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selling your work

Drinking Muddy Water: Why Your Pitch Isn’t Working

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Recently, for reasons that aren’t important here, I found myself at the Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco with a gaggle of third-graders (a gaggle is six, if you’re unfamiliar with the imperial system of measurement). One of the most interesting items I saw there was Neil Gaiman’s original pitch to DC for Sandman. And yes, if you’re wondering who goes to the cartoon museum and gets excited about the pages with no drawings on them, that would be me.

Anyway, that made me start thinking about pitches in general and why so many of them are terrible. It’s true, and the simple reason is because authors are so wrapped up in their story, the world they’ve been living in for months or even years, that they can no longer articulate it quickly for anyone else. I think it was in Save the Cat! that the author described pitching screenplay ideas to strangers in line at coffee shops. If their eyes didn’t glaze over after 30 seconds, he knew he had a decent story. This is a great approach if you’re kicking around ideas and haven’t written anything yet.

If you’ve already written your masterpiece and are now trying to get it read by agents, publishers, or anyone other than your mom or your spouse, you need a slightly different approach. It’s fun, it won’t take much effort, and you might discover something about your story that you never knew before. Instead of the standard breathless paragraph embedded in a query letter, try to tell your story in a different format, preferably one with very strict rules.

My personal favorite is the 12-bar blues method, but you can also go with villanelle or sonnet, anything that makes you fit your ideas into a box with a new shape. I like the blues format because the lyrics have a lot of repetition, which can help simplify a complex story, or possibly add nuance to a simple one. Here’s a fine example of the AAB lyric structure, brought to you by the North Mississippi Allstars, who you should be listening to anyway.

[vimeo=http://www.vimeo.com/39640318]

How is this going to make your pitch better? Well, like the coffee-shop method, if you can’t sell yourself your idea using a formal structure, chances are no one else is going to get it either, and that’s usually because there’s a flaw in your story somewhere. You don’t have a solid plot, or you have too many subplots, or you’re not entirely sure who your characters are or what they want. If your story easily flows into a formal poem or song structure, it’s going to translate in any medium. I don’t recommend sending your final pitch to prospective agents in this format, but your ultimate presentation will be stronger for the process, and you may be able to save yourself a lot of revision time with the next project if you create a pitch first.

Give it a try. If you’re feeling noncommittal, by which I mean lazy, use the poetry magnets on your fridge and make a haiku out of your story instead. We all have them. Mine happen to be lolcat magnets, but anything works.

 

writing

What You Love

Updated on

Happy Imbolc/Candlemas/Lunar New Year!

A few nights ago, I had dinner with a chef. He didn’t make the dinner; he just happened to be there. Someone at the table asked him a question, and his wife interceded with, “Don’t ask him—he hates food.” The chef elaborated that he didn’t so much hate food, just the people he worked with who saw it as a commodity, as a budget item. I could see how that would frustrate a person who has dedicated his career to creating meals with respect for the ingredients and the end users. It’s difficult to love something and watch other people treat it like a plastic bag.

But you probably already know this if you are a writer of any kind. Your story, your science, whatever you’re putting out there for people to read is drafted with love and respect for the raw materials: words. The right words get the job done, whether that job is explaining a newly hatched theory or making someone cry. If you don’t love the words, if you don’t cringe when you hear people abuse them, it’s possible that you are in the wrong business.

If you aren’t using the correct words to say what you mean, then you have no idea what you’re saying, and neither does anyone else. The grant application is misunderstood and denied. The novel excerpt is scanned and rejected because agents can spot a callous amateur in less time than it takes to hit Send on your query letter.

I could ramble on, but dozens of semioticians, semanticists, linguists, and my fellow pedants have thoroughly harrowed this ground already, so I’ll settle for some entertaining examples of linguistic ignorance (underlining is all mine).

