Memorial Day Reading

I hope everyone has time to reflect on war and the people who have died in war today.

My friend Charles "Norm" Stevens thankfully did not die in the war, but he flew over 30 missions as a bombardier during World War II and has written two very personal accounts of his time there. An Innocent at Polebrook describes his time during the war, and The Innocent Cadet describes his training beforehand. I have the honor of being in a writer's group with Norm, and I'll say that, particularly with The Innocent Cadet, he has revealed much of his internal thoughts and emotions in a moving and powerful way. He transforms from someone who was innocent to someone quite wise, with very different views of the world at the end of his military career. Afterwards, he was a high school writing teacher for several years and still continues to educate others.

Also tangentially, for a long time I have wanted to mention the work of PEN Center USA in helping to free writers around the world who are imprisoned for telling stories that seek to reveal truth. Other countries around the world don't have freedom of speech the way we do here. As a result, many people are put into jail, often without fair trial, for writing about the injustices of their country. Through letter writing campaigns (a strategy that has proven very effective in such situations) PEN Center USA has been able to free some of these writers. There's an article on a recent detainee, Nurmuhemmet Yasin, here.

Things I No Longer Believe

• You must have tension on every page.
  
• You must cut every word that is not absolutely necessary.
  
• You must write as if there is such as thing as "not absolutely necessary."
  
• You must strive for clarity.
  
• You must get to the point.
  
• You must have an opinion about the morals of your characters.
  
• You must maintain a consistent verb tense.
  
• You must tie up your loose ends.
  
• You must satisfy your reader with your ending.
  
• You must grab the reader from the first sentence.
  
• You must know your genre.
  
• You must know what the theme(s) of your story is/are.
  
• You must believe that theme can be stated as a single sentence.
  
• You must write stories that add up to some identifiable truth.
  

You Really Aren't the Sherlock Holmes of that Manuscript

I must confess that as a writer, I'm a compulsive editor, and sadly, not only for my own work. If someone hands me their writing and asks me their opinion, I'm usually bleeding red pen all over it as I mutter to myself, "well, that could be better, why did he use that word? why is this character's dialogue so stiff? that's a silly plot point..." and so on. Only later, after I've torn apart the writing, will I go back and find things I like.

I'll bet you do these things, too, or you have at one point. Admit it.

I'm a critic. Everybody's a critic. Most writers are terrible critics. We look at writing, published and unpublished, and wonder why it wasn't written better. We're detectives, see? We're constantly sifting through words to see what's wrong.

Loren Eaton wrote a fabulous post awhile ago titled "In Our Own Image." I liked this post for a lot of reasons, but mostly because I related to it and said to myself, I need to stop! His graphic that went with the post:



That's great, hah.

Anne R. Allen also wrote a post about this subject, titled "Beware the Authority of Ignorance," but in the vein of amateur editors. She wrote her post in answer to a quote shared by Victoria Mixon (Victoria is a professional editor).

"I am never shy about it when a professional is doing the reading. But God save me from amateurs. They don't know what they are reading but it is much more serious than that. They immediately start rewriting. I never knew this to fail. It is invariable. They have the authority of ignorance, something you simply cannot combat." - Steinbeck

I loved what Anne shared in her response post because it struck a chord for how I used to think in college:

An amazing number of people, even decades out of adolescence, still think negativity sounds smart. But it’s good to remember that any Archie Bunker can look at a Picasso and say, “My two-year-old paints better than that!”

I remember making a lot of stupid remarks in my college classes - always negative insights into a work - because, you know, negativity sounds smart.

The truth is, when we find negative things to say about writing, we're usually going for the easy kill. What you should really be looking for are the good things, and like I've heard said before, build your criticism like this:





NOT like this:




The outside bread pieces are the nice things you say. Everything in the middle: negative (even if it's constructive).

We've written a lot of posts on this blog about criticism, and this one is nothing new, but I'd like to point out today that oftentimes when we critique or beta-read or whatever you want to call it, we sometimes fall into the trap of looking for things we would change if it was our own writing, or we focus on line-editing almost every paragraph in a 70,000 word novel (when line-editing is probably the last thing it needs at the moment, especially by me, a non-professional).

Also, one of the best bits of advice I've ever received was that if all you can find are negative things to say about a work, you should probably hand it back over to the author and tell them to find someone more objective to look at it. Sometimes there's nothing wrong with a piece of writing. Most of the time I'm simply measuring it up to some golden standard in my head - a standard that is often unfair and ridiculous.

Connective Tissue

Do your stories have connective tissue? You know--the stuff in between the actual stuff that serves as transitions from one thing to the next. I've been revising a story, and I find myself cutting away all of the connective tissue because I feel like I'm wasting my readers' time, and then I end up putting it right back in to keep the scenes from feeling too jarring.

This especially comes up when I change from one character's perspective to another:

Charlene hoisted the sapphire out of the mine, tired but satisfied with her find after three long months of searching. Ricardo was immediately jealous. He stood at the entrance to the mine, smashing her fingers underneath his boot as soon as they appeared above ground. Charlene screamed, but she refused to drop the precious stone. Instead, she swung her body around and grabbed Ricardo's ankle. With a desperate tug, she pulled him down into the dark abyss.

versus:

Charlene hoisted the sapphire out of the mine, tired but satisfied with her find after three long months of searching. She was smiling with relief when she noticed Ricardo's shadow looming over her. He was immediately jealous. He stood at the entrance to the mine, smashing her fingers underneath his boot as soon as they appeared above ground. The rock started to crumble. Charlene screamed, but she refused to drop the precious stone. Instead, she swung her body around and grabbed Ricardo's ankle. With a desperate tug, she pulled him down into the dark abyss.

