Wrap Up
To bring together in one place various of my comments from other threads:
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I'd say that a tiny bit of creativity combined with a willingness to sit down and do the work will beat the heck out of gobs of creativity combined with a dilettante spirit.
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Practice doen't help a bit if you're practicing mistakes over and over again.
Practice helps if you're improving, if you're thinking about what you're doing, if you're reinforcing what works and suppressing what doesn't.
I've run into writers who've written their million words, whose millionth word was as cruddy as word one. Mere typing doesn't teach; seeking feedback, and taking it, may.
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-- <a href="http://p197.ezboard.com/fabsolutewritefrm3.showMessageRange?topicID=593.topic&start=1&stop=20" target="_new">Age, Experience, and Writing</a>
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I know, "Keep a journal" is almost universal young-writer advice. It's almost always a waste of time, too.
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-- <A HREF="http://p197.ezboard.com/fabsolutewritefrm3.showMessage?topicID=583.topic" target="_new">Taking Notes on Life</a>
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Many (most?) bestsellers are soon forgotten. Check out the bestseller lists from half a century ago. How many have you even heard of, far less read?
"Bestseller" is a genre as much as "romance," "western," or "mystery" is a genre. You'll find poorly written bestsellers in exactly the same way (and I suspect the same proportion) as you'll find poorly written horror novels, military novels, or lawyer novels.
"It's crap but we sell a ton of them" is itself a genre, and a particularly hard one to break in to.
Remember Sturgeon's Law:
Ninety percent of everything is crud.
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As we get older, as we read more books, works that once might have seemed fresh, new, even daring become "been there, done that."
It's the down-side of experience.
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Traditionally published authors get their families, friends, and mailing list to buy their product. Vanity authors aren't the only ones who use that business tactic.
Sure, and Scientologists are required to buy a certain number of L. Ron Hubbard's books to keep them on the best seller lists.
I think it's pathetic all the way around.
On the other hand, if y'all want to
buy my books, please feel free. (This isn't to put any of 'em on any bestseller lists, it's because I think they're dandy books, and I want to be read. Buy 'em used if you like. Cheaper for you that way.)
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-- <a href="http://p197.ezboard.com/fabsolutewritefrm3.showMessage?topicID=595.topic" target="_new">Best sellers</a>
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All it takes to make your manuscript "solicited" is that you sent a query letter and they said "Sure, send it along."
Even for the ones who say "no unagented," all that's happened is the location of the slush pile moved, from the publisher's office to the agent's office.
There's even a category called "agented slush." That is, submissions from agents no one's ever heard of.
Slush happens.
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A bad agent is worse than not having an agent at all.
A useful agent is one who has sold a book you've heard of.
Here's an
interesting article.
(Note: that site is semi-broken. If all you see is a bunch of ads and "loading" in the top bar of your browser, click on the "back" icon on your browser until you see text. If the text ends at the bottom of the ads, press your F11 key twice. That should get you the rest of the text.)
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"How long does it take?" is out of your hands.
Instead of giving yourself an ulcer, write another book.
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Speaking of "unknown agents" it's not unheard-of for writers to print up some nice letterhead as the "Morning Dew Literary Agency" or summat, and submit their own works as if they themselves were an agency.
Sure, that gets 'em past the "no unagented manuscripts" hurdle, but it still puts 'em in the "agented slush" pile.
Need I say that this is a terrible idea?
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The agent is for your next book, and the book after that. The agent is for your career.
And ... for the book you just sold ... sure it's sold, but the contract hasn't been negotiated yet. The agent should be able to get you better terms on the deal you've just been offered. The agent will also track rights and royalties, and resell this work after it reverts.
Look, agents aren't required. But they sure are nice to handle the business end of things.
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If bad writers could sucessfully fake being good writers, they wouldn't be bad writers.
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-- <a href="http://p197.ezboard.com/fabsolutewritefrm3.showMessage?topicID=588.topic" target="_new">Why slush piles?</a>
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There are only seven (some say eight) plots in the world.
The differences come in how you combine them, and what furniture you put around them.
For you next assignment:
Read:
<A HREF="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0679722610/ref=nosim/madhousemanor" target="_new">
Red Harvest</a> by Dashiell Hammett
Watch:
<A HREF="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0780022513/ref=nosim/madhousemanor" target="_new">
Yojimbo</a>
<A HREF="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00000K0DM/ref=nosim/madhousemanor" target="_new">
A Fistful of Dollars</a>
<A HREF="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00008RH3L/ref=nosim/madhousemanor" target="_new">
Miller's Crossing</a>
<A HREF="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/6304698747/ref=nosim/madhousemanor" target="_new">
Last Man Standing</a>
Compare and contrast. How are the plots similar? What makes these stories different?
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Another axiom:
All art is in conversation with other art.
Our own works are commentaries on the works we've read.
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Man against man, man against nature, man against himself, and man against God.
The other plots are: "The Brave Little Tailor," "The Man Who Learned Better," and "If This Goes On (or, "What If"). Some say "Reader, I Married Him" is the eighth plot.
