Brian Hodge

At almost every level, except maybe the upper echelons of bestsellerdom, writers seeking to establish professional relationships face a signal-to-noise ratio so lopsided it’s like pitting a mouse against an elephant.

 

Guess which critter the writer is.

 

The only way to cut through the noise and make yourself stand out is to do awesome work. And once you manage that, to keep upgrading your standards for awesome, and keep hammering away until the right editor, right agent, right publisher, right whoever, notices.

 

You know this already. Easier said than done, yes, but it’s the only way. Lazy work, amateurish work, work that lacks your heart and soul, isn’t going to get you anywhere. Awesome work is also just the first stage of making yourself stand out.

 

But let’s say you’ve pulled it off. The right people are starting to notice. Or let’s say you have faith and want to be ready when they do.

 

What then? How do you keep making yourself stand out? Besides the obvious of continuing to do what got you noticed in the first place?

 

Here’s one radical idea that you learned in preschool, that won’t cost anything, and is ridiculously simple: Express gratitude. Say thank you.

 

This Is Rarer Than You Might Think

 

Several years ago I decided to start making it a priority to send a few words of thanks to the editor responsible whenever a piece of mine came out in an anthology, a magazine, the occasional book of essays or other nonfiction. It’s one thing to say thanks when you’re sending back a signed contract. But this was after I’d received my contributor’s copy, after months or even, in the case of books, a year or two may have gone by. It’s old business by then.

 

Nothing gushy, no slobbering, just straightforward and from the heart: Thanks for sending the copy, and thanks especially for having me in it. I’m glad to be there. Whatever seems right or unique to the project.

 

I didn’t start doing this for any other reason than that it seemed like the right thing to do. Because I sincerely am glad to be there. Competition for table-of-contents space can be fierce, and sometimes editors really do agonize over their choices.

 

Here’s where the surprise came in: Early in this habit, an editor wrote back to express his appreciation for my appreciation.

 

Hardly anybody ever says thank you, he told me.

 

Wow. This was a prominent editor with dozens of books and lots of awards to his credit. He’s wrangled a number of prestige projects. His word is good, he treats authors well and with respect…

 

Yet hardly anybody could be bothered to tell him thanks?

 

Since then, I’ve always made it a point to be one of the exceptions.

 

And I can’t help but notice we’ve had a pretty good professional relationship that continues to this day.

 

Pesky Human Nature

 

I don’t know why gratitude gets overlooked in cases like this, but if I had to guess, I’d say it’s simply because it’s easy to overlook. There’s no penalty tax, your mom’s not there to remind you (“What do you saa-aay?”), and really, who has that extra minute or two? So it becomes an easily omitted indulgence that we think goes without saying. You do your job, I’ll do mine, and we’ll both get along fine.

 

You know … like robots on an assembly line.

 

But if you’ve ever read marketing maven Seth Godin, you don’t have to go very far before you find some riff on his contention that people crave human interactions that go beyond the simple mechanics of a business transaction. I would maintain that expressions of gratitude are a perfectly valid form of this.

 

Question A: Don’t you like to feel appreciated for what you do?

 

Question B: Then why neglect that inclination in others?

 

A funny thing happens when you resolve to be one of the relative few who take appreciative notice. You get noticed in return.

 

The Circle Expands

 

It isn’t only editors and publishers. I’ve made it a point to thank artists. Book designers. People who’ve tweeted on my behalf. More. Which may sound as if I’m advocating buttering up only to people who can do something for me in the future. Not so, and I can prove it: When I’ve been able to find out who they were, I’ve thanked some of the publishing process’s most invisible people: copy editors.

 

On the one hand, it just feels good to do it.

 

On the other hand, I no longer think of these folks as a widely scattered individuals with slivers of overlap, like a Venn diagram. I think of them as something distinctly and collectively more.

 

In his landmark book from 1937, Think And Grow Rich, Napoleon Hill — commissioned by steel magnate Andrew Carnegie to spend 20+ years analyzing the work approach of many of the nation’s most successful people and distilling it into practical habits and philosophy — wrote about a concept he called the Master Mind.

 

In a nutshell, the Master Mind is the combined synergy of a person and the other people he or she brings in to work together on a common purpose. Whatever their aim, they add up to much more than the sum of their parts. Traditionally they’re thought of as periodically gathering in the same place — putting their heads together to create one giant, pulsating noggin — and while this is no doubt preferable in most examples, there have to be exceptions.

 

We live one, we writers.

 

Writing goes hand-in-hand with a great deal of isolation. We do so much work alone that we can be fooled into thinking that we’re doing it all on our own. Au contraire. Even if you’re digitally self-publishing, you’re still not doing it all on your own.

 

Whatever the project, whatever its path to publication, think of the process and its constituent parts: editor, publisher, illustrator, designer, cover artist, copy editor, agent, promoter. More, probably, if you look for them.

 

These are your Master Mind. They may never sit around the same table, but still, they’re yours. They come together on behalf of you and your work, and not a one of them wants it to be any less than it can be. They want it to succeed. They want you to succeed.

 

Few of us, I imagine, actually take them for granted. But if we give that appearance, then what’s the difference?

 

Break the status quo, though, and you could have even more to thank them for in the future.

 

***** Parting is such sweet sorrow … but you can put it off a few more minutes. You’re always welcome over at my own blog, Warrior Poet, whose latest installment is “The Writer’s Soul: Built One Crack At A Time.”

 

[Photo by psd]

[I'm not keen on the idea of reruns, but better that than giving the day a miss. Today, the past couple of weeks have led up to this question: to euthanize or not. I hope you understand. Here's one from 13 months ago that will always be timely.]

 

An open letter to Anonymous:

I don’t know your name. I didn’t ask, and our mutual acquaintance was tactful enough not to volunteer it. So it’s not impossible you and I have crossed paths, but since I just don’t know, I can at least assure you:

This is nothing personal.