For me, the first example (okay, they are both a bit lame, and I apologize) is tighter and gets the emotions across more simply. The second example takes longer to make it's transitions. When I read it, I feel eased from one person's mind to another.

Does anyone else face this kind of problem? Do you approach it intuitively or do you have more general guidelines?

What You Can't Write About Any Other Way

Yesterday Davin wrote a post called "What You Can't Write About," and discussed the idea that a story isn't discussion of a grand theme, but is instead a dramatic representation of an individual's situation that might illustrate some aspect of that theme. My example was that "poverty" is not a story, but that "Davin Malasarn struggles against the poverty of his village to create a clean drinking-water source" is a story.

I have a feeling that Davin's post yesterday came about because Davin has been thinking lately about the idea of meaning in fiction, the idea that fiction can be more than just entertainment. Note that this is not an argument about interpretive fiction versus escapist/entertainment fiction. These are my thoughts about ways to talk about theme in interpretive (what some call "literary") fiction.

Themes in entertainment fiction tend to be very simple and unquestioned: "Murder is bad," "Family is good," "Children and small animals are precious," "Social, political and religious stability are good" and that sort of thing. Themes like this tend to be part of the frame--the background of the story--and aren't questioned. They aren't questioned because questioning those assumptions is not the point of the literature; the escapist story is the point and there's nothing wrong with that.

In interpretive, or literary, fiction these basic assumptions are the point. (Now I find myself suddenly having to make sweeping generalizations, so please bear with me.) Literary fiction tends to either call assumptions into question or to examine assumptions from a variety of views. Both of these literary tendencies usually challenge the reader's worldview. A very simplistic example of calling an assumption into question would be something like "Hey, the minority members at the margins of your culture are humans, too, with deeply-felt inner lives that are not that different from yours, and those people have an equal value to you." A simplistic example of examining an assumption from a variety of views would be "Hey, killing is morally wrong, but it's generally acceptable to kill to protect your child, but what if your child is a horrific, murderous person?"

There are a multitude of more subtle themes to be explored than these sweeping, grand themes, and a lot of the best fiction explores the more nuanced experience of life. More often of late, my own fiction has sort of buried themes that have to do with what I think of as my own shortcomings. This is not to say that I write a kind of breast-beating, self-pitying fiction; what I mean is that the faults my characters have will often reflect my own faults, because I understand those faults and I see how they can motivate people's actions. I also can see other ways of being, and talk about those as well. What do I mean by this?

In one of my books, I have a character who is moved to assassinate a king. He gives the reader one reason for this act (vengeance), but the truth is that he's attempting to be someone who has a significant effect upon the world because he views himself as someone who doesn't do anything at all particularly well. While I don't plan to kill anyone to become famous, I certainly have felt that feeling of insignificance, so that's what I'm ending up exploring in this book, in a subtle manner. It's a truth I examine; a small truth, but a truth nonetheless.

In another one of my books, I have a protagonist who makes a lot of bad personal decisions that benefit a second character, because the protagonist is in love with that other character, so much in love that he has enslaved himself to them. So while on the surface the story is an adventure tale, below that surface I am talking about making dumb decisions and committing self-destructive actions in order to please someone to whom you have enslaved yourself. While I have, again, never killed anyone, I have also been young and dumb and impetuous so there's another truth for you, albeit a small one.

When I wrote the title to this post, I was thinking about something I wanted to say to Davin in an email I have yet to write, which is that the deeper subjects of my fiction tend to be things I can't write about in any other way than to work them into a story. Being too close to things makes them impossible for me to analyze sometimes, so the abstraction of a fictional setting helps me to see these themes for what they are. My impulse to write doesn't come from an urge to analyze these personal themes, but these personal themes do seem to work their way into my writing, because I can't separate me from what I do, I guess. I should also point out that in the two books discussed above, the outline of the plot and the characters came to me far ahead of any ideas about themes or truths. I am not writing in order to declare those things that I consider to be true, but I'm not finished writing until I've said something true.

The themes that we can most truthfully and most interestingly illustrate are those themes that represent truths about ourselves. Again, I'm not advocating some kind of confessional literature where the writer bares his soul as a cathartic act (I know this writing exists and, you know, it bores me), but perhaps in this case I am saying that you should write what you know. The big themes only feel real, I think, when we see them at a human scale, and the most true experiences we can relate are our own, maybe. Again, all of this is provisional and I'm talking about my personal approach to meaning and theme in literature. Your mileage may vary. I'm also hurriedly writing this post from work, so some of it might just be rubbishy nonsense.

What You Can't Write About

I heard this idea the other day, and it struck me as useful. It deals with the idea of what writers CAN'T write about. I believe it comes from David Mamet's book Writing in Restaurants, but since I heard it second-hand, I can't say for sure.

So, what can't we write about?

According to this idea, we can't write about conflicts that generally apply to everyone. We can't write about aging, for example. Or homosexuality. Or poverty.

What can we write about?

We can write about choices that characters are making in the face of conflict.

