I came across this 50-year-old documentary about Ray Bradbury from 1963. This is a great piece that follows Bradbury’s writing process from idea creation through story submission. This is Bradbury at his height, and well worth a look.
Another interesting article from Buzzfeed. Over two dozen authors offer no-nonsense advice for young writers. My personal favorites come from Neil Gaiman, Patrick Rothfuss and David Drake.
Two developments of note:
A good article about agent-assisted publishing and Amazon’s White Glove program. This seems like the next logical step for literary agents, and it’s one that should make authors wary. Rather than pay 15% of your income for the length of the contract, it’s much wiser to commission a flat rate and itemize your expenses. Outside of ancillary rights to your material, I’m unclear what value agents add to the equation, especially if they’re providing services that you can perform yourself (for free) with minimal effort.
Last week’s big publishing news was that Amazon purchased Goodreads, which is a very smart investment on their part. I personally prefer GR over some of the other major book sites, such as Library Thing or Shelfari, some of which Amazon already owns. The consensus seems to be that rather than developing their own book site (see the underwhelming Bookish), major publishers should have bought Goodreads years ago. Now Amazon’s also-bought recommendations will be scary accurate.
It’s been a rough week or so for the horror genre. We lost three great writers in a very short span: David B. Silva, James Herbert and Rick Hautala, all in their sixties. Although no longer with us in body, they live on through their stories. Keep them alive by picking up their books and enjoying the stories they left behind.
Here’s a tribute for Dave Silva from Robert Swartwood.
James Herbert’s obituary in The Guardian.
Chris Golden’s thoughts on Rick Hautala.
And Rick’s acceptance speech for his Lifetime Achievement Award from the HWA last year. I was happy to see him receive it then, even moreso now.
Last week John Scalzi, current president of the SFWA, blasted Random House for unconscionable terms in its contracts. Specifically the Hydra imprint, RH’s latest SF/F/H venture that deals only with e-books. Read all about it here.
After the very public row, RH backtracked and amended its boilerplate. See better terms here.
People say Scalzi came out of the dust up looking like Captain America to Random House’s Hydra. I have to agree.
And the Authors’ Guild, not surprisingly, remained silent.
Came across this the other day, thought I’d share it with you. A young Mike Wallace interviews Rod Serling in 1959, both men chainsmoking throughout the Q&A. Ah, television.
This is right before The Twilight Zone premiered, after Serling had already won three Emmys for his writing. Keep track of how many times Serling lies to Wallace, about how he (Rod) has no interest in using TZ to expound on social issues of the day. The irony, of course, is that those very stories of injustice, conformity and antagonism became TZ’s hallmark. That’s why the show is still seen today, and just as timely as when it first aired.
In the near future I’ll list what I believe are the top ten stories from the Zone, so stay tuned for that.
Over the weekend my previous post about the myth of 10,000 hours was picked up by Forbes. The author, Suw Charman-Anderson, has her own elaborations on the theme. Feel free to link and retweet it to all your friends.
Elsewhere, a new website launched last week called Show Us Your Specs. The premise involves current TV showrunners sharing their first spec scripts, those important calling cards that helped them net their first writing assignments. I look forward to seeing who else participates in the coming months.
Damien Walter, writer for The Guardian, is conducting a lengthy investigation to find the best sci-fi, fantasy and horror available from indie writers. Read about what he’s looking for, then nominate your personal favorites.
Last year Walter released a checklist of seven criteria writers should consult prior to publishing their work. It’s a solid list, and the only one I don’t agree with is number two: practice writing for 10,000 hours. No doubt taken from Malcolm Gladwell’s book about how any skill takes 10,000 hours of practice to master, whether writing or golfing or painting. I generally write two pages in an hour (maybe three if I’m really cooking). That means I would have to write 20,000+ pages before my work is worth publication. 20,000 pages is the equivalent of fifty novels. If you don’t know what you’re doing by your fiftieth book, you aren’t paying close enough attention. Most professional novelists won’t reach that goal over the course of their whole careers.
A better litmus test, perhaps, comes from Ray Bradbury. Bradbury said every writer has a million bad words in them. The sooner you get through that first million, the faster you get to the words worth sharing. In other words, you must write the shit out of your system. I agree with that assessment, though I wouldn’t ascribe an arbitrary number to it. Each person has a different “million word” mark. Some may be more than that, others a bit less.
