money. Again, not impossible, but tricky.

Consider instead a novel priced at $2.99, which only needs to sell around 200 copies a month to earn that same level by the end of a year. Seems doable, does it not? At least, seems likelier. At $4.99, the novel needs to sell 120 a month to earn out by the end of a year. Consider a diverse catalog at a number of price points.

Do: Work The Short-Term Promotion

The ninety-nine cent price point should be a scalpel, not a hammer — it is an instrument of precision. One move is to use that price point as a temporary sales driver — maybe you intro your e-book at that price or do an occasional markdown in order to move some units and get some converts. Converts who might leave you reviews or at least recommend the book to others. Converts who might leave you gift baskets of fruit-flavored sexual lubricants and vibrating heretical idols upon your doorstep.

CONVERTS WHO WILL KILL IN YOUR NAME.

A writer can dream.

Oh, and I can also use the cheaper e-book as an incentive upon procuring the more expensive e-book — like last week’s promo where I gave away a free 250 Things to those who nabbed COAFPM.

Do Not: Equate Sales With Readers

Quick point, but worth noting: a lot of self-publishers refer to those who procure their works as “readers.” It’d be super-delightful if this were true, but it’s not. Some are just buyers — and, in my experience, the cheaper the book, the more buyers (who aren’t readers) you’ll have. This isn’t a bad thing, exactly — I’m not going to tell you how or when you should read my garbage. Use your Kindle as a doorstop. Fine by me.

That said, readers are better than buyers. Readers will do what is intended of your work, which is for the work to — drum roll please — get read. Readers also have the chance to become fans, and fans will buy all your stuff, tell other people about you, and generally be a happy part of your penmonkey ecosystem.

Ninety-nine cents may earn you a lot of buyers, but it does not guarantee those people will be readers. I have a pile of $0.99 books sitting on my Kindle. I bought ’em. I ain’t read ’em. And, frankly, I’m in no rush to. I wish I could say differently, but I’ve got other books I spent more coin on, and for some reason I equate more coin with greater value and so I wanna consume those first. (Same way I’d be likelier to eat an expensive cookie over a cheap generic-brand cookie. The assumption, correct or no, that the higher cost means higher quality means higher deliciousness factor. Why would I be fast to eat the cheap cookie?)

Do: Sell Direct

The $0.99 price point becomes more valuable financially when you’re selling direct. If I sell a copy of 250 Things at Amazon, I make $0.30. At B&N, I make $0.40. When I sell the PDF directly, I get $0.65.

And my direct sales hover at around 20% of my total sales.

I continue to wonder why most self-published authors fail to offer a direct option.

Summation

The ninety-nine cent price point works for certain things. It puts your book out there and it creates an opportunity for readers to get to know you and your work at an un-regrettable value point.

It doesn’t work (IMHO, YMMV, ASAP, NASA, LOL, etc) as a single blanket price point for all your work — especially if “all your work” comprises e-books of larger word count (like, say, novels). While I recognize that word count is not directly attached to quality, as a freelance writer I’m conditioned to expect that higher word counts tend to necessitate higher pay-outs to make the time, effort and size of the material worthwhile in terms of the writer’s own compensation.

Let’s hear your thoughts. How’s this all sit with you, writers, readers, self-pubbers? Accepting dissenting opinions and evidence now — don’t let this post be the end-all be-all of discussion.

August 30, 2011 / 106 Comments

25 Things You Should Know About Self-Publishing

Time again for another list of 25, this time about the trials and triumphs of self-publishing. This article could be titled, Things I Think About Self-Publishing, or, One Penmonkey’s Ruminations Upon The Subject Of Self-Publishing, and is not meant to be an end-all, be-all list, but rather, little nougaty nuggets of contemplation. Feel free to drop down and add your own if time and inclination allow.

1. A Sane And Reasonable Part Of The Ecosystem

Self-publishing has become a real contender. Major authors are self-publishing now. And self-publishing has its own scions who have attained epic success in that space. Self-publishing is now a very real part of the ecosystem. Some truly excellent self-published storytelling is at work. Anybody who turns their nose down automatically at the practice should be kicked in the junk drawer.

2. Not Better, Not Worse, Just Different

Publishing your own work is no magic bullet; it guarantees nothing and is not a “better” or “smarter” way to go than the more traditional route. It’s also not a worse path. Each path has its own thorns and rocks, just as each path offers its own staggering vistas and exhilarating hikes. Self-publishing gets you out there faster and tends to give you a better return on every copy sold. But it’s also a more self-reliant path, putting a lot of work onto your shoulders. The self-published author dances for every dinner.

3. Self-Publishers Can’t Just Be Writers

This is true of all writers, really: these days, every author must contribute a deeper share of editing and promotion. But the self-published penmonkey does even more. You’re a carnival barker, web designer, customer service agent, CEO, porn fluffer — wait, maybe not that last one. Point is, you’re now a publisher, with all the responsibilities that come in the package. Don’t want those responsibilities? Don’t self-publish.

4. Some Doors Are Presently Shut

Media reviews? Major and not-so-major awards? Foreign and film rights? Libraries? Book signings? Sexy book signing groupies? Not so much. Self-published inkslingers will find that many of these things are not necessarily opportunities that exist for them. Not yet, at least.

5. This Is Not The Path Toward Credibility And Respect

You will not find a great deal of credibility and respect in self-publishing your work. Part of this is due to old prejudices. Part of this is due to the fact that self-publishing still represents a vibrant and virulent catalog of glurge and slush. Of course, if you were looking for credibility, you wouldn’t be a writer in the first place, would you? You want respect, go be a zookeeper or a sex worker.

6. Most Self-Published Books Suck A Bucket Of Dicks

This bears special mention: you’ll still find that a lot of self-published books are basically canker sores on the prolapsed anus of good writing, good storytelling, and good publishing. Contrary to what some will say, this crap can and does sometimes float: I will from time to time peruse the Kindle Charts and gape in amazement at how superheroically buoyant some garbage can be. And yes, I acknowledge that legacy publishing offers some real stinkers, too. But I thought the goal was to be better than that, yes? And for the record, I have every confidence that the fucking Snooki book at least meets minimal standards compared to some of the piles of midden that pass for books amongst some self-published authors.

