Err on the side of audacity.

Right now, I'm celebrating my love and appreciation for Sue Monk Kidd. The Secret Life of Bees is available on cable right now, and I think I've watched it five times. I think they did a great job with the movie, but Kidd's writing is so much richer. Her books are so layered with wonderful symbols that trickle down into the folds and secret places of women. I just can't get enough of her right now.

So, I went to her web page, and she has some great stuff for writers.

http://www.suemonkkidd.com/Reflections.aspx?t=w&i=1

Err on the side of audacity is one of the tips she has on her list of The Ten Most Helpful Things I Could Ever Tell Anyone About Writing

Now that I'm on a role with my 2nd YA novel (I just can't stop writing), she has reminded me of the most important question I need to ask:

What does my character want?

I think I know. Now that she's been ripped away from home and her best friend, she wants to find someone she can trust and feel safe with. Emily will find such people in her new town, but the ultimate journey will be in learning how to trust herself.

A-Muse-Ment

I noticed that one of the songs on my Kitaro CD is titled Dance of Sarasvati. I looked her up and found this:

Sarasvati is the Hindu Goddess of all arts: music, painting, sculpture, dance, and writing. She is credited with presenting the gift of writing to mankind so that her songs could be written down and preserved. Sarasvati is often depicted on the back of a swan or peacock, and with four arms, with which she plays the lute or drum and bestows jeweled blessings. She is the Goddess of eloquence, and words pour from her like a sweetly flowing river. One myth of this Goddess is that She is a jealous rival of the Goddess of wealth, Lakshmi, and that pursuing wealth alone will assure that Sarasvati's gifts will desert you.

What could be a more fitting muse for a writer?

I don't have delusions of becoming a gazillionaire with my writing. But I do get caught up in the desire to be published. Nothing is a more sure block to writing than getting my muse confused. When my muse becomes a prospective agent or publishing house or even my desired audience, it slows me down and effects the quality of my work. My goal, now that my new novel is starting to live all around me, is to keep a clear, uncluttered channel between me and Sarasvati. Only by doing this can I ensure that the book gets written true to its vision and not true to what I tell myself someone else might want it to be.

So, my imagination should be used to write the book and not to body forth the book's life cycle.

Writing Breakthrough

I can't say it's been worth it, but this long period of blockage has been more productive than I realized. One of the things about writing that I find so interesting is that it takes place when I'm not writing. Or maybe I'm writing all the time, and just don't know it. So, when I'm blow drying my hair or cooking cauliflower gratin or waiting in a left turn lane, I'm writing. Stories cook, the details blending and maturing, while I'm waiting for the commuter bus or feeding my cat.

I've had what I think is a very interesting YA novel in my head for some time now, and I've been utterly stuck. I know what happens, all the nuts and bolts, but I couldn't write. I just didn't like any of the attempts I made to flesh out the story. They all seemed flat, like a deflated cardboard box. My main character had no soul.

Well, a couple of days ago, she started talking. Her voice surprised me, because she's kind of harsh. Definitely someone who doesn't make friends easily. Can I have that in a main character? Of course, I can. She's on the brink of a journey she can't imagine, geographically and spiritually. Now that she's talking, I can't wait to take her on it.

The Room

I just read an essay someone pointed me to, and will post the link to it here. I thought this one of the most eloquent descriptions of what it means to be a writer as I've ever read. But then, I appreciate anyone who knows that writing is supposed to be dangerous. Here it is: The Talent of the Room

Resolve

Generally, I'm not much of a New Year's resolution kind of person. I hate it when I don't live up to my own expectations. But, where writing is concerned, I feel a bit different. Writing can be, I believe, a goal-oriented activity. And goals and resolutions compliment one another.

I have spent the last year writing and submitting flash fiction, spending time in multiple writer's communities and feeding myself an internal dialogue of self-doubt. While flash fiction is fun to write, and the social aspect of a writer's community has introduced me to many interesting people, none of these activities have done much to further me as a novelist. The main thing lacking this year has been the production of much writing. Mostly, I've felt stuck and frustrated. I've spent time and money trying to get to the writer in me. For reasons that elude me, I've settled into a nameless fear.

