Yearly Archives: 2014

Agents Behaving Badly

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@jamesscottbell

Agents are human. At least that’s the rumor. I know several and count some of them (including my own) as friends. The ones I know are professional, care about their clients and truly want what’s best for them.
I believe the majority of agents are like this.
But in every barrel there is an apple or two that has, shall we say, spots.
I have no way of knowing how widespread the following behaviors are. And certainly there is no gauge that measures motivations. But if agents are human (that dang rumor just won’t go away) then I suspect they are subject human frailties as well.
Which is not an excuse for bad behavior. Our great task in life is to do battle with our frailties and overcome them. That is especially true for those who hold themselves out as professionals and in whom clients entrust their hopes and dreams.
I have heard over the past few months from some writing friends with agent problems. They never anticipated these contingencies and wonder what to do. Everything was so positive when they signed! What happened? They feel like they’ve taken a two-by-four to the head.
I advise as I can, but now there comes a time for advice to agents. Here it is: If you are doing any of the following things, stop it. 

1. The Throw-It-Against-The-Wall Agent
Some years ago I was at a writers conference where a new agent was taking appointments. This was a guy who had been in the business for a long time as an acquisitions editor. He had worked for a reputable publisher and, by all accounts, was someone with abundant contacts inside the walls of the Forbidden City.  
During the conference I kept hearing from newbie writers that this agent was interested in seeing their full manuscript! And, in a several cases, signing with him right then and there!
Only later did I find out what this guy’s MO was. He was signing up just about everybody. In only a few months he had a roster of 70 writers.
Seventy! How could he give these writers the attention they thought they were going to get?
He couldn’t. What he did was throw all these proposals against a publishing wall, hoping some would stick and get him a percentage of the advance money and downstream sales.
Rather than nurture the truly deserving, helping them shape a manuscript or proposal into something that had a real chance in the marketplace, he was operating an impersonal volume grinder.
Guess what happened? Two years later he was out of the agenting business. Gone.
And his clients? Cast adrift. Good luck. Thanks for playing. Two years of their writing lives down the dumper.
One thing I’ve always said to writers is: a bad agent is worse than no agent. The writers who signed with this fellow found that out the hard way.
LESSON: Only sign with an agent who has a track record or comes highly recommended by a trusted source.
2. The Suddenly-Clams-Up-Agent
I’ve gotten two emails from writer friends recently who have said the same thing: All of a sudden their agent has stopped communicating with them.
Their profile is similar. They signed on as new authors, with all the attendant happiness of the writer who finally has representation. A first deal was made! Smiles and good wishes all around!
Then the marketplace brought down its unsentimental fist. The debut novel didn’t take off. The second novel was given scant attention by the publishing house. The third novel (if there was one) was kicked to the curb.
With a dismal track record hung around their necks, the authors’ prospects for a new contract with a publisher were severely dimmed.
But the writers kept their hopes alive. New ideas, new proposals sent to the agents.
Only the agents stopped returning emails. Or phone calls.
They clammed up.
This behavior is mostly economic. Agents are in this business to make a living and will naturally put their energies behind the cash-cow clients. An author whose prospects have dwindled won’t get the same attention.
There’s also a personal aspect. It’s easier to avoid a hard conversation with the unpleasant prospect of a breakup.
Finally the agent, by saying nothing, may be hoping the client will “pull the plug” and leave of her own volition. Problem solved.
Such behavior is unprofessional and uncivil. You, agent, have a lot of clients. But the writer has only one agent, and to be treated like a discarded McDonald’s wrapper makes them feel like a world is ending, a career is dying, and long-nurtured dreams are turning into nightmares.
So do the right thing even if it’s uncomfortable. Have that talk with the client. She has placed her very heart in your hands. She deserves your communication.
3. The Rights-Grab Agent
The brave new world of digital publishing has put agents in a bit of an uncomfortable position. Early on there was talk that helping a client go indie (for a percentage) was a conflict of interest. That chatter has died down as more and more agents get into the hybridization game.
A situation has arisen, however, with a couple of writers I know. Way back when some of their books went out-of-print, they got the rights back. At that time such rights were considered nearly worthless.
Oh, how times have changed. Digital self-publishing has made it possible to give those old books new and lasting life. And a welcome revenue stream for the writer struggling to get a new contract.
But not so fast, some of their agents say. We still get a piece of your pie. Even if you self-publish. So go ahead! Only you will have to be exclusive on Amazon so we can have our share of the royalties come directly to us.
Writer Clare Cook shared such an experience:
And then one day on the phone my agent informed me that in order to continue to be represented by this mighty agency, I would have to turn over 15% of the proceeds of my about-to-be self-published book to said agency. Not only that, but I would have to publish it exclusively through Amazon, because the agency had a system in place with Amazon where I could check a box and their 15% would go straight to them, no muss, no fuss.
There actually may be plenty of muss and quite a bit of fuss over this. Putting on my dusty lawyer hat for a moment (it’s been sitting in the corner over there by my vinyl records), I say that unless a client signed a contract that specifically gives the agent a share of their independently held rights in OOP books, this won’t fly. And even if there weresuch a contract provision there is a chance it would not stand up in court if muss came to fuss.
The agent made the deal with the trad publisher and deserved the 15%. But when that deal is over it’s a whole new ballgame. If a client is self-publishing backlist and does not ask for an agent’s services in this regard, there is no new deal and no percentage due. Agents should not act as if they are rights holders.  
As I said up top, I’m privileged to know several agents personally. I do believe that the majority of agents have good intentions and professional practices.
But for any out there who see themselves in these profiles, let me offer you some sound and inexpensive advice from a trained psychologist:

Call Me Ishmael. Or Call Me Easy.

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I was browsing through Paste Magazine, one of my favorite websites, when I happened across this article about a website named “Call Me Ishmael.” I couldn’t get the Ishmael website to work, but the idea behind it is intriguing. There is a telephone number that you can call and leave a voice mail about a book that particularly affected you, and how and why it did so. The person running the website transcribes at least one message per week and posts it to the website. That is the idea, anyway. Again, I couldn’t access the website; hopefully that is simply due to increased traffic due to the Paste article. I love the concept, however. It’s kind of a “Post Secret” or “Whisper” on a somewhat smaller scale for readers.

Everyone had great fun a couple of weeks ago discussing Kindle Unlimited, and while we aren’t done with that yet I thought maybe we’d dial things down a notch as we head into summer’s warmest month and present our own, modest, one-day-only version of Call Me Ismael without resorting to voice mail, since a lot of people don’t use it any more, anyway. What book(s) changed your life? How? And why?

I have two: LOOK HOMEWARD, ANGEL by Thomas Wolfe and ON THE ROAD by Jack Kerouac. I read LOOK HOMEWARD, ANGEL and was immediately swept up into the magic of words. I decided moments after reading the first chapter that I wanted to spend my life writing, in one form or another, and to a greater or lesser degree I have done that. ON THE ROAD gave me wanderlust. There are few things better in God’s world than getting into an automobile and driving for several hundred miles at a stretch to a destination that you love or have you yet to love. In what I fear is the initial manifestation of the onset of dementia, I have recently been haunted with the thought of jumping on board a Spyder RT (yes, the irony is not lost on me) and tooling down to New Orleans, then across I-10 to Houston and beyond. So far I have talked myself out of it. So far. If I succumb, please blame Kerouac and my lifelong friend William D. Plant III, the gent who shoved both books into my hand and who also happens to be one of this and last century’s best unpublished authors.

Enough about me and what I may or may not do and why.  To yank things back on track: what book changed your life? How? And why?

First page critique: Oh, the places you’ll go! Or, not.

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Hi Guys! Today we have a first-page submission from another brave writer. This one is called ALICE IN REAL LIFE.

My comments follow.

***

Life is funny . . . in a brutal kind of way.

One minute you’re a youngster surrounded by grown-ups shoving sunshine up your ass about your bright, shiny future and the next, you’re alone in a crappy apartment, pushing thirty and taking stock of your inadequate underwear supply while packing to leave the country.
Or, is this just me?

