Author Archives: James Scott Bell

About James Scott Bell

International Thriller Writers Award winner, #1 bestselling author of THRILLERS and BOOKS ON WRITING. Subscribe to JSB's NEWSLETTER.

Writing About Experiences Not Your Own

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by James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell

Memorial Day Weekend. Across this land of ours, barbecues will be firing, grill masters will be grilling, hot dogs and hamburgers will be sizzling, beers will be pouring, flags will be waving, and kids will be playing. I do hope that some of that time will be used to educate our young charges about the meaning of Memorial Day.

Its roots go back to the Civil War, when people honored the dead by decorating their graves with flowers and wreaths. After the war, by proclamation, May 30 was selected as “Decoration Day.” By the end of the 19th century it was also being referred to as Memorial Day. Congress adopted that latter designation and made the last Monday in May the official holiday.

I get choked up about heroic deeds in time of war. The earliest Bell ancestor on these shores was William Bell, born in County Armagh, Ireland. He came to America in the 1760s and settled in Philadelphia, opening a tailor shop. During the Revolutionary War, when Washington’s army was holed up in Valley Forge, William made an officer’s uniform for his brother, John, who was serving with Washington.

But there was a problem. Philadelphia was under British control, with sentinels carefully guarding ingress and egress. This made it almost impossible to get food or clothing to Valley Forge, some thirty miles away.

John Bell’s wife took care of the problem.

As William worked on the clothing, John’s wife established herself as a woman going about her daily business. Dressed in sunbonnet and shawl, she would walk by the British sentinel,  carrying basket of sundries, and return with groceries and other good. When the uniform was finished, she sewed it between her skirts and petticoats. She passed by with her basket once again, without incident, just like it was another day. Only this time she kept on going, walking the thirty miles to Valley Forge, to deliver food and the uniform to her husband.

My great-great grandfather, James Winfield Scott, fought under Sherman during the Civil War. My grandfather, Arthur Scott Bell, was in the Army in World War I. His brother-in-law, my great uncle Frederick Hamilton Fox, was a Marine. He died in the Battle of Belleau Wood, and is buried at Arlington National Cemetery.

The book I’m proudest of (because it is the longest book I ever wrote and required the most work) is Glimpses of Paradise. It begins in 1916 Nebraska and ends in 1920s Hollywood. In between is a World War I sequence.

But I’ve never been in battle. Which raises a natural question: how do you write about experiences you’ve never had? Here’s what I did: 

  1. Extensive reading. I found some books deep inside the downtown branch of the Los Angeles Public Library that were priceless, first-hand accounts of World War I battles. I also spent hours in the microfiche room, going through newspaper accounts of same.
  2. I connected my emotions. I believe that if we’ve made it past forty or so in this life, we’ve experienced every emotion there is to a greater or lesser degree. While I have never felt the fear that a soldier feels on the eve of battle, I have felt the fear of dying. The same physiological response is there, and by extrapolation I brought it to the characters in the book.
  3. I looked at a lot of pictures of battlefields, soldiers, weapons and so on. I wanted to be soaked in them, so I could write with a “lived” feeling.
  4. I had an expert review it. I showed the battle pages to someone who knows warfare, and got some notes for changes.

I believe a writer should be free to write about any kind of character or experience, so long as they make the effort to get things right. What about you?

Defeating the Next-Book Willies

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by James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell

September of 2009 was Dan Brown week in the world of publishing. It had been six years since his mega-hit The Da Vinci Code. There was a lot of excitement about his new book, The Lost Symbol. Doubleday needed a huge hardcover bestseller in the midst of what’s been called “The Great Recession.” They got one.

The book had a first printing of 6.5 million and sold a million in hardcover and ebook the first day. It debuted at #1 on the NY Times list and stayed there for six weeks.

So why did it take Dan Brown six years to write it? He explained:

“The thing that happened to me and must happen to any writer who’s had success, is that I temporarily became very self-aware. Instead of writing and saying, ‘This is what the character does,’ you say, ‘Wait, millions of people are going to read this.’ It’s sort of like a tennis player who thinks too hard about a stroke—you’re temporarily crippled.”

What happened to Dan Brown on a mega level happens to most writers who publish more than one book. A lot of unpublished writers think things will be just swell once they’re published, and that they can produce book after book with nary a worry. (Insert here the usual jeremiad about AI-slop.)