You and I were among five authors that a fledgling writer contacted, looking for advice concerning her first novel. She knew us only by our work, our reputations, and held them in high enough regard to believe we might have some worthwhile counsel.

Three of us she never heard back from at all, but let’s give them the benefit of the doubt. Sometimes it takes me a long time to answer e-mail too. Good intentions alone don’t click the reply button.

You, though. What were you thinking?

Now, if you couldn’t be bothered, that’s one thing.

“I’m sorry, I wish I could help, but at the moment I’ve got so much on my plate I just can’t see past what’s right in front of me. Best of luck, though.”

That’s all you had to say. Cordial, honest, and while it may have come as a disappointment, no one would have thought any less of you. Would’ve taken you 30 seconds, tops.

Instead, I’ll bet you spent quite a bit more than half a minute on the way you handled it. Meaning time wasn’t the underlying issue at all, was it?

So I wonder: When you unloaded on her, did you think you were teaching her a lesson for having the gall to bother you? Did it give you some sort of petty satisfaction? Did you stew over it for a while, or did you let her have it with the first things that came to mind?

There are quite a few words that could apply to you, but let’s focus on just one:

Myopic.

Your reaction was myopic. Your sight fell short both ahead of you and behind.

First the forward myopia.

Did you pause to consider that you were losing a reader? Forever, probably? Do you think she’ll ever again see a work of yours and not remember your treatment of her, and pass it by?

I know for certain she’s bought books since then. Guess what. They weren’t yours.

And it may not be just her. There’s a marketing statistic I recall reading, that a person who has a negative experience with a company is seven times more likely to share it with other people than a positive experience.

So did you never consider that she might convey this experience with you to someone else? She may not have told me your name, but I’d be surprised if she hasn’t disclosed it to people she’s closer to. Members of a writers group, maybe, or others with whom she’s spent months or years honing her craft, who understand and empathize.

How eager do you think they’ll be now to contribute to your bottom line? Even friends of theirs, maybe. True, the damage may not extend out for too many degrees of separation. But neither will any good word of mouth. Odds are, you’ve lopped that branch off for good.

And now the backward myopia. Because you give the appearance of having forgotten a few things.

You seem to have forgotten how much courage it can take to reach out to a stranger, and how fragile confidence can be.

You seem to have forgotten that you were once unpublished. That you needed help, advice, wisdom, counsel. That you needed occasional pointers and course correction.

I wonder: Did you abide by your current creed then? Did you refrain from asking anyone for help? If you did, well, points for consistency to you, but still, such a solitary path seems pointless and self-limiting, because help was out there to be had.

And you seem, finally, to have forgotten the value of a few kind words. They cost nothing to give, yet to the recipient their worth can be inestimable.

Along the way I’ve been the beneficiary of many kindnesses, and can’t help but think of their sources with appreciation, warmth, and respect.

I don’t know if he’s still as accessible as he used to be, but there was a time you couldn’t find anyone, no matter how slim their resume, who had anything other than a good thing to say about how well they’d been treated by one particular resident of the top of the bestseller lists. I used to wonder how he had the time to respond to all the inquiries that no doubt came his way.

His name: Dean Koontz.

A few simple lines of encouragement he gave still live inside me long after, I’m sure, he’s forgotten giving them at all.

Others come to mind as well, none of whom behaved as though they were the guardians to some citadel of expertise. None of them seemed to believe they were members of a frat house entitled to haze pledges. None of them acted like they might enjoy clubbing baby seals.

Rather, they understood principles that escape some writers: Publishing is not a zero sum game. Your success doesn’t depend on anyone else’s failure. Part of success lies in how many others you can help climb higher.

These were writers who defined success to me, in more ways than one, and I can think of them as reflecting well in the light of a line I recently encountered:

“Money doesn’t change you. It just reveals who you are when you don’t have to be nice.”

As a beneficiary of each writer’s generosity of time and spirit, I imagine we both knew there was never anything I could do to offer payback in kind. Just this: remain a fan, read their work, and encourage others to do the same.

And try, however much I might fall short sometimes, to not lose sight of their example.

Either you too benefitted from such an example along the way, or you didn’t. It’s one or the other. But whichever it is, right now I kind of feel sorry for someone. Because either you, or they, probably deserved better.

So will the next writer who seeks your advice. And there will be a next time. I hope you come through. Really. I know you can, because you’ve overcome far greater obstacles.

They’re just panties, after all. So unwad them and do what we all have to do from time to time:

Back up and rewrite the scene for the better.

[Photo by Richo.Fan]

Unless you put your work away where nobody else can see it, writing is an act of risk. People might not get it. People might not get you. The work may not fit present needs. And that’s just the submission part.

Publication magnifies all that exponentially … and worse, does so in public. If it hasn’t happened yet, it will: At some point you’re going to feel as if you’ve been strolling carefree down a medieval London street and someone in a third-story window has emptied a chamber pot over your head.

You’re going to get dumped on, and it’s going to happen more than once.

How you deal with this, as one of the unpleasant but inevitable parts of the process, can make the difference between carrying on undaunted, and succumbing to the crippling sense that it’s just too painful to continue. And one of the most forward-looking coping strategies is to simply acknowledge this one great, untarnished truth:

You never know what else is coming.

“Thank You Sir, May I Have Another?”

Last month my fourteenth book came out, a collection called Picking The Bones. Unlike my previous three collections, where I included the Endnotes in the book itself, this time I turned them into a separate, downloadable PDF booklet. Because I wanted this to be more visual than a plain text document, one thing I did was incorporate the covers of the books and magazines in which the stories first appeared. Which I first had to round up. Hellooo, Google Images.

Sometimes finding the best JPG for the job took me back in time … including face-to-face with a review of the magazine that initially published the collection’s leadoff story. To excerpt:

Brian Hodge’s “With Acknowledgements to Sun Tzu” and (…) are both deeply serious political fictions. The Hodge is in no way SF, fantasy, or horror, and, sadly, the writing isn’t up to the tale’s ambitions. Hodge provides a completely superfluous beginning section, introducing much too bluntly details that will be made clear as the story develops. He also injects, rather clumsily, a layer of allegory that gives this story a pretentious aura without adding anything to its resonance.

