Writing Fiction

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Booksellers, hobbled by the economic crisis, are struggling to lure readers. Almost all of the New York publishing houses are laying off editors and pinching pennies. Small bookstores are closing. Big chains are laying people off or exploring bankruptcy. 

A recently released study by the National Endowment for the Arts found that while more people are reading literary fiction, fewer of them are reading books. 

Meanwhile, there is one segment of the industry that is actually flourishing: capitalizing on the dream of would-be authors to see their work between covers, companies that charge writers and photographers to publish are growing rapidly at a time when many mainstream publishers are losing ground. 

Credit for the self-publishing boomlet goes to authors like Jim Bendat, whose book “Democracy’s Big Day,” a collection of historical vignettes about presidential inaugurations, enjoyed a modest burst in sales in the hoopla surrounding President Obama’s swearing-in. 

After failing to secure a traditional publishing deal in 2000, Mr. Bendat, a public defender in Los Angeles, paid $99 to publish the first edition of his book with iUniverse, a print-on-demand company. 

He updated the book in 2004 and 2008, and has sold more than 2,500 copies. IUniverse takes a large cut of each sale of the book, currently on Amazon.com for $11.66. 

As traditional publishers look to prune their booklists and rely increasingly on blockbuster best sellers, self-publishing companies are ramping up their title counts and making money on books that sell as few as five copies, in part because the author, rather than the publisher, pays for things like cover design and printing costs.

John Updike, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, prolific man of letters and erudite chronicler of sex, divorce and other adventures in the postwar prime of the American empire, died Tuesday at age 76. 

Updike, a resident of Beverly Farms, Mass., died of lung cancer, according to a statement from his publisher, Alfred A. Knopf.

Every industry is in trouble this winter, and publishing is an industry. 

The other day, a commenter quoted part of my post on Michael Crichton and added his own observations:

"More clearly in the movie than in the book, the lab is a symbolic vagina: the various floors are built around a central shaft. The whole plot depends, in effect, on doing exciting stuff in this vagina without actually setting off an orgasm. (One of the scientists, a woman, is also an epileptic who goes into a trance when alarm lights flash. Figure that out for yourself.)"

Did Crichton ever admit to this? It's weird analysis like yours that always turned me off to english teachers. Some times a story is just a story. And, no, I'm not a Crichton fan. I'm someone who is tired of being told by english teachers/professors what constitutes literature, when 80% of the vaunted literature I have read for these people is pure crap.

To the best of my scanty knowledge, Crichton never admitted to it. But most writers have only a vague sense of the symbolism they employ. This is why we are usually the least useful critics of our own work.

This evening, after a good dinner, I did the dishes and came upstairs to find this story on Slate: Barack Obama's life will be somewhat normal for exactly 64 more days. So why not wash the dishes? Excerpt:

In Barack Obama's first interview since winning the election, he made an odd but revealing confession: He found it soothing, he said, to do the dishes.

I know exactly what he was talking about. For a writer, that kind of mundane chore is absolutely essential.

By dumb luck, I've managed to live a life in which nothing much has happened. I had the same job, college teaching, for 40 years. I've lived in the same nice house for 36 years, where our two girls grew up.

My wife's a wonderful cook, and I'm happy to clean up. When the kids were young, we'd all have dinner together; then everyone left the kitchen and I stayed to do the dishes.

In that time I could daydream, think about tomorrow's classes, and wonder about the current or future novel. And I discovered that nothing frees the mind like putting the body to some kind of automatic work.

It works on all levels. Sometimes I'd get an idea for a whole novel or nonfiction book. Sometimes, with a book in progress, I could focus on what ought to happen in the next chapter. It got to be a running gag: If I was having plot problems, we needed to invite people over for dinner so I'd have more dishes to wash.

It doesn't have to be dishes. Mowing the grass is good, and so are shaving and vacuuming. Walking our black Lab one night many years ago, I wondered what my neighbourhood would look like ten million years from now. That led to Eyas, the book I still consider my best.

That beloved dog is long gone, but I still walk his successors, two beautiful Australian shepherds, and I think about books in progress and books that I might someday write. Then I come home and accomplish work that I'd never have even imagined if the dogs hadn't dragged me out in the pouring rain.

