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Point, Counterpoint

Sunday, December 4, 2011

When I first began The Indie Book Podcast, I thought of self-publishing was, you know, a neat thing.  An interesting alternative path writers could take.  I was excited that it was starting to be viable, but I wasn’t 100% sure it was something I was going to pursue.  After all, I figured traditional publishing had a lot to recommend it, too.

Fast forward three months, and the self-publishing revolution has become less of an interesting novelty for me, and more of a moral crusade.  As I surf around the web, combing forums and blog posts for info that might enhance the podcast, I’m just starting to realize how much I’ve switched over, in my heart, from traditional writer to indie writer.  This worm has turned.

Which doesn’t mean I don’t occasionally enjoy reading the opposite point of view.  I particularly enjoyed this post from  writer Edan Lepucki.  It’s a well-written, well-reasoned recounting of Lepucki’s reasons for sticking with the traditional path.  So, naturally, I’m going to tear it to shreds.

Ok, not really.  But I am going to address his arguments, point by point, and see how my own hold up to them.

1. I Guess I’m Not a Hater

…I trust publishers. They don’t always get it right, but more often than not, they do. As I said in the piece that started me off on this whole investigation: “I want a reputable publishing house standing behind my book; I want them to tell you it’s good so that I don’t have to.”…

I wouldn’t call myself a hater, either.  I do think publishers put out good products, and that the publishing companies are responsible for some of the value of those products (AKA, books).  I don’t think the traditional houses are valueless by any means.

And yet, I do think there is something wrong with the current royalty structures publishers offer their authors.  I’m not talking mathematically wrong, here, I’m talking morally Wrong.  There’s just no reason for a publisher to rake in 85% of the cover price of e-books—not when they’re assuming so little risk, and incurring no per-unit costs.  Signing a deal that grants you 15% of net receipts (a pretty standard e-book royalty rate) is like saying that the work of writing a book only accounts for one seventh of its value.  That seems weird to me.  No, not just weird.  Crazy.

So, no, I don’t hate the big houses.  I respect what they have to offer.  But I’d like a little more evidence that they respect what I have to offer before I throw my lot in with them.

2. I Write Literary Fiction

…Many of the writers who have found success in self-publishing are writers of straightforward genre fiction. Amanda Hocking writes young adult fantasy, dwarfs and all. ... Aside from Anthropology of An American Girl by Hilary Thayer Hamann, I can’t think of another literary novel that enjoyed critical praise and healthy sales when self-published. That’s not to say that it can’t — and shouldn’t — happen, it’s only to point out that it’s a tougher road for writers of certain sorts of stories…

Well, that’s a fair point.  Actually, it’s the one I find most persuasive.  Like it or not, everything is not equal among the genres, and literary authors may have a harder road ahead of them if they choose to self-publish.

The taste makers for literary books are all still very much the old guard—the New York Times Book Review, Michiko Kakutani, et al.  If they aren’t looking at self-pubbed books—and I believe at present they’re trying their best not to—it’s going to be a long time before the readers of those books discover self-published authors.

Secondly—and I say this with love—the literary genre is the genre most invested in the idea of the writer as a special, elite artist.  Out here in genre-fiction-land, we’re frequently ok with being considered working stiffs, but the same is not necessarily true of our literary brethren.  I suspect that a lot of the value of being published, for a literary writer, comes from the cachet of being accepted into The Club.  This is particularly true for those literary writers who have secondary careers in academia, another industry invested in the ideas of prestige and the elite nature of the artist.

I don’t mean to suggest that literary writers are snobs, or that they things they want aren’t worth wanting.  The fact is, every writer wants respect, and there’s no reason literary writers shouldn’t make it a priority.  But as long as the communities they belong to grant that respect only to the traditionally published, literary writers will have a long row to hoe when it comes to self-publishing.