I think this serves to focus our stories and simultaneously make them more emotional and easier to write. A book about aging will probably feel too flat. A book about a character trying to fight aging has the opportunity to carry more personal emotion. Instead of trying to write about the plight of the world, writing about the plight of a small set of characters allows a reader to connect better with the material. Making the subject a personal matter serves to anchor the story, both for the reader and writer.

Do you think about stories this way?

I think as I try to put meaning into my stories, I sometimes get caught up with the idea of trying to write a commentary on a subject. I'll include facts about poverty in third-world countries, or water contamination, or energy consumption. This is probably fine in small quantities, but I think one risks losing their reader if the characters and their journeys are replaced with statistics. Stories can educate readers about subjects without being only about those particular subjects.

Our First WriteGirl Donation

Happy Friday, everyone! Just wanted to let you know that we got the first check from Lulu publishing with the profits from our first quarter Genre Wars sales. Thanks to all of you writers and readers, the Literary Lab will be donating $200 to WriteGirl, and already we've had more sales in the following quarter!

Scott, Michelle, and I are discussing our next Genre Wars contest and (at least in my opinion) we've got some great ideas that will encourage confidence and freedom of expression in this next batch of stories. We're going to have a preview announcement around June 1st to give everyone plenty of prep time. Together with this, we may also make the first Genre Wars anthology available as a pdf to try and raise a little bit more money for WriteGirl.

Thanks so very, very much to everyone who participated in Genre Wars Volume 1: all the contest entrants, all the people who submitted cover ideas, Becca for making sure all entries were anonymous, and all the readers!

a ding in the universe

The other day I watched a video that turned around my thinking and explained things to me that made sense. In fact, it made sense of several questions I've been asking myself lately:

(1) Why on earth do I devote most of my free time to writing novels?

(2) Why have I decided to self-publish my novella?

(3) Why cannot I seem to motivate myself for a huge project I'm supposed to be working on for a friend who who is paying me a significant amount of money?

The answers were in this video, and things suddenly became clear.

Victoria Mixon shared the video, which she found on another blogger's site where the video was related to blogging. Victoria related the video to writing, and I agree with her 100%. I don't participate on this blog or write my novels for money.



The video is 10 minutes long, so I don't blame you for not watching it. But, seriously, TEN minutes isn't that long, and you might learn something. I'm glad I took the time to watch it. This has changed my view on a lot of things.

The gist of the video? How money motivates us, and more importantly, how it doesn't. If you've ever once considered publishing for either money or fame, think again. I can imagine this is why many authors' work slacks off once they've published one or two great works.

I can imagine this is why I freak out about traditional publishing and look at it as a full-time job, which I'm not interested in pulling off at this point in my life. I know self-publishing can be just as much work, if not more, but not when you keep it on a small scale and not when you're not in it for the money or fame or to get your book to thousands of people/a huge audience.

I can imagine this is why I keep procrastinating the project I'm supposed to be doing, which consequently, requires insane amounts of creativity from me, and I'm simply not coming up with anything good. Or anything at all.

I can imagine that this is why I must know the motivations behind what I create. That, right there, shapes the future of my projects. Do you know the real motivations behind what you create?

Writing in Both 3-D and 2-D

The candleflame and the image of the candleflame caught in the pierglass twisted and righted when he entered the hall and again when he shut the door. He took off his hat and came slowly forward. The floorboards creaked under his boots. In his black suit he stood in the dark glass where the lilies leaned so palely from their waisted cutglass vase. Along the cold hallway behind him hung the portraits of forebears only dimly known to him all framed in glass and dimly lit above the narrow wainscotting. He looked down at the guttered candlestub. He pressed his thumbprint in the warm wax pooled on the oak veneer. Lastly he looked at the face so caved and drawn among the folds of funeral cloth, the yellowed moustache, the eyelids paper thin. That was not sleeping. That was not sleeping.

This opening paragraph from Cormac McCarthy's All The Pretty Horses is, for me, a supreme example of a writer simultaneously thinking about 3-D and 2-D in their work. In 3-D, this passage has the sensual details that bring the scene to life. We hear the floorboards, we see the flickering light, we feel the warm candle wax. Also in 3-D, we get the deep and restrained emotion of a character coming to encounter the body of a lost loved one.

The 2-dimensional aspect of the writing comes from the beautiful language used in this passage. Listen to the sounds and the internal rhymes in "lilies leaned so palely from their waisted cutglass" or phrases like "guttered candlestub." Also, notice how McCarthy decided to ignore standard rules of punctuation so that his prose isn't interrupted by too many commas.

When we write, it's important to think about both the 3-D aspects of the writing--the details that make the passage feel tangible and emotional--and the 2-D aspects of writing--the language, the words on the page. Both of these elements combine to create a satisfying read.

Can you have one without the other?

I personally tend to err on the side of more 3-D than 2-D. I think I use a lot of vivid details and focus on the emotion. Other writers, including some entries in our first Genre Wars contest, focused more on the surface technical aspects of the writing. Yes, you can have one without the other. The reader might not even notice. But, when both are working together, you'll statistically have a better chance of engaging more readers and probably engage the readers' mind during more of your story (when the story lags, the language might still be engaging and vice versa.)

Sometimes, during revisions, I can get trapped into the mindset of only seeing one of these components and forgetting about the other. That's fine on a draft, but it can lead to shallow work if you don't eventually remember to go back again and consider the other component.

