How to Publish a Book in 8 Hours

What It Means to Be a Writer Today, Part 8

How To Publish a Book in 8 Hours

Yesterday it had been eight years since I published my last book, One Great Game.

Last night I published a book – an e-book – in eight hours. And therein lies a tale of gee-whiz, uh-huh, whadayawaitingfor and what-the-hell-I’m-going-for-it. Now I’m going to tell the story so you can go for it, too.

Like most writers who’ve been at it awhile, I have my frustrations with publishing. I didn’t grab the brass ring on my first go-round, nor my second. But drawing on my novelist superpowers, I kept at it. Because I became a magazine editor and a journalist, I was forced to encounter publishing reality on a daily basis. In other words, I learned to make sausage. Early on I vowed not to lose my connection to the purest kind of writing, which is also, duh, the least remunerative.

For the past year I’ve been reading everything I could find about the future of publishing, in particular anything to do with electronic publishing. My goal was and is to start my own e-Pub imprint. My reasons were grounded in glorious self-interest. I wanted to publish and be damned, as they used to say. For five years before the meltdown of 2008, I’d worked on a book that was to launch a six-part seafaring series having to do with the American Revolution, time travel, and the twelve-year-old boy who has to save our young democracy while wrestling with the whole slavery deal. I finished it just in time for my agent to take it out into the teeth of an economic gale, where The Log of Matthew Roving sank without a trace. (Although reports of its death were, it turned out, premature: you can check out the preliminary sketches for the project on my website, www.donwallacebooks.com.)

At the same time, my essays and short fiction weren’t going anywhere, or else advancing at a snail’s pace: one memoir in Harper’s every four years, one Op-Ed or essay in the New York Times every two years, and silence from everyone else. I didn’t like my odds of breaking through before having to switch to false teeth to chew my filet mignon.

Like most people my age, I like to think of myself as an original rock n’ roll surfer-rebel-voodoo chile. Time to prove I still had my mojo, I decided. Having worked inside magazines and started magazines, including a prototype for book-reading fools like me that was to have been published by Kirkus Reviews, I figured I knew as much as I needed to know.

I was wrong about that, actually. There was lots I didn’t know and still don’t. But I knew what the hedgehog knows: that my patch of grass was changing forever. The future was slipping away from the legacy print houses.

Yesterday’s adventure began with my finding a story on Twitter, which I only began using seriously a month ago. It linked me to Laura Miller’s article in Salon.com about e-Book publishing. (I’ll list her url and any others at the end of this piece: I don’t want to break up the flow here.) Miller put four links at the bottom of her story. One was this epic 13,000-word discussion of self-publishing between two guys I’d never heard of: Barry Eisler and Joe Konrath. There went my day. Their Newbie’s Guide to Self-Publishing is the Common Sense of this publishing revolution. Between Miller and Eisler/Konrath I found myself at the website of a free e-Pub site called Smashwords.com. It was 3 p.m., I’d just come back from a sweaty walk, I had the taxes to do and dinner to cook. You can guess what happened next.

During my walk I’d tried to think big. Should I take my 500-page seafaring YA novel and throw it up there? How about my mystery novel about a women’s college basketball team whose coach is murdered? How about the first novel in my poi-noir “Hawaiian Hell” series. How about…

Something shorter. A novella or long story. As a test run, but one I could stand behind. Yeah, and being shorter maybe I’d have a chance to see it published before the week was out. I registered with Smashwords and read their calm and matter-of-fact explanation of how they worked. I searched through my WordPerfect files for a story or memoir. It had to meaty, it had to be good. I didn’t want to come out with anything half-baked.

A title leaped out at me: The Skins of Our Ancestors. I was surprised: I thought I’d lost it during a computer meltdown a few years back. I hit the Publish button. There were steps, beginning with one rule that must not be broken: read Smashword’s Style Guide and follow its 25-step process to the letter.

I’ve written a couple of technical manuals in my time. This one gets an A. (Even though some gremlin seems to have messed up a few paragraphs, I could piece together what they meant to say.)

Smashwords only works in Word. I work in WordPerfect, which is a writer’s program but increasingly out of step. So my first step was to strip out any WordPerfect formatting, indents, italics, and so forth from the file that was The Skins of Our Ancestors. Even if you write in Word, though, you’ll have to do this, too. As Smashwords explains, they need your textfile to be utterly basic to be perfectly and easily converted so it works across the many e-reader platforms. Because my file began as WP5 and was saved as WP9 and WP10 before converting to Word, I knew it had to be incredibly dirty. So I chose the Nuclear Option, copying the text into a Microsoft Notepad file, which acts like hydrochloric acid. Then I copied that melted-down text into a new Word doc.

But I wasn’t through. There was still debris in my file, so I followed the Style Guide and cleaned the thing two more times. Then I had to learn to go into the Change Styles folder, make sure nothing was selected except a left indent option, and set that as my new Default. Again, the Style Guide was as intuitive a companion as I could’ve desired. I owe a major lobster to Smashmouth’s technical writer, Mark Coker.

