Tag: writing (page 13 of 33)

(Note: this post relates mostly to fiction authors seeking literary agents, though certainly has some bleed-over regarding those with screenplays or non-fiction proposals or what-not.)

1. No, You Don’t Need An Agent

Let’s just get that out of the way right now. You do not require an agent to survive or be successful in this business. If you are without an agent you will not be shot in the streets by roving gangs of publisher-thugs. It is a myth that you cannot get published or produced without an agent to get you there. You may want an agent. (I have one, and am happy I do.) But you do not, strictly speaking, require one.

2. Do Some Due Diligence

Heh. Doo-doo. Ahem. What I mean is, do your goddamn homework. Agents get a rap for being elitists or gatekeepers or whatever, but you have to have some sympathy for what they do: they basically open their digital doors to whatever anybody wants to send them. An agent says, “I represent literary fiction,” and just the same they get flooded with sci-fi and screenplays and kid’s books and long-lost Tesla blueprints and insane schizoid scrawls written in crayon and possum vomit. The agent’s job half the time is to pick through the mud-glop slurry to try to find the few potential pearls hidden deep in the mire. If every writer did research and learned to target the right agents for their manuscripts, the whole thing would probably run a lot more cleanly. So: do your research. Why willingly advertise yourself as a total dickbrain?

3. Put The “Social” In “Social” Media

Many agents are on social media. (And one might wonder why you’d want an agent who isn’t on social media.) Follow them. Find out what they’re looking for. Discover whether or not they’re closed to submissions. See if they have any pet peeves (like, say, you snail-mailing a query filled with glitter and a “mysterious white powder”). You can even — gasp — ask them questions.

4. (But Please Don’t Stalk Them)

The rules of our polite society still apply. Don’t be crazy. Don’t be an asshole. Act like a professional. Do not hide in an agent’s shrubs or sneak onto their fire escape. C’mon. Don’t be weird.

5. If They Say Jump, You Ask, “Can I Do A Karate Kick To Show You My Moves?”

Individual agents ask for individual things. This one wants the first chapter. That one wants the first five pages. A third doesn’t want any part of your manuscript until requested. A fourth asks that you send him a query while the moon’s in Sagittarius and then only via snail mail and using a query letter scented with the musk glands of a pubescent ermine. (Though why you’d want an agent who still only accepts queries via the Pony Express is between you and your Penmonkey Jesus.) If you’re going to query a specific agent, perform the particular tasks that agent requires. Your mother thinks you’re a rare and beautiful bird. An agent just thinks you’re another cuckoo.

6. Repeat After Me: “Money In, Not Money Out”

You do not pay an agent. If an agent asks for money to look at your submission or anything like that, you can be sure he’s either a) a scam artist or b) really bad at his job. You want neither of these things. Your relationship to an agent is the same as it is to a publisher: money in, not money out. They help you get paid, and an agent takes a cut of that. Easy-peasy stung-by-beesy.

7. My Query Formula

I split my query into three portions: the Hook, the Pitch, the Bio. All bookended by the usual pleasantries and greetings and gratitude. The Hook is a single-sentence logline that is meant to grab the agent by the short-and-curlies. The Pitch is a subsequent paragraph exploding out the Hook (synopsizing in a single paragraph as opposed to a single sentence). The Bio is a very short closing paragraph about you. You want to keep the whole thing contained on a single page, which means around 350-400 words max. You want to write with confidence, but not ego. You do not want to presume to tell the agent how to do the agent’s job. Simple. Direct. Clear. Confident. And again, blah blah blah, don’t be a dick, don’t be crazy, this is a professional document, etcetera and whatever. Oh: QueryShark. And AgentQuery. Love both.

8. Agents Are Trained To Smell Your Flopsweat

Another note about “confidence:” agents have powerful sniffers and can smell the stink of your desperation from three blocks away. I’ve read too many queries that have a wishy-washy vibe, that come spackled with fear and uncertainty and bring this sense of laying prostrate before the pedestal and hoping to be allowed to make with the slobbery ring-kisses. If you think your work is good enough to query, then write the query with that kind of authority. If you don’t think that it’s good enough to query? Then it probably isn’t, so don’t waste their time. Or, more importantly, your own.

9. Agents Have Seen Everything, But They Haven’t Seen You

Agents have seen it all. They are the first line of defense in the war against Bad Books and Shitty Storytelling. It’s a wonder that some of them don’t just snap and try to take out half of New York City with a dirty bomb made of radioactive stink-fist query letters and cat turd manuscripts. That’s a scary thought: they’ve seen everything already. But the one thing they haven’t seen is you. Just as I exhort authors to put themselves on the page of their stories, I say the same regarding your communication with potential agents. Described more directly: you have a voice, so use it.

10. The Polite Reminder

You will at times send out a query and hear nothing. Many agents will suggest a response time on their agency websites or social media pages, and most are reasonable (though every once in a while you read a whopper: “You will receive a response to your query sometime after the year when we first settle on Mars and start flying to work with jetpacks”). If you pass this window of time and have not heard anything, a very short and polite and totally not-crazy reminder is entirely appropriate. If you don’t hear anything after that, well — maybe time to write that agent off and concentrate your fire on another star destroyer.

11. You Manuscript Is Not Half-a-Dick

Do not try to query an incomplete and unedited manuscript. Don’t. Don’t. Seriously. Behold my steely gaze and my all caps blog-making: DON’T. You wouldn’t try to sell somebody a half-eaten cupcake. You wouldn’t wave around a half-a-dick. If you’re fortunate enough that the agent requests a full manuscript, you best be ready to deliver on that delightful demand. Oh, and make sure it’s formatted correctly, okay? I don’t know that an agent will toss your shit in a trash-can just because the manuscript font is Times New Roman instead of Courier (I think mine was in TNR, actually), but they will ditch it if the formatting makes reading it feel like you’re burning your eyes with lit cigarettes.