Come on, I can’t be alone here. As a kid, you must’ve heard crap like, “the world is your oyster”, whatever that means. And I know I’m not the only one given this inspirational little book by a well-meaning grown-up at high school graduation: “Oh the Places You’ll Go!” by Dr. Seuss. Sound familiar? At one point, the main character enjoys a magical balloon ride, ascending through marvelous new experiences in a whimsical world. As if the only place to go is up. It’s cute. It’s promising. It’s bullshit.

Maybe parents hand this out to see the hope in their kids’ eyes that was lost when they found out the truth about Santa. Or, maybe they’re sadistic assholes that just want to tell one more lie. They know the ride into adulthood will be much more like a roller coaster. Not the Disneyland kind. The questionable, County Fair-taking-your-life-into-your-own-hands kind.

Sure, Dr. Seuss’s character hits a couple of bumps along the way, but my version would have even more reality mixed into those colorful pages. I’d still call it “Oh the Places You’ll Go”, but without the exclamation point and with a sad little Who on the cover pinching the top of his nose and shaking his head. Still whimsical, but with a hint of shame. Chapter 1, “Vomiting in a men’s room toilet while a stranger holds your hair”. Chapter 2, “The choice between paying rent and eating”. Chapter 3, “Your boyfriend’s selling drugs out of your apartment”.  But, wait – there’s more!  Chapter 5, “The engagement’s off”. Then, there’s the part I’m on now, Chapter 6, “Your mom battles cancer . . . and loses”.

Okay, I can see how this sounds like a great big bummer and book sales would not be good. Dr. Seuss wasn’t stupid. And Mom wasn’t sadistic for giving me hope, but, let’s cut the crap at graduation. Because I’ll tell you, the only time the world was full of magical shapes and whimsical colors was during Chapter 4, “That regrettable mushroom incident”.


***

My comments:

“Doctor Bombay! Doctor Bombay! Emergency! Come right away!“
 
Wow. Talk about having a voice. Reading this first page, I feel like I just got a two a.m. call from a close friend in crisis. The kind of call which would cause me to knock the sleep out of my eyes, throw on some clothes, and trundle across greater LA, braving freeway traffic to see how I could help sort things out.

My feeling is that this section sounds like the first page of an incredibly interesting memoir. I want to get to know this narrator.  What happened to her, and why? This page makes me want to go on the journey with her.

What say you, TKZers? Chime in!

The First Conundrum

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Nancy J. Cohen

Often people will start reading a series with book number one. “You can begin with any story,” I’ll tell folks interested in reading my Bad Hair Day series. But they insist on starting at the beginning. “That’s fine,” I’ll say, but is it really?

coverPTD

I am thinking how that first book is not the best example of my writing skills today. How long ago was it published? In 1999. And the book had probably been in production for a year before. So that means I wrote it sixteen or more years ago. Don’t you think my writing has improved since then? Yet here is this potential fan evaluating my entire series based on that one book. You’d hope she would cut me some slack.

At least I got the rights back to my early futuristics. I revised those stories before making them available in ebook formats. No problems there.

I do not have the same opportunity with my mysteries. But even if I did, would it be a good use of my time to revise all of my earlier stories? Or is it best to leave them in their pristine state, an example of my earlier writing style? If so, let’s hope that the readers out there coming to my series for the first time will approve and understand.

Sometimes the opposite is true. A writer’s early works are his best efforts, before he gets rushed to meet deadlines or to quicken production. In such cases, the later writing might suffer. I’ve seen this happen with some favorite authors.

So what do you think? If you want to read a new series, do you begin with book one or with the latest title?
 