7. Your Book Is A Boat Which Must Ride Upon Sewage

Those ass-tastic self-published books are your competition. But they’re the competition of any author. It just bears mentioning that, whether traditionally published or whether you DIY, come to the field with the best motherfucker of a book you can bring. Don’t half-ass it. You’re here to tell stories, not pleasure your ego. Let your book rise above all the effluence.

8. Pinocchio Wants To Be A Real Boy, Goddamnit

Treat your book like a real book. Not like it’s some part-human mutant hybrid, some stumbling thing with half-a-brain and a bison’s heart. Send out review copies. Get blurbs. Make it look nice. Sound nice. Read nice. Force the book to command the credibility and respect that others of its ilk are lacking.

9. Two-Fisted Team-Ups

A good self-published book does not need to be the product of some lone weirdo in a closet jizzing his foul-skinned word-babies onto the Smashwords marketplace. It comes to fruition with the help of a good cover designer, editor, beta readers, and others within the self-published community. It’s why I don’t like the phrase self-published — you should rely on others beyond yourself to bring your book to life.

10. Money Out Before Money In

For the record, that might mean spending some money. It’s worth it. The reward of having a professional-grade product and not the remnant of some amateur hour karaoke will earn out.

11. Please Don’t Let Your Cover Look Like A Three-Fingered Smear Of Dog-Shit

So many ugly covers. So many ugly covers. Once more for the cheap seats: SO MANY UGLY COVERS. Listen, I know — a cover does not make a book. But it’s the first line of offense at a place like Amazon, where I’m almost universally seeing the cover before I’m seeing the description. I will click a kick-ass cover because, I dunno, I’m an attention-deficit raccoon who likes shiny trinkets? A great cover shall be your standard-bearer. If you use Comic Sans or Papyrus on your cover, you should be drowned in a washtub.

12. E-Book Designers Are Non-Essential

The e-Book designers out there are probably mad — let me get ahead of that and say: you may find them useful. They do good work. But for many DIY authors, you may not need one (and may not be able to justify the cost). Formatting an e-book for the major services (Amazon, B&N) can at times be an exercise in soul-squishing agony, but over time you figure out the tricks and learn how to make it work. And once you do that, it’s not even all that hard. (For Amazon, can I recommend Mobipocket Creator? Free software, totally useful.) Hell, for the basics, Amazon and B&N will auto-format.

13. Editors Are Your Bestest Friends

Get a good editor. Can you self-edit? Sure. Is it a good idea? Not usually. Bare minimum: seek the advice of people you trust, and implement their advice in some way, shape, or form. Give them wine and chocolate and hookers and four-wheelers and kites made from the skin of their enemies and anything else they ask for. Pay their price. A good editor is your best friend.

14. Traditional Legacy Publishing Is Not Your Enemy

You will find little value in slagging those in traditional publishing, particularly authors, agents and editors. They’re not your enemy. We’re all part of the same ecosystem, swimming around in the pond where we a) tell stories and b) hope to not starve and die in the process. Most of us are here because we love what we do, so hold hands, kiss each other on the cheek, and stop casting aspersions.

15. Agents And Gatekeepers Are Still Your Friends

Iconoclasts love to hate on those that keep the gate, but those that keep the gate aren’t universally bad people. Further, they’re trained to a certain standard. Agents in particular don’t deserve scorn, and can, in fact, still help the self-published author. They may know when a book is right for a published market. They may be of aid in selling rights (print, foreign, film) that you otherwise might not have had access to. And, let’s not mince words: many self-published authors would jump like a cricket at the chance to have a book on bookshelves with a big publisher. For that, you will find an agent potentially quite helpful.

16. Amazon Is The 800-Pound Gorilla (And He’s Got A Gun)

If you sell anywhere, you’re going to sell at Amazon. Start there. Talking to other self-pubbed authors, the majority of their sales come through Amazon. And, since we’re talking, if Amazon is the big-ass gorilla in the room, I suppose that makes Smashwords the anemic marmoset who keeps scratching his balls and falling asleep in his own waste. Uhh… yeah. I might not be a fan of Smashwords.

17. The Term “Indie” Makes Some People Vomit Fire

Indie has been a term used in publishing for a while now, meaning a publisher who is not beholden to a Big Faceless Corporation. Thus there is some scorn at those who would use that term — “indie” — to describe self-pubbers. Of course, everybody just needs to pop some quaaludes and calm down. Language changes for better or for worse: the definition of “indie” is a moving target, and has been in film, music, and now publishing. We can all share the language. If we can’t agree to share, you’ll have to fight in the arena with poison-tipped fountain pens.

18. Beware The Insidious Whispers Of Froth-Lipped Zealots

Eschew false dichotomies. Avoid loaded promises. Spurn those self-proclaimed oracles who claim to know the future. Nobody knows what the truth is regarding self-publishing or traditional publishing, and anybody who thinks you need to jump one way and not the other may not have your best interests at hand. Make your own call as an Informed Human With A Super-Computer Inside Her Head Called A “Brain.”

19. This Is The Time For Bold-Faced Brave-Ass Experimentation

So much of self-publishing is doing what’s been done. (Another Twilight rip-off? Tell me more!) But the advantage of DIY publishing is that you are beholden to no one but an audience — so why not go big? Fuck the rules. Hell with the genres. Experiment. Play around with storytelling. Do something different instead of traipsing the same paths, la-la-la-lee-la. Got a picaresque cyberpunk novel loaded with ciphers and clues in your head that links up to some kind of bizarre geocaching transmedia experiment? Fuck it. Why not? You want to write penguin erotica? Transgender adventure tales? Bible II: Son Of Bible? Find those things that no major publisher will touch but you have passion for, and put it out there.

20. A Future Found In Format

The future of self-publishing isn’t merely in storytelling. It’s in the format. The format now is a clumsy foal stumbling around on wobbly legs. Find ways to break free from that. It’ll be up to the DIY authors to find new formats — transmedia initiatives, app-novels, stories told across social media. Do not be constrained by the formats that exist. Story does not begin and end with a physical book. It doesn’t stop at e-books, either.