Questions:

Do work in both 3-D and 2-D? Is there one that you tend to lean toward naturally?

Give us some examples where you have both working in harmony!

Chinua Achebe's Author Photo is Cooler Than You

I am currently re-reading Chinua Achebe's 1958 novel "Things Fall Apart." I first read this novel about 32 years ago. That's a scary thought. Some of you lot weren't even born etceteraoldmangrumblingabouthislostyouth. Anyway. One of the best things about my copy of the book--a 1959 US paperback edition--is the author photo. I will never be as cool as Mr. Achebe was in 1958 when this photo was taken:



Yes, he's an old man in a wheelchair these days, but back then? Total badass*. That's what I want my author photo to look like. And yes, I admit it: it's things like having an author photo that made my child brain want to be a writer when I grew up. My wish was to join that group of people who had made me happiest, who had brought the most joy and thirst for knowledge and adventure into my life: novelists. It's not just the photos, of course; the books themselves are the magic and the fact that there are people who write them dawned upon me only later. But when I figured out what an author was, I wanted to be one.

* "Things Fall Apart" is still the most widely-read novel by an African author, so Professor Achebe, sitting in his wheelchair, remains a total badass.

It Spills Over

Happy Monday Everyone!

I'm just feeling great today about how writing can spill into the rest of your life. Writing forces you to organize your thoughts and be able to express those thoughts into words. It forces you to use your imagination. It helps you make friends. It makes you more sympathetic. Really, even if I were to never reach my publication goals, I have to admit to myself that the act of writing for ten years has improved other aspects of my life in significant ways. Yay writing!

A Question of Genre

I am about 40 pages away from finishing Victor LaValle's novel Big Machine. I don't know how well this book sold, but it did well enough to be reprinted as trade paperback after its run in cloth*, so it must have done respectably enough, and it's won awards and been reviewed well here and there. Which comes as no surprise, because it's pretty good, so go read it.

What does surprise me, however, is that it's been marketed as a work of literary fiction. I don't deny that it is, mind you: the language is wonderful and the book deals with such deep subjects as identity, doubt, trust and the existence of God. But it also veers sharply into "X-Files" territory, with some Edgar Allen Poe thrown in for good measure. So this is like a paranormal literary fiction.

It's not sold as paranormal, and on the jacket copy the suspense is played up and the theology/weirdness is played down, but this is a strange novel about strange events, the real world's edges and underbelly being home to supernatural activity and beings. But you won't find Big Machine in the "horror" or whatever section of Barnes & Noble, you'll find it in the general fiction section, and the book is being discussed as literature.

I also can't help noticing that in the YA section of book shops, there is a lot of zombie/vampire/supernatural activity going on, and it's all called "YA" and not "science fiction" or "horror" or anything. And it further seems to me that there are few people who read only zombie novels, or only police procedurals, or only vampire romances, or only literary fiction about estrangement from parents or whatever. I do not believe in the idea that I hear often from agents and editors that people don't stray from "their" section of book stores, and so I begin to strongly doubt the notion--again, one we hear often from agents--that your book had better fit into a neatly-defined genre.

Because readers don't read like that. If you ask readers what their genre tastes are, I think most of them are going to look at you as if you're speaking a foreign language. Readers, I think, don't think about "genre," they think about books and authors that they like. And bookstore workers are generally well- and widely-read enough that they aren't afraid of a book if it doesn't fit neatly into one of their previously-defined genre slots. They do, after all, have that big "general fiction" area.

Where, really, am I going with this? I think that what I realized while reading Big Machine is that whenever someone tells you that you are ill-advised to mix genres in your work, that you really need to focus on one style or another, they are full of it. Writers lead the way; agents and editors all follow, always. They follow writers and they follow buying trends begun by...writers, yes, that's right. As my very own agent says about agents, "We're all sheep." If you are writing a really cool, really good book, you should follow your instincts and just write that really cool, really good book.

Yes, at some point you will need to market it to an agent who will have to sell it to a publisher, but you do NOT have to say what genre it is in your query, as long as you send it to an agent who you think will be interested in your book. My agent and I have never once discussed the genre of my book, and I didn't say "literary fiction" in my queries. I just talked about how really cool my book is.

And now, kids, I have to work. Which sucks, because I really want to go finish Big Machine.

* Yo, Victor LaValle: I bought your book in cloth to help you earn out your advance. Just saying.

Twilight: by Bella Swan

I can't tell you how many times I've read posts about "characters taking over a story."

Let's think about this - that's just kind of crazy, isn't it? These people don't really exist. Admit it. They don't. No one is taking over your story but you. Only you're writing it - unless you're working on something with multiple authors.

So let's get one thing straight - you can't sit around blaming your characters for things that go wrong. Stop it right now. YOU are in control, and if your story starts going off on some tangent and you think you have to follow because your characters are leading you there, well, you're just being lazy.

Sherrie Peterson wrote an excellent post the other day titled Who's the Boss? Here's a bit of her experience:

Well, I did plenty of flailing. I wrote this weird, melodramatic, dark crap that I hated. I kept thinking if that's where the characters wanted to go, didn't I, as the author, have an obligation to follow them there?

I've decided that way of thinking is wrong, at least for me, and certainly, for this story. My characters are NOT the boss of me.