3. I’d Prefer a Small Press to a Vanity Press

…The conversation about self-publishing too often ignores the role of independent publishing houses in this shifting reading landscape. … These presses are run and curated by well-read, talented people, and they provide readers with the same services that a large press provides: namely, a vote of confidence in a writer the public might have never heard of…

So, ok, I sort of object to the term “vanity press—” from my point of view, I’m not vain.  I’m entrepreneurial!

But, nit-picking aside, Lepucki makes an interesting point here.  The self-publishing conversation is often framed as an either/or—throw in with the Big Six, or go it alone.

To be honest, I don’t know enough about small publishers—what terms they offer to authors, how able they are to land their books on the bookstore shelves, etc., etc.  I’ll admit, straight up, that I could stand to learn more about this before I express an opinion of small press vs. self-pubbing.

I will say, though, that I am interested in the evolution of hybrid models of publishing.  No matter what, writers are going to continue to need services—especially editing—from people other than themselves.  I’m looking forward to seeing what kinds of business models grow to fill this need, and it could be that small presses have an important role to play.

4. Self-Publishing is Better for the Already-Published

Perhaps the smarter, and far more seductive, path is the one where the writer begins his career with a traditional publisher, and then, once he’s built a base of loyal readers, sets off on his own. The man who loves to talk smack about the publishing industry, J.A. Konrath, already had an audience from his traditionally-published books by the time he decided to take matters into his own hands. It’s much harder to create a readership out of nothing…

Well, I don’t disagree with the overall point:  it is easier to self-publish if you’ve already built an audience.  But here’s the thing:  getting traditionally published does not buy you out of the work of creating that audience.  Whichever way you go, you are going to have to blog, or tweet, or set up reviews and interviews for yourself—you’re going to have to be your own marketer.  If you’re expecting your publishing company to do this for you, well, maybe you’ll be lucky.  But very likely you won’t.

Getting traditionally published does provide some extra exposure, in terms of bookstore placement, but for many authors it comes with limited—or nonexistent—marketing.  That’s the world we’re looking at today, kids.  You can go through Door A or Door B, but you’ll still have to pimp your own book.

5. I Value the Publishing Community

… Even though my first novel was rejected by traditional publishers, one assistant editor’s notes on it — notes that were thorough, thoughtful, challenging, and compassionate — were enough to show me that these professionals are valuable to the process of book-making. I know you can hire experienced editors and copy-editors, but how is that role affected when the person paying is the writer himself? What if the hired editor told you not to publish? Would that even happen?

I’ll agree that a good editor is worth his weight in gold.  I’ll even agree that this is a real, thorny problem facing self-published authors.  Finding a good editor isn’t just a matter of scanning ads on the web.  You want someone who gets your genre, gets your audience, and, ideally, gets you as a writer.  That’s not something you find around every corner.

The thing I dispute is that signing on with a traditional publisher is a guaranteed way of finding yourself such a gem.  I’ve heard authors say they love their editor, and I’ve heard authors say they hate their editor.  It is very unclear, at present, what level of editing services any particular new author can expect.

At least if you pay for it yourself, you can exercise some control over what you get.  And if you don’t like the results, you’re free to move on to another provider.

6. The E-Reading Conundrum; or, I don’t want to be Amazon’s Bitch

… The thought of Amazon being the only place to purchase my novel shivers my timbers. I don’t mind if someone else chooses to read my work electronically, just as I don’t mind if Amazon is one of the places to purchase my work; I’m simply wary of Amazon monopolizing the reading landscape. Self-publishing has certainly offered an alternative path for writers, but it’s naive to believe that a self-published author is “fighting the system” if that self-published book is produced and made available by a single monolithic corporation. In effect, they’ve rejected “The Big 6″ for “The Big 1.”

I get where Lepucki’s coming from here.  Amazon is gaining power by leaps and bounds, and it is a hair chilling to contemplate what they might do with it in the future.  And yet, as Barry Eisler pointed out on A Newbie’s Guide to Publishing last week, it’s not as though the Big 6 operate competitively.  They are all offering the same crappy royalty rates to authors.

