Francis W. Porretto
An Indie Writer's Odyssey
Notes from the Independent Writer's Movement
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Copyright © 2012 by Francis W. Porretto
Cover art by Francis W. Porretto
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To Martin McPhillips
And To Mark Butterworth
And to independent artists everywhere
May God bless your courage
And smile upon all your undertakings
Foreword
There’s a new force abroad in the land: one that has the old powers terrified, cowering in their keeps with their guards clustered around them and their drawbridges up. That force is the independent artist: He who can:
Create his own original material;
Perform (or arrange for) editing, required artwork, and promotional blurbs;
Promote his creation by himself.
Chances are, you are such an artist. I am, too.
My art is fiction: the creation of stories intended to entertain and edify. I’ve been traveling this road for quite some time: more than thirty years. Only about two years ago, I marshaled the courage to cease importuning the barons of Pub World and take my stories’ fates wholly into my own hands.
I haven’t looked back since then.
The rewards have been considerable. Yes, money is a part of that, but far greater, in my case, at least, has been the sense of having joined an army mobilized for a good cause: the destruction of one of the longest-standing barriers between the artist and his customers.
The pre-existent power structure of publishing wasn’t exactly evil, but it did have some serious shortcomings. There was a certain lack of respect for the preferences of the reading public. There was a weakness in the available feedback mechanisms, when any such mechanisms existed and were attended to at all. There was also an emphasis on the exploitation of trends and fads, which necessarily shortchanges the writer whose work is genuinely trailblazing.
There was also a sense of constraint by “political correctness,” which synergized destructively with the other problems listed above.
The indie-writers movement has thrown a gauntlet at Pub World. Its moguls have been slow to respond, in consequence of which the major publishing houses now find themselves trailing the wave and paddling furiously in a possibly vain attempt to catch up with it.
There are several reasons to be excited, not the least of which is the proliferation of a lot of damned good fiction at bargain prices. The reader brave enough to test these waters can find quite a lot of good stuff...if he can steel himself to sort through the garbage that inevitably accompanies it.
The essays that follow were all written in calendar 2011, when independently produced, published, and distributed fiction lit its rocket boosters and really started to gain speed. Mainly, they were written to myself, as notes for the future that I could use as references for this adventure and bits of advice I could pass along to others working up the courage to try it. They’re not organized in any particular order, but they’re all quite brief, and I’ve tried to keep them light-hearted and entertaining.
If you’re a fellow indie, perhaps you’ll enjoy my little journal of thoughts on our common avocation. If you’re a customer, have a taste of the thoughts that percolate in an indie writer’s head when he’s not actually creating what he hopes you’ll throw him a few shekels for. If you’re neither...say, what brought you here, anyway?
Francis W. Porretto
Mount Sinai, New York
New Year's Day, 2012
The Thundering Herd
Blinding Flash Of The Obvious Warning! Once e-publishing became easy and inexpensive, it was foreordained that there would be a mad rush to exploit it—and that a very large fraction of those rushing to do so would spend their free time more profitably at origami or macrame.
In other words, most people who think they can write are mistaken.
(Hey, I said it was a blinding flash of the obvious, didn’t I?)
The distribution of writers attempting the e-publication channel goes something like this:
90% or more: Persons who cannot write and should not try.
~7%: Persons with a fair command of English, but who have no stories to tell that anyone else would want to read.
~2%: Persons with a fair command of English who have stories to tell, but whose styles and preconceptions are unsuited to telling them in a winning fashion.
~1%: Capable storytellers, including a significant number who could crack the “traditional” publishing channels (or who already have).
Let’s postulate that you’re one of the fortunate 1% -- that you have the writing talent, the stories to tell, and enough desire for a readership that you’re willing to put it all to work. Let’s postulate further that you decide on e-publication, since traditional publishing channels are notoriously slow to react and often seem arbitrary in their decisions. What would you guess your greatest frustration with the e-pub channel would be?
Of course: Distinguishing yourself from the other 99%.
There are methods for attempting to break out of the pack, but all of them are hit or miss. There are no guaranteed ways of getting John Q. Public to buy your wares. But even writers who’ve been smiled upon by Knopf, Penguin, or G. P. Putnam’s Sons can’t count on a profitable degree of popular acceptance. Most books from conventional publishing houses show a loss, even over the long term. It’s a tough business.
What, then? Just cast your words upon the waters and pray? Well, I’m hardly one to knock prayer. But some e-pubbed writers have reaped great success. They should serve as an inspiration to the rest of us. Perhaps we should try emulating them.
Trouble is, that’s pretty hard. First, most of us are extremely shy about what military SF writer Tom Kratman has called “pimping my own works.” Second, where does one go to deploy one’s soapbox, the nearest street corner? Third, the key characteristic of the successful marketer, no matter what he’s trying to market, is an absolute and unalterable conviction that he’ll win the day if only he can persevere—and for most of us, it takes only a handful of rejections to persuade us that we’ll never break through.
I have no answers. I have an audience of about 75,000 readers, but that’s largely because for a long time I gave all my fiction away: retail price $0.00. Most people are willing to download a completely free eBook; after all, they reason, if it’s dreck they can always delete it. But even a price of $0.99, which is the practical minimum for eBook sales at this time, is enough to deter the reader if he knows nothing about you and your promotional blurbs fail to intrigue him.
Maybe the most promising approach is to divide your fiction into “loss leaders” and “for profit” bins. Give the former away open-handedly; price the latter attractively. Some percentage of the readers who download a loss leader or two will come back for a “for profit” eBook...if you’re one of the 1%, and if you have the patience to hang around a year or two, or three or four, in hope of returns.