When it came right down to it, the problem was lack of confidence. I didn't think I was good enough to write the story the way I wanted it to be written, so I fell back on easier solutions. I gave the characters stupid obstacles to overcome and made it too easy for them, for ME, to find a way out. And it was boring. I hated the story so much I put it to the side and worked on other things.

There you go. Sherrie admits that her problem with the story was lack of confidence - and that can easily stray you into lazy-land when it comes to writing. No matter how you look at it, writing a good novel is hard. I remember writing this particular paragraph in my current WIP, a novella about Cinderella:

Rose appeared from the crowd next. Her cheeks mimicked her name. Her fluttering movements made her emerald green dress swish along the floor, and the sound seemed to travel up the material, all the way to Rose’s throat as she curtseyed and said in an airy, billowing voice, “Your Royal Majesties, I am honored that you have allowed us to speak today.” She stood in front of Lucy and Edith now, her tall frame a dark spindly tree between their bright dresses.

I remember thinking at the time - wow, I love Rose! She speaks clearly to me. Introducing her was easy. But why? It's not because she's a living being taking over my manuscript, that's for sure. I remember feeling tempted to put Rose in more scenes. She's Cinderella's stepmother, and in my story, she's only in one scene. She's a strong character, but that doesn't mean I'm going to drop her all over the place whenever I hit a rut. It's tempting, but no.

(1)
Remember that you're in charge of everything. Not critique partners. Not characters. Not all those rules you read about. If you run in a direction that feels like your character is "taking over," understand that, yes, creating a character that comes to life in your mind is fun, but it's still you that created the character, and you have the power to change direction. You certainly don't see Bella Swan's name as the author of Twilight.

(2)
Like I said in Sherrie's comment section on her post, I think we reach a higher level as a writer when we see our work not as set in stone or something out of our control, but as something fluid and flexible and something where we can break the walls down and rebuild and rewrite without ruining anything. When we reach that point, we're really writing, not just spitting out stories in our head.

You Can Cut Anything, But Should You?

We've all heard about query letters. And, one of the paragraphs in a standard query letter is a plot synopsis--your book condensed into a hundred words or less. It introduces your characters, the conflict, the main plot points, and the ending. In other words, it tells your entire story in a very focused and very efficient way.

But, is it as fun to read?

Often on the internet, and among my own (fantastic) writer's group, we'll stumble upon a problem sentence or scene. And, in the midst of trying to edit that scene, the writer will eventually say, "You know what? I can cut this entire thing and it doesn't hurt the story at all." I always cringe when I hear that, but up until now, I never really understood why I had such a problem with it.

Then it struck me. Each time we make a decision to cut out a problem instead of fixing it some other way, we bring our story closer to that one-paragraph plot synopsis in our query letter. Which, may seem fine, right? Short and concise is fine...right?

Well, if that's the case, why don't we just publish our plot synopses? Every story really can be reduced down to the bare bones, the focused story with no bells and whistles. But, should it be?

In other news, did I tell you all that I got a puppy? Except, it's not exactly a puppy so much as a praying mantis that climbed onto my herb garden when I put it out to sun a last week. Last night, Manty shed its skin and came out twice as big as it was before. I'm so proud! Tonight, I'm going to try and glue some fur on it.

Drip

I had no running water at my apartment last night. And, to top it all off, it was the night I got a haircut, so I had all these pricklies in my neck and ears. I ended up going next door and filling up pots of water and carrying them back to dump on myself, taking my bath Thai-style. It was invigorating, actually. And, today, I'm not even that smelly!

Question: Is there such a thing as universally interesting material? When I was in graduate school, my advisor once told me that one of the projects I was pursuing wasn't interesting. I spent a lot of time thinking about that because I always thought what was interesting was rather subjective. But, temporarily, I decided to embrace the idea that some things were universally interesting, and when I focused on those topics, I did typically find that other people were interested too.

Do Used Bookstores Hurt Writers? An Interview with Josh Spencer

I had the pleasure of visiting The Last Bookstore, a new used bookstore in downtown L.A. Not only did TLB carry a bunch of titles I rarely see in other bookstores, but it also hosted a local poetry reading that included the sale of dozens of self-published chapbooks. The owner of TLB is the young and very low-key Josh Spencer, and he was kind enough to answer a few questions for The Literary Lab.

LL: Tell us about yourself and about The Last Bookstore. (For example, how and when did you decide you wanted to open up your own bookstore? Do you only carry used books? Do you carry small press books or self-published books?)

JS: Well, I've sold books online for over a decade. For a few years I've had the crazy idea of opening an actual physical storefront to buy and sell used books as well, as an addition to my online business. Late in 2009, a space in my neighborhood opened up and I jumped on it. The landlord gave us only 10 days to open up, so my dad flew out from Hawaii and hand-built all our shelves in just 3 days! We worked ourselves to the bone getting everything set up and books on the shelves in time for the landlord's requested opening date, which coincided with the monthly Art Walk we have in downtown LA which draws over 10,000 people.

We generally only carry used books, but I'd say 75% of our inventory is in like new condition. We've carried a couple of new self-published titles and poetry chapbooks by local downtown LA writers, but for now used books are our focus. We also buy and sell used DVDs and CDs, and we carry over 100 new magazines on art, architecture, design, music, fashion, and the like.

The latter is sort of an experiment to see if we can sell any, and so far it's looking like we may drop the new magazines in favor of more used books.

LL: You've made your space available to help other writers. Can you tell us about some of these events?