  1. “‘Bill Stepien has not broken any laws,’ the lawyer, Kevin H. Marino, wrote, arguing that the subpoena violates his client’s rights against self-incrimination and unreasonable search and seizure.” New York Times article
  2. “It wasn’t until the Renaissance that true theater enjoyed a rebirth,” Kaplan CSET Subject Examination for Teachers
  3. “As they say, the problem with the French is they have no word for entrepreneur.” Newsweek article

To be fair, the first quotation is from an attorney, and they get paid for intentional obfuscation, but it’s still worth mentioning. The others? No excuse. I would also like to point out that all three examples were brought to my attention by a person who learned English as a second language. This fortifies my theory that the best way to learn about language is to study a different one.

Let me contrast my usage shaming with a reference to some of the most remarkable nonfiction I’ve discovered in decades. I say discovered because I didn’t actually read it; it’s from a TV series called The Story of Film: An Odyssey. You can watch it on Netflix and probably some other places. It was written, directed, and narrated by a guy named Mark Cousins. Watching it will not only give you a thorough yet condensed education on the history of film, it will, if you have any sensitivity to the language at all, make the hairs stand up on the back of your neck the way they do when you hear the very best lines of poetry. The film is based on a book, which I suspect would be a joy to read, but watching the series gives you the moving images and the words together. Remember “Poetry makes nothing happen”? Film makes light happen.

Anyway, love your work. Learn to do it mindfully and with respect, or find something more suitable. Accept that other people will stomp all over it and react with hostility and scorn when you try to educate them. Feel free to complain about it in the comments; I understand.

writing

Notes from the Field, New Year’s Resolution Edition

Updated on

Happy New Year!

New Year’s resolutions—I don’t bother with ’em, but if you do, and one of yours is to be a better writer in 2014, here are a few useful tips. I added some audiovisual aids because you’re probably nursing a hangover and will appreciate something to look at besides a box of text. You’re welcome.

fiction novel—This is a redundant term, and using it on a query will earn you a form rejection in record time. You might not even get the “Thank you for submitting” boilerplate, just an email with the words Fat Chance. A novel is a work of fiction; if a book-length manuscript is about real people or events, then it is nonfiction, unless you made part of it up, in which case you may call it historical fiction as long as all the people you write about are dead or you have a strong legal team.

ellipses—These can be tricky, and I see a lot of people overusing them in place of other punctuation. An ellipsis in academic writing is used to replace part of a citation that is not relevant or too long. If the excised part of the citation comes at the end of a sentence, use four dots: an ellipsis plus a period.

Example: “Hey, they aren’t half…bad.” (Statler and Waldorf, 2002).

In fiction or literary nonfiction, an ellipsis may be used sparingly to indicate a pause in dialogue or a trailing off at the end of a statement. If dialogue ends abruptly or is interrupted by another character, use an em dash. Like any other writing trick, overuse of ellipses results in diminished effect.

Bad example: “I think…it was the…old man…who killed me!”

Better examples:

Joe spoke haltingly, fighting for breath. “I think it was the old man who killed me!”

“In 1930, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, in an effort to alleviate the effects of the… Anyone? Anyone?… the Great Depression, passed the… Anyone? Anyone?”

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uhiCFdWeQfA?rel=0-A&w=320&h=240]

 

The Player: The old man thinks he’s in love with his daughter.
Rosencrantz: Good God. We’re out of our depths here.
The Player: No, no, no! He hasn’t got a daughter! The old man thinks he’s in love with his daughter.
Rosencrantz: The old man is?
The Player: Hamlet…in love…with the old man’s daughter…the old man…thinks.

(Skip to 2:06, or enjoy the full clip if you’ve got time.)

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fk7V8f6E5po?rel=0-A&w=320&h=240]

since and while—These are words that indicate the passage of time. If you are using them to mean because, whereas, or although, stop.

Incorrect:
Since you asked, I’m packing up your stuff.
While that is a valid point, I disagree.

