Category Archives: Writing

Regarding Rejection

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by Mark Alpert

I’m familiar with rejection. Before my first novel was published I wrote four books that went nowhere. I received rejection letters from every major publisher in the industry and a hell of a lot of minor ones too. (And because this record of rejection dates back to the late Eighties, some of them were actual letters rather than e-mails. Typed on paper, for crying out loud!) The rejections that hurt the most were of the “It’s good, but…” variety. You know what I mean: It’s well-written, but I didn’t like the characters. It starts well, but I lost interest. I liked the book, but I didn’t love it.  Or the worst: I loved the book, but it’s not right for us.

I hated those letters. My reaction was: If you like it so much, why don’t you just publish it? In my disappointment, I wondered whether the compliments were sincere. Perhaps the editors actually disliked the book but were trying to soften the blow. In a perverse way, I almost hoped that the praise was false. If it was genuine, that meant I’d come close to success but fallen short, which was more frustrating than missing by a long shot.

In retrospect, I realize how wrongheaded my reasoning was. First of all, I’ve learned that book editors are outrageously busy people. The notion that they’d take the time to invent a compliment seems so ludicrous now. I’ve also realized there are many valid reasons for rejection that have nothing to do with the quality of the novel. The publisher may have too many books on its list already. Or perhaps the imprint rejects a manuscript because it just published something similar and it didn’t sell very well. Publishing is a business, after all. An editor can afford to make a few money-losing bets, but not too many.

But my worst mistake was ignoring the obvious message of those letters: You’re getting close! You should keep trying! Now I see that receiving one of those “It’s good, but…” rejections is the equivalent of hitting the green outer ring of the bull’s-eye on a dartboard. If you can consistently hit that ring, then it’s just a matter of time before you’ll land within the inner circle and win the big prize.

My third novel, Extinction, comes out on Tuesday, and as I stare at the gleaming hardcover on my desk I think of all those rejection letters. I suppose there are a few supernaturally talented writers who can hit a bull’s-eye on the very first throw. But for most of us mere mortals, success and failure march hand in hand. You can’t have one without the other.

Situational awareness, or paranoia?

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Do you feel safe? By that I mean do you feel “safe” in a general sense, in your home, neighborhood, and workplace?
I’ve never had much of a sense of safety–which is odd, because I’ve never been a victim of any notable crime. Recently I’ve been feeling particularly vulnerable; I’m not sure why. For example, when my family and I stopped at a fast food restaurant just after midnight recently, I kept one eye on the entry and exit doors the whole time, just in case an armed robber decided to make a late-night run for cash. And yesterday when I was leaving the local mall, I checked first for loiterers, to make sure I wasn’t being followed to my car.
Where does this hyper-awareness come from? It could be the news. There’s been a lot going on lately. Locally we’ve had several armed robberies take place in mall parking lots. A couple of teenagers were stabbed inside another mall, one that had previously felt “safe” to local parents. Plus there’s been a spate of home invasion robberies. Nowadays whenever I answer the door I make sure the person on the other side is aware of MacGregor, my 80-pound Belgian Shepherd-Lab mix. (Sure, Mac is smiling in this photo, but you should see him when his hackles go up!)
Am I being excessive? Is this caution the result of prudence, or paranoia? Studies have shown a disconnect between perception and the actual crime rate, according to experts. But that argument doesn’t hold water with the voice inside my head, the one that logs the nearest exit every time I enter a public space.
I’ve gotten used to the characters in our books having a sense of situational awareness, but it’s disturbing to have one’s personal space invaded. 

Maybe somehow all this preparation will pay off. Yesterday we had a terrible bus wreck in our area. The bus evidently lost its brakes and careened down a mountain road until it smashed into a couple of vehicles coming the other way. My husband suggested that the accident was unavoidable, that “destiny” might have been responsible for some of the loss of life. 
Nonsense, I replied. If the bus driver had downshifted instead of riding the brakes, and if he’d driven the bus into the inside of the mountain instead of trying to stay on the road,  more people might have lived.
My husband stared at me.