Ouch, huh?

Actually, no. Oh, I’m sure that if I’d seen this review when it had first come out it would’ve ruined my day and tainted the next one.

But I didn’t see it then. When I finally did, I had an advantage that wasn’t available to me, or for that matter to the reviewer, at the time:

I knew what came next.

Taking The Micro View

But first, the kneejerk reaction. All our first reactions are kneejerk, often with an urge to blame the messenger. Or at least ask Did this person read what I actually wrote?

Sometimes the answer is this: They read the words, yes, but not the work.

People see what they see. Perceptions are tempered by biases, by expectations, by dogma over what something is or isn’t, and how it should go about its purpose … and there’s no point arguing about any of that. It’s wasted energy, he-said-she-said stuff.

Remember: Not everyone’s going to get it. Not everyone’s going to get you. Accept that and move on.

And look ahead…

Taking The Macro View

For “With Acknowledgments to Sun Tzu,” here’s what came next:

• It drew a lot of favorable commentary from the magazine’s readers and elsewhere. 100% favorable? No, of course not. But positive by a wide margin.

• It was selected for reprint in The 17th Annual Year’s Best Fantasy And Horror by Ellen Datlow, one of the most respected editors in the field.

• The International Horror Guild gave it their 2003 award for Outstanding Achievement In Horror & Dark Fantasy Fiction (Short).

• It is, as mentioned, the leadoff story — a crucial slot — in my new collection, which Publishers Weekly recently gave not just a good review, but my first starred review there. The significance? To quote PW reviewer Rose Fox, “A starred review from PW is a big deal. Like diamonds, their value is in their scarcity … As far as I’m concerned, a star means ‘This is better than others of its kind.’”

None of which I knew was coming at the time.

And now, it’s just a matter of perspective.

What Matters, What Doesn’t

Again: You’re going to get dumped on, and more than once.

Whatever form this takes — a bad review, a hatchet job on a message board, a snarky broadside on someone’s blog — ultimately it’s what you make of it. It has no more influence and power over you than what you decide to give it.

And what is it, really, but a bump in the road that has so much more left to be traveled, whose twists and turns you can’t foresee?

Where you start, and the bumps along the way … these don’t matter. What matters is where you end up.

It doesn’t matter who doesn’t get it. It doesn’t matter who doesn’t get you. What matters is who does.

And the welcome they give you tomorrow can make you forget all about the arrows in your back today.

***** Parting is such sweet sorrow … but you can put it off a few more minutes. You’re always welcome over at my own blog, Warrior Poet, whose latest installment fulfills a reader request with “A Tour Of My Workspace.”

[Photo by katieblench]

Predictability seems to be about the worst charge that can be leveled at a storyteller. After plagiarism, that is. Plagiarism and predictability, the big two mortal sins.

It doesn’t matter what you’re writing. It can be the total antithesis of the kinds of tales that, by default, have ample unpredictability etched into their DNA: mystery, thriller, suspense, crime. You could instead be writing literary fiction, whatever that is. Humorous memoir. Fantasy. Doesn’t matter.

No matter what the label, its readers want you to be ahead of their guesses and suspicions as to where the path leads. They want to be surprised … and with some regularity, too.

Forget this and, predictably, scorn shall be heaped upon your head.

The Unwritten Contract

You won’t find it in any roster of civil statutes, but whenever someone picks up a book or a story, there’s an implicit contract between reader and writer. The bare-bones version goes something like this:

• You won’t bore me.
• You’ll either take me to places I’ve never been before, or to places that feel as familiar as where I grew up.
• Love ‘em or hate ‘em, your characters should make an impression on me.
• And whatever’s coming, I don’t want to see it coming. Not all the time, anyway, and not from a long way off.

There’s something in us that delights in being surprised. In the storytelling context, we looove having the rug yanked from beneath us, being blindsided and sucker-punched. It’s like a little pleasurable hit of a drug. The brain quivers, ecstatic, with a teeny squirt of dopamine and we’re ready for more.

From the writer’s perspective, this doesn’t happen by accident. It happens by design. Lots of painstaking design.

It’s hardly an exhaustive list — in fact, I hope you’ll add to it — but here are 5 key places in most any storyline where unpredictability can be used to greatest effect:

• Most obviously, the ending
• Mobilizing events and their outcomes, or character reactions to them
• Hidden sides or buried traits of characters that suddenly break through
• Secrets that are deliberately withheld
• Novel uses of language

The Best Way To Keep Them Guessing? Keep Yourself Guessing

In wrangling these component parts to keep the reader off balance, first ideas nearly always deserve to be wadded up and slam-dunked into the trash. Second ideas too, a lot of the time, and maybe even third. Here’s why:

There’s a good chance the same thing has already occurred to your reader.

A good chance the same thing has already occurred to some lazy writer who’s already been this way before you.

A good chance the reader has, somewhere, already seen the same thing play out as you’ve initially imagined it.

Thus, there’s a good chance that if you’re in the habit of settling on the first thing that comes to mind, your reader will feel like she’s seen it all before.

Earliest ideas are usually the quickest and easiest, the ones within the shortest reach that anybody could grab. They’re the plain old rocks lying on the surface, rather than the valuable gemstones that take some digging to get to.

So get your fingernails dirty and dig deeper.

One Fundamental Way I Put This To Work

Later this month my fourth collection, Picking The Bones — fourteenth book overall — will be coming out. For the sales copy, I dipped back into the time capsule to crib from a review of my first collection, The Convulsion Factory, in which critic Stanley Wiater said: “Hodge is deadly serious about presenting a world where the worst punishment is the mere fact that you are aware you will probably live to see another day.”