Some years ago my wife insisted on buying a dishwasher. I could see the artistic crisis that meant, but you can't put a cast-iron skillet in a dishwasher. Some chores, thank heaven, will always be boring, robotic manual tasks. I hope I can perform them for many more years.

And I hope President Obama gets some dishwashing time as well. It could give him the ideas that will save us all.

It's Remembrance Day here in Canada, and Veterans' Day in the US. Today The Tyee published my essay War and How We Told It, discussing the early Canadian novels about what they called the Great War.

Via The New York Times: An Appraisal - Michael Crichton - Builder of Realms That Thrillingly Run Amok. Excerpt:

Michael Crichton, who died on Tuesday at the age of 66, was like a character in a Michael Crichton novel. He was unusually tall (6 feet 7 inches), strikingly handsome and encyclopedically well informed about everything from dinosaurs to medieval banquet halls to nanotechnology.

As a writer he was a kind of cyborg, tirelessly turning out novels that were intricately engineered entertainment systems. No one — except possibly Mr. Crichton himself — ever confused them with great literature, but very few readers who started a Crichton novel ever put it down.

De mortuis nil nisi bonum...Of the dead, speak nothing but good. At the age of 67, I feel a shiver when I hear of another writer dead at 66.

But Crichton's novels survive him, though they don't deserve it.

Crichton was clearly a very, very smart and well-educated man. He was also a fast writer of formula fiction, and he stayed within the limits of his "engineered" formulas. That was the key to his success and the cause of his failure.

Crichton understood how to take a half-teaspoon of science and add it to four cups of routine story. The result was a nanotech threat, or a dinosaur threat, or an alien-virus threat. The half-teaspoon of science made his stories just exotic enough to interest readers, without actually making them think. They could sit back and let the routine story carry them up and down the usual roller coaster. At the end, we usually got something like a return to the safe, reassuring status quo.

I read quite a few of his novels, sometimes enjoying them as a pleasant way to waste a weekend. But I stopped taking him seriously after The Andromeda Strain.

Here we have an alien disease, which is to be identified and destroyed in an underground laboratory. To ensure that the disease can never escape, a nuclear bomb is planted under the bottom floor of the lab.

More clearly in the movie than in the book, the lab is a symbolic vagina: the various floors are built around a central shaft. The whole plot depends, in effect, on doing exciting stuff in this vagina without actually setting off an orgasm. (One of the scientists, a woman, is also an epileptic who goes into a trance when alarm lights flash. Figure that out for yourself.)

Now, a satirist could have had a great time with such an image while poking fun at thrillers, Big Science, and any number of other targets. But Crichton didn't have a satirical bone in his body.

He certainly advocated for certain values, and opposed others. One value he opposed was Dumb Kids who Get In Trouble. Another value was Bitchy Women who Hassle the Hero. But he used dumb kids and bitchy women simply to move his plots along, and to make us sympathize with his heroes. God knows the heroes themselves didn't offer much we could sympathize with.

Most of his novels, especially after he began to succeed in Hollywood, read more like treatments for the inevitable screenplays that would follow them. They offered just enough technobabble to give the stories some credibility, and they kept readers turning the pages. But they never drew readers to think seriously about the issues the stories dramatized.

Writing fiction is a craft. If we're good enough at that craft, our readers (not we ourselves) can call us artists. Like any craft, writing relies on formulas and conventions. If we want to challenge those formulas, we first need to understand them very well.

Then we can tweak them in ways that make our readers snap out of their trance and ask: "What the hell is this story really about? And why the hell do I find such a story interesting?"

A story that makes us ask such questions, and find answers to them, begins to escape formula and become literature.

I'm glad for Crichton and his family that he was able to make enough money to keep them all very comfortable. But I'm sorry for Crichton, because his intelligence and talent suggested that he could have been a far better writer if only he had taken his craft seriously.

The Tyee has published my article In Praise of Elmore Leonard .

If you haven't discovered the old master yet, you have many, many great stories to look forward to...and to learn from.