I am in favor of authors having power over their work, and that means we need competition—competition for Amazon, competition for the Big 6.  I really hope we continue to see such competition in the marketplace.  But at present, I don’t think I can do much to affect the future landscape of publishing.  So there’s little reason not to throw my lot in with the people offering me the best terms today.

7. Is it Best for Readers?

Our conversation reminded me of Laura Miller’s humorous and perspicacious essay, “When Anyone Can be a Published Author,” in which she reminds us that the people who celebrate self-publishing often overlook what it means for book buyers and readers. She writes:

Readers themselves rarely complain that there isn’t enough of a selection on Amazon or in their local superstore; they’re more likely to ask for help in narrowing down their choices. So for anyone who has, however briefly, played that reviled gatekeeper role, a darker question arises: What happens once the self-publishing revolution really gets going, when all of those previously rejected manuscripts hit the marketplace, en masse, in print and e-book form, swelling the ranks of 99-cent Kindle and iBook offerings by the millions? Is the public prepared to meet the slush pile?

No, I suspect they’re not. This is a legitimate problem for self-published authors, and it’s one I truly hope my podcast can address.  We need taste makers in the self-publishing world helping people cut through the chaff—and, yes, it would be disingenuous if I didn’t admit that there is plenty of chaff to cut through.  Because you’re right:  no reader wants to read four crappy books on his way to finding a good one.

But happily, there are enormous resources available to help him.  There are Amazon reviews, review blogs, and, yeah, my little podcast.

I’d never claim that the vetting traditional publishers do isn’t a valuable service to readers.  But I’m hopeful that they aren’t the only ones who can provide it.

8. I’m Busy. Writing.

Self-publishing takes a little time and energy, but it’s not as much as you might think.  In fact, if you cast aside the idea that being traditionally published will get you out of marketing your own book, it’s really very little time at all.  You’re just communicating with artists and editors, and spending a few hours of research figuring out how to format your work for publication.

Is that really so much more time consuming than the communication a traditionally pubbed author has to do with his agent and editor?  Somehow I doubt it.

Now, I better get busy.  Writing.

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To Hire or Not To Hire… An Editor

Tuesday, October 18, 2011

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m beginning to shepherd my completed mystery novel toward self-publication.  I have amazing friends who are helping me out with this:  one who’s doing the art, another who’s doing the proofreading, and yet more who have given me wonderful feedback while the book was in production.  But one of the things I keep asking myself is: should I hire a professional editor?

Basically, I think the work of an editor breaks down into four categories:

Proofreading: The catching of typos, grammatical errors, dropped punctuation, and times when you said “canvas” but you really meant “canvass.”

Line Editing: A whole host of polishing efforts at the sentence level, all of which can be prefaced with “Wouldn’t it sound better if…?”

Macro Content Editing: The big issues, such as a character arc not working, a setting feeling blah, or the plot seeming unbelievable.

And, lastly, but certainly not leastly…

Micro Content Editing

This is perhaps the most varied and finicky of the four, and encompasses such issues as:

  • Your protagonist said she’d meet her lover in two days, but it has actually been three.
  • Your protagonist leaped to an unfounded assumption in this paragraph.  We need at least one sentence explaining how he got there.
  • You have two characters in this scene called “the captain” and “the colonel.”  We need names to be able to distinguish them easily.
  • On page 200, you are counting on your readers remembering a fact about a minor character introduced on page 60.  Most of them won’t.

In short, it involves a lot of small polishing efforts that have nothing to do with prose, but have to do with the consistency and comprehensibility of the whole product.

While proofreading, line editing, and macro content editing are the sorts of things I can do very easily with the help of my near and dear friends and writing group, micro content editing is just a touch different.  It requires a fairly book-y person: “avid reader” or “English major” are probably not adequate qualifications for this job.  It helps if your micro content editor can read the entire manuscript over a day or two, so they can catch inconsistencies.  It also doesn’t hurt if they know your genre intimately.

