Wisdom Gleaned Lately

Zestful Blog Post #290

I didn’t ask permission to share this stuff here, and I don’t have exact quotations, and I can’t in every case remember who quite said what. But most of these items are from writers I’ve encountered at events at Ringling College of Art and Design, as well as conferences and meetings in the last six months or so. Some are from me, and some you’ve no doubt heard from others before, especially this first one:

·       Don’t overthink it. (Don’t we all love that?)

·       Longer passages of quick dialogue can do two things:

o   Make for plentiful white space on the page, which is easy to read; and

o   Take up pages in a printed book, making it look meatier than it might be. (Heh-heh.)

·       Time spent getting to know your characters on a deep level is time well spent.

·       It’s hard to make money as an author.

·       Some authors make great money. The foolproof how-to formula is unclear.

·       It’s easy to get published.

·       It’s hard to get published.

[Gotta climb ev'ry mountain...]

·       Social media sucks and does nothing for your career.

·       Social media is great and can help your career a lot.

·       One gets lonely.

·       Collaborating with other authors (writing books with them) can be:

o   Fraught with icky drama, making you not want to do it anymore, like when somebody else claims credit for your idea, just the same as in other group projects we’ve all dealt with.

o   Really great, especially if it’s just one other person you like and trust.

·       Most of us are too uptight.

·       You should stick with one genre and make a name there.

·       Experiment widely in different genres if you feel like it; you never know when you’ll hit it big with some new thing.

·       A pseudonym can jump-start your career in a new direction.

·       To write a good action scene, such as a fight:

o   Give a quick overview, then

o   Get into some deep detail, then

o   Pull back again to the ‘long shot,’ so to speak.

o   Rinse and repeat.

·       Every one of us is walking—or running, or plunging, or staggering—along a different path. No two careers are exactly alike.

·       Therefore I say: Let’s trust our own paths, rocks and wrong turns and all. Because we’re getting somewhere. And sometimes the view is great.

What do you think? To post, click below where it says, ‘No Comments,’ or ‘2 Comments,’ or whatever. If you’re having trouble leaving comments on this or other blogs, it’s probably because third-party cookies have been turned off in your browser. Go into your browser settings and see if that’s the case. Then turn them on again in order to leave comments. [Photo by ES]

If you’d like to receive this blog automatically as an email, look to the right, above my bio, and subscribe there. Thanks for looking in.

The Climbing Rope

Zestful Blog Post #289

Back in elementary school I was neither the first nor last kid picked for teams; I was unathletic enough to not be chosen first, but popular enough not to be chosen last. Gosh, remember when we did that? I understand these days they don't let kids choose up sides, because of self-esteem. Gym was OK except for one dreadful piece of equipment: the climbing rope.

The rope, a hairy hemp freighter hawser thicker than an eight-year-old's thigh, started in a knot at waist level, then ascended nearly out of view, affixed to the ceiling two storeys up.

Every gym session, the teacher would tell us to line up and take turns climbing the rope. Success, of course, was measured by how far you climbed. Kids who made it all the way to the top, daringly slapping the iron swivel, then sliding dramatically down like firefighters or sailors, were like gods to me. (Oh, it was safe! The teacher dragged a small gym mat under the rope!)

I couldn't climb the thing at all. Not one inch. When my turn came, I'd sigh and take hold of the rope and try to pull myself up. I just couldn't do it. I had the desire to do it, but when I pulled with my hands, nothing happened. I hung there like a grape until the teacher, a loose-jowled guy who wore loafers and dress pants, would say 'next' in a bored voice.

As an adult, I'd wonder about that rope now and then. The breakthrough came when I was being weekend-lazy, watching an old Tarzan movie on TV. By God, there it was: Tarzan grabbed that vine and climbed it, and he used not just his arms but his legs too. He didn't clasp that vine in his hands, he hugged it. And he wrapped his legs around it and bent them like a frog's, then, pinching the vine with his legs, sort of stood up. He regripped the vine with his arms, frogged his legs up again, and kept going. (To the admiring gazes of Jane and Boy.)

And I remembered that the kids who made it to the top looked just like Tarzan. Why didn't I see it at the time? Why didn't I copy the other kids? I’m sure my kinetic sense wasn't very good then, and my brain wasn’t fully developed either. If the teacher—or even another kid—had broken down the moves for me, showed me and explained it to me verbally, step-by-step, I probably could have done it. I wasn't much punier than the other kids.