Even now, I’ve yet to meet Stan Wiater, but when I first read that, I wanted to jump in my car and track him down and give him a great big hug. I still might do it. Here’s what I’d yell before getting a faceful of pepper spray: “Thank you for noticing!”

Because a lot of work and thought went into striving for that reaction.

Last year, on public radio, I heard a writer/teacher named Brenda Peterson discuss the classes she taught. Her students were frequently prone to the habit of killing off their main characters, so she would have to slap a moratorium on this for the rest of the semester:

Killing them off is too easy. Think of another ending.

The same thing had occurred to me years before, after encountering in others’ work that same default cop-out that so bedeviled Peterson. So, for me, this became, if not an unbendable rule, at least a governing policy:

If you’re in the center of my world, you’re safe, in a way. Hardly anybody dies here. But that comes with a catch: You may wish you had. You’re going to be confronted with some transformation or some revelation or some understanding of yourself that maybe you can handle, and maybe you can’t. Still, I’m giving you a fighting chance here.

It’s harder, yes. It takes adding more hamsters to the wheel in my head. But the result is work that’s more personalized, that’s unique in its own way, because I don’t have the exact same sensibilities as anyone else.

And neither do you.

4 Steps To Walking The Tightrope Of Unpredictability

Like anything, keeping your work unpredictable is a skill that can be honed, and it has component factors.

(1) Know yourself, be yourself. It bears repeating: Your sensibilities are as unique as your fingerprints. We all see the world a little differently. So stake your claim. Learn from the craft of others, by all means, but don’t try to be their clone. As Bruce Lee said, “Absorb what is useful, discard what is not, add what is uniquely your own.”

(2) Know what you’re really writing, and why. You shouldn’t be writing for no reason. You should be writing to communicate something. Understand what that is, and you’re that much closer to finding the sharpest, most surprising ways of expressing it.

(3) Hold nothing back. No half-measures, no timidity … that’s how you reach the turf that is uniquely yours. By its very nature, honesty is surprising. For a much greater focus on this, see “Leave It All On The Page.”

(4) Know your characters. I’ve always maintained that when you really know your characters, they end up doing half the work, just by being themselves and shaking off your efforts to treat them like paper dolls. And if they start surprising you, they’ll surprise your readers. Whenever I get to this state, it’s almost like taking dictation: “What’s everybody up to today? Really!?! OK, then, let’s roll.”

Now go and sin no more.

***** Done? So it ain’t so. You’re always welcome over at my own blog, Warrior Poet, which I’m finally getting synchronized with my entries here.

[Photo by Hector Sevillano]

In On Writing, Stephen King mentions an early rejection that was one of the best lessons he ever got. It wasn’t an encouraging letter. It barely qualifies as a note. It was just a formula that some kind editor thought might make a difference:

Second draft = First draft — 10%

I’d even go so far as to say that 15% is worth shooting for, especially if you’re prone to bouts of logorrhea. Either way, though, the payoff can mean the difference between publish and perish.

Once upon a time, I wrote a novel whose first trip out into the editorial marketplace met with not much love. I brought it back for another trip into the shop, where it sweated off an additional 15%. It’s just how the math turned out, but seemed like a good omen, since 15% is an agent’s typical commission.

Before long, the novel was the subject of a four-house auction and became the centerpiece of a six-figure year.

That I had a different agent by then undoubtedly factored in big. And maybe that I’d changed the original title, Miles To Go Before I Weep, to the punchier Wild Horses (a word savings of a whopping 66.6%). You can’t isolate individual elements and know what made how much difference.

Still, the fact remains: It was the same novel, just sleeker.

Which dovetails with this fact: Most editors aren’t going to put in the time and oversight necessary to help you turn a potentially meritorious work from a sumo wrestler into a sprinter. So they say no.

An agent might — might — but even then is likely to broad-stroke the advice: “Tighten this up, and I’ll look at it again.”

Beyond that, you’re on your own.

We’ll look for chopping-block candidates below, but first, it may be worthwhile to analyze your work habits and see if you’re giving yourself surplus verbiage just because you can.

Do You Use The Technology, Or Abuse It?

If you weren’t banging out words in the Typewriter Age, consider yourself lucky. Tweaking a finished manuscript meant using time-consuming tools like correction ribbons and Liquid Paper, which now seem about as sophisticated as medical care based on lunar phases and toad bladders. More substantial alterations might mean retyping an entire page.

Bottom line: If you wanted to change something, it had to be worth the effort. It could be tempting to let non-critical stuff slide.

For obvious reasons, word processing changed all that.

Except, for some writers, this was the worst possible tool to put in their hands. And remains so. As ever, technology is neutral. For good or for ill lies in the using.

There’s a writer whose earlier works I loved, but who after a point became, to me, almost unreadable. I believe the key to this was found in an interview I read, in which she blew wet, sloppy kisses to the whole idea of word processing: Now there was no excuse. Everything could be just the way you wanted it. You could go back and tinker to your heart’s bliss.

True enough. But this ease of redoing can break in two radically different directions.

(1) Subtractive. The writer treats early drafts like crude sculptures that still need bits chiseled away before they look right.

(2) Additive. The writer keeps pouring it on, building up words as if they were layer upon thick, blobby layer of oil paint.

One writer objectively looks for things to cut and places to condense. The other revels in how easy it is to maintain never-ending creation.

Now, #1 isn’t necessarily a virtue when the material gets scraped from lean to downright sketchy.

And #2 isn’t necessarily a vice if you’re just giving yourself more raw material to reshape later. Kinda like taking six pairs of jeans into the dressing room to find the perfect one.

Just be aware. That’s all. Awareness will eventually deepen into an instinctive sense of balance between too little and too much.

9 Places To Start Whacking

There are no templates to follow, no rules beyond this: Remain true to the work and its needs. Uniform prose, kept equal by hatchet, axe, and saw, isn’t the objective. Still, when bloat happens, here are several common places it settles.

