Alan Russell

Over the President’s Day weekend I will be teaching at the Southern California Writers Conference.  Because I am no stranger to this conference, its director rarely consults with me regarding what courses I will be teaching.  This week I learned that one of my classes is, “Russell’s Rules to Publishing Success.”

Given a choice, I wouldn’t have picked that title.  In previous years I taught a course titled something like “Russell’s Riting Rules” (clever alliterative touch, right?), which provided writing tips for the pre-published.  The new course title suggests I know something about publishing success.  Although I have had my share of novels published, I still don’t feel like a publishing success.  Stephen King or John Grisham should be teaching this class, not me.

One rule I will probably emphasize is that writers must back up their work.  The reason this will be on my mind is that 10 days ago I lost several weeks of work because I wasn’t practicing that cardinal rule.  I set out to do the right thing.  Because the rain was producing gremlins on the electrical grid, I asked my born with a silicon chip son to back up two files on an external hard drive.  This is a kid who will be majoring in computer engineering next year.  This was child’s play for him, a trifling task, a quick favor for his Luddite father.  So what did Mr. Digital do?  He took the old files (same name) from the hard drive and rewrote them over the new files on my computer.  My son had never made this mistake before, and felt terrible.  It really was my fault, though.  I should have been doing my own backing up, but I’ve never been totally comfortable with the hard drive.  Having learned my lesson I went out and bought a laptop.  Now I’m backing up my writing with a USB memory stick, and the laptop.

However, I’m betting the class won’t be gasping with admiration when I tell them that they should backup their material.  I suspect they’ll want a roadmap to the New York Times bestseller list, and not my pabulum about it being the journey and not the destination.

Years ago my friend Ken Kuhlken and I did a booksigning at a mystery bookstore, and we were told by the owner that if we wanted to write a bestseller we should have the plot revolve around cats and chocolate.  It’s possible the bookseller’s advice was right on the money.  Maybe if he had said dogs and beer I might have even considered it.

Ken and I responded to that advice by writing a tongue and cheek book called, NO CATS, NO CHOCOLATE.  In the book Ken and I are the main characters, traveling from one unsuccessful booksigning to another.  During the journey, the two of us decide that since we can’t make a living from legitimate writing, we might as well sell out and write romance novels.  By book’s end we have the revelation that if we’re going to write about murder, we aren’t going to do it with high tea, doilies and bon bons (or cats and chocolate).  To thine own self be true.

Good writing explores theme and character – it shouldn’t be about exploiting mediocrity.  I hope that doesn’t sound elitist.  Mickey Spillane once said something to the effect of, “What the literati don’t realize is that there are a lot more people that like peanuts than caviar.”  Peanuts work for me if they are done well, and salted perfectly.

In writing, like medicine, I think the goal should be to first do no harm (that applies to both the writer and readers).  To my class I am going to offer such tried and true advice as:

*Create specific images.

*Don’t trust the opinions of your family or friends.

*Omit needless words (thank you Strunk & White).

*Don’t let the reader be complacent.

*Write the book you most want to read yourself.

*Don’t chase whatever’s trendy at the moment.

*In the words of E.B. White, “Don’t write about Man, write about A man.”

*Study the magic.  Reread your favorite books.  Why do they work?

*One good page a day for a year equals a book.

*Read your dialogue aloud.

*Develop your authorial bullshit detector.

*Repeat the mantra of every good writer:  show, don’t tell.

*Do the research, but don’t feel you need to bludgeon the reader with all that you’ve learned.

*Writing is a marathon, and the race is not always to the swift.

*Read Storytellers Unplugged every day so you can benefit from the advice of fine writers (I might really use that one).

*If you’re stuck in your writing, deviate from routine (Sully’s Rule).

That’s the kind of pithy advice the class will be getting.  I am sure some of the students will be disappointed at the “elementary” nature of my rules of writing.  I would appreciate any comments about your own “rules for publishing success” (whatever the hell that is).  Tell me what works for you.  It always means more if you get it from the horse’s mouth.  I thank you in advance, and so do the students.

Pax,

Alan Russell

February 5, 2010

When people ask me what I do for a living, I am always at a bit of a loss as to how to answer.  It sounds a little too highfaluting to announce, “I am an author.”  You just can’t say that sentence without sounding like you graduated from Oxford, or that you have something large that needs to be pulled out from your backside.  My preference is to say, “I’m a storyteller,” but that involves too long an explanation.  Usually I say, “I’m a writer.”

As all of you know, that answer never suffices.  You have to explain what kind of a writer you are, and then you are expected to talk about your books.  Some writers have business cards listing their books.  I am always saying I should have those kinds of calling cards, but that I have never been organized enough to get them speaks volumes.

Other professions don’t require the explanations that ours does.  It surprises me when people actually say, “Do you really make a living at that?”  To date I have not answered, “Are you really stupid enough to have asked that?”

As writers we need to remember that two percent of the population buys more than 90% of the fiction that is sold.  I have yet to figure out why it is that I never seem to get into a conversation with that elusive two percent of the population.

There is a certain danger that comes with others knowing about our profession, and because of that I think the official headgear of writers is the same as that worn by court jesters.  I have been approached to read manuscripts by more “friend of a friend of friends” than I care to remember.  Need a newsletter written?  Need a paper edited?  Need a business letter crafted?  For some reason because we work with words, others seem to think we would love to be involved with their endeavors.  What we want to say is, “Frankly, Scarlet, I don’t give a damn.”  What we usually say is, “Okay.”