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Now for some BSP. My new book, Warrior Lord (Drift Lords Series #3) is being released on Friday, August 1.
http://www.wildrosepublishing.com/maincatalog_v151/index.php?main_page=index&manufacturers_id=831
August 1, Friday, Book Launch Party for Warrior Lord, 10 am – 4 pm EDT. Join the fun. Giveaways all day! https://www.facebook.com/NewReleaseParty

What This Old Dog LearnedFrom Teaching New Writers

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By P.J. Parrish

You can, it seems, teach an old dog new tricks. I don’t mean the one above. That’s my dog Bailey. She’s as smart as a whip, but at fourteen, she’s not about to let me balance a Wishbone on her nose. I am talking about myself here. Let me first stipulate that I am an “old dog” (way past AARP induction age and been published now since 1985). Yet I am definitely still learning new tricks.

This point was driven home to me last week when my sister Kelly and I were up in Michigan teaching a two-day fiction writing workshop at Saturn Booksellers. It was pretty intense and we worked our charges hard, giving them Powerpoints on the twin pillars of plot and character, and on the finer points of transitions, pacing, theme and voice, rewriting, and what “show vs tell” really means.

But we also forced them to actually write, giving them quick exercises on a host of topics. We would show them a photograph and give them the opening line. Then they had five minutes to write to the assignment.  I was surprised at the quality of the short pieces they produced. I think they were, too.

Almost all of them, they admitted, felt bogged down and somewhat defeated by their works in progress — all for different reasons. But there was something liberating about doing those short-burst exercises that recharged their confidence and got their mental muscles moving again. (For some reason, this photo below, for the dialogue exercise, really inspired some great offbeat writing. Go figure!)

We also offered to critique the first ten pages of their manuscripts. There was some good stuff in their submissions and the mistakes tended to be the usual ones of craft that we here at The Kill Zone talk about all the time. But it was the big-picture issues that I found myself thinking about afterwards. Because even after ten years of teaching, after publishing twenty novels, a novella and a bunch of short stories, this old dog is still learning — from my students.

Here are my top big picture points from our Michigan workshop.

Chose your entry point carefully


Where do you begin your story? This is, to my mind, maybe the most important choice we make as writers and one I struggled with mightily on my WIP. I changed my opening five times before I finally hit upon the right moment to begin my tale. It’s like those astronauts in “Apollo 13”: You come in too late you burn up. If you come in too shallow you skim off the atmosphere and fly off into space. Many folks pick a point too early and the reader gets bored waiting for something to happen. This is why prologues usually fail; it’s just the writer clearing his throat or doing a backstory dump. Here’s what agent Dan Lazar hates to see: “Characters that are moving around doing little things, but essentially nothing. Washing dishes and thinking, staring out the window and thinking, tying shoes, thinking.”  But if you come in too late, you create confusion for the reader aka “coming out of a coma syndrome.” (ie where am I? Who is that? What the heck is going on?”)

Things to consider when picking your entry point: Early on, tell us who the protag is and make us care about her. Create a conflict for the protag in the opening pages. Establish the stakes. And make the opening scene compelling enough that we must read on. But don’t get too clever. Here’s Dan Lazar again: “A cheesy hook drives me nuts. They say ‘Open with a hook!’ to grab the reader. That’s true, but there’s a fine line between an intriguing hook and one that’s just silly. An example of a silly hook would be opening with a line of overtly sexual dialogue.”

Don’t try too hard


Nothing’s more cringe-inducing than a writer who’s swinging for the fences and whiffing. Whether it’s lame humor, groddy sex scenes, overly didactic themes, ten-dollar vocabulary, or cutesy attempts to be different (“Look, Ma! No punctuation!”), writing that calls attention to itself is just…bad writing. Yes, we all admire inventive writing, but there’s only one George Saunders. You are not him. Neither am I, alas. Remember what Nathaniel Hawthorne said: “Easy reading is damn hard writing.” Just tell a compelling story about characters we care about. Get out of the way of your story. This is something, my friends, that I need to have tattooed on my forehead.

