Archives for category: The philosophy of writing
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“I do not write for free” — counter-intuitively damaging?

August 19, 2010 //
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It is a mantra in writing advice that you should never give away your writing for free. Writing as a specialised skillset has become so devalued by the interaction between cheapskate publishers and writers desperate to be published that it’s a race to the bottom to see if they can get us to pay them to publish us (oh, wait…). To try to mitigate this continual erosion of value in the writing field, experienced writers advise newbie writers to never give away their writing for free. This can be as strict as telling them to not keep a blog, write for friends, or write for charity newsletters and the like. It can also include not writing for less than a certain number of cents per word.

This is undoubtably good advice, especially for non-fiction, but also for fiction which is, if anything, even more devalued. But I recently came across something that puts it in a different light. Read the rest of this entry »

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Categories The philosophy of writing, The writing life, Writing tips and techniques

Terry Pratchett, shaking hands with death

March 3, 2010 //
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Sir Terry Pratchett recently gave the annual Richard Dimbleby lecture, the first novelist to do so. You can read an edited extract here, but I recommend committing the highly illegal act of watching it on uTube.

The speech was actually delivered by Tony Robinson. And this is because the rare form of Alzheimer’s disease that Sir Terry suffers from means that he has trouble reading. Can you imagine it? A writer, and he can’t read. And he’s still writing. Take some inspiration from that, writers. And some hope, for readers, that losing the ability to read the written word no longer means losing the joy of ‘reading’.

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Categories Reading fiction, The philosophy of writing, The writing life

A giant company named Virago…

November 9, 2009 //
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…wants to automatically replace words in books with synonyms.

Amazon (for which Virago is a perfectly acceptable synonym, both having at least one sense referring to a large, agressive woman) has patented a ‘System and Method for Marking Content’. This “programmatically” substitutes synonyms into (electronic) text like books, reviews, news articles etc so that they can trace back the source of any illegally distributed material. I assume electronic text, anyway, unless they’re cracking down on the dastardly lending-printed-book-to-friend black market.

This is similar to the random pattern of dots overlayed on cinema reels to identify which specific reel was the one set loose as an illegal DVD copy or which cinema management was slack on spotting recording devices, except that instead of changing the movie-goer’s experience by irritating them with dots, they change the movie-goer’s experience by splicing in minute scene alterations – without even subjecting the process to a human eye to see just how annoying and wrong the change is.

Would a reasonable human say virago is an acceptable substitute for amazon? No, no way – the words may have the same meaning by a dictionary match, if you go down the list of meanings for each far enough, but they have substantially different senses in most people’s minds. Such a substitution would change the way the character so described is perceived.

Screw it, I shouldn’t even have to give an example of why this is so bad. I’m not making the claim that I choose every single word in my books with conscious care, but I certainly pay attention to nuances of meanings and to the rhythm of the sentences, and Virago (and not the perfectly well-behaved publishing imprint either) is tromping all over that with this system.

The patent also includes using “alternative misspellings for selected words”. Yes. That typo? That typo is not my fault. That was Virago the Giant Online Retailer.

If they’re that worried about pirates, why not adopt the system proposed by…that guy whose name I don’t remember…who said to flood the pirate market with error-riddled copies of whatever product, some only 10% different, some 90% different, so that people helping themselves to illegal material never know how true and reliable their copy is and it becomes easier to buy the appropriately priced legal material. That’s a system amenable to programmatic implementation.

That was the first time I’ve ever spelled rhythm correctly on the first go.

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Categories The philosophy of writing, Writing news

Go Home On Time Day

October 30, 2009 //
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Regular readers will notice I have skipped my regular blog posts this week. This is because I have been busy. Though not in the good Las Vegas way.

Which leads me to mention that The Australia Institute has declared November 25 to be national Go Home On Time Day. It is, and I quote, “in recognition of the more than 2 billion hours of unpaid overtime that Australians work each year” and “is intended to be a guilt-free way of raising awareness of the nature and extent of unpaid overtime in Australia and the important economic, health and social consequences it often has”. Check out the Go Home On Time Day website.