Now, I've always been a big one for naming one's fears. A thing without a name has control because we can’t cast parameters on something nameless. Finding definition can cause even the most intense fears to dissolve like a snow flake on the tongue. Where this fear is concerned, my efforts to find a name have fallen short. It's time for me to hang it up and get on with things. So, here is what I resolve for the coming year as a writer, in or outside of the presence of fear.

1. I resolve to think of myself as a writer. I will become the enemy of the inner voice that tells me I am not. I will not ridicule myself for taking myself as a writer too seriously. I will not tell myself that I am making a fool of myself every time I share my writing.

2. My second novel shall be my point of focus this year. I will devote two hours a day, at least three times a week, to working on this novel. I resolve to complete a first draft by the end of 2009. I also have another novel in my head, my first non-YA novel. I will allow it to form and present itself and will stop ignoring the characters who are trying so hard to get my attention.

3. I will focus my writing community activity to one group. I have belonged to a small, intimate online writer’s group for several years now. The group used to be such a source of support for me. We've gone through so many changes, which is natural for groups. Being made up of people, the dynamic of a group is a fragile thing. Several of the more active members have fallen by the wayside, and I allowed that to lessen my own commitment to the group. In 2009, I will put my online writer’s group in the center. The group is hosted by MSN, which is discontinuing the service boards, so we’re in the process of moving the group. When we move to the new site next month, I want to consider that a fresh start. I hope everyone else will view it as the same. I also hope we can add new members who will bring their writing and their critiquing energies into the group as well. For myself, I will post my novel for critique, and I will critique whatever the rest of you post. I need other writers to read my work. I want WSE to become, once again, a place where I can depend on at least a half a dozen people to provide me with honest thoughtful critiques. Even though the number of critiques I receive from careful readers isn't strictly under my control, I will do what I can to foster an atmosphere where that can take place.

Nathan Bransford's 1st Paragraph Contest

Nathan Bransford, a literary agent at Curtis Brown, is holding his 2nd annual 1st paragraph contest, hosted on his blog.

http://nathanbransford.blogspot.com/2008/12/2nd-sort-of-annual-stupendously.html

The prizes are either a query or partial critique. Whooeee... I think this is an interesting forum for a contest. All of the posts are public, so we can see the competition, and the comments are also public. The deadline is this Thursday, finalists are to be announced on Friday, and then participants will vote on which finalist will be the grand prize winner.

The Center

I’ve always loved that Yeats poem, Second Coming. For me, the first three lines epitomize how I see my life when I drift away from my God concept.

Turning and turning in a widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

The poem says so much more, but those three lines, taken alone, I can apply directly to me. The other day, though, they took on a new meaning for me with regards to my novel. I suddenly realized that my story is turning and turning, getting ever further away from the center, the falconer, me. As the distance grows, I lose the story, the voices of the characters. I need to pull them in and hold them close, I need to listen to them breathing and feel their foreheads for fever. I need to know what they had for lunch and how they feel about the upcoming holidays. I’m the center. If I want them to, they will have things to tell me. If I want them to.

I have to look forward to seeing them the way I looked forward to having my daughter here for Thanksgiving. I have to wake up wondering where they are and what they’re doing. I have to want to ask them out to play.

Why No $30 Agent Session @ Conferences - Reason #1

Agent: Your writing is solid, but the setting didn't quite work for me. It might work if you placed it somewhere dry. Maybe try resetting it in the Mojave Desert, maybe Needles, California in a truck stop under a bill board for grape crush.

Writer: B-but it's a surfing story.

Agent: Right. Keep the sand. The sand works.

Burroway - Writing Fiction

How did a whole month slip by without my posting anything here? I've started a writing class at the UW, and, along with too many other commitments, I'm letting things slip.

I'm getting ready for the La Jolla writer's conference next week, and, at work, I'm slogging through the stuff one slogs through in my profession.

For my class, we're reading Writing Fiction by Janet Burroway. It's too bad the class isn't going through the chapters chronologically, because I am also reviewing each chapter in the Craft Corner on Zoe. I've decided to post those chapter reviews here.

