Time to Write

Grammar doesn't matter--or does it?

On the Screenwriters Network bulletin from Shooting People (a great organization that publishes daily bulletins for film-makers, writers, animators, etc.) someone posted a message which read, “Workshop’s start at £12, edit’s start at £17.” I made the observation, “no charge for additional apostrophes, obviously. :-)“

The response of the moderator, the estimable Andy Conway, was, “That falls clearly into Trying to Start a Grammar Flame War territory, Jurgen. You know the rules about that. Yellow card for you.”

I didn’t know that mentioning incorrect punctuation on a writers’ site was controversial, and I have no desire to start a Flame War (which means angry postings back and forth).

Of course it’s a losing battle. All around us, apostrophes are being flung around or dropped with abandon and people who think two things that work well together are complimentary instead of complementary.

My formative years were spent escaping into reading, learning to value the choice of one word over another, and even being forced to diagram sentences by the sadistic, ancient (she must have been all of 45) Mrs. McKinley. They have left their mark and I can’t stop caring about getting it right. However, I’ll try to shut up about it in mixed company.

(for tips on how to be more creative and productive, sign up now for my free monthly Brainstorm e-bulletin. Just send an email request to BstormUK@aol.com)

What publishers refuse to put on covers

On the Statesman.com website, Katherine Tanney reports on attending a panel discussion on writing for young adults, including YA authors Jennifer Ziegler and Varian Johnson. One interesting tidbit:

“One thing YA writers apparently can't do is get their publishers to put young males on the covers of their books, even though, according to Ziegler, "There's such pressure on boys not to be seen holding a book with a girl on the cover."

Johnson's next book, "Saving Maddy," has a male protagonist, "but it still has a girl on the cover," he lamented.”

Hmm, I wonder whether there’s a marketing opportunity there for self-publishing YA authors—they would have an instant USP (unique selling proposition) if they had a boy on their cover.

Or maybe we should start a business selling fake macho book covers for boys who are reading books with girls on the original covers…

(for tips and techniques on being more creative, sign up for my free monthly Brainstorm e-bulletin. Just send an email request now to BstormUK@aol.com)

On Getting an Agent

A few years ago my book agent retired and for a couple of years I handled the contracts for my non-fiction work myself. However, I realized that in order to get my first novel to publishers it would be much better to have an agent so I went on the hunt again. Having fairly extensive film and TV credits and having written eight non-fiction books didn’t give me any advantage in this genre, so it was back to square one, just like when I was looking for a script agent when I was starting out in Hollywood. It’s always a humbling experience to be sent back to “Go”…

My first round of inquiries met with no success and I did what I tell my students NOT to do—give up. Well, not really, but I did pause. Eventually, though, I rewrote the query letter, polished the summary of the story, and sent out a batch of inquiries.

One of the agents requested that I send him the first 100 pages and, later, the whole manuscript, and I've just signed with him. I’ve looked over the contract, which is gratifyingly free of legalese. It’s for this book only, and there’s a get-out clause that either party can use after six months if they’re not happy.

I think it makes sense to start with that kind of contract because these things only work when both sides feel satisfied with the working relationship. Some agents offer multi-year contracts that cover everything you do, including your laundry list, and although that may seem flattering it’s a nightmare if, six months or a year down the line, you’re not getting the service you were promised.

Anyway, this agent is having two colleagues read the manuscript, too, and then collating his notes and theirs—he says he has some ideas, which I’m eager to hear, for tweaks that will help the book’s chances with publishers. Then he will take it out in September, when the summer lull is over.

It’s only a first step, of course, but an important one and I’m very pleased. In terms of passing along any lessons from this experience, the main one is persistence, persistence, persistence.

Where do you write? This time it's the bunker...

In the previous post, I described where Guillermo del Toro writes: his man cave. Today we discover that Gay Talese has a "bunker." It's described in New York magazine as "a plush cave [that word again] under the streets of Manhattan...

"There is no phone, no e-mail, no view, no sound. Along the walls there are shelves filled with brown box files that Talese has covered in collage."

