Writing Fiction

Downloads from Writing Science Fiction and Fantasy

The second edition of Writing Science Fiction and Fantasy has a CD with some supplemental materials—links to books and authors mentioned in the text, posts from this blog, plus a number of reviews. (I've even thrown in a scholarly article published way back in 1972.) The CD is readable only on a PC, however, so Mac users (including me) are out of luck.

However, I've uploaded those materials as a long Word file, and you're welcome to download it—even if you haven't bought the book. I hope you find these items useful.
Download wsff_cd_items.doc

Pitching a novel

I had the pleasure of coffee with a Vancouver publisher yesterday, where we discussed three possible books: two nonfiction and one fiction. 

The original idea I'd proposed, a family memoir by my two brothers and me, didn't go over well on the basis of a sample chapter. But I said I'd revise in the light of his comments and get back to him.

The other nonfiction idea was a collection of my BC-related articles for The Tyee, which I've been writing for since 2003. He looked over my proposal and thought it might have possibilities. Again I said I'd give him more to consider. I estimated that the book might have 45,000 words plus another 15,000 of commentary

As for the novel, I gave him a quick plot summary and the first 30 pages of Henderson's Tenants, on which I've been working, off and on, for years. (In total, I have about 30,000 words done.) The publisher said he'd get back to me early in the new year.

So I came home and started putting together the Tyee anthology. Somewhat to my surprise, I found that in a few hours I'd put together articles totalling 50,000 words, with more still to add. This is why I'm a big proponent of writing articles on your nonfiction subject: You're making money (or at least a reputation) from them, and creating material for the eventual book as well.

If he goes for the novel as well, I'll have a deadline to shoot for, which is all I really need to finish up this long-overdue project.

Royalty on 7 novels: $32.85

That's the amount I received the other day from iUniverse for the sale of 14 copies, over the first 9 months of this year, of 7 of my novels. You can find the links to them in the left-hand column. iUniverse is a print-on-demand publisher: years ago I sent them copies of some of my novels, which they scanned and stored as computer files. When someone orders a copy, iUniverse prints it, puts a new cover on it, and mails it out. 

If you buy one or two of these novels, you'll see how I taught myself the techniques of writing fiction. You'll also provide some small amount of support for the advice and information you've found on this site. It's been a pleasure to run this blog for the last 6 years, but I'd be grateful to see a little more income than $32.85 for books that took, all told, over 20 years to write.

I can offer you stories of time-traveling derring-do, the collapse of the Antarctic ice sheet, and a tongue-in-cheek alien invasion by religious maniacs. Also Eyas, a story about family life in British Columbia ten million years from now. 

While I've got a new novel in the works, most of my writing in the past decade has been journalism and book-length nonfiction. The journalism has been mostly in a remarkable online journal: The Tyee.

So by all means visit The Tyee now and then; we love high traffic numbers, and we're proud to be the best online magazine in Canada. You don't have to be Canadian to find our articles interesting, sometimes alarming, and very well written.

You might also click through the book covers in the far-right column and buy one or more of my three latest books—the second edition of Writing Science Fiction and Fantasy, the fourth edition of Writing for the Web, and the brand-new Sell Your Nonfiction Book. The prices are reasonable, delivery is prompt, and the content is useful. I get a modest commission for every sale made through this site.

Even if you're writing in a genre other than SF or fantasy, you should find some useful ideas in the fiction book. The webwriting book is equally useful whether you're blogging, writing ad copy, or publishing your fiction online. And the nonfiction book has new material on how to do online research that everyone should find helpful.

100 Online Resources for Writers

Via Online Degree.net: 100 Online Resources That Will Make You A Better Writer. Many of the resources are clearly for fiction writers, but others should be of use to screenwriters and writers in general.

Harlequin goes for self-publishing

Via Publishers Weekly: RWA, MWA and SFWA Angered by Harlequin's New Self-Publishing Imprint. This is bad news. Excerpt:

Romance Writers of America and other writer associations yesterday spoke out against the announcement earlier this week that Author Solutions had teamed up with Harlequin to form Harlequin Horizons, a new imprint for self-published romance authors. 

RWA has deemed Harlequin no longer eligible for RWA-provided conference resources—meaning the publisher is not entitled to enter any award competitions. 

Late yesterday, Harlequin publisher and CEO Donna Hayes responded, saying the company was “surprised and dismayed” at RWA’s actions, and that it would change the name of the self-publishing company from Harlequin Horizons to a designation “that will not refer to Harlequin in any way.” 

As PW reported Tuesday, Harlequin Horizons was set to recruit writers in two ways: authors whose manuscripts had been rejected by Harlequin would be made aware of the Harlequin Horizons option, and authors who signed with Author Solutions would be given the opportunity to be published under the Harlequin Horizons imprint. All services are on a pay-for-service basis.

The Mystery Writers of America and Science Fiction Writers of America, as the report says, are equally annoyed, and for good reason. If one of the biggest mass-market houses in the world starts relying on income from its authors, not its readers, we writers have a big problem on our hands.

Publishers will have another reason to stick to the biggest names and most profitable titles, and one less reason to gamble on a new writer or a midlist writer who can reach an audience only if given some time on the racks and shelves.