This is the best news of the week: the Orwell Diaries are a day-by-day journal of George Orwell's life, published 70 years to the day after he wrote them. The chance to get inside Orwell's head and see the world as he did is an opportunity no writer should miss.

I'm putting a link to the blog in the Writers' Blogs and Sites list.

Monique posted a comment asking: How Long is a Chapter? It's a frequently asked question. The link will take you to my post on this subject from May 2007.

You may also want to check my online course Write a Novel, which could be useful.

Most people find this site by Googling questions like how many pages in a novel. Once you're here, use the Google Search function in the right-hand column. You may find what you're looking for very quickly.

Via The New York Times: L. Rust Hills, Fiction Editor at Esquire, Dies at 83. Excerpt:

L. Rust Hills, a staunch advocate of contemporary American literature who, as Esquire’s curmudgeonly fiction editor in three separate stints from the 1950s through the 1990s, published original works by scores of the country’s finest writers, died on Tuesday in Belfast, Me. He was 83 and lived in Key West, Fla.

The cause was cardiac arrest, said a friend, the writer Christopher Buckley.

A shrewd reader with a keen ear for an original voice and a sure sense of the distinction between new writing and merely fashionable writing, Mr. Hills upheld standards he unashamedly thought of as literary.

The list of distinguished writers he championed early in and throughout their careers is long and comprises several generations. To name just a handful: Norman Mailer, John Cheever, William Styron, Bruce Jay Friedman, William Gaddis, James Salter, Don DeLillo, Ann Beattie, Richard Ford, Raymond Carver and E. Annie Proulx.

I have a faint recollection of hearing Rust Hills speak at Columbia, but I certainly knew who he was, and how important he was. Especially in the late 50s and early 60s, Esquire was one of the really big literary magazines. Every issue was an event—a provocative essay by Mailer, a short story by Styron or Gaddis. For aspiring young writers, Hills and Esquire showed that you could not just get published; you could make an impact.

We are now long past the age when editors actually edited. Now they make deals. Almost every book I read reminds of that, because today's books—fiction and nonfiction alike—are embarrassingly under-edited.

Spelling and grammatical errors are too numerous to count. Worse yet are passages that are so dull or poorly written that even your word processor's style guide would flag them for revision (or excision). Yet somehow they get past today's editors.

The problem seems to lie with publishers' bottom-line priorities. It costs money to do serious editing. In the Golden Age of American literature, roughly 1920-1970, publishers actually thought money wasn't quite as important as identifying good new writers and fostering their careers. If that meant hiring editors like Maxwell Perkins and Rust Hills, so be it. Today's corporate mentality is just looking for the next blockbuster, regardless of quality.

You can still find good editors here and there. Thirty years after my first novel appeared, I'm still grateful to Judy-Lynn Del Rey and Owen Lock for the attention they gave it. My editors at Self-Counsel Press are patient and meticulous; they've saved me from embarrassing myself on more than one page.

But it's more a matter of luck than certainty. So we owe Rust Hills our gratitude for setting an example that some still follow.

Mary posted a comment asking about creating a memoir in a font resembling that of her grandmother's typewriter.

It's a good question, because many of us choose a particular font for equally personal reasons. (I still fondly recall my mother's Royal portable, on which I banged out my first stories at age 11 or so.)

In the typewriter age, you had the font your typewriter came with. It started to get exciting with the IBM Selectric, when you could actually change the font by changing the typeball. Those were the glory days. Then computers gave us more font and format choices than we could handle.

If you're creating your own book with InDesign or some other desktop publishing program, you can use any font you choose. As a self-publisher, you're entitled to present your work in the font and format you choose.

But if you're submitting your manuscript to a publisher, that's a different story.

To an editor, your manuscript is just another chunk of work. She's got to put it into shape according to her publisher's requirements, and the font you love is irrelevant. Your editor just hopes it's easily readable: a fairly common serif font is usually best.

Of course, most publishers now require you to submit an electronic copy of your book as well as a paper manuscript. So the electronic version's font can be changed very easily. But it's far easier to read (and copy-edit) on paper than on screen, so your hard copy should be readable.