Chapter 1 - Whatever Works - The Writing Process

Burroway's first chapter prods us into examining writing as habit. It takes on the stance that a productive writer becomes so out of habit more than talent. Hence, this quote:

Forget inspiration. Habit is more dependable. Habit will sustain you whether you're inspired or not. Habit will help you finish and polish your stories. Inspiration won't. Habit is persistence in practice. --Octavia Butler.

I got to thinking about my own habits as a writer. I'm given to fits of feeling blocked. I've spent a lot of time and energy, not to mention money, trying to find ways through block. So now I'm asking myself what my habits are. What's my writing foundation? I realized that I have a lot of room for improvement here.

I do a morning exercise every day. First thing, before my brain kicks in, I do the morning pages. For me, that's a ten-minute, timed free-writing. Whatever's in there when I wake up. I seldom go back and read these pages. Last week, though, I did. I finished a notebook and went back to page 1 to see if there was any kind of flow. Most of it was pure dribble. Worthless rants about hating my job, plans with friends, my cat, thoughts about writing projects. Why do I do this, I wondered. But every now and then, I found a few paragraphs that seemed lyrical to me. Snippets of effortless art, that stuff that comes from the place I wish I could go to at will.

Now I'm thinking that maybe being able to go to that place at will, the place where the words flow, is something I can develop through habits surrounding writing. Maybe it's not some mythical, muse-occupied space where only those more gifted than I can go whenever they choose. Maybe it's a matter of developing better habits.

Burroway states:

Over and over again, successful writers attest that unless they prepare the conscious mind with the habit of work, the gift does not come. Writing is mind-farming. You have to plow, plant, weed, and hope for growing weather. Why a seed turns into a plant is something you are never going to understand, and the only relevant response to it is gratitude. You may be proud, however, of having plowed.

The chapter offers quite a list of ideas and exercises.

She approaches block from the stance of it being a tiresome cliché.

What's called writer's block is almost always ordinary fear. --Thomas Wolfe

Well, yeah. But knowing that doesn't make the fear go away. For me, I have to name my fears in order for them to lose control over me. As long as they're nameless, my fears are in charge. But she goes on to say:

I know a newspaper editor who says that writer's block always represents a lack of information. I thought this inapplicable to fiction until I noticed that I was mainly frustrated when I didn't know enough about my characters, the scene or the action – when I had not gone to the imaginative depth where information lies.

Okay. I can see that. I've conducted interviews with my characters and watched them go from lackluster to vibrant and chatty. It seems they are like anyone else...they just want someone to take an interest in them.

Another time when block settles in for me is when my ego is directing my focus.

There is an almost mathematical ratio between soaring, grandiose ambition...and severe creative block. --Victoria Nelson

When my desire for my work to be published is in the forefront of my mind, my audience automatically becomes all the people I'm sure are poised to reject me. Who wants to write anything to them???

Practical stuff, really. And all of it easily applied. I looked at some of the ideas under the section, Exercises, to see how I could modify my morning pages practice and make it more structured. I spotted several things in the chapter that I think will make my practice of writing more productive.

Synopsis on Demand

I just wrote a one-page synopsis for my meeting with an agent at the La Jolla Writer’s Conference I will be attending this November. I surfed around, looking for brief instructions. I figured that what I think a synopsis should be and what others think is likely quite different. So, I did what I most hate doing. I asked for directions.

Well, there are a gazillion web pages out there with advice. And I’m betting most of the writing books I have offer some insight into synopsis writing as well. In the end, I went to Nathan Bransford’s blog and found his blog entry on writing a synopsis. He said what I already knew, that there is no one way to write one.

So, here’s what I did. The only instruction for this synopsis was that it be confined to a single page. I prepared a single-spaced page with three sections:

The Story

The Characters

The Format

I don’t know if this is right or wrong, whether it’s what an agent would consider a good synopsis, whether it will make anyone want to read my book. I especially hope it does the latter.

Back It Up

When I was married (about a hundred years ago), my now former brother-in-law took it into his head to write the great American novel. He had saved a ton of money, so he quit working, rented an office, furnished it with a typewriter, desk and safe and commenced writing. The word, typewriter, should tip you off that this was before the time when everyone had one or more computers and this thing called the internet where we could move things all over the world.