Those writers will now be invited, in effect, to gamble on themselves--as if they haven't already by investing time and effort in producing a novel. This is a serious abdication of the publisher's role as marketer. 

Harlequin seems to think that the market it really understands is not the readers who have enriched it for decades, but the aspiring writers with something to say to those readers. I hope publishers in other genres have more confidence in themselves, and in their writers.

Promoting another book

Last month I published Sell Your Nonfiction Book, and I've put a link to it in the right-hand column. If you've found the information here useful, I hope you'll consider supporting the site by buying a copy--even if you're bound and determined to write fiction or perish.

The new book contains some information that fiction writers should find useful, especially the material on using Google for online research. I only wish Google had been around in the 1980s and 90s, when I was researching everything from daily life in ancient Rome to the grammar and vocabulary of Proto-Indo-European. 

Next week I'll be talking with a publisher about another project, also nonfiction. If it doesn't work out, I'll go back and take a serious run at finishing Henderson's Tenants. Poor old Mike Henderson has been stuck in the summer of 2030 for six or seven years now, waiting for me to finish his story.

Meet publishers' enemy No. 1: Cory Doctorow

Via the Globe and Mail: Meet publishers' enemy No. 1: Cory Doctorow. Excerpt:

The traditional publishing industry's worst nightmare arrived in Toronto this week when science-fiction author Cory Doctorow addressed the TD National Reading Summit on the burning question of “How to Destroy the Book.” 

As one of the world's most successful bloggers, a writer who freely gives away his work as well as selling it – and not least, a genuine expert in the suddenly fraught world of international copyright – this Toronto-born phenom knows as much about wrecking traditional publishing as anyone alive. 

For serious students of the art, Doctorow is currently conducting an experiment in both giving away and selling his latest work of self-published fiction, Makers, in every way possible – and scrupulously documenting the financial results in a series of columns in Publishers Weekly. 

The novel, about the struggles of technology hackers in a future economic upheaval, is being made available in a dizzying variety of forms – from downloads and “aps” to a deluxe limited edition of 250 copies made at a family-owned bindery near Doctorow's London home, priced at $250 a piece. 

But like Little Brother, Doctorow's bestselling young-adult novel of 2008, Makers will be free on his website to any reader with the hard-drive space to store it. Those who want a $15 paper copy will be able to order it from print-on-demand publisher lulu.com.

Questions from an aspiring writer

The other day I got a note from a young man about to graduate from college and thinking about writing. He gave me permission to reply here:

"At the moment I am looking into writing historical fiction in the footsteps of G. Orwell, A. Huxley, and A. Rand. In the wake of financial meltdown and the disturbing political frenzies which have reached fevered pitches (screaming "You lie!" at the President comes to mind...) the attention drawn to dystopians has been considerable; the resurgence in popularity of Atlas Shrugs  is a testament to the genre's appeal. 

"Could you point me in the right direction about agents, publishing houses, and perhaps inform me about online self-publishing? How does a first-time writer break into the business? Where could I go to research agents? Does one write the whole book and then seek an agent or only a chapter to see if it's worth the while?"

Digging around on this site with the Google Search function could answer many of your questions, and you may also want to explore my do-it-yourself fiction course, Write a Novel. But I'm glad to try to respond directly.

First, be clear about you mean by "dystopias." They're not "historical fiction," though some have made history. Yes, Huxley, Orwell, and Rand all wrote them (I think her early work is more classically dystopian than Atlas Shrugged). I suspect they were all influenced by Yevgeni Zamyatin's 1920s dystopia, We. 

But they were writing from very different positions, with very different ideas of what makes a good and bad society.

They were also working half a century or more ago, in a very different world from today's. A writer setting out in this genre would first have to read their antecedents: Sir Thomas More's original Utopia, Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, and a host of others. Getting some grounding in critical theory would help too: Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism taught me a great deal about dystopias in particular and science fiction in general.

Of course plenty of people are still cranking out standard SF about awful societies whose follies throw light on our own; the dystopia is a form of satire, after all. 

But it's a very tough genre for someone just launching a writing career. Mass market publishers find dystopias don't sell terribly well. An established mainstream author like Margaret Atwood is more likely to make a splash with something like The Handmaid's Tale or Oryx and Crake. And of course Cormac McCarthy's The Road is another example. (Much as I dislike it on technical literary grounds, The Road sticks in my thoughts.)

Bear in mind also that a good dystopia reflects its audience's current anxieties about social stability and threats against it. A really good dystopia gets deeper, into aspects of human nature (and human stupidity) that no one can remedy. That's why More and Swift are still relevant.

Of course, if you're writing to attack irremediable problems, why bother? And if you're attacking only the bogeyman of the moment, you'll soon be dated and forgotten.

I'm not saying don't write dystopias; just know what you're getting yourself into. And be aware that most novels have essentially no effect on the social issues they dramatize. One or two, like Bellamy's Looking Backward, actually inspired political movements to carry out their utopian programs. But even Atlas Shrugged, for all its continued sales, has made no perceptible dent in the American society it criticizes--however much it may have enriched Ayn Rand's estate.