Companies that offer editorial services don’t really advertise their skill at micro content editing.  They advertise their proofreading abilities, or else their macro content editing.  Occasionally they advertise line editing.  But micro content editing is, to me, at least as important to putting out a professional product.

In the course of my work on the podcast, I’ve seen a number of novels that clearly had someone performing the first three services… but sort of missed out on this fourth one.  So I’m left thinking, can I even hire someone to do this?  How will I know that they’re able to until they actually do it?  Will I ever know, given that any micro content editing issues in my manuscript are issues I already missed?

Anyone got some answers for me?

In this episode, we review River Panj, a thriller that took us on an insightful tour of Tajikistan. We also talk with author Nick Cole, about his book The Old Man and The Wasteland, and about the many choices writers have when evtering the modern marketplace.

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Learning How The Other Half Lives

Sunday, October 9, 2011

One of the unexpected results of doing The Indie Book Podcast is that I’ve started to get an inkling, however dim, of what it’s like to be an agent.  I’m trying to find really good material to review on the podcast, which means I’m reading an awful lot of samples.  This has been somewhat exacerbated by the fact that I put out a call for submissions a couple of weeks back, and a lot of authors are throwing their hat in the ring.  I currently have nine submissions on my Big Excel Spreadsheet of Things To Do.

Nine is obviously not a lot, compared to the volume agents regularly report.  And yet it’s enough that I have already had to retire my previous method of selecting books, which was to read the entire Kindle sample and really give the author a chance to hook me.  Now, I read until you give me a reason to stop reading.  If I get two chapters in and I’m still hanging in there, I’ll put the book on the list of things to review.

I’ve also had to get used to another staple of agenthood:  sending rejection letters.  Not every book is going to be reviewed on the podcast, and if yours isn’t, I’d honestly prefer to let you know straight up, rather than let you hope and wonder for weeks.  Back in the not-so-distant past when I was pursuing traditional publishing, I truly did not appreciate the agents who didn’t bother to send rejection letters.  How hard is it, I wondered, to copy and paste a form rejection into your e-mail client?  If I’m not worth fifteen seconds of your time, why am I supposed to think you’re worth fifteen percent of my income?

So, yeah, I come from a history of wanting people to Answer Their Dang Mail.  Which means now that I am in a position where people are sending their work to me, I can scarcely do less.

So, rejection letters.  Sending them hurts, a little.  I know, I know–rejection is part of the job, you have to have a thick skin, whatever, whatever.  It doesn’t mean I don’t remember what it feels like to have your heart seize up when you see a particular From: address in your email client. Or what it’s like to let out a deep breath and talk yourself down, to steel yourself for rejection before you even move your mouse toward that mail.

Now, I am not an agent, just a reviewer.  I doubt anyone attaches as much importance to my acceptance or rejection as they would to, say, Janet Reid’s.  Still, rejection sucks.  From both ends.

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Blog Resurrection

Friday, September 30, 2011

A little over a year ago, I retired this blog.  It wasn’t exactly a conscious decision.  For a couple of months, I kept thinking.  “Oh, crap.  I have got to get something up on that blog.”  But it just never happened.  Why?  To make a long story short (and, I’m sure, annoyingly cryptic), that was a fairly crappy time for me.  There were things I couldn’t stop thinking about, but couldn’t bear to write about.  After a while, it just seemed easier to let the whole thing go.

Happily, in the intervening year, life has gotten a whole lot better.  And thusly, more bloggable.

And more exciting.  Over the past year, my outlook on writing and publishing has changed a lot.  Over the next several months, I’m planning to work toward the self-publication of my novel, currently titled The Big Life– and soon to be titled something much better.

I’ve also started a podcast, called The Indie Book Podcast. It’s about reviewing self-published books, and discussing the future of publishing.

