Twitter seems to be the place where writers, especially independent, i.e., indie writers, find each other and keep each other up to date on what they’re doing. So I started looking for people to follow on twitter for the first time, and it quickly became overwhelming. Now I’m afraid to write blog entries because I feel like I ought to wait until I’ve made more of a serious effort to attract followers first.
Clearly this is like trying to drink a whole river, so I guess I’ll just keep on blogging. I wonder if it’s acceptable to repost your own blog entries periodically, if they remain relevant? I’ve seen people do a ton of reposting of things ranging from pertinent to trivial, so I guess it must be acceptable within reason. If I ever do that, I’ll try to make it clear it’s a repost.
In any event, I’ve actually been too busy to do much of it the last week or two anyway. More info shortly.
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/amazon-cut-e-book-prices-104805832.html?l=1
I don’t like government intervention into anything unless it’s absolutely necessary, so I’d have to say I disagree with this move. Frankly, it seems like there are a lot more important battles out there to be fought, and if not, they can lay off some bureaucrats and lower taxes accordingly. It would reduce the amount of pent-up government wanting to do what it does, specifically, apply force to make people and businesses change their behavior for noneconomic reasons…which usually means, for unreasons. But I digress.
I’d much rather see a market solution to the problem of excessive ebook pricing, and I think it’s already underway. People are actively looking for alternatives to expensive ebooks, looking for lower-priced similar material. And there’s alot of similar material. Given the amount of material out there at all, and the number of new self-publishing stars that are rising, it really seems unwise for traditional publishers to continue to insist on pricing ebooks higher than print books, even higher than hardbacks. But let the market handle it over the next couple of years.
I happen to prefer Amazon over the others, and I doubt I’ll be buying many ebooks through Apple, though anything’s possible. But this has nothing to do with team-picking and flag-waving. I just like their product and their pricing.
I’ve always been able to set words together, naturally, easily, so I’m not used to learning new things pertaining to writing. There had to be some place where people like me go to learn to use whatever talent they have at it. Probably lots of places. I didn’t have a lot of time to waste, and I wasn’t going to be able to wait around for classes or workshops. And I didn’t feel ready for workshops, and the idea of sitting in a classroom after suffering through a string of degrees so many years ago made me want to cry. Though I can’t. Man, wouldn’t it be great to be able to cry? Must be nice.
Anyway, I was left with two resources readily at hand: the entire web, and a bunch of books on writing on a shelf in my bedroom, leftovers from a friend’s studies on the same subject. The web seemed big and impersonal, and seemed like the kind of place where bad advice is a common as good advice. In fairness, awhile back a friend had sent me a link to an old blog of Jim Butcher’s relating to writing technique, and I had found it useful. But the books seemed like a better source of concentrated knowledge.
So I looked through the books. I chose one called How to Write a Damn Good Novel by a guy named James N. Frey. It seemed like a good general guide to dealing with the types of issues I had.
I would like to pause for a moment and point out two things that made this experience nightmarishly miserable for me. Not Frey or his book, but reading these types of books in general. First, I find nonfiction of any kind just brutal to read. It’s like being in school, but where the school follows me everywhere I can carry a book. I have friends who only read nonfiction, and they seem like reasonable people, but I think they must be sick or insane in some way that will only reveal itself when they start eating brains in public, or something. Personally I read exclusively fiction, and don’t feel like I’ve missed out on any knowledge. As everyone knows, huge swaths of history are fiction anyway, a lot of science turns out to be fiction in the end, and let’s not even get started on biography, philosophy or religion.
Second, these books were made out of paper. I hadn’t read more than a couple of books on paper since getting my first Kindle, what, three years ago? That’s two out of easily five hundred books in that time. And I hadn’t read even one paper book in at least a year before this event. I couldn’t believe how annoying it was to have to carry a stack of paper around, turn pages, etc. I think I wrote about this stuff in a previous blog entry, so I won’t belabor it, but it horrifies me freshly thinking about it now.
Bottom line, I didn’t have any choice on either count. It was this or put the project on hold and find a class, or keep writing in the dark while fully aware that I was missing something. I soldiered through the hardships of learning new stuff from reading nonfiction, making my way through the entire book and folding over pages to mark passages relevant to my specific issues. I’ve never liked highlighting, but dog-earing and maybe taking some summary notes later always worked for me.