To answer your practical questions: Write the whole novel, if only to prove you're capable of more than a few sample chapters. Research publishers' websites to see which (if any) are still considering submissions from writers without agents. Google "literary agents" and you'll find many lists of them, and detailed advice on finding one.

Online self-publishing is dead easy: start a free blog and post your chapters. Or pay some publication-on-demand house to design, typeset, and store your book on its servers, awaiting readers. But you're not likely, as an unknown novelist, to draw much attention.

My mentor Dalton Trumbo spent a decade or so working the night shift in a Los Angeles bakery while he wrote six novels and over 80 short stories. Finally he sold a short story (now an impossible market), and one thing led to another until he was one of the highest-paid writers in the world. He then became one of the most blacklisted writers in the world, but that's another story.

The money really shouldn't enter into it. Once, walking my dogs, I found a ten-dollar bill on the street. Never before or since. But the lack of ten-dollar bills doesn't make me a failure as a dog-walker; the dogs are happy, I get some exercise, and all is well. Writing should be the same: something you do because it's good exercise, forms interesting connections between brain cells, and gives you something to do besides watch TV and surf the blogosphere. If someone actually pays you for what you write, that's just luck.

Cheers,

Crawford

Any questions?

Some of the comment threads here are now four or five years old, and it can get tedious to wade through them. So I changed my settings: comments will now close after one month.

And for the coming month, this would be the logical place to raise questions stemming from my old posts. I look forward to seeing them.

Questions about royalties

A reader sent some interesting questions about royalties, and has given me permission to answer them here: 

My first novel was published  nine years ago and, naturally enough, sales in the first year didn't cover the advance.  Since that time I have received no royalty statements, and my then publisher has moved out of fiction.  I suspect he has also sold on rights to who knows how many other firms. 

Checking the web, it still seems to be selling in a whole host of countries.  Of course I have no means of knowing how many copies have sold in the intervening period - the numbers may be a miniscule - but nevertheless I am intrigued. 

Now that my second novel is out ( by a different publisher I hasten to add) I would be interested to find out exactly how many copies of my first book did sell. Is there any way of finding out?

First, dig out the contract you signed with your first publisher. With luck, you should have a number of clauses in the contract that might help you find out about the total sales of your first novel.

The royalties clause should state at what rate you'd be paid royalties (probably 10% of list price for a hardback and 8% for a mass-market paperback). 

It should also state that you're to receive a periodic statement of sales and returns--preferably twice a year, but maybe just yearly. If that's not in your contract, you're probably out of luck. 

That happened to me once (shame on my agent for not demanding it, and shame on me for not realizing it). It took relentless pestering of my publisher to get some rough idea of my sales--their policy, I learned, was not to report sales at all until and unless the book earned out its advance. I was very glad to escape from this publisher.

You may still be able to get the sales figures, however, if you have a clause permitting you to inspect the publisher's books. The inspection clauses may be time-limited, however. But that should enable you to see how many copies were printed, shipped, returned, and sold. You should also be able to find any record of rights sales to other publishers.

Next, look for the clause about going out of print and proceeds from remaindered copies. If the publisher decided to take your book out of print, he should have notified you and given you an opportunity to purchase copies at some steep discount--probably the same rate as he would charge to the jobber who took the copies off his hands. (When you see hardback recent best-sellers on sale for $4.95, those are remaindered copies, and the jobber probably paid a buck apiece for them.)

When the UK edition of one of my novels went out of print, I bought a hundred copies at 17 cents each; I think I still have a few in the basement. Many publishers, however, don't advise you when you're out of print until the next (and final) royalty statement.

If you're seeing your novel on sale overseas, they may be remaindered copies. Or the publisher may have simply sold batches to overseas booksellers. If so, the royalties clause should have specified the rate at which you'd be paid for such sales.

By the way, when a book goes out of print, you can ask the publisher either to reprint it or to return the rights to you. This is routine, and you're then free to find another publisher who might want to take a chance on it. 

I did this with Eyas, which had done poorly with Bantam Books. Del Rey Books took it, paid me a much smaller advance than Bantam had, and put it on the market again. Alas, it again did poorly, failing to earn out even the modest advance. (And it's still the best novel I've written, at least in my opinion.)

I don't hold out much hope that you'll actually get an accurate sales count from your old publisher, but the contractual items I've mentioned would be your best bet.

If you'd still like to see your first novel in print again, your best bet would be to formally obtain the rights from your former publisher, and then submit a copy of the book to a print-on-demand publisher. The POD publisher would scan your novel page by page and then print new copies as orders came in. I did this with seven of my out-of-print novels, and while they don't make much, people do buy a few copies every year.

Good luck!

Farewell to a good editor

I was sad to see this obituary in this morning's Globe and Mail: A behind-the-scenes force guiding books onto shelves. Excerpt:

Saeko Usukawa's long hours bent over draft manuscripts and her quietly persuasive work with authors helped guide hundreds of books onto bookstore shelves. 

As an editor for more than four decades, she was a behind-the-scenes leader in the Canadian publishing world. She edited books by award-winning authors including Wayson Choy, Douglas Coupland, Sky Lee, Bill Richardson and many others, covering genres as diverse as literary fiction, first nation studies, visual art, and cookery.

