One Word at a Time

I’ve been hard at work for the past month on the rough draft of the third in my trilogy of science-fiction novels.  I call the series “The Anthanian Imperative,”  and each book gets an identifying color.  The first is “Blue,” the second “Green,” and the third, “Red.”  The colors are actually integral to the plot of each book.  “Blue” and “Green” are finished and ready for an editor or agent to take a look at them and I’m currently trying to sell “Blue.”  (Anybody interested?)  But it’s “Red” I want to talk about here.

I’ve been working on “Red” off and on for about six months, and I’m about halfway through the rough draft.  Right now, I’ve got about 30,000 words down, and plenty of ideas for the rest of the novel.  The whole plot line is worked out in my head, and I’ve got 30 or 40 pages of handwritten notes that I’ve accumulated over the past several years of thinking about it.  That’s the same way I wrote “Blue” and “Green.”  But what’s different about “Red” now is the intensity I’ve been able to give to it, a ferocity I rarely gave to the other two.  I’ve been able to sit down almost every day (except Sunday when I write this blog) and pound out about 1000 words.  Occasionally I’ll do more work on the plot line and write more notes, especially details about the characters and their activities.

A thousand words a day is a great way to write a book.  I’m not saying it’s for everybody but it works for me.  It’s a heady mechanism for getting the job done.  I can actually look forward to seeing the final draft, when I’ll start the revision process.  For me, revising is easier than writing the first draft, because the hard work has already been done.  If you want to write a novel, going at it this way is (I feel) the best way to do it.  One word at a time, a few hundred a day, whatever suits you.  Plant butt in chair and write, even if all you do is complete a character sketch.

Top Ten Books

I noticed a week or so ago on the website Squidoo a list of the top ten books read in the last fifty years.  They gave a listing of the top books sold in the world in the last fifty years, and they assume this means those books were the top fifty read.  I suspect that’s probably true, but my blog today is not to question their use of the words “sold” and “read.”  I have something else in mind.

Here’s the list:
1.  The Holy Bible
2.  Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung
3.  The Harry Potter series (all seven books together), by J. K. Rowling
4.  The Lord of the Rings series, by J. R. R. Tolkien
5.  The Alchemist, by Paulo Coelho
6.  The DaVinci Code, by Dan Brown
7.  The Twilight Saga, by Stephanie Meyer
8.  Gone With the Wind, by Margaret Mitchell
9.  Think and Grow Rich, by Napoleon Hill
10.  The Diary of Anne Frank

The list interests me.  There are a few surprises, such as Think and Grow Rich, by Napoleon Hill.  I’ve never heard of the book and wouldn’t have thought it would have made the list in a million years.  Live and learn.  The Bible coming in first is no surprise, it always has.  I was a little surprised to notice that the Koran didn’t place on the list.  With the millions of Muslims in the world and their almost fanatical obsession with the Koran, I would have expected it to place somewhere on the list.  I’m not surprised about the Quotations from Mao Tse-Tung, though.  Every one of the billions of Chinese living in China during the reign of Mao Tse-Tung was required to buy the book, so it’s no wonder it appears on the list.

But looking over the list, what I found most interesting was the number of books that were written in English.  Six of the ten were in English.  The Bible, of course, was written in several different languages, notably Greek and Aramaic (I’m not a biblical scholar, so can’t address this fully here), and the Quotations of Mao Tse-Tung was written in Chinese.  Paulo Coelho’s book was written in Portuguese and Anne Frank wrote in Dutch.  But all the others were written in English, and many of those in the last several years–Harry Potter, DaVinci Code, Twilight Saga.  Gone With the Wind was published in 1937.

But what to make of the preponderance of books in English?  English is not the most widely spoken language in the world.  More people speak Spanish or Chinese as their primary language.  English, though, has come to be more of a world-wide language than any other, and many people in other countries learn to speak English as a second language.  That’s not to say that The DaVinci Code, for example, was read in non-English countries in the original English; they read the translation, just as we in the USA read translations of Anne Frank’s diary.  A scientist would say English has penetrated the other countries.  But that can’t be the whole explanation.  There are many excellent writers in other languages–just look at the Nobel Prizes for literature, for example.  Perhaps publishing and marketing account for the high ratio of English books.  Spending, not only for publication but also for translation and advertising, and the ability to flood the market in a foreign country might play a role, I don’t know.  But somehow English has become the language of choice for writing.

Take note, all you aspiring writers out there, there’s hope for you yet.