The boxes contain his notes, photos, and other reference material for each of his projects incuding his best-known book, "They Neighor's Wife." They are all color-coded and carefully labeled.

Another interesting note about how he works: "He spends years reducing his research until at long last it all fits on a single piece of shirt board. And then he draws it. And then he starts writing."

(There's a chapter in my book, Your Writing Coach, about setting up a writing space that works best for you. You can get the book from Amazon, Barnes & Noble and other online and offline retailers.)

What do you write when you don't know what happens next?

What do you do when you don’t know what your character would do next?

Figure out his or her hot buttons:

What do they fear the most?
What and who do they love the most?
What is their darkest secret?
What is their deepest desire?
Who have they betrayed, and how?
Who has betrayed them, and how?
What would they do to save their lives?
What wouldn’t they do to save their lives?
What don’t they like about themselves?
What are they proudest of?

When you know this and the basic spine of your story (or even just the start and end, or even just the start), coming up with compelling conflicts and plot twists is a lot easier!

Yipee, this is post number 1000! Help us celebrate by letting your writer friends know about this blog. Thanks!

Where do you write? Meet 'the man cave'

In an article in the Independent, Guy Adams describes the creative space owned by writer/director Guillermo del Toro, the “Man Cave”:

The Man Cave has blood-red wallpaper. Its hallways are filled with monster statuettes, mock-baroque paintings, and Gothic objets d'art. The bookshelves are stacked with leather-bound notebooks, on which he sketched out plot-lines and characters for his best-known films: Blade II, Hellboy, and the critically acclaimed Pan's Labyrinth. It is, in other words, his creative hub.

"I bought it because my crap used to take up three-quarters of the house, and my wife couldn't stand it," he explains. "One day we were fighting because I wanted wall-space near the kitchen for a statue of a rutting woman zombie. And she said, 'you should live in a cave'. So I did what I was told. Now the family home is pristine, and all my crap is in this crazy place where I write."

Is that cool, or what! (OK, I know mostly only my male readers will agree…)

He has a huge number of projects underway. How does he do it?:

"I compartmentalise my life very easily," he says. "When I'm doing one thing, I'm really doing one thing. I have a sign on my office at the studio. It says 'fuck off, I'm writing'. When that sign is on the door, nobody knocks. I just put music on and I occupy myself very hard. And that is how I get things done. And I never stop. I hate free time. I hate down time. This is what I do."

(If you’re interested in cultivating focus, have a look at my book, “Focus: the power of targeted thinking,” published by Pearson and available on Amazon and other online and offline retailers in the UK—the US edition has been postponed to March 2010.)

How many creative ideas can you have in a day?

On a blog called “A Nickel’s Worth,” Scott Nickel did a 20-question interview with cartoonist Jerry King. When we feel too precious about creativity, it’s good to be reminded that people like King exist. He says,

“I can easily do around 10-15 cartoons a day. However, I work at home, and my kids are in my office all day, so I don't get as much done as I used to. I'm selling around 200 cartoons per month.”

Yikes! What’s more, the ones I’ve seen are funny. He says he never worries about running out of ideas.

I think a lot of creativity is about your state of mind. If you think you can have only one creative idea per day or per week, your mind will make sure that's the truth. If you think you can have 10 per day, your mind will make sure that is true.

I think I've told this story before, but I used to think I could write only a few hundred words a day. One long weekend I set out to break that limitation. I decided to write an entire screenplay in four days. I did it,too--it was a terrible screenplay but that wasn't the point; it was a success because I realized that I wouldn't die or even faint if I had to write dozens of pages per day. It removed that internal limitation. If you find yourself limiting yourself, maybe a similar exercise will help.