Read. Read. Read some more


Our students, who ranged from a 17-year-old writing vampire YA to a great-grandfather writing a WWII novel, were all pretty good on this account. But we stressed to them that they have to read with an analytical eye, dissecting how other writers spin their magic. I have gotten lazy on this account lately, telling myself that I just don’t have time to read. But up in the Michigan woods, I read two terrific books — Odd Thomas by Dean Koontz and The Blue Hour by T. Jefferson Parker. From Koontz I re-learned  the importance of rich characterization and how to handle an unreliable narrator. (Which I am grappling with). From Parker, I got a great lesson in how to handle dual protagonists. If you want to be a writer, you must first be a reader.

Don’t be afraid


One of the hardest things for our students was exposing themselves and their writing. This is why we made them write in class and share. Fear is a common affliction among writers. I’m not immune; I’m afraid I don’t have the chops to pull off my WIP story. For the yet-unpublished, the fears are more basic. They are afraid of scrutiny, criticism, ridicule, rejection — you fill in the blank. I know folks who have slaved for years over their books (aka The Thing That Has Eaten Up Ten Years of my Life) who have never worked up the courage to show it to anyone. Yes, we get personal gratification from the process. But the purpose of writing is communication. You have to put it — and yourself — out there.

Make your story compel someone to say, “Wow, that’s exactly how I feel.” If you do that, well, then you can relax a little. Because you’ll know then that you really are a writer. Peace out. Woof.

25 Tips for Writing a Winning Short Story

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Jodie Renner, editor & author, @JodieRennerEd

Writing short stories is a great way to test the waters of fiction without making a huge commitment, or to experiment with different genres, characters, settings, and voices.

And due to the rise in e-books and e-magazines, length is no longer an issue for publication, so there’s a growing market for short fiction. You can submit your short stories to anthologies, magazines, and contests, or publish a collection of three or four of your stories yourself in a short anthology. Or even one really good story, and price it at 99 cents. You can also get together with other authors in your genre and each contribute a story for an anthology, as did Kill Zone authors in 2010, with Fresh Kills, Tales from The Kill Zone. Time for another collection, I’d say, wouldn’t you? (Nudge, nudge.)

In fact, it’s a good idea to try to publish a few high-quality, well-edited short stories between novels to help with discoverability and growing a fan base.

Also, today’s busy readers (especially the young ones) have more distractions and temptations for their time, therefore shorter attention spans, so a short story is a nice escapism-byte for increasing numbers of people, I think.

I’ve judged short stories for several contests and anthologies, including for Writer’s Digest, and I’ve come up with some tips for writing a compelling short story that is worthy of publishing or submitting to contests, magazines, and anthologies. Of course, these are only guidelines—like any good cook with a recipe, you’ll tweak them to suit your own vision, goal, and story idea.

PLANNING STAGE:

1. Keep the story tight. Unlike a novel or even a novella, a short story is about just a small slice of life, with one story thread and one theme. Don’t get too ambitious. It’s best to limit it to one main character plus a few supporting characters, one main conflict, one geographical location, and a brief time frame, like a few weeks maximum—better yet, a few days, or even hours or minutes.

2. Create a complex, charismatic main character, one readers will care about. Your protagonist should be multi-dimensional and at least somewhat sympathetic, so readers can relate to him and start bonding with him right away. He should be charismatic, with plenty of personality, but give him a human side, with some inner conflict and vulnerability, so readers identify with him and start worrying about him immediately. If readers don’t care about your character, they also won’t care about what happens to him.

3. Give your protagonist a burning desire. What does she want more than anything? This is the basis for your story goal, the driving force of your story.

4. Decide what your character is most afraid of. What does your hero regret most? What is his biggest fear? What is he most afraid might happen? Give him some baggage and secrets.

5. Devise a critical story problem/conflict. Create a main conflict or challenge for your protagonist. Put her in hot water right away, on the first page, so the readers start worrying about her early on. No conflict = no story. The conflict can be internal, external, or interpersonal, or all three, against one’s own demons, other people, circumstances, or nature.

6. Develop a unique “voice” for this story by first getting to know your character really well. A good way is to journal in his voice. Pretend you are the character, writing in his secret diary, expressing his hopes and fears and venting his frustrations. Just let the ideas flow, in his point of view, using his words and expressions. Then take it a step further and carry that voice you’ve developed throughout the whole story, even to the narration and description, which are really the character’s thoughts, perceptions, observations and reactions. (In a novel, the voice will of course change in any chapters in other characters’ viewpoints.)