All this reading and uploading and stripping took about two hours and a half. It was highly intensive, eyes-pressed-to-the-screen kind of work. But I was caffeinated and stoked. I could feel my words transforming themselves. Alchemy was in the air.

Smashwords requires two things of a writer: that you do it their way, and you read the damn Style manual. Their way means: no fancy fonts, no experimental spacing or text games. They do give advice on formatting text blocks, charts, images, etc, but all I could say after scanning those steps was, “Thank god I’m a fiction writer,” and “We’ll just stick to words, now, if you please.”

They do require you to do a basic cover, and in fact they give off a vibe that without a competent-looking one your book isn’t going to be placed in their Premium Services category, which is how you show up on Amazon, Barnes&Noble and Borders.
How to create a cover? I figured I’d just upload a picture and slap a title above it.

I’ve taken a lot of digital pictures since 2005, professionally and personally. I was glad I’d gotten into the habit of taking pictures without people in them. (It’s amazing how faces ruin a good landscape.) In this case, I found a shot I’d taken of the oceanfront in my hometown, Long Beach. Since my story was partially about my Long Beach roots, the shot had resonance.

As a magazine editor, I also knew the shot had room for cover lines. The best real estate on a magazine cover is upper right, and this shot had a clear channel all the way down the right.

But when I read in the style guide I’d need a single-image cover sized ideally at 500 pixels wide and 800 high, I knew I was in trouble. My laptop didn’t have any fancy design programs in it, although the Microsoft Office suite undoubtedly had tools. But I’m leery of these internal MS programs; they rarely work as advertised. Third-party programs are usually created by real people to solve read needs in real time, and sure enough, the Style Guide mentioned one, called Paint.net. I linked, downloaded the program, it opened without requiring me to reboot (I had so many files open at this point that would’ve probably sent me off to bed) and I figured out which button to click to put my image up as a background. (It’s called Layer.)

Then I accidentally closed the color palette function and never did find a way to open it. I hit the “T” for text in the toolbar (memories of making magazines late at night guided my fingers) and discovered I’d somehow selected pink. Oh well! To help make the pink pop I found a function that allowed black striping inside the letters. But the sunny ocean backdrop swallowed the title. I knew it would be rejected by Premium Services. And I needed Amazon, etc.

It was late, and I broke to dump some previously cooked chicken sausage into a pot with a can of tomatoes, then chopped some baby bok choy into it. While that was heating Mindy wandered downstairs and put on water for pasta and made a salad. I wandered back to the screen. There was a list of commands in a box on Paint.net, including one that said “Invert Image.” I hit it.

At the top of this blog I hope you’ll see my original photo, before I downloaded Paint.net. The “Invert Image” drained my photo of color and turned it into a negative image. It was noir, it was eerie, it was California’s bright shining myth turned inside-out. It was perfect for my story, which was about black-white relations during the Civil Rights crisis of the mid-1960s.

On the inverted image I happened to type in the first words in lower-case and immediately knew this was the way to go. Ditto for my line-break choices. Suddenly the pink looked real good. Subtle. For pink.

Mindy and I ate dinner with the preoccupied expressions and disjointed conversation common to writers on deadline. She went upstairs to finish her email blast, I went to my screen. Let the publishing begin!

I worked on into the night. A copyright page was required, in a certain style. An author page on Smashmouth’s site needed creating; I was prompted to get a PayPal account, another download which again didn’t require me to reboot. I was reeling a bit as I went through the extensive required formatting and proofreading pre-pub tests. It was 11:30 as I registered and edited and checked indents over and over.

Finally, I uploaded the clean document and pushed Publish.

And was rejected.

But the Style Guide was right with me. If my MS Word 2010 file ended in a “docx” then I had to re-save it in another , probably older Word file that ended with “doc.” Naturally Word doesn’t tell you what those file endings are when you’re doing a Save As, but I guessed Word 2003-2007 because somewhere in the guide the author, Mark Coker, had mentioned that this was his favorite conversion program.

Always pay attention to your tekkie. The file was accepted, uploaded to Smashmouth, and the “Meatgrinder” process, as they call it, began. I was number 323 in the queue and could just walk away, brush my teeth, and go to bed.

In the morning, my eight years of publishing drought had ended. There was more to do in terms of proofing and other tying up of loose ends, including downloading Kindle’s mobi and Adobe’s Reader programs to make sure that The Skins of Our Ancestors would meet their standards. But the book was done. All that remained was to set a price.

The Skins of Our Ancestors is a 24-page story. It’s dense and a bit of a risk. It was meant to anchor a whole book on my upbringing in a Southern/Northern family in Southern California during the racially turbulent ‘60s. I decided it was worth more than free, more than a 99-cent download from iTunes. The Newbie guys, Barry and Joe, had talked about the importance of pricing an e-Book low enough for it to be an impulse purchase. But this was a major chunk of my life and my output. Yeah, that’s worth $2.99.