21. You Are Not A Spam-Bot

Self-publishers have a lot of their own promotional work to do. That means it’s very easy to accidentally become naught but a megaphone hawking your wares. While you should never be afraid to ask for sales or market, you need to market as a human being. Connect. Be funny. A lot of this is going to succeed based on that most ephemeral of market drivers: word-of-mouth. The way you generate that? Nobody knows. But it starts with writing a kick-ass book. Well, that and human sacrifice. But you can’t make an omelet without killing lots of innocent people in the name of dark literary entities living beneath the earth.

22. Do Not Buy This Book

Let me just be frank: you don’t need this book. Anything it contains can be found elsewhere. For free.

23. Embrace A Vibrant And Active Community

The self-publishing community is a helpful place, for the most part. Can be quite helpful and vocal in support. Discover through this community the best practices. Return the favor. Communicate and converse.

24. But Don’t Be A Cheerleader For Crappiness

On the other hand, some elements of the community can be toxic, and further, can act as cheerleaders for self-publishing’s own worst instincts. Don’t champion a novel because it’s self-published. How it got there is irrelevant to the end result. If it’s a good book, then talk about it. If it’s shit, then forget it. You have the freedom to self-publish; there’s no need to vociferously defend that right. But if you want self-publishing to be real, to earn the respect and credibility you think it deserves, then it needs fewer cheerleaders and more police — people who will call a rat-turd a rat-turd and not pretend it’s a Rice Krispie treat. Self-publishing also needs more sexy groupies, since we’re talking. Call me.

25. Calm Down, Twitchy McGee

Got a novel? Don’t self-publish it. Not right away. Give it time. Sit on it. My advice to you is to run it up the flagpole with agents and editors, with friends and readers and other writers. You need to know if it’s worth a shit, if it’s worth putting out there — do you want to contribute another bucket of crap to the ocean of effluence? No, you do not. Further, you want to be aware of the pluses and minuses to self-publishing. Some books have a shot at going big with traditional: you might earn a good advance and have a chance with film or foreign rights. Do not be hasty to ignore these benefits. Other books will do very well on the Kindle marketplace despite not having a great shot at traditional. Self-publishing can be transformative — and lucrative — if you put the right work, your best work, out there on the block.

My advice is the same I will continue to give when it comes to the fake bullshit battle between self-publishing and legacy publishing: do both. Write books for each — plant a foot in each world so you may reap the harvest of each. What say you, authors? What are your thoughts on self-publishing these days?

* * *

Want another booze-soaked, profanity-laden shotgun blast of dubious writing advice?

Try: CONFESSIONS OF A FREELANCE PENMONKEY

$4.99 at Amazon (US), Amazon (UK), B&N, PDF

And: 250 THINGS YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT WRITING

$0.99 at Amazon (US), Amazon (UK), B&N, PDF

August 23, 2011 / 80 Comments

25 Things Writers Should Know About Social Media

1. The Devil’s Trident

Social media has three essential prongs of activity: broadcast, rebroadcast, conversation. This is true for everybody, not just writers, but it’s worth noting just the same. I say something or repeat something someone else said (broadcast/rebroadcast), and from that social seed-bed, conversation may arise.

2. Be The Best Version Of Yourself

Writers and other creative-types often seem to believe that they need to become someone different online, that they cannot be themselves lest they not find a publisher, not get work, not sell their book, not collect sexy groupies, etc. To that I say, bullshit! And cock-waffle! And piddling piss-wafers! Be yourself. That’s who we want. We just want the best version of you. Scrape the barnacles off. Sit up straight. Smile once in a while. But you can still be you. Uhh, unless “you” just so happen to be some kind of Nazi-sympathizing donkey-molester. In which case, please back slowly away from the social media.

3. Put “Brand” And “Platform” Out Of Your Fool Head

You are not a brand. Social media is not your platform. The world has enough brands. You are not a logo, a marketing agenda, a mouthpiece, a Spam-Bot. Approach social media not as a writer-specific tool (keyword: tool) catered only toward your penmonkey self and see it instead as a place where you can bring all the crazy and compelling facets of your personality to bear on ~~an unsuspecting populace~~ your audience. People want to follow other people. People don’t want to follow brands.

4. Communicate With Other Human Beings (And The Occasional Spam-Bot)

Put the “social” in “social media.” Social media needn’t be a one-way street. A real connection goes both ways. Talk to people. Chat. Converse. Discuss. Share ideas. Don’t be one of those writers who uses their social media channel as a bulletin board announcing naught but their next signing, book release, or $0.99 bowel movement. Don’t aim only to be heard but to open your ears, as well. (Oh, and I’m totally kidding about the Spam-Bots thing. Don’t talk to Spam-Bots. Eradicate them with extreme prejudice. Perform the “honey-pot” maneuver — draw them to you with keywords like “real estate” or “ipad” and then EXTERMINATE EXTERMINATE EXTERMINATE with the vim and vigor of the Daleks.)

5. Guide Them Toward Your Sticky Embrace

Having a blog, website, or online space where you establish an authorial “base camp” is a great thing. It allows you to own your content, track stats, post long-form material, and be whatever it is you need it to be. I use this site for writing stuff, baby babble, recipes, and pagan Lithuanian pornography. Can’t see the porn? You haven’t unlocked the special content. Enter Konami code. Password is: “TheWhoreOfVilnius.”

6. Determine The Tools In Your Toolbox

Find different uses for different social media. Facebook is pretty light on writer-stuff for me. Google+ is good for longer-form discussions. Twitter is really where it’s at for me — it’s where I get the most conversation and connection. Then the blog is the central tentpole to the whole goddamn circus. Maybe you use Tumblr. Or some as-yet-unknown social network, like Wordhole or iPalaver or Friendhammer. Anything except LinkedIn. I mean, c’mon. LinkedIn is the scabby venereal disease of social media.

7. Breed Positivity And Share What You Love

Writers are content creators, and so it behooves us to share what we love. You’re generally better off showing positivity rather than sowing the seeds of negativity. For the most part, the Internet is a monster that thrives the rage of countless disaffected white people, so I don’t know that it does a writer good to be a part of that noise. Your audience cares more about what you’re into rather than what you’re not. After all, I don’t particularly care for a lot of things. Most things, really. If I spent all my time talking about them, I’d be little more than a septic social fountain spewing my bitter froth into the world.

