Alexandra Sokoloff

RETURN TO THE STORYTELLERS HOMEPAGE

This question is coming at me from all directions this week. Fall, I guess, right?

First of all I’d like to address the question of why you need an agent at all.

Well, if you want to be a full-time professional novelist, you do. I know, people do it without. Fine – if you’re one of those people, I’m not talking to you.

But for those of us who DON’T have that kind of business savvy, this is what an agent does.

A good literary agent lives in New York (that’s CITY). An agent’s job is pretty much to go out to breakfast, lunch, dinner, coffee, and drinks with every good editor in the city, and know what those editors are looking for, so that when you hand your agent your new book or proposal, your agent will know exactly which editor is looking for what kind of a book – know each editor’s taste intimately, so that your agent can submit to exactly the right agent at each publishing company and put you and your book in the position of making the best possible deal available on the planet at that moment.

Really. That’s what your agent does.

When your agent submits your book, s/he will most likely submit it to 8-10 of the top publishers in New York simultaneously, and you need to have that book submitted to the editor MOST LIKELY TO BUY IT at each house, in the hopes of -

1 – creating an auction and/or pre-emp situation

2. – getting the best possible editor and the best possible deal out there.

You cannot do these things yourself. An agent can. This is the difference between writing for a living and writing in those spaces between the demands of the day job.

So that’s the WHY of an agent. What exactly is the HOW?

I know a lot of authors recommend starting with the lists in Writers’ Market, but the very thought makes me cringe. How are you supposed to know who’s a good agent from reading randomly through that enormous book? Instead, I highly recommend making your own targeted list of agents who represent books in your genre, who have made recent sales, and who other authors you admire are enthusiastic about. We are SO LUCKY to have Google to allow us to do this kind of research instantly, right from our own desks.

I also know that getting an agent is so hard these days that a lot of aspiring authors jump at the first offer of representation. That is a TERRIBLE thing to do. You only have one shot to get your book read and bought by the major publishers and you need the best representation you can find. An agent with “clout” can get you thousands more in advance money, just because of their relationships and who they are. It can easily be the difference between you writing as a hobby – and writing for a living. It’s worth taking the time to do extensive research, and approach the agents you most want to work with first, before you settle for the first thing that comes along.

Here are some great resources to consult when you start your agent investigation:

1. The Backspace forums

Backspace is an invaluable resource for all aspiring authors (and published authors, too!) There are public pages, but the real gold is the private forum – it’s a $25 or $30 one time fee to join but invaluable. You can get your questions answered directly by great agents and editors, and get public or private feedback on particular agents or your query letters by other Backspace members.

2. Here’s a great site with over 1500 agent listings and software to research agents and keep track of your queries: Querytracker

3. And another – LitMatch – contains hundreds of agent names–and can single out agents in specific genres such as “mystery” and “thriller”. It also lists each agent’s requirements for submission.

And another: AgentQuery.com

4. Subscribe to Publishers’ Lunch, a free newsletter that you can sign up for on the Publishers’ Weekly site, and start a notebook in which you list agents who have sold books in your genre that week and the editors and publishing houses they have sold to.

5. Continue to build your targeted list of agents by going to the library or a bookstore or your own bookshelves and selecting at least 20 popular books in your genre and turning to the ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS page. Unless s/he’s a complete and total ungrateful idiot, the author will have thanked her/his agent in the first few lines.

You can also often find your favorite authors’ agents’ names on the authors’ websites, complete with contact info.

6. If you need help finding current, successful books in your genre, ask your local librarians and independent booksellers, who are your best friends.

7. Always check with Writer Beware to make sure that other agents you’re approaching are legit.

Here’s another agent verification site: Agentresearch.com

8. Go to writing conventions in your genre that agents will be attending, especially if you can sign up for pitch sessions. Meeting agents face to face in these situations is the best way to establish the connection that can lead to signing with an agency. The Shaw Guides provide a comprehensive list of conferences and conventions, nationwide, as does Jacqueline Deval’s excellent book PUBLICIZE YOUR BOOK – a comprehensive list of conventions in the back. If there’s a particular agent you have targeted, check to see if that agent is participating in pitch sessions at particular conferences It is absolutely worth it to go make the initial contact in person, in a structured setting like this. The personal contact will not only most likely get your submission read, it will give YOU a chance to see if you really want to work with that agent, which is equally important.

9. Go to conventions and hang out in the bar. I particularly recommend Bouchercon, Thrillerfest, the Backspace conference, Romance Writers of America National Conference, and Romantic Times Booklovers Convention. Be pleasant and charming, buy an agent a drink. Again, the personal contact will not only likely get your submission read, it will give you that chance to see if you really want to work with that agent.

HOW TO WRITE A QUERY LETTER:

Folio Literary Management has an EXCELLENT blog on all aspects of agenting, publishing, and writing careers.

Check out this post on the perfect query letter:

And then go ahead and delve into the other posts!

San Francisco agent Nathan Bransford, with Curtis Brown, also has an excellent blog on these and other topics – check out his essential links on the right side of the blog.

I’d love to hear of other good sources people have found so I can keep adding to my lists, so please let me know what I’m missing!

I’m doing another one of my screenwriting in an hour workshops in New Orleans this weekend, at Heather Graham’s Writers for New Orleans workshop. (Yes, and partying in New Orleans, too. I deserve it, okay?)

I know, it’s crazy, right? – what can you possibly teach anyone about anything in an hour?
Well, I can’t teach screenwriting in an hour, but I’ve found I can teach people how to start to teach THEMSELVES screenwriting in an hour. (And what I’m really teaching is story structure, and secretly I’m really teaching it to help novelists use screenwriting techniques to improve their own writing, because as I’ve said about a million times, if you’re not willing to commit to an actual career as a screen or TV writer, or have a source of independent financing for your movie, then it’s a waste of your time to write a script, except as a learning experience. Write a book instead.)

To teach yourself story structure, you start by making a list of 10 movies and books in the genre you’re writing in and/or that you feel are similar in structure to the story you want to write. From this list you are going to develop your own story structure workbook.

Then – write out the PREMISE or LOGLINE for each story on your list – as I’ve already talked about here, and compare your own story premise to those of your master list. The most important step of writing a book or a movie is to start with a solid, exciting, and I would say, commercial premise (because after all, we are making a living at this, aren’t we?)

Now we are going to step back and talk about basic film structure. Movies generally follow a three-act structure. That means that a 110-page script (and that’s 110 minutes of screen time – a script page is equal to one minute of film time) – is broken into an Act One of roughly 30 pages, an Act Two of roughly 60 pages, and an Act Three of roughly 20 pages, because as everyone knows, the climax of a story speeds up and condenses action. If you’re structuring a book, then you basically triple or quadruple the page count, depending on how long you tend to write.

Most everyone knows the Three Act structure. But the real secret of writing a script is that most movies are a Three Act, eight-sequence structure. Yes, most movies can be broken up into 8 discrete 15-minute sequences, each of which has a beginning, middle and end.

Try this with your master list. Watch a film, watching the time clock on your DVD player. At about 15 minutes into the film, there will be some sort of climax – an action scene, a revelation, a twist, a big set piece. It won’t be as big as the climax that comes 30 minutes into the film, which would be the Act One climax, but it will be an identifiable climax that will spin the action into the next sequence. Proceed through the movie, stopping to identify the beginning, middle and end of each sequence. Also make note of the bigger climaxes or turning points – Act One at 30 minutes, the Midpoint at 60 minutes (you could also say that a movie is really FOUR acts, breaking the long Act Two into two separate acts. Whichever works best for you.), Act Two at 90 minutes, and Act Three at whenever the movie ends.

In many movies a sequence will take place all in the same location, then move to another location at the climax of the sequence. The protagonist will generally be following just one line of action in a sequence, and then when s/he gets that vital bit of information in the climax of a sequence, s/he’ll move on to a completely different line of action. A good exercise is to title each sequence as you watch and analyze a movie – that gives you a great overall picture of the progression of action.

