Time to Write

Why so many writers with talent fail

Can guidelines for young artists apply to young (and not so young) writers as well? The previous post features a short video about artist John Baldessari, narrated by Tom Waits. It end with three things Baldessari thinks young artists should know. Let’s look at how the first of these applies to writers:

"Talent is cheap"

Yep. If you’re creative and have lots of ideas, congratulations, you’ve taken the first step. But it’s only the first step. 

I’ve known lots of writers with talent but no discipline.

They talk entertainingly about what they are going to write someday.

When they hear about a new book or film sometimes they tell you, truthfully, that they had that idea, too.

Most likely they have part of a novel or screenplay in a drawer. If they show it to you, you will be impressed by their talent.

Often they affect the current version of a bohemian style. Black predominates in their wardrobe.

The only thing missing is action. Writing the book or the screenplay. Or at least finishing it—there’s always a bit of work left to do on it before they send it out.

It can be a pleasant lifestyle—some of the perks of being a writer but none of the stress and risk, plus you don't have to wash black clothes so often. No impact, though, and not much creative satisfaction.

People sometimes ask me what the definition is of a writer—that is, do you have to be published to call yourself a writer? I don’t think so. A writer is somebody who writes….and finishes what they write. And then starts on the next thing. 

(Why not listen to the writing advice of writers who had both talent and discipline--people like Dickens, Twain and Austen? You'll find it in my newest book, Your Creative Writing Masterclass, published by Nicholas Brealey and available now from Amazon or your other favorite bookseller.)

If you want the reader to identify with your character, do this

In the previous post I referred to research done at Ohio State University on how and why readers identify with characters in fiction. Another finding of that research was that if the character is different in some major way from the reader, not surprisingly the reader identified less with the character if that difference was revealed early on vs. being revealed after the story covered several aspects where the reader and the character were similar.  

For the fiction author there is a practical implication--if you want your reader to identify with your protagonist, first emphasize the elements with which the reader probably can identify, then reveal the ones that are less likely to apply.

Of course this doesn't apply across the board--otherwise Kafka would have been wise to let us identify with Gregor before he turns into a bug. 

(Kafka is one of the great writers quoted in my newest book, "Your Creative Writing Masterclass," published by Nicholas Brealey and available now form Amazon and other booksellers. Why not learn from great writers like Kafka, Dickens, Fitzgerald, Hemingway and 100 more?)

If you are what your read...what about what you write?

A team of researchers at Ohio State University have found that readers of literature "begin spontaneiously assuming the thoughts, behaviours, goals and traits of fictional characters as if they are their own." This is especially true of reading material written in the first person. 

Let's look at the specifics. One group of university students read a short story about a person who attended the same university as the group voting despite a number of obstacles. Another group read a similar short story but about someone not at their university. The accounts also varied as to whether they were written in the first person or the third person.

There was an election at the participants' university not long after this. The group who read the first person account of a character who attended their university had a much higher turnout on election day than the others (65% vs. 29%).

I wonder how this applies to writers who immerse themselves in a character as they write a novel or a screenplay. Are there "method" writers who feel the influence of their characters even when they're not writing?

I once was asked whether I wanted to write a screenplay based on the story of a woman who had been held captive and tortured. I turned it down because I didn't want to spend a lot of time immersed in that world--the job would have involved lengthy interviews with the victim who herself had a criminal past, and a number of her associates. 

Actually, the producer could tell this wasn't my cup of tea and wouldn't have hired me anyway, he told me after I'd said no. I think his statement was, "These people would eat you alive." 

It's not that I can't or don't want to write parts for villains; in fact it's a pleasure because they do tend to be the juiciest characters. However, they've been just one part of the story and I've always been more interested in how they are similar to the "hero" rather than how they are different. 

I've also had the opposite effect--that is, I've really enjoyedj spending time with characters I liked and was sad when I finished the screenplay.