8. Show The World You’re Not A Raging Bonerhead

The Internet is like hot dogs: it’s made of lips and assholes. A writer does well to set himself aside from all that and use social media to reveal that he is, indeed, not a giant bucket of non-contributing human syphilis

9. Kill Them With Kindness

Connection, not conflict. Communication, not combat. Don’t get into fights online. I mean, it’s one thing if you’re getting into an argument with a Nazi-sympathizing donkey-molester. Because, seriously? What an asshole. But nine times out of ten, getting into a snit-spat-tiff-miff-feud-fuss-or-fracas online doesn’t make you look like a shining prince of social media. It just makes you look cranky. Note the difference between “friendly, chummy disagreement” and “pissy Internet rumpus.” The former? Fine. The latter? Not so much.

10. Variety Is The Spice Melange Of Life

…and is essential to the creation of the sandworms, as well as the diet of the wandering Fremen. Wait, what? This isn’t Frank Herbert’s DUNE? Oh. Oh. Sorry! What I’m saying is, divvy your social media existence up. Don’t talk about any one thing. It may not be critical to chop everything up into neat percentages, but just vary the content of your broadcast. Ensure that you do more than share links. Contribute original thoughts. Add conversation. Say something. Just keep the commercials — i.e. self-promotion — to a necessary minimum.

11. Be An Escort, Not A Whore

Speaking of self-promo… the reality of the modern writer’s existence is that self-promotion is inescapable. Whether you’re published by the Big Six or published or by your buddy Steve out of his mother’s basement, you’re going to have to serve up some self-promo. Social media is your online channel for this. It has to be. And it isn’t a dirty word — if I follow a writer, I want to know that their new book is out because I may have missed that news. I just don’t want to hear it 72 times a day. And there’s the key to self-promotion — like with all things (sodomy, gin, reality TV), everything in moderation.

12. Just Say No To Quid Pro Quo

Controversial notion: do not re-share something purely as a favor to someone else. I know — it’s an easy favor to make. “You shared my link, now I share your link. In this way, we tickle each other’s pink parts.” The thing is, if one is to assume you are a writer to trust, then those who listen to your social media broadcasts want to know that the information you share is, in a way, pure. If they believe that the things you’re saying are motivated only by mutual social media masturbation, then you’ve gone and ruined that. Share things you think your audience wants to hear or things you believe are worth sharing. If all you’re doing is echoing links endlessly, what separates you from just another Spam-Bot?

13. You Don’t Build Audience, You Earn It

Lots of writers look at their follower tallies like they’re experience points in a role-playing game, like with every MilliWheaton earned you hear a “ding” and then gain +4 against 4chan or a new Save Versus PublishAmerica roll. Your audience isn’t just a number. It’s a whole bunch of actual human beings. Humans who don’t just want to be sold stuff or yelled at but who want to interact and be amused and enlightened — and who want to amuse and enlighten in turn. Earn your audience, don’t build it. They’re not dollar signs. They’re not credit you can spend buying vintage porn on eBay.

14. Followers Are Not Fans

It’s easy to believe that, pound for pound, those who follow you and read your broadcasts and interact with you online are automatically the same people who are going to buy your books, pimp your stuff, and become super-fans. Bzzt. Wrongo. A retweet or Facebook “like” or “Re-G” on Google+ (that’s what I’m calling the re-share feature over there) is free. The investment to procure your wordsmithy is a whole different level of commitment. That said, these people are all potential fans. It’s your job to make that happen.

15. As A Storytelling Medium

Use social media to tell stories. Real stories or fictional ones. Hey, if my three-month-old baby has an epic diaper-breach and manages to defy gravity and shit up his own back and into his hair, I’m gonna tell you about it. Talk about your life. Or use Twitter to write micro-fiction. Or empower your blog to experiment with telling old stories in new ways. Experiment! Do what you’re bred to do: write.

16. My God, It’s Full Of Words

Social media is, as noted, full of words. Words that must be written. You’re a writer, so tackle social media — from Tweets to Blog Posts to Friendhammer Epistles — with all the grace and aplomb you would give to any of your writing. In other words, let social media demonstrate your abilities as a writer. Use punctuation. Capitalize. Write well. Learn to engage in brief spaces. This will help you be a better writer.

17. The Self-Correcting Hive-Mind

Social media self-corrects. Many find this uncomfortable, but it’s an excellent memetic Darwinism. If I tweet about, say, my three-month-old’s poosplosion, inevitably I’m going to come across people who don’t want to hear about that. Eventually they may say, “This guy talks a lot about poop,” or “Boy, he sure says ‘fuck’ a lot,” and then they stop following me on Twitter or stop coming here to terribleminds. It’s regrettable, but that’s the nature of life. Social media is a frequency that people can tune into or turn away from. That’s normal. Let that happen. Don’t get mad at it. Embrace that kind of course-correction.

18. Dip Your Ladle Into The Brain Broth Of Social Media

Writers need to know things. So ask those in your social media world. Say, “I need a good book on wombat husbandry for a novel I’m writing,” or, “Can anyone recommend good writing music?” or, “If I were to write a stage play based on the Twitter stream of Kanye West, would anybody beta-read it for me?” Don’t be afraid to ask for things. And don’t be afraid to answer when others ask. Again: communicate.

19. The Water-Cooler For Writers

I believe it was game designer and writer Jeff Tidball who said he sees Twitter as a water-cooler for stay-at-home freelancers, and I think he nailed it. Writers don’t have the ability to hover around a water-cooler and talk to other writers most times, and so social media fills that function. It’s a great way to connect with other penmonkeys and creative-types and engage, interact and amuse. It’s important for writers to know other writers. It’s how we get book blurbs or find out what bottle of Bourbon we should try. Used to be you had to travel to conventions and conferences to do it. Now you can do it at home. Without pants.