(1) Saying the same thing three times when once will do. Often, we hammer points home to convince ourselves more than the reader. Don’t worry. They’ll get it.

(2) Scenes that go on past the point of the scene. Everybody’s together, things are happening, people won’t shut up … it’s like a party where the guests won’t leave. Kick ‘em out already.

(3) Laborious descriptions of scene-setting details. Try this: The next time you’re captivated by a tale set in a place that’s visually alive in your mind’s eye, go back and see how many scenic cues there really were. There are probably fewer than you’d think. Trust your reader the way that writer trusted you.

(4) Exhaustive descriptions of characters’ appearances. Again, a few well-defined strokes are all that’s needed, and the reader will fill in the rest. Consider this self-portrait of John Lennon. How much more simplistic could it be? Yet who else could it be?

(5) The weather. I’m all for setting-as-character, but there’s a big difference between mood and meteorology … or just plain filler.

(6) Backstory that isn’t germane to current events. Sure, coming up with it helped you know the character better. But is it equally illuminating to the reader, or is it now so reflected in the character’s behavior that it goes without saying?

(7) Research whose only purpose is to show off how much research you did. You went to all that trouble to find it out. Seems a shame not to use it. Instead, look at it this way: You learned more than you needed so you could feel confident about what you left out.

(8)Passages that sounded good at the time but have absolutely no purpose whatsoever. One rejection letter of an early novel of mine cited that it had “several jolly irrelevancies,” a phrase that stung at the time, but which I’ve adored ever since.

(9) Multiple endings. Yes, it can be difficult to let go. Thus, aftermath upon aftermath, denouement after denouement. May you instead know the startling satisfaction of thinking there’s more to go, then realizing, “Oh. It’s done. Right here.”

Yes, cutting can hurt. “Kill your darlings,” Faulkner advised, and sometimes we think we hear the darlings scream. But that high-pitched sound is just the hot air squeeing from overinflated prose.

Give those wounds a few days to heal. You’ll be amazed at what you can live without.

***** Done? Oh, we’re never done. You’re always welcome over at my own blog, Warrior Poet, where the latest, “When It’s Too Jam-Packed For Comfort, Give Yourself Permission To Breathe” is huffing and puffing.

[Photo by A Little Lam]

Sometimes the most intimidating aspect of tackling a long project, like a novel, isn’t any one thing. It’s the whole thing. The entire monolithic beast. It’s a mountain, you’re at the bottom, and to plant your flag at the top means more climbing than you can possibly imagine.

The sight of it, the thought of it, is overwhelming.

But what about, say, that narrow little plateau just 10 feet up? Forget about looking any higher. Just the plateau. Can you imagine getting that far, at least?

If you can, then there’s hope.

Forgetting The Big Picture

Breaking down a ginormous task into smaller, more easily managed chunks is a basic tenet in the vast flood of project-management and self-development literature. It’s sometimes likened to eating a whale. In one bite? No can do. Filets? Now you’re getting somewhere.

Sorry, fellow cetacean lovers. It’s just a metaphor.

At some point, though, we need to cross over from the simple mechanics of re-organization into mindset. How we mentally frame and approach and see the big, snorting beast in front of us. Overwhelm, after all, is not a set of conditions. It’s an emotional reaction to them: fear and paralysis and a cry of “Where do I begin?”

Recalibrate your view of what lies ahead, and you can strategically forget about the big picture for as long as being myopic is in your best interests.

This shift in perspective is at the heart of what ultra-endurance athlete Stu Mittleman, in his book Slow Burn, says about marathons:

Our objective isn’t to run 26 miles. It’s to run one mile 26 times.

So what might this look like when applied to the page?

So glad you asked…

The Novel As Short Story Collection

When I was writing my first crime novel, Wild Horses, I soon fell into the habit of regarding each chapter as if it were a short story unto itself. Finish one, and the next chapter was just another short story that happened to be about the same characters. Finish them all, and it added up to a collection of stories that was more than the sum of its parts.

It was nothing of the kind, of course. None of the chapters could’ve been printed in standalone form and made much sense.

Ah, but for a time, in my head, short stories is exactly what they were … and in the making stage, the discovery stage, my head was the only theater that mattered.

Chunk by chunk, the usual loose, made-to-be-broken-whenever-convenient rules for stories applied:

• Each chapter had an arc — a definite beginning, middle, and end.
• I went into it with a clear idea of the ideal entry point, where it was going, and what it needed to accomplish in between.

And that’s about all, really.

It’s an approach I’ve used since then, and neglected as well, and overall I find that it keeps the work punchier, more focused, more directed.

That Goes For Nonfiction, Too

I’m under no illusions that I’ve made some arcane discovery. Still, the only other person I’ve encountered detailing a similar approach is Tim Ferriss, in, as of this writing, the most recent post at his blog.

He cops to a sense of overwhelm while writing his first book, The 4-Hour Workweek, and the saving grace inherent in downshifting his vision to the component level:

It changed only when I started viewing each chapter as a magazine article: strong enough to be a stand-alone piece, including a clear opening or “lede,” a clear middle with case studies, and a punctuated end with lessons learned.

From that mindset, a few trial runs, I developed a chapter template … I needed a repeatable process. To sit down to “write a book” was just too overwhelming, even with a table of contents as a blueprint.

Returning To The Big Picture

Will it work for every novel, every nonfiction book? Maybe. Maybe not. That’s up to you. Because it’s just a strategy — a means to an end, not the end itself. The beauty of it, though, is that it leaves no visible traces. The reader, seeing you on top of the mountain, doesn’t have to know how you got there, and probably won’t care.

All the reader really needs to know is this:

That you wrote the stories — the articles — the chapters — and eventually the book took care of itself.

***** Your next stop? Why not make it my own blog, Warrior Poet, where the latest, “To Produce & Protect: 5 Things That Creators Can Learn From IT Geeks” is gamely trying to hide its pocket protector.