Invariably, those requests come without an offer of remuneration.  “It’s just a page or two,” we are told.  I don’t ever remember telling a plumber, “It’s just a leak or two.”  I mean, plumbers love to work with pipes, don’t they?

As for speaking engagements, beware those that tell you, “We don’t pay an honorarium, but you can sell as many books as you like.”  Those are usually organizations that even Ron Popeil couldn’t sell to.

There is a difference between writing full-time, and writing fool-time.  When you are too often side-tracked by writing that is not your own, you are a fool-time writer.  Guilty as charged.  I am glad that I am in good company, though (Thomas Sullivan, come on down.)

I am proud of being a writer, but November is not a good month to remind others of that fact, especially if they have high school kids.  In years past I have been hit up by friends and acquaintances to “take a look” at their children’s college essays.  I have been encouraged by those parents to “spruce it up a little.”  Talk about trying to make a silk purse out of a cow’s ear.

Now I am getting an education as to why these parents were so desperate.  Maybe the thought of their child’s staying at home while attending a J.C. for the next two years drove them to seek out “that writer guy.”  Yes, the birds have come home to roost.  My 17 year old boy is in the midst of filling out college applications.

You would think by now I would be ready for this, as I have been through the process one time before.  Four years ago my oldest boy wrote his college essay and then asked me to look at it.  When I finished reading it I asked him, “When you wrote this were you trying to give the admissions people every possible reason to turn you down, or just most of them?”  We revised the essay.  It is a process where you should not have any sharp instruments nearby.

Now I am going through that process again, but it’s even worse.  My middle child has decided he should apply to schools like Swarthmore, Rice, Cornell, the Naval Academy, and Brown.  Naturally, all the schools want different essays, and many of them want multiple essays.  There are six supplemental essays alone for Brown.

You know Munk’s painting The Scream?  This month it bears an amazing resemblance to me.

In another week or so, assuming the two of us survive our collaboration, my son’s college essays will be done.  Until that time, though, I really wish I wasn’t a writer.

Pax,

Alan Russell

November 5, 2009

Fledgling writers make the mistake all the time. Even experienced writers sometimes get caught up in the same trap. You work on a book for months, you write a substantial number of pages, and then the wheels start coming off. Something is very wrong.

You tweak the chapter. You finesse the words. You try and build a better mousetrap any number of ways, but it’s still not working. Usually it’s because we are not looking for the problem in the right place. We think the fault is with chapter 10 (or eight, or 14, or wherever), but much of the time the real problem is elsewhere.

When this happens to you, it’s time to sing a song. The answer, my friends, is blowing in Dem Bones. Let’s sing it together, shall we? I want it sung with gospel vigor, with clapping of hands and shaking of body parts. One, two, three:

The foot bone’s connected to the ankle bone,
The ankle bone’s connected to the leg bone,
The leg bone’s connected to the knee bone,
The knee bone’s connected to the thigh bone,
Oh hear the word of the Lord!

The song might not work for American Idol, but it does help with explaining the Great American Novel. In this column it’s my job to be the word of the Lord. The adult body has 206 bones. Don’t worry, I’m not going to ask you to sing through all the connections, but trust me, there are a lot of them. When the human body is a bit out of kilter the problems can manifest themselves in any number of places. Just watch the show House if you don’t believe me.

A book is a series of interconnected parts that is as complicated as the human body. When we hit that stumbling block in a novel we hope that the answer is to take two aspirin and regroup in the morning. Sometimes that works. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. But those bones can be tricky. Sometimes you have to do a hard diagnosis of your book.

Maybe your novel isn’t working because the setup is wrong. When I wrote my third novel, THE HOTEL DETECTIVE, I couldn’t understand why the book wasn’t coming to life. I knew the world of hotels only too well, having worked in them for many years. I knew the characters, and I had the stories. As far as I could determine, there was no problem with the plot. Still, I was 150 pages into the book, and it wasn’t right.

Oh, dem bones.

I had to look at those bones. I studied the foundation of the book. If you’re going to build up, you better have a solid foundation. That’s where I got an inkling of what was wrong. I had built the book in the wrong way. Because my first two novels were written in the first person, I thought THE HOTEL DETECTIVE would follow suit. But first person was absolutely wrong for this book. There were too many characters in the hotel to have everything revolving around one individual – hell, the hotel was a character in itself.

Before my revelation, I had spent weeks tinkering with the book. I had been convinced my problem was in and around page 150, which turned out to be about 150 pages from the truth. As soon as I started writing the book in third person the novel took off.

Every author has to be their own doctor. Proctology exams are no fun, but they have to be done. Why isn’t this book working? Maybe your protagonist is wrong. Maybe your character needs a better support system. Maybe your subconscious knows the plot isn’t right and is putting up roadblocks to the book’s completion. Maybe the setting is wrong. Maybe you need to visualize the book as it should be. Anybody with a bad back knows how having the wrong bone out of place wreaks havoc on the body. Books are impacted in much the same way. When something is wrong the entire book is out of kilter, and though we want the solution to be expedient (i.e. on the chapter where the problem surfaces) sometimes we have to be willing to unravel that thread no matter where it takes us.

It’s all about dem bones.

So you better hear the word of the Lord!

Pax,

Alan Russell

September 5, 2009