Thus Spake Zarathustra

“I’ve always been famous. It’s just that nobody knew.”

— Lady Gaga, Fox News, May 2009

The First Rule About Fight Scenes

The first rule about fight scenes is not to discuss fight scenes.

Ok, well, when you end up punching your own face in a parking lot, don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Tomorrow, I’m going to have a guest blogger, Rayne Hall. She’ll be teaching a workshop on ‘Writing Fight Scenes‘, which starts on 1 June 2011: www.romance-ffp.com/event.cfm?EventID=303 and she’s going to give us a little taste. And no, I don’t  get a kickback for signing up people for the class, I just can’t stress enough how much I recommend Rayne as a writing mentor.

Rayne has been one of my online buddy friends for a while. We were both on the Online Writers Workshop together, and I also continue to belong to a smaller, more select group of professional authors that she runs, called, cleverly enough, the Professional Authors. The purpose of the group is to help authors who have made one or two sales make the leap to a full time career earning a living wage as a writer.

On Joe Konrath’s blog, he was discussing recently the rule of 10,000.

I’m currently reading a book that was recommended to me by my buddy Henry Perez, called Outliers: The Story of Success. It mentions the 10,000 Hour Rule. In short, no one becomes an expert at something without having invested 10,000 hours in it.

I found it interesting to apply this to my career. It took me twelve years to become published. While holding down a fulltime job, I still managed to write over a million words during that time–roughly 15 to 20 hours a week. Guess what? That’s 10,000 hours.

How do you become an expert at something? You put in the time. One way or another. Two common ways of putting it for writers are in hours and words. You write a million words. You work 10,000 hours at it. But there is one other important thing we shouldn’t overlook. You also have to allow yourself time to absorb the rules of writing.

Yes, ultimately, we learn by writing. There is no substitute for BIC-HOK: Butt In Chair, Hands On Keyboard. But unless you have infinity, you don’t want to bang away randomly like a mathematician’s monkey aping Shakespeare. You absorb the rules of writing in two ways, by reading, reading and reading, and by analyzing what you read. You exchange critiques with other writers.

There’s a point at which most writers get burnt out on writer’s classes, writer’s blogs, critique groups, and all that jazz. After a while, you absorb the rules to such an extent that you don’t need them anymore. That’s natural, and all to the good, but don’t make the mistake of thinking that classes and critique groups aren’t worth it. At a certain stage along your journey, study can make the difference between someone who dabbles for fun and someone who is serious about perfecting their craft.

I’ve taken some of Rayne’s classes, and she is an awesome teacher. She will hold your hand if you need it, but also kick your ass until you deliver the best damn scene you can. I highly recommend her class,  Writing Fight Scenes.

Does Giving Away Free Ebooks Work?

Novel Rejected? There’s an Ebook Gold Rush! begins with a tale of an author who just tossed a few backlist titles online and suddenly started finding the cash rolling into her bank account.

After a few of those stories, they pause to announce in all caps, WE NOW INSERT THIS PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT BECAUSE WE DO NOT WANT YOU CALLING US WHEN YOUR e-BOOK TANKS:

“We have less than 50 people who are making more than $50,000 per year. We have a lot who don’t sell a single book,” says Mark Coker, founder of Smashwords.com, a Web site that helped launch indie publishing.

“When I load all our numbers on a spreadsheet, it’s the typical power curve,” he says. “On the left, there’s a skinny area of the chart where people are knocking it out of the park. And then we have a very, very long tail off to the right, where some titles sell very few at all.”

Belle, the Amazon veep, adds,“There are a lot of books, even low-priced, on Kindle that are not selling at all.”

My own experience with offering a free loss-leader on Smashwords is that for every hundred free downloads of Initiate (Book 1), one person will buy Taboo (Book 2). So a 1% sell through. Not that great, considering it’s taken 25 days to achieve those 500 downloads/5 sales.

I’m still hovering between those who haven’t sold a single book and those who are making more than $50,000 a year. And $50,000 a year isn’t that much. As my husband likes to remind me, it’s not much return on investment for a graduate degree.

http://www.sfnovelists.com/2011/05/07/experimenting-in-ebooks/#comment-10742

3 Things Not to Do When Writing Your First Page

I was fortunate enough to attend the Los Angeles Festival of Books. Misque Press didn’t have a booth, although I did bump into some fans and signed some print books. That was pretty sweet.

I was also given a free (unsolicited) book myself. I wasn’t too surprised to flip over the book and see that the imprint was AuthorHouse, a vanity press. I accepted the book because (1) I never turn down a free book and (2) I was curious to know if this was actually a viable way to gain new readers. Is it worth the expense and trouble for an author who is vanity-press published, self-published or with a small press to foist books upon passing strangers?