(for more tips on how to be more creative and productive, sign up for my free monthly Brainstorm e-bulletin. Just send an email request to BstormUK@aol.com)

The sources of creativity

Some astute observation from Linus Karlsson and Paul Malmstrom, co-founders/Chief Creative Officers, Mother ad agency, New York, at creative-online.com:

“Our observation is that many successful creative people grew up as nerds—but somehow got out of it and turned into semi-generalist, helicopter people. Also, many are able to strike a perfect balance between true humbleness and frightening egomania. Lastly, exceptional creatives are not sure if they hate or love what they're doing, and every day is a battle to justify existence and worth."

Especially when I work in Hollywood, I meet some people who have not been able to strike a perfect balance between humbleness and frightening egomania. Often, it’s the decision-makers who tend toward the latter and the writers who tend toward the former.

Karlsson and Malmstrom go on:

"Our secret has always been that there's no secret. The brain wants to have fun. If you keep thinking about that every day, you're always going to be interesting and relevant. The brain hates boring and expected. Creativity stems from going about things the wrong way. Irritation is also interesting as a source for inspiration. Why do certain things irritate you? Don't know, but go there. It's more interesting.”

(for tips and techniques on how to be more creative, sign up now for my free monthly Brainstorm e-bulletin. Just send an email request to BstormUK@aol.com)

Writers, our future is digital (& the good news)

Mequoda Daily recently ran an article regarding online publishing. Here are two key points:

“All information products will be digital by the year 2025. In a few years, customers will expect to be able to buy any digital product — newspaper, magazine, or video — and download it immediately to both their desktop computer or their portable digital reader.”

Here’s the good news:

“Digital products make micro-publishing viable. A book that previously could only be published for as few as 100 – 2,000 special-interest readers could be economically viable. Digital products mean the previous expenses of typography, printing, binding, warehousing, picking, packing and shipping are eliminated. An author who can sell as few as 1,000 copies at $20 each might be satisfactorily compensated for his special-niche written material.”

The more sobering fact, of course, is that you still have to find those 1000 people, but if the product is special-niche, that may not be so difficult.

(And if you need some help writing that book, get a copy of my book, "Your Writing Coach," published by Nicholas Brealey and available on Amazon and other online and offline retailers.)

What the creative person needs to be today

On Creativity-online.com, Joyce King Thomas, Chief Creative Officer of the ad agency, McCann Erickson, New York, said some interesting things about being creative in the ad agency world. It struck me that you could say almost exactly the same thing about books, screenplays, and other writing projects these days:

“To be a great creative person today, you have to be open to anything. You have to come to every project with zero preconceptions of how you're going to solve the problem. Advertising is in total, absolute flux right now. The mediums we use, the way we make money, the way agencies are organized. Nothing is stet.

What we do today is some kind of hybrid of advertising, communication, ideation and conversation creation. Ultimately, it has the same goal of persuading consumers to behave differently. I'm not about the past. Advertising, or whatever you call what we do today, is way more interesting now. What has always been most interesting to me about this business is that, at its core, it's about changing someone's mind. The biggest challenge agencies have today is juggling the need to be financially prudent and the imperative to move forward.”

The only difference is that as writers our goal is to get the readers/viewers to FEEL something, rather than to change their behaviour (although with self-help or political or ecology books we may be doing that as well). And, as is true of ad people, we ignore at our peril the changes in the business and marketing aspects of what we do.

(For tips on how to be more creative, sign up for my free monthly Brainstorm e-bulletin. Just send an email request to BstormUK@aol.com)

What to do when you're stuck (my advice to a young writer)

Recently a young writer wrote to me, freaking out because he had just started the second draft of his novel and was, for the first time, experiencing being stuck--in fact, terrified of continuing, for reasons he didn't understand. In case it might be useful to someone else as well, I thought I'd post my advice to him here:

First, don't panic. Every writer encounters some blocks and some points at which things aren't flowing as well as you would like. The trick is to realize that these are temporary states that you can overcome.

There are a few things you can do. Which one works best for you is something you'll have to find out by experimenting.

First, it would be good if you could take a day or two away from the project without guilt. Just give yourself permission to have a day or two off, doing something you enjoy and that will keep your mind occupied. I don't know what you like to do, but examples could be a weekend of hiking, or indulging in a movie marathon, or watching a box set of some tv series, or visiting out of town friends, etc.