20. Gaze Into The Whirring Gears Of Industry Machinery

You can use social media to do more than connect with writers. The entire industry is out there. So go and watch. And then partake. Follow agents. Ping publishers. You can watch trends unfold and see what agents are looking for (or what mistakes people are making in their queries). It’s a great place to interact with the industry as a person-who-is-a-writer, not merely a writer-shopping-a-product. Though, I must pass along a critical warning: gazing too long into the publishing industry is like dropping a fistful of acid and then staring into a backed-up toilet for days. You will starve and go mad.

21. Behold Zen Serendipity

Open yourself to the social media experience. Don’t be one of those walled-garden scrod-boats who follows like, 10 people but has 10,000 followers. Put your ear to the ground like Tonto. Listen to shit. Pay attention. Let the sweet serendipity and weird waves of connection wash over you. People are each their own little rabbit-hole: grab a thread and follow it down into the dark, and just as you might use Pandora to discover new music or Amazon to discover new books, use social media to discover new people. Without people and their thoughts and their stories, writers are just lonely weirdos screaming into an empty closet.

22. Appreciate Your Audience

Your audience follows you and rebroadcasts you and that’s a very nice thing. So appreciate them. Interact with them. Respond to them. I don’t mean to say, act as God from on-high acknowledging the little people — I mean, you’re them and they’re you and social media is a powerful equalizer. Appreciate that they take the time to listen to your nonsense day-in and day-out. That’s pretty cool of them, innit?

23. Crucify Gurus And Stab Them With Your Mighty Spears

Anybody who wants to charge you a bunch of money to “optimize” your “social media skills” is selling fool’s gold. This stuff isn’t hard. It ain’t fucking math. At its core, social media is really, “Talk to people, and try not to be a dick.” That’s true for writers as it is for everybody else.

24. Go Old-School

Every once in a while you need to unplug and embrace some old-school social media: go outside and talk to people. Go to a bar, a book signing, a game store, whatever. Engage with fleshy 3-D meatbags!

25. Remember That You Need To Escape Its Gravity

In the end, social media has uses for the writer. But it also runs the risk of becoming the Sarlacc Pit: a giant evil desert vagina that draws you in with its tentacle porn and slowly digests you over the course of many millennia, not allowing you to make any progress on that screenplay you’ve been writing for the last 16 years. Your priority is to write stories, not to fritter away hours on Facebook or dick around on Adult Slutfinder or pretend like LinkedIn is anything but a giant digital boat anchor. The most important thing a writer should know about social media is that it is not the crux of the penmonkey’s existence. What matters most of all is that you write great stories. So what are you doing hanging around here?

* * *

Want another booze-soaked, profanity-laden shotgun blast of dubious writing advice?

Try: CONFESSIONS OF A FREELANCE PENMONKEY

$4.99 at Amazon (US), Amazon (UK), B&N, PDF

And: 250 THINGS YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT WRITING

$0.99 at Amazon (US), Amazon (UK), B&N, PDF

August 17, 2011 / 32 Comments

The Life Cycle Of A Novel

Were you to take a freeze frame snapshot of my current writerly existence, you would find a still image of much juggling. No, not bowling pins, chainsaws, and rat terriers but rather a flurry of writing projects — and, as it turns out, a goodly portion of those projects are in fact novels.

BLACKBIRDS is at the publisher. I just finished the first draft of something with a codename POPCORN. I’m in the midst of doing a final editing pass on DOUBLE DEAD. I’ve got word count down on MOCKINGBIRD. I’ve got a bucket of notes on a little something-something called THE BLUE BLAZES. I’ve got the first novella in my Atlanta Burns series done with the second in the conception phase.

All this fails to mention the dozen-plus novels existing across various outlines and synopses.

Fuck turtles.

It’s novels, all the way down.

And so I thought, for those of you looking to write novels, that this was a good place to pause and have a look around. Let us gander at the wondrous miracle that is the birth and life of the common novel.

1. Crash Of Cymbals

An idea falls from the sky. A burning nugget of possibility tumbling out of the bleak black nowhere like a meteor. It slams into your brain. “A goblin love story! Wacky hijinks with two space detectives! The presidential campaign and political ambitions of the common Corsican nuthatch!” The idea blooms swift, like a rose in super-fast-forward. “This will be my opus,” you think. “A big advance. Book awards. Respect.”

2. Sinister Plotting

You plot and scheme to whatever level grants you solace. Maybe you write a 400-page “story bible” for a 350-page novel, a treatment so thick you could bludgeon a Cape buffalo with its weight. Maybe you just write a single index card in thick black Sharpie featuring some cryptic phrase that only makes sense to you as the storyteller: “CHRISTMAS SKELETON FAILS THE LSAT.” Hell, maybe it’s all in your head.

3. The Cold Vacuum Of Space

The blank page. Tabula rasa. Endless possibility. A million-billion ways to jump with the first sentence, first paragraph, first page. A finger hovers over the keyboard; it swiftly retracts as if stung. No. Yes? No. It’s like standing on the wing of an airplane in mid-flight. The wind. The empty air.

4. Hyperventilating

Panic attack. “Oh, Christ, I can’t do this. What do I do? The first page has to grab them. It has to grab them by pubes and perineum. The first sentence alone has to fucking sing. I don’t know what to do. What to say. I can’t feel my legs. Am I dying? Is it hot in here? Cold? My lips are numb. I can feel my teeth. Is this a palsy? Did I have a stroke? OH GOD WHAT IF I FUCK THIS PAGE UP.” Cue lots of sobbing and twitching.

5. The Eagle Has Landed

Swift is the realization that the first page doesn’t have to be perfect; it merely has to be functional. And suddenly, it’s like uncorking a bottle. A bottle which contained a rambunctious demon. Time to write.

6. The Tango Of Mirth And Shame

Day by day, a roller coaster. A whirling dance. Some days it’s 4,000 words that unmoors from your heart and soul the way a glacial shelf will suddenly shudder, crack and fall. Other days you barely carve off 1,000 words, and each word feels like a tooth ripped from the jaws of a snarling poodle/alligator hybrid (new on SyFy, THE GATORDOODLE). Some days you’re high on your own stink, huffing your word-fumes in a brown paper bag. Other days all you get is a swirling hate vortex living in the space between your heart and your gut, threatening to eat both. On Tuesday you’re king of the castle. On Wednesday you’re a fraud and a fool who will be found out. This way, that way, this way, that way…

7. Lost In The Woods

Late middle of the book. Everything’s come undone. You feel unfettered. You’re a lone pair of underpants hanging on the line, flapping in the wind. Where to go next? Does any of this make sense? It’s all coming apart. You’ve no sense of things. No grasp of placement. The character seem like strangers. The plot seems foolish. You can’t find the thread, can’t see the throughline. Is this a swamp? Where are your pants?