My conclusion?

No.

The problem is that passing strangers are likely to include only a tiny proportion of your target audience. This book, for instance, was not my usual genre. I’m still trying to figure out what genre it is. It’s not even clear if it is supposed to be fiction or non-fiction. The back blurb doesn’t tell me, the title makes no sense, and the cover art is generic. So the book is not off to a good start.

The first page made three mistakes which immediately made me want to stop reading. I don’t mean grammatical errors or typos. I suppose those would have put me off as well, but that’s so obvious, I don’t think I’d bother to belabor the point. No, these were mistakes which I’ve seen newbie writers make, but seeing them in the relentless clarity of black on white reminded me of why these are not good writing.

Because I don’t like writing negative reviews, I’m going to paraphrase the book rather than quote directly.

1. First and Second Paragraph:

Help! Help! Please don’t kill me! (Scream – Scream) Don’t chop off my foot! You monster, leave me alone! Oh! Oh! Not the other one too! Help! Please don’t kill me!

Just kidding!! I gothchya! I just wrote that to get yur attention.

Mistake One: The book starts out with an apparent attack. There are no quotes, and the description formatting is odd: (Scream – Scream)…? Wtf? But anyway, some kind of assault seems to be in progress, a pretty bloody and gruesome assault. So I’m pegging the genre as horror, true crime, suspense, mystery, dark speculative or at least dark something. Although the cover, with its field of daisies, didn’t exactly scream “dark” so, it’s not without some head-scratching.

Then the second paragraph hits, and I realized the whole first paragraph is just a writer trying to be “clever.” The writer even tells us so: you, Dear Reader, are so dumb, that I can only get your attention by blood and gore, even if that’s not remotely related to my topic. So I’ll deliver blood and gore in the all important First Paragraph, and then, once you’re hooked, let you in on the secret of my actual topic.

Why This Doesn’t Work: The reader, believe it or not, can actually close the book just as easily after the second paragraph as after the first. You cannot “trick” the reader into reading by offering false drama.

What You Should Do Instead: Begin as you mean to go on. By all means, start with torture and murder, if you are writing a thriller. If you are writing a sweet romance about a nurse and a millionaire and a secret baby, probably not. What good does it do to attract an audience to a show they won’t like? Promise only what you deliver.

2. Third and Fourth Paragraphs:

Hello. My name is Star Jones. I’m a high school student at Dearling High. I have an important message for you that I need you to listen to and heed. You’ll see. Right now, I am looking forward to going on a trip with my best friend. She’s the greatest. But I have a bad feeling about this trip, like it might be cancelled.

There, what did I tell you? My mom just came in and said it was cancelled. Drat!

Mistake Two: Compared to the atrocity in the beginning, this is a minor annoyance. But addressing the reader is difficult to pull off. Discounting nineteenth century literature, I have seen it done with breathtaking aplomb to delicious effect one or two times. This was not one of them.

To add injury to insult, the sentence that follows is exactly what inspired that most repeated of all writing truisms, Show Don’t Tell.

Why This Doesn’t Work: The narrator is so busy speaking to the reader that we have no idea what the scene looks like, or if the narrator is even embedded in a scene. Is this a novel, with scenes and characters, or is the narrator telling us something meant to enlighten and persuade us, like a spiritual lesson? It’s not clear here. (After skimming ahead, I reached the tentative conclusion that the author was trying to write some kind of extended parable, in which the main character would learn deep spiritual lessons and then pass them on to the reader. But it didn’t work well, because the attempt to filter the message through the fiction format just came across as an awkward hybrid.)

What You Should Do Instead: Newbies in writing groups bludgeon one another with this moldy pickle of advice, Show-Don’t-Tell, way too often, and sometimes not to the betterment of the piece of writing in question.

In this case, for instance, it would work just as well to say, Tell Don’t Show. Because this paragraph is trying to do both, and doing neither well. If you’re going to be relating the action blow-by-blow, then you should go all the way. Have mom poke her head in and say the trip is cancelled, describe the surroundings, etc. That would be “showing.”

But you don’t have to do it that way. If you want this to be an intimate conversation between the narrator and reader, you could also just tell the reader about the events. “I was looking forward to the trip, but shortly before I was to leave, my mom told me it had been cancelled.” That’s telling.

Either could serve the story. Just make up your mind.

3. Fifth Paragraph:

I think yur gonna like what you hear. Some people say I’m too young to be so wise, or that if I were so wise I wouldn’t use words like “yur” and “gonna” but that’s just how I speak. My mom has taught me how to use an adult vocabulary, though, so I can sound older when I want to, especially when discussing important matters. It doesn’t matter to me if you believe I am a real teenager.