Sometimes that alone is enough. When you go back to the project, you're refreshed and able to resume.

Second, I suspect you are putting a lot of pressure on yourself because while a first draft usually means a rough draft, some writers think they have to get everything right in the second draft.

You don't.

Most writers do a third, fourth, and even fifth draft. So try to relax: the second draft only has to be a bit better than the first one. And the third draft only has to be a bit better than the second one. You keep going until at some point you realize that you've done it as well as you can and it's time to send the thing out into the world--but only when you feel ready.

I hope that makes sense, let me know how you get on.

(For more tips and techniques on how to be more creative, overcome blocks, and be more productive, you can subscribe to my free monthly Brainstorm e-bulletin by sending an email request to BstormUK@aol.com)

Titlenomics (or what's in a book name?)

Writing in the New York Times, Patricia Cohen examined the trend in ripping off titles that do well. Prime example: the success of Freakonomics has led to Womenomics, Obamanomics, Slackonomics, Inventonomics, and the forthcoming Scroogenomics: Why You Shouldn't Buy Presents for the Holidays.

How about Enoughonomics, Already!

Another one that has just about run its course is the "....that changed the world." My favourite is "Mauve: How One Man Invented a Color that Changed the World," although a close second is "Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World." Fate? Bananas?

The article quotes Eamon Dolan of Penguin Press: "You can't have a sense of revelation with something that's been repeated four or five times."

However, there's something to be said for catchy names--I'm sure Freakonomics, which also has the the provocative subtitle, "A rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything," wouldn't have been a best-seller if it had been called The Economics of Everyday Life.

PS: If you enjoy this blog, please email your friends about it. Maybe you should say it's a rogue writer explaining the hidden seamy side of writing...freakowriteonomics.

(If you need some guidance in writing, take a look at my book, Your Freaky Writing Coach...no, that's not right, it's just Your Writing Coach, published by Nicholas "The Enforcer" Brealey...no, wait...)

Children's Author Goes Wild (great true story)

If you are among the valued few to have seen my film, “The Real Howard Spitz,” starring Kelsey Grammer, you may remember that he played a children’s book author who didn’t like children. Today I ran across a hilarious story of a real-life author who would have felt kinship with my protagonist. It’s about Alison Uttley, the author of “Little Grey Rabbit” as remembered by Gwen Headley:

“When I worked for Collins (the predecessor of HarperCollins) I was detailed to accompany Alison Uttley to the Children’s Book Fair at the Royal Horticultural Halls in Westminster. She was a sour little old woman, with no small talk, and I was clearly merely a minion.

But I was quite good at publicity, and I’d arranged for everyone attending the fair to be invited to COME AND MEET ALISON UTTLEY. At half hourly intervals the PA system hollered out ‘ALISON UTTLEY!! LITTLE GREY RABBIT AUTHOR!! HERE AT 12!!’

We’d placed Uttley on a curtained daïs, and on the dot of 12 the curtain rose. A howling crowd of excited children stormed the stage.

As Uttley hadn’t bothered to listen to a word I’d told her, she was completely unprepared for this. Dimly she perceived an overwhelming mob running at her and with British pluck she unhesitatingly grabbed her duck-handled umbrella and waded into the attack, felling infants right and left.

The kiddies paused, briefly regrouped, then broke up and ran off, screaming in terror. Uttley strode among them, lashing out freely.”

Howard Spitz would have been proud!

Using Twitter with your fictional characters

Here’s a link to a two-minute video in which Carri Bugbee explains how you can use Twitter to promote your fiction by having your character do the tweeting.

  She did it for the character of Peggy Olsen in “Mad Men” in the show’s second season.(That's a picture of Elisabeth Moss, who plays Peggy.)

 As she points out, you will still need to use other means to make people aware of the character.

 When it’s a lead in a popular TV show that’s a lot easier than if it’s the protagonist of an unpublished novel or unproduced screenplay, but if the character is interesting enough and you have other ways of drawing people’s attention to what you’re doing, it might be a good strategy.