The next opportunity I had to climb a rope like that—not that such opportunities come by every day—I grabbed the thing, hugged it, wrapped my leg around it, and—went up!

This is how I feel about aspiring authors and story development. Thousands upon thousands of stories start with a cool nugget of an idea. And then they hang there.

But the truth is, story development—getting from cool idea to fully formed story or narrative—isn't a mysterious endowment. It isn't a you-have-it-or-you-don't thing, like leprosy or royal lineage. Just like rope climbing, story development is a skill that can be learned and improved. And it’s simple: All you need to do is look closely at how successful authors do it, and realize that they’re showing you, right there on the page. Study up. Read without haste. Make notes. Ask and answer questions like:

·       How does the author move from the opening into the first conflict?

·       Who are the major characters?

·       How does each character—major or minor—serve the plot?

·       Is anything there for no reason? Or maybe I need to look closer?

·       What is the author trying to tell me here, and here, and here?

·       How can I copy this?

Work with what you see, and with what you seek.

What do you think? To post, click below where it says, ‘No Comments,’ or ‘2 Comments,’ or whatever. If you’re having trouble leaving comments on this or other blogs, it’s probably because third-party cookies have been turned off in your browser. Go into your browser settings and see if that’s the case. Then turn them on again in order to leave comments.

If you’d like to receive this blog automatically as an email, look to the right, above my bio, and subscribe there. Thanks for looking in.

A Good Feeling to You Today

Zestful Blog Post #288

Who is a hero to you? Someone alive or not, doesn't matter. What about that person is inspiring? Did they accomplish something remarkable? Did they behave admirably under extraordinary strain? What resources do you suppose they drew on to perform as they did? Physical strength? Inner courage? Endurance? Faith? Perhaps it was even humility. Because to be kind and loving when others are not requires the courage of humility: the willingness to be seen as wrong or bad. Conjure the spirit of your hero. Pretend to be that person, just for a minute. Lift your eyes and say, "I am _________." Does a feeling of calm strength come over you? It's yours now.

Seneca, one of my heroes, said, “It is quality rather than quantity that matters.”

And that’s what I wanted to give today. Who’s one of your bestest heroes, and why? To post, click below where it says, ‘No Comments,’ or ‘2 Comments,’ or whatever. If you’re having trouble leaving comments on this or other blogs, it’s probably because third-party cookies have been turned off in your browser. Go into your browser settings and see if that’s the case. Then turn them on again in order to leave comments.

If you’d like to receive this blog automatically as an email, look to the right, above my bio, and subscribe there. Thanks for looking in.

A Few Fast How-Tos and a Book by a Pal

Zestful Blog Post #287

How to deal with not having read the authors you meet.

First of all, nobody reads everybody. Upon meeting another author whom you haven't read, say, "So wonderful to meet you! I've heard great things about your work!" That's it. Don't overdo it.

If you need to make convo with someone for an extended period, such as being seated together at a lunch or dinner, you can say, "You know, I'm afraid I really don't know your work, but I've love to hear how you got started."

If it’s a trad-published author, you can ask, “Do you like your agent?” Every author who has representation is curious about every other author's agent. 

How to be a happy tyrant.

Demand the utmost from your characters. You are both composer and conductor! Sometimes, during a demanding passage under an exacting baton, musicians strain so hard to deliver the effects asked for that they snap a string or blow their lips out of shape.

Only by going to the limit, and risking going past it, and suffering whatever damage might be the penalty, will we find out if what we thought was our limit is really that.

We can only discover new strengths by exhausting the old ones.

How to avoid a headbanging mistake.

If you have an opportunity to do a live event like a booksigning and they want to know good dates for you, look ahead on line and find when the next Olympics and major sporting events are going to be. Try not to schedule anything during the Olympics, the Super Bowl, Presidential election night, or, come to think of it, the soccer World Cup final sequence. The World Series is hit-and-miss (ha, I just made a pun), and not as much of a ratings draw as the other things. Kentucky Derby, I guess if you live in Kentucky.

I'll always hold grudges against Sarah Hughes, Irina Slutskaya, and Michelle Kwan for making nobody come to my booksigning event in San Francisco on the night of the women's Olympic figure skating finals in 2002.

And now for a word about a book by a buddy. Congratulations to Jim Misko on his multi-prizewinning novel.