Frankly, the experience of doing this podcast is the very thing that gives me faith I can make self-publishing work.  I mean, just two months ago I decided to be a podcaster.  Now I am one.  And while I don’t have a lot of listeners yet, the numbers are moving in the right direction.

That’s the world we’re moving into:  where you can just do stuff, and no one can say you nay.  Maybe you succeed at it, maybe you don’t.  But the audience–and, hopefully, the quality of your work–is what makes that determination.

The podcast is doing other things for me, too.  It’s weaving me in closer with the community of writers.  It’s giving me more confidence in my public speaking skills.  And it’s teaching me tons about marketing, through the simple expedient of forcing me to do it.  Even though it takes time away from my writing, it seems like the best thing I could be doing for my career right now.

I’m nowhere close to perfect at it, and I hope I will improve.  But anyway, it’s exciting.  It’s published.  And it’s beginning to feel very real.

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Story Days

Wednesday, September 1, 2010

Sorry I haven’t posted for a while.  I’ve been busy writing other things.

I’ve been so busy, in fact, that it’s been over a week since the event I wanted to talk about here: my first monthy Story Days.

Story Days were my idea for carrying forward the optimism and go-hung attitude I acquired at Boot Camp.  Basically, the idea was that I’d give myself two days to reprise the two principle assignments from Boot Camp: coming up with five story seeds, and one full-length story.  Well, a couple of weekends ago, Mark and I decided to go for it.  I would do my two assignments, and he would get into the spirit of things by completing half a online course about iPhone development.

We got started bright and early on Saturday morning.  By about 4 P.M, I had my ideas, and I was happy with them.  Then began the process of choosing which one.  The first idea to hit the cutting floor was low-hanging fruit:  it was a cute enough idea, but it just wasn’t compelling enough.  The second had an ending that didn’t completely satisfy me.  The third idea I cut felt like it would be hard to deal with at short story length.  And then I was left with two ideas I really liked:  one a literary idea, and the other a mystery.  I decided it would be more useful to me to have something I could sell to a mystery magazine, so that’s what I went with.

And then I got started.  The first three pages went down easy, so easy.  That’s where I left it when I went to bed Saturday night.  On Sunday I got up again and got another five pages or so before things got difficult.  Real difficult.  But the story got done, at at 10:30 P.M. I was able to relax and bask in my victory.

I have to confess:  it wasn’t easy to attain the same level of pressure I had at Boot Camp.  There weren’t going to be fifteen people I respected reading this story immediately, so it just didn’t matter as much, you know?  I think the last scene or two suffered somewhat for this.  But, the story is done.

I think I’ll do this again around the 15th of September.  I would like to make it a monthly thing.  The next time around, though, I may work on revisions instead.  Because I am building up a backlog of things that need to get revised and sent out.

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Too Many Ideas

Thursday, August 19, 2010

This past weekend my sister was visiting here.  I was deeply engrossed in The Hunger Games, and I remarked that one of the wonderful things about YA is that the writers have so much freedom with their premises.  There is not a lot of justifying in YA, there are just wild ideas, thrilling stories, and an audience that is willing to suspend almost any amount of disbelief.  I don’t mean this as a jab in the slightest; there should be one genre as freeing as this.

There also are not a ton of restrictions on acceptable subjects for YA.  Sex and violence are indeed up for grabs.  I was thinking at first that this was a relatively new development reflecting changing attitudes toward innocence — until I remembered the stuff I used to read as a teen, such as The Grounding of Group 6, a surprisingly delightful book about teens who survive a murder attempt by their own parents.

I wondered what it would be like to work on a YA novel myself.  “Ok,” said Kate, “let’s think of a super wild premise for you.”

“Well, if we were going to do this in a disciplined, Boot Camp sort of way, we would come up with five premises,” I said.  “And then pick the best one.”