The obituary mentions that she started at Douglas & McIntyre in 1979, so I must have been one of her first authors: I still recall with pride the memo she sent Scott McIntyre after reading the manuscript of Icequake. 

I also recall her remarkable editing style: She was very quiet, very gentle, and simply not to be argued with. She understood books better than the authors did--better than I understood mine, anyway--and she would softly point out where the problems were and what the solutions should be.

I've been very lucky with most of my editors, so I have trouble understanding authors who've battled theirs. I look forward to getting the editor's take on a manuscript--to see what I've missed in my own story, and where the story is working well. Even when I don't agree with an editor's suggestion, I'm careful to reconsider my own opinion.

Much of what I know about writing, both fiction and nonfiction, I learned from editors. And Saeko was one of my finest teachers.

The "Connecticut Yankee" novel

The other day I found a new paperback in the local library: Into the Storm. It was another spin on a genre I call the Connecticut Yankee novel.

In the CY genre, some guy (or bunch of guys) goes back in time to face a hell of a problem with the tools of modern technology. In Mark Twain's original, "Sir Boss" goes back to King Arthur's court with the engineering skills of the late 19th century. Before long firearms are going off and knights are riding to battle on bicycles.

The genre really took off with Lest Darkness Fall, by the late and beloved L. Sprague DeCamp. Here an archaeologist, visiting the ruined Coliseum, is hit by lightning and finds himself on the same spot in the early 6th century. Before long, he's running the world's first newspaper and distilling brandy.

Plenty of others have explored (and exploited) the genre, and a recent development has been the "alternate history" CY novel, in which we see how events might have worked out if the South had won the Civil War and then fought the North with bombers, tanks, and nuclear weapons. S.M. Stirling has built a saga out of putting Nantucket Island into the third millennium B.C.

I confess I'm a sucker for the genre, but its basic premises deserve some careful scrutiny.

In Into the Storm, a decrepit 1914-vintage US destroyer, fleeing the Japanese in early 1942, finds itself transported to an alternate world where humans didn't evolve and a horrendous war is under way between mammalian lemurs and wicked, wicked raptor-like human-size dinosaurs. Lots of explosions ensue, and of course the story must run into at least three volumes.

What gets me about the genre is the iron-clad faith in technology. If only the American (or at least Western) gadgets and weapons of the 20th or 21st century are available to our heroes, American values will prevail and everyone, except the raptors, will be happy. (Never mind that lemurs branched off our evolutionary tree long before the apes did, and would find humans as incomprehensible as we would find lemurs' evolved descendants.)

This faith in technology has led the US and its allies into any number of miserable wars, coups, and assassinations in the last 60 years, with notable lack of success. B-52s dropped bombs on Vietnamese guys pushing bikes down the Ho Chi Minh Trail, and the bike-pushers won. Helicopters, drones, and satellites have scanned the Tora Bora for almost a decade, and Osama bin Laden is still at large.

Even real history doesn't back up this view of technology as social redeemer. In the late 18th century, the Nootka of Vancouver Island captured a British trading ship, plundered it, and killed all the crew except for John Jewitt, the ship's blacksmith.

For the next few years, Jewitt was the slave of a chief named Maquinna, making iron-tipped weapons and doing what he was damned well told to do. The Nootka had a strong and complex culture that used iron, and Jewitt, for its own purposes. It was not about to be transformed just because Jewitt understood some high-tech techniques.

But some SF readers still eat up CY novels, imagining the fun of thwarting the Mongols' invasion of Poland (The Crosstime Engineer) or some other unfortunate event. I eat them up too.

Mark Twain, the father of the genre, understood it better than his followers: The Connecticut Yankee fails to bring Dark Age Britain up to modern standards. In fact, his technology only makes darkness fall that much faster.

A thoughtful SF writer should bear this mind when inspired by a Connecticut Yankee idea for a story.

Should you ignore these great novels?

A literary blog called The Second Pass has posted a list of ten books you shouldn't bother to read, regardless of their prestige. I agree with some and strongly disagree with others:

White Noise, by Don DeLillo: I can't read anything by DeLillo, no matter how primed I am by his glowing reviews. Accepted.

Absalom, Absalom, by William Faulkner. Faulkner was a Hollywood drinking buddy of my grandfather, and I liked a couple of his novels when forced to read them in college (Light in August and The Sound and the Fury), but I never sought out any of his novels, so I'll go with this dismissal.

One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel García Márquez. Nonsense. It took me a couple of tries to get into it, when I was young and dumb, but I've read it three or four times since then and found more every time. A writer who hasn't read it is a writer who doesn't know how how tough the competition really is.

The Road, by Cormac McCarthy. No argument. I went to some effort to demolish this awful book in a Tyee review, yet it still sold by the hundreds of thousands. That told me the real end of the world has already happened, and it's a lot worse than McCarthy's version.

The Rainbow, by D.H. Lawrence. Lawrence struck me as a boring idiot when I first encountered him as a college student, and I have since lived a long and happy Lawrence-free life.