Also be advised that in big, sprawling movies like RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK and THE WIZARD OF OZ, sequences may be longer or there may be a few extras. It’s a formula and it doesn’t always precisely fit, but as you work through your master list of films, unless you are a surrealist at heart, you will be shocked and amazed at how many movies precisely fit this 8-sequence format. When you’re working with as rigid a form as a two-hour movie, on the insane schedule that is film production, this kind of mathematical precision is kind of a lifesaver.

My advice is that you watch and analyze ALL TEN of your master list movies (and books) before you do anything else. Once you’ve watched a movie for basic overall structure, you should go back and watch it again and this time do a step outline, or scene outline – in which you write down the setting, action, conflict and revelation in each scene, as well as breaking the whole down into its three acts and eight sequences. After you’ve worked your way through at least three movies in this way to get this structure clearly in your head (although all ten is better) you’re probably ready to start working on your own story as well.

And the method I teach in my workshops is the tried and true index card method.

You can also use Post-Its, and the truly OCD among us use colored Post-Its to identify various subplots by color, but I find having to make those kinds of decisions just fritzes my brain. I like cards because they’re more durable and I can spread them out on the floor for me to crawl around and for the cats to walk over; it somehow feels less like work that way. Everyone has their own method – experiment and find what works best for you.

Get yourself a corkboard or sheet of cardboard big enough to lay out your index cards in either four vertical columns of 10-15 cards, or eight vertical columns of 5-8 cards, depending on whether you want to see your movie laid out in four acts or eight sequences. You can draw lines on the corkboard to make a grid of spaces the size of index cards if you’re very neat (I’m not) – or just pin a few marker cards up to structure your space. Write Act One at the top of the first column, Act Two at the top of the second (or third if you’re doing eight columns), Midpoint at the top of the third (or fifth), Act Three at the top of the fourth (or seventh).

Then write a card with Act One Climax and pin it at the bottom of column one, Midpoint Climax at the bottom of column two, Act Two Climax at the bottom of column three, and Climax at the very end. If you already know what those scenes are, then write a short description of them on the appropriate cards.

And now also label the beginning and end of where eight sequences will go. (In other words, you’re dividing your corkboard into eight sections – either 4 long columns with two sections each, or eight shorter columns).

Now you have your structure grid in front of you.

What you will start to do now is brainstorm scenes, and that you do with the index cards.

A movie has about 40 to 60 scenes (a drama more like 40, an action movie more like 60) so every scene goes on one card. This is the fun part, like putting together a jigsaw puzzle. All you do at first is write down all the scenes you know about your movie, one scene per card. You don’t have to put them in order yet, but if you know where they go, or approximately where they go, you can just pin them on your corkboard in approximately the right place. You can always move them around. And just like with a puzzle, once you have some scenes in place, you will naturally start to build other scenes around them.

I love the cards because they are such an overview. You can stick a bunch of vaguely related scenes together in a clump, rearrange one or two, and suddenly see a perfect progression of an entire sequence. You can throw away cards that aren’t working, or make several cards with the same scene and try them in different parts of your story board.

You will find it is often shockingly fast and simple to structure a whole movie this way.

Now obviously, if you’re structuring a novel this way, you will be approximately tripling the scene count, but I think that in most cases you’ll find that the number of sequences is not out of proportion to this formula.

Now, that’s about enough for this post, but in my next installment I’ll talk about how to plug various obligatory scenes into this formula to make the structuring go even more quickly – scenes that you’ll find in nearly all stories, like opening image, closing image, introduction of hero, inner and outer desire, stating the theme (as early in the story as possible), introduction of allies, love interest, mentor, opponent, hero’s and opponent’s plans, plants and reveals, setpieces, training sequence, dark night of the soul, sex at sixty, hero’s arc, moral decision, etc.

And for those of you who are reeling in horror at the idea of a formula… it’s just a way of analyzing dramatic structure. No matter how you create a story yourself, chances are it will organically follow this flow. Think of the human body – human beings (with very few exceptions) have the EXACT SAME skeleton underneath all the complicated flesh and muscles and nerves and coloring and neurons and emotions and essences that make up a human being. No two alike… and yet a skeleton is a skeleton – it’s the foundation of a human being.

And structure is the foundation of a story.

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THE DARKER MASK, Heroes from the Shadows, came out this week from Tor Books – an anthology of noir superhero stories with an illustration for each story in the pulp style.

I’m proud to have a story in it and be in the company of such mystery and horror greats as Walter Mosley, Gar Haywood, Chris Chambers and Gary Phillips (co-editors), L. A. Banks, Lorenzo Carcaterra, Tananarive Due and Stephen Barnes, Mike Gonzales, Gar Anthony Haywood, Ann Nocenti, the late and much-missed Jerry Rodriguez, Reed Farrell Coleman, Doselle Young, Mat Johnson, Peter Spiegelman, Victor LaValle, and Wayne Wilson.

As you might guess from that lineup, these are not your standard white male superheroes (and no clingy helpless white female secretaries, strippers, or cheerleaders, either). THE DARKER MASK offers disenfranchised, marginalized characters who have to overcome personal and societal obstacles to grow into their extraordinary talents.

Read more about the book on Amazon, here:

But of course, as always, please order from your local independent bookstore!

I was at some author event the other night and doing the chat thing with people at the pre-dinner cocktail party and found myself in conversation with an aspiring author who had just finished a book, and naturally I asked, “What’s your book about?”

And she said – “Oh, I can’t really describe it in a few sentences– there’s just so much going on in it.”

WRONG ANSWER.

The time to know what your book is about is before you start it, and you damn well better know what it’s about by the time it’s finished and people, like, oh, you know – agents and editors, are asking you what it’s about.

And here’s another tip – when people ask you what your book is about, the answer is not “War” or “Love” or “Betrayal” or “Zombies”, even though your book might be about one or all of those things. Those words don’t distinguish YOUR book from any of the millions of books about those things.
When people ask you what your book is about, what they are really asking is – “What’s the premise?” In other words, “What’s the story line in one easily understandable sentence?”

That one sentence is also referred to as a “logline” (in Hollywood) or “the elevator pitch” (in publishing) or “the TV Guide pitch” – it all means the same thing.

That sentence really should give you a sense of the entire story: the character of the protagonist, the character of the antagonist, the central conflict, the setting, the tone, the genre. And – it should make whoever hears it want to read the book. Preferably immediately. It should make the person you tell it to light up and say – “Ooh, that sounds great!” And “Where do I buy it?”

Writing a premise sentence is a bit of an art, but it’s a critical art for authors, and screenwriters, and playwrights. You need to do this well to sell a book, to pitch a movie, to apply for a grant. You will need to do it well when your agent, and your publicist, and the sales department of your publishing house, and the reference librarian, and the Mystery Writers of America books in print catalogue editor ask you for a one-sentence book description, or jacket copy, or ad copy. You will use that sentence over and over and over again in radio and TV interviews, on panels, and in bookstores at signings (over and over and OVER again) when potential readers ask you, “So what’s your book about?” and you have about twenty seconds to get them hooked enough to buy the book.
And even before all that, the premise is the map of your book when you’re writing it.

So what are some examples of premise lines?

Name these books (or films):

- When a great white shark starts attacking beachgoers in a coastal town during high tourist season, a water-phobic Sheriff must assemble a team to hunt it down before it kills again.

- A young female FBI trainee must barter personal information with an imprisoned psychopathic genius in order to catch a serial killer who is capturing and killing young women for their skins.

- A treasure-hunting archeologist races over the globe to find the legendary Lost Ark of the Covenant before Hitler’s minions can acquire and use it to supernaturally power the Nazi army.