My royalty breakouts will vary. From Smashmouth.com it’s possible to get a pure 70 percent. Retailers like Amazon and B&N and others take a bigger share, around 50 percent. But these are terms much, much better than legacy publishing offers authors on e-Books (around 14.5 percent after all their surcharges are applied).

In the coming days and months and years, we’ll see how it all plays out. But right now, the magic number is eight. As in eight hours from e-Book newbie to author.

My plans now? The e-Pub imprint I’ve dreamed of is already a reality, and I’ll have more news on that soon. But this experience has me wanting more, now. I know that’s a danger with self-publishing; let’s call it THE danger. If you start ladling slop into your stream of books and publications, you’ll do yourself no favors.

Still, I’m not going to stop now. I think a story a month sounds right. Some will be free, some will be 99-cents. All will be from my archive of unpublished work—nothing just riffed off, like this blog. I think it’s important to reserve a kind of writing for e-Book publication, writing that promises more than the shoot-from-the-hip stuff that fills the web today. Call it premium, or estate reserve, or private label.

Or call it literature.

I also think this may be the route I take with my six-novel series, The Log of Matthew Roving. So maybe that’s what I’ll be putting up six months from now, around September time, the traditional fall season in publishing. I’ll need that much lead time, given that the 500 page novel is 25 times longer than The Skins of Our Ancestors and will require a lot of formatting and re-formatting…

Thank you, Smashwords.

The Skins of Our Ancestors is at http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/51969

Thanks to Jane Friedman, whose Twitter RT started the ball rolling.

Thanks to Michael Maren for telling me to write this blog. To Laura Miller. Here’s her Salon piece, with great links at the bottom:

http://www.salon.com/books/laura_miller/2011/03/29/writer_sell_thyself/index.html

Finally, here’s to Joe Konrath and Barry Eisler. You really have to read Joe’s blog with the 13,000 word Q&A:

http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/2011/03/ebooks-and-self-publishing-dialog.html

What It Means to Be a Writer Today, Part 7: Who Wrote the Book You Loved?

Who Wrote the Book You Loved?

By Don Wallace

Who are the greatest writers of the 20th century? I nominate the following:

Constance Garnett, C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Francis Steegmuller, Gregory Rabassa and Edith Grossman, Edwin and Willa Muir (with Eithne Wilkins and Ernest Kaiser), Norman Thomas di Giovanni, Robert Bly and, I don’t know, maybe the three score guys from the Hampton Court Conference convened in 1604 by King James.

So, yes, I asked a trick question. But if you read in English, like me, then much of the literary greatness you drank so deeply from in youth was a potion filtered through the copper-coiled consciousness of a translator. And if you accept the greatness of the authors above—Tolstoy, Dostoevski, Turgenev and all the other Russians, Proust and Flaubert, Marquez and Fuentes and Llosa and the other Latin Americans, Kafka, Borges, Hamsun, and God—why not give credit to their translators? Because those are their words you’re reading.

As someone with more skin in the writing game than is wise or healthy, I’ve always found this disconcerting.

I remember first getting this sinking feeling when in college, reading Flaubert and Stendahl. Not having had a lick of French at that point, beyond pronouncing “escargot” once or twice (and “condom” a bit more often), I struggled with the archaic Victorian English until the thought hit me: what if these translations were like those 1950s movies with Maurice Chevalier, whose heavily accented English would be parodied in the later Pink Panther movies with Peter Sellers? Once I had the thought, the giggle would just not go away.

With my fragile literary consciousness at risk, I shelved the idea. But it has resurfaced over the years, particularly when I catch myself aiming for “the literary.” I get this fear that I’m simply writing in a style like those dubbed foreign movies where everyone, no matter what nationality, speaks in a tony BBC accent. Has the fear killed off a couple of stories? Yes, and good riddance to bad rubbish, as someone might say on Masterpiece Theatre.

Now, I love translators, generally. I wouldn’t be here without them—on the page, I mean. But leaving aside their indispensability and noble sacrifice on behalf of art, their ubiquity and their concealment in plain sight does bring up an inconvenient question:

Who wrote that book you loved?

The author, you say. Really? How can you tell? Do you read (French, Russian, Hebrew, etc.)? Okay, then. The translator. All foreign literature in translation is like these movies with which Hollywood is currently infatuated, the ones where James Franco or Matt Damon or Leo DiCaprio get themselves inserted into someone else’s body in another time zone. To save the world or get the girl, which amounts to the same thing.

Only, how do you know that when you’re reading Borges you’re not really kissing Matt Damon? Now there’s a thought. Hope you enjoyed it.

Anyway . . . just once I’d like us to admit that we’ve always accepted the greatness of these “great” books on faith. I understand the reasons. I mean, nobody goes to the rack and looks for books with a “Fair-to-Middling Foreign Classic” sticker on the cover. And yet, that’s what you could be getting, if the translator is a dodo or the editor ran out of money for adjectives. Or, as happened to most of the books in translation that I grew up on, the moral code of the times insisted on bowdlerizing all the good parts.