This has only the most tenuous link to writing, except that I will point out that:

  1. the more hours you work, the less productive you are,
  2. the more hours you work, the fewer hours you have to do your writing (no, really?), and
  3. work-life balance makes for happier person, which makes for more creativity, mental energy, focus and discipline left over for the things that really matter to you, like writing your novel.

Go Home on Time: try it sometime.

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Categories The philosophy of writing, Writing news

Little idea of the point of what you’re writing today?

October 15, 2009 //
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I had little idea what the point of it was, but it was a trick that I could do.”

Flash Forward cover image

So John Sulston writes in his book, co-written by Georgina Ferry, The Common Thread, about the international scientific effort to map the human genome (and how private interests sought to sabotage the government-funded collaboration for their own gain; if anyone thinks the private company Celera in any way lived up to their hype that they would do it cheaper and faster, and wouldn’t try to patent genes or hold back information for profit, they need to read this book for the insider view).

Sulston is talking about the Baconian approach to science: gathering data without a hypothesis. He came up with a technique based on a new technology or method, and applied it just for the sake of it, with no preconceived notions in mind. In his case, it led fairly directly to sequencing the genome, quite the payoff.

Payoffs come in writing, too, when we are prepared to follow leads without worrying about other people’s expectations, what we thought we were writing when we started out, how commercial or mainstream the work is, and so on: when we write for the sake of writing, not to meet our preconceived ideas.
Read the rest of this entry »

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Categories The philosophy of writing, Writing tips and techniques

Tabourot’s Law: after you scream but before you give up

September 3, 2009 //
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Tabourot’s Law is a concept you might have only come across should you be learning to play the theremin. In fact, until this post, the phrase “Tabourot’s Law” was almost a googlewhack – except I’m cheating because true googlewhacks only happen with two words but no quote marks.

You’re saying, “shut up about the googlewhacking, what the hell is a theremin?”, aren’t you?

An early thereminA theremin is a musical instrument (picture courtesy of Theremin World). It was invented by a Russian man named Lev Terman, or Leon Theremin in the West, about 90 years ago. You play it by moving your hands around the two antennae, one of which controls pitch, the other volume, attached to oscillators.

You have heard one: its sound (though not the instrument itself) is used in the Beach Boys’ Good Vibrations – listen for the “quavery wobble”. It’s also one of Hannibal Lector’s two favourite instruments.

Reverend Guppy's Aquarium cover imageThe theremin, and Tabourot’s Law, came to my attention through the auspices of The Reverend Guppy’s Aquarium: Encounters with heroes of the English language, from the Earl of Sandwich to Joseph P. Frisbee by Philip Dodd. It is, of course, a (fascinating) book about eponyms – words derived from people’s names, and obviously enough, Theremin is one of them (described in the chapter about Adolphe Sax).

Dodd mentions a teach-yourself theremin book. Thanks to a reference on the theremin site, at the bottom of this page of discussion, I now know it was probably Dr. R.B.Sexton’s Method for the Theremin. Ah yes, the famous Saxon Method: wave your hands around the antennae.

Saxon provides a piece of advice he in turn got from Tabourot, who was a castenet tutor who wrote Castanuelas, Olè. I can’t quite tell if this was written relatively recently or 500 years ago by a monk (and republished relatively recently) whose real name wasn’t even Tabourot anyway.

I’ll quote Dodd: “Its central method was that if you are having problems trying to achieve something difficult and are convinced you will never make any progress, then at the very point you are about to give up in frustration, that is precisely when you are going to make a breakthrough”.

Or, to quote Saxon himself, in more vivid terms:

Tabourot’s Law states that success always comes after you start screaming in frustration but before you actually give up.

Dodd says, “It’s an excellent law, which I recommend applying to most human endeavours” – including the endeavour of writing fiction. And not just human endeavours, either – when we were teaching our dog the ‘down’ command – old dog, new trick – he barked in frantic and high-pitched frustration just before he finally worked out what we wanted from him, the exact expression of Tabourot’s Law.

I’m sure the mental anguish and stress that tends to accompany a breakthrough – the outward expression of the mental force being expended – has a name in psychological research and has been studied extensively, but I find “Tabourot’s Law” to be picturesque.

Next time you’re working on a story or a scene and you’ve been going around in circles and it seems like it’s just never going to work and you should just pack the whole thing in and go do something actually rewarding like learning to play an obscure musical instrument, mutter to yourself, “Tabourot’s Law” and keep trying just that little bit longer.