I will stop short of recommending this book in particular over others. I have nothing against it. I suspect there are a lot of books that teach more or less the same information. I will say this, though: it turned out that I’d found the answers I needed to get past that first wall.
It took me a day or two to read that book, and immediately afterward I spent another day or so reading a second one, How to Grow a Novel by Sol Stein. That was the book that yielded the horrible quote I posted early in this blog, but otherwise it was informative and useful for the most part. Even if it was a physical book, hardback, full of nonfiction.
I might later review individual books on writing, but that’s not my purpose right now. What happened next was that I was able to go back to my writing with some new tools that gave me two new capabilities:
In addition to these key new powers, there was an important rule I learned, one of those things that you read and know it’s true but still hate it and rail against it:
“All first drafts are crap.” - Attributed to Hemingway, though I haven’t verified that.
For me to accept that I would spend as much time rewriting as I have been writing was hard, but I understand the wisdom of it. Some days the writing was slow going, and after I got this point from the Stein book, I realized that I could just pound through sections that were dragging, rather than getting bogged down, because the odds are I’ll have to rework them anyway.
I haven’t decided whether to cover any aspects of writing theory and craft in this blog. I’m no expert and I’m no teacher, certainly not of this stuff. But I have written a lot of articles, and it might be worth covering some of these points one by one down the road. We’ll see.
And so, after about a week of struggling and finally solving the problem with my least favorite bitter medicine combo—learning by reading non-fiction—I got past that wall.
After I had been writing consistently, daily, for a couple of months, I hit a wall. I sat down in my usual chair…which was at Starbucks…and nothing happened. And I didn’t know what to do.
Actually, it wasn’t nothing that happened. “Nothing” would be writer’s block, I guess, and it wasn’t that. I assume that must be horrible, though I haven’t had it happen to me. What happened to me was that, over a period of a few days, I had been getting less and less confident about what I was writing. It was partly about not being able to gauge the quality of it, and that is something I would imagine most writers have to go through for a long time in their own careers, possibly without ever ending. I don’t even know if that’s solvable, although the solution to my own problem seems likely to help in this area as well.
In this case it was more about not being able to know whether the pieces I was writing would fit the final picture. I would write a scene and not know whether it would add or detract from the book. I would contemplate another section and wonder whether I should write it or hold off. I despaired of being able to consistently achieve any kind of emotional resonance, or to make sure the final product would feel complete but not bloated. And so, bogged down in these concerns, I started grinding to a halt.
At first I thought I could just bull through, and I did for a few days. Writing every day is rule #1, and I was doing it. But it became clear that there was a wall in front of me, and I wouldn’t get past it without doing something new and different.
I gave myself a hiatus from writing every day, for a couple of days at least, basically because I had no choice. I decided to try something. I would fire up the Kindle and go back to reread some of the books I have liked in the past, books where the stories built up empathy and excitement to a crescendo and left me feeling like I’d been on an emotional journey.
I happened to read some Jim Butcher books in this case, because I like them, and they’re quick, and they’re modern. There are a lot of other books that some would say have more staying power, classics like Dune and Shogun, that I love for the long term, but those take days to read, and I wasn’t in the mood. I think some of the Dresden Files books, and the very well-planned and executed Codex Alera, are good examples of modern dramatic fiction with relatable characters and excellent emotion management, if that makes sense.
I thought that I could read books like these for inspiration and try to analyze what worked about them. But instead, all it achieved for me was a kick when I was down. I am not the type of person who can analyze a movie while watching it, and predict what’ll happen next to annoy whoever’s with me. Reading the books was enjoyable but not educational, and I despaired of being able to accomplish the same kinds of things. And I was drifting.
But quitting was never an option. It never really is, not until you’re in the ground or at least physically can’t make yourself take another step. And so I cast about for another answer.
And in the spirit of short blog entries, we’ll get to that next time.
Well, as far as I can tell, I’ve gotten all the pieces of tech set up that I wanted to for this blog:
Of course now I need to work on some new content, and I will. Been writing consistently for 2-3 hours a day the last 7 days with one day off (meaning less than an hour of writing).
Next I’ll cover a topic I’ve been wanting to talk about since the beginning: walls.