12. Agents Are Readers

It’s easy to imagine agents as iron-hearted gatekeepers guarding the gates of Publishing Eden with their swords of fire: marketing angels serving the God of the Almighty Dollar. Most of the agents I know and have met are readers first. They do this because they love this, not because it pays them in private jets and jacuzzis filled with 40-year-Macallan Scotch. They like to read. They love books. Which is awesome.

13. That Said, This Is A Business

Agents are called upon to make business decisions, too. That’s the sad fact of the penmonkey existence: your wordsmithy may be top-notch, your storytelling may be the bee’s pajamas, but if doesn’t seem like it’ll survive in the marketplace, then that’s just how the dung-ball rolls. They make these decisions based on what one assumes is past experience, current trends and a dollop of gut instinct. Just the same, it doesn’t mean they’re right — it’s not like they run your manuscript through a Publi-Bot 9009 and he BEEP BOOP BEEP computes the chances of your manuscript being a success or failure. Rejections from agents that suggest the story and writing are solid but they’re not sure it’ll sell is a sign to do one of three things: keep querying, try out some smaller publishers, or self-publish.

14. Your Heartbreak Is Their Heartbreak

Agents understand rejection. They have to — they go through it same as you do. They rep authors and the books of those authors and they write pitch letters same as you write query letters and they send those letters out to editors and they go through rejection same as you — they may be one step removed (as in, an agent did not write the book) but they’ve invested time and patience and blood and sweat into it, too. A book they rep gets rejected is sad for them same as it’s sad for you — and not just as lost money.

15. Hot Author-On-Author Action

Author referrals matter. They are not the end-all be-all of everything, but I know of many authors who ended up with agents when another author recommended them. That said, don’t cozy up to authors on the sole hope they’ll refer you to an agent — that’s a little sleazy. You gotta at least buy them drinks and dinner first. Me, I demand nothing less than a Tijuana panther show. What? Donkey shows are so passé!

16. A Deal In Hand Is Better Than A Bird In Hand Because, Y’know, Bird Poop

This is one of those paradoxical conundrums like, “Every job requires experience but a job is the only way to get experience.” The story goes that it’s easier to get an agent if you already have a deal, but of course a lot of publishers don’t offer deals to unagented authors. (Further twisting the nipple are the stories that pop up: “I had a deal in hand, went to agents, and they still turned me down.”) If you can get a deal pre-agent, then it’s a good time to get an agent — but, just the same, don’t believe anybody who tells you that it’s a necessary component. I, among many authors, did not have a deal in hand and yet still have an agent.

17. The Bones Of Literary Agents And Dodo Birds

Are literary agents going to go extinct in the New Publishing Media Regime? Fuck if I know. What am I, an oracle? Sure, I sometimes huff printer ink and decipher the secret hidden meanings in coffee grounds and mouse scat, but that doesn’t mean I have a good answer here. My guess is that agents aren’t going anywhere, just as the whole of the publishing industry isn’t going anywhere. It may slim down. It may cull those who are not forward-thinking. It may force them to adopt new roles. But I do not believe literary agents are on the endangered list. Now pass the printer ink. DADDY NEEDS TO GET GOOFY.

18. Some Agents Are Total Dickbags

Rant time. Some agents get the reputation as cold and callous rainmaking gatekeepers because they act like it. Not every agent is the shining embodiment of good-hearted book-reading do-it-cause-we-love-it folk. Some agents won’t write you back. Some will snark off about authors on social media (agents, seriously, please don’t do this — just as you wouldn’t want an author to do this to you, you shouldn’t do this to an author). Some will string you along. When I went out to agents with BLACKBIRDS, I was a little amazed that while agents demand professional behavior, several chose not to be professional in return — and we’re talking agents who belong to big agencies, not like, some sleazy bookmonger from Topeka. Some strung me along. Some requested full manuscripts while at the same time forgetting I ever existed. Some responded six, even eight months after I already had an agent. I’d say somewhere between 10-20% of my total experience with agents was negative. The occasional agent is an unprofessional prick.

19. (But That’s Just The Way People Are)

One bad agent doesn’t make all agents bad. I’ve seen reprehensible actions by publishers. I’ve seen asshole authors and woefully unprofessional self-publishers. Don’t let bad examples be representative of the whole.

20. Pick Proper

Just gonna put this out there: a bad agent will do more harm to your career than no agent at all. You should find the right match. Find an agent with whom you get along. Consult your intestinal flora.

21. A Good Agent Cultivates The Author

A good agent cares about the author, not just about the author as a delivery system for a single book (or, perhaps, a single book that comes inconveniently paired with the author). The right agent has your career in mind. The right agent buys you liquor and puppies. Okay, maybe not so much with the liquor and puppies. But if any agents are reading this, I’m just saying: let’s all get on board the liquor-and-puppies train.

22. A Good Agent Defends The Writer Against The System

I don’t mean to get all Rage-Against-The-Machiney on you, but the traditional publishing system can, at times, be a bit predatory. This is by no means universal but once in a while you hear a real horror story about an author who ends up signing a contract that basically guarantees that if his book makes it into print he has name his first son after the publisher and if the doesn’t become a NYT bestseller the author has to come and wash his editor’s car. An agent defends the author against such predation. The agent helps the author not just get a good deal but the best deal.  The agent makes sure the author doesn’t get fucked.

23. A Good Agent Is Savvy Toward The Future

Agents who look down on new media? BZZT. Agents who look down on self-publishing? BZZT. Agents who are afraid of digital? BZZT. Authors need to be much more versatile and media-savvy in this day and age to survive, and agents have to do the same. Don’t sign on with a backwards-looking agent. You want an agent who knows how to duck and roll, not stand there and get punched.

24. Sometimes, You Need To Break Up

If your agent isn’t working for you or you’re not simpatico with the agent, maybe it’s time for an old-fashioned break-up. It happens. It has to be hard to do (I’ve never done it and have no reason to do so), but why stay in a business relationship that isn’t serving either of your needs? Just don’t send a drunken text at 3:30 in the morning. Have some class. Go there in person and throw a potted plant through their window! (Okay, maybe don’t do that either. What do I know? I’m drunk right now!)