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Categories The philosophy of writing, Writing tips and techniques

Measuring your success as a writer

July 2, 2009 //
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For the last few weeks, I have been discussing how the art of writing intersects with commercial success. First I said that it’s already hard to write, but even harder when you choose your genre solely based on what you think will sell, rather than what you love. Then I pointed out that most writers don’t make a lot of money from writing anyway. And then I used actor Marcus Graham to prove that you’ll be happier if you moderate your ambitions to something realistic.

In all of this, how do you measure your success as a writer? Using how much money you make, as I’ve tried to make plain, is a poor measure. Using the number of sales is only slightly better, because it’s still directly correlated to how much money you’re making. There’s plenty of writers who have released a decent body of work, with large mainstream publishers, have had sales, and who still cannot give up the day job.

For example, there’s Tony Shilltoe, an Australian fantasy author who has “enjoyed moderate publishing success” with more than a dozen books, and who still cannot give up the day job (though maybe he doesn’t want to). The key point for him is that he has not broken out of Australia into overseas (the giant US and UK markets).

I cannot speak for this writer and how he feels about it; I’m just using him as an example – a writer who has, at least since 2002, produced one to two publishable books a year – and that’s pretty impressive for someone with a fulltime job.

So how would you measure your success? Measuring it by money will only make you unhappy. Choose other measures, and make them correspond to where you are in your writing life.

If you’re just starting out, your measure of success could be twofold: Do you sit down and write every day? And are you able to complete an entire book-length story? Plenty of ‘writers’ undertake lots of stories and never have the willpower to work through the mid-book grind to finish a complete draft, so you can be proud if you have.

If you’re further along, you might make your measure of success whether you write a certain number of words every day, and whether you go back and edit that first draft until it becomes something better.

And again, you might be further along than that, and measure your success in publishing credits – with small publishers or large, with short stories or longer works, with fiction or non-fiction. Or it might by awards and good reviews (though that is relying on external factors and opinion and I would not recommend it – other peoples’ opinions matter in terms of deciding if your work should be published or not, but they should not be used to determine how you feel about it). Your goals depend on you.

My measure of success is simple, but less quantifiable: Am I happy? Do I look forward to my day? Do I go eagerly once more unto the writing breach, dear friends (even when I “close the wall up with our dead English” words; ie when it’s not going well)? Yes. Then I am successful.

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Categories The philosophy of writing, Writing tips and techniques

Marcus Graham agrees with me

June 25, 2009 //
1

I love Elvis…um, Marcus Graham.

In this article, Graham talks about his career trajectory. In particular, and in relation to my last few weeks of posts, the article begins:

MARCUS GRAHAM tells a funny story about the moment, many years ago now, when he gave up on Hollywood. It meant, as for any actor, letting go of a big dream and, like any adult, discovering that the dream wasn’t what you thought it would be. But in that pivotal moment in Graham’s life, he grasped the seeds of something else.

“I’ve learned that the less the ambition, the greater the happiness,” Graham says cheerfully.

And then later: “Letting go of the blind ambition of his 20s and 30s made him happier and calmer.”

Life today creates strange pressures: it’s not admirable anymore to just be quietly good at something that you’ve worked away at for years. You have to be the best! And do it really young! And really quickly! In writing, that’s first-time authors winning the Booker or 16-year-olds writing bestselling fantasy novels that get made into movies and spawn lots of sequels (though, hey, it is fantasy, so there’s got to be at least three books).

It leads to expectations that work against new writers. They expect too much of themselves, too quickly, and too much of the publishing industry, and others expect too much of them too. Something like Harry Potter or Twilight….those are bolts of lightning. Those authors themselves were under pressure to re-create the phenomena with every new book. How can a new author expect to create the next phenomenon when it is unpredictable, crowd-driven, faddish? How can a literary author aim to win the Booker when the judges’ tastes change every year and their decision-making is often obscure and apparently random?

Becoming an A-list movie star in Hollywood is the pinnacle for many actors. Wanting to be the next Rowling appears to be the goal for many fantasy writers. Winning the Booker is the dream for many (British Commonwealth and Irish) literary writers. Those are the sorts of big and glorious ambitions that might set you on your path, whatever it might be.