[Photo by Casey Serin]

This may be taking much for granted, but I’m going to venture a guess that, as a writer, you have at least one of these end-goals in mind. Even if only at the level of a wistful, wouldn’t-it-be-nice daydream:

• To be the kind of writer who rewards repeat reading.
• To create work that fans introduce to their kids when they’re old enough.
• To do work that readers find speaks to them differently at different stages of their lives.
• To write books that people don’t just remember reading, but also remember the experience of reading — when, where, what was going on in their lives at the time, and why your work came along at just the right moment.

And so on. You may have some of your own that have never occurred to me.

Pretty much our entire raison d’etre here at Storytellers Unplugged is to explore the twisty, steep, and subtle paths for getting there.

This one today is more about how to ensure that you don’t.

2 Shocking Admissions!

Awhile back I was hanging with a writer friend. This may come as a shock, but when writers get together, they sometimes talk about … other writers. Not always kindly, either.

We’ll pause while you hoist your jaw up off the floor again.

One particular writer came up — let’s call him Author X — whom my friend once loved, years earlier, but admitted he just couldn’t read anymore.

I’d given Author X a couple tries and had never been able to warm up to his work. Not a flicker. Not even for a guilty weekend fling. I was pretty sure that I always understand why, too, based on something Author X said in an interview I read with him at the time.

Admission: That he wrote at a rate of about 15 minutes per page.

My reaction: It reads like something that was written at a rate of about 15 minutes per page.

When I related this to my friend, seeing the expression on his face was like watching a couple of missing puzzle pieces materialize and snap into place:

Yeah. That’s it. Exactly.

3 Obvious Guarantees

As long as there are readers, there will always be an audience, sometimes a substantial one, that is perfectly happy to read stolid,  prose that skates a filmy-thin surface from Point A to Point B to Point Z, then vanishes into the air with an inaudible poof without once having demanded anything of those readers.

Like asking an uncomfortable question. Or challenging a preconception. Or just getting them to vacate their own perspective for a while and really look at the world through another pair of eyes.

Instead, in essence, this is being content to put on a puppet show with paper dolls.

Now, if this is truly the experience you seek to bring, then Vaya con Dios, my friend.

But before you do, please stop and think for a moment.

Think about three things I can almost guarantee you:

(1) It was not work like that made you want to write too.

(2) The work that did, or that now lights you up in one or more of those four ways mentioned at the beginning … its authors spent a lot more on it than 15 minutes per page.

(3) Its authors have no idea how much time they actually did spend per page.

But Don’t Take My Word For It

For writers, one of the best bits of advice that came out of Malcolm Gladwell’s 2008 book Outliers — which helped popularize the law of 10,000 hours — wasn’t in the book. Rather, it was at the bottom of an interview he gave while promoting it in the UK:

“The thing I keep coming back to, after 18 months on this book, is the work thing. I always say to young writers who are struggling, well, how many drafts do you do? And then I say, what, you only do three drafts? I do ten.”

Some metrics are worth counting. Worth bragging about.

Others aren’t.

Know the difference, and you just might earn readers for life.

***** Your next stop? Why not make it my own blog, Warrior Poet, where the latest, “Making Space: The First-Of-The-Year Creative Enema,” is begging for a more polite title.

[Photo by meddygarnet]

I once knew a photographer who credited a lot of his favorite work to happy accidents … those creative outcomes you don’t intend, don’t try for, or that come out totally wrong but manage to be just right after all.

This was in the days of film, when early digital cameras cost as much as a car and had resolution we’d now sneer at in a cell phone cam. To a far greater degree than digital, film made room for happy accidents. There was no checking an LCD to see if you needed an instant do-over. You didn’t really know what you had until you got it home or sent it to the lab. And sometimes what you had were deviant exposures or focusing blunders. Film that slipped the sprocket so a negative ended up double-exposed. All kinds of darkroom voodoo gone awry.

Not right, yet, sometimes, somehow righter than right.

Words can be like that, too. If a picture’s worth a thousand of them, just imagine the margin for error.

Reading With One Eye Tied Behind My Back

As of last week, I have a new title. For something. I don’t know what yet. For now there’s just this title, and the promise of whatever it will ultimately suggest goes with it:

“Scars In Progress”

For whatever reasons, the sound of this, the look of it, light me up inside. I wouldn’t have it if I’d been paying full attention to what I was doing. I was hurrying through some dull text and read it wrong — saw it wrong for an instant — and a geekier, more mundane origin I can’t imagine. Here’s the actual phrase:

“Make sure there are no anti-virus scans in progress.”

This isn’t unfamiliar territory. Here’s another from several months ago — a typo, because the I and O sit next to each other on the keyboard:

Blondfolded.

I still don’t know what it means. Where it fits. Whose world or perspective it comes from. But it definitely strikes me as evocative.

It’ll keep until I know. They both will. Ideas, and fragments of ideas, are the most patient entities in the world. The resonant ones have a shelf life of … oh, roughly forever.

What’s Reviled But Essential, And Happens All The Time?

In spite of their everyday ubiquity, mistakes aren’t looked kindly upon by our era, our culture, ourselves. It starts early. If your school papers were anything like mine, the angry red checkmarks were more vivid than any commentary on whatever I did right. We exalt perfection, however unattainable it may be, and praise precision as the way to get there.

In the meantime, if it hadn’t been for somebody’s oopsies, we wouldn’t have Ivory Soap. Or Post-It Notes. Or vulcanized rubber.

Typos, misread words, misheard remarks … when placed in the shadow of perfection, they sound like silly moments of no consequence. And often they are.

Sometimes, though, they’re pure creativity asserting itself. Here, mistakes are shortcuts, wormholes between dimensions. They’re salvation from the tyranny of routine predictability. They’re like DNA mutations that end up benefitting the organism, or even leading to an entirely new spinoff lifeform.

