By John Ramsey Miller

A female editor once told me that I wrote female characters better than most women authors she had worked with. My agent said the same thing, and I was flattered by it. Great compliments, coming from two knowledgeable women. I don’t know how well I actually write female characters, but I’ve known a lot of women, and hope I understand a little something about the opposite sex. Most of what I know I learned the hard way, which is how I learn most things, and I keep on learning as much as I can about my craft. Knowing people and human behavior is the part you never stop learning, and you have to understand individuals to understand relationships, which are always complex and interesting. I have been blessed to have known a lot of strong women and so most of the women I write are reflections of them. But in the course of publishing seven novels I’ve yet to have any woman ask me why I am qualified to write female characters. I have also written a lot of black characters and I am “porcelain” white and have never to my knowledge been anything else.

I recently heard a segment on NPR centered around a book a female author had written that was set in the deep South during desegregation. Just so happens I was right there at the exact time. This particular panel was discussing the fact that it was amazing that the author was white but had dared write from a black female character’s point of view. (I’m paraphrasing here from memory). A black man (I only assume he was black but it was radio) on the program said that in this particular case it didn’t bother him much as he was able to set aside the fact that the author was white and get into the story. The author obviously got it. Well, of all the audacity. It seems it was forgivable in this case because she did such a good job telling the story from that perspective and she got the dialog right enough to squeak by. Hell, I don’t see why a black author couldn’t write from a Klansman’s point of view if they wanted to, although I can’t imagine why he or she would. A writer writes from his or her experience and imagination based on his observations, and imagining the perspective of someone other than yourself is the stock and trade of a good author. James Patterson, a white man, writes Alex Cross, who isn’t, with perfect pitch. Why does an author have to be something to write it? Or why does he or she have to be specifically something to understand the character’s perspective? You don’t have to be a homosexual to write a homosexual character any more than you have to be a woman to write from the viewpoint of one. I get tired of hearing “You can’t write that!” “The Hell, I can’t! You just don’t want to read it.”

Censorship comes in many forms, and I hate it in any form it takes. I don’t write to hurt feelings, but characters are characters and I write what I see and hear. If I want to write a gay detective, which I don’t at the moment, I’ll write one without having to sleep with other men to qualify. If I want to write a lesbian cop, I can do it and I imagine I can do it convincingly. If I’m not comfortable doing so it will show in the work. Most of us are expected to write with kid gloves on and steer clear of certain subjects, and we all hate it as creative people have to. The market decides what it will or won’t accept and those rules change so frequently that we can’t keep up with them. Political correctness has less than nothing to do with a good story or the characters that we choose to depict.

Do you have to be a black person in Mississippi not write about what it is like being black in Mississippi in the 60s? If you saw it from a white boy’s perspective, you should still know what the black person was seeing and thinking. You don’t have to have been shot to know what being shot feels like, or give birth to imagine that mixture of pain and joy. You don’t have to have sipped from a “Colored Only” water fountain to know what that degrading experience felt like. If you watched “Miss Jane Pittman,” you felt her bravery, her pain, and the sheer determination it took to go to one marked “White Only” and how delicious the water tasted and how huge a step that was for her. I can write that, and so can you.

Let’s get real people. No area of writing should be off limits to anyone and it shouldn’t be. As artists, we owe our readers as good or great a book as we can produce, and that is the only limit we should be expected to place on our work. How many of you have had an editor or agent turn you away from what you wanted to write with a simple, “You can’t write that.”

by John Gilstrap
www.johngilstrap.com

Ever noticed that naysayers are a dime a dozen? Everywhere you go, there seems to be an unending supply of pessimists, doubting Thomases, bear-marketers and curmudgeons who seem to shine brightest when they can wallow in predictions for bad times. It’s been that way for as long as I can remember, but in recent years, the publishing world seems to have been inundated with pessimists, one half-empty glass at a time. “The book is dead,” we hear. “No one cares about the written word anymore.”

I’ve recently come to view these laments as the panicked cries of old-schoolers who see change on the horizon. I’ve known a lot of editors in my time, but I can’t think of a single one who was technologically on the edge. For them, the definition of a book begins and ends with the notion of ink on paper, classically bound in either paper or cloth. Looking out ten years, I’d say those folks have good reason to be fearful.

Or, God forbid, they could adapt.

