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Style is the rocket

8 June 2012 by 10 Comments

‘Don’t mock the afflicted.’ This is a good rule, but it needs a rider: ‘Unless they choose to afflict themselves, and treat their affliction as cause for pride.’ Colour-blindness is not funny; but a colour-blind man who should proclaim the virtues of his superior eyesight, and sneer at all those who suffer under the illusion that red is different from green, would be the stuff of immortal comedy. He would be laughed at heartily, and have no one to blame for it but himself.

There is a kind of literary colour-blindness which occurs, for the most part, only among highly cultivated people; for such folly in nature is self-correcting. It takes two opposite forms. One is the belief that prose style is all; that a work of literature is only as good as its individual sentences, and that a bland or pedestrian prose style is in itself sufficient to condemn a story as subliterary dreck. The second form I shall discuss later. [Read more…]

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The cry of the highbrow

7 June 2012 by Leave a Comment

‘Ah, Shakespeare. Quite a promising poet in a minor way, when he was writing those sonnets and sucking up to Queen Elizabeth’s courtiers. All very proper. Pity he squandered his talents by going into that low-brow theatre business.

‘I wonder what ever became of him? He could have been somebody if he’d stuck to proper literature.’

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Wasserman vs. Resnick on genre publishing

7 June 2012 by Leave a Comment

[I]n certain genres (romance, science fiction and fantasy) formerly relegated to the moribund mass-market paperback, readers care not a whit about cover design or even good writing, and have no attachment at all to the book as object. Like addicts, they just want their fix at the lowest possible price, and Amazon is happy to be their online dealer.

—Some idiot named Steve Wasserman, in The Nation

OMG! This is such a relief! I’ve been so misled.

I can finally stop editing and taking pains to package my romance backlist well! NO ONE CARES! They’re just addicts!

I can finally stop editing and taking pains to package my fantasy backlist well! My readers don’t care about quality!

I can tell my dad, a science fiction writer, to relax and stop sweating over Hugo-quality material! No one cares! Science fiction readers are just junkies!

I can tell my publisher to stop spending all that money on my award-winning cover artist! An LA Times book reviewer has declared that it’s pointless! My readers are indifferent to brilliant cover art! We could probably just package the worthless sh*t that I write in a brown paper wrapper!

Whoa! So GLAD Mr. Wasserman enlightened me. The pressure to write well, the pressure on my editors to acquire and edit well, and the pressure on my cover artists and designers… Gone! It never mattered! Our readers our brain-dead junkies! Yay! What a RELIEF not to have to behave like REAL writers, editors, artists, and publishers, after all!

—Laura Resnick

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Laura Resnick on writing

7 May 2012 by Leave a Comment

Writing is like yoga.

It’s also like sex, cooking, parenthood, opera, war, gardening, and conjugating French verbs. But we’re going to go with the yoga analogy for now.

In my yoga class, my teacher tells me to think about my rib cage, my thigh muscles, my spine, my breath, my gaze, my ankles, my mouth, my cheeks, my hands, my balance, my toes, my belly, my kidneys, and The Universal. She also, at the same time, tells me to clear my mind and think of nothing. Then she tells me to stand on my left earlobe.

I’m sure the obvious parallels to writing are instantly apparent to you.

—Laura Resnick, Rejection, Romance, and Royalties

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Panning for mica

5 May 2012 by Leave a Comment

J. A. Konrath wrote an ebook called The Newbie’s Guide to Publishing, chock-full of good advice when written; but alas, it is two years old now, and a geological era out of date. I don’t want to make a bad example of Mr. Konrath, who has done a beautiful job of keeping up with the times; his blog remains a valuable source of information and insight. But I want to quote this from the Newbie’s Guide, because it contains an important truth about the traditional publishing business, and a cardinal fallacy about salable fiction:

Consider the agent, going through 300 manuscripts in the slush pile that have accumulated over the last month.