Correct:
I’ve been living here since 1993.
While you were sleeping, I kidnapped your goldfish.
Because you never kiss me goodnight any more, I’m moving out.
Although you make a mean cup of coffee, that’s not a strong enough basis for continuing our relationship.

chaise lounge—I know, I know; it started as a simple typo, but that’s no reason to let it fester in our language. Chaise longue means “long chair” in French. It rhymes with “fez wrong,” only you need to lengthen that o  and put a little Long Island on the ng. Lounge is what you do on the chaise longue, or possibly the room in which you display this article of furniture.

influencer—This word is very popular right now, and it’s making me crazy. Influence is both a noun and a verb. It means “flow into,” in the sense of a stream or small river joining a larger river, bringing its unique pH, native plants and animals, and sediments with it. An influence is an addition to someone or something that alters content, direction, or velocity. Influencer is a superfluous, unnecessary, and illogical formation, and you can tell all the thought leaders who are tossing it around that I said so.

Thanks for reading, and best wishes for prosperity and published work in 2014.

writing

Just get there already.

Updated on

Here’s an issue I’ve been dealing with lately: the minute description of trivial actions in fiction. I call it telescoping, stretching out something that can easily fit into a smaller space. The following is an example, entirely from my head and not from a manuscript I’ve been reading lately (certainly not yours).

I got up. I walked to the fridge. I opened the door, looked inside, and got a beer. Then I turned around and went over to the counter to find an opener.

This entire passage could be replaced by “I got myself a beer.” Even this abbreviated version, which conveys every nuance of the previous example, is unnecessary unless it relates to the plot in some way. Is the narrator an alcoholic? Is it 9:30 in the morning? Does the narrator, unable to locate a bottle opener, attempt to open said beer with a bread knife and sever a finger, requiring a trip to the ER, where he meets his love interest/nemesis/long-lost son? If the answer is no, cut the beer. Get yourself a beer (unless it’s 9:30 in the morning or you’re driving while writing, which I don’t recommend) and figure out what you want to make happen in this paragraph. Writing just to get words on the page is fine, but go back and cut the filler on your next revision day. Fiction is not third-grade arithmetic; you don’t need to show your work.

My point? Trust your readers to follow you. If your hero is watching TV in one room when the doorbell rings, the next line doesn’t have to tell us that she got up and walked to the door and opened it. “The doorbell rang. It was Eddie, the punk kid from downstairs.” We get it. If you’re afraid that readers will get lost or bored unless you take every little step with them, maybe you need to rethink your story. Anything that is tedious to write will be several orders of magnitude more so to read. An agent won’t bother, nor will any disinterested* shopper perusing your author site and considering dropping $8.99 on your self-published masterpiece.

Just get there; we’re right behind you.

*disinterested means unbiased, open to possibilities, as opposed to uninterested, which means “mind made up already, Do Not Want.” Today you get two for one.

books writing

My Cat Can Save Your Story

Updated on

For some reason, I can’t read books about writing books. I went to graduate school to learn how to get better at writing books, and do you know what we read there? Actual books, about silkworms or falling in love or dying in wars. That would be my recommendation to anyone else. One exception I’ve found is books about writing screenplays, maybe because most screenwriters are more transparent about why they write: it’s about getting paid, not so much about honing one’s craft or changing the world with the magic of prose. Also, screenplays have more rules than novels; they are defined by their form like a villanelle or a 12-bar blues progression (more about which later).

Anyway, I’ve found two excellent, intelligent, and above all short books about how to write a better screenplay that translate very well to novel writing. Neither of these books, singly or together, will turn you into a rich and famous author, but they will at least buy you a ticket in the lottery.

mystory

 

My Story Can Beat Up Your Story, by Jeffrey Alan Schechter

This book is invaluable when it comes to writing strong, identifiable characters and compelling situations. It’s amazing how easy it is when you reduce your story to the simplest possible terms, which you will need to do anyway if you want to write a successful pitch, more about which later.

 

savethecat

 

Save the Cat! by Blake Snyder

This is another quick and easy read that will make you want to smack yourself in the face and rhetoricate*,”It’s so obvious! How did I not think of that?” Seriously. Got a plot problem? This book will show you how to fix it.