It’s been said that eighty percent of success in life is “just showing up.” Maybe and maybe not, but a fair degree of success just might come from showing up and then hanging around despite all disappointments and discouragement.
Just don’t spend the money until it’s in your bank account.
The Quickest Attention-Getter
Write some erotica.
There’s nothing that moves faster on the Web than erotica. Especially well-written erotica. And as a loss-leader, nothing beats free erotica.
Squeamish about it? I was. I’m a devout Catholic, and a bit reticent about matters sexual. But one cannot gainsay the evidence. As they say on C.S.I., people lie; evidence doesn’t. So one fine day not too long ago, I girded up my loins – get your mind out of the gutter – and set to the task.
Happily, it turned out that I was fair to middlin’ at it. More, I discovered that there’s a significant difference between erotica and pornography – and the typical reader greatly prefers the former.
To put it in the fewest possible words: Erotica is about desire; pornography is about plumbing. Ergo, it’s possible to write good, highly evocative erotica without being in-your-face about the sex.
When I put my erotica collection A Dash Of Spice: Erotica for Good People up at Smashwords and set the price to $0.00, it immediately leaped to the top category of downloads. Shortly after that, interest swelled in my contemporary supernatural fantasy novels and my short story collections.
Today, A Dash Of Spice is priced at $0.99, and it’s still selling, though not as briskly as when it was free. I’ve accompanied it with two other erotic fictions: Priestesses, a novel composed of linked, supernaturally themed erotic short stories; and Farm Girl, a free “couples erotica” novelette. They’re both moving quite well. Word gets around.
If you haven’t tried your hand at this form, consider it. It has unanticipated satisfactions, especially if you can...wait just a moment, please...sweetie, not now, I’m trying to write! Can’t you wait just a few...oooh...that’s nice...just let me lower these a few inches...ah, that’s it...riiiiight there...
Later, folks.
Giving Them What They Want
Well, of course you want to give your readers what they want! Why would they remain your readers if you didn’t?
Careful, friends. Here there be dragons. Sometimes, giving them what they want makes them ask for more.
Shadow Of A Sword is getting rave notices. I can’t be unhappy about that...or about the money...but among those notices are quite a number of requests for a fourth book in the Realm of Essences saga.
Truth be told, I can’t be unhappy about that, either—but I’ve already started work on a project completely disconnected from that canon! I know from experience that I can’t work on two stories simultaneously. Besides, I thought I tied off all the loose ends in Shadow. I have no idea where I could go from there.
The never-ending series, featuring a continuing set of protagonists (and sometimes antagonists too), is a relatively recent development in novel-length fiction. Maybe we could date it to John Galsworthy’s “Forsyte” novels. But surely any series can be overextended. Surely even the most attractive Marquee character will eventually become a caricature of himself. How is a writer supposed to know where to draw the line?
I know, I know: It should be my worst problem. But now I’m torn: should I pursue the attractive and evocative new idea to which I’ve already committed 10,000 words and a hell of a lot of emotion, or should I stick to the course of my established success?
I think that, in part, my readers’ desire for a fourth volume arises from one of my newer characters, a thoroughly unique politician who’s running for president. He’s unique because he’s honest, principled, candid, and detests other politicians. We haven’t seen many of that sort in recent decades—and just now, the hunger for such a figure is intense. Several of the exhortations toward a fourth book have mentioned him explicitly: my correspondents want to see him in the Oval Office, in action.
Well, frankly, so do I. But he’s a fictional character. I don’t know anyone remotely like him. And I don’t own some sort of super-synthesizer that would permit me to bring him to life.
This decision could take a while.
Oversights Large And...Well, Large
A smart writer never tries to function as his own editor. Any mistakes you made in the draft, you’re almost guaranteed to overlook as you “edit” your work. So beware the temptation to “save a few bucks” by eschewing a professional editing job.
But even a first-rate editor can’t compensate for certain errors. I just discovered one in Shadow Of A Sword that’s genuinely embarrassing: I omitted an entire scene.
Not so clever, eh? And I did proofread my first draft before I sent it to my worthy editrix Kelly. I simply missed it on the second pass. And Kelly, of course, couldn’t possibly have known that a big chunk of text she’d never seen was “supposed to be there.”
Well, fortunately I still have time to revise the paperback before it’s committed. As for the eBook version, that’s even easier. But it provides an interesting lesson to those of us who write important, high-impact scenes “out of sequence” and say to ourselves, “I’ll insert that after I’ve written the rest of that segment.”
Yet another demonstration that Post-It notes really are the invention of the century.
Heroism And Clarity
I mentioned in an earlier piece that among my goals with the Realm of Essences books was to redefine the hero and heroic fiction for the Twenty-First Century. In point of fact, that’s been on my agenda for quite some time.
Modern fiction is all too often anti-heroic by design. The protagonist is hardly indistinguishable from the common run of men. The story’s ethical orientation is muddled or entirely absent. Whether the protagonist wins, loses, or must continue on in a sequel often seems to be a matter of chance.
And so, it was to my great pleasure that a recent reader of Which Art In Hope said this about its protagonist:
The main character, Armand Morelon, is a true hero—how wonderful to find a hero in today’s fiction!
Of course, it’s always nice to know that you’re not entirely alone—that someone else, near or far, shares your convictions and preferences. But in this matter of heroism, there are substantial challenges to be overcome even once you’ve decided that your Good Guy is going to be really, truly Good and win the day (albeit at a cost):
Does your hero start out as a noble soul, or does he develop into one? If the latter, how would his maturation, and the timing thereof, be best handled?
How much clarity of perception and judgment should you allow him? Remember, you’re the author; you know more than he does about what’s coming.
When the story’s final crisis is upon him and he must rise to the occasion, should he do so smoothly, or haltingly and with much regret? How should his moral framework be involved?
