Time to Write

"The Writer" and "Imagine" bite the dust - what does this trend mean for writers?

Print magazines, a prime outlet for free-lance writers, are struggling and some are giving up. Last week I heard that The Writer, a US-based magazine that was established more than a century ago, has suspended publication and is looking for a buyer. In today's climate, a buyer will be hard to find. 

Today I received a letter saying Imagine, a magazine about animation, will no longer be published but will focus on online content. It's not clear whether they will try to charge a subscription to the site or rely on ads for their revenue. 

If you subscribe to Time or Newsweek you will have noticed how thin they're getting. I think it's only a matter of time before they both switch to online-only.

I still like to leaf through an actual paper-based magazine, but I doubt it holds the same appeal for the younger generation of readers. 

So far the revenue magazines can get from online ads doesn't match what they used to get from print ads. That means less income, fewer staff writers, less money to pay free-lancers.

Add to that the huge number of free blogs, YouTube videos, and articles on websites, and it becomes clear that the future of many print magazines is dim...and with it, the outlook for free-lance writers.

This mirrors the decline of the music business. Streaming music sites like Spotify are taking the place of buying CDs or even buying songs to download. The royalties songwriters and performers get from that kind of streaming music service are minimal. Of course piracy is also a major problem.

Many bands have compensated by touring and selling merchandise. I don't see any obvious counterpart to that for writers. A few "names" get paid well for giving lectures but they represent fewer than 1% of published writers. 

One possible solution is the "1000 fans" model. This says if you can cultivate 1000 fans who are willing to spend an average of $50 to $100 per year for what you provide, you can make a good living. However, finding 1000 fans is not an easy task, and neither is generating enough material to get them to spend that amount. It suggests that ebooks will not be enough, what the author has to sell is an experience of being in the inner circle. It's a Catch-22: to develop an active fan base you have to be well known; to be well known you have to spend time and money you can't affort unless you have an active fan base.

This one is going to take all the creativity we can muster!

A word NOT to use in your screenplay or novel outline (and some alternatives)

I've just finished rewriting an outline I wrote for a possible TV limited series. One of the most important things I do when I rewrite a rough draft of an outline for a screenplay or novel is to remove and replace the words "realizes" or "realized".

As usual, I found a few of them in my first draft. For example, the first draft might read, "He realizes that his supposed best friend is not on his side at all."

Potentially a powerful dramatic moment, right? What's the problem?

How do you show somebody realizing something? Do they get an "aha!" look on their face? Do they speak their realization to themselves? Do they just look pained? This is a particular problem for scriptwriters, unless they work on one of those telenovelas in which a character suddenly looks up and sees a flashback of a scene shown a few days or weeks earlier, with the sound featuring a slight echo this time. Then her eyes begin to glisten with tears: Aha! Rodrigo has been having an affair with Margarita!!! Cue big sobs and general over-acting.

In a screenplay we could show what leads to this realization so that the audience will realize it at the same time the protagonist does. Maybe the protagonist sees something on his friend's computer, or he is tipped off by someone else...it doesn't matter what it is, as long as it can be shown.

In a novel it's OK to say that a character realized something because novels do give us permission to be inside the protagonist's head if we want to, but even then it's better to describe the actions that lead to the character's conclusions.  

However, we're not talking about writing the screenplay or the novel yet, just a brief outline. That doesn't give us room to go into details. Instead we just need to use words that suggest they are stand-ins for actions we'll see in the final product.

"Discovers" is a good one. Discovery is an active process. 

"Finds out" is also pretty good. Again, finding or finding out suggest a process, not just a conclusion. We could also write, "He finds proof that..." Proof is tangible.

The best choice depends on the context. Here, courtesty of thesaurus.com, are some more that might fit:

ascertain, bring to light, catch, come across, come upon, conceive, contrive, debunk, design, detect, determine,  devise, dig up, discern, disclose, distinguish, elicit, espy, explore, ferret out,  get wind of, get wise to, glimpse,  hear, identify, invent, learn, light upon, locate, lookup, nose out, notice, observe,  perceive, pick up on, pioneer, realize, recognize, reveal, see, sense spot, unearth

It may be that you are writing about something that is a sudden thought, with no apparent process of discovery involved; in that case, "realizes" or "realized" may be the best word after all. In most cases, though, it's a good idea to look for alternatives. (There are lots of useful tips on writing in my book, "Your Creative Writing Masterclass." You can buy it from Amazon or your other favorite bookseller.)