If the usual how-to books and “writers on writing” monographs written by famous authors when they were strapped for cash or ideas work for you, great! Use them. If you find them as tiresome as I do and have limited patience and discretionary reading time, try these out and let me know what you think. If you love movies and have an encyclopedic knowledge of plot twists, so much the better.

*No, I did not make that word up. I thought I had, but it turns out someone else got there first.

writing

Notes from the Field, July 2013 Edition

Updated on

This post deals with common usage errors I’ve run across recently. If you’re a little unclear on any of these, don’t feel bad: many highly educated writers and professionals are blatantly misusing them. Now you don’t have to be one of them.

affect/effect—Affect as a verb means to change; as a noun it is most commonly used to describe a mental or emotional state, often one that is consciously put on to impress others (affected). You find that one frequently in psychology texts (lack of affect = showing no response to stimuli). Effect as a verb also means change in the sense of “to make something happen.” As a noun it describes the result of an action on something: a baseball affects a window, and the effects are broken glass and an insurance claim.

  • Verb examples: Education is the best tool to effect social change, and its benefits affect everyone in the community.
  • Noun examples: Her affect is world-weary and sophisticated, but its effect on people is anything but complimentary.

alright/all right—Alright is a throat-clearing term like OK, hey, look, or dude. It has no meaning except to draw attention to what follows. All right describes something that is not wrong. It may not be great either, but it will do. OK fits both of these meanings and can be used interchangeably. If in doubt, go with OK.

  • Examples: Alright, you guys, that game wasn’t the best you’ve ever played, but it was all right.

All right can also have its literal meaning of great, fantastic, couldn’t be better, and of course in a test-taking context if you answered no questions incorrectly, you got them all right. To stray into British usage for a moment, all right used as an interrogative takes on another connotation in conversation to mean anything from “Can we stop arguing now?” to “Have you got your head out of your arse yet?”

compose/comprise—Compose means to make up or put together. Think of composing music. Comprise means to embrace or contain. This is so simple, yet it’s easily the most common usage mistake I find. It is most frequently misused in the passive voice.

  • Examples: The city is composed of seven wards, each of which comprises a police department, fire station, public school district, and at least one park.

lie/lay—Lie is an intransitive verb, which means it has no object. Lay is a transitive verb and does require an object. Colloquial uses such as “Now I lay me down to sleep” and “Lay myself down” are no doubt adding to the confusion, but in fact this is a reflexive use of the verb, and the reflexive pronoun is an object.

  • Present-tense examples: Please lay the books on the table while I go lie down for a while.

More confusion arises because the past participle of lie is lay. The past participle of lay is laid.

  • Past-tense examples: I laid out the cards for solitaire after Mother lay down for a nap.

whether (or not)—Use whether when discussing two options, either of which is viable. Only add or not to indicate that the outcome of an event will remain unchanged regardless of the decision in question. If the meaning of a sentence stays the same if you remove the phrase or not, then leave it out: He can’t decide whether or not to get ice cream.

  •  Examples: I don’t know whether I should stay or go; Dan is leaving whether I go or not.

Questions? Suggestions for further discussion? Leave them in the comments section below.

writing

Drawing Down the Sun

Updated on

Sometimes unexpected things happen, like, for example, a key appliance in your household develops an alarming smell of burning plastic. You could complain loudly, and I recommend that, but then you have to move on to Stage 2, which is Doing Something About It. Stage 2.1 involves making a list of options. I like lists; they give you the illusion of progress.

A tolerable gas tumble dryer costs about what I earn from a booklength project. Instead of buying one, I decided to implement Holmgren’s Principles 5, 6, and 12 and hang my washing out on a clothesline in the sun and wind, which are both free and plentiful around here until late October. This is my first point, that sometimes the easiest and cheapest course of action is worth consideration, at least temporarily.

The second point is this, and it can be extrapolated to your writing process. Hanging laundry on a line is a meditative exercise. There’s sorting, and manual dexterity, and plenty of space and time for your mind to turn over other things. This is a new alternative to sitting in front of a screen getting stressed out, selecting long passages and then pressing delete, or just thinking about how you have no idea what you want to say. Another physical activity, another setting, can jar your mind out of the daily neural rat maze and show you a new solution, and how great is it if that new activity is generated by serendipitous failure?