For those who take writing seriously, who want to keep producing good work, the writing sometimes gets harder, not easier, as some would think. I’ve found this to be true for myself and for many of my published writer friends.

Why should this be? I think it’s because with each book, we know more about the craft and, consequently, where we fall short. We raise the bar because we hope to grow a readership. We want to keep pleasing them, surprising them, delighting them with plot twists, great characters, and a bit of stylistic flair. We keep pursuing that storied “next level.” That can bring on what I call “The Next-Book Willies.”

Dan Brown dealt with TNBW by hanging upside down in “gravity boots.” It seemed to “help me solve plot challenges by shifting my entire perspective.” But then: “My wife was very concerned that I would pull myself up into these gravity boots and not have the strength someday to get back down. I’d just be hanging there forever. So I now use an inversion table.”

Other writers have similar quirks:

Roald Dahl at least wrote sitting down, but insisted on climbing into a sleeping bag before doing so. Truman Capote (In Cold Blood; Breakfast at Tiffany’s) supposedly wrote lying down, a coffee – then a sherry, then a martini – in one hand and a pencil in another….Philip Pullman can only write in ballpoint on lined A4 paper that has two holes in it (not four)….John Cheever, in a 1978 Newsweek essay, confessed that the publication of a definitive collection of his great short stories was “in no way eclipsed by the fact that a great many … were written in my underwear.”

Victor Hugo (Les Misérables) allegedly asked his valet to hide his clothes and wrote in the nude – or at least, on cold days, wrapped in a blanket – so he could not go outside.

Here are a few, er, more normal practices I would suggest, all of which I’ve employed. Not surprisingly, the first is, WRITE. Start a free-form journal and just go. Begin entries with “I remember . . .” or “I really hate…” or “I wish…” This is not work on your WIP. It’s giving permission to your brain to come out and play. When you are working on your WIP, consider starting each stint with a Sue Grafton-style novel journal.

RE-READ. Pull out a favorite novel and read parts of it at random, or even the whole thing. Don’t worry about feeling even worse because you think you can’t write like that author. You’re not supposed to. You never can. But guess what? They can’t write like you, either.

INCUBATE. For half an hour, think hard about your project, writing notes to yourself, asking questions. Back yourself into tight corners. Then put all that away for a day and do other stuff. Your Boys in the Basement will get to work and good things will start bubbling up. For an advanced session, try going 6 hours without phone, computer, tablet, or TV. (Think that’s easy these days? Just try it!) ! You can use a pen and paper if you like. I recommend doodling.

BLOOD TO BRAIN. If you want to try gravity boots, be my guest. What I do is lie on my back and put my legs up on a chair or bed, and then do some deep breathing and relaxing for 15-25 minutes. This is especially helpful to get through the afternoon blahs.

So what about you? Have you ever had the “next-book willies”? What do you do to overcome this, or other forms of writer’s block?

Quotable

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“When I was younger and first beginning to write, I’d think I was going to get the Pulitzer and the Booker and the Nobel Prize. Now I don’t give a damn. I’m content to know that I write . . . good. I’m a good writer and that’s all I care about.” – Evan Hunter (aka Ed McBain)

Past Predictions and Current Conundrums

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by James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell

Way back in November, 2009, I wrote a piece for TKZ about the ebook/self-pub explosion, and what it portended for the future of the publishing biz. That month it felt like there was an eruption of chatter about the pace of developments following the intro of the Kindle (Nov. 2007) and the self-publishing platform it provided. At this time there were several previously unpublished writers making nice bucks pubbing their fiction for 99¢ (e.g., Amanda Hocking); also trad pubbed authors diving fully into indie (e.g., Joe Konrath, Barry Eisler).

Agents were in a dither, present and potential clients would go rogue. “Don’t do it,” they warned. “You’ll kill your career!”

And there was a controversial move by a big publisher, who started a fee-based self-pub service (better known as vanity publishing), which carried their logo on it. You can read about that controversy here. Other major publishers soon followed.

Looking back, the brouhaha over Kindle and self-publishing had the same feel as the AI cataclysm happening now. I thought it might be instructive to review what I wrote back then, and reflect on what’s happening now. Here are clips, followed by my comments:

First, the very pace of change in our world is now such that major developments happen almost as fast as chair throwing incidents on Jerry Springer. 