JS: I actually leave all our events up to Billy Mark, a poet and musician and our events coordinator. He could tell you better than I could. I'm a bit "event-shy" myself because I don't like crowds and small talk. But I know we just had a book release by local poet Chiwan Choi which had a packed house, and he also runs a Poetry Chapbook reading and discussion every 3rd Sunday from 3-5 pm. A few weeks ago we had a reading by Jim Marquez, literary editor of Citizen LA and self-publisher of several books. Every Thursday except for the 2nd Thursday of the month, we have Literally Funny -- live readings of comedy pieces. It's pretty popular. On May 23rd, we're having an "Essays on Downtown LA" night with members of Los Angeles' downtown 3-on-3 basketball league. I think those are guys that live in the homeless shelters, so that should be pretty interesting. Then we also have live music nights and some other events. We're pretty open to hosting any community event that we like and that brings in book-buyers!

LL: Are there other ways in which you're helping writers?

JS: Hmm, not that I can think of. We love writers, obviously, and some of our events are geared to them, but as a used bookstore we're mainly focused on serving readers and collectors of books in their habit.

LL: What can we as writers do to help support bookstores?

JS: Keep writing books that people actually want and need to read!

LL: Among writers, the sale of used books is often discouraged because the writers rarely benefit financially from the sale of their books in used condition. Do you feel like you're hurting writers in any way?

JS: Really? I'm a writer and a ton of my friends are writers, and I've never heard that sentiment towards used books. That's interesting. But I feel like a single used bookstore hurts current writers about as much as a bee sting. The advantage of a used bookstore versus a new bookstore is VARIETY. We don't sell 100 copies each of a few dozen titles like most new bookstores; we sell one or two copies of 10,000 different titles by different authors dead and alive. I can't think of a single title we've had and sold more than a dozen copies of, and our best-sellers are usually by dead authors anyway. So it doesn't really affect current writers in any real way that I can see. Besides, most new titles don't trickle into used bookstores until 6 months to a year after they're out and by that time they've usually already had the majority of their sales, with the exception being sleepers and self-published titles.

A lot of people who shop in our store wouldn't be able to afford many new books, or they prefer older books, or they like used books because they can get 3 for the price of 1 new book. But then there are really rabid readers who are going to buy what they want to read when they want to read it, whether it's new or used. They have a hunger for books like vampires do for blood! Although the act of buying books lacks much in the way of sex and violence, unfortunately.

Ultimately I think the more people who are reading in a community or society, the better that is for writers. Whether people are buying used or new, or borrowing from a friend or the library, all efforts that feed the enjoyment of the written word are beneficial.

That Sentence Isn't Your Problem

A few years ago I wrote a story called "Fidelio." Here is the first part of it:

One night: the phone rang. It was Josephine.
“I’m going to kill myself.” She sounded serious.
“You sound serious.”
“I am serious. I just want to die.”
“Okay, but I get all your stuff. Or at least I’d like that red chair with the matching ottoman you have in your living room.”
“Why are you being such an ass?”
“What’s it going to be this time? Razor blades? Pills? Jumping out the window?”
“Don’t be mean to me tonight.”
“I’m just trying to take an interest in your life. Or death, in this case.”
“Stop mocking me.”
She hung up.

I was working on a painting. I am not a good painter, and it’s a constant struggle to control what appears on the canvas. I was losing the battle but I persevered. The colors were all wrong: dark shades of mud and blood, with bile. This was not a beautiful painting; it had all the tones of Hell’s rainbows. I should paint in the daytime, with natural light and birds singing out my window, but I can’t face my paintings in the day. They’re nocturnal, blind things, best left underground. The light of the sun would kill them.

Another night: the phone rang. It was Josephine. She sounded depressed and tired.
“I’m depressed,” she told me.
“You sound tired.” And drunk, I didn’t add.
“I’m exhausted. What time is it?”
“Well after midnight. You should go to bed.”
“I’m in bed. What’re you doing?”
I looked at the painting, a disaster of primary colors suffocated beneath mounds of dirt.

(end excerpt)

The story continues along like that, alternating between the dialogue (always between the narrator and the drunken, depressed Josephine) and the narrator's description of his attempts to make a painting. I worked on this story for some time, and there were a few sentences that bugged me, that I could never get "right." One of them is the last one shown here: I looked at the painting, a disaster of primary colors suffocated beneath mounds of dirt. I can't tell you how many times I switched back and forth between "suffocated," "suffocating" and "buried" and between "beneath" and "under" and between "mounds" and "hills" or "layers." I also recast the sentence to begin with "The painting" instead of "I looked at." I did a bunch of stuff to that one sentence. Whole evenings were devoted to it, but I was never satisfied with that sentence. Bits of the dialogue also nagged at me and I fussed endlessly, getting nowhere.

I have similar stories to tell about sentences or paragraphs or whole scenes in my novels, where I have sweated over them for far too long, never to get them quite right. I have decided something about these bits that nag at me and don't let go and never come to please me: it's not the prose, the grammar, the word choice that's wrong about them. It's that the ideas themselves are fundamentally wrong for the story and I should cut the whole passage and either come up with something different or, as was the case with the story "Fidelio," just abandon it as an idea that doesn't work. "Fidelio" doesn't add up to anything; it switches back and forth between these two story streams and ends nowhere, when it finally ends.