But to paraphrase the article, the dream is not always what you thought it was going to be. The amount of publicity, pressure, and sheer fan obsession must have given Rowling cold sweats. In this discussion, a Booker prize winner complains of having no time to write because of the touring expected of her since she won. And Marcus Graham woke up in Hollywood one day, and thought:

‘Bloody hell, here I am getting paid all this money to not work, while I wait for a job that I actually don’t want. What the f— am I doing here?’ So I took the $US10,000; they decided I actually was too mysterious [for a show called Mysterious Ways] and I left town.”

But: “despite letting go of ego, he still has the drive to act.” A writer can let go of unrealistic dreams of fame and fortune, and still want to write and be motivated to sit down and write (rather than daydream about having already written and receiving the accolades). It’s about deciding on workable goals, realistic goals.

For me, it’s regular publication for a small, niche audience. I don’t want lots of money, I sure as hell do not want fame, I don’t need critical recognition in the form of awards and prizes. I want to say, here, here’s a fun book, hope you enjoy it (and I want my small audience to say, thanks, I did, when’s the next one coming out? Write faster, lady).

We’ve all been trained to think of sensible, achievable goals as giving up. It’s not. It’s reaching for the happiness, the satisfaction, the contentment within your grasp, not those fabled distant stars that are so far away that their light takes millions of years to reach us. Reach for the Sun instead; its light only takes 8.3 minutes – a star less daunting to reach for.

There’s a greeting card in that, somewhere.

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Categories The philosophy of writing, Writing tips and techniques

It Ain’t A Get-Rich-Quick Scheme

June 18, 2009 //
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Continuing on from last week’s entry, I thought I’d address some major misconceptions for people who are specifically setting out to make money from writing fiction.

People are misled by the big popular books. They look at the mega-seller of the year, whether it’s a Harry Potter or a Da Vinci Code or a Twilight and that’s what they expect for their own book – and they often think it’ll be easy enough to write one to boot.

Writing is hard. Writing a publishable book is even harder. Actually getting it published is like winning the lotto (me to a friend: and maybe I’ll get published, hah hah. Friend to me: and maybe I’ll win lotto, hah hah. True, yes. Supportive, not quite).

And getting it published and then having it go on to not only out-earn its advance, if you even get one, but to sell several million copies? I don’t even have words for how rare that is. Well, OK, it’s like being hit by a meteorite.

Consider this. Crime writer (and writer on The Wire) George Pelecanos said in an interview last year in the Guardian’s Observer Magazine that he was paid $2500 for his first book and not much more for the second; for the sixth book, he got $7500. Only then did he get a two-book deal for $90,000.

So he had to write six books with low advances, and then he had to write two more to get what amounts to a yearly salary per book.

That’s eight books – eight books that sell enough to keep your publisher happy – before you can even think about quitting your day job. And most B-writers, even with lots of books out, still have to have outside work to maintain themselves. That’s why you can’t measure your success by how much you earn.

By all means, have lofty goals, aim high, reach for the stars. First-time authors hit it big sometimes. Long-time authors hit it big slightly more frequently. It does happen. But it doesn’t happen often.

And not only do most writers not ‘get rich’, it certainly isn’t ‘quick’, even putting aside the need to write many books. If you’re staring down the barrel of mortgage payments or imminent retrenchment, sitting down to write a bestseller is not going to solve things for you.

Let’s assume you are after all the next Dan Brown and that you’re a NaNoWriMo veteran and knock up your MS in a month. It still has to go through the whole submissions process (months in a queue) and, once accepted, publishing (editing, formatting, layout, proofs) process. Likely you won’t see any money from the thing for a good year or more after you’ve typed the final full stop.

I would say most authors who move on from writing as a hobby to wanting to see their work published daydream, even a little, about having a bestseller. That’s OK. And it’s OK to want it and to work towards it – it’ll impel your writing and, especially, marketing efforts.

Even optimistically expecting it to happen can be self-affirming and motivating to the personality type who thrives on eternal positive thinking. Though, having read Enough by John Naish, I think this approach is dangerous and will lead to discontent and unhappiness, personally.