“Who has time to think of all that during an accident?” he asked.

“I do, every time I go down that mountain,” I said.

It’s that voice again. I actually don’t mind it too much, because it’s that voice that helps me conjure up scenes in my writing. What’s the worst thing that can happen, and what does this character do?
That’s what we writers do all day, right? We think about these things. 
The problem is shutting it off when the writing is done. 

Censorship Sucks

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by Mark Alpert


Like many writers, I’m avidly following the turmoil at Southern Weekend and the Beijing News, the Chinese newspapers where reporters are challenging the censorship of Communist Party propaganda officials. Censorship is a big issue, learn more about how it affects the entertainment industry at avoidcensorship.org. It’s an irresistible story because the heroes are journalists — hooray! — and they’re fighting a repressive political system that may finally be on the brink of major change. I have a special interest in the story because my upcoming novel, Extinction, is set mostly in China, and the book’s plot involves the repression of political dissent there. (And I just learned that a Chinese translation of the book will be published, albeit in Taiwan, not mainland China.) But the controversy also reminds me of a humiliating incident that took place thirty years ago when I was starting my journalism career. I discovered firsthand that censorship occurs in America too.

 
It was the summer of 1983. I was in graduate school at Columbia University, studying creative writing, but I knew I couldn’t stay in school forever and I’d have to find a job soon. So I got an unpaid internship at the Scranton Timesin Pennsylvania (the newspaper is now called the Scranton Times-Tribune). I was a journalism neophyte — I hadn’t even written for my high-school paper — but now I had a golden opportunity to learn the trade. For my first assignment I called a bunch of local travel agencies to find out where Scrantonians spend their vacations (actual headline: “Cancun, Disney World Are Favorite Vacation Destinations”). Most of the stories I wrote that summer were fluffy feature articles that could be safely assigned to an inexperienced reporter (another headline: “Elderly Have Happy Time At West Side Senior Center”). But as every journalist knows, real news sometimes pops up unexpectedly.
 
On July 25th the newspaper sent me to a meeting of the Scranton Plan, a group of community leaders who were encouraging businesses to set up shop in the Scranton area. In truth, it was a pretty dull assignment, which perhaps explained why no one but the summer intern was willing to go. The Scranton Times was intimately connected to the Scranton Plan; the newspaper’s co-publisher at the time, George V. Lynett, Sr. — whose family owned the Scranton Times and continues to run it to this day — also served as a co-chairman of the community group. Lynett opened the meeting with a review of the group’s strategies and a summary of the business advantages of Lackawanna County (cheap power, large labor pool, etc.) In the middle of this phenomenally boring discussion, someone else at the meeting — sorry, I don’t remember who, and I lost my notes a long time ago — wondered aloud if the group was neglecting to mention one of the prime advantages of the area. He said they might want to consider publicizing the fact that Scranton had a much smaller minority population than New York and other big cities.
 
Suddenly, I was all ears. I expected Lynett to scold the local bigot. I thought the publisher would firmly rebut the troglodytic view that large minority populations were somehow “bad for business.” But instead, to my astonishment, Lynett said the Scranton Plan didn’t need to publicize the area’s dearth of minorities because the fact was already implied in the group’s promotional pamphlets, which had pictures of only white people.
 
Even though I was a neophyte, I recognized that this was news. How could a newspaper publisher in the 1980s say such a thing? What’s more, Lynett knewI was there to cover the meeting. Did he expect me to simply ignore what he said?
 