Okay, Boomer. Jerry Springer?

Talk about pace! The Kindle Wild West days seem almost serene compared to today’s AI pandemonium. Each week seems to bring another “advance” that we may—or scarily, may not—control.

And humans naturally feel anxious about change until we can catch up and figure out what’s going on. But we always seem to feel a few steps behind these days.

That was true then, it’s truer now—on-steroids. Back then it was about the future of publishing. Now it’s about the future of the human race. Just the other morning I read about Anthropic’s Mythos, which has its tentacles reaching into biology. “[T]hat means AI may soon grant people extremely dangerous powers: to synthesize viruses, generate novel neurotoxins or assemble omnicidal ‘mirror life.’ Such dangers are the dark side of AI’s wonderful promise to democratize intelligence. It is even conceivable that an AI could give a misanthropic loner the power to end humanity.”

Anxiety, anyone?

How fast are things moving? Already there’s talk that the Kindle is on the way out. Authors and publishers are even now embedding links to websites and YouTube for added content in digital novels, links which can be accessed on, say, an iPhone but not a Kindle. There’s even a name for such digi-novels: Vooks.

Well, Vooks did not take off, nor did “added digital” content. Readers, it seems, prefer to get caught up in a story without pausing to find or endure added “stuff.”

Which leads to the technological changes that seem poised to alter the paradigms we’ve lived with for centuries, such as books on paper being paid for by readers.

Yes, many prognosticators opined that physical books were on the way out. It made some sense at the time. I’m still blown away that I have the complete works of Dickens on my Kindle, and can read Martin Chuzzlewit on my phone.

But print has proved resilient. Indeed, I wrote back then:

I’ve pointedly spoken to several twenty-something readers over the past few weeks, and was gobsmacked when none of them liked eReaders. They were paper people! Astonishing.

My two predictions from November of 2009:

1. People are still going to want good stories to read.

What I meant was that a self-publishing author has to be good, not just prolific. This is being tested now, big time, as AI makes it possible for an author to churn out dozens of “novels” a year, of mediocre quality. I still optimistically hold that quality writing from a human being is the best way to find a loyal readership.

2. They’re not going to pay as much money to get them.

This was the major concern of Big Pub at the time, that a “tsunami” of inexpensive ebooks would erode their biggest slice of the publishing pie—hardcover editions. Well, hardcovers still sell (if they are by “brand names.”) Trade paper (with its more attractive price point) sells more.

Yet voracious readers, like any consumer, will seek out the best deals for their habit. Good indie authors selling their work for $2.99 – $5.99 (the current “sweet spot”) have a big market out there.

I concluded that fiction writers will always be around, because the world needs us. Maybe now more than ever.

Still true.

Want to make any prediction about the future of reading, publishing, or humanity? The floor is yours!

News: Authors Guild Releases Model Contract Clauses Re: AI

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(Kay DiBianca is currently on hiatus)

Over at Authors Guild:

“The model clauses below cover important aspects of AI uses of author’s works: specifically, prohibiting AI use of an author’s work without the author’s consent; licensing specific AI uses as subsidiary rights with fair compensation; protecting audiobook and translation rights from AI uses without the author’s approval; and governing the author’s permissible use of AI in submitted manuscripts as well as the publisher’s use of AI in connection with the work. Authors and agents may request that publishers use any of these clauses, and publishers are free to adopt them.”

Re: Authors:

“Author shall disclose to Publisher if any AI-generated text is included in the submitted manuscript, and may not include more than [a de minimis/5%] AI-generated text.”

Re: Publishes:

The Authors Guild is concerned about reports that some publishing professionals are uploading manuscripts and authors’ personal information into public, consumer-facing AI systems for uses such as generating summaries, assessments, and marketing copy without permission from the authors or adequate guardrails to ensure that the manuscripts are not used by AI companies for training.

Uploading or inputting a copyrighted work or an author’s personal information into public, consumer-facing AI systems without permission may constitute a violation of the author’s copyright or right of privacy, and it puts the author’s intellectual property and personal information at risk. Editors, agents, and others in the industry who have access to authors’ works should not upload their manuscript to or otherwise prompt consumer-facing chatbots with any author’s works without first getting the author’s written permission. Further, where consumer-facing chatbots are used in workflows, publishers and other industry professionals should ensure that they opt out of having the work used for training. All of the common chatbots provide this option. Publishers should also take care that any internal AI systems are sandboxed models with guardrails to prevent the manuscripts or author information from being used as inputs for training.