The brother-in-law was a smart guy and took himself and his work seriously enough to ensure he had a backup. He made a copy of his work and asked us to keep it in our apartment in the event a fire or something unforeseen occurred to eliminate the original in his office. I think it was an honest to God carbon copy. When was the last time you saw one of those? When was the last time you saw a typewriter eraser? Or a...well, I digress.

Now, it's so easy to have multiple backups of our work and that ease makes it all the more common for us to not do it. Oh, it's easy. I can do it any time. I don't even need to say that, if you don't back up your work, you should. There are a lot of ways to back stuff up, though. One important factor that still holds true from the brother-in-law and carbon copy days is that it's important to have a copy in some geographic location other than your home. We think of our computers going to sleep and never waking up. But loss of home or office is another angle. So, making a copy by printing it out or copying it to a disposable drive or to a second computer is not sufficient.

If you print your work, save a copy somewhere other than where your computer resides. But there is a much better way to handle copies. File Transfer Protocol (FTP) is the simplest and most accessible way of moving documents to a storage place for safe keeping. Most internet accounts include storage space. If not, get a gmail account. Google to the rescue. Gmail offers an easy, accessible, free place to store work. You can access it from any web browser, and it never goes away. The question of whether or not we want Google to have that much information about our lives is another question, but for a quick backup of something, just attach the document to an email and send it to yourself. See? Easy.

Midnight Sun - What a Scam!

The only thing I hate more than being lied to is being taken for an idiot. Stephanie Meyers discusses on her web page her feelings around Midnight Sun being leaked to the internet. Understandably, she talks of feeling violated and robbed. She states that she is so distraught that she has decided to postpone the book indefinitely.

Okay, that's when I got a little suspicious. This has publicity written all over it. And it's a cheap shot. The publicist who talked her into this stunt should be fired. First, her reaction makes me picture a two-year-old, flinging herself on the floor, refusing to walk another step. Second, it makes me feel manipulated.

I'm not saying that the book wasn't leaked, although I think that's a possibility. I'm saying that Meyers and her publisher are manipulating her readers by withholding. What's the best way to make a teenager want something? Tell her she can't have it. They're creating greater demand. And it's going to backfire.

She's lost me as a loyal reader. This book will show up, and it'll sell like hotcakes because of the controversy and anticipation created by this event. I'll buy it when it shows up in a second hand bookstore, unfettered by any obligation to provide its writer or publisher with royalties.

Who's Telling the Story?

I've been thinking about narrators...the voice of the story teller. I realized something while driving to work this morning. I like conspicuous narrators. The Thirteenth Tale, Diane Setterfield's wonderful debut novel, starts out like this:

"All children mythologize their birth. It is a universal trait. You want to know someone, heart, mind and soul, ask him to tell you about when he was born. What you get won't be the truth. It will be a story. And nothing is more telling than a story."

I was instantly hooked. What story will this story teller offer? Can it be trusted?

Memoirs of a Geisha begins: Mine is a story that should never be told.

I find this kind of hook irresistible.

Then there's the frame story...James and Conrad and all the Victorian writers loved frame stories. Some guy in a room with other guys, all in soft, leather chairs, speaks through a cloud of cigar smoke with a brandied tongue and tells a tale so tall, so horrific.

Then there's the collective narrator. Faulkner used this one a lot. A Rose for Emily was narrated by the collective "we." I find myself using this kind of narrator in flash fiction a lot. Not sure why. I like the notion of a story being told by a community or a group. Here's what we saw.

I've been circling around my YA novel for some months now, and the problem is with the narrator. I haven't hit my stride yet because I haven't found a voice for the narrator. I didn't know this until today. I simply knew that I was stuck. But now I know what I'm looking for. I want someone who has a voice like Vida Winter in The Thirteenth Tale. I want someone to begin with something irresistible, like Memoirs of a Geisha. A teen girl, talking to a friend from home, saying, "Sorry I haven't called you back until now. I just didn't know how to tell you everything that's happened here. But, now that I think of it, you're the only friend I have who would ever believe it." Whoopie.