I have a growing sense that when I spend too long working on a single aspect of a story or a novel, likely the thing that I continue to fuss with is merely a symptom instead of the real problem and it's time to step back and look at the story/novel from a greater height, as it were. And I think I see a lot of this happening in a lot of other people's work, especially in the revisions/editing phase. People knock themselves out polishing sentences that shouldn't even be in the story, sentences in the middle of paragraphs or pages or scenes or chapters or even whole acts that should be cut out and rewritten or abandoned. Nobody likes to hear this, and nobody likes to do it, but sometimes that sentence you're working on is not the problem with your story. Sometimes the story has other, deeper problems. That bothersome sentence is a cry for help.

So my advice, for what it's worth, is that whenever you have something in your story that you simply cannot get right, can't get to work no matter how much time and effort you put into it, it might be time to step back and look around at the story as a whole and see what other forces are at play that have created the big crack you can't manage to patch, or that annoying bump you can't sand flat, or that other metaphor you can't analogy.

Questions! So I'm thinking about posting less often than twice a week, like maybe only on Fridays and maybe not every week. I would like the quality of my posts to improve; I'd like to be more helpful and informative and have more time to work on each post and be able to include actual examples of live prose and link to entire stories, maybe, and other things that I can't knock out in fifteen minutes before I turn to my actual professional office job I'm supposed to be doing. So my questions to you are:

1. Was this post helpful? Why/why not?
2. Are these technical posts about craft of value/interest? Why/why not?
3. Is there something you wish I'd post about that I do only rarely or not at all?
4. Sometimes I just have an opinion or a bit of advice and I can't come up with the obligatory questions to the blog readers. Is that a problem?
5. Have I mentioned that Mighty Reader and I bought a new Weber Q120 grill and we're having a barbeque this weekend?

Synopsis Pointers and a Reminder

If you are a serious writer who one day wants to be traditionally published, you will most likely have to write a synopsis at some point in your career, either for an agent or for an editor. A query letter, for example, contains a synopsis of your book, albeit a very brief synopsis. A book proposal for an editor contains a synopsis - a long synopsis. If you're writing a series, and you sell the first book with interest in the others, a publisher will most likely want synopses of the other books.

So, you need to know how to write a synopsis at some point.

I'm sure many of you already know how to write a synopsis, but for those of you who still find it frightening or a mystery, here's a few pointers. This isn't a post on how to write a synopsis because I don't believe there is any 100% right way to do it. I do believe the only way to learn is to just sit down and write it. Experiment. Let others read it. The more you practice, the better you'll get. Yes, imagine that.

Some of this information I learned from a writing conference I recently attended. Nephele Tempest from the Knight Agency taught the synopsis class.


Focus
Every synopsis, no matter the length, will need to focus on the following:

Theme
Characters
Setting
Conflict/goals/wants
Resolution

See, simple. Keep it simple.

How much detail you give on each of these points depends on the length you're going for. Remember, you most likely don't need to mention your entire cast of characters and every scene.


Structure & Length
Your synopsis should probably be told in chronological order, even if your story isn't told in chronological order.

If an agent requests a brief synopsis and doesn't say what that means, go with 1 - 3 pages or a large paragraph (single or double spaced). If an agent doesn't specify, well, anything goes, I suppose.


Don't
Don't summarize every chapter and/or scene unless that's what the publisher or editor wants (sometimes this is needed, but not for a brief synopsis).

Don't put characters names in ALL CAPS unless specified. That's usually for a script, not a synopsis.

Don't write your synopsis in first person. Please. Synopses should almost always be written in third person past tense.

Don't show. A synopsis is the exception to the "show, don't tell" saying (I refuse to call it a rule).

Don't start your synopsis at Chapter 4 if the agent requested the first three chapters and a brief synopsis. Include the entire story. Yes, I've heard of people doing this, and it's not a bright idea. The agent may read the synopsis first. Imagine that. They might not even read your chapters at all.

Don't leave off your amazing mind-blowing conclusion to the story because you want the agent to request your full to see what happens. Bad idea.


Do
Do use your writerly skills to create the same sort of feel in your synopsis that exists in your book. For example, if you're writing a light-hearted YA story, don't make the synopsis heavy-handed and dramatic. This does not mean, however, that if you're writing a thriller/horror that you should try and scare the pants off the reader in the synopsis. I like to think of it as trying to capture the voice you've created for the main character - if your thriller/horror MC is dry and sarcastic, it might be fun to weave that into your synopsis.

Do treat the synopsis like a business document. Don't put it in French Script MJ italicized font because it looks cool. Be clear and concise and please have someone proofread it before you hit send.

Do take a book off your shelf, or a well-known movie, and practice writing a synopsis of it. It's much easier to practice on something you haven't written yourself.


To conclude, I'd just like to say that when I wrote my first synopsis, it took me a solid week to get it right, and that was only because I was rushed and had a deadline. When I write another one, I'll take a lot longer. I had several people read it - including people who had read the book, and people who hadn't. I received a lot of different feedback, and in the end, it's you who decides what will work for your writing.

Remember, the synopsis represents your book. It is not a summary (unless it's a very detailed synopsis pretty much outlining the book). Treat your synopsis as a thorough hook that represents the essence of your story and the characters you've created.

Do you have anything you'd like to add as pointers for synopsis writing? How important do you feel it is to know how to write a synopsis, and does writing one frighten you (or did it if you've written one in the past)?