7. Create an antagonist and a few interesting supporting characters. Give each of your characters a distinct personality, with their own agenda, hopes, accomplishments, fears, insecurities and secrets, and add some individual quirks to bring each of them to life. Supporting and minor characters should be quite different from your protagonist, for contrast.

8. To enter and win contests, make your character and story unique and memorable. Try to jolt or awe the readers somehow, with a unique, charismatic, even quirky or weird character; a unique premise or situation; and an unexpected, even shocking revelation and plot twist.

Captivate_full_w_decal9. Experiment – take a chance. Short stories can be edgier, darker, or more intense because they’re short, and readers can tolerate something a little more extreme for a limited time.

WRITING STAGE:

10. Start right out in the head of your main character. It’s best to use his name right in the first sentence to establish him as the point-of-view character, the one readers are supposed to identify with and root for. And let readers know really soon his rough age and role in the story world.

11. Put your character in motion right away. Having her interacting with someone else is usually best—much more dynamic than starting with a character alone, musing. Also, best not to start with your character just waking up or in an everyday situation or on the way to somewhere. That’s too much of a slow lead-up for a short story—or any compelling story, for that matter.

12. Use close point of view. Get up close and personal with your main character and tell the whole story from his point of view. Show his thoughts, feelings, reactions, and physical sensations. And don’t show anyone else’s thoughts or inner reactions. You don’t have time or space to get into anyone else’s viewpoint in a short story. Even the narration is your POV character’s thoughts and observations. Don’t intrude as the author to describe or explain anything to the readers in neutral language.

13. Situate the reader early on. Don’t forget the 4 W’s: who, what, where, when. Establish your setting (time and place) within the first few paragraphs, to situate your reader and avoid confusion. But as mentioned above, avoid starting with a great long descriptive passage.

14. Jump right in with some tension in the first paragraphs. There’s no room in a short story for a long, meandering lead-up to the main problem, or an extended description of the setting or the characters and their background. Disrupt the main character’s life in some way on the first page. As Kurt Vonnegut advises, start as close to the end as possible.

15. Show, Don’t Tell. Don’t use narration to tell your readers what happened—put them right in the middle of the scene, with lots of dialogue and action and reactions, in real time. And skip past transitional times and unimportant moments. Just use a few words to go from one time/place to another, unless something important happens during the transition.

16. Your character needs to react! Show your character’s emotional and physical reactions, both inner and outer. And to bring the character and scene to life on the page, evoke as many of the five senses as possible or appropriate, not just sight and hearing.

17. Every page needs tension of some sort. It might be overt, like an argument, or subtle, like inner resentments, disagreements, questioning, or anxiety. If everybody is in agreement, shake things up a little.

18. Dialogue in fiction is like real conversation on steroids. Skip the yadda-yadda, blah-blah, and add spark and tension to all your dialogue. And make the characters’ words and expressions sound as natural and authentic as you can. Each character should speak differently, and not like the author. Read your dialogue out loud or role-play with a friend to make sure it sounds real and moves along at a good clip.

19. Build the conflict to a riveting climax. Keep putting your protagonist in more hot water until the big “battle,” showdown, or struggle—whether it’s physical, psychological, or interpersonal.

20. Go out with a bang. Don’t stretch out the conclusion – tie it up pretty quickly. Like your first paragraph, your final paragraph needs to be memorable, and also satisfying to the readers. Try to create a surprise twist at the end – but of course it needs to make sense, given all the other details of the story.

21. Provide some reader satisfaction at the end. It’s not necessary to tie everything up in a neat bow, but do give your reader some sense of resolution, some payout for their investment of time and effort in your story. As in novels, most readers want the character they’ve been rooting for all along to resolve at least some of their problems. But be sure the protagonist they’ve been identifying with succeeds through their own courage, determination, and resourcefulness, not through coincidence, luck, or a rescue by someone else.