These questions must be fearlessly faced. Among other things, they compel you to ponder, well in advance, what you’ll make him pay for his moral convictions—and whether he’ll be immediately willing, or squirm to avoid the price. The degree of subtlety, insight, and love you bring to his travails will determine how your reader reacts to him.
Heroism involves embracing a commitment to something larger than oneself. It stands to reason that a character can demonstrate heroism in only one way: by paying a hefty price, all he has to give and perhaps a bit more, to attain or defend that to which he’s committed.
Heroism is rare. The average guy doesn’t readily commit to anything beyond himself and his family. Nor would he be all that quick to pay a large price to demonstrate or defend his convictions. Some smallish fraction of average guys will rise to a difficult occasion heroically despite never having displayed unusual character before, but fortunately for them and for us, such occasions are fairly rare.
So plausibility enters the equation as well. Your hero-to-be, if he starts out as an average guy, mainly concerned with himself and his family, must develop in an expansive way. That is, he must become aware that there are larger priorities and values to be defended, and over time, realize that he is willing to defend them even at great cost.
Musing over these requirements of heroic fiction, it becomes clearer to me why so few contemporary writers are willing to try it on. It’s tough. It requires you to design a character of substance, drag him through a maturation process that’s likely to be painful, and at the climax point, compel him to pay a very significant price for his convictions. As if that weren’t enough, you have to be clever about his victory: he can’t win easily or by obvious means.
Subtlety and surprise can play a part by concealing the true crisis. If you can make the story’s big, showy conflicts ethically clear and easily navigated, while holding the hero’s real, ultimate difficulties off to the side, only tenuously connected to the main thread of action, you can provide your reader with an unusual kind and degree of pleasure. It takes a lot of forethought, and even more care and craftsmanship.
Yet heroic fiction is making a major comeback. Granted, not all of it is first quality. Not all of it is plausible. But there are more writers attempting it than have done so for decades. And even their mediocre efforts are garnering significant popularity.
No Religious Test!
More and more, fiction writers are incorporating religious motifs into their stories. This gladdens me greatly, and not merely because I write Christian-flavored fantasy and science fiction.
There’s a lot of power in religious ideas. It derives from the premise inherently required to entertain them: the existence of a supernatural realm, whose denizens (possibly including the Big Guy Himself) sometimes take a hand in matters here among us mortals. All by itself, that premise compels us to ponder several other questions:
How various are those beings?
How powerful are they—and following from that, what capacity do we have to resist them?
What motivates them? All of them, or only some?
What developments might move them to become involved in human affairs? Once they do involve themselves with us, what might constrain them?
Is there only one supernatural realm, or could there be many—and if the latter, are they aware of one another? Is there a hierarchy among them? Do they cooperate, or compete, and how?
The flood of ideas available from contemplating any one of those questions is enough to keep a writer busy for a lifetime.
BUT! There’s a great danger involved in fiction that incorporates religious ideas: the tendency toward preachiness. It’s a problem especially for the devout, as we put great value in our faiths and would like to share them with others, for our mutual benefit. Granted that to advance a wholly original idea about the supernatural—one that bears no relation to any recognized religion, such as Kurt Vonnegut’s Bokononism—is free of that danger. (Well, unless you go insane and start believing it yourself, anyway.) But for those of us who enjoy working “conventional,” Judeo-Christian motifs into our stories, great caution is required.
Our principal responsibility is to entertain the reader: to make him feel that his investment of time and money in our story was worthwhile. Preachiness cross-cuts that goal rather badly. It’s a bit like dragging the poor sap into a revival tent by force and then demanding five dollars from him before we let him leave.
That’s the heart of my complaint with most contemporary religious fiction. Let’s leave aside the mediocrity of the writing. I don’t like to be preached at, and neither do most fiction readers. If you want to make your Good Guy a devout Christian, or Jew, or whatever oddball faith you prefer, feel free to do so, but for the love of God, don’t have him declaiming to us about it after every decision. Even one such indulgence, if badly handled, can put a sour taste in a reader’s mouth.
As usual, I’m mainly speaking to myself here. But I’d bet a pretty that plenty of other writers with religious inclinations could stand to hear it, too.
Paralysis By Analysis
Quite a number of writers claim that their worst problem is coming up with ideas. I’ve heard that so often, and from so many diverse sources, that it’s become hard to repress my natural response:
“Oh? Would you like to buy a couple of mine?”
Just now, I’m struggling to choose among four distinct, equally compelling ideas for a new novel. It’s frustrating me about as badly as I’ve ever been frustrated. I’m beginning to feel like the proverbial donkey that starved to death because he found himself equidistant from two piles of oats and had no way to choose between them.
I suppose I shouldn’t kick, given the idea-paucity problem other writers complain about so often. All the same, this is quite a challenge. I’m beginning to wonder if I should poll the readers personally known to me for a vote.
But it’s actually only a special case of a general problem: paralysis by analysis. When your deliberations deadlock as mine have, one of the hazards seldom spoken of is the rising fear that you’ll “make a mistake.” As silly as that can sound in this context, it has a power those who haven’t felt it might not appreciate.
At some point I’ll “break the tie” and choose one of these paths forward. But between now and then, the temptation is strong to think about...well, anything else, including the avenue of tossing off a few short stories just to keep my chops in working order.
I have no idea whether, or how, this sort of thing afflicts artists of other kinds, such as painters and composers. I hope it doesn’t; it’s both cruelly trying and devilishly ironic. But if it does, tell me, please, colleagues: How do you cope with it?