Notice how all of these premises contain a defined protagonist, a powerful antagonist, a sense of the setting, conflict and stakes, and a sense of how the action will play out. Another interesting thing about these premises is that in all three, the protagonists are up against forces that seem much bigger than the protagonist.

But most importantly, you get a clear idea of the whole story: who, what, when, where, how.

Here’s my premise for THE HARROWING:

Five troubled college students left alone on their isolated campus over the long Thanksgiving break confront their own demons and a mysterious presence – that may or may not be real.

I wrote that sentence to quickly convey all the elements I want to get across about this book.
Who’s the story about? Five college students, and “alone” and “troubled” characterize them in a couple of words. Not only are they alone and troubled, they have personal demons. What’s the setting? An isolated college campus, and it’s Thanksgiving – fall, going on winter. Bleak, spooky. Plus – if it’s Thanksgiving, why are they on campus instead of home with their families?

Who’s the antagonist? A mysterious presence. What’s the conflict? It’s inner and outer – it will be the students against themselves, and also against this mysterious presence. What are the stakes? Well, not so clear, but there’s a sense of danger involved with any mysterious presence.

And there are a lot of clues to the genre – sounds like something supernatural’s going on, but there’s also a sense that it’s psychological – because the kids are troubled and this presence may or may not be real. There’s a sense of danger, possibly on several levels.

The best way to learn how to write a good premise is to practice. Make a list of ten books and films that are in the same genre as your book or script – preferably successful – or that you wish you had written! Now for each story, write a one-sentence premise that contains all these story elements: protagonist, antagonist, conflict, stakes, setting, atmosphere and genre. Get the story down in one sentence first, then start to play with the words to make every word give you important detail and tone.

Then practice on friends – or strangers – and watch their faces. You know you’re on to something when they light up and say, “Wow, that sounds great! What happens?” or if they’re a writer themselves, “Damn you! Why didn’t I think of that?”

If you need a lot of examples all at once, pick up a copy of the TV Guide, or click through the descriptions of movies on your TiVo. Those aren’t necessarily the best written premises, but they do get the point across, and it will get you thinking about stories in brief. Another good place to look for successful premises (with the bonus that they have recently sold) is Publisher’s Weekly (you can subscribe to the free newsletter, Publisher’s Lunch

And now that you’re an expert – go for it. Write yours and share!

I was doing a reading at a Barnes & Noble last night and one of the readers there was complaining that she had had a hard time finding my books. Oh, they were in the store, all right, but where? She tried Mystery and Sci-fi/Fantasy with no luck. Finally she asked for help and the clerk took her to Fiction and Literature.

That’s because THERE IS NO HORROR SECTION at Barnes & Noble. And there’s barely a horror section at Borders – blink and you’ll miss it, and some Borders stores don’t have one at all.

I suppose you all have noticed, too, that the AFI lists of “Top Ten Films in Ten Classic Genres” came out last week and there was no horror list…

I think things are getting pretty dire, is what I want to say, and we better start talking about it. That’s not actually the subject of my blog today, because I just wrote a column about it for Dark Scribe magazine. But while I was digging around for material for that column I found my notes from the Masters of the Craft panel, World Horror Con, Toronto, 2007. Reading through them made me remember how incredible that panel-going experience was, so I thought I’d share, for those of you who weren’t there.

Writing conventions are always invaluable on so many levels it’s hard to quantify. But there’s often, or maybe always, one particular thing that happens that is worth the whole cost and effort of attending – that may actually cause a paradigm shift in the way you approach your writing and/or your career.

For me that life-altering event was the “Masters of the Craft” panel, with F. Paul Wilson, Ramsey Campbell, Gahan Wilson, Joe Lansdale, Robert Sawyer and David Morrell. It’s always wonderful to see Paul, Ramsey, and David, who have been not just inspirations, but also extremely generous and supportive mentors (and in the case of Paul and David, bandmates…) But the combination of these author/artists in conversation together was truly transcendent.
It’s possibly impossible to distill a panel like that into anything useful for people who weren’t actually there, but I’m going to try to pass on the highlights anyway because I was so struck by the synergy of what these guys were saying about what it takes to make the kind of lasting career they all have.

Artist of the Macabre Gahan Wilson was so charming and funny and earnest when he went off on this rant: “When you start you have to have a mad conviction that you’re going to succeed. It has nothing to do with logic because the chance of succeeding in any art is hopeless. And you have to love it, be absolutely crazy about it. Don’t do it unless you’re nuts.”

Lansdale seconded him (and you must imagine this in a thick West Texas drawl): “You’ve got to be obsessed with it at first. It’s like being in love – at first you never get out of bed – but after a few years you find you’re able to do a few basic other things, like take out the garbage once in a while.”

(I think all of us who have been published, or are about to be, know this. In fact we’re so obsessed we don’t really notice how obsessed we are, and when you finally get to a point that you can lift your head up and look back on what you did to get where you are you’re pretty stunned at how insane it all seems. Thank God we don’t seem to notice when we’re actually doing it, and thank God we don’t realize how long it’s going to take when we start out, or I don’t think there would be any books published, ever.)

Then there was this:

“Writing is like a parasite. It never quits. It’s wearing. The wires are always firing and you don’t get to rest like other people.”
– Joe Lansdale

I can’t tell you how good it feels to hear that from other authors. I never tire of hearing it. It makes me feel not so completely freakish. Or maybe I’m just clinging to that thought in order to justify acting like a completely insane person.

Gahan Wilson had another reason for never allowing himself to turn off:

“Some nights you wake up all of a sudden and God is in the room and telling you what your story needs and you better write it down, or God will get pissed and go away.”

The panel spent a lot of time talking about what makes a breakout success. Joe Lansdale said: “It’s about voice and capturing what real human beings think about. I’ve read all the clever stories and can pretty much guess an entire story from the first chapter, so what keeps me reading is the voice, the style.” He went on to say that Stephen King was the first author he read who wrote in the voice of their (Joe’s and King’s) generation – the voice of the Sixties, with all the asides and a particular kind of stream of consciousness and incorporating so many references to music and popular culture. I’d never heard it put exactly that way before, but it made absolute and total sense.

Paul Wilson agreed, but added there was also a certain element of luck involved. “The right story at the right time will hit in a way that can make a career for life.” He referenced his own THE KEEP as an unpredictable success that made his career. And that’s also something we all have to keep in mind: the more chips we have out there on the table, the better our chances of that kind of luck striking.

All the authors talked about how unnerving it was to them that so many people they started out with at the same level of writing just dropped off along the way. Lansdale said, “This is not a romantic profession. It’s more like boxing. You get knocked down and what keeps you in the game is that you keep getting back up.”

David Morrell agreed, and warned, “Don’t chase the market. It will never work. It’s better to be a first rate version of yourself than a second rate version of anyone else.”

And Paul Wilson said the most important thing is – “You have to write what you love to read.”

The darkest moment of the panel for me was when Ramsey Campbell and Joe Lansdale both said bluntly – “No wife, no career.” Obviously that’s not going to happen for ME, so I’m ignoring it.

It was very telling to me that all the authors on the panel were perfectly willing to be chameleons in their writing. If horror wasn’t selling, they just wrote around that and called it something else. David Morrell said, “If people aren’t buying supernatural, then write a creepy ‘thriller’ that has all the atmosphere and suspense but a real-world explanation.”

But the most important moment of the panel for me was when the authors were talking about genre, and crossing genres, and Joe Lansdale swept all of that aside impatiently and said:

“Real authors create their own genre. Stephen King is his own genre. You have to throw out your conceptions of genre and develop a voice and an honesty about the human condition that becomes its own genre.”

Now THAT – is a career-defining concept. And it was great to reread this in the middle of pulling together my Dark Scribe column, because what I was trying to do was ask some hard questions about – well, what the HELL has happened to horror as a genre, and how can we fix it? Or should we even try?