When I returned to the newsroom to write the story, I included the controversial comments. The copy editor passed the text to the managing editor, who dutifully passed it on to Lynett, and soon afterward I was called to the publisher’s office. To his credit, Lynett was polite and apologetic. He told me that if we were in a journalism class, most of the students would agree that he should run my story as I wrote it. But this was the real world, he said, not a class. He said the story would make Scranton look bad and possibly hurt the local economy, which had been struggling for decades. He deleted all the comments about minorities from the article, turning it into a dry, boosterish account that wouldn’t embarrass the newspaper or its publisher. (The censored story is pictured above.) I was disappointed and dismayed, but there was nothing I could do.
 
I’d just seen the truth of journalist A.J. Liebling’s famous maxim: “Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.” And I would see it again: four years later, when I was a reporter for the Montgomery Advertiser in Alabama, the newspaper’s publisher tried to water down a series of stories in which I described the unyielding racial segregation in that city. Perhaps it’s unfair to compare this kind of interference with the strict press controls that the Chinese government imposes. But any kind of censorship is insidious. If writers truly want to be heroes, we have to be constantly on guard against it.

Dreaming up a great story, in toto

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I’m one of those people who dreams constantly at night. I must sleep in a constant REM stage, the optimal state for dreaming, because the moment I close my eyes, I plunge into an exciting nocturnal realm. My dreams are complex and richly textured, full of subplots and action. They seem compelling and  cohesive in real time. But the moment I wake up, they make no sense.

A couple of nights ago, however, I had a rare treat: my dream delivered an entire story. It was a family drama set in the context of Sci-Fi suspense, incorporating elements of artificial intelligence, corporate espionage, and time travel. The dream-story built to a boffo climax, like a great onscreen thriller. Best of all, it still made sense when I woke up! It was such a great story that I didn’t trust the experience. I actually checked the TV schedule to make sure an episode of The Twilight Zone hadn’t been playing while I was asleep. (Normally if the TV is on when I doze off–usually it’s tuned to the Military History Channel–whatever is playing will work itself into a dream. Which probably explains why I have so many nightmares about being pursued by Nazis in tanks).

I don’t know if I’ll do anything with my dream–story; Sci-Fi is a little outside my comfort zone.  But it made me think–wouldn’t it be great if our “boys in the back room” delivered more stories this way? Instead of having to coax plot lines and characters from our brain’s ether, we could have them delivered to us as dreams at night, like pizza.

Have you ever written a story that came to you in a dream? Or do you find your dreams to be useful in some other creative way?

Publishing and Marketing Your Crap

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James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell

I get emails from The Writer’s Store in Burbank, CA, because I teach therefrom time to time. It’s a great store that offers a wide variety of classes, many of which interest me. This one really caught my eye:

Publishing and Marketing Your Crap


Now there is an honestly titled workshop! Or so I thought for about a second. Then I realized what happened was that the subject line in my email viewer cut off the full title. And looking closer I saw that the C was really a G, and the actual title was: Publishing and Marketing Your Graphic Novel.
Nerts! I was really interested in the other one, just to see what the curriculum would look like. So, with a catchy title and no workshop, I now offer some notes on how to publish and market your crap.
1. Write fast, but with this caution: don’t ever worry about growing as a writer. Believe that if you write in a genre, especially erotica, the quality of the writing doesn’t matter.  
2. Don’t seek anyone else’s opinion about your writing, especially people you have to pay, like a freelance editor. Save your money (you’re going to need it).
3. Design your own cover. 
4. Upload your book.
5. Market your books by setting up robo tweets, at least eleven each day, urging people to buy your book. You don’t have time to actually interact with people on social media. You should be busy writing your next piece of crap!
Okay, all seriousness aside, the issue of fast production versus quality of product is crucially important. It was recently given treatment by astute industry observer Jane Friedman. On her blog she suggested that “commodity writing” (as opposed to “literary writing”) has a chance to do well in the indie world because it can be churned out to an audience that reads these things “like candy.” She laid out the formula this way:
1. Write a ton of material.
2. Publish it yourself on all the digital platforms.
3. Repeat as quickly as possible.
4. Make a living as a writer.
Then Jane added a line that produced no small amount of blowback: “This model doesn’t care about quality.”
Indie sensation C. J. Lyons responded with a comment: “But I disagree with your point that indy writers are not concerned with quality. It’s not just writing a book and repeating that leads to success, it’s writing a GREAT book, one that will delight and inspire your readers to tell their friends and share it with the world, then repeat.”
Jane clarified that she was not advocating this view, but that it seems to be somewhat prevalent among those going indie.
The fertile keyboard of Porter Anderson tapped out a discussion of all this for his popular Writing on the Ether column, which prompted yours truly to add a comment of his own:
Re: “commodity” publishing. I’ve been saying this ever since “the boom” was a boomlet and people were going, “Whu?” about digital publishing: it’s like the mass market boom post WWII. Fast, cheap, genre, and it sold a ton. And a lot of it wasn’t, well, all that great. But guess what? Within that market emerged those who WERE writing with an obvious quality. John D. MacDonald. Gil Brewer. Charles Williams. Richard Prather. Ross Macdonald. And guess what else? They rose to the top. Or maybe not all the way to the top, but certainly more than halfway up the glass.
So “quality” (an amorphous thing like obscenity, which one Supreme Court justice defined as “I know it when I see it”) is definitely something the indie writer ought to pursue if he or she really want to increase the odds of making real bank at this game. It’s not just about numbers. My “formula” is quality + production + time.
How does one add “quality” to the writing? Study the freaking craft. Not just on one weekend. Every day, learn something, in what you read, in what you write. But carve out specific times for study, too. I don’t want a brain surgeon who just surges. I want him reading the journals and going to conferences and learning to do what he does even better. Then I may be able to keep what little brain I have left.
So my bottom line is this. There may be some who argue that quality doesn’t matter and sheer volume will bring in the big dough. Allowing for the occasional exception, I say it won’t. You’ve still got this pesky thing called a reader you have to please. If readers don’t like the first book of yours they try, they’re most unlikely to buy any of the other 37. 
Yes, quality is in the eye of the beholder. So behold your own work, and kick it up a notch. This is the only way to improve the chances that your books won’t get dumped into the great white bowl of literary obscurity.
Flush with optimism in 2013, I remain,
Your humble correspondent.


Thriller Epiphanies

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by Mark Alpert

A few years ago I traveled with my family on a cruise ship that passed through the Panama Canal. It was fascinating to watch the canal employees board the boat and guide it into the locks. My favorite moment came at dinnertime, when we saw the canal officers deliver meals to the employees on our boat by dangling the Styrofoam containers from the tow ropes. Ingenious!

Because the locks for the Pacific-bound boats are parallel to those for the Caribbean-bound shipping, we got an up-close view of a Panamax freighter traveling in the opposite direction. They’re called Panamax ships because they’re built to the maximum size that the canal can handle. The width of the boat is just a few feet less than the width of the lock. The canal employees tie the freighter to “mule” locomotives that run on both sides of the lock and very carefully pull the ship into the giant “bathtub.” The hull passes so close to the bathtub’s concrete walls, you can almost hear it scraping.

While observing this process, I glimpsed an indentation in one of the concrete walls. It was a vertical notch, maybe three feet wide and a couple of feet deep, with a steel ladder running up the length of it. I supposed it was there for safety reasons; if someone fell into the bathtub, he could swim to the ladder and climb out. Then I imagined what would happen if someone was clinging to that ladder while a Panamax freighter slid into the lock, its barnacle-crusted hull passing just inches from his nose. That would be a cool scene, I thought. Somehow or other, I have to put it into one of my books.

It took a while but I finally managed to do it. The scene appears in my next thriller, Extinction, which comes out in a few weeks. I’m betting that all thriller writers have epiphanies like these, when you imagine a terrible peril and instead of saying to yourself, “Oh stop, you’re being morbid,” you resolve to write about it. Am I right or wrong?  