Drips And Drops
When you’re an unknown independent, not backed by any significant marketing force, you can’t afford to posture as if you’re the second coming of John Steinbeck. You have to be modest, no matter what opinion you hold about your skills as a storyteller. Nor can you demand a king’s ransom for your books.
Unfortunately, CreateSpace, Amazon’s print-on-demand subsidiary, sets minima for its productions that force trade-paperback prices on the physical editions of my books. At those prices, they don’t sell much. But it’s worth something to me to have physical copies on my shelves, so I try not to agonize over it.
However, I price my eBooks at $0.99 each. It’s the lowest price permitted by SmashWords, Amazon, and the other retailers who’ve graciously agreed to carry them.
They sell...a little. A good month brings me about $100.00 in sales. I’ll never get rich at that rate. Hell, It won’t even cover the payments on my mattress. But it’s assuredly better than nothing—and it provides the most valuable sort of feedback an indie writer can receive:
Some hundreds of persons have expressed, through their wallets, that my fiction is worth something.
Some of those purchasers might be willing to pay more per volume. There’s only one way to find out. I might try it, some day. But for the moment, the gratification of receiving even a pittance for my prose is quite sufficient. I do have a day job with which to pay for beans, bullets, and Band-Aids.
So the valuta comes in in a thin dribble, rather than as a magnificent cataract of baksheesh. And it does pay for my blood-pressure drugs, at least. And I find it to be a blessing like unto an eighth sacrament.
I’ll bet you would, too.
When Metaphors Attack!
I’m on record as saying that literary devices—similes, metaphors, and allusive images—are overused in today’s fiction. But ever since I wrote that essay, there’s been an itch at the back of my skull. The itching powder was planted by a commenter who supplied this James Gould Cozzens quote:
The general theory is the more similies, the better or more colorful the writing, while of course truth is the simile is a boob trap. What it amounts to is that the writer, unable to think clearly enough or write well enough to say what he means, gets around the impasse by cutely changing the subject.
This is not quite fair. It’s an overstatement that omits consideration of why similes and metaphors originated.
There are three situational justifications for similes and metaphors:
When an objective, “fact-oriented” description of events would be excessively long;
When such a description would be in bad taste;
When the device evokes an allusion of importance to the story.
Consider the following passage from On Broken Wings:
Her new love stared sightlessly up at her. She crouched over him, felt for his pulse, found none, and began to scream.
It was a scream of loss and pain, but it was more. Rage swelled within her, pure and lethal, until her universe could hold nothing else.
It was the call of a predator who has summoned all his powers, and challenges his enemy to come forth from the forest to meet him in a final trial of strength and ferocity. It echoed from the buildings and gathered itself to pound against the dome of the sky. It foretold a great battle and a river of blood. It promised death and destruction in a universal tongue. No creature that heard that howl could do other than flee.
She was still standing over Rolf and screaming when the police arrived and began to handcuff her.
The image of a great predator summoning his foe to battle was explicitly what I wanted from that passage. Battle is the reason for Christine’s existence; it’s what she was formed and trained for. The murder of her lover is the trigger that sends her forth, warpaint on and weapons in hand, to conclude the first phase of her life.
Then there’s this passage from Which Art In Hope:
From dinner onward, their evenings were a barely restrained revel, a celebration of excited anticipation expressed in giggles, absurd jokes, and looks and gestures of endearment that a complete stranger couldn’t miss. Each night the hearthroom rang with song, with clapping, with the inarticulate delight of voices raised in affectionate japes and ripostes. It went on until, drunk to bursting with family, the couple rose to take their leave and, against wails of protest from the others, retire to their bedroom.
There, bathed in the light of a single candle, they explored the dominion of bliss. They gave their bodies to one another without reservation. Theirs was the fire of youth and the wholeness of love, wherein the oldest things are made new. Each caress, each tenderness, each whispered word became a new skein in the bond that knitted them together, a new stone fitted to their rising edifice of joy.
Good taste and explicit sexual depictions simply don’t go together. Sex is an important component of human life, to be celebrated and never condemned, but the mechanics of sex should remain private. All the same, I wanted the emotional fabric of the betrothed couple’s journey into physical mutuality to be palpable to the reader, so I dressed it in metaphors—hopefully, metaphors expressive enough to do the job.
There’s always an element of uncertainty around the use of similes and metaphors. You can’t be sure that the reader’s reaction to the phrase will be the one you intend! It’s another reason to be cautious about them, use them sparingly, but it’s not a reason to rule them out of your toolbox.
And now, as comic relief, some really bad similes and metaphors:
The toddlers looked at each other as if they had just been told their mutual funds had taken a complete nosedive.
She grew on him like she was a colony of E. coli, and he was room-temperature Canadian beef.
She was a couch potato in the gravy boat of life, flopping dejectedly on the sofa.
It will take a big tractor to plow the fertile fields of his mind.
He spoke with the wisdom that can only come from experience, like a Guy who went blind because he looked at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it and now goes around the country speaking at high schools about the dangers of looking at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it.
He was as lame as a duck. Not the metaphorical lame duck either, but a real duck that was actually lame. Maybe from stepping on a land mine or something.
Her face was a perfect oval, like a circle that had its two other Sides gently compressed by a Thigh Master.
His thoughts tumbled in his head, making and breaking alliances like underpants in a dryer without Cling Free.
She caught your eye like one of those pointy hook latches that used to dangle from screen doors and would fly up whenever you banged the door open again.
The little boat gently drifted across the pond exactly the way a bowling ball wouldn’t.
McMurphy fell 12 stories, hitting the pavement like a Hefty bag filled with vegetable soup.
From the attic came an unearthly howl. The whole scene had an eerie, surreal quality, like when you’re on vacation in another city and “Jeopardy” comes on at 7:00 p.m. instead of 7:30.