It’s true – my favorite authors, the authors I read over and over again – King, Shirley Jackson, Paul Wilson, Daphne Du Maurier, Ira Levin, Anne Rice, the Brontes… really are genres unto themselves.

So that’s what I’m aspiring to from now on. Maybe rigidity about the genre is part of what got us into this mess to begin with, so from now on I’m embracing my designation as Fiction/Literature.

With a little horror on the side.

- Alex

by Alexandra Sokoloff

I have to warn you, this month’s post is going to seem a bit radical to some of you. You may even feel, well, horror, at what I’m about to tell you.

I’m going to talk about my secret favorite convention. And no, it’s not WHC, or WFC, or World Con or Horrorfind or DragonCon or any of those.

It’s the Romantic Times Booklovers Convention.

(I’ll wait for the gasps to subside…)

But I think it’s important for people in the mystery, thriller and, yes, even horror genres, to hear this because Romantic Times is a convention that probably is not on the radar for other genre writers – but it should be.

Let me make this perfectly clear. I never read romances as a kid, or any time after – I had less than zero interest, although looking back I can see there was some romance crossover in the Gothic thrillers I gobbled up in my endless quest for the supernatural. And it’s that crossoverness that definitely makes Romantic Times a more obvious bet for me than a balls-out horror writer, because paranormal is so huge right now – in romances AND mysteries, and though a lot of paranormal seems to be about warm and fuzzy werewolves and endless variations on quirky vampires, there’s also a significant segment of the paranormal readership that likes a good straight-up ghost story.

Now, if you are writing balls-out horror, this is not the place for you. But if you are writing comic horror, erotic horror, horror/mystery crossovers, horror/thriller crossover psychic detectives, ghost stories, fantasy thrillers or, bluntly, if you are a female author, period – you might want to pay some attention, here.

What you’ve probably heard about RT – if you’ve heard anything at all – is that it’s that it’s full of women dressed as vampires and fairies, and half-naked male cover models slinking around. Well, you would be right. But there’s a lot more to it than that.

I heard from almost the very beginning of my promotional efforts that I should go to RT because I write sexy and I write paranormal, and because romance readers simply Buy Books. In fact, they Buy Books voraciously, which I discovered when I went to my first romance-centric workshop in the fall, Heather Graham’s Writers for New Orleans and sold more books to an audience that didn’t know me from Adam than I had sold at several other genre conventions combined.

But the thing that stunned me from the very first moment of the Romantic Times convention last year was how incredibly professionally and logically organized RT is. It’s put on by the Romantic Times review magazine and it’s very adamantly a fan conference. Even though there are lots of aspiring authors there, and great programs for them, this conference is a goldmine for published authors because there are so many people there just to meet authors and buy books (well, okay, and attend the endless and amazingly fun parties, which I’ll get to…)

And here’s my main point. I think we all, admit it, can be a little snotty about our own genre, and look down on writers who write and readers who read things that we wouldn’t necessarily read or write ourselves. But romance readers buy more books than any other single group of readers and they do NOT have the same prejudices. They love reading, they love authors, they love books. Period. Give me THAT reader any old time.

I am frankly staggered at how smart this genre is about marketing and promotion. RT really works to recruit and organize a thriller track and a mystery track (track = a series of panels and events in that genre), alongside their bookseller track, a huge paranormal track, writing tracks, and breakout (how to get an agent/publish) tracks. ITW (International Thriller Writers) and various mystery groups work well in advance with RT planners to organize outside book signing at the truly lovely Murder By The Book bookstore bookseller events (last year the fourteen thriller writers chipped in to host a breakfast for all 75 booksellers in attendance at RT, where we did a meet and greet and gave out promotional material and books. 75 booksellers at once – think about it…).

The conference also features some unique ways of handling reader/author interaction. Apart from outside bookseller events, there is only one mass signing – that takes place in a HUGE convention room on Saturday, after all the authors have already done their panels. The book fair is heavily promoted to the community, on radio, TV and in print, and lots of readers turn up just for that. The authors are lined up alphabetically at long rows of tables, and the readers just walk up and down the aisles. There are drawings for dozens of author-donated gift baskets going on throughout the whole three hour signing, and video screens project book trailers through the whole event as well (THAT was fascinating, and this year I was excited to have both of my book trailers playing in the book room and on the hotel TV during the convention. And yeah, you bet that sold books for me this year, and beyond that, was putting my name and my book titles out there for the entire convention, so that even people who would never buy what I write are now aware of me as an author.).

Another cool feature of RT is “Club RT”. Throughout the convention, in the dealers’ room there are a couple dozen little café tables set up and authors are scheduled for one hour slots where they just sit at these tables and anyone who wants to can come up and chat, get books signed, etc. If I were an aspiring author I would have spent half my time at this conference just going around to chat with different authors in my genre. A truly unique and intimate opportunity for authors, aspiring authors, and fans.

Of course a feature of RT I really love and am thrilled to be able to participate in is Heather Graham’s Vampire Dinner Theater, an original musical review written by Heather and her longtime, comically brilliant collaborators, writer/director/performer Lance Taubold and writer/manager/performer Rich Devin, always featuring several of Heather’s charming and multitalented offspring. Last year the show was “Vampires of the Wild Wild West”; this year it was “Blood and Steel, a Pittsburgh Monster Mash,” in which I was tricked out as a kinky Bride of Frankenstein, and F. Paul Wilson played Riff Raff, the butler – belting out an insane version of Hotel Transylvania).

I also have to say, when women organize these things everything is just – prettier. The attention to detail is staggering. Promo Alley, where authors put out their postcards and bookmarks and giveaways, is a long aisle of covered tables on both sides, and instead of having people just throw their swag on the tables, all the giveaways have to be in displays or decorated baskets. Yes, that takes an extra hour of prep time, but oh man, is it worth it. You can actually SEE the promo stuff, and you get a feel for each author from the decorations of the boxes and baskets. Brilliant idea.

Ditto with the parties. RT has professional costumers/decorators who dress the ballrooms for the theme parties – Moulin Rouge, Midnight at the Oasis, Vampires of the Wild, Wild West, Immortals of Rock and Roll, the Golden Age of Hollywood and of course, the Faery Ball. There is lighting. There are trees. There are enormous Moroccan pillows. There are stage backdrops. There are mirror balls and candles. There are screaming mechanical skulls. And the level of personal costuming rivaled the Renaissance Faire events and special effects masters’ parties I’ve been to in LA (I never even dreamed there were so many variations on fairies. Seriously…).

And these women DANCE. All night. I’m sorry, but you can only talk so much. You get out on the dance floor with a bunch of readers screaming “It’s Raining Men” and you have made friends for life.

And the point of the parties, is, of course, that they attract fans. Boy, do they.

If this is all sounding a little estrogen-heavy, you’re right. But remember – women buy books. And male authors are catching on to the gold mine of readers to be – mined – at RT and are coming over to the decadent side. This year F. Paul Wilson and Barry Eisler were featured authors (Joe Konrath dropped out at the last minute… terrible drag) and I expect that more and more men are going to be realizing what an advantage that Y chromosome gives them in a situation like this.

And well, okay, I admit it – all professionalism aside – after years of having to put up with only female strippers at Hollywood events, I like the turnabout of having half-naked beefcake at a convention.

Sue me.

Being a cross-genre kind of girl myself, I seem always to be preaching to other authors to think more broadly about other genres their books might fit into, and about how to promote themselves in other genres. This kind of thinking and marketing is particularly important for authors in the horror genre because, let’s face it, horror is not exactly a popular book genre these days. In fact, I’m not sure it could be any LESS popular. I don’t know how many of the rest of you have considered the fact that with Borders potentially being sold and the most likely buyer being Barnes & Noble, there soon be be NO bookstore chain with a horror section. B&N maintains no horror section whatsoever, and even Borders’ horror section is rarely more than one shelf. Not one row, one shelf.