A Friendly Book Review

Have you ever read a book, especially a new one, then wrote a review of it?  With the ease of publication by electronic means now available that results in new books popping up on Kindles, Nooks, iPads, etc., the chances that someone you know will have a novel or a non-fiction book that you can purchase on your e-reader in the near future are growing all the time.   Conceivably, a friend of yours could even have a traditionally published book that will appear on the shelf in your local bookstore.  Out of friendship, you may buy that book and take it home, or download it onto your reader.  Then, presumably, you will read it.

Wonderful.  Once you’ve read it–and this applies more to electronic texts than printed ones–you may be tempted to go to Amazon (or wherever the book came from) and write a review, or at the very least, give a simple rating of the book in terms of zero to five stars.  Be careful.

I haven’t published a book yet, either electronically or on paper, but I’ve made a conscious decision in the last several weeks that, from now on, I will not write reviews of books published by my friends.  For one main reason: it puts too much pressure on the reviewer.

So many reviews by close friends have a tendency to be automatic “5-star” glowing reviews and ultra-high recommendations.  Of course, the reviewer does this so as not to jeopardize the friendship and alienate the friend.  (There are other reasons, too, but I won’t go into those.)  That may be a good idea in preserving the friendship, but it doesn’t do the book–or the writing ability of the writer–any good.

If someone writes a review of a book or story I’ve written, I’d like it to be as honest as possible.  Getting a 5-star review tells me very little about whether the reviewer liked the book or not.  It’s very rare for someone to like everything about a book, about every little thing and every little detail that went into making it.  I need to know what went wrong (at least what the reviewer thinks went wrong) about the book.  The dialogue, the characterization, the plot, the setting, the front cover, the picture of me on the back cover.  Only in that way can I improve and write a better book the next time.  You aren’t doing me any favors by giving a 5-star review if you didn’t think the book was worth it.  If you don’t want to give a knee-jerk 5-star review, then don’t review the book at all.  Just read it.  That’s what I intend to do.

Some may say I’m just bailing out on giving reviews.  I don’t mind writing a review, but my intention is not to make people angry.  I just want to give them my honest opinion.  If a writer friend insists on an honest opinion, and I didn’t like the book, the result could be disastrous (though not necessarily).  I would rather preserve the friendship.  So I ask you to do the same.  Don’t give me a fake review.  I will get lots of reviews anyway from people who don’t know me, even from professional reviewers, so not having a few reviews from friends doesn’t do any harm.

Thanks.

One Thing After Another

Have you ever heard the old expression, “If it isn’t one thing, it’s something else.”?  Writing a book, actually writing anything, is a good way to come up against that expression on a regular basis.  I’ve written two science-fiction novels now, and am hotly in the process of writing the rough draft of a third.  (They form a trilogy, so there’d better be three of them.)   But each book is unique, and each has had its own problems.  The first required that I learn how to write fiction from the basic elements to the most sophisticated concepts since I’d never written fiction before.  I have written numerous scientific papers, but that’s a far cry from writing fiction, and each draft of the book–and there have been many–was written using what I’d learned up to that point.

Some of the problems have been large-scale, such as what order the chapters are arranged, or how to handle the personality of each of the main characters.  Other problems have been smaller, like, does the character have blond hair or dark?  Most of the problems, though, have come in the form of inter-personal relationships.  For example, how does character A relate to character B and how does B react?  This can get tricky, because if character A does one thing, it can affect the actions of many of the other characters later on, and even affect the outcome of the novel.  In many cases I’ve had a character act a certain way because it results in the conclusion I wanted, but that character also wound up looking foolish or stupid or insensitive or something, and I’ve had to go back and change him/her.  That just brings up more problems.

The end result of a novel has to be a unified whole.  A novel can’t ramble on and on, neither can it be too short or unsustainable.  There has to be just the right amount of discussion of what happens during each scene in the novel, or the whole thing will fall flat on its face, and problems arise constantly about handling each scene.  Broken down into its simplest terms, a novel is really nothing more than a series of words formed into sentences, sentences formed into paragraphs, and paragraphs into chapters.  Every word on every page is a choice among hundreds of thousands in the English language (and, if you write sci-fi, even some that aren’t in the language) and the arrangement of those words makes problems itself.  Why, I sometimes ask myself, would anyone want to sit down and work for a year or more just to put eighty or a hundred thousand words in some coherent order on several pieces of paper?  You have to want to do it.  You have to want to face the question every day, what word will I use here?  To face every day, the thousands and thousands of questions and problems, large and small, that arise, and attempt to answer them.