From the cover:

Miles Foster is a newly minted teacher who dreams of getting a teaching job in the highly respected and financially stable Portland, Oregon school system where everything is available, and where he and his wife call home. But the only opening for his talents is in a remote lumber mill town in central Oregon, two hundred miles away. It is a poor school with forty students, and is controlled by a jealous superintendent and school board who tolerate no thinking outside the box and who conspire to destroy his teaching career.

Miles must find a way to educate students who have been passed along regardless of what they learned, and defeat the damaging control of the school board and superintendent without losing his marriage or his job, or both.

Buy it HERE.

What do you think of today’s how-tos? To post, click below where it says, ‘No Comments,’ or ‘2 Comments,’ or whatever. If you’re having trouble leaving comments on this or other blogs, it’s probably because third-party cookies have been turned off in your browser. Go into your browser settings and see if that’s the case. Then turn them on again in order to leave comments.

If you’d like to receive this blog automatically as an email, look to the right, above my bio, and subscribe there. Thanks for looking in. [photo of Cass Tech High School music room by ES]

Book Thieves

Zestful Blog Post #286

I bet some of you remember Steal This Book by Abbie Hoffman, a counterculture guide that came out in 1971. I bought a copy, which tells you something about my ethics then. However, I did read it avidly and, being an impressionable youth, wished I had the guts to try some of Hoffman’s ideas for ‘sticking it to the man,’ like demanding my free buffalo from the federal government, or pretending I was hungry and broke to get food from trusting churches. Some of the stuff in it seemed just stupid to me, though, like pasting a postpaid piece of junk mail to a brick and dropping it in a mailbox so whatever corporation had to pay the postage due. Another uncomfortable one was going into a busy restaurant and eating leftover food before the tables get cleared. Ew. Not that I've led a shame-free life.

I worked in bookselling for ten years in the 1980s and 90s, first as a floor clerk (in a bookstore owned by two brothers named Tom and Louis Borders), then as a manager and regional executive. Lots of people would come in and steal books. We had a pretty good idea of how many books we lost to shrink (the retail euphemism) because once a year, we'd do a physical inventory count. You compare the stuff you have on hand with the list of stuff that's supposed to be in the store, and the difference is shrink, or shrinkage. We lost a lot of inventory.

It was rare to catch a thief in the act. We had no security staff or hidden cameras. Furthermore, it was assumed that staff would not steal, especially since everybody got $25 worth of store credit every month, plus a 25% discount on everything. What can I say? Borders, in those days, was a small company in the Midwest. And I think very few employees stole; giving stuff away to employees is a good way to create good will. When the company got big, financial experts came in and convinced top management to take away store credit, and the employee discount went down to 10%, if I remember right. (Members of the corporate board of directors got 25%, which as you might imagine went over great with the rank and file.) Stores also got primitive security systems, which at first were a joke, then got somewhat better.

 [A look at my home sports-and-leisure, nature, and reference sections.]

Scammers would try many tricks, from trying to return stolen books for cash, to paying with bad checks, to claiming to have lost a gift certificate to fire, pet digestion, or other imaginative mishap.

The vast majority of thieves got away. But once in a while, staff would spot somebody and realize they weren't a legitimate customer. There was one guy who focused on the computer book section. Pound for pound, computer books tended to be higher-priced, and they were easy to sell to used-bookstores. This fellow would appear to be browsing the low bookcases, taking a few books off the shelf, then he'd dip down into a squat where he was hidden from view. Then he'd rise up, empty-handed but bulkier around the middle, and hustle out the door to his car.

I didn't have the nerve to confront the guy (and by the time I could get the police there he'd have been long gone), but I did follow him to his car after I clearly saw him steal. I made sure he saw me, made sure he knew I knew, and watched him go, writing down his license plate number. Never saw him again.

More shocking to me were the employees who did steal. We caught one guy, who had worked out a system of hiding books behind empty boxes in the back receiving hall. Come time to clock out, he'd leave the store via the back way, collect his booty, and walk around to the parking lot from the alley. It was too cute, and another staffer figured out what he was doing and turned him in.

Come to think of it, I have a bunch of other stories about book thieves, and maybe I’ll write them down for a future post.

Although it's never right to steal, you can understand why a hungry person would steal or cheat for food. But books, you can take them home for free from the library, or you can sit and read them right in the store.