Tune In, Turn On, Screw Up

And here’s where the navigating gets tricky. Can you, should you, resolve to make more mistakes? You could, if it was just a numbers game, but really, it’s the quality of one’s flubs that matters.

The magic of the right mistake at the right time is its bolt-from-the-blue randomness. Happy accidents are all about surprise and serendipity. It’s hard to engineer that.

The best we can do is remain open to them, and resist the urge to repel them as character flaws. And, maybe, at least goose the odds of their happening by refusing to spend every moment trying to be perfect, precise, and productive, and embracing the ambiguous.

I once read an interview with Tom Waits in which he spoke of his love for hearing music coming down the halls and through the walls of cheap hotels. Details would get filtered out, leaving holes for him to fill in on his own. A lot of his own music in the last 10 or 20 years has reflected this very quality.

That’s one way.

Or maybe it means giving yourself permission to be thought a flake every now and then, and loosening your gaze to soft focus. Reading too quickly, typing too carelessly, turning your eyes from the shadows before you know what is and isn’t there. Or only half-listening to something that someone else thinks you should pay close attention to.

The key is not taking it all in. Leaving room for replication error and gaps in knowledge. When we don’t have the full picture, it creates a vacuum that nothing can fill better than imagination. It’s as if the subconscious (which, as if to prove a point, first came out as sunconscious) takes over, grabs the Scrabble-like pieces it’s been given, and immediately rearranges them into something you need to see.

“Scars In Progress” … it even sounds like one of my titles.

I, the conscious part, was just the last to know.

***** Where to next? May I suggest over to my own blog, Warrior Poet, where the latest, “You’ll Never Know Until You’re Pushed,” is cued up and ready to go.

[Photo by jurvetson]

You’ve heard it all your life: You only get one chance to make a first impression. True enough in the flesh, but then again, there’s whatever people might have heard about you before they have a chance to shake your hand. What’s true in real life is also true on the page.

Learn to exploit that, and your characters can come alive before they ever set foot onstage.

The Weight Rankings Of Characters

Like boxers, characters come in different weight classes. There are flyweights who enter and exit in a single paragraph, and rarely even need a name. There are lightweights who may occupy just a scene or two. Middleweights who recur throughout the story, as secondary characters, and the main character heavyweights the story revolves around.

Then there are the super-heavyweights.

These are the characters who make the page tremble when they pass by. Who suck up the air in the room and exert their own force of gravity. The characters who make the most lasting impressions.

And, very often, they’re not the main character. Instead, whether friend, foe, or something in between, they’re there to impact the main character, for better or for worse; maybe change that person’s life and world forever.

Super-heavyweights nearly always arrive with more oomph when their arrival is anticipated.

It’s only logical that in whatever world you’re creating, such a person has long since earned a substantial reputation. Maybe multiple reputations, even conflicting and contradictory reputations.

So use them to pave the way.

Tell, Don’t Show

There’s a basic obstinacy in us as readers that resists being instructed, through flat narrative declaration, how to feel about someone.

A more or less omniscient view that informs us of a person’s sublime beauty, staggering intellect, legendary cruelty…? This is just hype. Shallow, lazy hype, and most of us are inured to it. Hype is for five-year-olds.

Instead of issuing the directives yourself, it will be infinitely more effective if you scoot your auctorial self out of the way and give the job to other characters. Let them do the talking, gossiping, and editorializing. Odds are, then we’ll happily buy whatever you’re selling.

Now, if what you want to convey is coming through a first-person point-of-view, that’s a little different. First-person POV implies a specific person’s outlook, knowledge, or opinion. That might work fine. Even so, the impact will still be magnified if the narrator has help.

In preparing the way for a super-heavyweight, here’s some of the ground they can cover:

• Larger-than-life deeds the SHW has done.
• Things the SHW has done to, for, or with the speaker or others.
• Dire warnings or positive expectations about the SHW.
• Anecdotes of how the SHW has reacted to adversity.
• Reactions to the mere mention of the SHW’s name.
• Rumors about the SHW.
• Things about the SHW that can’t possibly be true but people believe anyway.
• Things other people have done to, or because of, the SHW.
• Advice on how to interact with the SHW.

And so on. These can be positive or negative. If they clash, so much the better — the reader feels invited to make up his or her own mind.

Avoid generalities, for the most part. It’s the details that bring the lightning.

Case Study: The Silence of the Lambs

When I first saw the movie version of The Silence of the Lambs, I thought the introduction of Hannibal Lecter was one of the most effective character rollouts I’d ever seen. Film has sensory advantages the page doesn’t, but still, this is one movie that hews extremely close to its source material, and the tactics are essentially the same. It employs several of the above list.

True, for readers of Red Dragon, Thomas Harris’ first outing with Lecter, and for those who saw its film version, Manhunter, he’s already a singularly unforgettable monstrosity. But this matters less than you might think. Wisely, Lambs takes nothing for granted, and starts from a zero point.

The setup: FBI trainee Clarice Starling is being sent on a seemingly bureaucratic errand to deliver a questionnaire to Lecter in his asylum cell.

Lecter is talked about almost continuously for five-and-a-half minutes before he’s seen. Before we ever set eyes on him, we first see the apprehension, revulsion, and terrible awe with which everyone else regards him. We see his profound impact on people who are anything but lightweights themselves, and the way this sequence unfolds is deftly orchestrated:

1. First, a question dangled like a hook: “Do you spook easily, Starling?”
2. Then his nickname: Hannibal the Cannibal.
3. Orders to obtain even the most trivial minutiae about him, showing the intense curiosity the FBI’s behavioral unit has about him.
4. Warnings: “Be very careful … You’re to tell him nothing personal. Believe me, you don’t want Hannibal Lecter inside your head.”
5. Labeling, from a second source: “He’s a monster. A pure psychopath.”
6. Rigorous, almost paranoid procedures for dealing with him.
7. An excruciatingly detailed warning, the consequences of deviating from procedure: “When the nurse leaned over him, he did this to her.” Starling is shown a photo we never see. We only see her face as she looks at it. “The doctors managed to reset her jaw, more or less. Save one of her eyes. His pulse never got above 85, even when he ate her tongue.”
8. Warnings further reinforced by a third source.