On the Road, by Jack Kerouac. In grade 11 or 12 we nerds at Santa Monica High read Kerouac hot off the press, and thought he was pretty cool. We grew up. Kerouac and the Beat Generation did not. (But when I met Allen Ginsberg at a Columbia University event a couple of years later, I liked him a lot.)

The Corrections, by Jonathan Franzen. Bought this as a Christmas present for my wife, who was instantly bored. Checked it myself and found that her literary taste, as usual, was bang-on.

The USA Trilogy, by John Dos Passos. When I read this as a teenager, I thought it was awesomely avant-garde (and Norman Mailer swiped some of Dos Passos's gimmicks for Naked and the Dead). Revisiting it a couple of years later, I found it just another rotting blowdown in an old forest.

Jacob's Room, by Virginia Woolf. OK, I never got Virginia Woolf. And I told myself as an undergraduate, circa 1961, that I would read her and Henry James when I was mature enough. That time has not yet come.

A Tale of Two Cities, by Charles Dickens. This is one of those novels everyone knows so well, they think they've read it. I know I haven't, so I'll pass on this one. But Bleak House, over 150 years after its first publication, remains one of the great must-reads of English literature.

Writers need to distinguish between best-sellers, most of which are forgotten in a year, and classics, which (as Northrop Frye observed) are books that refuse to go away. With a good graphic memory, I can recall several covers of Time Magazine from the 1950s glorifying great writers now vanished, like James Gould Cozzens and Herman Wouk.

Some of the books I've dismissed here will probably refuse to go away, like Jacob's Room and A Tale of Two Cities. One of the first reviews of The Great Gatsby called it "a book for the season only," one of the dumber judgements of all time. Such books, in effect, judge us, and find us wanting. 

But writers, especially, should read both classics and books for the season only, and judge themselves by what they find. Sometimes we'll meet a writer who's humiliatingly good, but at least shows us how well a human being can write. 

More often we'll find more evidence that any idiot can publish a book, and other idiots will write glowing reviews of it. This should give us encouragement: We too are idiots, after all. 

More about words and pages in a novel

"How Many Pages Make a Novel" now has a comment thread several years long, and it's actually awkward for me to track through the thread to try to answer the latest questions. So let me try to re-state some basic points, and to answer some recent questions in the process.

A short-short story is anywhere from 250 to maybe 1500 words. A short story is 1500 to 10,000 words. A novelette could be 10,000 to 30,000 words. A novella is 30,000 to 55,000-60,000 words, and anything longer is a novel. However—

These are all terms from the early part of the 20th century, when popular magazines ran a lot of fiction. A few writers made very comfortable livings selling short stories and novelettes to women's magazines, men's magazines, general-interest magazines like Saturday Evening Post, and even newspapers. 

One men's magazine built itself around not running fiction: it was called True, and every item in it was nonfiction. (I loved it, but I also loved Bluebook, a men's magazine that ran many early Robert Heinlein novels in serial form. This was so long ago that "men's magazines" didn't have pictures of naked girls.)

For a long time, the short-story and novelette market has been a ghost of its former self. The only "popular" markets are a handful of fantasy, SF, and mystery magazines. University-funded "little" magazines will sometimes run a short story or two, but they pay little or nothing. High-end magazines like The New Yorker and Harper's will run short fiction, but usually only by established authors.

The chief markets for a new writer, therefore, are genre novels for the mass market (SF, fantasy, thrillers, romances, etc.) or for the young-adult market. YA novels are usually shorter (20,000 to 40,000 words—but then there's Harry Potter!). Most genre novels for adults start at 60,000 words and work their way up to fantasy series in which each novel is maybe 125,000-250,000 words long...and the series goes on for as many titles as readers will buy.

Most publishers' websites, if they have a page of advice for contributors, indicate the general length of the books they publish. But you can also get a sense of that by simply counting the words on two or three random pages of a book, averaging the numbers, and multiplying by the number of pages.

But bear in mind that layout and design can influence the size of a book. Sometimes a short novel can be "bulked up" with wide spaces between lines of large text. This gives purchasers the illusion that they've bought a lot of reading for the price of the book.

I don't want to discourage anyone from writing at whatever length they like. Short stories can be great reading, and also great training for writers aiming at novels. Two or three novellas, published together, can be quite marketable (preferably, however, if the author's already well known).

In general, I'd advise writing long. It's easier to cut than to add material. So if you want to sell a romance and you know the length is going to be 55,000 words, shoot for 65,000...and then go back through the manuscript and cut the 10,000 weakest words.

Some good news

The last few months have been decidedly nonfiction for me: I got swamped by the arrival of swine flu, which hugely increased traffic on my site H5N1, and hugely reduced my free time. I was also finishing a new book, Write Your Nonfiction Online (the bad link is now fixed) and just this afternoon sent in the revised manuscript. And I've been writing and editing for The Tyee, which is enormous fun.

But I've also thrown some old irons back in the fire. My agent in Toronto is exploring TV/film possibilities for three of my books—the new edition of Go Do Some Great Thing: The Black Pioneers of British Columbia, plus my novels Icequake and Lifter.

