I was torn for the past couple of days, trying to come up with a topic for today’s blog. I started to pick up with my last post from a couple of weeks ago about book covers and their impact on buyers. One of the covers was Florida Roadkill, by Tim Dorsey, who passed a few days after that blog posted, at age 62.

Tim wrote to make us laugh, and to share the weirdness of Florida with the rest of the country. He was an outstanding storyteller who brought a unique character to the page, and frankly, the man entertained us.

That’s the business we’re in, but no matter what blog idea came to mind for today, it didn’t work. Maybe it’s because I just turned in a manuscript and needed a break, but no, that wasn’t it. I’m 5,000 words into a new novel since December 1, editing a short story, writing newspaper columns, and generally rolling just fine.

So what to discuss. Y’all get volumes of advice from this blog and the esteemed writers who support it. We’ve examined writing from a number of angles and perspectives, and listed hundreds of tips, which will only help if someone is truly wanting to get published. I say that because untold numbers of would-be authors are out there, attending Christmas parties and talking about how they’ll write some day when they get time.

I guess that’s the point of today’s post. 2024 is just around the corner. Some see the beginning of the new year as a fresh start, and it can be, but gyms around the country can testify how that burst of enthusiasm tends to wane a few weeks in. Oh, we set goals all right, and the spirit is willing for a short period of time, but then we slip back into our usual routines.

Here’s what I suggest, but it isn’t predicated on the new year. Just write, and do it now.

That’s it. Of course you have to show up for work, which means put your rear in a seat for at least a little while and type words. The words, then sentences, don’t have to be perfect at first. That was a problem I had in the beginning. I wanted everything to read smooth and absorbing like Stephen King wrote it.

It don’t work that way.

Get the words in your head down first and follow them to the next paragraph, the next chapter, and eventually to The End. There. You have a rough draft. Then you read it and gasp.

Holy crap! This is awful. Look at all the time I’ve wasted these past months. I’m done. I’m gonna buy some traps and go eliminate the gopher population around the house, at least that’s something productive.

Nope. Re-read and edit. Put that project down and start another manuscript and come back to it in a few weeks. Wait, it sounds a little better. That’s because you’re in a routine and your words are flowing better, and you eye sees that.

Work on it some more and get that old polish rag out. Y’all remember how we used to shine up our old cars. Mine was a 1969 Ford Galaxie with a 390-engine fed by a four-barrel Holley that sucked gas like Niagra Falls. It took a long time to wash the car, apply the wax, and then rub for hours until all that white glaze was gone, but it shone like a diamond when I was finished.

Don’t do what a friend did, though. Back in 1972, he and his girlfriend applied an entire can of paste wax on her dad’s Buick Wildcat and let it bake in the Texas sun for an hour or two. Oh, that’s not the worst part. They were hot and drove the swirl-glazed car to the Dairy Queen in it for ice cream. The combination of July heat, engine heat from below, and old Sol above turned the wax into concrete. Her dad was due back home at six that evening, and even with the liberal use of elbow grease, and finally an electric buffer, that football-field size hood was never the same.

But you just saw that car in your mind, if you’re familiar with those old boats, felt the heat, and the dread that washed over a couple of kids that hot summer day. That’s what writing does. It puts us in that place. The more you write, the better you’ll get at bringing those words to life.

Now that you have the manuscript finished, it probably won’t read like old Steve wrote it, but don’t give up. Apply some more wax and polish away. When you have it ready, find yourself an agent. That’ll take a while, but don’t give up.

Own those rejection notices. Hell, put ‘em on you wall and keep trying, but work on that next project.

You can do it.  There’s no reason to wait for a magical date that means nothing. It doesn’t take a new year, it takes determination. Get started now. One page a day. Half that if it’s too much, but write, then read someone else, then write some more.

Write.

Read.

Write.

Submit…until someone says yes.

Never. Give Up. That’s your present from me this year.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.

Charlie Munger has died. Mr. Munger was ninety-nine and lived a long, brilliant life. He was highly successful in many fields. Making money, for sure, but he accumulated and distributed vastly more valuable assets of wealth such as life long learning and influencing others to think by writing.

Charles T. Munger was the multi-billionaire vice president of Berkshire Hathaway, one of the world’s leading financial institutes. He was the man who taught Warren Buffett how to invest and stood giant as a role model for many thought leaders. That includes writers—past and present—who used Munger mental models to help understand and articulate their thoughts.