Anyway, it's something to watch out for when you immerse yourself in a story. There may be times when you need to consciously leave the characters behind when you get up from your writing desk.

(How did the great writers like Dickens, Austen, Chekvhov, Hemingway and others approach creating vivid characters? You'll find their advice on this in my newest book, "Your Creative Writing Masterclass," published by Nichoals Brealey and available now from Amazon and other booksellers.)

One way to plot a traditional mystery or detective novel

Want to write a detective novel but having problems with the plot? One method is to work backward.

Start with the murder. Who was the victim?

When you have worked out his or her story, including behaviour or personality traits or issues that could cause a lot of conflicts, you’ll also be able to come up with a group of people who all could have done it and their possible motives. 

These motives will suggest story strands. For instance, let's say the victim was having an affair. That means his wife and maybe the women (or man) he was having the affair with could both be suspects (especially if he had tried to end the affair).

That means in story terms you will have to think about how he met the person with whom he had the affair, how often they got together, where, what excuses he used to his wife for not being home, etc. You will not reveal all of this information, it will be raw material. 

For instance maybe your detective finds out the victim owed money to someone--another motive. In the course of investigating that lead he finds out that the victim used to go to a casino and the detective thinks that means the victim had a gambling problem.

Nobody at the casino recognizes the picture of the victim. One gambler, however, stays at the hotel next door and says, "I’ve seen him at the hotel several times."

That leads the detective to realize that the victim was meeting someone at the hotel.

When you have worked out a good story for each suspect you'll have plenty of raw material and then with half your brain you have to step back and pretend you are the detective and don't know any of this, and with the other half of your brain you remember it all and figure out how the detective can find out some of it and how one thing can lead to another. 

The important thing in this genre is to keep coming up with surprises. As I said, maybe the affair was with another man, or it was with a prostitute but he never slept with her, he just talked--and what he talked about leads to another secret he had.

When I read this kind of fiction the thing that interests me more than the mechanics of the plot is the personality of the detective or other protagonist. If he or she is interesting I’ll forgive some plot lapses. A good example: the Nero Wolfe novels by Rex Stout. Nero and his sidekick Archie are what makes the books fun to read. If you want your detective novel to stand out, I think coming up with a distinctive protagonist is the key.

 (Get advice on plotting, creating characters, developing your style and much more, from the great writers of the past and present, including Twain, Dickens, Austen, Amis, Vonnegut and many more. It's all in my new book, 'Your Creative Writing Masterclass,' published by Nicholas Brealey and available now from Amazon or your other favorite bookseller.)

 

The writer's fear of revealing too much (& ep. 5 of Sherman Writes a Book)

Are you blocked because you fear revealing too much about yourself in your works of fiction? First enjoy the 5th episode of "Sherman Writes a Book," in which he has a similar fear(it's under two minutes long), then see the tips below for beating this kind of writer's block. (To see Sherman's story from the start, go scroll down to May 1 and then watch them in order.)

 

THE FEAR OF REVEALING TOO MUCH

Sometimes writers develop a block because they suddenly fear that their book or script will reveal too much about themselves. What if everybody realizes (or just assumes) that all of the protagonist's embarrassing stuff actually is the truth about the author?

First, it's true that the best fiction often reflects some aspect of the author. It's almost impossible to write anything that doesn't have some part of you in it. Of course that's not the same as saying what happens to him or her has happened to you. After all, very few writers of mystery and crime novels have actually killed anyone, yet the best are able to get inside the mind of a killer enough to do justice to that character. If they can't do that, the book won't be very good.

You have deniability! Every author is allowed to say, 'I could imagine doing such a thing, that' doesn't mean I've done it' (even if they have). 

Also, let's face it, if you have a passion for writing, that means there's something about your life and/or your thoughts and feelings that you want to convey. As for which parts of your book reflect those, you can keep your readers guessing. 