My beef here is that “greatness” which is actually mediocrity (in any case, but here specifically in translation) lures us away from finding our own soul’s path, our craft’s best practices and our own extra-authentic style. And, dude, falling in love with the “wrong” “great” literature can so spoil your groove. As Glen Beck might say, and hopefully will soon: reading foreign novels in English brings your babies ever closer to the clutches of that secret international puppet-master class.

Okay, so I sound paranoid. I hope it comes off in a fun way. And maybe this sounds a little hectoring, as if I’m now going to sniff and say that if you can’t read Nabokov in Russian then you really can’t claim to have read him at all. Well, nope, I’m not going there. Let me repeat: I love books in translation. It’s just that . . .

Come a little closer. Tell me something. Hmm? We’ve established that you wouldn’t have gone near these books unless they’d been certified “great” beforehand. In other words, it’s indisputable that you accepted a definition of “great” before you ever read a single transmuted sentence. Now, this surely influenced your reception of the work, did it not?

In science, that’s called a failure to control for bias. In literature, it’s called Norton Classics.

But we’re not here to deny the judgment of the jurists; our beef is with prose that takes the easy way out, by adopting the mannerisms, style and subject matter of the consensus great and famous. I’m not indicting the prose of the “greats” in translation, but of those writers who fall under their sway and never, ever emerge . . .

Hey, relax. I’m not prosecuting you—I’m interrogating my younger self.

I guess, more and more, the way imitation turns into something original fascinates me. When you’re young this is experimentation, right? Experimentation: the word that exonerates pot-smoking Presidential candidates and promiscuous young writers. I remember reading Joyce’s Dubliners and Borges’ Ficciones one rainy weekend and the next thing I knew, my characters spoke in Irish accents while dipping in and out of alternative universes—all in suburban Long Beach, California, ca. 1970.

After awhile, though, I was bothered by how easily my sincere flattery became impersonation. The infatuated writer turns creepy, like the stalker in “Single White Female” or Bergman’s “Persona.” The theme from “The Twilight Zone” begins to play in the background . . .

Time here to pause. Reflect. Become afraid. Very afraid. But don’t worry, I’ll be back. We’re not done here. Not by a long shot.

Because the question will not die: Who really wrote the book you loved? Raymond Carver—or Gordon Lish? Thomas Wolfe—or Maxwell Perkins? James Patterson—or a string of J. Walter Thompson vice-presidents?

The Problem with Good Books: What It Means to Be a Writer Today, Part 6

The Problem with Good Books

By Don Wallace

When we asked whether Bad Books ruin us for Good Writing, it was a bit of a softball question, as Bad Books are part of the same cultural arc that acclaims White Castle sliders and “Dancing with the Stars” and Kill Bill, Vol 1—part of our All-American self-abasement sweepstakes. Nobody can be against Bad Books in America, for the same reason that characters who eat at McDonald’s in movies (or in politics) are morally superior to those portrayed dining on sous-vide squash soup and roasted beef-marrow-bones sauced with duck liver foam. We are a low-rent democracy. For an author, citing a Bad Book as influential is shorthand for saying, “See? I’m just a regular person like you. Now buy my book so I never have to eat at McDonald’s again.”

Of far greater concern are the bad books I’ve read while under the impression they were good. In my experience, a Bad Book passes through the digestive system like a bad oyster; you may spend a day with a hangover, full of remorse, but no lasting harm is done, usually, and the next day you can actually fit in your jeans again. With a Good Book—or what you think is one or, more probably, have been told is one, over and over again until you believe it—you’re on the receiving end of something that can do sustained and probably irreparable damage to everything: your love life, your opinions on a huge variety of subjects, your choice of a career or lack thereof. Good Books explain your recent enlistment in the Foreign Legion or Teach for America, your love of ethnic cuisine or meat and potatoes, your modest drug habit or boxed set of Mozart. Every time you open your mouth at the dining table to deliver an opinion, Good Books inflict collateral damage upon your friends and family.

All of the above would be perfectly acceptable if Good Books didn’t also mess with your prose. But they do. Because officially recognized Good Books are set out as examples, unlike Bad Books, they instill in us what Harold Bloom called “the anxiety of influence”—which leads to imitation, which in turn can lead to years spent wandering up somebody else’s blind alley.

It would be easy to pussyfoot around here, play it safe: drop hints and act the part of coy ingenue. But what’s the fun in that? I’ll start by mentioning the writers who repaid my love by leading me into The Punitive Error of Jokiness (Pynchon), The Manly Sin of Bruxism (Hemingway), or The Vastly Orotund Pretentiousness of Memory-Palace Builders (Gass, Grass, Gaddis, Gardner…). They wrote stuff I still like and admire, but what rubbed off on me did not improve my writing, unless in the sense that one must go through Purgatory to reach Heaven.