That also means it's double-spaced, so the editor can make corrections and comments. Isaac Asimov, in the typewriter age, used no margins and single-spaced everything, just so he wouldn't waste time putting new sheets of paper in his machine. He published hundreds of books this way, leaving it to his editors to put his manuscripts into publishable shape.

But you're not Isaac Asimov. So I suggest you visit the website of the publisher you think is most likely to accept your manuscript. See what the authors' guidelines say about fonts and formats.

Follow those guidelines no matter what. Their purpose is to make the editing of your manuscript as fast and efficient as possible. If your personal taste makes your manuscript hard to edit, the editor will just reject you, unread. And it will be your fault, not hers.

A couple of days ago, Juliana posted a comment asking about how to go about finding a publisher for her almost-finished novel.

The best advice I can offer is on my Write a Novel website, which is a self-guided online course. Chapters 16 and 17 are the relevant sections.

Via The Independent in the UK: Christian protests may leave Philip Pullman's trilogy as one of a kind. Excerpt:

Perhaps it has disappeared through a window into another universe, like its characters.

It looked increasingly unlikely yesterday that cinema audiences in this world will get to see the planned film sequels in Philip Pullman's children's fantasy trilogy, His Dark Materials.

Sources in the film industry said that plans for a sequel to The Golden Compass appeared to have been put on ice following the fervent Christian protests surrounding the first film, which led to boycotts and box office disappointment in the United States.

Pullman told The Independent that he had not yet been contacted by Shepperton Studios and was not aware of any imminent plans to film the sequel, The Subtle Knife. When the first film was in production last year, he was regularly contacted by Chris Weitz, its writer and director.

"I know everyone would like to see a sequel and I know I'd like to see it. When the first film was in production, I was talking to the studio and to Chris Weitz and producers quite frequently. I'm sure I would be now if the sequel was in production," he said.

That's a shame. I saw The Golden Compass on DVD, and enjoyed it though it rushed through the book's content too quickly. The next two films would at least have been great to watch.

Pullman can at least content himself with his royalties: The trilogy seems to continue to sell well, and for good reason—it's a brilliant adaptation of cutting-edge science into the fantasy/SF genre. A 12-year-old who finishes the three novels has a pretty good briefing on some key controversies in modern physics.

Should writers draw a moral from this? Yes, and here it is: If you're writing to make money, go into advertising.

But if you're writing to express your vision of the world, the prejudices of your readers should be your last concern. Write what you love, and the money will follow. Or not.

And if not, so what?

Dalton Trumbo was one of my first mentors when I was a teenager with ambitions for a writing career. So I'm happy to see this New York Times review of the movie his son Christopher has written about him: When an eloquent voice was stilled by Hollywood. Excerpt:

Peter Askin’s stirring documentary “Trumbo” gives you reasons to cheer but also to weep. It makes you lament the decline of the kind of language brandished with Shakespearean eloquence by Dalton Trumbo, the blacklisted Hollywood screenwriter, in his witty, impassioned letters excerpted in the movie.

Some of those letters, collected in the 1999 volume “Additional Dialogue,” are delivered as forceful dramatic soliloquies by a battery of distinguished actors including Joan Allen, Brian Dennehy, Michael Douglas, Paul Giamatti, Nathan Lane, Liam Neeson, David Strathairn, Josh Lucas and Donald Sutherland.

Another cause for lament is the shortness of historical memory in today’s climate of infinite distraction. Why chew on the unhappy events of six decades ago when you can drool over pictures of Brangelina or get lost in the latest video game? Anyway, who cares what happened way back then?

Writers in particular should care because it can (and will) happen again. Whatever you think of Dalton Trumbo's political judgment (clearly not good), his integrity and courage were exemplary.

Via The Globe and Mail: Young authors turn online collaboration into book deal. Excerpt:

Two 21-year-old women have landed a book deal after writing a book together online in only 18 days. Danielle Bennett, from Victoria, and Jaida Jones, from New York, managed to attract the attention of a major publishing house with a fantasy novel featuring flying metal dragons, magicians and an all-out battle between warring rivals.

“It's still unbelievable,” said Ms. Bennett in Victoria, where she grew up. “There are still times when I flip through this book and say, ‘Did we write this?' ”

The hardcover version of Havemercy will be released across North America this week. The anticipation of the 400-page book hitting store shelves is leaving both authors nervous and excited.

