Babel Clash

SO…YOU WANT TO BE A WRITER?

I write for a living.
It’s the best day job in the world.
I get to play in my imagination all day long and get paid for it.

It’s what I’ve always wanted to do. I remember in third grade, when the teacher asked us what we wanted to be when we grew up, I didn’t say ‘astronaut’, ‘fireman’, or ‘movie star’. I said ‘I want to tell stories’. I was fortunate to make my first professional sale while still in college (a 2,000 word article on jujutsu blocking and grabbing techniques). However, that sale did not exactly catapult me into the life of a full-time writer. No, that came a lot later.

For most of my adult life I worked various day jobs and wrote on the side. Early on I sold rebuilt televisions, I mowed lawns, I worked as a bouncer in a strip club, I was a bodyguard in the entertainment industry, I taught at Martial Arts History and Women’s Self-Defense at Temple University for fourteen years, I worked for a pharmaceutical company taking adverse experience reports, and I was a graphic artist in a law firm. Even though writing was something that defined me, it was never the job that paid all the bills.

Until it was.

When I took a risk almost ten years ago to try and build my writing career to something my family and I could live on, it was a risk. A big risk. My wife volunteered to work for a few years while I wrote, with the understanding that if that ‘whole writing thing’ didn’t work out I’d go back to the corporate world. She gave me five years, bless her soul.

It took three.

I sold my first novel, GHOST ROAD BLUES in 2005. I’m writing my eleventh right now, a sequel to ROT & RUIN. Today my latest Marvel Comic hits the stands (MARVEL UNIVERSE VS WOLVERINE, prequel to MARVEL UNIVERSE VS PUNISHER, which came out today in trade paperback.). These days I write about three novels each year, plus short stories, essays, blogs and comics. Like I said…I have the best day job in the world.

But, let’s talk about what that full-time job looks like. There’s a lot of mythology out there about the writing life. You see writers in movies and on TV, spending hours of each day in moody contemplation, or retreating to a cabin in the woods to write that novel, or drinking heavily as they wait for the muse to whisper magic secrets to them. And, sure, there are a few writers like that, but they pretty much aren’t the pros.

Professional writing is not a job for prima donas. Working pros don’t ‘wait for inspiration’ to hit them. Every working pro I know has more ideas than they’ll ever have time to put down on paper. Working writers are generally practical people who have solved one of the core mysteries of the craft: that writing is about art and publishing is about business.

Another piece of propaganda is that writers, like all creative people, are bad at business. I used to believe that, too. I said so, often, because I’d heard it so often. It’s as false as the belief in some quarters that if a writer is commercially successful then it means that they’ve accomplished it only at the expense of their artistic integrity. Hogwash. Those are defenses offered up by the uninformed, misinformed, and disinformed.

If I could roll back the years and do things differently, the first thing I would have done would be to make sure I took business courses while studying writing in college. Business management, contract law, accounting, maybe a class on business etiquette. Basic stuff necessary for a small business, because that’s what a writer is: a business.

The writing day is a work day. I write full time, which means that I am putting a minimum of eight hours into my job. Granted, I get to work where I want (and I’m writing this in the coffee shop at my neighborhood Borders Bookstore), but I’m working. I have a target of at least two thousand words a day. Most weeks, though, I write three to four thousand words a day, writing ten hours a day.

Before I was full time…I made sure I wrote every day. Every day, without exceptions and excuses. Excuses never got a writer into print. If you want to talk about ‘sacrificing for your craft’, then sure…lose half an hour’s sleep and get a page written. Let a day go by without writing and you lose ground, and you make it easier not to write the next day. And the next.

One of the most frequently asked questions I get (and in fact, every writer I know gets) is: Can you give some useful advice for aspiring writers?

The short answer is: hell yes. And the advice is gladly given because, like most of my professional colleagues, I want to see other writers break in easily and quickly, and see them do well. Why? Because we believe that if there are more good writers generating top quality work, then more people will read –and that will benefit everyone in this wacky biz. Real pros don’t view publishing as competitive. We view it as a big boat, and the more hands on the oars, the more skillful hands working the rigging, the better, faster, and more successfully we’ll all be. It’s a glass half full thing.

So here are some quick bits of advice, culled from my own experiences and from really good advice I got along the way:

WRITE EVERY DAY: Yeah, I know I already said that, but it bears repeating.