25. One Word: Symbiosis

The relationship between writer and agent is a two-way street. While it’s true that the agent works for you and you don’t work for the agent, this is still a relationship based on mutual gain — neither is the other’s bitch, but both should listen to and respect the other, even if it is the author who has final say (as it is the author’s life and career). I’m not suggesting that the author is crocodile and the agent is little bird who picks the croc’s teeth, but I am suggesting that each feeds off the relationship in positive ways. If you find that the relationship isn’t symbiotic, then maybe it’s time to take another look at #24, dontcha think?

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The newest: 500 WAYS TO BE A BETTER WRITER

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Only a buck: 250 THINGS YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT WRITING

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

The epic mega-book: CONFESSIONS OF A FREELANCE PENMONKEY

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

Or its sequel: REVENGE OF THE PENMONKEY

$2.99 at Amazon (US), Amazon (UK), B&N, PDF

Consider this, if you will, a sequel to the gone-viral post, “25 Things Writers Should Stop Doing (Right Fucking Now)” — sort of a mirrored-reflection be-a-fountain-not-a-drain version.

Now, a warning, just in the rare instance you don’t come to this site all that often:

Here There Be Bad Words. Naughty profanity. The sinner’s tongue. Lots of “eff-this” and “ess-that.”

If you’re not a fan of profanity, no harm, no foul. But you might want to turn your tender gaze away before your eyeballs foam up and ooze out of your poor innocent head.

Please to enjoy.

1. Start Taking Yourself Seriously

This is a real thing, this writing thing, if you let it be. It’s not just about money or publication — it’s about telling the kind of stories only you can tell. Few others are going to take you seriously, so give them a 21-middle-finger-salute and do for yourself what they won’t: demonstrate some self-respect.

2. Start Taking The Time

Said it before, will say it again: we all get 24 hours in our day. Nobody has extra time. You must claim time for yourself and your writing. Time is a beast stampeding ever forward and we’re all on its back. Don’t get taken for a ride. Grab the reins. Whip that nag to go where you want her to go. Take control. Hell, pull out a big ol’ electric knife and carve off a quivering lardon of fatty Time Bacon all for yourself. (As a sidenote, the Germans had a name for that phenomenon: Zeitspeck. True story I just made up!)

3. Start Trying New Stuff

Branch out. Get brave. Look at all the ways you write now — “I write in the morning, sipping from my 64-ounce 7-11 Thirst Aborter of Mountain Dew, and I pen my second-person POV erotic spy novels and it earns me a comfortable living.” Good for you. Now punch that shit right in the ear. Okay, I’m not saying you need to change directions entirely — what kind of advice is that? “Hey, that thing that works for you? Quit doing it.” I’m just saying, mix it up. Make some occasional adjustments. Just as I exhort people to try new foods or travel destinations or ancient Sumerian sexual positions, I suggest writers try new things to see if they can add them to their repertoire. Write 1000 words a day? Try to double that. Don’t use an outline? Write with one, just once. Single POV character? Play with an ensemble. Mix it the fuck up. Don’t have just One True Way of doing things. Get crazy. Don’t merely think outside of the box. Set the box adrift on a river and shoot it with fire arrows. Give the box a motherfucking Viking funeral.

4. Start Telling Stories In New Ways

Another entry from the “Set The Box On Fire” Department — with the almost obscene advances in personal technology (the smartphone alone has become more versatile than most home computers), it’s time to start thinking about how we can tell stories in new ways. A story needn’t be contained to a book or a screen. A story can be broken apart. A story can travel. Your tale can live across Twitter and Foursquare and Tumblr and an Android app and Flickr and HTML5 and then it can take the leap away from technology and move to handwritten journals and art installations and bathroom walls and — well, you get the idea. Let this be the year that the individual author need no longer be constrained by a single medium. Transmedia is now in the hands of individuals. So give it a little squeeze, and find new ways to tell old stories.

5. Start Reading Poetry

Poetry? Yes, poetry. I know. I see that look you’re giving me. “What’s next, Wendig?” you ask. “We all hold hands and dance around the maypole in our frilly blouses and Wonder Woman underoos?” YES EXACTLY. I mean — uhh, what? No. Ahem. All I’m saying is, all writing deserves a touch — just a tickle — of poetry. And do not conflate “poetry” with “purple prose” — such bloated artifice has no room in your work.

6. Start Saying Something

You are your writing and your writing is you, and if you’re not using your writing to say something — to speak your mind, to fertilize the fictional ground with your idea-seed in an act of literary Onanism — then what’s the damn point? You have a perspective. Use it.

7. Start Discovering What You Know

Ah, that old chestnut. “Write what you know.” Note the lack of the word only in there. We don’t write only what we know because if we did that we’d all be writing about writers, like Stephen King does. (Or, we’d be writing about sitting at our computers, checking Twitter in our underwear and smelling of cheap gin and despair.) The point is that we have experience. We’ve seen things, done things, learned things. Extract those from your life. Bleed them into your work. Don’t run from who you are. Bolt madly toward yourself. Then grab all that comprises who you are and body-slam it down on the page.

8. Start Writing From A Place Of Pain

You also know pain. So, get it out there. Don’t build a wall and hide from it. Scrape away the enamel of that tooth and expose the raw nerve — meaning, it goes into what you’re writing. Our pain is part of what makes us, and if we speak to that honestly in our writing, the reader will get that. Audiences can smell your inauthentic contrivances like a dead hamster in the heating duct. A reader wants to see their story in your story. They want to relate their pain to the pain on the page, and if that pain isn’t honest — meaning, it isn’t born out of experience or empathy — then your work will come across as hollow as a gutted pumpkin.

9. Start Upping Your Game

I don’t care if you’re good at what you do. I don’t care if you’re great at what you do. You can always improve. You can always be better. You know what happens to people who tread water? They grow inevitably weary and then they drown and hermit crabs use their body as a sex playground. That’s a fact. I read it in the New York Times. If anybody knows facts, it’s them.