And that is what we spent the rest of the day doing.  Idea #1 was ok.  Idea #2 was great.  Idea #3 was freakin’ awesome.  Idea #4 was back to ok again.  And Idea #5… ah, Idea #5.  It was completely epic, and it quickly spawned ideas for an entire series.

So now, I am a bit confused.  I have been working on a sequel to the novel I’m currently shopping, but in the wake of Boot Camp I’m more excited about the idea of turning out something new, something I can use whether or not The Big Life sells.  I have several good YA ideas, enough that I don’t know which I like best.  I also have two pretty great mystery ideas.

I am not quite sure how to tackle this decision.  Practically, by sticking with mystery, the genre I love best?  Cynically, by jumping to YA, a hugely marketable genre that I believe I could love?  Or emotionally, by laying out these stories and trying to figure out which one pulls most at my heart?

I don’t know.  I do know this is a wonderful problem to have.

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Into the Dragon’s Maw

Saturday, August 14, 2010

Or, When Orson Scott Card Read My First Chapter

Ok, so this is the last Boot Camp post.  Really this time.

Card took us Boot Campers out to dinner Thursday night, and we started the evening off with some general getting-to-know you conversation.  Someone asked me what I do.

“I write,” I said.  “No one pays me to do it, but I write.”

And this segued into me telling the table about my book, and Card offered to read the first pages for me.  I was, I guess I hardly need tell you, delighted.

The time came on Saturday afternoon, after we had finished up class and people were making their way out of the building.  Card read my pages and shredded them.

And, ho-ly crap!  Did they deserve it!

There were so many things that I knew about my first chapter that Card didn’t get at all.  I mean, important, establishing details like where Kitty’s coming to Chicago from and exactly what her purpose is there.  I know part of the problem was that this was a new first chapter, written to replace my original straight-into-flashback first chapter, which I loved but ultimately could not stand by.  And when I wrote the new one I did a bad job of imagining how much detail would be enough for my readers to understand the situation.  Moreover, the only one who read the new pages was Mark, who had already read a couple of versions of the entire novel — naturally he wasn’t confused.

But Card was.  About a lot of stuff.  And though I knew how the mistake happened, it was hard to sit there next to one of the great contemporary fiction writers, listening to him ask question after question about my story, and realizing more with each moment that I had dropped a major ball.

When he finished reading, Card looked me in the eye and told me that despite all the problems he had pointed out, the thing he really wanted to tell me was that it was very good.  That I felt like a professional, and that the pages felt very commercial.  I have to admit, I blinked at that last bit.  Because I do still occasionally travel in circles where “commercial” would be the worst insult you could fling at a writer.  But that wasn’t how Card meant it, and after a half-second’s thought that wasn’t how I took it, either.  He meant that the thing felt salable.  It felt like a book.

So in the wake of that review I felt a little embarrassed, you know?  But mostly?  Mostly just grateful.

Not for the praise that came at the end, but for the fact that I feel I can see now what must be done.  I feel like I now have a road map to the last 5% of work I need to do to get this thing really sold.  That is huge.  That is a gift.

So I will never, absolutely never regret letting Orson Scott Card eviscerate my first chapter.

I only regret I didn’t ask him to sign the pages.

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Semper Fidelis

Wednesday, August 11, 2010

All right, this post will be my last love letter to Orson Scott Card and his Boot Camp, I promise.  At least for a while.

I’ve been thinking about the lessons I would take away from Boot Camp.  And I think they come down to three big ideas I am walking away with:

A book is not a precious thing

One thing I learned last week is that I can come up with five good story ideas like that. *snaps fingers*  And I can write a story like that.  Which probably means I can write a book like… well, I guess probably like thaaaat.  But you know, pretty quick.

I do not have to treat my book, or any other I write, as a precious artifact to be husbanded, honored, and shielded from all mistreatment.  If I screw it up somehow in my efforts to get it published?  Sucks, but I can write a new one.  If I never get it on the shelf?  Same deal.  I will treat my work with respect, but I will understand that there is always more where it came from.