LEARN THE CRAFT: Most writers are born with some kind of storytelling ability (maybe it’s a gene), but good writing is the result of storytelling plus learned skills. Take the time to learn about voice and point of view, about figurative and descriptive language, the three-act structure, about action and tension. Learn how to construct a sentence and a paragraph. Take classes. Go to writers conferences. And read about the craft. There are a lot of books on writing available. Here are the ones I recommend to my writing students: The Elements of Style, Fourth Edition by William Strunk Jr., OnWriting Well by William Zinsser, Zen in the Art of Writing by Ray Bradbury, On Writing by Stephen King, Writing the Breakout Novel by Donald Maass (and the accompanying Workbook), The Breakout Novelist: Craft and Strategies for Career Fiction Writers by Donald Maass, and The Successful Novelist: A Lifetime of Lessons about Writing and Publishing by David Morrell.

WRITE AN OUTLINE: A lot of writers don’t use ‘em, and even more claim they don’t; but most of the working pros do. You should, too. Know where your story is going to go so that you don’t waste time writing scenes which don’t contribute to that goal. That said, once you have an outline allow the story to grow organically so that you don’t force it to fit. A technique that works for me is that I write the first and last chapters of a book; then I write an exploratory synopsis–which is an essay written for myself in which I work out the story and the narrative logic; and then I write an outline.

NEVER REVISE UNTIL YOU FINISH YOUR FIRST DRAFT: Never. Ever. Revision of that kind is a momentum-killer. It’s a quicksand pit. Write it down fast and ugly and then fix it in the rewrite.

DON’T TRY FOR A PERFECT FIRST DRAFT: It’s a myth, it doesn’t exist. No one has ever done it, and no one can. Write a solid piece, and then pretty it up in the rewrite. A lot of writers hit what they believe is ‘writers block’ because what they’re writing doesn’t read or feel like the stuff they’re reading. Of course not. What they read in books has been written, revised (maybe many times), edited, and proofed. Out of the box perfection isn’t the point. Tell a good story, then revise.

DECONSTRUCT GREAT BOOKS: Take a couple of your favorite books and re-read them again as a writer rather than a reader. Read and re-read them. Write outlines based on the book so you can study the authors’ blueprints. Look for the three acts. Look at how and when characters are introduced. Look at the ratio of dialogue to prose. Identify when and how expository information is given–is it hidden in dialogue or action rather than in info-dumps. You can use the table of contents of any good book on writing as a guide to what to look for when deconstructing these books. A warning, though: don’t do this so you can try and write like your favorite authors; do it to understand what made them your favorites. Apprentice to them through this process, but use it as a launch-pad to find your own unique voice as a writer. When I was contemplating my first novel, GHOST ROAD BLUES, I did this with the best books of the genre in which my book would ideally be placed. The books I deconstructed were Stephen King’s ‘SALEM’S LOT, Peter Straub’s GHOST STORY and FLOATING DRAGON, Robert McCammon’s THEY THIRST, and Dan Simmon’s CARRION COMFORT.

LEARN THE BUSINESS: If you understand how publishing. The best ways to do this including subscribing to industry newsletters and attending conferences. I recommend the free newsletters provided by Publishers Weekly and Galley Cat. I also subscribe to Publishers Marketplace, which not only provides the excellent Publishers Lunch Deluxe, but also tracks most of the deals in publishing. For more up-close-and-personal learning, most writers’ conferences put you in the same room with agents, editors, publishers, and published authors. A well-informed and industry savvy writer has the best chance.

BE RELENTLESS: If you believe in your talent, then let nothing stop you. Not rejection letters (we all have ‘em) or even a horde of flesh-eating zombies.

Oh…and let’s add one more: HAVE FUN. ‘Cause it is.

Borders in one of the few stores that maintains a distinct Horror section.  At Waldenbooks, horror titles find a home in fantasy or general fiction.  B&N shelves their King, Koontz and Straub books with general fiction.

Horror fans seem to appreciate our commitment to their genre.  On the flip side, trying to identify which titles belong in which section can be tricky.  We feature Kelley Armstrong in fantasy but Kim Harrison in horror (her adult books anyway).  We often keep an author’s work together.  So Stephen King’s Eyes of the Dragon is a fantasy, but it’s shelved in horror.  Dan Simmons’ Hyperion and Ilium novels stay in Science Fiction, but the Terror and Song of Kali live in Horror.

Sure, it would be nice to shelve a borderline book in two places.  Financially, it could mean buying twice as much inventory.  Technically, our computer system can’t handle it.  Third, we’d risk confusing customers, who might find a title only in horror one week and then only fantasy the next, as one or the other sold out.

As genres blur together (which I encourage, mind you), determining the best home for a title gets trickier.  The line between fantasy and horror is especially blurry.  For better or worse, vampires, werewolves and zombies are everywhere from Young Adult to Romance.  Zombie Romance?  Really?

F. Paul Wilson, our latest guest, has made a nice home for his work in our horror section.  What do you think?  Did we find the right home for Repairman Jack?