Shane Parrish is one of those thinkers and writers. Shane hosts the Farnam Street website. It’s named after the lane in Omaha, Nebraska where Charlie Munger lived his entire life.

Farnam Street is a thought-provoking site and publishes every Sunday morning. Last week’s edition included a piece titled Writing To Think. Shane, being a Munger disciple and promoter of works like Poor Charlie’s Almanack and The Psychology of Human Misjudgement, encourages his followers to freely share his material. With that invitation, I’m going to repost Shane Parrish’s article, Writing To Think.

Writing to Think by Shane Parrish

A few weeks ago, my 13-year-old son asked me why writing was so important. He wasn’t happy. One of his teachers had asked him to write an essay and he would rather use AI to generate it for him and be done with it.

The question seemed as natural to him as using a dishwasher is to us. If there is a better, more convenient way to do this, why not use it?

Today’s kids are growing up in a world where they can generate essays in seconds. Many employees are already using AI for a lot of simple tasks like email, catching up after vacation, summarizing meetings, and drafting PowerPoints. While some of these tasks might be accomplished more efficiently by ChatGPT than by human effort, I’d argue there are times when inefficiency is the point.

The reason they teach writing to kids in school is not to generate endless essays on history or books but to create a space to practice reasoning. By delegating writing to AI, my son might be reducing his time spent doing homework. But he’s missing the chance to think more clearly about the topic at hand.

Writing forces you to slow down, focus your attention, and think deeply. In a world where attention is fragmented in seconds, thinking becomes more reactive than reasoned. Only when we have time to play with a problem can we hope to think about it substantially. Writing requires sticking with something a little longer and developing a deeper understanding.

Mortimer Adler once said, “The person who says he knows what he thinks but cannot express it usually does not know what he thinks.” We all know someone with this surface level of understanding. They read an article or two and have the confidence of an expert. It’s as if you are having a conversation with someone who tells you they are a hockey player, only to find out they’ve never skated.

Writing is the process by which you realize that you do not understand what you are talking about. Of course, you can learn a lot about something without writing about it. However, writing about something complicated and hard to pin down acts as a test to see how well you understand it. When we approach our work as a stranger, we often discover how something that seems so simple in our heads is explained entirely wrong.

Most organizations see PowerPoint and writing as interchangeable. They are not. Powerpoint masks poor thinking. Just because presentations are easy to create doesn’t mean the person creating them understands what they are talking about. If my experience is any indication, about 30-40% of people giving presentations lack more than a surface-level knowledge of what they are presenting.  All the time spent making the presentation look good comes at the expense of wrestling with the problem and developing unique insights.

Pretty graphics don’t only drug the presenter, they also intoxicate the audience. When dressed up, even poor thinking can come off as well thought out. Writing avoids this because it strips away the fancy graphics. Poor thinking has nowhere to hide.

Other than reading them yourself, one way to test your ideas is to let others read them. Strangers reading your writing can’t see all the thoughts in your head, only the ones you put into words and share. It’s easy to assume the people who disagree with you are wrong. Sharing your understanding with the world allows you to not only test your thinking but gain the perspective of others (as the comments here will no doubt do). Writing forces you to step on the ice and skate.

Anyone who’s ever revised a piece of writing and done it well knows the pain of having to kill their darlings. But deleting, in writing and life, is a valuable tool. When you write, you develop an attachment to the text you produced only because you produced it. Choosing to discard writing forces you to reconcile between what is true and what you wrote, which can lead to tremendous personal growth both in writing and in life.

AI-generated text, on the other hand, is disposable by nature. It doesn’t force you to practice attachment and letting go. The most important key on the keyboard and in life is often the one that deletes.

Deciding what to pay attention to and, more importantly, what to overlook and remove, is one of the most critical skills. Breaking a problem down into its essential elements and reassembling it from the ground up helps you to discern fact from opinion. Wisdom is as much about knowing what to ignore as it is about what to pay attention to.

Perhaps the best reason to write is that it offers a vehicle for discovering deeper insights.

Practically speaking, writing forces you to take a complicated and ill-defined problem and compress it into something more manageable. This ‘compression’ is useful. Not only does it help you remember your ideas, but it helps you develop new ones. Paul Graham put it this way: “A good writer doesn’t just think, and then write down what he thought, as a sort of transcript. A good writer will almost always discover new things in the process of writing.”

The insights you discover are not limited to the subject you write about. You also learn about yourself. Writing doesn’t just convey your ideas; it conveys a part of you. Your personality and worldview become part of the work itself. While the reader remembers the story, the writer is forever changed.