You also have the power of opt out of interviews and other forms of self-exposure. It didn't hurt the sales of "Catcher in the Rye" that J. D. Salinger was reclusive. In a recent interview, Stephen King revealed that he regretted doing a series of American Express ads that showed his face because from then on everybody knew what he looked like. 

In short, remember that people will think whatever they want to think...but they spend far less time thinking about you then you think they do.

(There's great advice from the best writers about writer's block and a myriad of other topics in my newest book, "Your Creative Writing Masterclass," published by Nicholas Brealey and available from Amazon or your other favorite bookseller. Not just advice from me but from the all-time best writers like Mark Twain, Jane Austen, Anton Chekhov and many more. When you get the book, you get them as your mentors.)

Overcoming writer's block (including ep. 3 of Sherman Writes a Book)

Sherman's saga began on May 1, so you may want to start there and work your way forward. Each video is under two minutes long. Below the video we look at another kind of writer's block and how to overcome it.

 

 

THE 'WHAT IF THEY RECOGNIZE THEMSELVES' BLOCK

If you're writing something that is based even loosely on real people, you may wonder whether they, like Sherman's mother, might wonder whether you're writing about them. If you have portrayed them in a less than flattering light, will they hate you? Sue you? 

Here are some tips on how to avoid that:

* Change lots of details so it's not easy to recognize your models for the characters. You can change gender, age, physical description, the setting, profession, hobbies, relationships, etc. 

* Go for hybrids. In other words, mix together the characteristics of several people so that the combination is not that much like any of them. This also gives you deniability. You can say, honestly, "No, that character was not based on you."

* Remember that actually people generally don't know themselves well enough to recognize what you've used, especially their bad traits. Lots of successful authors have commented on that. 

And if you're worried that a totally ficitonal character might accidentally be similar to a real person who coud turn around and sue you, here are a couple of tips:

* If you create somebody really hateful, give them either a common name or an obscure name. The Bill Smiths of the world are used to encountering hundreds of other Bill Smiths and they won't automatically think that an evil character with that name is modelled on them.

If you give the character a very obscure name, check Facebook and Google that name to see if anybody actually is called that. Be especially careful that you haven't give this evil character any characteristics that you spot for someone with a similar name. For instance, if your character is a sadistic dentist named Hieronymous Skitch, and you find there's a real dentist named Hieronymous Skatch, change the name totally.

Frankly, usually fears about this issue usually are overblown. Use a bit of common sense and you'll be fine.

(Want more good writing advice? Not just from me but from Charles Dickens, Anton Chekhov, and Jane Austen? It's in my newest book, "Your Creative Writing Masterclass," published by Nicholas Brealey and available from your favorite bookseller.)

 

Video: P. G. Wodehouse talks about how he writes (the puzzle method)

The author of the "Jeeves and Wooster" novels, P. G. Wodehouse was interviewed for the BBC's Monitor program in 1958. The link below will take you to a seven minute clip from that interview. The wartime broadcasts referred to were ones he made in 1941 in Berlin. They led people to think he was a Nazi sympathiser but after the war this was investigated by MI5 and he was exonerated.

In this video he talks about his life, how he writes, and why he never lets his characters take over. 

You can watch the video here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/archive/writers/12201.shtml (There's no sound on the first minute of shots of his home, his books, etc. The video is about 7 and a half minutes long.)

(Would would you like to have Mark Twain as your writing coach? Or how about Anton Chekhov or Jane Austen? You'll find their advice about writing in my newest book, "Your Creative Writing Masterclass," published by Nicholas Brealey and available from Amazon or your other favorite book seller.)

 

Writing 12 novels in 12 months with Crowd Funding

The novelist Matt Forbeck (“Amortals”) has set himself an impressive goal: write twelve novels in twelve months, to add to his previous sixteen. He described the venture in a post at suvudu.com.