The dangers of these first examples, for a young writer, or for any writer starting out, can be demonstrated by imagining each as a person you’ve been seated next to at a Thanksgiving dinner table. Perhaps he is an uncle or a boyfriend or visiting Puritan. Anyway, the guy telling puns and jokes nonstop until you’re exhausted? Pynchon. Nice writer if he’d just ditch the whimsy. Of course, seriousness can be overdone, as witness Uncle Ernest over there. Geez, what a blowhard! He could use a little more time on the dance floor with Aunt Hadley, doin’ the Lighten Up as rendered stereophonically by Archie Bell and the Drells. Still, Uncle E at least shuts up now and then, and can handle his liquor, unlike The Four G’s, as we think of those second cousins from Hohenzollern-Haut-Savoy who’ve memorized every mini-series and controversy on Masterpiece/History/PBS and keep topping each other with fact upon fact, scene upon scene, debate upon debate.

Easy pickings? Agreed. None of the writers above are exactly sacred cows. (Or steers. We did notice they were all male.) All have taken their lumps, seen their stars tremble in the firmament, even fall. The really dangerous writers are those who still have that aura of untouchability.

A prime example is Raymond Carver, the same “Ray” I collected off my doorstep one morning (the liquor store across the street was the last to close and first to open in Santa Cruz). Poor guy, on the cusp of fame and fortune and he didn’t know it, shaking so hard he could barely sip the cup of instant Folgers I made him. The hand-rolled cig didn’t help much, either. Waylon Jennings on the turntable at 7 a.m.? Good intentions pave the road to hell.

When I got to Iowa and the Writers’ Workshop the following year, imagine my surprise to find Ray Carver and his brand of minimalism enshrined as the default mode of writing among my peers. I didn’t disagree; the proof was there on the page, plus as a Westerner I loved Carver because I’d lived in “his” landscapes and among “his” people. But it felt a little odd to have my own writing taken to task in workshops for its un-Carver-like qualities. I hadn’t realized the purpose of a workshop was to foster imitation.

What the cult of Carver wrought for the next ten to fifteen years, maybe longer, was The Sin of Remorseless Reduction—the elimination of adjectives, modifiers, thoughts, motifs, and anything the least bit fancy from the prose, as well as any deeper emotions and motivations from the characters. As we were allegedly doing this in the service of portraying the “inarticulate,” this made artistic sense. Hemingway did the same for the whores in “The Light of the World” and the shell-shocked in his Nick Adams stories. But as a template for writers trying to find their own way, and their voices and prose styles, it was like a diet of bread and water.

For me, still recovering from an undergrad overdose of Pynchon and Heller and Tom Robbins, this restrictive diet was probably a good thing. But it became a straitjacket—no, a veritable gastric band!—when combined with the cult of Carver’s approved subject matter: a narrow focus on those stunted but certifiably authentic souls who pumped gas, lived in trailer parks, worked as fry cooks and truckers, and even sat next to us in the Hamburg Inn No. 2 nursing hangovers, unaware that we might eavesdrop on them to flesh out our tales of their mating and subsistence rituals.

Carver was a dangerous man to love, no question. His trademark flattened-out affect strangled many a writer’s child in the crib. This wasn’t his fault; it was all our own, for following him where he did not ask us to, through twenty years of K-Mart realism, where some of the best writing minds in my generation and others to follow wandered in a land of no inflection, where the slightest comma could be King.

What It Means to Be a Writer Today, Part 5: OMG I Loved the Wrong Book!

OMG I Loved the Wrong Book!

By Don Wallace

In my last post, in the interest of lessening the level of general anxiety, we gave out Genius Passes to all writer-readers. (If you weren’t there, stick around and see me after this session. But don’t come empty-handed.)

Anyway, as an exercise in self-esteem inflation the results were so great that this time around we’ll take on another potential downer: the relationship of author worship, critical influence, and peer pressure to our personal development as writers. Let’s see if we can’t turn our secret under-the-covers-flashlight-reading into radiant happiness. (You’re looking very well today, I might add.)

But a word of caution: see title above.

The first thing to say, it seems to me, is that if you love the right books, your writing will one day be just as good. Love Joyce? Love Woolf? Love Cortázar? Congratulations, you must be right up there on the New York Times Bestseller List.

Oh. You aren’t? So sorry.

And they’re not either? No Joyce, Woolf, Cortázar? OMG!

Well, we’re really not that naive. We ate our Wheaties without expecting to become Lance Armstrong or Kristi Yamaguchi. But I will say that we who write have a right to be ticked off at the system. In terms of the books we were told to admire, we were raised on Grape-Nuts only to be let loose on a world that buys Froot Loops.

Fortunately, most of us snuck Froot Loops or Count Chocula or at least Frosted Flakes, so we have an idea of what the marketplace truly wants. And the same went for books. We all read crap and loved it.

That leaves the question of what to do about those furtive, secret itches we get when we’re writing our usual very serious and profoundly meaningful stuff. Do we repress the urge? Do we admit to it and apologize to the muse and try to ignore it? Or do we open the creative floodgates and invite Little Boy Bad Book to play with Little Lord Fauntle-Book?

If you’ve had kids, you know how that’s going to turn out.