This isn't exactly a hot new development. Various people have inquired about film rights to the pioneers book over the years, and Lifter has been looked at a couple of times by the Disney people. When Icequake came out in 1979, a lot of people thought it would make a great but unproducible movie: The special effects would be too expensive. 

That, of course, was long before computer graphics came along. Now, Icequake could be pretty effective even in a made-for-TV movie.

Having grown up among movie people, I'm not holding my breath—and I'm not spending my percentage before I get it, either.

In the meantime, I've got a lot of new ideas for Henderson's Tenants, and while we were on holiday I got a single major idea for resurrecting a novel I did back in the late 90s—a project that never found a publisher. 

So now that the latest project is off my desk, I'm looking forward to doing some more fiction this summer.

Nineteen Eighty-Four after 60 years

Orwell's great novel was published on June 8, 1949. On the eve of its 60th birthday, a number of British authors talk about its influence, and the influence of other books: Orwell's 1984 sixty years on.

It's certainly been an important book in my own personal and professional life. On my third or fourth reading, I finally understood that Winston Smith is not a hopeless fighter for freedom. He's just hopeless. 

The entire bogus plot against Big Brother has been created by O'Brien, sending hypnotic messages to Winston through the telescreen: "We will meet in the place where there is no darkness." Winston's willingness to do anything to overthrow Big Brother shows that he has no more morals than O'Brien himself. Just as he had no loyalty to his own family, he has none to Julia.

Although one early reviewer (in a Labour newspaper) saw this aspect of the novel, most critics seem to have missed it. They needed a tragic hero, a convenient martyr to postwar Stalinism. 

Orwell certainly was attacking Stalin (the Stalinists, after all, killed his anarchist comrades in the Spanish Civil War). But his real warning was to his own side, the decent left-wingers in Labour. The philosophy of Oceania, after all, is Ingsoc—English socialism, monstrously corrupted by its own willingness to win power at any price. (With Gordon Brown's Labour government now imploding, Orwell seems as timely as ever.)

Apart from the political message, the lesson I gained from this reading of Orwell was not to trust surface meanings in fiction, and not to expect stock responses (like rooting for the "hero") to be of much use. That was a valuable lesson for any writer.

One writer's path to the first novel

What a surprise—last night I got a note from an old roommate at Columbia, Richard Beeson, whom I hadn't heard from in many years. He told me about the long, roundabout path he had to take to his first novel, Seduction of a Wanton Dreamer, and I thought it might be of interest to other writers:

I was so immersed in the music business that I had little time for anything else. I did keep trying to do my own writing (the reason I went to Columbia in the first place), but an opera job at Lincoln Center is all-consuming. 

I became orchestra manager at NYC Opera, thinking that would give me more free time. Big miscalculation. I started this book in 1988, the year after I became orchestra manager, and managed to finish the first part (which I thought then was the whole book) in 1991, but it didn't fly. 

I kept puttering with it, but simply didn't have the time to do it justice, until finally in late 1999 I bailed out of the job and "retired" as of Feb. 2000. Then I spent a year or so going through all my notes, including all the dreams I had logged. I even made a database of them.

Slowly I managed to formulate the plot and characters for the rest of the tale. I began to think of it as a many-book series, probably seven. When I had finished 3, I found an agent, but after a few months she said she didn't know what to do with them. She suggested I write a mystery instead (based on some of the material in the big books).

I did that, and had just finished it, when I was diagnosed with the big C, head and neck, stage 4. (This was in early 2004.) I managed to come back from that, but the experience changed my whole approach to my writing. 

I left that agent and spent the next 4 years rewriting the big book into one book comprising three parts. Also rewrote the "mystery," making it a thriller. I found a team of agents who were willing to represent the thriller, but they didn't even want to look at the book that really mattered. After a year, they gave up on the thriller.

At that point, I said to hell with it, I might as well self-publish. I had always been loath to follow that route, but the way the publishing industry was going, and given my age, I didn't think I had much choice. It could take me another five years to find an agent for a weird book like Seduction, and how many more years for the agent to find the publisher, etc. etc. This way it took less than a year to get the book "on the shelf," as it were. Also got to design my own cover, which I couldn't have done otherwise.

So now it's out, and in a few months I'll bring out the thriller.

Of course I'm delighted that Richard's brought out his book, especially after so many years, and I wish him every success with it. 

Like Richard, I long considered self-publication a racket—and it was, in the days of the vanity presses. But it is now possible to come to a businesslike deal with an electronic print-on-demand publisher that gets your work out there, on however modest a scale. If you've got any kind of knack for business and marketing, you should at least be able to get your investment back. 

If the book does sell pretty well under your own imprint, you may even be able to interest a commercial publisher in becoming its distributor. That could give you access to markets you could never reach while pitching it to booksellers with your car trunk full of copies.

As with Richard, determination is the key factor.

Dialogue in fiction

A commenter asked, a couple of days ago, about how to format dialogue in a manuscript. Much of the answer is in this section of Write a Novel, my online self-guided course.

But as long as I'm thinking about it, here are some general suggestions:

In North America, we set off dialogue with "double quotes." In Britain and many other Commonwealth countries, we set it off with 'single quotes.' Note that periods (and commas) go inside the close quote.