First Sentence - John Cheever

I was going through John Cheever's short story collection this evening, and I came across this one from O Youth and Beauty:

At the tag end of nearly every long, large Saturday-night party in the suburb of Shady Hill, when almost everybody who was going to play golf or tennis in the morning had gone home hours ago and the ten or twelve people remaining seemed powerless to bring the evening to an end although the gin and whiskey were running low, and here and there a woman who was sitting out her husband would have begun to drink milk; when everybody had lost track of time, and the baby-sitters who were waiting at home for these diehards would have long since stretched out on the sofa and fallen into a deep sleep, to dream about cooking-contest prizes, ocean voyages, and romance; when the bellicose drunk, the crapshooter, the pianist, and the woman faced with the expiration of her hopes had all expressed themselves; when every proposal--to go to the Farquarsons' for breakfast, to go swimming, to go and wake up the Townsends, to go here and go there--died as soon as it was made, then Trace Bearden would begin to chide Cash Bentley about his age and thinning hair.

Whew! Cheever. I wish I'd had you at my elbow in college creative writing classes when that snotty girl with the braces accused me of writing run-on sentences. This story is such a great example of Cheever throwing aside all control. What fun.

Readings and Meeting Other Writers

I like to think about what this online world has done for writers. I suspect I'm not the only writer who spends time alone with relative ease. I don't turn on the radio or TV to have noise in the room or to hear the sound of someone's voice. Alone time is something writers with families crave. It's something that I guard. Sometimes even The Princess is a little too much company.

So, we have our online communities, people we "know" from the internet places we visit. We know slews of people we've never met. I interact with people every day on the internet. It's easier for a socially, er, limited person such as myself. Not that I don't love a good party or enjoy a day out with friends. I'm just saying that it's easier this way, maybe in ways that shouldn't be so easy.

I work with people like myself as well...people who will send an email to someone who sits on the other side of the room. Sue and I sat next to each other and would IM one another to have a private conversation.

So, who are these people I meet online, and how do I know they are who they say they are? People with little internet community experience are often exceedingly skeptical about the friendships formed online. They think of drooling pedophiles and get-rich-quick scammers and ask how I know these people are who they say they are. "They can say anything they want about themselves, and you'd never know if it's true or not."

It's true. The internet is a place where people can be solidly false or unflinchingly honest. They can create a persona and live out a fantasy existence or take a risk and reveal who they really are. What an interesting place.

But writing communities, although we have our share of screwballs, seem to be a place where we can join together and really work on our craft outside the confines of solitude. We can have our work critiqued or reviewed or just read by a variety of people without ever leaving our homes or seeing anyone face-to-face. If we don't like the way someone comes at us, we can simply delete them and move on...except for the brooders, that is.

So, when it comes to physically meeting other writers, it's wonderful and risky and exciting. I've gotten together with Jen, whom I met on an MSN writers forum. We've gotten together several times over the past 3 or 4 years, and I consider her to be a keeper, someone I will hold dear always. Now, when I think of her, I don't just think of her incredible talent as a novelist. I think of her smile, the hours we've spent jabbering about writing, and the pieces of her life she's shared with me.

Last night, I went to a reading of a writer whose work I love. Kathy Fish read some of her flash fiction at the University Bookstore here in Seattle. It was so cool meeting her and seeing what she looks like, hearing the lilt of her voice as she read the words I've read so many times. Now, I have her tone, her smile and that sliver of her personality I was able to feel in the half hour we chatted. Two other people from the same online community were in attendance, and it was wonderful getting to meet and connect with them as well. Both of them are editors of ezines I just adore. I was afraid I'd drool or burst into hysterical laughter or fall to my knees and beg them to publish me. I did none of those things, though, and they suffered me with grace. So, now I'll never be able to read their posts without picturing them and knowing their voices. It surprises me how much that changes things. For better or worse? Well, neither. It's just different. Not only have I seen and heard them, but I've now been seen and heard as well. That's the part I don't like. I'd much rather see and hear them without them ever seeing or hearing me.

In November, I'm going to a conference in San Diego, and I get to meet my dear friend, Marie. She has read and supported me with my writing for a long time now, and she's also been the recipient of many a whining session as I've gone through things over the past few years. We're going to be roomies at this conference, and I'm so excited I'm afraid I won't make it to November without wetting my pants. We actually talked to each other in the flesh over the phone a week ago, and it was amazing. She has a voice other than her great writer's voice... I mean a vocal voice. Wow.