So reading bad books does create what the Wall Street wizards call “moral hazard,” in that like the recent unpleasantness, it encourages the mingling of toxic assets with AAA-rated securitized literature. And as we all know, today Wall Street is wolfing down steak while we’re eating our seed corn.

Is the same thing happening to our published, approved, canonized literature? How can it not, is the reply. Into the realm of the high-falutin, Chabon introduced the comic book, Lethem the super-hero, Franzen the talking turd—and the critics fell all over themselves in their rush to praise. Rather than fight it, and risk looking like old fogies, like the 1950s Comic Book League of Decency, we tried to dig it. And, you know what? Two out of three ain’t bad.

Anyway, there still are standards. A few walls have been left standing. How do I know this? Well, if reproducible results were the only criteria with which to measure literary success, obviously the genre known collectively as ZVSF (Zombie and Vampire Shopping and/or Fucking) would be taught in our better universities.

Oh. They are? Boy, did I miss THAT boat.

But I’m not complaining, really. Quixotic as it may seem, here’s the crux of this ongoing blog and the reason it’s called What It Means to Be a Writer Today and not, say, WIMTBAW-Yesterday. Time marches on, taste trailing in its wake like a sulky poodle or John Galliano in an S&M collar.

Taste changes. Writers die. Books die. Sometimes they resurrect. One thing we can be sure of is that the books we read live on as long as we do.

Unfortunately, that goes for Bad Books, too. In fact, when it comes to our earliest books, the Froot Loop ones maybe made us into writers as much as our Grape-Nuts ones.

So be proud of having read Huckleberry Finn in fourth grade, or Pride and Prejudice in sixth grade, or The Fall as a sophomore. But don’t be surprised if your other early reading now makes you a laughingstock—but only in your nightmares, we hope.

Unless you really did say that thing about Pippi Longstocking in your creative writing seminar. (Really? Well, at least Pippi’s a girl. Women’s studies are going to love that. But tell me you didn’t . . . Star Wars novels? All 136 of them? How interesting. What? When you were twenty years old? Of course I agree that Jabba the Hutt is a perfect example of how bodyism can be turned into something positive, like sex work-ism. Yes, it’s all very transgressive, I’m sure. And I loved Princess Leia’s outfit.)

To close, let us paraphrase a canine classic and bestseller and say, There Are No Bad Books. At least when it comes to what inspired you—and still inspires you—to write.

Next time out we’ll continue the “hair on fire” roadshow by examining The Problem With Good Books. This will include an examination of the Influence & Taste Machine as it trimmed and embroidered the careers of John Cheever, Ray Carver and his army of imitators, and why it is necessary to blow it once in awhile. Should be fun. Eventually, after a detour or two, we’ll get to the way the real world of fiction publishing works, and where it might be headed. And we’ll also reunite with our companion-examples of the earlier blog, the 23-year-old and 45-year-old, both just starting out on the path.

This post also appeared on the We Wanted to Be Writers website.

The Good News: What It Means to Be a Writer Today Part 1

The Good News


Sitting here in publishing limbo, bracing ourselves for waves of change and tidal surges of destruction, we may feel compelled to ask what exactly did we get ourselves into when we decided to be writers. After all, the consensus of media and other anointed commentators seems to be that the whole writing game is over. To give it a catchy, twitterable title: “Print is Dead, The Book is Toast, And William Shakespeare Were He Alive Today Would Be Writing For HBO and Doing Slam-Tweet Contests–LOL!!!” None of which is refutable.

As this new year dawns, Borders may already be in bankruptcy. E-books surpass print books in sales. And somewhere, in a rude straw-filled library carrel, another would-be writer slouches toward a coffee break. Another would-be writer pauses in making that latte (skim, extra espresso shot) to mentally jot a note about a story unfolding in her head. And in far-off Colombia, a coffee grower’s cocaine-addicted son is typing as fast as his fingers can fly, chasing a vision that nobody can deny and may even get him admitted to an MFA program in the U.S.A.

That’s the beauty of this thing of ours. Publishing may be going to hell, or heaven, who knows. But writing goes on. Writers stumble on their vocation every day.

In future posts, I’m going to try to stick to one topic: What it means to be a writer today. It takes chutzpah to call this first post “The Good News,” but what the hell, it’s a new year and the slate is clean and as I will soon point out, even the “bad” news is good.

As to where I’m coming from, always a valid question with writers on any subject, I figure that in my own way I’m in a perfect position to judge the current scene. I’ve been at the writing thing for my entire adult life, I’ve straddled the academic and “real” world, written for a living and for no reward except the rapture, been inside the beast called publishing, lived on both coasts and in the middle, and I’m not a big success.

I think that last is crucial: success ruins writers in terms of advice. Either they tell you stuff to discourage you (because they’re so unique, and you’re so jejune) or they make it seem so elementary that you feel you’ve been a slacker not to have written and published at least a trilogy by the time you’re twenty-five.