Mistake Three: For whatever incomprehensible reason, the author has decided that writing out slang words like “yur” and “gonna” makes her character/narrator sound like a teenager. It doesn’t, but what’s worse than the false note in slang is that the author is so uncomfortable with her character’s vocabulary that the author feels the need to draw attention to the slang by trying to justify it.

Why This Doesn’t Work: The author’s “preemptive strike” against the reader’s inability to believe the main character is authentic just makes the reader aware of how discomforting the whole mess is. Then the author becomes downright defensive and tells the reader she doesn’t care if the reader believes in the character. Let me call that bluff. If I can’t believe in your character, why should I read the book?

What You Should Do Instead: First of all, treat slang with caution. It’s easy to sound like a doofus. But for goodness’ sake, if you do try to use slang, don’t draw attention to your weakness by trying to defend it. A preemptive strike is not a good policy in literature, especially if your attempt to bomb the enemy aircraft on the ground turns out more like Pakistan in 1971 than Israel in 1967.

***

In the author’s bio, the author admits, “there was no plan as to how the subject matter was to be put across,” and unfortunately, this shows. The book was first published on Amazon in 2004 and as yet has not one review. Of course, a better first page wouldn’t help if there were not also another good three hundred some pages to follow. I’m not sure how good those pages are. I never reached page 2.

Nook or Die

Remember that post where I descended into an infantile rant against B&N, cursing so excessively that some of my four letter words had five letters? Hopefully not, because I erased it, and it’s a good thing too, because it turns out the delay getting my books onto Nookbooks was, ahem, entirely my fault. Damme.

Moving on. The good news is that Initiate and Taboo are now available for the Nook! Woohoo! Finally!

Here’s the link:

The Unfinished Song: Initiate (Book 1)

The Unfinished Song: Taboo (Book 2)

Now, Nook lovers, if you haven’t already gerrymandered your own copy from the DMR-free Kindleeditions, please go buy now, because I hate looking at the number 0.  😛

An extra big Thank You to SF Reader, Octopus Ink and Kiki Deister for having reviews up before the book itself. You guys rock.

Killing Off Characters

Sometimes, it is true, writers have to commit murder.

Some stories require us to kill off characters. I get that. It can make a story more real, more believable, even more satisfying, if it’s the right character. Even if it is a character whose death we grieve rather than cheer, it can feel “right” and perfect the story.

Sometimes, however, a character dies in a book I’m reading or movie I’m watching, especially if I was taken by surprise, I feel like, “Damn, I don’t need that extra dark in my day right now, thanks much.”

If I see a movie about the Holocaust or read the memoir of a Rwandan refugee, as I often do, I go in knowing what to expect, and I can decide ahead of time if I am up to something heavy. But if the story has been billed as a light romantic comedy and then suddenly Mommy and Daddy die in a car accident and it’s all weeping orphans, I am not a happy camper. As an example, take Stepmom which was billed as a comedy but [SPOILER] ends with a dead woman and weepy kids. Excuse me, but that’s a cheap shot. Television and books do the same thing all the time. Hm, story growing stale? Let’s kill someone off. Yeah, that will be deep.

Guess what? Just killing off a character does not make your story deep.

Making your character live is what deepens your story.

This is much on my mind as I work on the revisions for Book 3, The Unfinished Song: Sacrifice. As you might guess from the title, one or more characters might bite the dust. And I’m trying hard to make sure that no death is gratuitous, or there just to serve my plot rather than my theme. I am trying to ask myself, “How would I feel about this as a reader? Would I throw the book across the room?”

Of course, in fantasy, it’s also easy to bring characters back from the dead. I guess that can be cheap too. Fans of realism in fiction (when people laud “realism” they always mean “pessimism”) will argue that it cheapens death if a character can simply wake up a vampire or be brought back by a resurrection spell. I grant the point. It’s also something I love about the genre.

There are some books that can pull off a character death, and even a character resurrection, without making it tawdry. One of my favorites is Passage, by Connie Willis. The book is about a team of scientists who are studying near-death experiences by simulating death chemically, so it makes sense that someone dies for real, as a contrast to the simulated experience… and it is one of the gripping questions of the book whether it will be a death experience or a near-death/resurrection experience. I won’t spoil this one. What’s wonderful about the book is that either ending could have fit her theme, and so I was prepared to believe and weep either way. Beautiful book.

I fear my book won’t be in the same league, but I hope it makes sense. Also, still to come, there’s Book 4, The Unfinished Song: Roots.