10. Start Buying New Skills For Your Character Sheet

“Writer” is a piss-poor name for what we do because that verb, to write, comprises only a portion of our professional life. It’d be like if you called auto mechanics “brake light technicians.” Sure, they fix brake lights. But they also change oil and replace alternators and counsel troubled married couples. (What? My guy’s really good. Don’t judge me.) Like I said quite some time ago, writers have to edit, market, manifest business savvy, do math, hunt and capture wayward editors in the windswept tundra, and so forth. Further, fiction writers utilize all manner of absurd skills in their work. Writing about a hired killer? Why not learn how to use a gun? (Trust me, firing a gun and reading about firing a gun are two very different things.)

11. Start Cultivating Your Sanity

You’re crazy. No, no, it’s okay. I’m crazy, too. We’re all a little bit unhinged. Hell, I’m one broken screen door away from drinking a fifth of antifreeze and driving off a highway overpass on a child’s tricycle. Writing is not a particularly stressful job — I mean, you’re not an air traffic controller or an astronaut or some shit. Just the same, it’s a weird job. We hunker down over our fiction like a bird with an egg and we sit there alone, day in and day out, just… making up awful stuff. People die and hearts are broken and children are stolen by van-driving goblins and all that comes pouring out of our diseased gourds. So: cultivate your sanity. Take some time to de-stress your skull-space. Take a walk. Take a vacation. Drink some chamomile tea and watch the sunset. Chillax. That’s the new thing the kids are saying, right? “Chillax?” Yeah. I’m up on my lingo. Chillaxin’ is the hella tits, Daddy-o!

12. Start Escaping The Insidious Gravity Of The Black Hole Known As “The Internet”

The Internet is a time-eater, eating your hours in great gulping swallows. The Net has value, no doubt. Great for research. Ideal for communication and distribution. Pristine for pornography. Just the same: it’s not your priority. Your priority is to write, so you need to jam a metaphorical rocket booster up your hidey-hole and blast your way out of the Internet’s gravity, at least until the wordsauce is made.

13. Start Going Places

Get the hell out of your house. Open the door. Kick out a window. Escape. Go somewhere. I don’t care if it’s the corner store or the island of Kauai or Mount Kilimanfuckingjaro. Writers are often too insular. They think those two oft-cited pieces of writing advice — “Put your ass in the chair and write” and “read a lot” — are all it takes. Bzzt! Wrongo! You’ve got to see a bit of the world. Have some adventures. Experience what’s going on around you. Become a part of the whole crazy machine. Let it fuel your wordsmithy.

14. Start Reading More

You need to read more, too. Bury your nose in a book, or, I dunno, lick a Kindle or whatever the equivalent would be. And don’t just up your reading quota: read more broadly, more completely. Read beyond comfort or entertainment. Jump the genre fence you’ve built for yourself. Read history and sociology and pick up a romance novel and flip through some children’s books and read some classic works and — well, you get the idea. Just read, wantonly and without regard. And with a keen eye toward all the fiddly bits.

15. Start Helping Other Writers

We may not be an official community with like, trials and hazing and union dues, but we certainly are a de facto one. We all need help and so it behooves us to ask for it and give it in return. As I am nothing if not a rampant self-promotional strumpet, I’ll just leave this here: 25 Ways For Writers To Help Other Writers.

16. Start Working Like A Motherfucker

You want to write? Then it’s time to work. Work isn’t a bad word. Work may be a four-letter-word, but you know what? I like four-letter words. Commit to the effort. Give your work the due it deserves. If someone asks what you’re doing? Don’t tell them you’re writing. Don’t say you’re telling stories or penning the Great American Novel. Tell them, “I’m working. I’m down in the word mines breaking my brain to bring this ink into the world. Now shut the door and get me a quad-shot espresso.” Don’t just put your nose against the grindstone: rub your entire naked body against the grindstone. And then film it. And put it on Youtube.

17. Start Making Your Own Opportunities

You can’t just sit in your attic and hope that opportunity will find you there, writing your stories amidst the Christmas decorations and creepy dolls and Tibetan yak-bone butt-plugs. Opportunity does not find the writer; the writer finds opportunity. And when the writer cannot find it, he reaches for the doll-heads and the wrapper paper tubes and the yak-bones and he makes his own damn opportunity. I hate the word “proactive,” but fuck it, it’s spot on for what I’m talking about — be proactive. You make opportunity by writing the best stories you can write and then putting those stories out there for editors and agents and readers. Don’t wait for permission. You know who needs permission? Children and cowards. And, thankfully, robots. For now. For now.

18. Start Self-Publishing

Note again the lack of the word “only” here; you should not only self-publish. But you should self-publish something. It grants you a new channel to release your work and reach new readers. It teaches you different skills. It lets you show all those jackholes with their sloppily-edited crap-stain indie efforts with Comic Sans and Papyrus covers how it’s done, son. This year: self-publish. Do it. Try it. Taste it. You’ll like it.

19. Start Diversifying

You know what happens when you put all your eggs in one basket? Your basket doesn’t have room for other awesome shit. Like figs. Or G.I. Joes. Or yak-bone dildos. Right? Right. A writer these days thrives on diversity. When one vein of word-heroin dries up, you’ve got others that keep on feeding your habit. Over here it’s freelance articles and other there it’s short stories and that way lies a novel and beyond that is the ad copy you wrote for Big Steve’s Booty Barn (the finest low-cost brothel in the good state of Nevada!). Plus: many fingers in many pies means maximum pie deliciousness. Because, fuck yeah, pie.

20. Start Valuing Your Work

If you don’t value your work, why would anyone else? End of story.

21. Start Doing All That Shit You Said You’d Always Do

If you calculated all the people in the world that have at one time or another said the words, “I’m going to write a novel,” or, “I’m going to pen a screenplay,” you’d have to invent a brand new number. A number that would break the backs of all other numbers. Everybody says they’re going to write this or write that — well, it’s time to put up or shut up. This year: you’re going to do it. You’re going to take one of those projects you’ve always wanted to do and you’re going to punt that sonofabitch to the top of the pile. You’re going to give it priority. End the fantasy by making it a reality.