REVISION STAGE:

22. Hook ’em in right away. Now that you’ve got your whole story down, go back and grab the readers with an opening that zings. Write and rewrite your first line, opening paragraph, and first page. They need to be as gripping and as intriguing as you can make them, in order to compel the readers to read the rest of the story. Your first sentence and paragraph should arouse curiosity and raise questions that demand to be answered.

23. Cut to the chase! The short story requires discipline and editing. Trim down any long, convoluted sentences to reveal the essentials. Less is more, so make every word count. If a sentence or line of dialogue doesn’t advance the plot, add intrigue, or develop a character, take it out.

Also, use strong, evocative, specific nouns and verbs and cut back on supporting adjectives and adverbs. For example, instead of saying “He walked heavily” say “He trudged.” Or instead of “She walked quietly into the room,” say “She tiptoed…”

24. Make every element and every image count. Every element you insert in the story should have some significance or some relevance later. If it doesn’t, take it out. You have no room for filler or extraneous details in a compelling short story. In fact, try to make all descriptions do double duty. Rather than listing their physical attributes and what they’re wearing, your description of a character should reveal their personality, their mood, their intentions, and their effect on those around them, and also the personality and attitude of the character who is observing them.

25. Pay attention to word count and other guidelines. Short stories are generally between 500 and 7,500 words long, with the most popular length around 2,500 to 4,000 words. If you want to submit your short story to a website, magazine or contest, be sure to read their guidelines as to length, genre, language, etc. Also, for your own protection, do read the fine print to avoid giving away all rights to your story.

For some great insights on creating a compelling short story, see James Scott Bell’s post here on TKZ, How to Write a Short Story. And check out Anne R. Allen’s great posts on the subject, such as “Why You Should be Writing Short Fiction.” Also, if you’re fairly new at writing short stories and would like more guidance, see my recent post, Some Quick, Basic Tips for Writing a Riveting Short Story. (Click on the titles.)

Do you have any suggestions to add to this list?

Jodie Renner is a freelance fiction editor and the award-winning author of three craft-of-writing guides in her series An Editor’s Guide to Writing Compelling Fiction: Captivate Your Readers, Fire up Your Fiction, and Writing a Killer Thriller. She has also published two clickable time-saving e-resources to date: Quick Clicks: Spelling List and Quick Clicks: Word Usage. You can find Jodie at www.JodieRenner.com, www.JodieRennerEditing.com, her blog, http://jodierennerediting.blogspot.com/, and on Facebook, Twitter, and Google+.

 

A Horrible Thing I Saw The Other Day

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@jamesscottbell

“I wasn’t trying to predict the future. I was trying to prevent it.” – Ray Bradbury on Fahrenheit 451