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-- <a href="http://p197.ezboard.com/fabsolutewritefrm3.showMessage?topicID=594.topic" target="_new">Plot problems</a>
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When I see a manuscript with a copyright notice on it, dated ten or twenty years ago, believe me, it doesn't give me a happy feeling.
In any case, copyright exists from the moment the work is fixed in tangible form. All that registering buys you is the ability to go for punitive damages.
The books that get plagairized are the ones that are already published. Unpublished manuscripts ... I think I've heard of it happening. Once.
(I know that you hear wild stories of unscupulous agents kidnapping hapless slush manuscripts and selling them to pirate presses in Shanghai. I find this hard to believe for two reasons: First, if the unscrupulous agents were able to sell anything they wouldn't need to be unscrupulous, and second, why would the pirates want to print unedited slush by Joe Noname, when for exactly the same cost and effort they could print a Dean Koontz or Stephen King book?)
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I think that most editors who see a copyright notice on an unpublished manuscript say "What a maroon!" or words to that effect, and read the story however far it carries them.
I'm not saying that there aren't folks who are offended. But it's probably an insignificant number.
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You sometimes put rights for sale on a short story, but not on a novel.
Me, I only put rights for sale on a manuscript if some of the rights have already been used. There are lots and lots of rights you can sell, all to different markets. First North American Serial rights. First World Anthology (Exclusive of the British Commonwealth) rights. Exclusive Reprint rights. Non-exclusive Reprint rights. Dramatic rights. Electronic rights. Serialization rights. Back-of-the-cereal-box rights. Printed on cupcake wrapper rights.
If the story's never sold anywhere before -- it's all for sale. The contract you sign should specify exactly which rights the publisher is buying. And in this -- like everything else -- it's all negotiable.
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I didn't know there were "Harry Potter" cupcakes!
If there aren't that'll mean that someone at Scholastic missed a marketing opportunity.
Oh, and the best seller list? Been there. That and $2.50 will get me a double-shot mocha latte.
(Actually, there isn't a "the best seller list." There's lots of best seller lists. USA Today. New York Times. Locus. The Picayne Press. Lots and lots of best seller lists. You're not half doing your job if you can't honestly put the words "best-selling author" on your second book. If you have half-way decent distribution you'll be on
someone's best seller list.)
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-- <a href="http://p197.ezboard.com/fabsolutewritefrm3.showMessage?topicID=586.topic" target="_new">Copyright</a>
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...does that mean you write them all simultaneously?
Well, yes.
These are other things that are going on at the same time as the main action, that are supporting, or contrasting, with the overall theme of your book.
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-- <a href="http://p197.ezboard.com/fabsolutewritefrm3.showMessage?topicID=589.topic" target="_new">Subplots?</a>
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Anyone following this discussion who hasn't yet read
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie needs to go out and do so now.
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"Withholding information" isn't necessarily a good plan either. We're trying to give information to our readers. We go out of our way to make sure the readers have the information. Information is what the readers are using to create pictures in their heads.
If you want to conceal something from your readers, tell them, but put it in a low-interest place, or mixed in among other things.
I recall reading a thriller some years back. In this book, the protagonist's sister is having a torrid love affair with a US Senator named "Sam."
It wasn't until sixty pages later that the author revealed that "Sam" is short for Samantha, and the Senator is female. Woo! Good job, author! I've now got to mentally re-cast sixty pages-worth of the pictures I'd drawn in my head.
Never mind that every single character in the book would have known Sam's gender, the author decided to conceal it from the reader in order to carry out some surprise or another.
That was the point where I threw the book across the room.
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-- <a href="http://p197.ezboard.com/fabsolutewritefrm3.showMessageRange?topicID=579.topic&start=1&stop=20" target="_new">Confident but Confused Protagonist</a>
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I have to agree with aineg -- word choice and sentence rhythm can take you farther than dialect will.
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-- <a href="http://p197.ezboard.com/fabsolutewritefrm3.showMessageRange?topicID=552.topic&start=1&stop=20" target="_new">Phonetic Dialog</a>
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I've gone the made-up pronoun route in a story where we had three genders. (The third one was "ne.")
I've also gone (in a novel where a biologically female character went disguised as a male for big chunks of the story) with she/her when she was dressed and acting as a woman, and he/his when she was dressed and acting as a male.
If you really want to use the correct unknown-gender singular pronoun in English, it's they/their.
(If anyone wants a hotdog they can come over here.)
Before anyone gets their panties all bunched up, "they" has been a perfectly acceptable singular pronoun since Geoffrey Chaucer. Shakespeare used "they" as an unknown-gender singular pronoun, Edmund Spenser used it, Jane Austen used it, George Orwell used it. It's only the silly prescriptive-grammarians who think that "they" can't be used as a singular pronoun.
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-- <a href="http://p197.ezboard.com/fabsolutewritefrm3.showMessage?topicID=581.topic" target="_new">androgenous characters and pronouns</a>
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Don't even think about revising until you have 300 pages or "the end," whichever comes last.
You won't know what you have until then.
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You'll find your style. Style is what you can't help doing.
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-- <a href="http://p197.ezboard.com/fabsolutewritefrm3.showMessage?topicID=577.topic" target="_new">Changing Gears</a>
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