Getting to know people on line is safe, but at some point, I've gotta just crawl out of my cave and join the physical world. So far, it's been a hoot.

What are you working on?

I'm working on figuring out what to work on. I'm stuck. It's not the first or probably the last time. But stuck I am.

So, last month, I participated in that dynamite flash marathon and got a handful of new work out. I felt launched, oiled. But then I skipped a beat and lost it like a pebble falling to the bottom of a well.

I have to cut myself some slack because I just started a new job in June, and I'm going through this huge learning curve. But if I wrote as much as I thought about writing, I'd have a series of novels done by now.

I feel discouraged because I've fallen into self-doubt. I'm losing the reason behind writing. A part of me really wants my novels to be published, but I have to tell myself that the goal of publication is not a good motivator. It's quite the opposite.

For example, I have a plot outlined for the current YA novel I'm writing. I'm having some problems, but the story is solid. The book is already written somewhere just under the surface of my skin, and it's beautiful. But here's the problem. The book is about a teen girl who moves to Monroe, Washington with her flaky mother. She's lost, she's lonely, and she hates it here. Then something paranormal happens and her life clicks into place. Then, last week, I finally got around to reading Twilight, that first book in the blockbuster hit YA series. It's about a teen girl who moves to Forks, Washington to give her flaky mother some distance. She's lost, she's lonely, and she hates it here. Then something paranormal happens, and her life clicks into place. Argh!!!!!!!!!!!! Okay, there are no vampires or werewolves in my story. But, geeze! Can't you already hear the agents and editors? We don't need another book about a teen girl who moves to Washington, has a flaky mother and is lost, lonely...well, you get it. Where else could I place it, given the great first sentence I've come up with? It was a dark and stormy night. Just kidding.

Then there's the hybrid memoir I've started, written about 30,000 words of and have just realized that the place I thought was a crack in the story is just there to let a little light in. Should I work on that? Again? It feels so self-indulgent. But I like the idea of lacing memoir with pure fiction and playing with ways we try to cast ourselves in the best possible light. Memoir is just begging to be messed with. Memoirs remind me of something my mom used to say, that you can't hit yourself hard enough to really hurt yourself. That whole notion that a protagonist needs to be liked and sympathized with pisses me off. I want to exploit it and write a memoir that has the fantasy, the lies we tell ourselves and shows what I hide when I dress for a party.

Then there's my draft of a book about five lesbians friends who are suddenly all single for the first time in their group relationship. I want to tinker with the ways friendships are so fluid and how the ground can so violently shift when women enter times of change. I have plots worked out for three of the five, and the other two are whispering to me daily, wanting equal time. Do I write, though? Noperoonie.

So, so sum it up, with all this going on, I'm working on learning how to administer an IBM cluster, running SuSE Linux and DB2 in an Enterprise Data Warehouse. I'm learning how to manage Samba mounts and how to format and partition disk arrays. And I'm on the 3rd book of Stephanie Meyers's vampire/werewolf series.

Five Things That Piss Me Off Every Time

1. Arrogance in the name of religion.
2. Arrogance in the name of gender superiority (coming from either direction).
3. Arrogance of the young toward the old, or the reverse.
4. Arrogance from the top down or from the gutter looking up.
5. Arrogance.

Flash-a-thon Winding Down

Someone said that one of the flashathons in the past was a month long. I'd be dead if I tried that. This one lasted 2 weeks, and I was able to keep up the pace for the first week, then I started slowing down. I wrote five new pieces, turned one short story into a flash and submitted two flashes that hadn't been workshopped before. I reviewed 76 flashes and became familiar with a whole bunch of writers whose work I hadn't read before. I also got tons of great critiques and reviews of my work.

One of the many great benefits of the internet is being able to belong to a huge community of writers who read and enjoy each others work. I may not have my novel on the shelves of libraries and bookstores, but I am read. What more can a writer ask?