“I had the ability, but not the money, so I found ways to hedge my bets. In a world in which ebooks are starting to dominate, length isn’t as much of an issue, so I decided to go with shorter novels, about 50,000 words each. I also chose to line up pre-orders for the books through Kickstarter, the world’s top crowdfunding platform. Since I’d be writing without an advance, that gave me the money I needed to feed my family while I worked on the projects.

I call this plan 12 for ‘12. So far, it’s been a smashing success. I broke the dozen novels down into four trilogies of books, and I’m running a Kickstarter drive for each one of them. The first two were fully funded and then some, ranking in the top twelve — there’s that number again — fiction projects ever on Kickstarter. Today (March 31), I’m finishing up the third book, meaning that I’ve completed three novels in the last three months, each on schedule.”

His Kickstarter crowdfunding goal for the first book was $3000 and he actually raised $13,276. If you’re considering trying this kind of campaign you might be interested in the incentives he offered.

 The 56 people who pledged $5 will get an ebook edition of the first in the first trilogy, the 92 who pledged $25 get a personalized and autographed ebook edition, an mp3 of a song and will be named as a Player in the credits.

The 27 who pledged $35 also get a limited edition softcover of the first novel and named as a Citizen in the credits.

 The 16 who pledged at least $50 get all that and will named as an Accomplice in the credits.

There are more levels, all the way up to one backer who pledged $1000 or more and will collaborate with the author to create a major superhero or villain (an Alpha) and will be named as an Alpha in the credits. 

There were no takers for the $2500 or $5000 levels, the latter of which would have seen the author fly to the donor anywhere in the world to deliver 50 hardcover copies of the novel for a reading and signing for the donor and friends. (To see the video and other details of this part of the crowdfunding campaign, go to http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/forbeck/12-for-12-10-bnw-novels)

The campaign for the second book raised $12,800, with the highest pledge being $500.

Obviously it helps enormously if you already have a loyal following. If you are unknown and want people to fund your book you will have to have a vey appealing story, a compelling video, some great incentives, and the time and energy to use social media to reach your target audience.

 (Who knows about how to write? How about Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, Jane Austen? Their advice to writers--along with the advice of more than another modern and classic authors--is in 'Your Creative Writing Masterclass," published by Nicholas Brealey and available from Amazon or your other favorite bookseller now.)

 

 

Writing a novel...the same one four times: Jane Hamilton explains

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If you’re struggling as you write your novel and you assume “real” writers have it much easier, Jane Hamilton, author of “The Book of Ruth,” is evidence that it ain’t necessarily so. She told a symposium recently that it took four complete versions of “Map of the World” before she got it right.

She said “Sometimes I can’t do the next thing until I finish the bad thing.”

She also revealed that conditions were far from ideal when she started writing. She was sharing a computer with her husband and bringing up young children. She said, “My early novels were fuelled with pure rage.”

 Her books are about relationships, and she started her talk by quoting this wonderful passage from an essay by Willa Cather on Katherine Mansfield: “One realizes that human relationships are the tragic necessity of human life; that they can never be wholly satisfactory, that every ego is half the time greedily seeking them, and half the time pulling away from them.”

 If we keep that in mind, we’ll never run out of stories!

 Source: Salsburypost.com http://www.salisburypost.com/Entertainment/040112-book-hamilton-qanda-qcd

(Mark Twain has advice for you about writing. So do Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Anton Chekhov, and Jane Austen. You'll find it in "Your Creative Writing Masterclass," published by Nicholas Brealey and available from Amazon and other booksellers now.)

The strange worlds of the late Harry Crews, novelist

The writer Harry Crews died recently, leaving a legacy of some of the weirdest fiction (and a memoir) you’ve probably never read. Although he wrote in the tradition of Flannery O’Connor and Hunter S. Thompson he never achieved their level of fame.

He believed that “the writer’s job is to get naked, to hide nothing, to look away from nothing.”

If you go by his memoir, “A Childhood: The Biography of a Place,” he had lots to reveal. At the age of five he contracted polio. At seven he fell into a vat of boiling water (it was used for slaughtered pigs) and burned off most of his skin. He fought in the Korean War as a Marine and married and divorced the same woman twice. One of their sons drowned at an early age in a neighbor’s swimming pool.