8. The Nattering Of Goblins And Crows

A chorus of goblins and their crow-faced consorts stand just behind you, whispering new ideas in your ear. They smell your confusion. “Don’t write that,” they say. “Write this.” And they parade before you a cackling Conga line of shiny new novels. It’s a ruse. A trap. They’re the sirens drawing you away from your current work and toward the crushing rocks of ruined productivity.

9. Beethoven’s Ode To Joy

You see the light. You find the path. You karate-kick the sirens in the face, stab the goblins, shoo their crows — you’ve found your way. Possibility and potential once more reveal themselves. Churn forward.

10. The Water Breaks, The Baby Is Coming

Writing the ending is you, duct-taped to a mining cart as it speeds down through the underdark, faster, faster, you can’t stop it now if you wanted to, it is what it is, the ending shall be what the ending shall be, you’ve lined up all the dominoes, they fall as they must, the hand-brake is broken, you emerge. The ending is written. The manuscript broadcasts its inchoate existence to the world.

11. Bliss

Oh my God. It’s done. It’s done. Ha ha! Ha ha ha! HA HA HA HA HA! Eeeee! Woo!

12. Ennui

Oh my God. It’s… it’s not done. Is it? This was just the first lap. It’s all uphill from here. Oh. Oh, no.

13. Overwhelming Dread

The realization hits like a nail from a nail gun: you’ve got a lot more work to do. The boulder must be pushed up the rock again. And again. And again. Your book is a boat anchor whose chain is wrapped around your ankle. It weighs you down. It’s a brick. A bludgeoning brick. Bricks and boat anchors and boulders, oh my. Dread assails you. Fatigue nibbles at your marrow like an army of tiny chipmunks.

14. Exile

Fuck that novel, you say. You piss on it and shove it in a drawer. You can’t stand to look at it anymore lest you kneel and sing a technicolor hymn to the porcelain god. Fuck that novel right in its wordhole.

15. Wake Up In Tijuana And Realize It’s Time To Go Home

It’s been weeks. Maybe months. You’ve been whoring it up with short stories, blog posts, social media, Facebook games, a pint of Ben & Jerry’s, a fifth of vodka, and a drilldo named “Mister Sprinkles.” You stumble back into the house, and there it is. It’s escaped the drawer. The pee stains have dried to a crisp sepia crinkle. You pick it up. You reconcile. Your exile is complete.

16. Second Draft

You’ve got a meat cleaver, a micro-torch, and a jar full of maggots hungry to eat dead flesh. The second draft commences. Repeat after me: to fix something, I must first break it.

17. Third Draft

The third draft is there to fix the mistakes of the second. The second draft went the wrong way. Somehow the second draft just fucked things up worse. You walked the maze again and this time the minotaur didn’t just eat you, he sat you down for a long talk about a time-share. Then he made you do his taxes. Then he made love to you. Then he killed you. The third draft now has to walk the maze again. Beware of minotaurs.

18. Seventh-Fifth Draft

OH MY GOD SO MANY DRAFTS. You didn’t know writing a novel might need this much tweaking. What the novel is now looks nothing like what the novel was then. Same characters, same idea, same story. Roughly. But so much else is different. Every pass a new tweak. Writing, plot, theme, plot, new character, plot, writing. Dizzy-making. Still. By the end, you stand atop the hill next to the boulder. You suddenly realize: it didn’t roll down this time. You made it to the top. You and your boulder friend. From Sisyphean to Herculean. From impossible to improbable. From victim to hero. Holy fucking shit.

19. The Reader’s Report

Don’t get too excited. The reader has to weigh in. Maybe more than one reader. Stuff you were sure worked didn’t. Stuff you were sure didn’t work did. Up is down. Cat is dog. CRAP MORE DRAFTS.

20. The Editor’s Cocked Eyebrow

Don’t put that rage boner back in your pants. Because now a proper editor is going to look at it. Someone with a real critical eye. Someone who knows things the readers don’t. Someone who’s done this before. This is the forensics pass. Where the editors shines a UV light over the whole of the manuscript and shows you all the hidden blood spots, jizz drops, and other uninvited fluids.

21. Draft #3000

You’ve run the gauntlet. You’ve carried the novel through a hundred doorways ringed with fire. The work has been forged and reforged. Purified and refined. It is as good as you can make it. It is time.

22. The Novel Goes Off To War

Go forth, little novel. Duct taped to the novel are all your hopes and dreams. The novel flies far and wide. Agents big and small. Publishers big and small. Or maybe you do it yourself — get the cover together, format the book, and send the book to one of the many e-book marketplaces. The book must dance for its dinner, sing for its supper, suck dick for its dessert.

23. The Passing Of One Geologic Epoch

Nothing moves fast. Takes forever to hear back from an agent, then hear back from a publisher. These are books. Not Chicken McNuggets. It takes time to write them, and it also takes time to digest them. Even putting the book “out there” yourself isn’t fast. And the response isn’t overnight. Everything is slow. It is the forming of stalagmites and stalactites — one mineral drip at a time. A game of inches.

24. Conquest Or Castigation

YAY! You got published! Or BOO, you didn’t. Or maybe you got published and didn’t sell. Or maybe you got an agent but no publication. Or maybe you’re a bestselling author with a Rolls Royce literally cobbled together from rare first edition novels. You came and conquered, or you arrived and were promptly crushed by Hannibal’s elephants. Or you fell somewhere in the middle, in the hoary zone of the midlist. Or maybe you’re almost there, if only you’ll do three or four (thousand) more drafts…

25. Reflection

You look back over the last seventeen years — the length of time it took to get all this done — and ask yourself, was it worth it? Was it really truly worth it? Will you ever do this again? You can think you won’t. But you will. Of course you will. This is who you are. This is what you do. You couldn’t stop if you wanted to. You are writer. So get back to work, will you? This life cycle won’t live itself.