22. Start Taking A Long Look Forward

A writer without goals is a writer who ends up lost in the woods. Probably without pants. And dining on possum scat. You know that jerkoff question they ask you at job interviews: “Where do you see yourself in ten years?” That question has value to authors. Set a realistic course for yourself and start knocking down some milestones one by one. Focus up. Gain clarity. Don’t just wander around without any idea of what you hope to accomplish. Envision your entire career. Then start working to make it motherfucking so.

23. Start Writing What You Want To Write

For some, life is short, for others, it’s unmercifully long — however it shakes out, take some time to write something that matters to you. Something personal. Something you want to write as opposed to something you have to write. We only get one go-around on the Great Hot Wheels Track that is life, so why not manage some slick jumps and loopty-loops before your car flings off into the oblivion beneath the couch?

24. Start Having Fun, Will You?

I tire of writers who don’t enjoy what they do. The next writer I see who mopes about being a writer gets attacked by bees. I mean, if you’re not writing because you love it, then why do it at all? The fat stacks of cash? The primo health care plan? The yacht full of supermodels?

25. Start Doing

Simple. Sweet. To the point. Writers need to be generative creatures — so, start doing. Start creating. Start telling stories. Start making it happen. But then, the corollary to that: finish what you started.

What will you start doing in 2012?

Like this post? Want more just like it? Try these books:

The newest: 500 WAYS TO BE A BETTER WRITER

$2.99 at Amazon (US), Amazon (UK), B&N, PDF

Only a buck: 250 THINGS YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT WRITING

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

The epic mega-book: CONFESSIONS OF A FREELANCE PENMONKEY

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

Or its sequel: REVENGE OF THE PENMONKEY

$2.99 at Amazon (US), Amazon (UK), B&N, PDF

One of the questions that’s been driving me of late is, “Just what the hell is an author’s voice and how does he find it and what does he do with it once he has it? Does it make smoothies? Can you shout a dragon out of the sky like in Skyrim? Would you eat it with a goat, would you eat it in a boat?” So, I figured I’d take to the Bloggery Zone and see if I couldn’t conjure 25 things I think about a writer and his voice.

Behold my insipid majesty on the subject:

1. One Word: “Style”

The traditional definition of a writer’s “voice” is, simply put, that writer’s chosen style. “John Q. Snarlmonkey writes with snark and panache, using tons of ellipses and lots of capital letters and made-up words. I love Snarlmonkey’s voice.” Voice equals style. That’s the easy answer.

2. Except, Okay, Fine, It’s So Much More Than That

Seriously, fuck easy answers. Easy answers are for babies and oxygen-starved kittens. A writer’s voice is an incomprehensible and largely indefinable combo-pack of — well, of just about anything. Style, dialogue, tropes, themes, genres, sub-genres, ideas, characters, stereotypes, archetypes, word choice, grammatical violations, and so forth. Anybody who tells you that David Foster Wallace’s voice does not include his obsession with footnotes should be shoved into a cannon and fired into the mouth of a great white shark. Voice is not one thing. Is is, in fact, the summation of a writer.

3. Revised Definition, Then

The writer’s voice is the thing that marks the work as a creation of that writer and that writer only. You read a thing and you say, “This could not have been written by anybody else.” That is voice.

4. That Makes It Yours, Which Makes It Awesome

If you believe that old chestnut, no original stories exist and every character is just a remix of another character who came before. Maybe true, maybe not. What the fuck do I know? I’m a writer, which is another way of saying, “Makes poor life decisions.” What I do know, however, is that a writer gets to own her voice. It’s hers and hers alone. It is her fingerprint, her retinal scan, her indelible and never-replicable identity. The craft of being an author is knowing all the elements that go into a good story. But the art, ahhh, the art is in the arrangement. And that arrangement embodies your voice. How can you not love that?

5. Sometimes Voice Defies Penmonkey Law

I’m just going to say this: sometimes a writer’s voice breaks The Rules, capital T, capital R. A writer makes certain stylistic choices and those choices may be objectively incorrect. That may — key word: may — be one of the strands of memetic material that runs through the DNA of an author’s voice.

6. Don’t Mistake Bad Writing For Good Voice

That being said, bad writing is bad writing. Any stylistic hangnails should be minor and made with full awareness of why they need to exist: don’t write like a shit-heel and call it part of your writer’s voice. Crap writing is indefensible. Try to pull that one over on a seasoned editor and they will stab you in the gonads with a red pen. And you will have deserved it.

7. You Can’t Force It

Forcing your voice is a futile endeavor. Like trying to hammer a cat through a mousehole (which is totally not some weird new sex move, by the way — UNLESS IT IS). Voice is a component of practice and maturity. Same way you can’t concentrate really hard to make puberty come earlier (“Grow, pubes, grow!”), you cannot artificially and prematurely discover your voice. Writers must cultivate patience (or perhaps patience’s rude and grumpy cousin, stubbornness). You’ll get there. Your voice will come.

8. “It’s A Trick. Get An Axe.”

You can try to trick your voice into appearing early, try to overwrite or use purple prose or engage in stylistic flourishes that plum don’t belong. Don’t bother. It’s just peeing with someone else’s dick — it’ll feel weird and alien, like some critical component does not belong.

9. We First Must Mimic

When you first start writing, you write like those writers you read most frequently. Maybe you mean to. Maybe it’s an unconscious thing. But don’t fight it. It’s all part of the process.

10. Other Authors Are Spun Into Our DNA

Eventually we stop miming the style of others, but along the way we still break off parts of other authors and graft them to our own styles. Some parts must be kept. No harm in that — we shouldn’t be upset with our influences. Why turn away from those who got us here? Those whose voices mattered most? As long as their voice does not take over our own, we’re good. It’s okay if we are in part the culmination of other voices. Like I said before: the art is in the arrangement.

11. This Shit Takes A Long Time

You don’t find your voice overnight. It doesn’t just appear like the fucking Tooth Fairy. I don’t know that it’s a function of time or a function of how much you write or some mutant hybrid of each, but it’s a slow discovery. You’ll catch glimpses of it once in a while, and you’ll cultivate it without even meaning to — and then, one day, it’s like, boom. Your balls drop and there it is: your voice. Or, if you’re a girl, your… vagina blooms? I don’t know what happens with your lady-parts, having none myself. I should get a set, just to see.