Flashathon on Zoe

Ellen Parker initiated a flashathon on Zoetrope's flash workshop page. The deal is to post a flash a day for two weeks. It'll probably kill me, but I'm going to do it. So far, I've done well for one day in a row. I'm committed to writing new flashes, too, not recycling old stuff, although I did try to rework a piece out of my essay, The Dead Files. I won't post it, though. New stuff only!!!

So, a flash is defined, at least here, as anything 1000 words or fewer. Zoetrope has a sort of silly rule that says a flash can't be fewer than 100 words. How can you put a minimum to flash?

Anyway, here's the real kicker. For each flash you post on Zoe, you have to review 5 flashes by other submitters. That's a lot of critiques per day. But, so far, I've discovered some new writers I didn't know and I'm getting to read a lot more of the writers I already love, so it's a pretty good deal all around. And I get a lot of critiques too. So, we'll see how it goes. In two weeks, I'll probably be flashed out.

Literary Fiction vs Indie Films and Music

Someone on one of the critique forums I frequent wrote an essay, posing the question, why doesn't literary fiction generate the same kind of excitement and discourse that independent films and music do?

Those of us who read small press anthologies and dip into the wonderful assortment of web-zines available right now know that most of the readers are writers. We all know which ones are good, which ones we'd kill to get into, and which ones are so-so. We know which ones are worthy of high-brow literary criticism and which ones are just pure fun. So, why don't people frequent these places in large numbers like the places where indie film and music are offered? What's the difference?

Well...here's a big difference. Listening to music or going to a film is usually a group experience. Sure, you can listen to music or watch a video alone, but you can share the experience with someone else and do it together or with a group. Reading is a solitary experience and can only be shared with other people who enjoy solitary experiences.

My friend, John, and I often read stories aloud to one another. We have our ritual Christmas story night during the holidays and often choose something from my shelves of short story collections and small press anthologies rather than watching something from On Demand. I think it would be great fun to have a party where everyone brings a short story not self-written and we read stories, eat wonderful junk, and drink choice beverages, maybe until dawn. That's what kind of weirdo I am.

Another thing the essay tied in to is the flickering on the horizon about the changing publishing industry. It's going to all change, and very soon. Well, not soon enough for some and too soon for others. Everyone's clamoring right now to guess what's going to happen. We have new devices like the Amazon Kindle and every software developer with an imagination (and that's most of them) trying to come up with a reader that can integrate into other hand held devices. Have you noticed that the screens on cell phones and other hand held devices are getting bigger? There's the wave of Japanese text message storying and just all kinds of stuff. Publishing companies are starting to fear Amazon because it's harnessing technology and forcing them to strain out of their neolithic mind sets. Amazon's also making some pretty monopolistic moves, but that's another story. The thing is, publishing is going to change completely because reading is going electronic.

Every time I say that, someone says, "Well, I'm never going to stop reading the printed word. It's never going away." It may not go away, but it's going to diminish. one writer of this forum said a few days ago that some of her readers of erotic romance say they never read anything but e-books anymore. Right now, romance, erotic romance and sci fi are popular in e-book form, but it's not far off for everything else to click in on this. It will change the way publishing operates in such a way that the Random House or S&S stamp of approval might not carry same meaning it does now.

Everyone's wondering how writers are going to get paid, how will publishers fare, what are new ways of promoting and finding audiences. Right now, e-book publishers pay way higher a percentage in royalties than the New York giants. Sure, they sell the books for less, but it still comes out to more. Pertinent to the essay that prompted me to write mine, though, is how the landscape will change for literary writers. Vanity presses have, indeed, damaged the rep of e-publishing. People have confused self-publishing with e-publishing. So, the question is, how will e-publishers establish a reputation of only publishing quality? I think the answer is that they must continue to be the gatekeeper. Houses with a reputation for publishing only quality works will attract readers who are more discriminating.

I hear such mixed opinions about kids and reading. Ask a children's librarian if kids are reading, and they'll tell you yes, more than ever. YA is a hot genre to write in right now. Teens, especially teen girls, are gobbling up books like crazy. I wish there were an enthusiastic e-publisher of YA, because I'd go that route with my novel in a heartbeat.

The inner struggle writers have between writing literary vs. mass consumption will never go away, but the method writers use to find readers will soon turn a corner that will change everything for everyone, and, once it turns that corner, it will never look back.