Now for the good news. First, location does not matter. Sure, all the media attention makes it seem so necessary, somehow, to get published before you’re twenty, acquire a quirky ethnic or foreign accent, pal around with the future famous, grow a scruffy beard, and move to Brooklyn or even better, Williamsburg. Well, no. Most of the so-called great writers didn’t come from New York or do their great work there; most still won’t.

If you drag yourself across the country because you think Brooklyn will water your roots, by all means, do it. Rude shocks make for better writing. But thanks to the creative destruction of the publishing mechanism, times were never better for getting your work out into the readersphere.

Second, the door is open. The above-referenced creative destruction is opening a million or more doors for those who, for the first time in history, can bypass the filters that publishing used to weed out the hordes of would-be writers. Not to knock the hard and ill-paid work of agents (the first filter) and editors (the second filter) and publishing executives (the third, hidden filter), but the world they made was never a meritocracy of literature or even storytelling. It was more like a bodyguard working the velvet rope at Club 54. The amount of slush pile submissions was simply overwhelming. And depressing. There was no way to sort it without adopting the most callous triage.

In the end, most books were published by word of mouth–a friend who knew a friend passed along a name, someone sighed and said, “Okay, I’ll take a look.” For those who had really powerful friends, the process was easier and the results often were meretricious: in the ’50s, white males in snap-brim hats apparently had a field day, effortlessly drinking martinis and smoking Chesterfields and single-finger typing huge novels; in the ’80s, any reasonably pretty daughter of a CEO who could put her hair up in a chignon and pout for a photographer could publish her slim volume of stories. (Not to be unfair to pretty daughters of the rich, but writing is a zero-sum game when it comes to reviews and column inches of press coverage, and Daddy’s empire also monopolized attention.) Today, you don’t need to be anybody’s daughter, or white, or male. You just digitize and self-publish and flog that blog of yours. It can happen to you.

Third, the field is clear. Nobody is stopping you. Because the value that the marketplace attaches to books is always much lower than the effort it takes to produce them, those with the drive, obsession, mania or serenity to keep writing and improving (and self-editing) can just motor along and watch the wrecks of wannabe writers pile up on the roadside.

If you start out writing at twenty, by the time you hit forty you’ll be among a very select group–those who kept going. Not that this promises any satisfaction other than that. But as an indicator of mental and psychic engagement in the world, chasing a dream is much better than sitting around wondering where it all went.

That’s enough good news for one day.

The Two Paths: What It Means to Be a Writer Today Part 2

The Two Paths


In my previous post, I explored the news for writers emerging from the ashes of traditional publishing. Recently, I have been thinking about how writers get started. Two people I know have recently asked me for advice, or else didn’t get out of the way fast enough when I offered it. These two friends couldn’t be more different in terms of age: one is 23, the other 45. They also couldn’t be more similar. They feel frustrated at what life has to offer in the way of engagement with the world. No jobs for the high minded, for the restless of soul, for writers.

They also want to make some money doing something they love. What can I say?

In reality I don’t say anything, not compared to what I feel should be said. It’s not feasible to dump one’s accumulated riffs and rants, the burnt seeds of wasted potential, the caffeinated speed raps, the fruit of reading and thought and experience. Forty years of that.

Instead, I say to the young, go, if you must, to law school, because there is no path that I can even point you down. We know you’ve tried to get internships, job interviews, but as of September 15, 2008 the old ways of wetting your feet while writing your first stories just up and vanished.

Forty years ago, when my wife and I and our friends stumbled blinking into the world, there was such a way. I now know it was more of an illusion but it had the blind unwavering trust of millions and so was stable underfoot. Here it is:

You emerge from your evolutionary pool—school, library, gang—with the sense of a secret power, perhaps your only power: words have extraordinary meaning for you. In turn you value them, honor what they can do, and practice like a samurai until adept in their use.

In college your abilities are recognized, which is nice. But in the old guild style you are expected to hang back, work hard, write a showcase story or novel excerpt, which is brought to the attention of a magazine editor —a quarterly or journal—who after a couple rejections publishes something. After a couple more acceptances the names of an editor or two at the slicks are murmured to you. You write and are terse and polite. They write back one-sentence verdicts, thumbs up, mostly down.

You send a story. Rejected. Another. Rejected. You’re out of stories. You write more; it’s becoming like a regular job now. Either you get on the stick and crank or you’ll still be doing this when you’re 25! And now you’re broke and the family isn’t sending any money and somebody murmurs “Grad school.”

Either you go or you don’t; it’s more of the same. Now you’re 25. Words still do it for you. But money is no longer discretionary; without it creative thinking gets banished to third or fourth on the day’s to-do list.

Now, thus far this story describes a world that still exists in outline, in living memory. But what follows no longer survives: a ladder of literary markets.

Kurt Vonnegut apologized to a bunch of us in 1975 at Iowa, saying he felt shitty about our prospects when he used to be able to sell a story to The Saturday Evening Post or Ladies Home Journal for $5,000 or even $10,000. That money from the “slicks” subsidized the likes of Cat’s Cradle and Slaughterhouse-5. Meanwhile we could look forward to fighting over $250 honorariums and payment in copies. Kurt was a sci-fi writer, he could see the future wasn’t getting any better. It never does.