 Look at it this way: if you try it and it fails because nobody pays attention to it, who will know? 

 By the way, I do post occasionally on Twitter; if you want to find me on there, my user name is jurgenwolff (and I promise I won’t inundate you with reports on what I’ve had for breakfast).

A quick question for you (thanks in advance)

I'm closing in on my 1000th post on this blog, and I wanted to ask you a question:

What would you like to see covered on this blog that isn't here at the moment? It can be about writing, creativity, productivity, my own projects--anything that would make the blog more useful or more entertaining or more whatever you value.

You can leave your answer here as a comment, or send it to me via email to j4london@aol.com

I look forward to hearing from you--and to writing the next 1000th posts!

Natalie Goldberg Interview - write no matter what

Here is a link to an interview with Natalie Goldberg, poet, teacher and author. Her book, "Writing Down the Bones" has sold over 1.5 million copies. In this half-hour interview from Future Primitive, one of the main topics she talks about is writing even when you are going through a tough part of your life. 

That resonated for me, because years ago while my father was dying of cancer, I wrote a comedy screenplay. It seemed like a weird thing to be doing, but I think it was one of my best scripts and a welcome escape from what was happening in the rest of my life. Even if you can carve out only ten minutes a day, keeping the writing going can be valuable. 

(There are a lot of right-brain writing techniques in my books, "Your Writing Coach," published by Nicholas Brealey and available from Amazon and other online and offline retailers.)

New Writing Videos

I've just set up a new Youtube channel on writing:

www.youtube.com/yourwritingcoach

It features short videos of advice on overcoming the fear of rejection, the role of agents (and whether you really need one), how to overcome writing blocks, how to be better at rewriting, and getting support for your writing.

I'll be adding more in the weeks to come--if you have any suggestions for topics, please let me know in a comment here or via email to j4london(at)aol.com. Also if you have feedback (other than not leaving so much headroom in the shot next time!). 

(And for tips and techniques on how to be more creative and productive, sign up for my free monthly Brainstorm e-bulletin. Just send an email request to BstormUK@aol.com)

Video interview with Sark

I've long admired the artist and writer, SARK, who has written a bunch of colourful books designed to bring out the writer or artist in everybody. But until I saw the video below (which I found in the Developing Talent newsletter), I never knew what her name stood for. 

One of the key points in this five-minute interview: action comes before inspiration. 

(You can also find tips on how to be more creative in my free monthly Brainstorm e-bulletin. Just send an email request to BstormUK@aol.com.)

Scott Adams on the discontents of success (and listening to your readers)

Scott Adams is the cartoonist who created “Dilbert.” He bared his soul in an interview in the San Jose Mercury-News earlier this year. Despite his huge success, he envies Charles Schultz, who had stratospheric success with “Peanuts.” Here’s how Scott explains it:

 "I'd be lying if I said it didn't bug me a little bit," he says. "I'm certainly aware that most people would be happy to be in my position. But whatever personality trait that causes you to work 10 years straight without taking a day off to make all this stuff happen is the same thing that prevents you from enjoying it. The hunger doesn't go away. It just transforms into hunger for something else. ... And it's not a good thing, by the way."

 The article also mentions that Dilbert was rejected by every major syndicate before being accepted by United Media and initially appeared in only about three dozen newspapers. 

Adams was the first syndicated cartoonist to put his email in his strip, which led to a big demand for more work-related gags (before then, most of the gags were about Dilbert’s life outside of work). When he gave his audience what they wanted, the popularity of the strip soared and it’s now in its 20^th year.

Awkward Family Photos

OK, I admit it; today was one of those days when an hour or two disappeared into the internet. 

But here’s something worthwhile (sort of) I discovered: the site www.awkwardfamilyphotos.com. 

The title pretty much explains it. I think you’ll find it inspiring if you write creepy fiction involving family murders or characters about whom others eventually say, “He kept pretty much to himself.”