The other day I saw a horrible thing.
It wasn’t a traffic accident on the 101 Freeway, of which there are many on any given L.A. day.
It was not a wounded soldier or a bar fight or a new reality television show.
Nevertheless, what I saw twisted my stomach and made me groan for the future of our kind.
It was an otherwise lovely afternoon and I was walking along the sidewalks of Hollywood Boulevard. As usual it was awash in activity––people of all shapes, sizes, colors, tempers, faiths and costumes sauntering along the street of dreams.
As I am wont to do I was watching faces.
I love watching faces. Each one is a potential character or storyline.
I was content.
I was engaged.
And then I stopped, recoiling in horror.
Okay, it was only an inward recoil. But there it was, as real as the hardened gum on Dick Powell’s star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
A woman was pushing a stroller. In the stroller was a young child, a boy of perhaps two years.
The boy was holding a digital device. His head was down and his fingers tapped the screen like a mad reporter on deadline.
I thought: I have met dystopia and it is us.
In 1953 Ray Bradbury penned an essay for The Nation about science fiction. He began by describing a scene in his novella Fahrenheit 451 where the fireman comes home to find his wife in a virtual stupor, an earpiece attached to her head. She was not reading, for that was forbidden. Aural stimuli were being pumped into her docile brain.
For Ray Bradbury, that kind of passivity was one of the most awful scenarios imaginable.
Bradbury then recounted how he had been out for a stroll recently and saw a couple walking their dog. The woman held a transistor radio with an earpiece (back then, a rather ponderous and rare piece of equipment) plugged into her auditory canal.
The husband, Bradbury noted, might as well not have been there.
Bradbury expressed his astonishment that his prediction of a rather gloomy future was happening much faster than he supposed.
And this was the early 50s! What would the late, great RB think of any given restaurant today? Couples, trios, whole families sitting at the same table, heads bent over phones or tablets, hardly exchanging a word?
And now this, here on Hollywood Boulevard. Is this our future? Will it be made up of little boys and girls who had iPads in their strollers, now all grown up into humorless, unimaginative technocrats unable to engage the real world?
I remember feeling some of this same revulsion when I first saw a DVD player in a motorized vehicle. It was a desert night and I was driving back to L.A. after some event. I pulled up alongside a dark SUV and saw a small monitor playing a cartoon for the denizens of the back seat.
This was a night when the stars could be gazed upon in wonder and the mysteries of desert shadows might stir the imagination.
But not for the children in the car! For them the desert was a bright and colorful Looney Tune with a funny roadrunner and a rather frustrated coyote. 
I’m fearful. I fear that digitized babies are not engaging their world or training their imaginations. I fear they will grow up unable to engage a long-form piece of writing, let alone real people in actual, meaningful conversation.
Am I overreacting?
Let me throw it out there to you, Zoners. Am I engaged in the sort of fogey-ism that is a part of every generation?
Or, like Ray Bradbury, should we be truly alarmed?

Summer Movies

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I made good progress on my novel this week, but I have no interest in writing a post about writing now. It’s summertime and I want to talk about the movies. This week I saw two movies that couldn’t be more different: Boyhood, the Richard Linklater film that everyone’s talking about, and Dawn of the Planet of the Apes. Well, now that I think about it, there aresome similarities between the two films. They’re both about family, right?
Actually, the latest Planet of the Apes installment was a great disappointment. It was too dark, not thematically but visually — almost all the scenes in the movie take place at night or in a gloomy forest. (And I think all those 3D movies are inherently dark because the glasses block a high percentage of the light from the screen.) After stumbling out of the theater I wistfully recalled the bright colors and memorable lines from the very first Planet of the Apes, the one with Charlton Heston and Dr. Zaius. “Take your stinking paws off me, you damned dirty ape!” “You maniacs! You blew it up! Goddamn you all to hell!”
But I can wholeheartedly recommend Boyhood. It was filmed over twelve years and it follows the travails of an ordinary family, but it’s a scripted movie, not a documentary. Linklater found two child actors (one of them is his own daughter) who were willing to shoot a few scenes every year. In the opening scenes the boy is six and the girl is eight; by the end of the movie they’re both in college. Their mom and dad are played by Patricia Arquette and Ethan Hawke, and they undergo an equally familiar transition. At the start of the movie they’re good-looking but hapless parents; by the end, they’ve both gained a measure of wisdom and responsibility, but neither one is very attractive anymore.
It’s a long movie, almost three hours, and I admit I was a little bored at times. The story of this family has a few dramatic moments — notably (spoiler alert!) after the mom enters into a second marriage with an older man who turns out to be a violent drunk — but most of the film shows the commonplace milestones of growing up, such as birthdays and camping trips and high-school football games. When the boy hero Mason Jr. goes to a new middle school he gets bullied a little, and when he’s a bit older he drinks beer with some other teenagers, but nothing momentous happens in either scene. The bullies never really hurt Mason, and there are no negative consequences to the drinking incident. These scenes aren’t part of a big plot puzzle, they’re just interesting episodes from a typical adolescence. But the scenes stick with you afterwards, because they remind you of similar episodes from your own past.

I found this approach very refreshing. In my novels I spend so much time constructing the plot and making sure that every scene advances the story. But in Boyhood the story is life itself, so it’s okay to have lots of loose ends.