So the ladder vanished, rung by rung. The network of fiction editors was squeezed for pages, lost column inches to diets and TV stars, and then lost their jobs. Short stories no longer ran in magazines—the argument that a spate of unreadable experimental fictions accelerated the process has merit, but really it was TV, then cable, and long before the Internet we’d lost Mademoiselle, Glamour, all the women’s mags we once turned our noses up at. And the ecology of fiction went into shock. Book excerpts, of mid-list novels, used to be subject to bidding wars. An author might get a couple hundred grand on top of her advance. No more.

Meanwhile the old guild system was failing, without all that fresh green money to water the roots the new trees weren’t thriving. Used to be, a writer like John Irving could publish a couple or three books that didn’t sell many copies and then he’d have his “break-out book” and the publisher would rush copies of his old books back into the stores and they’d become retroactive bestsellers, too. And everyone got rich, or at least made good money, and did so while upholding an ecosystem that guaranteed a stable future.

Once that was gone—no slicks, no excerpts, no patience to let writers grow (because money = patience)—book publishing became like Broadway. Where, as playwright Robert Anderson said to us at Iowa, you can make a killing, but you can’t make a living.

This is a good place to pause, with our two writers facing his or her respective paths, or rather, standing where the paths peter out before a great dark wood. The young writer, wondering whether to persist, the more mature writer, starting out in the evening, both are going to make a choice.

What they decide—and the consequences thereof—will be dealt with in my next post.

Past Present Future: What It Means to Be a Writer Today, Part 3

Past Present Future


In our last installment we left two beginning writers, one 23, the other 45, at the outer edge of a deep dark wood. We spent a lot of time explaining how the old literary ladders had been busted, that the good ol’ days of big advances and multiple markets for short stories, all were gone. We left them asking the question, “Where do I go from here?”

And like cowards, we ran away. More than a week they’ve been standing there! They’re cold, they’re hungry, they smoked their last butts on the second day.

Now we’re going to do something worse. Instead of bringing them a hot cup of soup and a cold beverage, we’re going to yell at them: “Are you crazy? The world is in turmoil, the economy is in the tank, and you want to be what?”

But guess what? They look right through us. Like we don’t exist. Like we’re the ghosts in the Underworld in Dante’s Inferno. What’s up with that?

What’s up is the best reason to be happy about the future of writing, reading, and even our precious literary standards. Because the ones who are just starting out on the path treat us like ghosts and walk right through us, and on into the future.

Why is that such a good thing? Let’s start with our 23-year-old. First, young beginning writers can be so annoying, no question. They just blithely start writing, without asking the permission of older writers. Don’t they know that’s not how it’s done?

Of course they don’t, and that’s the beauty of being a beginner. It just kinda sucks for the rest of us, who’ve put in our 10,000 hours that Malcolm Gladwell talks about in Outliers, only we put in those 10K, like, 100K hours ago. So we’re due, and we’re sore because here comes yet another tyro who’s just had her hippocampus light up like a mouse brain in a lab test over a short story she’s written. Written without our permission!

And that’s the beauty, I repeat. Let us learn from the young. We should all be beginners. Don’t feel you have to wait 10,000 hours because some woolly headed New Yorker writer said so. Don’t you know he’s saying that to weed out the field of woolly headed rivals?

Just sit down at the table in the laundromat and knock out a dozen poems, like “The Flowers of Evil,” or a book of short stories, including “Breakfast at Tiffany’s.” Type Typee at age 25, emo Omoo and White Jacket before you’ve even learned proper grammar, and let the critics sniff.

As for the 45-year-old, well, she should really know better. That’s why the rest of us find older beginning writers to be even more irritating. The young, they’re young. The older writers, really, with all the mileage on their souls . . . (How are you going to take a decent plunging neckline author photo?) And yet here they come, looking like Joan of Arc right after she got conked on the head while stirring the cook-pot and had a vision of herself leading France to freedom. They throw aside good jobs, fat pensions, sensible shoes and instead of watching “Mad Men” and “Hawaii 5-0″ and “Dancing with the Stars” while folding socks, they start writing. They write Almayer’s Folly, and Jim, and The Secret Sharer, and Nostromo. They write Stones for Ibarra and Don Quixote. They write The Maltese Falcon and The Thin Man.

And they totally ignore the OMG expressions of the youngsters in skinny jeans and high-top tennis shoes who own writing the way strollers own the sidewalks of Brooklyn.

That’s why we should all be older beginning writers, too. Because they’re saying the future belongs to them, hipster beards or not. But also because they’re saying that we who are old like them, but who put in our 100K hours, we should stop carping. Either get aboard or step aside, because this train’s got to run today.

And now, back to you, No. 23 and No. 45 at the edge of the deep dark wood. Did that answer your question? Are you ready to take the next step, and the next, and the one after that?

But they’re gone.

We’ll catch up to them next week. Or not.