* * *

Want another booze-soaked, profanity-laden shotgun blast of dubious writing advice?

Try: CONFESSIONS OF A FREELANCE PENMONKEY

$4.99 at Amazon (US), Amazon (UK), B&N, PDF

And: 250 THINGS YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT WRITING

$0.99 at Amazon (US), Amazon (UK), B&N, PDF

August 16, 2011 / 55 Comments

The Secret Menu Of Writing Advice

I love that restaurants have secret menus. Go to In N’ Out burger and order an “Animal Style,” you get a mustard-slathered patty with grilled onions, sauce, extra pickles, and cheese all globbed onto the patty. Feel free to order the Red Eye, Black Eye, or Green Eye at any Starbucks. If you go to Burger King and ask for the “Suicide Burger,” they will deep fry a patty made from the ground up meat of a euthanized hobo.

That last one might be wrong.

Point is, I think it’s a fascinating snidbit, that restaurants have these secret menus for those “in-the-know.”

So, let’s pretend that here at terribleminds you will find a secret menu of writing advice.

You may be saying, “Well, what the fuck does that mean?”

And I’d say to you, “Don’t say ‘fuck.’ We don’t talk like that around here.” And then we’d all have a good laugh and yell “Shitcake fucksplosion!” right before we freeze-frame high-five.

What it means is, I’m going to give you the real honest-to-Jeebus writing advice, slid to you across the table in a non-descript brown envelope. Like, if you take all the other bullshit I say on this site, duct-tape it to a goat and then push that goat off a cliff, you could still get by on the things I’m about to tell you.

Here, then, is the secret menu. Please enjoy your order. Drive around.

Write Big And Write Bold Or Go The Fuck Home

We get one go-around on this here carousel. Then we’re dead. Maybe we reincarnate. Maybe we float around the clouds with wings on our backs. Maybe we’re just meals for maggots. But we still get one life.

And that life is too short not to take risks and long to live with an output of weak-kneed, limp-noodled, utterly derivative, safe-as-houses storytelling.

Write what you want to write. Write what you need to write. Write what engages you, what interests you, what gets your blood pumping and your jaw tight. Because what else are you going to do? Play it safe? Write what everybody else is writing just because everybody else is writing it? What’s the point? Why bring nothing new to the table? Why fail to bring yourself and your passions to the page?

Write urban fantasy because you want to write it. You want to write astronaut porn? Suburban murder mysteries? Arthouse tales of North Korean sexual repression? Fuck it. Buckle up, and write it.

No, you may not find a market. No, that book, script, show or game may not be selling right now, and it may not sell ever. I didn’t say this was good publishing advice. But it is good writing advice. Because if you write big and write bold and write the things you want to write, you’re going to produce stronger material than if you wrote somebody else’s story in somebody else’s voice. Trust in your instinct.

(And here’s the other thing — no, a publisher or agent may not want Thing Thing You Just Wrote, but that doesn’t mean you still can’t find the story’s niche — and your own audience. Times, they are a-changing.)

Bleed From A Place Of Honesty

Cut your heart out of your chest, clutch it in your fist, and slam it down onto the paper. That is the real meaning of write what you know, which is probably better written as, write with total fucking honesty.

Take all that shit that lurks inside you, all your fears and wants and experiences, all your neuroses and psychoses and loves and loathings, all your hopes and dreams and memories, and inject ’em into your work.

For fuck’s sake, say something with your fiction. Your father hit you? Spend a year homeless? Can’t get it up in bed? You’d kill a man just to walk on the beach? Use it. Use it! You have this monster-sized equation inside you, like something from one of those movie scenes where a lunatic mathematician scrawls out a nutso whiteboard full of numbers and symbols. Every part of this equation is just one more piece of you that builds up to this moment, this “you” that exists.

Bring that into your work. Feel something when you write. Find the bridge between you, the characters, and the story. Bleed on that page in a way that makes you vulnerable. I don’t care if you’re writing about vampires or space hookers or frustrated housewives, put yourself in there. I don’t mean, “be the character,” I mean, dissect all of who you are, and ejaculate your DNA into every cell of that story.

Always be telling your story, even when it’s not your story.

You’ll be amazed at how clarifying that can be.

Character Is Everything

Audiences care about characters more than anything else. I don’t have any math to prove this, I don’t have any facts or data and like most things, I’m just making it up. But I believe it to be true just the same.

Character matters more than anything else. We will follow a good strong character through all their torments and trials and triumphs just to stay with them for another five minutes, five pages, five comic panels. The plot can suck corpse-teat, the theme might be muddier than waters stirred up by a catfish orgy, but if you give us a kick-ass character, you might still find us hanging on.

A great character is transcendent. A powerful vehicle through a story. In fact, a story is really just that — the experiences of a character through a given narrative. That’s a wonderful thing. Simple and elegant.

Concentrate all your firepower on writing a great character. Not necessarily a likable character, either. Worry instead about giving us a character who draws our gaze and demands our undivided attention.

Give us a character we will live with and will die without.

ABC: Always Be Calibratin’

Never stop getting better. It’s as simple as that. Know who you are as a writer, and always find ways to recalibrate and improve your work. Every day is a brand new chance to kick a little more ass.

Writing Is A Conversation We Need To Have

I’ve long said that you need to write to be read, while others have said you should write for yourself. The truth here lives where it nearly always lives — somewhere smack in the middle.

Otherwise, therein lurks a false dichotomy. Because guess what? You can — and should — do both. Of course you should write for yourself. That’s what most of this post is about, frankly — it’s about putting yourself out there, about tailoring your work to your tastes, and about loving what you do.

But you also need to write for an audience. You should write to be read! Why? Well, what the fuck is writing for? Writing is a form of communication. It is, in a way, a conversation — and an important one — between storyteller and storytold. It’s not masturbation. Writing demands the ego to say, “The story I want to tell is an important one.” And you spend the time and the effort to put it out there. Why? To what end?