Her hair glistened in the rain like nose hair after a sneeze.
Her eyes were like two brown circles with big black dots in the center.
Her vocabulary was as bad as, like, whatever.
He was as tall as a six-foot-three-inch tree.
The hailstones leaped from the pavement, just like maggots when you fry them in hot grease.
Long separated by cruel fate, the star-crossed lovers raced across the grassy field toward each other like two freight trains, one having left Cleveland at 6:36 p.m. traveling at 55 mph, the other from Topeka at 4:19 p.m. at a speed of 35 mph.
The politician was gone but unnoticed, like the period after the Dr. on a Dr Pepper can.
John and Mary had never met. They were like two hummingbirds who had also never met.
The thunder was ominous sounding, much like the sound of a thin sheet of metal being shaken backstage during the storm scene in a play.
The red brick wall was the color of a brick-red Crayola crayon.-Unknown
He fell for her like his heart was a mob informant and she was the East River.
Even in his last years, Grandpappy had a mind like a steel trap, only one that had been left out so long it had rusted shut.
The door had been forced, as forced as the dialogue during the interview portion of “Jeopardy!”
Shots rang out, as shots are wont to do.
The plan was simple, like my brother-in-law Phil. But unlike Phil, this plan just might work.
The young fighter had a hungry look, the kind you get from not eating for a while.
Her artistic sense was exquisitely refined, like someone who can tell butter from I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter.
She had a deep, throaty, genuine laugh, like that sound a dog makes just before it throws up.
It came down the stairs looking very much like something no one had ever seen before.
The knife was as sharp as the tone used by Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Tex.) in her first several points of parliamentary procedure made to Rep. Henry Hyde (R-Ill.) in the House Judiciary Committee hearings on the impeachment of President William Jefferson Clinton.
The ballerina rose gracefully en pointe and extended one slender leg behind her, like a dog at a fire hydrant.
The revelation that his marriage of 30 years had disintegrated because of his wife’s infidelity came as a rude shock, like a surcharge at a formerly surcharge-free ATM.
The dandelion swayed in the gentle breeze like an oscillating electric fan set on medium.
He was deeply in love. When she spoke, he thought he heard bells, as if she were a garbage truck backing up.
Her eyes were like limpid pools, only they had forgotten to put in any pH cleanser.
She walked into my office like a centipede with 98 missing legs.
Her voice had that tense, grating quality, like a first-generation thermal paper fax machine that needed a band tightened.
It hurt the way your tongue hurts after you accidentally staple it to the wall.
Now that’s talent!
The Hangers-On
Sometimes, you just have to let them have the stage. I’m talking about the characters that won’t go away: the ones you created for a Supporting Cast role, but who’ve kept growing beyond it, acquiring more definition and texture, until you feel you almost have to promote them to Marquee status.
Several characters have done that to me:
Louis Redmond of Chosen One and On Broken Wings
Father Raymond Altomare of On Broken Wings and Shadow Of A Sword
Charisse Morelon of Which Art In Hope
Althea Morelon of “The Last Ambassadors”
And just now, Todd Iverson of “Taillights,” “Making It Right,” and “Conspiracies.”
Iverson is currently attempting to force his way into my novel-in-progress, At The Gates Of The City. I have an eerie feeling he’s going to make it.
I suspect this happens to quite a lot of writers. Sometimes the character doesn’t even have to have a presence in an existing story. Ursula Leguin felt compelled to create a story for her anarchist theorist Odo, who was merely a background referent in her award-winning novel The Dispossessed. And I’d bet a pretty penny that Jack Vance was endlessly tempted to put his background-referent character Baron Bodissey explicitly into a novel.
A character that acquires greater stature than the writer originally gives him can be quite insistent about being allowed to use them. The reason is simple: good fiction is about vivid characters doing dramatic things. If you’ve got a vivid character in your sights, embedding him in a dramatic passage of events comes almost naturally.
Back when I began the adventure of fiction writing, I was, as so many young writers are, convinced that the secret to telling a good story lay in the plot. Make it dramatic and swift! Make it striking, all its crises Earth-shaking in importance! Characters? Oh, I suppose I’ll need a few. But the plot’s the thing.
Look how wrong you can be, eh?
There’s a great deal of instruction available from one’s characters. Possibly from one’s Supporting Cast characters in particular. We don’t imagine them as movers and shakers, but what if they become such? What are they telling us about the events we’ve imagined and the course of action we want to portray? What are they telling us about the nature of Man and human motivation? Most especially, what are they telling us about the great motivators: love and hatred, loyalty, duty, the urge to excel and the desire to be free?
I struggle to listen to my characters—to imagine them talking to me, as if they were as real as I. The Supporting Cast characters are often the ones with the most to say. Sometimes the conversations become quite animated, even audible, at which point my wife sometimes becomes concerned. (“Is something wrong, dear? Why are you muttering that way?”) But the gains are most definitely worth the costs. And every now and then, a new story or novel will emerge.
Stuck In This World
One of the problems I’m having with At The Gates Of The City, my novel-in-progress, is my penchant for supernatural motifs. The previous three Realm Of Essences novels—Chosen One, On Broken Wings, and Shadow Of A Sword, as if you were in the slightest danger of forgetting—were founded on an alternate Creation myth that involved an incorporeal race that had participated in the making of our universe. But the threads that bound those stories to that myth were severed in the third volume. It would be difficult to re-weave them for a fourth book.
Yet here I am, stuck with a super-powerful heroine and a readership that wants to see her in action again! Robert A. Heinlein summed up my problem in a single sentence: “For each fine cat, a fine rat.” I have to find an antagonist that will do justice to a struggle against Christine D’Alessandro. No pushovers!