I have a career

I have been treating myself like a person who hopes to join a profession.  But the fact is, I have joined it.  Getting published and making sales are obviously huge parts of my job, parts I have not mastered yet.  But they are not the things that make me a writer.

I will no longer be ashamed to call myself a writer or to answer questions about it.  I will no longer apologize, with my attitude or with little self-deprecating jokes, for not yet being published.

I am a writer.  I write.  That’s what I do.

I am not going back

I have returned to my home, of course, but I am not going back to the life I lived before Boot Camp.  A life where I fear my work, worry about it, and put it off.  I am going to do everything I must to stay in the Boot Camp mentality, where I work very hard and am exhausted and happy.

One idea I have is to designate the first and second of each month as “Story Days,” during which I’ll do a repeat of the Boot Camp assignments to construct five story seeds and write one story.  But I think the biggest thing that will keep me in this mentality is just the knowledge that I can exist there, and the memory of what it can give me.

*

So, maybe this is three ways of saying essentially the same thing.  Whatever.  Suffice it to say that I feel I have returned to Atlanta a changed woman..

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Orson Scott Card and Conventional Wisdom

Monday, August 9, 2010

As I mentioned in my last post, Orson Scott Card is a man of strongly held opinions.  I wanted to take a moment to talk about some of those opinions, and how they shook me up.  Because they are so very far from the conventional wisdom I have learned.

Infodump vs. Expository Flow

Don’t infodump on us, writers always here.  Sprinkle in your backstory slowly, carefully, just a bit at a time.  This creates tension that pull us along and keep us reading; it also keeps us from being bogged down in a lot of exposition right up front.

Card doesn’t believe in being coy.  He believes in giving the reader all the relevant info the character has, as soon as it becomes relevant.  He doesn’t think the gradual revelation strategy does create tension, anyway.  He said that tension comes not from hidden information, but from known information.  You can let us wonder about the last 1% of information, but you must give us enough so that we can understand the story and care.

Having written one story trying to stay true to Card’s principles, I think I can say that this is not really an either/or proposition.  It is possible to get all the info in there without the “infodump,” the one or two paragraphs of pure exposition.  It is not easy, not in the slightest, but it is a problem that can be tackled.

And doing it made me realize how much I do get irritated when I don’t understand what is going on in a story, or when I think I understand, only to have the writer contradict my assumptions later.  You know what?  This withholding of information thing?  It’s annoying.

Agents vs. Editors

Every aspiring author knows that you get yourself published by acquiring an agent, who will then sell your work to an editor at a publishing house.  There are exceptions, maybe, but not a lot.  This is the path.

Card does not think so.  He believes editors are better at recognizing wonderful, unique books.  And he believes you should acquire an agent only after you have a contract offer in hand.  (You do still need one, because they make sure the contract doesn’t screw you and also aggressively sell the foreign rights to your books.)

And although most editors say that they do not accept unagented queries, Card says this is not so.  He says of course the good editors accept queries, and always have.  They just say they don’t to weed out the faint of heart, like that scene in Fight Club where Brad Pitt slaps down his first Project Mayhem recruits.

I am struggling with this one.  If Card is right about how editors operate, then the conventional wisdom is based on incomplete information and cannot possibly be trusted.  And yet, I am terrified (terrified!) of querying the ten or fifteen editors who might publish my novel and having them turn me down.  Because what could I offer an agent then?  The chance to represent a book that’s already been rejected all over town?

And yet there’s no question that what Card knows about the publishing industry greatly outweighs what I know about the publishing industry.  I will definitely have to give this one some thought.

Revisions vs. First Drafts

Revise, revise, revise is what I have learned.  Get down a crappy first draft, but for heaven’s sake, get it down.  You can always fix it later.

Card: “The first draft is the only living draft.”  He doesn’t mean that you can never fix things or edit.  But he does think that the first draft matters.  It’s where you get down what matters to you, where you do the invention that makes your story live.