We can introduce dialogue, and identify the speaker, in several ways:

David said: "That's a terrible idea."

David said, "That's a terrible idea."

"That's a terrible idea," David said.

"That," said David, "is a terrible idea."

In general, David said: is a bit rare. Most writers seem to prefer David said, as an introduction. When the reference to the speaker comes after the quotation, the final sentence of the quote ends with a comma and close quote before explaining who's talking. If you choose to interrupt the dialogue with the explanation, the dialogue that follows said David doesn't take a capital letter.

A long-winded speaker may go on for two or more paragraphs. In that case, we use the quotation marks to indicate the start of each paragraph, but the end of only the final paragraph:

"That's a terrible idea.

"For one thing, it would be really expensive.

"For a second thing, I would probably get killed."

The missing close-quotes tell your readers that the same person is still talking. 

Every time you do include a David said or a Sarah replied, you're probably wasting your readers' time. The characters' manners of speech should be so distinctive that we instantly understand who's talking. Maybe you'll need an explanation at the beginning of the exchange between David and Sarah, but once they get going, we notice that David and Sarah don't sound anything like one another.

Some writers, lacking confidence in their readers' intelligence, will make their characters address each other by name at every opportunity:

"David, why did you come home so late tonight?"

"Sarah, you're always nagging me!"

"David, it's not nagging! I'm worried about you!"

"Give me a break, Sarah!"

If you and your sweetie talk that way, don't come to me—go find a counsellor. But do keep the he said-she said expressions to an absolute minimum.

Look again at that last exchange of dialogue. The question marks and exclamation marks (just one of each) go inside the close-quotes. They convey the tone of each speaker's statement. But if your characters are always yelling at each other, that should be clear from the content of the dialogue, not from the exclamation marks.

And how do we indent dialogue? Just like any other paragraph. A half-inch indent should be fine. Each time a different person speaks, we indent again. So every time David speaks, he starts with a new indented paragraph. When Sarah answers, new indented paragraph.

No one taught me this. When I was reading pulp science fiction magazines almost 60 years ago, I noticed how they displayed and punctuated dialogue. When I started writing my own SF on my mother's portable typewriter, I imitated the usage of the magazines. And when I started sending in my manuscripts, the editors were very happy with them because they didn't need line-by-line corrections. 

Editors are wonderful people, and if you give them almost no work to do, they'll think you're wonderful too.

Dialogue as generational dialect

Ran across a good article in this morning's Globe and Mail: The linguistic divide. Excerpt:

A University of Toronto sociolinguistics professor has discovered that those under 40 are much more likely to use the word "like" when narrating a story, than those over 40. As in "I'm like, 'What are you talking about?' " instead of "I said, 'What are you talking about?' " 

This linguistic difference is a key demographic marker, says Sali Tagliamonte, who has published a paper exploring the use of "be like" in the scholarly journal Language Variation and Change. 

"The use of 'like' is a watershed. It captures a change in how people narrate their stories," she says. "We think it came from California in the 1980s and it gained prestige as a trendy and socially desirable way to voice a speaker's inner experience."

I couldn't find the original article (and you have to subscribe to the journal to see anything more than the abstracts), but this brings up a good point for fiction writers. 

We tend to think of our own speech as "normal," and in dialogue most of our characters will speak as we do. If you're a teenager writing about teenagers, that's probably fine. But if you're a teenager writing a historical novel, or a fantasy, your characters may still sound like 21st-century teens. (And if you're a 50-something writing young-adult fiction, you're likely to get into big trouble!)

As a writer and as an English teacher, I've paid close attention to speech patterns and usage for over 50 years. I well recall when "like" emerged in Beat Generation novels, cheerfully plagiarized from black jazz musicians by white kids like Jack Kerouac. The LSD converts in the 1960s used "like" a lot as a way (I guess) of conveying what their hallucinations were, uh, like. Eventually it mutated (young people would say "morphed") into a synonym for "said."

And as a soon-to-retire teacher, I could predictably paralyze a class with hilarity just by speaking the way the students did.

To strengthen your dialogue, then, listen hard. Notice the vocabulary and cadence of English spoken by your grandparents or your grandchildren. When you read novels written in the 1950s (or 1850s), pay attention to the dialogue. 

Did Victorian Londoners really speak in that ornate style? Actually, they probably did; it was a society that enjoyed reading and being read to, and cherished big vocabularies. (Even then, notice the class and generational differences in the dialogue of Dickens's characters.)

Also notice the words and expressions that don't show up in, say, Jack Kerouac or Norman Mailer's early work. Chances are that much of your own vocabulary stems from developments in the language since then. You could create an awkward anachronism by having your World War II platoon talking like one on patrol in Baghdad.

Quite apart from ensuring historical accuracy, listening for usage and dialect makes you notice what's new—expressions coming into the language from all kinds of sources. Picking up on them can sensitize you to the language and make your future dialogue that much richer.

Manuscript format and word processors

A reader sent an interesting question the other day:

What are the rules to numbering pages of a novel?
Does every page need a number? If so, top or bottom of each page?