Sifting through the stats for nuggets of insight

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It’s always fun, and occasionally instructive, to analyze how new readers find their way to TKZ. So yesterday I took a quick look at the blog’s system stats. Here are some of the key word searches that brought  people to the blog:

Rhino, rhino skin: Searches for rhinos take readers to Jim Bell’s Rhino Skin, which contains good advice for writers who need to develop a thicker hide as a survival tactic.

Best written sex scenes: This search phrase has got to be our all-time winner for drawing new readers to the blog. It usually lands on Clare’s post, The Top 5 mistakes made in sex scenes. Written in ’09, it’s the post that keeps on giving.

Semi Colon: This search lands on Jim’s The Great Semi Colon Debate. If your page has a semi colon stuck in its craw and you want to vent about it, this is your post.

Formula for writing a best seller: Those in search of a magic formula for best sellerdom will undoubtedly be disappointed to read there’s no such thing in a post I wrote a while back, How to write a best seller.

Book revolution: This search lands on any number of field reports about the rapidly changing publishing industrY.

Overall, the search stats for TKZ reveal that readers find us because they’re serious about their writing craft, and they’re looking for insights on the journey toward becoming a better writer. From the number of repeat visitors we get here at TKZ, and the blog’s overall growth over the years, I can surmise that we’re providing some discussion that’s useful. The Zoners of TKZ pledge to continue doing our best to engage readers and continue the conversation in 2013.

And now I’d like to hear from you. Are there any particular topics or voices you’d like to hear discussed this year at TKZ?

The Day After the Day the World Ended

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Hmm. We’re still here. I think we can cue up “Looks Like We Made It” by Barry Manilow. Is anyone out there? You? You as well? Good. I think we’re okay here. We can decorate the Christmas tree and do the last minute shopping we’ve been putting off (somehow, an apocalypse that did not happen is no excuse for giving a loved one a sub-par Christmas). I put off buying a new side-view mirror until the last possible minute yesterday. I sacrificed the old one on the side of the garage earlier this week and figured “What ho! It won’t make any difference after Friday.” Now it does, and I’ll spend Sunday, or at least part of it, installing it. And be glad for it. I think.
Thrillers have long been obsessed with end times of various sorts. A cottage industry of sorts arose a couple of years ago which produced some interesting books (and many that…well, weren’t) about what happens when ancient calendars run out of days, but I’ve been reading books about the world’s end since I could first read, which was a long time ago. My favorite is I AM LEGEND by Richard Matheson. Yes, I know, it’s not quite the same thing, any more than Walking Dead is in either graphic novel or television form, but it amounts to the same thing. The characters in those books, and others, keep on trucking, to the point and the extent that one wonders why. I mean, is the biological imperative that strong? To ask another way, and from another direction: is there anyone out there who was actually hoping that things were going to bite the moose on December 21, 2012? Maybe a little bit, in some dark corner of their psyche they normally keep in a little tiny closet with a triple-bolt deadlock on the door, and that has been scratching like crazy to get out the past few days? I’m not talking about something to the extent and degree that we hoped for blizzards to hit during exam weeks in grade school. I mean something that whispered, “Wow! Now we can go flirt with the neighbor, forget about shoveling snow, and send that pesky collection agency a big foaming cup of…” Well, you can fill in your own end-time dream.
Now that tomorrow is the today that some folks didn’t think would happen, there are things to do. I’m going to bring the granddaughter home and make cookies. That side mirror isn’t going to climb onto the car and attach itself, so I need to do that. The tree is up, but not decorated. Our cat, christened “Fennec” by my younger daughter but nicknamed “Demonspawn” by myself, has claimed it, and attacks anyone who touches it. I think, until the end of time that it has all of the decoration that it needs. You be the judge.
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year! And we’ll see you in 2013, if the Good Lord is willing and the creek don’t rise.