“We're pretty stunned most of the time,” said Ms. Jones, who was in Victoria to visit with her co-author and celebrate their accomplishment. “We're keeping our fingers crossed that it will do well.”

This story is news precisely because it's so unusual: the means of collaboration, the speed of production, the acquisition of an agent by unknown writers. Yes, it happens. I'm delighted for these two young writers, but other writers shouldn't beat themselves up because their own projects (collaborative or not) haven't succeeded.

I must have been 13 or 14 when I read my first Gore Vidal novel, an SF tale called Messiah. It was about a death cult that arises in the US and takes over the word. Since then I've read a lot of his other fiction, and much of his nonfiction.

He's a fine writer, able to work in many genres: SF, historical fiction, screenplays, satire. If you haven't discovered him yet, you have a treat (and a shock) coming.

Vidal is appealing because he's very smart, knows more than you or I ever will, and honestly doesn't give a damn what you or I think about anything. Here's an interview with him, published on June 15 in The New York Times: Questions For Gore Vidal - Literary Lion.

Several young writers have recently posted comments asking about whether their novels are the right length for young-adult publishers.

I'm delighted to see so many ambitious writers, and I wish them all every success. But they shouldn't ask me—they should ask the publishers.

Here, for example, are the Penguin Young Readers Group Submission Guidelines.

These guidelines are typical of what you can expect. Yes, they are brutal. Yes, they are discouraging. This is a very tough business. Only a handful of people actually make a living by writing novels, and for the young-adult market the handful is even smaller.

But don't give up. Here's what I suggest you do:

1. Look at who's published the books you really like—the books that made you want to write your own. Google them and look for the link to their submission guidelines. No guidelines? They don't want to hear from you. Don't waste your time. Look elsewhere.

2. If they do offer guidelines, follow them. If they say they look only at manuscripts that agents submit to them, look at sites like WritersNet, which has a page of agents who handle young-adult stories.

3. Do not expect these agents to jump on your manuscript just because you're a kid who wrote a story. Musical prodigies sometimes perform at Carnegie Hall. Literary prodigies almost never break into print.

4. If you do find an agent who actually takes your manuscript, understand that the agent does not expect to make any money from it. The agent will get 15% of your royalties. Fifteen percent of $10,000 is $1,500—not enough to pay the rent for two months, and you're unlikely to earn $10,000 to begin with. The agent hopes that after two or three novels, you might attract enough readers to earn a few thousand dollars in royalties.

5. If you have an agent who's willing to shop your manuscript around, great. But get right to work on the next story, and don't worry about the first one. If it does sell, the publisher will want a follow-up. If it doesn't, the new manuscript will probably be better than the first one.

6. If all else fails, think about this: Almost no teenager publishes a novel. But a teenager who writes a novel knows that it doesn't take your whole life to do it. It's a lot of work, but you can finish a novel in six weeks or six months or a year. Then you can write another one, and another one.

One of my mentors, when I was a kid, was Dalton Trumbo, a screenwriter and novelist. His novel Johnny Got His Gun, published almost 70 years ago, is still read and revered as perhaps the greatest American anti-war novel.

Trumbo worked for ten years on the night shift of a Los Angeles bakery in the 1920s and 30s. In that time he wrote six novels and over 80 short stories. None of them sold. Finally he sold a short story. Then another. He wrote Johnny in six weeks while also working as a screenwriter.

He couldn't have written it as a teenager, or as a first novel. He needed to write a lot of fiction, novels and short stories, just to teach himself the craft.

So I'm delighted that you're writing a novel, or that you've finished one. By all means try to find a publisher, but don't give up just because the first one turns you down.

If you want to succeed in this business, Trumbo told me, you need just two things: ego and energy. You need to think that the ideas in your head are so important that the rest of the world ought to know about them. And you need the energy to write and market them, which may take years.

If you're in your teens and already writing novel-length fiction, chances are you have both ego and energy. So keep at it. Write what matters to you, and eventually some publisher will realize that it will matter to a lot of readers as well.