So, yes, in fact, I am using solar and wind energy to dry my clothes and help me organize my thoughts. (My dryer could only do one of those things.) Harness change and put it to work instead of fighting against it. Got writer’s block? Do something else, preferably something you have to do anyway.

writing

The Fine Art of Putting It Off

Updated on

All writers procrastinate. Anyone who tells you otherwise is either a big liar or writing to avoid some even more onerous chore. It’s OK, really. I had a teacher in grad school—it was this guy; you may have heard of him. Good teacher, good writer. Anyway, he suggested that for many of us procrastination is part of our method and we need to accept that and work with it instead of struggling to overcome it.

Sorry, were you looking for advice on how to break the habit? Yeah, no, not here. I understand there’s a group that meets in the Methodist church basement up on the hill every Thursday. You could try there. They won’t be able to help you, either, but they do serve donuts. For those of you who have embraced your inner slacker, I have a few suggestions to make living with the condition a bit less painful. Pulling all-nighters is OK in college, but past age 40 the aftermath is really unpleasant, especially if you have kids who still expect you to feed them and walk them to school.

    1. Make a list. Don’t bother dividing it up into days because the Monday stuff is just going to slide on into Tuesday, and then you have to rearrange everything.
    2. Put everything on the list, including items such as “eat lunch” and “walk the dog” that you have to do. Include a few things that you don’t strictly speaking have to do, but you know you’re going to do anyway, like “hit the nearest coffee shop for caffeine and sugar” and “watch CinemaSins on YouTube.” That way, you won’t feel demoralized at the end of the day when your list isn’t any shorter than it was at the beginning.
    3. Take the big ugly jobs, like “write first draft of novel” and break them into slightly more manageable tasks, like “create outline” or “revise Chapter 2.” Sometimes you have to break it down to “write one goddamn paragraph.”
    4. Know your limits. If you’ve been writing on deadline for awhile, you have a feel for how long any job is going to take, and you know precisely when you have to get started thinking about how long you can put this thing off. Personally, I prefer tight deadlines these days because it saves me some trouble. Having too much time between beginning a project and hitting the Send button on the final revision is just inviting disaster. Anything can happen. It’s so tempting to push yourself, to say, “I did one just like this in four weeks; I can get started in D minus three and a half this time.” I won’t say don’t do it because we’re all functioning procrastinators here, but slack in small increments, my friends.
    5. Get a support network. No, not those donut-eating losers in the church basement; find some real friends, either online or flesh and blood, who maybe also work from home editing books or writing books or building custom birdcages out of recycled scrap metal. That way, they will sympathize when you email them to suggest a recon mission to the beach or the last remaining used bookstore in town but will be too busy with their own deadlines to actually take you up on it.
    6. Get curious. I have a report on impingement mortality and entrainment for seawater intakes to edit. What is that exactly? What does “fecundity hindcast” mean? No idea, but I sort of want to find out. That’s how I got into this writing and editing gig, to learn new things, and I suspect that’s why you’re here, too.
    7. So get back to work. You took a break. Breaks are good. Thanks for reading! But I got a deadline to catch.

science writing

Holmgren’s 12 Principles of Permaculture and How They Apply to Writing

Updated on

David Holmgren developed his 12 principles to assist architects, engineers, environmentalists, farmers, and anyone else involved in creating a sustainable habitat. In honor of Earth Day, I have found a further use for them.

1. Observe and interact.

To write truthfully, you need to pay attention to what’s around you. Even the wildest fantasies are inspired by what’s going on right here and now. Want to write realistic dialogue? Listen and talk to people.

2. Catch and store energy.

Take notes; you never know what will spark your next idea. Open yourself to inspiration in common and uncommon places.

3. Obtain a yield.

Keep your day job until your writing pays. To take this in another direction, does your creative work sustain you in other ways? If not, reconsider how you are spending your energy.