By the time Starling reaches his cell, the sense is one of utter dread.

And in context, mission accomplished.

Latter Day Infantilism

From the time we’re babies awakening to the world around us, we watch other people for cues on how to react to things. The expression on the nearest adult’s face can tell us whether that tumble we just took is cause for laughing or crying.

We never really change.

So when you have characters who need to evoke a particularly strong reaction, first give them a reputation to live up to.

Then have them surpass it.

***** One more dance? You are invited over to my own blog, Warrior Poet, where the latest, “Lessons In And Out Of The Arena: Spartacus: Blood And Sand (Season 1)” waits with arm extended.

If you were to start combing through the sound bites of current productivity wisdom, it probably wouldn’t take you long to come across a couple of the more oft-repeated nuggets. Without quoting anyone or any version in particular, they go more or less like this:

Specialize. Specialize specialize specialize. Narrow your focus and your activities with laser-like precision. Because success and achievement come not from the many, varied things you do, but because of all the things you’ve had the steel to peel away from yourself and leave behind.

And this:

If everybody else is caught up in doing something, that should be your cue to do the opposite.

You see how a case could be made that the one cancels the other out?

Now, I’m probably misconstruing the whole spirit of this hyperspecialization advocacy, and yes, it’s no doubt the proper road to take for some people.

For a writer, though, it sounds like death. Slow, suffocating death.

*

Just to clarify: I’m all for relentlessly focused effort. I’m all for a laser-sighted, heat-seeking mission to accomplish a goal. All for sacrifice in the name of getting better.

But if all this is so unilaterally directed that one thing is all you know, all you’re passionate about, all you can talk about, then sorry … but sooner or later you’re going to inspire most everybody who doesn’t share your particular fervor to feign an excuse to disengage from the tedium of your company.

The call to hyperspecialization has its own version in the writing sphere:

Live at the desk. Learn to live at your desk.

As a battle cry, though, it just seems to land with a big, wet thud. While it may pay off short term, for the intermediate and long terms, it doesn’t actually sound much like being alive after all.

*

I suspect that most of us who love language have certain words, certain phrases, the mere sight and sound of which ignite us to our core. It’s the way they look on the page, the way they feel on the tongue, the way they hang in the air like magic incantations … which, for those of us so affected, is exactly what they are. Because they light up the skies and make low-hanging fruit of distant stars.

Here’s one of mine:

Renaissance man.

Or, if you prefer the non-gender-biased alternate, polymath, although that just doesn’t have the same cachet. But. A rose by any other name, no?

Renaissance man…

The phrase is usually defined as someone with many talents or interests; one whose expertise ranges over lots of different areas. So dry, though. I’d rather dwell on what it might’ve looked like in action. Say, someone who spent the morning exploring the flora close to home; who opened a notebook and made sketches of leaves that would do justice to any botany textbook today; who came home to the clavichord and composed a pastorale inspired by the outing; who finished the afternoon perfecting fencing techniques and rounded out the evening with poetry. The next day, tending to business and investments.

Such well-rounded days flowered from the Renaissance conviction that there were no caps to limit human growth, and thus people were obligated to learn as much as possible, in as many areas as possible, and develop their potentials to the fullest extent they could.

As a model, a template to follow, this is endlessly inspiring and evocative to me.

It also seems like an ideal approach for a lifetime of writing. Because if your work is to live and breathe, it does so only because of the breath of life you’ve huffed into it. And while the desk may be where you work, it isn’t where you truly live.

At its best, the desk is just a place you visit during your travels, where you bring back the intangible treasures you’ve picked up along the way.

*

This past August, an article in The New York Times book section took a 40-year look back at James Dickey’s novel, Deliverance. Here’s an excerpt sketching out the basis of the novel’s DNA, and how much it shared with its author:

Off the page he cultivated swaggering hobbies: archery, fishing, guitar, the banjo. Dickey began writing Deliverance in the early 1960s, basing the novel on canoe trips he’d taken with friends … His hobbies paid off: the prose about rivers, music and archery is acute. The ‘Dueling Banjos’ scene, made famous by the film, is just as good on the page. The narrator notes how the rural boy’s ‘fingers moved only slightly, about like those of a good typist; the music was just there.’

No one can say what Deliverance would’ve been like, if it would’ve had the same resonances, if James Dickey had not lived so many of its elements. No one can say whether the novel would’ve existed at all if he hadn’t. It might’ve. Jack London, remember, never made it anywhere close to Alaska.

Just the same, I’m glad James Dickey charted the course he did.

A wonderful thing is imagination, and empathy an invaluable virtue.

But there’s nothing quite like writing from within the heart of experience.

So the more you seek to connect with readers, then the more you owe it to them to live. To live, to learn, to aspire to dwarf sequoias with all you grow to be. To live with as little headroom as you can get away with.

Because the world needs those who’ve loved and lost, who’ve lusted and won, who have sown and reaped in a hundred fields, who have followed their bliss and dared to fall on their faces, who have yielded to temptation and prevailed against it, who’ve shrugged off the arrows in their backs, who have risked looking ridiculous in cultivating whatever abilities and compulsions they find inside themselves whether or not the engines of commerce tell them there’s any good use for it.

The engines of commerce may not need all that. But the world does.

And so do your readers.

Because, if nothing else, the tapestry it weaves eventually becomes the basis of wisdom.

And there’s never too much of that to go around.

***** It doesn’t have to end this way. You are discreetly invited over to my blog, Warrior Poet, where the latest, “Agree To Disagree: The Key To Constant Conflict, Part 2” is ready ‘n’ waiting.

[Painting by Leonardo da Vinci. Photographed by dbking]