According to an article in this week’s Publisher’s Weekly, ebook sales at B&N accounted for 3% of total book sales last year, up from less than 1% the year before. The absolute numbers might not be staggering, then the trend certainly is. Run the figures in your head, and you quickly see that the old-fashioned brick-and-mortar bookstore represents a pretty regressive business model. (As I blogged last week, even I, one of the Luddite hold-outs, got a Kindle; and if I can be converted, anyone can.)

For the sake of argument, let’s proclaim the book as we currently know it to be on a terminal course. (I personally believe that there will always be a vibrant market for bound books, but that $25 cover price for what will essentially be a reproduction antique will be a hard sell.) On the day the last printing press were to stop, the market for stories would still be thriving. People would still be reading.

How do I know? Watch how the members of the younger generation entertain themselves. They’ve got their iPhones and their social networking, but what are those, essentially, but words? When I was a kid, we rotted our minds by watching endless hours of bad television (“My Mother the Car,” anyone?). These days, television viewership is plummeting like a comet as kids turn to other forms of storytelling. Even gaming is storytelling. That’s what we do, folks. And with each new Internet fad comes new opportunities for people with imaginations to shine.

If J.K. Rowling and Stephanie Meyers have proven nothing else, it’s that the new generation craves entertainment on the page. And if the scourge of vanity presses has proven nothing else, it’s that quality still matters.

While the $25 hardcover is great for the publisher, I don’t see how it can sustain itself against the lower-priced competition. As the hardcover goes away, so does the stigma of the paperback original, and the hugely different distribution systems for the two formats. My crystal ball shows this being a heavy blow to authors who’ve grown used to 7-figure advances, but a tremendous opportunity for the vast sea of writers formerly known as midlist.

I think the publishing business is today where the transportation business was in the 1920s. The fact that automobiles rendered horse-drawn carriages irrelevant didn’t mean that people stopped traveling; it just meant that modern convenience trumped tradition. I assume that buggy wheel manufacturers who adapted to making automotive wheels did pretty well, even as the whip manufacturers found themselves with way fewer options. Carrying the analogy even further, remember that Henry Ford made a bloody fortune by producing a product that was specifically priced to be affordable.

What do you think? Do you see the publishing world imploding on itself, or do you agree with me that this is a great time to be a writer?

by John Gilstrap
www.johngilstrap.com

I’ve mentioned before that I have a day job with a trade association in Washington, DC, and I’ve alluded to the fact that the job keeps me on the road a lot. I might not have been clear, however, on the definition of “a lot.” During the month of February, for example, I have not spent a single day in my office–every day has been on the road somewhere. The first two weeks of March aren’t looking much better, although a chunk of that will be spent at Left Coast Crime in Los Angeles.

I get to spend most weekends at home, though, and I genuinely love what I do. Airports, airplanes and hotel rooms provide ample opportunity to take care of the writing side of my life, so for the most part, when I’m home, I’m there in both body and spirit. Good times.

Reading, books, on the other hand, is a pain in the neck when you have to schlep books on and off of airplanes. But there’s a solution.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, I finally broke down and bought a Kindle, and I’m already in love. Each morning, for the bargain basement price of $11 a month, the Washington Post is delivered directly to my briefcase, where it takes a spot right next to the books I’ve purchased, and one outstanding manuscript that a friend of mine asked me to take a look at. It’s thinner than a children’s book, weighs virtually nothing, takes up no space in my briefcase, and holds more books than I have probably read in my entire life. I’ve also subscribed to Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, and heaven knows what else I’ll find enticing.

Really, the Kindle is the coolest toy in years. And yes, in case you’ve got a good memory, I am in fact the man who wrote an entry on this very blog about a year ago entitled, “Kindle Schmindle.” I am man enough to admit that I was way wrong before.

So, with that side of my brain and persona slogging ever so slowly into the 21st century, I now confess that the other side–the creative one that tells stories–is moving back toward the 19th century. I’m handwriting my manuscripts more than I ever have, fountain pen to quality paper. I think I probably wrote 50% of Hostage Zero (July, 2010) by hand, and thus far, I’ve written every word of my next novel by hand. Barnes & Noble sells really nice leather-bound lined journals made of quality paper, and I take one with me wherever I go. No batteries to run out, no switch to turn off during takeoffs and landings, and a solid, tactile connection to my writing. It could be a passing fad for me, or it could be the future; only time will tell. For now, though, it feels right.

Sooner or later, of course, I have to type what I have written into a submittable form, and when I do that, I make many, many changes and corrections, so I don’t want to overblow the intent here. Still, it occurred to me as I put down my Kindle and picked up this computer for the first time to write something other than an email, that even as things change on the surface, maybe important things never change much at all.