I’ve heard of people who’ve written a hundred or more novels in their lifetime, and my puny two make me look like an unmitigated slacker, especially since neither of mine have been published.  But I’ve met the problems of writing a novel, and I believe I’ve done a reasonably good job.  Undoubtedly, an agent, then an editor, is going to want to change some things, bringing about more problems, but I’m ready for them.  It’s been tricky, tiring, and brain-teasing, but fun.  Anybody else out there want to try it?

Writing: Good vs. Bad

I’ve been reading Tea Obreht’s book, The Tiger’s Wife, this past week, and it’s brought up a point about writing I’ve been thinking about ever since I got into this business.  First of all, though, a little about the book.

I’d heard a lot about the book over the past year, so when I was at the bookstore about a week and a half ago and I saw it on a display table, I decided to get my own copy.  At first I put it in my “books-to-be-read pile” on the table by the window, but after I finished the book I was reading, I couldn’t resist tackling it because I’d heard it was so good.  It had made a lot of personal favorites lists, and I wanted to see what all the fuss was about.  So far I haven’t been disappointed.

The book is about a young doctor, Natalia, in an unnamed Balkan country during wartime, probably the breakup of the old Yugoslavia of the 90′s.  She’s looking for details about her grandfather’s recent death, but the war has made finding out what happened difficult.  The tiger’s wife is a story he’d told her when he was still living, along with another story about the “deathless man.”  (I’ll leave it to you to read the book and find out what that means.)  If you haven’t read the book, I highly recommend it, and I’ll undoubtedly put it on my list of recommended books on this blogsite.  But enough said about the book.

The book is well-written, certainly, and it falls into the rather nebulous category of “I couldn’t put it down.”  That’s usually not strictly true, of course, but it indicates a book so well-written that a reader finds himself or herself captured in the story, and reads and reads for so long that it only seems like he/she “couldn’t put it down.”  I’ve been reading it for about a week now, and I’m fascinated by the story and the fluid way Ms. Obreht tells it.  It’s like the story flows from the page into your brain without impediment.  And that’s what I want to talk about.

I’ve always wanted to write that well.  I’ve refined my style over the years to try to write as though–as it’s usually put by the masters of writing education–the writing is “invisible” to the reader.  Other people say, if it sounds like writing, re-write it.  In other words, the information in the prose of your style shouldn’t be hindered in any way in getting out to the reader.  The author should be totally out of sight and out of mind.  I suspect Ms. Obreht’s style and work would fit that description very well.

But that’s not really true, is it?  An author can never be out of sight or out of mind.  The author is always right there in the words.  The choice of words, the way the author strings those words together, those are all a part of the author’s style, and can never be “invisible.”  A reader may like the way a particular author strings words together to form sentences, and the way he puts sentences together into paragraphs, and the info of those sentences may flow easily into the reader’s mind, but the author is never invisible.  He’s always there, always glaring back at you from the printed page, or from the screen of your e-reader.  That’s what makes a good or bad author.  That’s what distinguishes John Updike from, say, Janet Evanovich.  It is that stringing of words, phrases, sentences, paragraphs and so on that makes a book so good that you end up saying, ”I couldn’t put it down.”  If a writer is invisible, he’s not saying anything.

A Writers Conference

I just got back from attending a writers conference at the University of New Mexico, and here are a few thoughts about it.  Just a one-day affair with a box lunch, I heard from a couple of editors and a few agents and authors.  The most significant part of the conference from my point of view was the pitch I got to make to an editor.   Though as an editor, normally charged with acquiring books for publication, at this conference, at least in my case, he didn’t ask about acquiring my novel (he isn’t in the business of getting science fiction) but he did give me good feedback partly on the novel, but mainly on my query letter.  I had given him my business card with a short excerpt from my query letter (actually one of my letters) on the back and he noted it seemed to be too detailed.  Perhaps I’m going into too much detail and should revise it.  I’ll do that when I start querying again.

I heard a good talk from a veteran screenwriter who gave those who want to write screenplays (not me, but a screenplay is a sort of shortened novel, and the techniques for writing a screenplay can be used in writing a novel) several tips to make a screenplay worthy of the attention of a producer.  A screenplay is divided into scenes of 10 to 12 minutes each, and each scene has to follow seven basic elements to be effective.  The same can be said of scenes in a novel.  Following the same idea and the same elements can help you write your novel.  Get a good book on writing screenplays and use some of the techniques in there in your novel.

Another talk I heard was from a mystery writer, though his workshop was directed more toward writing a novel in general.  What applies to a mystery can be applied to almost any novel.  Time well spent.