That old doofy koan of “If a tree falls in a forest and blah blah blah *poop noise*” could just as easily be written as, “If a storyteller tells a story and nobody’s around to hear it, who gives a shit?”

Storytelling is communication, conversation, and contract. It is between creator and audience, and then after the story is told, between the audience and the audience. That’s a powerful thing.

When Something Isn’t Working, Do Something Different

One suspects that is fairly self-explanatory. Outlining fails to produce a finished draft? Fuck the outline. Current writing schedule manufactures only drivel? Write according to a new timetable. Only the most insane people keep trying the same thing when it produces a poor result, and yet that’s so often what writers do. When one tool fails you, pick up a different tool. That hammer won’t cut that board. That chainsaw won’t cure Polio. If the road is closed, build a new road.

Let The Love Of Your Work Be Your Primary Reward

Put differently, love your work, don’t work to be loved.

I don’t care what you’re writing — a novel series, a film script, a freelance RPG, a television show, a web-comic — you damn well better love what you do. Because otherwise? You’ll fail. Maybe you won’t make the words happen. Or maybe they’ll happen, but they won’t dance. The satisfaction of the work, the love of the craft, the power of the art, has to sustain you.

Because little else will. Not the money (haha), not the respect (HAHA), not the health care (HAHAHAHA snort *vomit*). It’s gotta be you out there doing this thing that you do because you love it, because you can see yourself doing nothing else, because this is who you are and who you shall be. If you hold any illusions or fears that This Is Not You, get out of the game. It’s just not worth it.

If the love isn’t there, then you shouldn’t be, either.

* * *

Want another booze-soaked, profanity-laden shotgun blast of dubious writing advice?

Try: CONFESSIONS OF A FREELANCE PENMONKEY

$4.99 at Amazon (US), Amazon (UK), B&N, PDF

And: 250 THINGS YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT WRITING

$0.99 at Amazon (US), Amazon (UK), B&N, PDF

August 11, 2011 / 13 Comments

“New Ideas Are Like Shiny Jewels,” by Dave White

Oh, sure, everyone wants to know where a writer gets his ideas from. Ideas are great. They must come from this magical little place inside your head. Or a box. A box you keep under your desk. No one else gets ideas like this. Writers must love getting ideas.

Wrong.

Guess what?

Ideas are both the best and worst thing about writing. They can be fantastic when you’re stuck. And they can be hell when you’re busy.

Case in point, I’m flush with ideas right now. I’m a teacher, so I get a lot of my writing done in the summer. This summer, with no strict deadline intact, I decided I’d try something different. Knowing that I have writer’s ADD (Ooh look a flashy thing. Hey, wait! What’s up on Twitter?) and can only work on one project at a time for about 2 hours, I thought that I would revise the manuscript I’m working on in the morning. In the afternoon, I’d start a brand new manuscript. I have strong ideas for what needs to happen to both, and it seemed like a good way to keep myself writing every single day. And it’s been working great so far. I’m making major progress on the revision and I’m getting 1,000 words down consistently on the new piece of work.

This is great, I thought. I’m on a fucking roll. By the time school starts, I’ll have enough done that I can wrap up my revisions first and the move right into the next project, which will be at least a quarter of the way done—first draftwise. I was loving this. Feeling really, really productive. Feeling like a writer.

Then something weird happened last night. No, not that kind of weird. Get your mind out of the gutter. Just… weird. Writer weird. I don’t have enough time for all of this stuff in my head weird.

Shut up.

Anyway, I was sitting around thinking about my favorite TV shows and movies and the way the best shows, movies, and books twist your expectations. They come up with a great hook and get you to speculate about what’s going to happen for the better part of your watching or reading experience. They get you excited about what happens next right from the start. And I was wondering how I could do that with my own books. Especially the ones I was working on.

And then…. Oh crap… I had a brand new, fucked up, great freaking idea for a new book.

This is the sort of thing that halts writers in their tracks. New ideas are like shiny jewels in a display case. They always look better than what you have. Their perfect, something that’s going to sell a million copies, win you awards and get made into movies. They want you to look at the piece of crap your working on (And it’s usually only a piece of crap because you’re in the process of making it a lot better.) and toss it out the window and start anew.

That’s not a good thing. (Yes, I can hear you. “Oooh, the big writer man is scared of shiny new ideas.” Just keep reading.)

If you stop to work on your brand new idea, you’ll never get anything done. You’ll never finish a manuscript because you’ll be starting all over. A writer has to know what to do with a new idea when he or she’s working on something already.

There are two things I usually do. (Hey, what’s new on Twitter? Wendig is shouting again… sigh.) One is put the idea away and save it for later. I have about three good ideas to start novels and one really good idea for a short story put off the to the side waiting for me to write them. I might get to all four, I might only get to one of them. I don’t know.

But they’re sitting around waiting for me. If you write ‘em down, you won’t lose the ideas, and—even better—the ideas may have a chance to mutate in your mind and become something even more solid.

The other thing I try to do is incorporate said new idea into what I’m working on. It’s happened about 16 times in the manuscript I’m revising. It’s as if my subconscious knows the book needs something and keeps trying to add to it. Your subconscious knows why it’s coming up with these ideas and where they belong. It’s up to you, the conscious writer, to figure it out. (Yes, writing isn’t magic. I know. I was sad too when I heard this.)

But the most important thing is, don’t let it slow you down (Hold on, Twitter check again). If you want to be a professional writer or a published writer or whatever the proper term is these days, you have to finish. So, occasionally you have to put an idea away for later.

No matter how shiny that jewel is behind the case. No matter how green the grass is on your neighbor’s lawn. I like my neighbor’s lawn too, but if I had it, I’d still have to mow it. (I think that metaphor works. Or am I mixing metaphors. STOP CHECKING TWITTER!)

I digress.

Anyway, I guarantee you this, once you buy that jewel and start to wear it, a new prettier one will show up right behind it, and you’ll want to wear that one as well.

Dave White is the author of the e-book exclusive WITNESS TO DEATH (criminally underpriced at $0.99, says Chuck, so go buy it), as well as the Shamus Award nominated novels WHEN ONE MAN DIES and THE EVIL THAT MEN DO. He lives and teaches in New Jersey.