12. Evolution And Mutation

Your writer’s voice, like your real voice, changes. One day you’re all fresh-and-squeaky, and then calendar pages whip off the wall and suddenly your voice is scratchy and dry like you’ve been gargling watch parts and cigarette butts for the last ten years. Read any given author over a period of time and you see this — you can witness the Auteur Theory in action as their voice squirms and shifts.

13. Beware The Cardboardization Of Your Work

Some will try to beat your voice back, like they’re thwacking a tiger with an umbrella in order to urge him back into the bush. (Also not a weird new sex move.) Again, if you’re confusing bad writing with good voice, okay, fine, let others — be they agents or editors or readers — judge your voice and find it wanting. But also beware what happens when they want to milk your words of what makes them special in order to make something more marketable. Your voice is one of the strongest and most complicated weapons in your arsenal. Do not give it up without a fight. Poll your intestinal flora. Check your gut. You’ll know.

14. Not Just How You Write, But Who You Are

We assume voice to be a thing built of technical components. That’s it, but only part of it. Your voice is also who you are. How you bleed and spit and scream on the page. You are your voice. Your voice is you.

15. The Sexy Tango Of Honesty and Authenticity

Be honest. Be forthright. Be authentic. You believe things. You know things. You question things. All this crazy shit needs to spill out of your head and end up on the page and in that — in the choices you make, choices that come from questions only you could’ve ever asked — your voice will bloom. Like a vagina. A blooming, fragrant vagina. I might be confusing “vaginas” with “flowers” again.

16. What You Add Versus What You Subtract

It’s easy to suggest that a writer’s voice is what’s there when you write unbidden, unrestrained by the shackles of grammar or good taste or, y’know, sobriety. But your voice is not only a summation of those things you let out the door — it’s also a calculation configuring those doors you keep closed. It’s about subtracting as well as adding — pruning as well as cultivating. Voice can be a matter of writing small just as easily as it can measure the boldness of your stroke. HA HA HA STROKE MASTURBATION um, nothing.

17. Look To Your Body Of Work, See The Voice Emerge

Voice is not just the result of a single sentence or paragraph or page. It’s not even the sum total of a whole story. It’s all your work laid out across the table like the bones and fossils of an unidentified carcass.

18. Listen To Your Voice — No, I Mean Your Actual Voice

There lurks an intimate connection between the written word and the spoken word. We pretend it’s not true, as if the written word is somehow higher up in the food chain, somehow more exalted, but that’s a big brass bucket brimming with bullshit. Language exists initially to communicate from person to person — it is born of speech and sound. Words aren’t just symbols: they’re really how we say things. And so it is that your actual voice matters in this regard. Listen to what you say and how you say things: your authorial voice lurks in this. You should endeavor to write at least in part how you speak. By doing that, you capture the essence of how you say things. Related: always read your work out loud.

19. The Banshee’s Scream

Voice matters. Voice is important. But at the end of the day, if it takes your story and drowns it in a hot stockpot of scalding soup, then you’ve done yourself a disservice. In the Great Cosmic Chain Of Telling Bad-Ass Motherfucking Stories, voice is subservient to story, not vice versa. Voice helps you tell the story at the same time story helps you find your voice. But no matter what, story is the pinnacle, the zenith, the apogee, and other words that mean the “tippy-top” of the narrative mountain.

20. Regular Like A Morning Constitutional

Consistency in voice matters. It should day to day, page after page, hold together. The only way this fails is if you’re uncertain. If you lose your shit. If you freak the fuck out.

21. Don’t Panic

Breathe easy. Loosen your mind sphincter. Don’t panic. It’s like with sex — think too much and too hard about it, you’ll short circuit a synapse and put the kibosh on the mood. Serenity serves the writer’s voice.

22. Where Writer’s Block Is Born, Screaming And Keening

I wonder if writer’s block is actually a thing born of not yet knowing your voice. If we’re here to assume that part of a writer’s voice is knowing what to say and how to say it, then not being sure of — or comfortable with — one’s voice would lead to the fear that spawns the poorly-named writer’s block. It seems sensible. Then again, so did running through that Arby’s naked last night, sauced to the gills on ecstasy and wine coolers. Maybe I’m not the best guy to listen to on what’s sensible.

23. Eventually You Stop Being Afraid Of Yourself

Writers are at the outset a scared species. It’s not our fault: we’re told that it’s a bad idea and unless we want to prepare for a life lived inside a palatial piano crate we should just buckle down and become accountants. And so I think there’s a lot of bad psychic voodoo that clogs the works, and until we start to clear that out, it’s really hard to find out who we are on the page and what our voice looks and sounds like. Finding your voice is then synonymous with losing the fear of not just writing but of being a writer.

24. The Confidence Game

Confidence is key. I’ll say no more than that: confidence is key.

25. Don’t Write Like Anybody Else

At the end of the day, take the opportunity to write like you want to write. Actually, it’s weirder and deeper than that — what I really mean is, write like you need to write. Your voice might be a component of confidence, but it also might be an accumulation of obsessions and foibles and fears and frailties and all the crazy moon-unit shit that makes us who we are. I’m going to quote from another terribleminds commenter, found last week at “25 Things Writers Should Stop Doing (Right Fucking Now)” — Amy Severson said: “When I finally realized that I was never going to write like the the authors I loved and just started writing how (and what) I wanted to, it was like someone blew out the little candle I was huddled under and flipped the switch on a dozen spotlights.” I think that says it all about a writer’s voice, don’t you?

* * *

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Or the newest: 500 WAYS TO BE A BETTER WRITER

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I read this cool article last week — “30 Things To Stop Doing To Yourself” — and I thought, hey, heeeey, that’s interesting. Writers might could use their own version of that. So, I started to cobble one together. And, of course, as most of these writing-related posts become, it ended up that for the most part I’m sitting here in the blog yelling at myself first and foremost.

That is, then, how you should read this: me, yelling at me. If you take away something from it, though?