In short, a day of my life spent perfecting my craft.  That is, my chosen craft of novel writing which, at this point, I’m not sure I’ve perfected to the point where I can sell a novel.  You never stop learning.

Question for discussion:  Is it Writers Conference (a conference for more than one writer), or should it be Writer’s Conference (a conference for and about writers)?  Personally, I prefer the latter.

A Picture and a Few Words

There’s an unusual aspect of the English language (and perhaps other languages as well) that I’ve noticed the past several months.  I’ve identified a concept we need a good word for because we don’t have one.  The problem I’m talking about is the terminology for taking pictures digitally.

Back when pictures were first taken, images were recorded on a piece of glass with a photosensitive layer of silver nitrate.  Later, a flexible plastic called cellulose nitrate came into use, and this is what Edison used when he invented his motion picture camera.  Since the cellulose nitrate was a thin material and the photosensitive material was extruded onto it in a thin film, the material came to be called “film.”  Later, cellulose acetate replaced cellulose nitrate because the nitrate form was extremely flammable, and the acetate form was called “Safety Film.”  Cellulose acetate film exists even today in all sorts of forms and formats, color and black-and-white, but it’s being replaced by digitally capturing images by digital cameras.

And that’s where the problem lies.  Back when film was in its prime, making a movie or a documentary or taking a motion picture of a news event was called “filming” it.  Later we had videotape and doing the same with a videotape camera was called “taping” it.  For example, first they “filmed” TV shows, then they began “taping” them.  But what of capturing digital images, either still or moving?  What do we call it?  I’ve seen news reports where the author of the report used the word “film” or “filming,” probably because he/she didn’t have a word that means “capturing images in digital format.”  I even commented on one of these and chided the author (as I recall, it was a report from a reputable news service) for using the term “film” when the images that person was talking about were obviously digital and there wasn’t any film associated with the report at all.

So, what do we call it?  When we had film, we called it “filming.”  When we had tape, we called it “taping.”  What word do we use now?  “Digitizing?”  “Digitally capturing moving images?”  “Digitalling?”  “Digitalis?”  (Well, anyway…)  Leave us not be too ridiculous.  We need a word that identifies the action of making a digital image; that is to say, we need a good digital verb.  I haven’t come up with a good term as yet.  Suggestions anyone?

Risk Taking

I’ve come to the conclusion that becoming a writer is a risky business.  The important word here is “business,” not so much the word ”risky,” though that’s a part of it.  After all, writing is a business, as much as accounting or medicine or law or installing air conditioning.  And while all those vocations have certain inherent risks, there are risks to being a writer too.

If you’re an accountant or a lawyer or a doctor, you can count on a market for your talents being there when you start work.  With writing, that’s not guaranteed.  If you write books about zombies, or hungry girls competing for food, you may feel there’s a ready market for your books, but the fickle winds of publishing can change faster than you can say “iPod.”  What’s hot today may not be tomorrow.  That’s why they (that ubiquitous “they”) tell you to write your own kind of book, and don’t try to imitate others.  Do your own thing.  Play by your own rules.  If you don’t, then by the time you publish your novel about werewolves in London, the fad will be over and you’ll have to pay back most of your hard-earned advance.

But that’s just the point, isn’t it?  If you take a big chance and write the book you want to write, there’s no guarantee that anybody will read it, even if it fits within a well-known genre, like science fiction or mystery or even a cookbook.  You may have a great idea for a novel, maybe even a great idea for a book that will define a new genre, and you seriously hope it will be read around the world, but you (and I) are at the mercy of the winds of fashion, and that great book or genre could languish on the shores of abandon, and you’ll have to pay back most of your hard-earned advance.

It takes guts to be a writer.  And a willingness to take risks.  Your future may rise or fall on the basis of conventions you have no control over and probably don’t understand, and couldn’t control even if you did.  Do you really want to get out there and join that struggle?  If you’re like me, of course you do.

All of that applies to publishing in general, whether by traditional methods, or by self-publishing.  But self-publishing has its own dangers.  If you self-publish, you assume the role of not only author, but publisher, cover artist, copy editor, accountant, and so forth.  Do you know how to do all that?  Can you learn?  Of course.  Do you want to do it?

Probably.

It Just Keeps Getting Bigger…

I’m always surprised at the things that go on in our galaxy, the Milky Way Galaxy.  In the past year or so, in the reading I do sporadically about the stars and planets and the cosmos, I ‘ve run across several articles about what has turned out to be the most common type of star in the Milky Way Galaxy.  This is the red dwarf star.