Publisher shall not upload the Work or any of Author’s personal information to consumer-facing AI systems for purposes such as generating summaries, assessments, or marketing copy without written permission from the author or as otherwise agreed to hereunder; and when such permission is granted, it shall ensure that the manuscript is not used by third-party AI companies for training, such as by opting out of allowing training in user settings.

And:

To prevent injecting any AI-generated text into an author’s work, publishers should not use AI to substantively edit manuscripts, with the exception of basic spelling and grammar- checking applications.

Publisher agrees and warrants that it will not use AI to substantially edit a manuscript (excepting the use of basic spelling and grammar-checking applications).

In Defense of How-to-Write Books and Blogs

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by James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell

Every now and again I hear some author putting down how-to-write books. “You can only learn to write by writing,” they’ll say. “Don’t waste your time studying writing. Write!”

Which strikes me as making as much sense as saying, “You can only learn to do brain surgery by doing brain surgery. Don’t waste your time studying brain surgery. Just cut open some heads!”

Excuse me if I show a preference for a sawbones who has studied under the tutelage of experienced surgeons.

The writer I know best—me—absolutely learned to write by reading how-to books. I had been fed the bunk that “writers are born, not made” while in college, and I bought it, in part because I got in a workshop with Raymond Carver and couldn’t do what he did. (I didn’t know at the time that there was more than one way to “do” fiction. Carver was a literary guy, and I wanted to write thrillers.)

Years went by with me believing that I didn’t have what it takes to be a successful writer. I added to society’s woes by becoming a lawyer.

When I finally decided I had to write, even if I never got published, I went after it the way Jack London went after inspiration—“with a club.” I started gobbling up books on writing. I joined the Writer’s Digest Book Club and read Writer’s Digest religiously (especially Lawrence Block’s fiction column). I also wrote every day. Living in L.A. it was required that I try screenwriting first, so I wrote four complete screenplays in one year, giving them to a film school friend, who patiently read them and told me they weren’t working. But he couldn’t tell me why.

Then one day I read a chapter in a book by the great writing teacher Jack Bickham. And I had an epiphany. Literally. Light bulbs and fireworks went off inside my head, and I finally got it. Or at least a big part of it.

So I wrote another screenplay, and that was the one that my friend liked. The next one I wrote got optioned, and the one after that got me into one of the top agencies in Hollywood.

Now, Hollywood is the only town where you can die of encouragement. My million-dollar payday did not come through, so I decided to try my hand at writing a novel. Amazingly, it sold. Then I got a five book contract, and I was on my way as a working novelist.

In great part because of something crucial I got from a how-to book.

And that’s the reason I’ve written how-to books of my own, and posts here at TKZ. I want to give new writers nuts-and-bolts that will help them construct saleable fiction. I am gratified when I hear from people who have sold books and given me partial credit. One of them is the wonderful Sarah Pekkanen, who gave me props (along with Stephen King and Donald Maass) a year before her debut novel came out. Today she’s the #1 New York Times bestselling author of fifteen solo and co-authored novels. (No, I’m not saying I’m responsible for her massive success, only that I and two others were there for her at the right time; her work ethic and talent did the rest.)

How did the writers of the past learn? Many of them had a great editor, like Max Perkins. Some had an older writer who read their stuff and suggested ways to make it better. Some, like the great writer-director Preston Sturges, learned from the how-to books available in his day. (In Sturges’s case, it was the books of Brander Matthews.)

So a good how-to book is like an editor or teacher. Is there not some value in that?

Now, it is quite true you can’t just read how-tos and get better. You have to have a certain felicity with sentences and the sound of fiction. That’s why the best writers were readers from a young age, piling up the sounds of great sentences in their heads. But they also had help learning the tools to make things better. And of course they had to write, and apply what they learned.

If you do that, the things that work become part of your writing “muscle memory.” Like a grooved golf swing. Then you can go out there and play to win. As Tom Sawyer says in Fiction Writing Demystified:

Writing fiction takes knowledge about basic storytelling. Again, some of us have an instinct for it. A feeling for it. But if you sense that you do not, don’t give up. Much of that part is craft, and it is learnable.