But to rely on it? And to write solely for that purpose? I think most attempts at that fizzle. I don’t think it can be sustained in the face of the realities of the publishing business.

Unless you’re a celebrity already. Then it’s a Get-Richer-Quicker Scheme.

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Categories The philosophy of writing, Writing tips and techniques

Writing for commercial success: love or money and why can’t it be and?

June 11, 2009 //
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The February 2009 issue of Good Reading Magazine had an interview with author Margo Lanagan, who has since won a Ditmar for her novel Tender Morsels.

She had this to say about commercial success, or her relative lack of it:

I’d done five of my own books and I still didn’t have any money from the thing. I couldn’t see how I was going to get to the stage where I could give up my day job, and I thought ‘I really need to find a genre that’s going to travel overseas; Australia is just too small’.”

With its huge market reach in the US and the UK, and relative lack of localised content, fantasy fiction seemed the obvious choice. And so she set out to create (in the tradition of the genre), her very own fantasy trilogy. Unfortunately, all did not go as planned. For three years she attempted to construct this epic, but she couldn’t maintain control of the narrative and so kept hitting dead ends.

I believe her early works were short story collections (which rarely sell well now) and YA novels, while the acclaimed and award-winning Tender Morsels is literary fantasy (which means I will be very sure to seek it out).

I find the quote interesting because it illustrates one of the difficulties of writing: if you pick a genre to write in solely because you think it will sell, rather than because it’s what you enjoy, you will often have trouble writing something decent. This is for a number of reasons:

    1. You will not know the genre. The classic presumption that many people make is that certain genres – coughromancecough – are easy to write because they follow a formula. The presumption could not be more wrong. Every genre has its traditions and expectations and even if you’re going to break them, you have to know them first.
    2. You won’t really be enjoying yourself. Your heart won’t be in it, and you’ll run into the same kind of narrative issues Lanagan discusses above.
    3. Not even publishers and booksellers know what will be a commercial success – I refer you to the article I linked to earlier “93 percent of traditionally published books sell only 1,000 copies”.

Now, I’m not saying there aren’t writers out there who don’t perfectly well manage to write in whatever genre necessary for them to sell books. But in general, the best way to approach commercial success seems to be to choose a genre you like and know, and then work within that to produce books you think will have mainstream appeal, based on research into current or emerging tastes and trends.

As an anecdotal example, I once read (on a messageboard from an unknown contributor, so caveat emptor) that George RR Martin deliberately set out to write a bestselling fantasy series by asking fantasy fans what they liked and did not about popular series like the Jordon Wheel of Time books (You know what we don’t like, Martin? Writers who stop halfway through).

And that obviously worked for him, because Song of Ice and Fire has done amazingly well (except for the, you know, stopping halfway through – which maybe just illustrates the point about following your heart, not your hip pocket). So, my advice to those seeking commercial success would be to do your research – but start with what you love.

Now, as I have said before, I personally do not think aiming for commercial success is necessarily the best path to take. I do not write for or even aspire to commercial success; I have long-since accepted that I am not a mainstream writer. I should probably point out that I’m not literary/highbrow either, since that’s usually taken as the opposite of mainstream. I’m just me (I take a little of Montaigne’s philosophy of being satisfied with what you are instead of stressing yourself to become what you are not).

Because of my philosophy, I like the upshot of the interview with Lanagan:

casting aside any hope of financial reward, she now wrote as pure escape for herself…this collection of short stories received critical acclaim and lots of awards…

Slightly damaging to my point, the collection still didn’t sell well – short stories, don’t, remember – but she has now published the award-winning Tender Morsels which is published internationally rather than just in Australia, so she’s getting there. Hooray for writing for pleasure not profit!

Anyone with a creative hobby knows the tension between enjoying it for its own sake and making money from it. And unfortunately, some people, both writers and buyers of writing, appear to have taken the common writerly refrain of “I enjoy it so much, I’d do it even if I wasn’t being paid for it” as an excuse as to why writers don’t need decent renumeration (or copyright protection, apparently).

The upshot is all writers need to find their own balance between love and money. I’ve found mine, blockbuster writers find theirs, you will find yours (and let’s hope in every case it’s love and money).

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Categories The philosophy of writing, Writing tips and techniques
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