Personally I’d place that benchmark at about 500,000 words. I spent my first 250K learning the technical basics of writing and storytelling, the nuts-n-bolts of sentence-by-sentence composition. After that my stories reached a minimum level of publishability and I began to start selling. Not with regularity, mind you, but any early sale should be feted as a win, especially after a long period of self-imposed isolation.
It took another 250K of experimentation to properly utilize those tools I’d aquired in my writers’ toolkit. Style, voice, format, plotting, and the balance of creativity versus productivity were issues I tackled at that stage. I challenged myself with different projects and forced myself outside my comfort zone. I tried a lot of things (many of which failed) before finally settling on my default voice and style. During this period I focused primarily on short stories, but I also broached screenwriting and even wrote my first novel.
In 2005, after seven years of steady writing, I felt like I’d paid my dues — or at least didn’t consider myself a fraud compared to “real” authors. I emerged from that period with a range of writing tricks and techniques, plus the self-confidence and knowledge that I did have something to contribute to the craft of fiction. Shortly thereafter, beginning with my second novel, I really upped my output and started to crank.
Now that doesn’t mean I know everything about writing. It’s not possible for any one person to achieve that level of expertise in a given field. I’ll spend the rest of my life honing and polishing the same set of lessons I learned during those initial years, investing decades to find new ways of applying the correct tools in the correct manner.
So if you’re new to writing, forget the 10,000 hour rule. Try instead my 1,000 days rule. Richard Laymon advocated writing at least one hour per day. That’s a low bar to hit, so let’s go with that. Sixty minutes, or two pages written, whichever comes last. Don’t just pick up a pen whenever the Muse strikes. If you follow that schedule every day (note the italics), by the end of three years you’ll have reached well over half a million words.
If you scroll down, you’ll find a hit counter at the bottom of this page. I placed it there a year ago this week. This blog has been up and running since mid-2010, and for the first two years or so I didn’t have that counter. I had no idea how many people were coming to the website, or whether I was just talking to myself. Last February I set up the hit counter to quell my curiosity.
Turns out there were more of you reading this than I thought. At that point I set a goal for myself: I wanted to see 100,000 hits in a year’s time. Is that a lot for a blog? I had no idea then, nor do I a year later. It was just a number pulled out of thin air, a nice round one with lots of zeroes. Never did I think I’d actually reach that figure. Imagine my delight, then, when I awoke this morning to find the counter had blown past that lofty threshold. Huzzah!
I knew it was getting close; I didn’t want to announce anything beforehand, because I didn’t want folks arbitrarily inflating the numbers. Hell, I don’t even know if that means 100,000 people visited the site once, or one obsessive person (my first stalker!) visited 100,000 times over the past twelve months. Either way, I’m chuffed.
My sincere thanks to everyone who reads or lurks here on the site. Feel free to comment; I don’t bite. Comments for blog entries automatically close after two weeks, as a way to keep spam bots from clogging my comments page. But they’re free and open to anyone before that time. And if you enjoy the material I put on the site, please consider picking up one of my books. I won’t mind, really. My novels are listed on the righthand side of this page for your perusal.
Elsewhere on the internets, Neil Gaiman has crafted what he calls a Calendar of Tales. He joined with Blackberry to create a project based entirely on suggestions from Twitter. Last week he released a series of writing prompts, one for each month of the year, then sifted through the responses to find the twelve he wanted to turn into short-short fiction. You can download the finished stories here.
But the project isn’t done. Neil’s currently looking for artists to provide illustrations for each month’s story. Interested? Details on Blackberry’s site.
Vanity Fair has an excellent article in next month’s issue, about the rise and fall of the spec market for Hollywood features. It’s a long piece, chock-full of great tidbits and interesting interviews. Even if you’re not a screenwriter, it makes for a fascinating read.
In television news, here’s a round robin piece from i09. I read this back when it was first published and recently stumbled over it again. Where else are you gonna get advice from veteran TV showrunners?
Last month the Washington Post published an open letter to Barnes & Noble about the bookseller’s continuing financial troubles. The author loves bookstores and wants to see B&N survive, making a case that show-rooming — in which readers find their new favorite reads at a physical store then make the ultimate purchase online — actually helps the retailer’s bottom line. I find the logic a bit sketchy, but the essay’s still worth a read.
Elsewhere, the CEO of HarperCollins recently spoke in an interview with BBC Radio 4. She mentioned that bookshops could start charging shoppers to browse, as a means to combat show-rooming. Does this strike anyone else as absolute insanity? I imagine burly bouncers standing guard outside the doors of every B&N, collecting cover charges from readers and giving the ol’ heave-ho to loitering riffraff.