Behind me in my office is my shelf of writing books. I review them from time to time, reading the parts I highlighted. My philosophy has always been that if I can find even one thing in a how-to that helps me, that elevates my writing and makes it stronger, it’s worth the effort to find it.

Do you agree?

Quotable

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“If you’re good enough, like Picasso, you can put noses and breasts wherever you like. But first you have to know where they belong.” – Alice K. Turner, fiction editor, Playboy magazine, 1980 – 2000

 

Do Readers Care Who Writes the Book?

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by James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell

I listened to a podcast panel the other day, all about (can you guess?) Artificial Intelligence. It was a robust discussion of what AI means for writers and publishers, as has been covered several times here at TKZ and just about everywhere else in the known universe. The podcast and transcript can be found here.

One of the interviewees is a romance writer who openly admits utilizing AI generative tools to crank out her product. She released 200 romance novels last year, under 12 different pseudonyms. She sees this as a business, starting out each project by researching what tropes are selling, then interacting with LLMs to set up an outline. “I can then ask the system to generate the first draft for me.”

When asked if she reveals to readers that the books are largely AI, she said she does not. The one time she did she got 14,000 death threats. (A post about the darkness of human nature run amok may be inserted here.)

Anyway…the question came up about whether readers ultimately care how a book is produced. Well, 14,000 wackos seem to. But what about the sane? Journalist Derek Newton offered an answer:

I think the reaction that she received is probably good anecdotal evidence of what the market wants and expects. And my personal view is that a minimum, readers ought to have information about where their books come from….is this a purely human written piece, a work from the mind and spirit and soul of an author? Is it a mix up, a mash up? Did the author have an idea and use AI to put it together? Or is it something that Claude or ChatGPT banged out in 15, is it on the Amazon bookshelves fifteen minutes later? Those are very different things. And I think since we can know that, we should share that information with readers. Maybe some readers don’t care. Maybe they prefer AI. Maybe they only wanna read human stories. But I think the minimum standard ought to be we ought to tell people. And one more thing. She did mention in the interview that she discloses to Amazon. Amazon does ask that, but they don’t share that information, and they don’t have any way to verify it. So any author could simply say no or check the box. Oh, yeah. I didn’t use AI, and there’s nobody looking into that. So sharing it with Amazon may be true, but it really doesn’t add any value to the process or to readers. Readers don’t get that information, and there’s no way to know it’s true.

New York Times reporter Alexandra Alter said:

Yeah, I think it matters, when readers have the choice to decide, okay, I would love to read something written by a human, or I’m curious. Can AI write a good story? I’ll check this out. I think, you know, some might be curious and wanna read something generated by AI. But my impression from comments I’ve seen online and from my conversations with readers is that one of the things that draws people to books is the opportunity to connect with another human mind. And most people, like that human connection and would would opt for that, you know, given the choice.

On the other hand, a listener offered this comment:

We all need to accept that AI is a part of the future. Just like in the past, people had to accept the advances in technology. I believe there should be transparency about AI use, but I think the panel would be surprised to find out that most readers don’t really care if a book is written by AI or an author. Most readers are reading for enjoyment, not loyalty to a particular author.

Ah, as Hamlet might have muttered over his Kindle, that is the question. I don’t believe for a moment that most readers don’t really care if a book is written by AI. If a reader gets massive reading pleasure from a book, they’ll want to a) find more by this author; and b) get to know this author on a human level. When I read my first Bosch, I wanted to know all about Michael Connelly. I read more Bosch, and wanted to meet Michael Connelly…and did, at a book signing. That mattered to me.

And when I’ve done signings and people come up and tell me how much they love my books, there’s no greater feeling in the world. I extend my human touch via my Substack newsletter and, of course, right here at the Zone.

However (and I’m just spitballing here), maybe there is an exception in the romance world. Category romances have always been the largest market in the publishing ecosystem. Many of these are written under pseudonyms. Voracious romance readers go through them like candy. Perhaps for this market human agency is not a big deal.

What about everywhere else?

Let’s talk about it. Do you care about human authorship? Do you care if an entrepreneur uses AI to crank out hundreds of “entertaining” books, making real money on volume? If you read a book and liked it, then found out it was 90% AI generated, how would you feel?