Yet you browse around in bookstores and you see rows and rows of, oh, science fiction and fantasy, paranormal romance, mystery and thrillers.

I’m sure eventually there will be a horror renaissance… we all know these things go in cycles. But I’m writing NOW, and I need to be making a living NOW, and I know I’m not the only one. It’s interesting to see how many cross-genre, cross-promotional panels that are scheduled at WHC – I’m glad to see it, because I think that’s a conversation all of us in the genre need to be having.

I’ll be doing a report on WHC with that slant next month (and also reporting on the Public Library Association, which is the reason I’ll be late for WHC, but for my money, in terms of promotion, PLA is unmissable.)

But this month I’m posting a report on Left Coast Crime.

I love conventions and maybe my cross-genre talk is really just an excuse for me to go to more of them. But since my books do easily fall into other genres (we don’t even use the H-word at St. Martin’s – I write “supernatural thrillers”) I spent a lot of time in my debut year exploring conventions in all the genres I fall into: horror, mystery, thriller – and (though admittedly this is stretching it) paranormal romance. And you can turn up your nose at the last all you want to, but guess where I sold more books last year than at any other convention – and I mean, ten times as many books, in hardcover?

Romantic Times.

Those readers buy books, emphasis on BUY.

But before I get all radical with the talk about the romance market, I’ll try what might be an easier sell to this crowd: the mystery conference.

This month I attended Left Coast Crime in Denver: http://www.leftcoastcrime.org/2008/

Left Coast Crime is primarily a fan conference, so if you’re writing dark and suspenseful and more psychological horror, or horror with a police procedural or investigative element, it’s a very viable conference for you to pick up new fans (and also get yourself into a Western market, if you’re based in the East). I’ve only been to two LCCs but I’ve been to a very wide variety of conferences in the last two years and I think LCC is probably the second best mystery con out there for me (Bouchercon is first – it’s HUGE and in Baltimore this year in October, really something dark suspense authors should think about attending…)

I love LCC because: it’s so casual and friendly, it’s very inclusive about sub-genres and again, it’s very, very, very fan-oriented. The organizers are great about putting all published authors on panels, so as long as you register in good time, you are guaranteed to have a nice spotlight.

I’ll set the stage: Denver is a fairly good-sized city in a great bowl of plains, surrounded by a ring of very high snowy mountains. Gorgeous. The airport is quite a ways away from downtown, where the con hotel was – a 45-minute car ride through a lot of open plain.

Downtown is very funky – there’s a Gold Rush feel to it and an instant sense of eccentricity – in the layout of the streets (narrow and veering wildly all over the place, coming to strange triangles everywhere), in the buildings (many of which are built in strange triangles to fit the strange triangular intersections), and the overall dress is Wild West: lots of cowboy hats and boots and fur vests. The people – well, the people were a trip. As in San Francisco (another Gold Rush town, come to think of it, Denverites cultivate their eccentricities. One of the first things I saw when we got off the freeway downtown was a homeless guy perched on a bridge with a sign that read: SPACESHIP BROKE DOWN – NEED MONEY FOR PARTS. And from the look of him, he wasn’t kidding.

So my top three things about LCC:

First – at the risk of beating this into the ground, LCC is a FAN conference. This was more true in Seattle last year, but the fans tend to outnumber the authors by a wide margin (more and more rare at conventions) and they are very much there to find new authors. They go to the new author showcases and all the panels and they take notes… then go home and report on the conferences and the authors to their book clubs. It’s fantastic word-of-mouth.

Here’s my specific tip: I’ve been to two LCCs now and for some reason the hospitality suite is the place to be. LCC is great about providing pretty full breakfasts and lunch, all complimentary, and coffee and snacks throughout the day. The suite wasn’t as packed as it was last year in Seattle, but I still had some of my best con experiences just sitting around drinking coffee, stealing coconuts from the catering decorations, and getting to know a lot of readers who I know will go out and get my books. It means that you will have to forgo some hanging and drinking with your author friends, but I really think you might have the most fun and useful conference experience just planting yourself in the hospitality suite and never leaving. It’s one-stop shopping, with free food and caffeine.

Second, if you’re an author, ALWAYS hit the local bookstores. On Friday, my friend Pari Taichert and I rented a car and drove around to eight Denver bookstores to meet managers and sign stock. It took about four and a half hours (because of Friday traffic and because Denver is much more spread out than you would think). We got to visit both Denver Tattered Covers, which are absolute cathedrals of books, each in their own way, one in a great old downtown building and another in a grand old theater – and the completely charming Murder By the Book, in a house in a funky little walking area – as well as make the rounds of the B&Ns and Borders. You get much more of a sense of the town driving around (renting a Garmin GPS helps!) and you are establishing a relationship with another book market.

Third – always try to hit the forensics panels, which are an entire track at LCC. You will always get your money’s worth in the forensics panels. Mystery Writers of America veteran and forensics expert Jan Burke did a stellar job assembling law enforcement and forensics professionals, and it’s always gold to hear her and Dr. Doug Lyle talk about their work – you can get a year’s worth of research in in an afternoon. And I love hearing forensics and law enforcement experts from the specific region – you get a much better sense of the whole region in general.

LCC is once a year in the late winter, and yes, always West of the Rockies… but I hope some of you will think about coming over to the Left side.

http://www.leftcoastcrime.org/2008/

- Alex

by Alex

I always tell the students in my writing workshops that if they’re not writing down the dreams they have, every morning, they’re working way too hard.

I’m starting to do interviews about THE PRICE, which comes out this week, and I got that question yesterday: “Where did the story come from?” And because you tend to forget how you started your last book, and pretty much everything else about it, when you’re tearing your hair out over the new one, I had a moment of, “What the hell?” And my mind was scrambling for some intelligent thing to say about my thematic obsession with the secret deals that we make with ourselves about the things we want, but what came out of my mouth instead was, “I dreamed it.”

Which shocked me speechless for a second, and then I remembered. That’s right. It did start with a dream. A series of dreams, actually.

I love that about interviews… they teach you so much about what you’ve written and why you wrote it.

I didn’t dream the whole book, or even the whole idea of the book, which I understand happens to people all the time – and I believe it. But certainly I dreamed the seed that grew into the book.

This is an extremely sad story, but this is what happened (in real life). A friend of mine and his wife had just had their first child, and she was born with a hole in her heart. She lived the whole of her two months of life in the children’s ward of a Boston hospital, and her parents moved into the hospital to be with her. When she died, her parents were too distraught to come home to all the unused baby furniture and clothes, so a bunch of their friends packed everything up for them, and because I have a huge attic, we put it all upstairs in my house. That night I started having dreams of a beautiful little five-year old girl who was not alive but not dead, either – somewhere in between. And that was the beginning of the book – that little girl haunting me in my dreams.

Now, who’s to say why it was that little dream girl who crystallized all the rest of that heartbreaking real-life situation into a book? No one would read the dreams I had and recognize them as the book that came out of that, which really isn’t about that little girl at all, important though she is in it. Maybe I needed to feel the girl first because I don’t have a child of my own and I needed to put myself in the position of her parents to write the book I was going to write.

But there are certain dreams you have that are just so vivid that you KNOW they’re the start of a book. I don’t know if this is true of all authors or artists but it is true of many of the writers, musicians and painters I know: your dreams work just as hard on your ideas as you do at your desk in waking life. And particularly as a writer of the supernatural, I depend on those dream images to give a certain unreality to real-life situations – and to give a certain inevitability to my unreal situations.

I know that this new book is finally clicking into place because I’m starting to dream it, or rather dream I’m in it, and let me tell you, it’s a relief to have my subconscious take over for me, because I was getting tired of doing all the work myself.