Also, since I have closed my personal blog, The Innocent Flower, I'd like to put a reminder here that I am still running my short story contest. You can find the details here: Glam's Short Story Contest. I'd love to see your work! The deadline is June 1st.

Chrono-illogical?

I admit it. Almost all of the stories I write have back story. Do yours? Generally, I don't have a problem with backstory, but I do think it can become a problem when one always relies on it.

A story that requires backstory hasn't started from the proper beginning. Or, to put it another way, a story with backstory is told out of chronological order.

The reason for writing out of order is most likely because of drama. Either the backstory is so uninteresting that it ends up getting tucked away into other more interesting parts. Or, the backstory is so interesting that it's saved for the climax. In this latter example, the backstory serves to fill in a missing gap in the story, giving the piece as a whole almost a mystery-solving characteristic.

I'm not advocating writing everything in chronological order. Not at all. But, I do think that a story without backstory is a significantly different animal than one that does have it. A story without backstory carries a lot of momentum behind it. The forward-moving timeline really propels the reader forward, and I think it can have a much more exciting feel to it.

I also think that backstory often comes from an attempt to explain a character. In the "literary" character-driven-type story, a character's motivations often stem from some past experience. At least that's how I've used it. But, I wonder if this is also a limitation. It seems to me to be a rather narrow view of psychology when my character eats his lover because of some past break up he had while living in Paris.

What do you all think? Is backstory a weakness? How many of your works don't have backstory? And, most importantly, does it matter?

Write A Short Story? How Hard Can It Be?

I recently wrote a short story called "Berlin." Although I spent very little actual time on it, I thought it was a pretty good story and so I decided that I would send it out to a couple of literary journals and see who wanted to publish it. I've gotten back a couple of rejections already, and assume that the other fine publications to whom I've submitted will eventually reject the story as well. It's not, I realize, a very good story. And that's pretty much the case with all of my short stories.

Sure, whenever I have finished one I think it's the greatest thing that I've ever written and I am proud and excited and I want everyone I know (and all the strangers I can round up) to read it. And to congratulate me on my brilliance and insight. And to throw cash at me. I can dream, can't I? Anyway, I finish these stories and then I try to find homes for them and usually I don't. Part of that is perseverance; it's really time-consuming and annoying to submit to literary magazines, who all want exclusive submissions (I ignore that) or want to be told if it's a simultaneous submission (I ignore that, too), and also want 4-6 months on average to decide. Four months? I could be dead by then.

Anyway, I only read a handful of literary magazines on a regular basis, and most of those don't take unsolicited stories so my submissions are mostly to places I don't read. Maybe that's part of the problem, and I'm just pursuing the wrong markets. But I don't think so. I really think that I don't understand the short story and so I don't write them well.

What occurred to me last week while reading Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri, is that when you write a short story, you have to throw yourself into it with the same passion, energy and commitment you use when writing a novel. It can't be something you hastily scribble out in an afternoon if you expect it to be of the same quality as those stories written by people who take the short story seriously. I do not constantly revise and tinker with and otherwise improve my short stories. I dash them off and then give them one revision and then maybe tweak a sentence here or there and then call them done. That's not the way the professional short story writers work.

Which is why I should stick to novels: I will spend years revising, I will rewrite novels from the ground up and I will get to know my novels far better than I will ever get to know one of my 2,000-word stories. I take my novels seriously, far more seriously than I ever take my short stories. Until that changes, I may as well get used to my short stories not finding homes in the handful of literary magazines I read. My stories aren't ready to rub elbows with the stories in those magazines, because I'm not putting in the work those authors are putting in. That's just the way it is and so, while I have fun writing the occasional short story, I don't deserve to have any of them published.

If you write short stories, do you expect them to be as good as (or better than) the published stories you read? Do you labor over them obsessively the way some of us do our novels? If you write both short stories and novels, is there a difference in the amount of work you put into the two (aside from novels simply taking longer to draft because of the length)? Do you take your short stories as seriously as you do your novels?

Maybe You're Already Doing It

As I start this post, I realize that the idea of what I want to post about isn't totally clear in my mind.

Some of you may know that I've been looking for a job. I'm not currently jobless, but I do feel that I will be ready to move on from where I am in a few months.

For my future, I currently have several different jobs that I'm considering:professor in a community college where I would be mainly teaching, professor in a liberal arts college where I would also run a lab, consultant in a think tank, and something called a program officer that deals with the distribution of funds to other research scientists.

This last week, I had the opportunity to have lunch with a program officer, and the more she told me about her job, the more I realized how excited I would be to have it. It seemed to be the perfect combination of tasks that I love doing with a minimal amount of stuff that I don't like doing.

And, for some reason, that struck a chord with me when I thought about my writing.

I think so often as I'm trying to improve as a writer I force myself to do things that I see other people doing. I'll try to improve my dialog, for example. Or, I'll try to tell less and show more.

But, I wonder if maybe writing what I'm naturally resistant to isn't such a good idea after all. In other words, just as there's a job out there for me that makes use of those tasks I love without the tasks I hate. Maybe there's a readership out there that appreciates my natural tendencies in writing.

Must we develop every writing skill out there? Or, does the lack of skill in a certain area help us steer our own writing in a unique way that might also fill a niche?

Note added later: Some of the comments here say what I tried to say much better than I did here.