Crews had tattoos before they were popular with anybody other than sailors and sideshow workers, drank too much, and got into fights—at the same time teaching at the University of Florida, where one of his students was crime novelist Michael Connelly.

A parade of freaks and outsiders populated his novels, which include “The Gospel Singer,” “Naked in Garden Hills,” and “Scar Lover.” He wrote between 4am and 9am, beginning his writing sessions with the prayer, “God, I’m not greedy. Just give me the next 500 words.”

The Georgia Review featured part of an unpublished memoir by Crews. Here’s an excerpt:

"As Mama and I walked, she had her hand clamped on my shoulder so tightly she was hurting me and my arm was starting to go numb. Each time she had to put her weight on her bad leg the viselike grip convulsively dug more deeply into the place where she held me. I had glanced at her face several times and it showed no sign of pain, only a kind of resigned indifference. But I knew the kind of hurt she had to be feeling from the way she held my shoulder and leaned into me as we walked. And in all the long years that followed that morning she never talked to me about the trip to the bus station or about the hideous ordeal that would begin for her as soon as I was gone. 

She had to have been scared, terrified even, but no more than a dozen words, if that many, had passed between us. And that has seemed passing strange to me ever since I got old enough to think about that morning and what was happening, not only the enormity of what was ahead of her, but how distraught she must have been over what had already happened. She was looking at the prospect of having her hip and thigh ripped open like the belly of a butchered hog and then having most of her body encased in hard plaster during the hottest months of the year, but besides that, her worst nightmare had already come true. 

She had always feared not being able to keep the three of us together, to earn enough money to keep me, my brother, and her under the same roof. And now we were being torn one from the other, and only God knew what the future held, whether or if we would ever get back together. The night before, after my brother had been gone to his job at the box factory for the better part of an hour, she said in a quiet, bemused voice, not so much to me, it seemed, as to herself: “I’m gone bring us all back together if I can, but . . .” She did not finish the sentence. 

Now not only was my brother back at the apartment wrapped in an exhausted sleep, but she was taking me to the bus station to make the trip alone to stay with Aunt Eva and Uncle Alton in Bacon County just north of the Okefenokee Swamp in south Georgia, and from the bus station she was going straight to the hospital to submit herself to the surgeon’s knife for the first time in her life. Her incredible courage that had been born of desperation and sustained by a lack of alternatives had not been enough to hold together that which she loved most in the world.”

While doing some research I made a mistake he might have enjoyed: instead of Harry Crews, I typed in Henry Crews (it was early in the morning...). I encountered quite a few Henry Crews, several recently deceased, including Henry W. Crews, who, the obit said, “had retired from Babcock and Wilcox, where he worked as a bar straightener.”

 There was also a twitter page for another Henry Crews, started in December 2010 and finished in June of 2011.  Did he die or just run out of Tweets?

 Another was a genealogy search for William H. Crews: “Family legend has it that he was killed by lightning while working out in the fields about 2 yrs after their second son, George Marion was born.”

 At about that point I realized something was wrong; the author wasn’t hugely famous but he was more famous than this search suggested. The search for Harry Crews was more productive. “A Feast of Snakes” and several other of his books are in print and available from Amazon and other booksellers. You might want to have a look.

Sources: LA Times http://www.latimes.com/news/obituaries/la-me-harry-crews-20120401,0,1537312.story / Georgia Review http://garev.uga.edu/crewsleavinghome.html

(Would you like to get writing advice from the greatest writers of modern and past times? People like Twain, Dickens, Chekhov as well as Vonnegut, Hemingway, and Bradbury? It's all in my book, "Your Creative Writing Masterclass," publshed by Nicholas Brealey and available from Amazon and other booksellers--why not make it a practice to buy at least one book a month from your local independent bookseller?)