I meet a lot of people who say they don’t dream. Well, that’s impossible – dreaming is a vital life function. What they mean is they don’t remember their dreams. Since dreams are so elusive, you need to actively court them to keep them on the surface long enough for you to remember. I’ve kept a dream journal since I was fifteen or sixteen. The more you write them down – even just a word or a feeling that you remember – the more they will start to stay with you. And this sounds strange, but it really works – if you wake up from a dream that you can’t remember, but you know you were just dreaming – try rolling gently back into the position you were actually sleeping in. Many times the entire dream will pop right back into your head, like magic. I don’t know how that happens, but it works like a charm.

And I swear, if you don’t keep that pad and pen, or tape recorder if you prefer, right next to your bed, you will not remember as much. Your dreams seem to need to KNOW that you are committed to remembering them, or they won’t let you remember.

In fact, if I get on a kick of writing every dream I remember down, then I remember pages and pages of dreams, six or seven a night – so many it would start to cut into my work time if I wrote them down.

So you have to find a balance. Or maybe I could get my dreams to do entire books for me if I wrote all that stuff down. Who knows? I wouldn’t be at all surprised.

So of course my questions for the day are – Do you remember your dreams? Can you share an example of a book or story that came from a dream? And do you have any tips about dreamwork in general? And for bonus points – have you ever had precognitive dreams?

Alexandra Sokoloff

Watch THE PRICE book trailer!

by Alex

PART ONE – THE JOB

Let me be clear about this up front. Right now is NOT the time to be sending your scripts to Hollywood in hope of breaking in to screenwriting. As I posted about here, the Writers Guild is on strike and anyone who tries to scab will be blackballed from working guild-covered jobs for life. DON’T DO IT.

That said, I know a lot of you have thoughts about screenwriting, and may not know that the time right AFTER a strike is historically one of the best times to sell a script, and at the best possible price. It may be counterintuitive, because you would think (and you’d be right ) that a lot of professional screenwriters would be writing their own original scripts during the strike and there would be a glut of original screenplays being submitted. But actually that has tended to drive the market for spec scripts up.

So I thought I’d take my next few posts to talk about screenwriting, the business and the craft.
First, a brief background (and of course you can read more in depth at my website.). Before I sold THE HARROWING, I worked steadily as a screenwriter for ten years. I had a pretty typical screenwriting career, actually – I worked for every major studio (except Universal, for some reason) and some independent production companies, I sold original scripts and got hired on assignment to do novel adaptations, I made a good living, and in all that time I had one movie made (depending on who you talk to, it’s estimated that 400 to 600 scripts are bought or commissioned for every one that gets made. Not good odds.) Which is the second reason I started writing novels. The first reason is that I’m passionate about my work and not only was I sick to death of having things I wrote not made – I was sick to death of having things I wrote butchered – and THEN not made. I was sick to death of seeing other people’s great scripts butchered, too, but that’s another column. I’ll try to keep this one in focus.

For the purposes of this column, I’m going to be talking primarily about feature screenwriting, although I will mention television writing as well. (And I’m talking specifically about Hollywood feature screenwriting, not independent feature screenwriting, which is a completely different animal.) Feature writing and television writing are structured very differently, but what I want to point out right up front is that in television, writers have the power (not at first, but once you get into the higher ranks). In features, directors have the power and writers most assuredly do not.

We’ll get back to that, though.

I’ll start with the first thing you need to know about screenwriting, and the biggest misconceptions I find people have about it.

IT’S A JOB.

Authors – and aspiring screenwriters – rarely seem to know this about screen work. It’s a job in a way that writing novels just isn’t. Employers (studios, producers) are looking for writers who are committed to doing the screen thing as a living, full time (double full time, is often the real case). They don’t want to just buy your fabulous spec (meaning original script), pay you big money and never hear from you again. The chances are infinitesimal that they’ll ever make your movie at all. Your script is just a sample to show that you can write the movie THEY want to make, which they will dictate to you, and which probably won’t make a whole lot of dramatic sense, but they’re paying you to do it.

So, speaking now to authors who are thinking of toying with screenwriting – unless you’re willing to move to LA (and it has to be LA, unless you want to do independent film, which pays even less than novels!) – and really go for it, it’s probably not what you want to be doing. A lot of your time as a working screenwriter is taken up trying to GET jobs, and that in the end was the most frustrating thing to me – how much wasted time and writing was going on with nothing to show for it. Except, of course, I was making a living.

For the vast majority of novelists, it’s a much more viable idea to work on optioning your novels and getting some money from Hollywood without having to pursue a screenwriting career. On the other hand, if you’re fairly young and film or television is your passion, and you want to make a living exclusively at writing, it’s a really viable job. You can get paid for writing, you can support a family, you can work in a glamorous business with wildly talented people (and a lot of jerks, too, but truly, a lot of brilliantly talented people) and once in a while you can get something done.

Another thing novelists never seem to know about screenwriting is that screenwriters are union workers. Working screenwriters belong to the Writers Guild of America – WGA – East or West, depending on which side of the Mississippi you live on. The WGA is a federal labor union and handles collective bargaining for screen, TV, game and news writers. The WGA has negotiated, through long activism, a very good MBA, minimum basic agreement, which ensures that WGA members get paid certain minimums for their work, including pension and health benefits. That’s why screen and television writers are paid so much more than novelists, on average.

But what, you ask, is the catch?

Yes, there is a huge catch. We got the contract, and salary minimums and benefits – but in order to do that, we gave up copyright. When studios buy your script, they buy your copyright. It’s their project. And from then on, you are an employee, and you can be fired off your own script at any time, for any reason or no reason, but the reason is almost always the same – the studio/producers will want a bigger writer on the project. In fact, they will want a whole series of bigger writers on the project, the more the better, somehow – it’s not unusual for two or three dozen writers to work on a single project (although only three writers or teams of writers are ever allowed to be credited on any one movie) and that, in a nutshell, is why movies are so bad these days. And that’s another column, too.

But I’m sure you’re not here to read about collective bargaining (even though it’s kind of crucial). I’d like to say, though, that I’ve not just been a working screenwriter – I’ve also been tremendously active in the WGA, including a 2 year term on the Board of Directors, and administering a private message board for over 2000 WGA members. So when I speak in sweeping terms about what makes a screenwriting career, I’m not just speaking about how I did it, personally – I actually have had a ringside seat from which I see very specifically who does break in to the business and how they break in and how they sustain their careers.

Now, on to what you really want to know, what everyone wants to know:

HOW DO I BREAK IN?

The way you break in is: write a great script (and having a male lead doesn’t hurt), get a great film agent and have that agent market your script as a weekend read and hopefully get into a bidding war. I’ll get into more details later, but that’s the process in a nutshell. Chances are you won’t sell that script, especially because the spec market has been depressed for years (although a good time to sell a script may be on the horizon – more on that later, too).

But whether or not you sell the script, if it’s good, even if all the studios and financing companies pass (and there are only about 10 real sources of money in Hollywood at any given time), you will be flavor of the month and they will want to meet you and you will then go through a couple dozen meet-and-greet meetings in which execs and producers will tell you the projects they’re trying to get going and you can potentially get an assignment out of that – or you can work harder and go in with a pitch of your own that you might sell and be hired to write.

That is how the vast majority of screenwriters get started. That is precisely how I got started – great script (I thought!) got me great agent who sold it to Fox in a bidding war. Script never got made, but I was “in”. I got an assignment off that, and kept getting hired from there.

So, next question.

HOW DO YOU GET A FILM AGENT?

This is how I got my film agent. This is how most screenwriters I know (and I know a lot) got their film agents.

First, they lived in Los Angeles.

Second, they worked as story analysts, or readers, for a studio or agency or production company. A story analyst reads scripts and books that are submitted to companies for consideration for film or TV development, and writes “coverage” – a 2-10 page synopsis of the book or script (depending on the company’s requirements) and a one-page evaluation of the material’s potential as a film, complete with a grid that scores the script in terms of character development, story, dialogue, action, and other narrative elements.