As I look at those two views, I realize that there’s a touch of desperation to the first one.  As though you cannot possibly be expected to make something good on the first try, and might in fact lose the opportunity to create anything at all if you don’t get it done now! Card’s view assumes that you are a professional, with the ability to make your vision a reality.  You can take your time with it, because your ability to work is not a precious thing.

I don’t completely know where I stand on first drafts vs. seconds, but I know Card’s view holds a world of appeal for me.  I will be making every effort in the future to make sure that my first draft is a living draft, not just a skeletal one.

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Boot Camp: Workshop Revelations

Sunday, August 8, 2010

I got home from Boot Camp late last night. I kind of can’t believe it’s over.

It was such an amazing week. I did not a full night’s sleep the entire time I was there, but I would have happily stayed for another week of the same.

On Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, we workshopped the stories we wrote in that marathon session from Tuesday to Wednesday. Here is the most true thing I can say about Orson Scott Card: he is not shy. If he thinks your story needs evisceration, he will cheerfully provide it. He is as free with his political opinions as with his professional ones. And he even shared episodes from his personal history with us, often things of deep intimacy and significance.

I know some people would find Card’s bluntness offensive. But here is my take on it: Card is overwhelmingly generous in his honesty.

He gave us his true opinions, whether he thought they would please us or not, without (I’m pretty sure) holding anything back. Let’s just take a moment and acknowledge that not everyone would be willing to do that, or even can.

Card’s workshops run very differently from the ones I have been in before. The foundation we were given to work from, as critiquers, was composed of Card’s three Wise Reader questions:

  • Huh?— For use when you’re confused about what’s happening in the story
  • Oh, yeah?— For use when you don’t believe the story
  • So what?— For use when the story fails to hold your attention

For example, my story got a good number of “Oh, yeahs?” because it was I didn’t have time to do any research into the building of cathedrals during 16th century Germany; the details I faked simply weren’t believable enough.

But here’s the question I want to talk about: So What? I think I can say without reservation that if I had uttered those words in any other workshop I’ve been in, I’d have received one or two dirty looks, and possibly an invitation to leave the room. We just don’t tell each other we’re bored with one another’s stories. We dance around it: “I think the scene where he makes the moccasins maybe isn’t quite as strong as the other scenes.” But we don’t say, “Hey, dude? The moccasins? Boooo-rrrrring!” We don’t say anything like it. And that may be the exact problem the author needs to know about.

I mean, this was kind of a revelation to me: you should tell people when they bore you. So, regular writing group? Beware.

Another revelation was that thirteen people could have such different takes on a story. The workshop tables were set up in a big circle. Starting with the person next to the writer, we would each go around and give our comments in an orderly fashion, except for Card, who always went last. Card has a rule that once a comment has been made, it’s been made: we don’t all have to go around and say “I agree about the dialogue.” If you don’t have anything new to say, you simply confess it and we move along.

I assumed that this would be happening a lot. It didn’t. Once or twice, yes, but generally speaking, people had stuff to say. Often another camper would say something I almost thought but didn’t: something that irked me in the story but never quite got processed on the level of conscious thought.

Over the course of three days, I felt like I was able to build up a very germinal picture of the minds of my fellow campers. So often the inner life of another person is completely invisible to you; so much so that you almost forget it’s there. And yet over the week I felt like I was able to understand these people, just a little, from the inside: what they care about, what they notice, who they are when they’re alone with a story. It was a wonderful thing.

The stories were incredible: inventive and surprising and satisfying. If I hadn’t known, I wouldn’t have believed they could have been conceived and written so fast.

People had a lot of nice things to say about my story, and also some really good criticisms. In addition to criticism, Card gave me a history lecture (and I wasn’t the only one who got one, either; Card is the most well-read person I know). I feel like I have some great ideas of what to do with the story… but I also know that it needs a good bit of research.

I have so much more the say about Boot Camp, but this post is plenty long enough. Back soon!

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