She’s not looking to help writers. She’s panning for gold. And to do that, you have to sift through dirt. It might be some very good dirt she’s dismissing. But it is still dirt.

Be the gold.

The best way to get published, or to win a contest, is to shine. Don’t be mistaken for dirt. Don’t do anything that lets them reject you — because they’re looking to reject you unless you can show them you’re brilliant.

This all sounds very well, but in practice it has a terrible flaw. Mark Twain knew what that flaw was. He learnt it the hard way, and wrote about it in Roughing It: [Read more…]

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Some thoughts on ebook pricing

5 May 2012 by Leave a Comment

There has been much hollering and handwringing on all sides of the argument about ebook pricing. Traditional publishers claim that printing and distribution are a small part of their costs, and therefore, that ebooks must be priced as high as print books to make money. On the other side, independent writers and a lot of consumers point out that the marginal cost to produce an ebook is approximately zero, so ebooks should be tremendously cheap. The third side points out that retail prices are a matter of supply and demand, and have nothing to do with the cost of production as such.

All three sides are wrong, or at least incomplete. [Read more…]

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Jerrold Mundis on the flow of writing

24 April 2012 by Leave a Comment

It’s a rare occasion when the words just flow without interruption. More often they flow for thirty seconds, five or ten minutes at a time. Then you stop and think, stare at the page or the screen, look out the window, or whatever it is that you do, and then write for another thirty seconds, five or ten minutes. Once in a while, you’ll catch fire and in a white heat type as fast as you can for an hour or two, even three or four. That has happened to me — maybe ten or fifteen times over the past twenty-five years. For most writers, nearly every day it’s a matter of hills and valleys, with pauses in between.

—Jerrold Mundis, Break Writer’s Block Now!

Another bit from the same book that particularly struck me:

The average full-time writer puts in four to four-and-a-half hours a day, five days a week; the average part-time writer puts in one to two hours a day, five or six days a week. . . . Writing is energy-intensive. Overreaching invites burnout and block.

 

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Reject yourself! (Mark Twain on quality control)

19 April 2012 by Leave a Comment

There are at least two schools of thought about editing and revision in self-publishing.

One (exemplified, perhaps, by Dean Wesley Smith) says that you should write as much content as you can and publish it as soon as it’s done. This results, I suspect, from taking Heinlein’s Rules far too seriously. Folks, they’re not the Gospel according to St. Robert; they’re one man’s opinion, and a very unusual man he was. ‘You must refrain from rewriting except to editorial order’ is fatal advice for a self-published writer, because, in the nature of things, that editorial order will never come. (It did Heinlein great harm, too, in his later years, when his editors stopped trying to argue with him.)

The second school of thought, which I have seen well expressed by Joel Friedlander, is that you ought to take every bit as much care with editing and revision as if you were a conscientious publisher printing someone else’s work. [Read more…]

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John C. Wright on being a famous writer

17 April 2012 by Leave a Comment

. . . my name is known everywhere my books are read. I mean everywhere, as far away as my basement and occasionally in my living room. My fame is such that there are members of my family who recognize my name after only a few reminders.

—John C. Wright

 

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Extruded Books: a cautionary tale

16 April 2012 by Leave a Comment

For some thirty years now, I have been following the commercial publishing industry, particularly in its various New York mutations, and trying (for commercial reasons of my own) to figure out why apparently intelligent people would do business in such cockeyed ways. I don’t pretend to have figured out the whole story, but I have pieced together a good deal of evidence, and I believe I can point out the major turnings in the road that led publishers to the pass they are in today. Rather than bore you, my 3.6 Loyal Readers, with dry details and rubbishy statistics, I shall shamelessly exploit my status as a spinner of tall tales to set forth the data under cover of a fictitious example. All names have been changed to protect the manifestly guilty; so let me introduce you to Nathan Extruded, founder and publisher of Extruded Books. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Essays, Foolishness Tagged With: , ,
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