People get those jobs by living in Los Angeles, where you can’t throw a rock without hitting someone who works in the business.

I didn’t get my first job as a reader by throwing rocks at my neighbors, but I did get the job through a neighbor who was working as a reader herself and had too much work to handle. I ghosted some of her scripts, and when a reading job came up at her company she recommended me, and I got the job – it was that easy.

Working as a reader is tremendous training for screenwriting because you learn the format, you learn what works and what doesn’t, you learn how the business really operates from a writing point of view, and you learn who the agents are, out there.

When I was a reader I kept file cards on every single script that came in to my company and every single agent who submitted. So when I had my great script finished, I knew exactly which agents I wanted to approach. I made a list and cold-called those agents, and explained that I was a reader at this company and I’d read these scripts of the agent’s by these clients and I had a script that I thought that agent would respond to.

Every single one of the agents but one said to send the script. I got multiple offers of representation and picked the best one of the bunch, and he sold that script to Fox.

BUT WHAT IF I DON’T LIVE IN LOS ANGELES?

Well, as I said above, if you’re not willing to move to Los Angeles, you’re probably not going to have a career as a screenwriter. It happens, but rarely. At least in the beginning, you have to actually be there.

But – there is a tried and true way to get an agent and break into the business if you don’t live in Los Angeles. You will still have to move to Los Angeles to sustain your career, but you can take this road to break in without actually moving yet.

THE CONTESTS:

There are some established screenwriting contests and fellowships that have launched many a writing career. There are a million writing contests out there and most of them will not help you to a screenwriting career at all. But the following contests have consistently gotten the winners and placers good agents, writing assignments, or TV staff jobs:

- The Nicholl Fellowship – the most prestigious and best breakthough screenwriting contest out there. Many pros say it’s about the only contest that can lead to a professional career. http://www.oscars.org/nicholl/index.html

- The Disney Fellowship and Nickelodeon Writing Fellowship – winners get an actual job and hands-on training. The Nick Fellowship grooms writers to work on one of their shows.

- The Warner Bros Drama Writers Workshop and Comedy Writers Workshop – a fast-track way into TV staffing. You write your hour spec and submit. They get about 600 scripts a year; they pick 25 to interview, and choose 13 for the program. You write a second spec under their supervision, and they get you interviews with current CW network and studio projects. About half of any given class gets hired on staff out of the program. Being in the program can get you a good agent if you don’t have one.

- For University of California students and alumni, the Goldwyn Award is also major. There is huge industry competition for the first-place winner, and the Goldwyns heavily promote the winners. Just about every winner becomes a WGA member and is working in the industry within a year of winning.

- TVwriter.com and WriteSafe contests: I know winners of these contests who have gone on to industry jobs. TVwriter.com is also just an excellent resource and community for aspiring TV writers. The film equivalent is Wordplay – Wordplayer.com – about which more next week.

AND JUST ONE MORE NOTE ABOUT BREAKING IN…

… because even though I’ve not even scratched the surface of this subject, I think I’d better let some of this stuff absorb and pick it up again next week. But I do want to reiterate my opening points.

Again, right now you can forget about breaking in to screenwriting because the WGA is on strike. (Go here for details). If you sell a script now, you will be blacklisted from a film career for the rest of your life. Don’t do it.

But again, traditionally the few months right after the conclusion of a strike has always been the very best spec market, with the very best prices paid. So IF the pattern holds, if you can write yourself a spec script and plan to take it out right after the strike you are in a really good position to sell/break in. (See, I told you collective bargaining was important!).

I hope some of this has been helpful. Please feel free to deluge me with questions, and I’ll answer them where I can, and I hope our other screenwriters out there will jump in with their experiences as well.

Next time I’ll also talk about the craft of screenwriting.

Alexandra Sokoloff

(Everyone out shopping? Yeah, I thought so…)

Ah, the holiday season. What better way to spend the end of the year, than in spiritual reflection, decorating trees, buying perfect presents for loved ones, sending out cheery holiday cards and newsletters, drinking champagne and eating fabulous little cookies, indulging in the free DVDs that the evil corporations continue to send striking screenwriters because force majeure be damned, the Oscars must go on…)

Right?

Um.

Wrong.

This Holiday season, if I don’t do at the very least five pages a day WITHOUT FAIL I will not make the deadline of my next book. Not even Christmas Day off for me.(My boyfriend says – “How long are you going to keep doing this to yourself? “ But how am I doing this to myself? Nobody tells a grocery store clerk or a bank manager or postal worker – “Oh, you don’t have to work today. Why do that to yourself? Let’s go see a movie.” Well, actually, people probably DO say that, but if such advice is actually followed, the result is dismissal and disgrace and homelessness).

Now, in some ways it’s not such a loss, for me. For one thing, I’m not actually a Christian, and I don’t have children that I need to halt everything for, and my family is very laid back about all holidays in general, and I hate malls, and as long as we see Sweeney Todd this week, the boyfriend’s not going to complain too much (mostly because I can keep him quiet with all the free DVDs). I must say it’s annoying to have to do the more obligatory Christmas things without getting the benefit of time off from work like everyone else, but I knew this job was dangerous when I took it.

But there is one part of the holiday season that I can celebrate at the same time that I’m doing my pages, and that doesn’t grate on me because I’m missing out on all the fun. And that’s Winter Solstice.

As we all probably know, technically, the solstice is the beginning of winter in the Northern Hemisphere and summer in the Southern Hemisphere. It’s the longest night and the shortest day of the year. We also all probably have heard that ritual celebrations practiced at Christmas go back to pre-Christian times, and we’ve co-opted many solstice traditions (like Yule logs and Christmas trees and the lighting of candles and the birth of the sun – or son) for Christmas. The celebration of solstice extends across pretty much every culture.

But I particularly like the magic aspect of solstice.

Now, the winter solstice was actually December 22, but its effects last for several days before and after the date. In pagan tradition, the year is divided into quarters, and the two solstices and the two Equinoxes are the most powerful times of the whole year. Whatever you do during these times gets a certain extra push from the universe. I find that invariably to be true. Your dreams are more powerful, money arrives in the mail, you solve that problem in Chapter 10. Seriously. For authors, for example, this is a fabulous time to write – your productivity is through the roof. I didn’t just get some kick-ass pages done on my book in the last few days – I also have been cranking the pages out on the novella I’ve been putting off because of panic about the book. Every research book I’ve picked up has been THE EXACT BOOK with the EXACT information I needed to move to the next chapter of my own. I just feel stronger and more capable about everything.

Running around buying gifts is one thing, fine, but the days just before and just after Solstice will invariably turn up some real gifts, cosmic gifts. Pay attention and see what shows up for you, and if you feel like it, share.

I wish everyone Happy Christmas, and everything else that you celebrate, and all good things in the New Year, but especially this year, an extra Solstice something for all.

Now, back to work.

Or, you know – shopping.

Alex

http://alexandrasokoloff.com

Sorry for the late post (and my first, too!). You’d have to be an idiot to travel on Thanksgiving weekend, right? Well, present and belatedly accounted for.

I suppose that being the newest member of Storytellers Unplugged I should take this opportunity to introduce myself. But, well, *@#% that. We can have polite chitchat later, or better yet, go out for a drink sometime. But right now I’m on strike, with the rest of the WGA, East and West, and today I’m here to tell you way.

I’ve been a WGA activist for six years, now including a term on the Board of Directors and founding the WGA’s unoffical message board, WriterAction.com. Because of my work with the WGA I’ve been living with strike plans and strike talk for three years, now. This has been a long fight, and it will be longer – as long as it takes for us to win.

It’s our future. It’s your future, too, if you’re looking for a professional career in anything relating to writing. It’s your future if you don’t want the corporations to be the sole determiner of entertainment content.