But where would I find a sufficiently powerful opponent for my “killer beauty queen” in this world?
Some writers use a powerful protagonist’s internal conflicts to neutralize his powers. That’s not my style; in any event, the approach strikes me as marginal, seldom legitimate. Consider that Christine has just participated in the defeat of a super-powerful entity from another plane of existence. How could she have plausible internal conflicts after that?
One possibility is to use numbers: “swarm the lion under with a multitude of ants.” It has possibilities, but conjuring the drama of a great conflict out of such an opposition will be much harder than evoking it from a one-on-one face-off with an antagonist of equal stature.
Another possibility is to revive the supernatural connection with a semi-plausible implication of “infection.” That is: Imply that someone who had been infested, or heavily influenced, by my departed super-villain has thereby acquired a share in his powers. That, too, has possibilities, but it would take rather careful development to make it sing.
Quite a three-pipe problem!
"Ur Doon It Rong!"
SF author Sarah Hoyt recently wrote of having embraced certain fashionable sins against the English language:
My friend Dave Freer, over at Mad Genius Club has a blog about Political Correctness in literature. I confess I have agreed with him ever since I was first trying to break into writing and found myself reading manuals on how to be politically correct in my writing.
I’ve learned to use the execrable he/she or worse, they instead of he in the type of sentence that now goes “one shouldn’t do that, lest they” simply because it’s not worth to endure screams of outrage over what’s at worse inelegant and agrammatical. And the type of person who thinks her worth lies in not being referred to under a generic “masculine” pronoun – as dictated by the rules of most indo european languages — inevitably also thinks screaming about it is an act of civic duty if not virtue.
I sympathize. My God, how I sympathize! But I won’t give in.
I’ve been upbraided in fora beyond counting for retaining the “he”-as-generic-singular-pronoun convention. Conversely, when I’ve suggested to other writers that the convention remains as it was, and that using it is greatly to be preferred to mangling one’s syntax or writing as if one were terminally confused about one’s subject, I’ve evoked the very screams of outrage of which Miss Hoyt speaks above. To borrow the timeless idiom of a good friend, the harridans in the audience have called me “everything but white.”
That’s what harridans do. Once I became accustomed to it, it ceased to affect me.
Also, there’s the little matter of racial sensitivities. Not too many people are aware that a century or so ago, the accepted term for persons of the Negro race was “black.” But over time, the race-hustlers deemed that term offensive. So the accepted term became “colored.” Over time the race-hustlers anathematized that term as well. So the accepted term became “Negro,” the technical racial classification. But over time that term was deemed beyond the pale. So now we’re down to “African-American”—but that won’t last; give ‘em time.
If you follow politics, you may be aware that Governor Rick Perry of Texas, who recently declared himself in the running for the Republican presidential nomination, brought the wrath of the Left down on his head for daring to use the phrase “black cloud” in referring to the economy. No surprises there; it’s part of the Left’s linguistic offensive to rule every possible idiom and figure of speech offensive.
The idea isn’t that anyone is genuinely offended by these idioms, or by the old “he”-for-generic-singular convention. It’s to make us censor ourselves: to compel us to prejudge every word that emerges from our mouths, pens, or keyboards according to whether it might offend someone. This, when American Negroes casually call one another nigger and a feminist playwright concludes her most popular play with a chant of “Cunt...cunt...cunt...”
As a technique for silencing, and ultimately subjugating, one’s opposition, this one has no superiors and few peers.
This mick-wop honky has had quite enough:
Idioms that use “black” or “dark” to indicate ominousness are just fine by me.
Persons who prefer lovers of their own sex are homosexuals, not “gay.”
Please, enough with the “undocumented worker” BS. They’re illegal aliens.
My fiction will depict villains who are Negroes, homosexuals, Hispanics, and Muslims as it suits me—and given the crime and terrorism statistics, it will frequently suit me.
And most emphatically, “he” is my standard generic-singular pronoun.
Don’t like it? Read someone else.
I won’t give in.
Telegraphy
One of the forbidden sins of fiction is the ending the reader absolutely knows is coming, to the last detail. A writer can fall into this trap in many ways, but the most poignant of them is this: a focus on a completely personal conflict between the hero and villain, such that the climactic scene of the story simply must have the two of them face off in person.
Why is this the “most poignant” route toward a telegraphed ending?
The amount of work involved on the writer’s part;
The amount of work involved on the reader’s part;
The great need for fully developed, plausible contests between what is clearly good and what is clearly evil.
(Just in case it hasn’t been perfectly pellucid up to this point, I believe in absolute good and absolute evil. I strive to depict them in my stories. I lament the fact that there are so few decently written, plausible stories of that sort being told. It says a lot—none of it good—about the state of Western culture that prominent contemporary critics regard such oppositions as somehow puerile and risible. But then, they have no great love for plot, either.)
One of the most impressive things about Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings saga is that, though a final contest between Sauron’s power and that of the Free West was inevitable, the actual climax came on Orodruin—and not through the will of Frodo, the tale’s nominal hero, but by an act of Gollum’s. Indeed, that climax was foreshadowed in the earliest segment of the first book, when Gandalf reproved Frodo for wishing Bilbo had “slain the vile creature [Gollum], when he had the chance,” yet it was all the more surprising and satisfying for that.
There are ways to keep even the most “inevitable” ending from seeming utterly cliched. You don’t want your hero to win because he’s invincible, or because he’s noble and pure, or because he’s the hero! You want him to have to squeeze out every last iota of strength, cunning, insight, and endurance, and not...quite...have...enough. You want him to need a break, or some help. You want him to owe something to someone.