Then we come up to ‘today,’ meaning post-digital-publishing-revolution, and we have book pirates. That term makes them seem somehow romantic, like modern-day Robin Hoods. In fact, they are scum. I subscribe to an anti-pirate service called Blasty, which searches for and somehow removes from search engines websites claiming to have my books downloadable for free. It doesn’t take down the sites or send cease-and-desist letters, but I think what they do is just about as good.

I’ve found that most of these pirate sites are merely phishing holes. For instance, if you want a free copy of The Actress, click here and enter a bunch of your personal information: your contact info, and hey, if you keep clicking through they’ll ask for your credit card number, just as a precaution to secure your account, and hey, they won’t actually charge anything on it. I guess some people fall for all that. And of course they don’t have a digital copy of the book to give you anyway. Come back tomorrow. If Abbie Hoffman were alive today, I’ve no doubt he would learn code and try to be a hacker. But he committed suicide in 1989, partly because he was no longer under 30. Look it up if you don’t believe me.

I don’t worry too much about these pirate sites, because if somebody wants to download my book for free, that doesn’t necessarily mean they would have bought it otherwise. Lots of enraged authors miss this point. So somebody gets to read your book for free, and maybe they’d like more, and maybe they’ll eventually buy something. You can’t get too worked up about this stuff.

But in conclusion, book pirates are scum.

What do you think? Do you have a book theft/piracy story? To post, click below where it says, ‘No Comments,’ or ‘2 Comments,’ or whatever. If you’re having trouble leaving comments on this or other blogs, it’s probably because third-party cookies have been turned off in your browser. Go into your browser settings and see if that’s the case. Then turn them on again in order to leave comments.

If you’d like to receive this blog automatically as an email, look to the right, above my bio, and subscribe there. Thanks for looking in.

You're All Right

Zestful Blog Post #285

I knew a woman who made it her life’s work to become unblocked. To realize her potential. When I met her she was middle-aged, divorced, with two grown kids and a rucksack full of dreams waiting to come true.

But somewhere along the line she’d decided—or agreed with some shrink or shaman or dead parent—that the way she was wasn’t right enough. She ought not to act on those dreams until she’d gotten herself right.

She occupied herself with all sorts of things to self-actualize, to ‘awaken her inner artist’ or something, to figure out what she really should be doing, to free up, to become worthy. To become who she was. Perhaps she should sign on as an animal research assistant and observe beautiful creatures in far-flung habitats. Perhaps she should take flying lessons and try to get a job as a cargo pilot. Or perhaps she should write a novel. Fine. 

She died at age 52 of ovarian cancer before the process was complete. I sadly suspect she could have lived until 102 and still never completed her process of ‘becoming.’

I say, screw becoming. Screw preparing. Be and do. The being and the doing will make all processing moot. Screaming at an effigy of your mother in the woods, taking ice baths or firewalks? You could. But only living freely—with openness to mistakes and crappy results—will make us live well. And only writing freely—with openness to mistakes and crappy results—will make us write well.

It is so very simple.

What do you think? To post, click below where it says, ‘No Comments,’ or ‘2 Comments,’ or whatever. If you’re having trouble leaving comments on this or other blogs, it’s probably because third-party cookies have been turned off in your browser. Go into your browser settings and see if that’s the case. Then turn them on again in order to leave comments.

If you’d like to receive this blog automatically as an email, look to the right, above my bio, and subscribe there. Thanks for looking in. [Photo by ES]

Old-School Tech Tests

Zestful Blog Post #284

This beefy post is the first part of a feature I wrote for Writer’s Digest magazine's November/December 2018 issue, themed ‘the throwback issue.’ I believe it’s hitting subscriber mailboxes now; should be on newsstands now or soon. I had a great time writing this, and have already heard happy comments from enthusiastic readers who write.

[Excerpt begins]

I’m an analogue girl in a digital world. I like old things and old style. I used a rotary-dial phone until the march of progress threatened to crush us both. My car just celebrated its twenty-fourth birthday. I like canvas sneakers, gin martinis, and homemade afghans.

But I’m a writer in contemporary times, and I’ve adapted to new technologies. Frankly, most of it has been a blur. I do remember, though, sitting alone at night in an office building sometime in the 1980s, watching my boss’s printer slowly excrete 200 pages of random ASCII characters. For all I knew, the computer was trying to tell us something. I sent the pages to the tech guys at headquarters for analysis. They still haven’t gotten back to me.

Fast-forward to now, when miniature microphones and voice-to-text software literally enable us to write as fast as we can talk. I understand the next phase is nearly upon us, where a machine will write my novels for me. And no doubt publish them, collect royalties, and spend the money on nice things for itself.