4. Apply self-regulation and accept feedback.

“No one understands my brilliance!” Possibly. You can either be brilliant all on your own or listen to and consider suggestions, especially if more than one of your readers give you the same critique.

5. Use and value renewable resources and services.

Write what you know; work with what you have. You know which projects are likely to pay you back for the time invested.

6. Produce no waste.

Focus your ideas and nurture those that are likely to bear fruit. Obviously not everything you write is going to see publication or even a second draft, but if you suspect you might be frittering away your time, you’re probably right.

7. Design from patterns to details.

Develop your outline or plot first, using a pattern that makes sense to you and is at least somewhat familiar to your audience. Add the small touches, the trees in your forest, as you go.

8. Integrate rather than segregate.

You can apply this to your associates, your jobs, and your writing projects. It’s a far more efficient use of creative and emotional energy.

9. Use small and slow solutions.

Remember that story about the patient tortoise and the arrogant rabbit? Incremental change is easier to implement and monitor than a drastic, reactionary rewrite.

10. Use and value diversity.

Eggs, meet multiple baskets. Try a new method if you’re stuck. Seek out different critics.

11. Use edges and value the marginal.

My favorite one! Watch the interstices in any system or population; really interesting stuff happens there and often goes unnoticed. Got a rough edge in your story? Instead of trimming it off, examine it closely. It may be your new center.

12. Creatively use and respond to change.

Change happens, and fighting it is a waste of your time. Put it to work for you instead of complaining.

I hope these concepts are helpful in your writing endeavors and life in general. Celebrate Earth Day by reusing them and passing them on.

science writing

Applied Poetry, Part One

Updated on

Here’s what I love about technical and scientific work: it brings with it a fantastic and varied vocabulary and creates new associations for common words. What makes writing fresh and exciting? A new voice, a new way of describing something we all can recognize. A new phrase made out of old words. Every discipline has its own specific lexicon, exotic and utilitarian at the same time.

Below is a brief sample of borrowed terms that are entertaining me at the moment. Want to play along? Start reading things outside of your usual choices. Pick up a magazine about astrophysics, knitting, veterinary medicine. See what you can find and steal for use elsewhere. If you find something great, add it in the comments.

Axiom of countable choice: This is “an axiom of set theory [that] states that any countable collection of non-empty sets must have a choice function. Spelled out, this means that if A is a function with domain N (where N denotes the set of natural numbers) and A(n) is a non-empty set for every n ∈ N, then there exists a function f with domain N such that f(n) ∈ A(n) for every n ∈ N.” Straight out of Wikipedia because I can’t explain it any better than that without screwing it up. One thing I can tell you is that it is not inductive, because countable choice is not the same as finite choice.

Chain of custody: This is a form that accompanies field samples on the way to a laboratory for testing. It provides a record to guarantee that the samples were not compromised. I love the idea of a metaphorical chain, a written tale of an item changing hands from creation to disposal. Imagine if every person had one.

Doctrine of signatures: Not a science term anymore, but this was cutting-edge medicine in the Middle Ages. First discussed by Dioscurides in Greece and Galen in Rome and later written about extensively by Paracelsus and Jakob Böhme, the doctrine advances the idea that living things will heal or affect parts of the human body that they resemble. For example, liverwort looks like a liver and is used to clean the blood. Earwigs were believed to make a fine remedy for earache. The idea is that of some divine pharmacist signing everything with its proper function for us, the alleged stewards of creation.

Shadow price of carbon: This reminds me of the Shadow Parliament or Shadow Ministers in the Westminster system of government, which sounds terribly sinister but is really just a form of checks and balances. If it makes you think of the Shadow Proclamation, well, I’m right there with you. The actual definition of the SPC is the long-term environmental cost of using or avoiding the use of a unit of carbon in terms of greenhouse gas emissions. Nearly everything has a shadow price: say, for example. you slip out of your office to grab a cup of coffee and miss a call from a client, who then offers a $40,000 job to someone else. The shadow price of coffee just became $40,002.