I’m not talking about red giant stars here, that’s a different matter altogether.  A red giant is a star in the last stages of its life, and it expands to be bigger than the orbit of Mars before it explodes in a huge supernova and spreads its innards all over the rest of the galaxy.  Like Betelgeuse is about to do.  No, I’m talking about a much smaller star, the red dwarf.  A red dwarf is smaller than our sun–much smaller in many cases–and unlike its larger cousin, isn’t in any hurry to explode.  Red dwarf stars are the most common type of stars in the galaxy, and may make up as much as 80 percent of all the stars in the galaxy.  (The latest estimates put the number of stars in the galaxy at 400 to 500 billion.)  But they’re so small and burn so weakly that you can’t see them by naked eye from Earth.  Some are so small, they’re not much larger than Jupiter.  When you look at the night sky, what you are seeing are the larger stars that burn white (or in some cases, red), like our sun.  We’ve known about red dwarfs for such a short time, they never showed up in most of the sci-fi movies or stories.  I don’t recall hearing anybody mention red dwarfs or see any whizzing by outside the windows of the briefing room on the Enterprise while Captain Picard was discussing the latest problem with his crew.

What’s even more interesting about red dwarfs is that we’re beginning to find planets around them.  Many, if not most red dwarfs may have planets, and they’re turning out to be small rocky planets that may be capable of harboring life.  A few caveats here, though.

Red dwarfs are so weak that the “habitable zone” where conditions are good for life developing on a planet’s surface is much, much closer to the star than the corresponding zone in our solar system.  Some planets orbiting red dwarfs circle around them in a matter of days, in fact.  Closer in, even in hours.  And red dwarfs have an annoying tendency to flare up every now and then, showering any planets in their system with X-rays and UV rays.  Not good for living organisms trying to get a foothold on a planet’s surface.  But the possibility exists that somewhere out there, among the billions of red dwarf stars is a small, relatively warm, moist planet with a bacterial, or perhaps slime mold-like organism on it, perhaps shielded under a rock or at the bottom of a lake, that is saying to itself, “I’ve come this far, I can go all the way.”  In short, the galaxy keeps getting stranger and stranger.  What will we find next?

Agent Queries, an Update

Well, I’m back at the computer keyboard after a week off from blogging.  I had something else that kept me away last Sunday (March 18) so I didn’t get a chance to write some of my usual bilious crap.  Here goes this week.

This week I want to write an update on my querying for my first novel, The Anthanian Imperative–Blue.  A rather long science fiction novel (124,000 words), it’s been my pride and joy for over ten years now, and I’m impatient to get it published.  I’ve sent out over sixty-five query letters in various formats recently, as regular letters, as e-mail queries, and as queries filled out on agent websites (six of those so far).  I’ve received thirty-four replies, that is, slightly more than half the agents responded, either by e-mail or by sending a reply in the self-addressed stamped envelope I supplied.  All of those replies were form letters, of course, because no one has asked for anything more.  No agent is going to take the time to sit down and give a personal reply to everyone who queries, I’m sure they’re way too busy for that.  Many agents nowadays have started a new reply routine: they don’t reply at all if they’re not interested, so many of the non-responses I’ve not gotten are really rejections, as much as any form letter.  It’s hard to quantify the responses that way, though, because it can take up to three months for an agent to reply, so the lack of a response doesn’t mean anything for a long time.  Is the agent still mulling it over, or is the lack of a reply a no?

But I’ve gotten a few form letters which, though they’re really rejections, are curious in their wording.  All of them say no, obviously, but several have said something like, “send it elsewhere, someone else might like it,” or “continue to submit elsewhere.” Many wish me luck in my writing career, but the reply worded in that way leaves me curious.  Let’s assume that my manuscript is a pile of horse c–p.  (I don’t think it is, but it may be.)  Is it appropriate for an agent to be encouraging a new writer to continue to send it out if it really is that bad?  That could reflect badly on the agent, and perhaps come back and sting at a later date.  So many form letter replies are so vague as to be almost meaningless, for example, “we regret that we cannot consider your material at this time,” so I’m wondering why an agent would have a letter that encourages someone to continue submitting if they really think it’s lousy.

In any event, I’ve temporarily suspended querying to agents, and am thinking about sending it to publishers directly.  Right now I’m in the process of revising the first chapter as well as making small changes in the rest of the manuscript.  Then several publishers will get the polished final result.  We’ll see what happens.