But I feel it’s time to ask: Is more tech necessarily better? Is faster better than slower? Is more output worthier than less? Is the destination more important than the journey?

With those questions in mind, I took it upon myself to investigate. To re-immerse myself in the materials and sensations I used to enjoy so often—and also to experiment with even older methods—I spent a weekend working on my current novel using an assortment of technology that originated between the building of the Sphinx and opening night of “My Fair Lady.”

On Saturday morning, I settled down at my writing table, a mug of coffee at my side and a wood-cased pencil in my hand. I chose a Blackwing 602, known for its smooth core and fragrant cedar casing. (I’d decided to skip inscribing words on stone or wet clay tablets and start with the next writing technology most closely related to those, graphite.)

Pencil sharpening is an act of beginning. You sit down, you gather yourself, you sharpen. You feel and hear the sharpener working—whether a cranker or handheld—and you smell that fresh wood. You behold your newly exposed graphite. If the point is sharp, you feel brief anxiety over whether the microscopic conical top section will break off as you touch it to paper.

I enjoy the deliberateness of the pencil experience. As you write, the point degrades to whatever degree of dullness you feel like tolerating. You rotate the point to take advantage of the wear pattern—every rotation offers a sharper edge.

When you write with a pencil, you are in a very real sense, drawing. You’re laying down the two-dimensional images of words. You can write little or big; with light pressure or hard; you can print carefully or race along in whatever version of cursive is yours.

You can erase mistakes! But if you’re on a tear, you can just strike through with vigor and keep going. Or you can flurry down a satisfying storm of obliterating zigzags. The re-sharpening pause is a balm. While sharpening, you have a chance to look up, change the focal length of your gaze, quit thinking for a moment, and use your hands differently.

I wrote about a thousand words with the Blackwing 602, savoring its straightforward sturdiness. You don’t have to baby a pencil; you can leave it lying around; you can even lose it without too much grief. You can write with it in a canoe or on a mountain ledge, or upside-down while lying in bed. No worries about ink, mechanisms, batteries.

The assortment. 

Mid-morning, I skipped ahead in time and unholstered my trusty plastic Pentel automatic, with a .7mm lead, in the relatively soft and bold 2B grade I like. The obvious advantage of the automatic pencil is no sharpening, no bother. You click a button or twist the barrel to advance your lead, and you can write fast and precise. The writing experience is less varied, though. That’s the price you pay.

With any pencil, one must bring some pressure to bear, which puts wear and tear on you. My writing elbow got sore after a few hours of pencil work.

After lunch I turned to a group of instruments you have to dip in ink, that marvelous liquid humans first concocted in Neolithic times. Hollow reeds served as writing tools in ancient Egypt, China, and the Middle East. They’re still used for drawing and special calligraphy.

I’d found a reed pen in my art box, so I started with that. It was a seven-inch-long wand about half an inch in diameter and cut to a quill-like point. I opened a bottle of black Noodler’s ink, dipped the reed in, and started writing. I blobbed too much ink down at first, then got the hang of making bold strokes.

I had to reload with ink every few words, however. Because of that, and apart from the novelty, the experience was wearying and just not practical. I perceived how a fine reed with an expertly-done point—and a halfway experienced scribe—could work some beauty.

Writing with a quill didn’t go much better. I’d found a large feather during a walk a few years ago and saved it. Now, following an online tutorial, I made a writing point from its shaft. Like the reed, the quill emitted an ugly blot before scratchily producing a contiguous line. After about ten words, it ran dry. I reloaded and kept going, but the work went slowly and vexingly. Thinking about the fact that Shakespeare wrote all of his plays with such an instrument made me nearly sick with pity. But life was slower then, and I think everybody had more patience.

[This is the end of the excerpt. For the rest of the article, hustle out to your favorite newsstand and pick up the November/December issue of Writer’s Digest magazine.]

What do you think of old-school writing tech? Do you have favorite tools and practices? To post, click below where it says, ‘No Comments,’ or ‘2 Comments,’ or whatever. If you’re having trouble leaving comments on this or other blogs, it’s probably because third-party cookies have been turned off in your browser. Go into your browser settings and see if that’s the case. Then turn them on again in order to leave comments. [Photo by ES]

If you’d like to receive this blog automatically as an email, look to the right, above my bio, and subscribe there. Thanks for looking in.