Many things can be done by tools that write for you, but they won’t help you learn to think, understand deeper, or solve hard problems.

When it comes to my kids, I told them, “One of the ways we learn to think for ourselves is to write out our thoughts.” When your invisible thoughts become visible, you are forced to wrestle with them in reality and not your imagination. “But Dad,” they protested as they continued to write in their summer journals, “It is so much easier to outsource to AI.”

They’re right. But they aren’t yet smart enough to see that in a world where intellectual labor is increasingly outsourced to tools, the human aptitude for clear thinking and unique insights will become all the more valuable.

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Kill Zoners — Does this piece resonate with you? Please share your thoughts on writing to think—and thinking to write—with our group.

By John Gilstrap

As I read Reavis Wortham’s excellent post regarding titles and covers last Saturday, my first thought was, Hey, I’ve got a different squint on such matters. I think that’s what my post will be about on Wednesday!

My second thought was, Wait. I already wrote that post.

And, as luck would have it, on the day when I should be writing new material for this post, I’m swamped with Life Stuff and don’t have time to pen a whole new post. So, here we go with a post that first appeared on TKZ on November 4, 2020:

Whoever coined the trope that you can’t judge a book by its cover had to have been an academic. Certainly, the trope-coiner was not a reader of novels. Yes, it is true that some great novels come encased in ugly wrappers, but few of them find a broad readership.

What follows is based on zero research and even less science, but it reflects quite a few decades of personal observation.

People buy books in steps.

First, they have to know to look for it. This is the unicorn hair in the mix. I don’t know what drives me to look for a book. Certainly, there’s word of mouth, and I read a lot of books for blurbs, but I don’t remember the last time I went into a bookstore blind–without a target I was looking for–and scoured the shelves, hoping to be attracted to a cover. I don’t think I’ve ever done that in the virtual world, where online bookstores are not, in my opinion, very browsable.

Next, there has to be an instant attraction. Perhaps it’s the author’s name—which highlights the importance of “branding”. But that instant attraction is just that—instant. It’s fleeting. There and gone. This is where the cover comes in, highlighting the reason that genres exist in the first place. The title is important here, too. A thriller has to look and sound like a thriller. Ditto a romance or horror novel. In that brief second of instant attraction, the artwork makes a connection and causes the reader to move to the next step . . .

They read the plot description. In just a few words, the pressure is on to pull the reader into the story. To make them gamble their hard-earned money that the ride you’re going to provide is worth the money. How do they make their final decision?

They read the first pages. Yesterday, PJ Parrish posted a terrific primer on the elements of a good opening. Here’s where that pays off. Boom! Decision made, one way or the other. There’s neither the time nor the real estate to flub the opening and make it better later.

So, where is the cynicism?

Okay, here it is: The covers and titles needn’t have much to do with the actual plot of the book. They work together to accomplish their jobs in a glance, and then they are forgotten. They work in tandem to convince a potential reader to take a chance, and if you, as the writer, do your job to entertain, no one will notice. Some examples from my own work:

Hellfire is the Jonathan Grave book that hit the stands back in July. What does Hellfire even mean? The story is about two kids who are kidnapped to keep their mom from revealing a terrorist plot after she has been arrested. The word itself–Hellfire–is an oblique reference to an air-to-surface missile system. And it sounds cool. It positions the book properly in the minds of readers who generally enjoy the types of books I write.

The red cover makes it distinctive on the shelf–unless or until red becomes the cover du jour for the current crop of cover designers. It also lends itself well as a Facebook cover image. But if you really look at the image and its various elements, it could be for a reprint of All’s Quiet On The Western Front, or it could be a story about Satan.

Other examples from my oeuvre (today is Pretend-I-Know-French Day): The second book in my Jonathan Grave series is Hostage Zero. It’s the title that broke the series out, and the phrase means nothing. None of the hostages are numbered, and none of them launch a plague, as in “patient zero”. It just sounded cool, and that’s why we went with it. The cover of Friendly Fire features the White House, yet neither the president nor his team are involved in the story. What we wanted to do is establish the book and its author as being “inside Washington”.

My point here is that storytelling and marketing are entirely different skillsets, with only distantly related goals. As an author, my job is to entertain my readers by giving them a helluva ride. To get that chance, I need to convince them (trick them?) into picking out my book from among all the others on the shelf.

Your turn, TKZers. Do you have any tricks you’re willing to share about how you convince readers to take the plunge?