Had Christine taken on Tiran mano a mano in the conclusion of Shadow Of A Sword, and triumphed by virtue of her superior physical prowess, it would have been both unsatisfying and implausible: the former, because it would be just too straightforward; the latter, because Tiran, an incorporeal entity of great spiritual and emotional power, is indefeasible through strength alone. In that regard, Ransom’s defeat of the Evil One in Perelandra by destroying the body it inhabits is something of a cop-out. Had the rest of the book been less evocative, and less gorgeously written, than it was, that ending might have spoiled both that novel and the whole Space Trilogy of which it was the centerpiece.
It’s not easy to avoid a telegraphed ending. It’s more of a trial than most non-writers would imagine, because writers tend to “fall in love” with our heroes. All the same, there are few more efficient ways to spoil a story that’s otherwise worthy and well told.
Self-Abuse Vs. Other-Abuse
Relax, relax: this won’t be about...that.
SF writer Sarah Hoyt has a darkly amusing post up about the somewhat masochistic experience of being published by a conventional (i.e., paper) publisher. It resonates with the experiences of other conventionally published writers I know, and makes me...well, at least utterably glad to have been spared that fate.
The prestige value of being admitted within Pub World’s gates has declined somewhat since the advent of print-on-demand and e-publishing, but if one omits personal considerations, it remains the “preferred” way to reach bookstores’ shelves and, by implication, a readership. However, personal considerations ought not to be omitted...at least, not entirely. An old Dilbert strip, in which Dogbert has decided to become a publisher, is relevant:
Dogbert: I’ll buy your book, but you have to make some changes. Take out the murder, add some songs, and make the main character a large purple dinosaur.
Aspiring Author: But it’s a murder mystery!
Dogbert: Oh, like that’s so original.
Apparently, there’s a measure of truth in that depiction.
Miss Hoyt considers herself a “midlist writer,” and as I know nothing about how such determinations are made, I shall refrain from comment. (I like her stuff, but who the BLEEP! am I?) Her post about the treatment a middling writer—i.e., not Ian Fleming, not Stephen King, and most definitely not Tom Clancy in his glory days—can expect from publishers isn’t shocking, but it is depressing in the extreme. If that’s what I pursued for several years, I can only be grateful that I failed to “achieve” it.
But self-abuse—i.e., the route of self-publication—isn’t necessarily less wearing or demeaning, though it does have the advantage that the masochist is generally on good terms with his sadist. It’s an alternative, with its own trials, travails, and triumphs. The choice of either path—for those writers who have the choice—is mainly a matter of taste.
Stephen Green adds a few thoughts on the subject:
What the Internet has done to the news industry, ebooks are doing to publishing — which brings us to the winners in this brave new world.
Big publishers have squeezed the life (and incomes) out of mid-list writers. Between your Clancys and your prestige authors lies the put-upon midlister. He doesn’t sell millions of copies and get the big advances. He doesn’t have the proper degree from the proper university to express the proper opinions. He just tells good stories to an appreciative audience — if he can find a publisher willing to take a chance on an unknown commodity to earn an uncertain (but certainly slight) dividend. Giant publishers are, by nature, risk averse. And there’s nothing more risky than spending jillions of dollars to print thousands of copies of books by someone nobody has heard of.
But epublishing empowers the midlist writer to go crash the gates and at least be seen on the Kindle Store — which is a lot more than Random House is going to give them. And if one of Amazon’s editors takes a keen interest in something, they can publicize the book at very little risk to the bottom line. A few thousand (or even a few million) banner ads cost nothing compared to a whole bunch of remaindered dead-tree books.
There are thousands upon thousands of good storytellers who can’t get anyone at Knopf or anywhere else to give them the time of day. But for Amazon and Apple, more content is always better, because publishing is practically free.
Indeed. For a very long time, the established publisher was the only game in town. He had the printing presses. He had the cover artists. He had the marketing department and the expertise at publicity. A writer whose expertise is in writing, rather than in running a printing press, painting a cover, or marketing his wares pretty much had to go through a conventional publisher.
Yes, things are different now, thanks to eBooks, eReaders, and the Web. But most of us who write still need help getting our stuff out in readable form, and persuading others to risk their money on it.
Fortunately, where there’s a demand, there will soon be a supply. Just as there are independent writers who disdain to batter themselves bloody against the gates of Pub World’s fortresses, there are now independent cover artists and independent editors. Amazon has made publishing in paperback format rather straightforward. Smashwords has made e-publishing even easier.
The one area where most of us still need help — apart from the actual creation of readable fiction, that is — is marketing. I have no doubt that help will soon be on the way, though for a while the indie writer who makes use of it will be speculating on the efficacy of the marketer he signs up with. That will leave us with the sole (and difficult) problem of turning out good stories well told, such that readers who elect to stake a buck or two on them won’t wish they’d spent the money on something else.
The multiplication of alternative routes toward a readership, and the corresponding division of labor, will triumph. They always have before; why should storytelling for money be an exception? But that doesn’t mean conventional publication will fade away like Sauron after the destruction of the One Ring. Nor does it mean that self-published writers with grit and perseverance can expect some day to cavort in money playpens like Scrooge McDuck. But the bruises on our egos, like those on Philosophy In The Bedroom’s Eugenie, will be those we choose, rather than the inevitable price of playing the only game in town. And three silly similes is quite enough for one post on this subject, don’t you think?
Sadness
One of the things a writer, however great or small his readership, must learn to accept is that not everyone will love his stuff—and some of those who don’t will express themselves rather definitely on the subject.
The really sad part about this is that some fraction of those “anti-fans” will be vituperative about it. They’ll shower him with abuse, and he’ll have no recourse but to shrug it off. After all, there’s no law that compels criticism to be courteous...probably a good thing, too. But a fraction of that fraction will come back repeatedly to exercise their scatological talents at his expense, which can be a bit wearying.