Then go forth and kick your writing year in the teeth.

Onto the list.

1. Stop Running Away

Right here is your story. Your manuscript. Your career. So why the fuck are you running in the other direction? Your writing will never chase you — you need to chase your writing. If it’s what you want, then pursue it. This isn’t just true of your overall writing career, either. It’s true of individual components. You want one thing but then constantly work to achieve its opposite. You say you want to write a novel but then go and write a bunch of short stories. You say you’re going to write This script but then try to write That script instead. Pick a thing and work toward that thing.

2. Stop Stopping

Momentum is everything. Cut the brake lines. Careen wildly and unsteadily toward your goal. I hate to bludgeon you about the head and neck with a hammer forged in the volcanic fires of Mount Obvious, but the only way you can finish something is by not stopping. That story isn’t going to unfuck itself.

3. Stop Writing In Someone Else’s Voice

You have a voice. It’s yours. Nobody else can claim it, and any attempts to mimic it will be fumbling and clumsy like two tweens trying to make out in a darkened broom closet. That’s on you, too — don’t try to write in somebody else’s voice. Yes, okay, maybe you do this in the beginning. But strive past it. Stretch your muscles. Find your voice. This is going to be a big theme at the start of 2012 — discover those elements that comprise your voice, that put the author in your authority. Write in a way that only you can write.

4. Stop Worrying

Worry is some useless shit. It does nothing. It has no basis in reality. It’s a vestigial emotion, useless as — as my father was wont to say — “tits on a boar hog.” We worry about things that are well beyond our control. We worry about publishing trends or future advances or whether or not Barnes & Noble is going to shove a hand grenade up its own ass and go kablooey. That’s not to say you can’t identify future trouble spots and try to work around them — but that’s not worrying. You recognize a roadblock and arrange a path around it — you don’t chew your fingernails bloody worrying about it. Shut up. Calm down. Worry, begone.

5. Stop Hurrying

The rise of self-publishing has seen a comparative surge forward in quantity. As if we’re all rushing forward to squat out as huge a litter of squalling word-babies as our fragile penmonkey uteruses (uteri?) can handle. Stories are like wine; they need time. So take the time. This isn’t a hot dog eating contest. You’re not being judged on how much you write but rather, how well you do it. Sure, there’s a balance — you have to be generative, have to be swimming forward lest you sink like a stone and find remora fish mating inside your rectum. But generation and creativity should not come at the cost of quality. Give your stories and your career the time and patience it needs. Put differently: don’t have a freak out, man.

6. Stop Waiting

I said “stop hurrying,” not “stand still and fall asleep.” Life rewards action, not inertia. What the fuck are you waiting for? To reap the rewards of the future, you must take action in the present. Do so now.

7. Stop Thinking It Should Be Easier

It’s not going to get any easier, and why should it? Anything truly worth doing requires hella hard work. If climbing to the top of Kilimanjaro meant packing a light lunch and hopping in a climate-controlled elevator, it wouldn’t really be that big a fucking deal, would it? You want to do This Writing Thing, then don’t just expect hard work — be happy that it’s a hard row to hoe and that you’re just the, er, hoer to hoe it? I dunno. Don’t look at me like that. AVERT YOUR GAZE, SCRUTINIZER. And get back to work.

8. Stop Deprioritizing Your Wordsmithy

You don’t get to be a proper storyteller by putting it so far down your list it’s nestled between “Complete the Iditarod (but with squirrels instead of dogs)” and “Two words: Merkin, Macrame.” You want to do this shit, it better be some Top Five Shiznit, son. You know you’re a writer because it’s not just what you do, but rather, it’s who you are. So why deprioritize that thing which forms part of your very identity?

9. Stop Treating Your Body Like A Dumpster

The mind is the writer’s best weapon. It is equal parts bullwhip, sniper rifle, and stiletto. If you treat your body like it’s the sticky concrete floor in a porno theater (that’s not a spilled milkshake) then all you’re doing is dulling your most powerful weapon. The body fuels the mind. It should be “crap out,” not “crap in.” Stop bloating your body with awfulness. Eat well. Exercise. Elsewise you’ll find your bullwhip’s tied in knots, your stiletto’s so dull it couldn’t cut through a glob of canned pumpkin, and someone left peanut-butter-and-jelly in the barrel of your sniper rifle.

10. Stop The Moping And The Whining

Complaining — like worry, like regret, like that little knob on the toaster that tells you it’ll make the toast darker — does nothing. (Doubly useless: complaining about complaining, which is what I’m doing here.) Blah blah blah, publishing, blah blah blah, Amazon, blah blah blah Hollywood. Stop boo-hooing. Don’t like something? Fix it or forgive it. And move on to the next thing.

11. Stop Blaming Everyone Else

You hear a lot of blame going around — something-something gatekeepers, something-something too many self-published authors, something-something agency model. You’re going to own your successes, and that means you’re also going to need to own your errors. This career is yours. Yes, sometimes external factors will step in your way, but it’s up to you how to react. Fuck blame. Roll around in responsibility like a dog rolling around in an elk miscarriage. Which, for the record, is something I’ve had a dog do, sooooo. Yeah. It was, uhhh, pretty nasty. Also: “Elk Miscarriage” is the name of my indie band.

12. Stop The Shame

Writers are often ashamed at who they are and what they do. Other people are out there fighting wars and fixing cars and destroying our country with poisonous loans — and here we are, sitting around in our footy-pajamas, writing about vampires and unicorns, about broken hearts and shattered jaws. A lot of the time we won’t get much respect, but you know what? Fuck that. Take the respect. Writers and storytellers help make this world go around. We’re just as much a part of the societal ecosystem as anybody else. Craft counts. Art matters. Stories are important. Freeze-frame high-five. Now have a beer and a shot of whisky and shove all your shame in a bag and burn it.