If you’re already glazing over, or just don’t want to read further, please at least watch one or both of these videos to get an inkling of what this strike is about:

Why We Fight:

The Heartbreaking Voices of Uncertainty

Every three years the Hollywood creative guilds – actors, directors, and writers, renegotiate their contracts – that would be the MBA, the minimum basic employment agreement – with the studios who employ us. The contract includes among many, many other things: minimum payments, residual rates (this is the screen version of royalties), and pension and health contributions, as well as creative concerns. If we don’t reach a fair and acceptable agreement, then really our only tool to sway the studios is to strike – to refuse to work until they negotiate fairly.

I say studios, but the fact is, the old style Hollywood studios no longer exist. Vertical integration has been a fact of Hollywood for going on twenty years now and the creative guilds are actually being forced to negotiate for fair payment with enormous, multibillion dollar, multinational corporations. There is a good argument being made that by now this is in violation of anti-trust laws. And the same vertical integration is increasingly a reality in the publishing industry, too.

There has not been a screenwriters’ strike since 1988 – before I was in the guild. There has not been a strike in large part because for various reasons, in the years when we needed to negotiate hard, the WGA has not been strong enough to even threaten a strike.

But this year, this contract, we needed all the strength we could get. There are dozens of important issues, but we are really only striking about one: internet downloads.

Anyone with half a brain knows that internet is the future of everything in entertainment. The corporations don’t want to pay writers, directors or actors for reuse of their work through the internet, and they think that if they squeeze us out of that now, that they’ll never have to pay us for that again.

That’s the bottom line.

Not only did the companies come to the bargaining table with a proposal that completely eliminated payment on internet reuse, but their initial proposal had 76 rollbacks of our previous contract, including separation of rights. Separation of rights is what screenwriters have instead of copyright: for example, it allows me to retain the right to publish a novel based on my original screenplay. It is one of the most cherished creative rights we have as screenwriters.

That’s just one of the proposals the corporations lay down which made it quite clear that they were not intending to bargain seriously or fairly.

That’s how weak they thought we were. We haven’t struck in twenty years and they probably assumed that we couldn’t pull it off this time. They thought this would be an easy win and they would be able to cut us out of internet profits once and for all time.

They were wrong.

As a former member of the WGAw Board of Directors, I have had the great pleasure of working with all of the current WGA west officers: President Patric Verrone, VP David Weiss, Secretary-Treasurer Elias Davis, WGAw Executive Director David Young, and most of the current WGA Board of Directors, and a great number of the WGA Negotiating Committee, East and West members, and they have been smartly and inexorably working toward this moment for three years, now.

Here’s when I knew we were going to win.

The strike of 1985 was a huge setback for the WGA in terms of residuals. Back then the issue was videotape residuals – videotapes were an emerging market and the WGA was striking primarily to get a fair share of the profits from videotapes. The WGA had previously agreed to a temporarily lower residual to help the companies build this “emerging market”. The “emerging market” had taken off for feature film releases and accordingly the WGA asked for the higher residual rate in the 1985 contract. The companies refused – making that issue a strike issue.

But the WGA has traditionally been deeply divided between screen and television writers. There are many, many more TV writers than screenwriters, and our issues are different. In 1985 there were no TV shows being sold on videotape yet, and the television writers perceived the videotape issue as a feature writers’ issue. A group within the television writers persuaded the other TV writers to cave on the issue and the WGA didn’t get the raised residual rates it wanted on cassette tapes. Two months later the original STAR TREK series was released on videotape and those TV writers realized just how badly they had miscalculated.

This year we have the same situation with the internet.

But we no longer have the divide between TV and feature writers. This is EVERYONE’S issue.

Three years ago I saw the current WGA leadership begin a massive courtship of the most powerful TV writers we have, the showrunners – the producer/writers who create and control the shows. The studios can keep pumping out feature films indefinitely – they have a huge backlog of scripts that they can pull out of their vaults while the writers are on strike. But television is much more in the moment. A TV show needs product every single week to stay on.

The showrunners are overwhelmingly united this time around. And they’re not working, period.

More than three dozen TV shows currently have no more than one episode left to air before they will have to shut down production. We’ll be going into reruns and reality momentarily.

The corporations have billions and billions of dollars to wait us out. But they have no stories without us. And without our stories, they’re going to be losing money faster and faster.

How long can this go on? As long as it has to.

What we’re asking for, as the creators of television and film content, is a tiny fraction of profit from internet use of our work.

That will be our living, in the future, and we’re not giving that up.

And now I’ll post some links to far more eloquent summations of the issues.
———————————————————————————————————————-

FAQ:

WHY ARE YOU ON STRIKE?

Payment for reuse of our writing has been a key part of our earnings for half a century. Now the studios are using the growth of the internet as a tool to take that away from us.

WHY SHOULD WE CARE ABOUT MORE MONEY FOR SPOILED, RICH WRITERS?

True, some writers are paid very well — but in any given year, almost half of the Guild’s active writers go without any employment at all. They count on residuals to pay their mortgages and feed their families between jobs. These new pay cuts will be particularly devastating to our most vulnerable members. And right now, most of the writing for new media isn’t even covered by the Guild at all — which means no minimums or pension or health insurance. That’s not fair, and it needs to change.

HOW LONG WILL YOU BE ON STRIKE?

Until we get a fair deal. Because the future — the internet — is at stake, this is the negotiation of a generation.

AREN’T YOU HURTING THE REST OF THE COMMUNITY BY STRIKING?

This concerns us deeply. But remember, we didn’t want this strike; it was forced upon us by management. In fact, we even went so far as to take off the table one of our most important issues — DVDs — in hope of averting it.

ISN’T IT TRUE THAT IN A STRIKE, NOBODY WINS?

We’re fighting not to lose. Management is trying to take so much away from us that if we don’t dig in and defend what we have, next time around they’ll be coming after our pension and health benefits. So we need to draw a line and stand up to them. In that sense, we’re fighting not only for writers, but for many others in our industry as well. We’re all in the same boat, and if we succeed, the pattern we set will benefit every other guild and union in Hollywood.

Strike Captains’ blog: United Hollywood

http://unitedhollywood.blogspot.com/

YouTube videos explaining the strike:

Why We Fight:

The Heartbreaking Voices of Uncertainty: Media Moguls on the Internet:

Fade to Black:

Heroes of the Writers’ Strike:

My hero – Howard Michael Gould

Jon Stewart on The Daily Show:

http://www.thedailyshow.com/video/index.jhtml?videoId=127766&title=moment-of-zen-torture

SNL writer Tim Kazurinsky on Chicago’s WGN explains the strike:

WGA Video Strike Log:

WHAT YOU CAN DO TO HELP:

There are various online petitions that you can click on and sign to show support – I’ll link to some of them here.

http://www.petitiononline.com/WGA/petition.html

http://www.petitiononline.com/f4wga/petition.html

Keep up to date with actions at unitedhollywood.com (WGAw) and strikenotes.blogspot.com (WGAE), and I’ll update this thread with current actions for those who want to help.

Here’s another great site with suggestions for how to get involved:

http://www.fans4writers.com/participate.shtml

Here’s a viral pencil campaign for those who want to send a message to the corporations:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2GggokNW-4c

Here are some virtual picket signs if you’d like to show support on your MySpace/Livejournal/Second Life, etc. sites:

http://community.livejournal.com/wga_icons/

A larger community with mega-graphics:

http://community.livejournal.com/wga_supporters/

And here’s the graphic people have been using to replace their main picture on Myspace:

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v317/kullervo/wgamyspace.jpg

And we’re working on a T-shirt I particularly like:

SUPPORT THE WGA – HAVE SEX WITH A WRITER.

Anything for the cause, you know?

Great to be here, everyone.

Alex Sokoloff