See this brief essay and the comments to it for an illustration.
It’s in the nature of the beast, friends. If you put a public foot forward, you will get stepped on now and then. Sometimes an assailant will leer into your face as he grinds his heel into your instep. And most ironically, should you react, your assailant will do his level best to paint you as the bad guy.
There’s nothing to be done about it. Nothing at all...except pray for strength for forbearance for yourself, and for a gentling of the soul of your attacker. And in a truly supreme irony, to say openly that that’s what you’re going to do will sometimes draw the most vicious rejoinders of all.
This business takes a lot more than a way with words.
Block-Breaking
Just about every writer who writes about writing and the writer’s experience, regardless of what sort of advice he proffers, will eventually get around to the nasty old subject of writer’s block. What do you do when the words, or the ideas, or the setting, or the character definitions, or anything else in this Furshluginer avocation just won’t come?
I shan’t insult you with any variation of a head-on attack on the problem. There’ve been enough of those. Most of them will work for some writers; none will work for everyone. Besides, there’s a significant possibility that a head-on attack is the exactly wrong thing to try.
I step away from the keyboard. I’ll read something, or take a walk, or have a snack, or play with the dogs and cats. Maybe I’ll even go outside and do some yard work, much as I detest it. I simply refuse to treat my creative center as if it were an adversary to be cajoled or coerced into what my rational center would prefer.
Creative work is finicky. We should know that from the difficulty of describing what it is and how it develops. We don’t even know if it has a set of necessary preconditions. Doesn’t it make more sense to relax about it and let it happen on its own schedule?
That might not seem a satisfactory approach to someone facing a deadline, with money at stake should he miss it. But suppose the head-on approach, determined to batter your creative powers into submission to your will, is more likely than not to make matters worse?
Thoughts?
Last Sentences
Quite a lot has been written about the importance to a story of a striking opening, including a real gripper of a first sentence. Many writers, and writers-on-writing, have emphasized the importance of a strong opening. And indeed, many a fine novel gained its first readers with a striking first sentence:
It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.
Call me Ishmael.
In the week before their departure to Arrakis, when all the final scurrying about had reached a nearly unbearable frenzy, an old crone came to visit the mother of the boy, Paul.
A Dream Of Freedom was a ship that had once been a world.
If upon reading the sentences above, you were immediately reminded of the masterpieces they open, you know what I mean. If not, you have some pleasurable reading awaiting you.
But there are traps here. One of Albert Camus’s more memorable creations, in The Plague, was his character Grand, whose obsession with writing a “perfect” first sentence was so complete that he never wrote anything else. It’s good to begin well, but it’s infinitely more important to begin.
It’s of another order of infinity, greater than the first, to end well. Have a few memories on me:
He loved Big Brother.
“It is a far, far better thing I do than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.”
Beneath the unclouded and mild azure sky, upon the fair face of the pleasant sea, wafted by the joyous breezes, that great mass of death floats on and on, till lost in infinite perspectives.
“Think on it, Chani: that princess will have the name, yet she’ll live as less than a concubine—never to know a moment of tenderness from the man to whom she’s bound. While we, Chani, we who carry the name of concubine—history will call us wives.”
Beyond that, as has always lain beyond the knowledge of men, there is only hope.
This is about more than marketing. Yes, as the old saying goes, the first chapter sells the book, and the last chapter sells the next book. But beyond that, your conclusion is the very last thing your reader will carry away from your story. It should be the capstone of his experience, the fulfillment of his expectations. Literally every word you’ve written before that concluding sentence was a prologue to this one. Make it sing!
My readers write to me with fair frequency. They have much more to say about how my books end than how they begin. To my fellow writers: What about yours? To avid readers: What concluding sentences—or paragraphs; let’s not be too myopic—have struck you as brilliant conclusions to a story well told?
To The Curb With Your Blurb!
(Sigh. I would have liked to make the title “A Demo For Your Promo,” but that would be the wrong message for what follows.)
This one is aimed squarely at writers who distribute through SmashWords or a comparable site. I’ve discovered some good fiction there—and a lot of utter crap, of course—but I’ve also discovered that there are many whose storytelling gifts are greater than their ability to promote their work.
Now, I’m no promotional genius. I use this site, my other, op-ed oriented site, a little Twitter, and a lot of prayer, and just about nothing else. But I flatter myself that my max-400-character SmashWords blurbs are middling-decent hooks, if not a little better, for the reader interested in my admittedly weird sort of fiction. To save you the wear and tear on your mouse, here are a few:
Hope, a world peopled by anarchists, is in ecological crisis. For 1200 years, a secret Cabal has elevated powerful psi talents to the Godhood of Hope—the management of Hope’s crust—at the eventual cost of their lives. Now only two remain: Armand Morelon and Victoria Peterson. But one is utterly unwilling and the other is murderously insane. And the survival of Mankind hangs in the balance.
For On Broken Wings:
You’re a young woman with no memory of your past. You’ve been made a sexual slave by a gang of vicious bikers. After ten years’ agony, you’ve freed yourself by committing murder and earning a faceful of scars. But the biker king is obsessed with you. Your sole chance of escaping him lies in trusting a mysterious young man you’ve just met. Do you choose the devil you know, or the devil you don’t?
Christine D’Alessandro returns to Onteora County and is enmeshed in two deadly conflicts: one between security entrepreneur Kevin Conway and his competitor Ernest Lawrence; and one between presidential aspirant Stephen Sumner and President Walter Coleman. Behind them looms a third struggle, between two immortals, for the future of Mankind unto the limits of Time. Sequel to On Broken Wings.
Download this book for your ebook reader.
(Pages 1-36 show above.)