13. Stop Lamenting Your Mistakes

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you fucked up somewhere along the way. Who gives a donkey’s duodenum? Shit happens. Shit washes off. Don’t dwell. Don’t sing lamentations to your errors. Repeat after me: learn and move on. Very few mistakes will haunt you till your end of days unless you let it haunt you. That is, unless your error was so egregious it can never be forgotten (“I wore a Hitler outfit as I went to every major publishing house in New York City and took a poop in every editor’s desk drawer over the holiday. Also, I may have put it on Youtube and sent it to Galleycat. So… there’s that”).

14. Stop Playing It Safe

Let 2012 be the year of the risk. Nobody knows what’s going on in the publishing industry, but we can be damn sure that what’s going on with authors is that we’re finding new ways to be empowered in this New Media Future, Motherfuckers (hereby known as NMFMF). What that means is, it’s time to forget the old rules. Time to start questioning preconceived notions and established conventions. It’s time to start taking some risks both in your career and in your storytelling. Throw open the doors. Kick down the walls of your uncomfortable box. Carpet bomb the Comfort Zone so that none other may dwell there.

15. Stop Trying To Control Shit You Can’t Control

ALL THAT out there? All the industry shit and the reviews and the Amazonian business practices? The economy? The readers? You can’t control any of that. You can respond to it. You can try to get ahead of it. But you can’t control it. Control what you can, which is your writing and the management of your career.

16. Stop Doing One Thing

Diversification is the name of survival for all creatures: genetics relies on diversification. (Says the guy with no science background and little interest in Googling that idea to see if it holds any water at all.) Things are changing big in these next few years, from the rise of e-books to the collapse of traditional markets to the the galactic threat of Mecha-Gaiman. Diversity of form, format and genre will help ensure you stay alive in the coming entirely-made-up Pubpocalypse.

17. Stop Writing For “The Market”

To be clear, I don’t mean, “stop writing for specific markets.” That’s silly advice. If you want to write for the Ladies’ Home Journal, well, that’s writing for a specific market. What I mean is, stop writing for The Market, capital T-M. The Market is an unknowable entity based on sales trends and educated guess-work and some kind of publishing haruspicy (at Penguin, they sacrifice actual penguins — true story!). Writing a novel takes long enough that writing for the market is a doomed mission, a leap into a dark chasm with the hopes that someone will build a bridge there before you fall through empty space. Which leads me to —

18. Stop Chasing Trends

Set the trends. Don’t chase them like a dog chasing a Buick. Trends offer artists a series of diminishing returns — every iteration of a trend after the first is weaker than the last, as if each repetition is another ice cube plunked into a once strong glass of Scotch. You’re just watering it down, man. Don’t be a knock-off purse, a serial killer copycat, or just another fantasy echo of Tolkien. Do your own thing.

19. Stop Caring About What Other Writers Are Doing

They’re going to do what they’re going to do. You’re not them. You don’t want to be them and they don’t want to be you. Why do what everyone else is doing? Let me reiterate: do your own thing.

20. Stop Caring So Much About The Publishing Industry

Know the industry, but don’t be overwhelmed by it. The mortal man cannot change the weave and weft of cosmic forces; they are outside you. Examine the publishing industry too closely and it will ejaculate its demon ichor in your eye. And then you’ll have to go to the eye doctor and he’ll be all like, “You were staring too long at the publishing industry again, weren’t you?” And you’re like, “YES, fine,” and he’s like, “Well, I have drops for that, but they’ll cost you,” and you get out your checkbook and ask him how many zeroes you should fill in because you’re a writer and don’t have health care. *sob*

21. Stop Listening To What Won’t Sell

You’ll hear that. “I don’t think this can sell.” And shit, you know what? That might be right. Just the same — I’d bet that all the stories you remember, all the tales that came out of nowhere and kicked you in the junk drawer with their sheer possibility and potential, were stories that were once flagged with the “this won’t sell” moniker. You’ll always find someone to tell you what you can’t do. What you shouldn’t do. That’s your job as a writer to prove them wrong. By sticking your fountain pen in their neck and drinking their blood. …uhh. I mean, “by writing the best damn story you can write.” That’s what I mean. That other thing was, you know. It was just metaphor. Totally. *hides inkwell filled with human blood*

22. Stop Overpromising And Overshooting

We want to do everything all at once. Grand plans! Sweeping gestures! Epic 23-book fantasy cycles! Don’t overreach. Concentrate on what you can complete. Temper risk with reality.

23. Stop Leaving Yourself Off The Page

You are your stories and your stories are you. Who you are matters. Your experiences and feelings and opinions count. Put yourself on every page: a smear of heartsblood. If we cannot connect with our own stories, how can we expect anybody else to find that connection?

24. Stop Dreaming

Fuck dreaming. Start doing. Dreams are great — uh, for children. Dreams are intangible and uncertain looks into the future. Dreams are fanciful flights of improbability — pegasus wishes and the hopes of lonely robots. You’re an adult, now. It’s time to shit or get off the pot. It’s time to wake up or stay dreaming. Let me say it again because I am nothing if not a fan of repetition: Fuck dreaming. Start doing.

25. Stop Being Afraid

Fear will kill you dead. You’ve nothing to be afraid of that a little preparation and pragmatism cannot kill. Everybody who wanted to be a writer and didn’t become one failed based on one of two critical reasons: one, they were lazy, or two, they were afraid. Let’s take for granted you’re not lazy. That means you’re afraid. Fear is nonsense. What do you think is going to happen? You’re going to be eaten by tigers? Life will afford you lots of reasons to be afraid: bees, kidnappers, terrorism, being chewed apart by an escalator, Republicans, Snooki. But being a writer is nothing worthy of fear. It’s worthy of praise. And triumph. And fireworks. And shotguns. And a box of wine. So shove fear aside — let fear be gnawed upon by escalators and tigers. Step up to the plate. Let this be your year.

* * *

Did you know that Chuck has a small army of writing-related e-books available? Each brined in a salty spice mix of profanity, inchoate rage, and liquor? Check ’em out, won’t you?

Try: CONFESSIONS OF A FREELANCE PENMONKEY

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

Or its sequel: REVENGE OF THE PENMONKEY

$2.99 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

Or the newest: 500 WAYS TO BE A BETTER WRITER

$2.99 at Amazon (US), Amazon (UK), B&N, PDF