I also read somewhere, that last names should be on each page before submitting to a publisher.
I take a deep breath here, because I have over two hundred pages completed without numbers/name and my wonderful reliable computer does not have a format that includes the inserts.

Microsoft Word costs more than I can dish out right now. Is there any other way?

Good questions.

Yes, normally a manuscript does need a number on each page, usually in the upper right corner but sometimes at the bottom center or right. Putting the author's name at the top of each page is a fairly common practice, but not essential. (It's just insurance, in case part of the manuscript is misplaced in an office full of manuscripts!)

Here's one way around the cost of Microsoft Word: Get one of the free downloadable word processors like Open Office.

You might also try a web-based word processor like ThinkFree, Google Docs or Zoho. I haven't used them much, but they seem to handle most routine word-processing chores. And they're free.

It shouldn't be hard to learn the basics of whatever free word processor you pick, including how to insert page numbers. Then copy your existing manuscript and paste it into a file in the new word processor. You may have to make some formatting changes, but basically that should work fairly well.

Also, visit the websites of the publishers you plan to submit to. See what they require. In many cases, they may just want an electronic version of the manuscript. Whatever they want, supply it. Remember that it may be a personal achievement for you, but it's just work for your editor. Make it as easy for her as possible.

Blogging the writing of a new book

I've started a blog for a new book just getting under way: Write Your Nonfiction Book Online. After using blogs (including this one) to create and promote three books, it seems natural to do it for a fourth. Blogs make good workspaces for print projects, especially those requiring access to online resources. And once the book is out, the blog becomes a promotional space and a way to update and correct the text.

It's also now possible, of course, to write and publish online, so fiction writers may find some of the content of the new blog useful for that purpose also.

Hazards of being a blogging novelist

Guy Gavriel Kay has an entertaining item in today's Globe and Mail, about the bad things that can happen to successful novelists who interact online with their readers: Release the fans! Excerpt:

George R.R. Martin is the hugely successful purveyor of an ongoing, seven-volume fantasy series called A Song of Ice and Fire. Four books are done. The first three came quickly, then there was a five-year wait for the fourth. 

The first indicated publication date for the fifth instalment, fiercely awaited, was 2006. That has rather obviously been missed: Martin is still writing it. The natives are restless. 

How restless? Well, on his blog, cutely called Not a Blog, Martin fired back two weeks ago at what he called “a rising tide of venom” about how late he is. 

Seems some of his loyal and devoted readers are savagely attacking him for taking holidays, for watching football in the fall, for attending conventions, doing workshops, editing a volume of short stories, even for being “60 years old and fat” (I'm quoting here, trust me) – the implication being he might drop dead before fulfilling his obligation to do nothing else but finish the damned series.

Publishing digitally

Via today's Globe and Mail, an article worth reading and pondering—even if you haven't published yet: Who gets the biggest piece of the digital pie? Excerpt:

There has not been a wholesale overthrow of the traditional book in favour of portable handheld devices such as the Apple iPhone and Sony Reader, or even the home computer. 

It's estimated that no more than 3 per cent of total annual retail book sales in North America can be attributed to digital consumption, and most of that is occurring in the United States. 

But in the last year or so there have been harbingers of what veteran publishing guru Jason Epstein calls “a historic paradigm shift.” And the “ongoing and accelerating interest,” as Illingworth describes it, has anxious authors and jittery publishers bobbing and weaving around the issue of what's a fair split of the revenues in this Brave New World.

When Updike and Cheever Came to Visit

One of the great pleasures of the new century is that Dick Cavett writes a blog on the New York Times. In his latest post, he writes about When Updike and Cheever Came to Visit. Excerpt:

What if we could get John Cheever and John Updike?” someone said.

“Together. On the same show!” The fantasy came true.

But the greatest pleasure of the post is Cavett's own lovely, funny prose. If you're tragically too young to remember when he owned late-night TV, his posts will both make you realize the depth of your loss, and almost make up for it. Dick Cavett should be designated a National Treasure.

Publish and perish

A gloomy but relevant article in today's Globe and Mail: Publish, and your book will probably perish. While the examples are mostly Canadian, the situation is the same everywhere. Excerpt:

A book's promotion was also, remembers Toronto-based fiction writer Andrew Pyper, about "sharing rides in Hondas to readings in church basements in small towns" - a phenomenon, after having published four books in the last 12 years, he still deems "the core of the thing." 

Indeed, [Margaret] Atwood - who once, early in her career, did a book signing in the men's socks and underwear section of an Edmonton department store ("I think it was because it was near the escalator") - continues to call publishing "an art and craft with a business component." 

"But now," adds Pyper, "there's this additional virtual [promotion] apparatus of sites and blogs and whatever. ... Do these things actually work? Nobody seems to know."

I sympathize with Atwood: For my first nonfiction book, I was stationed in a Vancouver department store, where someone asked me where the men's shirts were. (The department store, a major national chain, is now defunct.)

Top 100 Creative Writing Blogs

I'm happy to see that this site is included (#81) in a list of the Top 100 Creative Writing Blogs. By all means explore the other sites—you're likely to find some good advice.