Simple language leads to perfect stories

It's easy to find praise for simple things in life. But writing seems to evoke the opposite effect in building sentences, paragraphs, sections and stories. We want to be noticed with our writing. However, if you look underneath that wish you should find the desire to be heard and remembered. Simple language delivers those two results. Simple lets the story rule the reader's attention.

Last night in our weekly Writer's Workshop we enjoyed Blackberries, a simple short story that our member Kathleen Clark showed me over our summer break. The Leslie Norris sudden fiction story -- another name for a short-short, under 1,000 words -- has few sentences that run beyond 15 words. Despite the brevity, the language is rich in feeling and detail. Here's one of the few, written about a blackberry vine.

His father showed him a bramble, hard with thorns, its leaves just beginning to color into autumn, its long runners dry and brittle on the grass.

Just count the verbs to see why this sentence works so simply. Show. Hard. Color. Even the adjectives are doing verb work, like dry, or waxing specific with an action, like brittle. The nouns swing into action: bramble, thorns, leaves, runners, grass. Of 26 words, 10 breathe simple life into this writing. (Kathleen called the story "perfect." I struggle to find any reason to disagree.)

Blackberries, like many other stories in Sudden Fiction International, runs on three main characters and two minor players across the space of four printed pages. The writing doesn't shy away from using variations of the verb "to be" in various tenses. Norris considers that advice, of using better verbs than be or were, but uses these simplest verbs along with others. Much of the simplest writing does.

Could be a good time to be not yet in print

Google and the Authors Guild announced today that they're revising an agreement to pay authors for printed books that get read online. Along with the American Association of Publishers, the parties wanted to give Google the clear path to scanning millions of printed works, then offering them to read over the Web.

There might be no better time to stay out of print than now, while your as-yet-unpublished book isn't covered by the agreement. Published writers, you and your publisher have until June, 2010 to file an objection to the agreement if Google has already scanned your book. Nobody has seen the latest version of the agreement promised today. But DC Comics and Microsoft have filed objections to the existing settlement.

The Authors Guild threw up a roadblock to Google's scan-and-display policy when it was announced last year. A fairness hearing in US, scheduled for today, has been delayed until next month.

The Guild is the domain of the published writer, and the organization takes its eligibility to an exclusive level. Even if you have a book contract, it must "include a royalty clause and a significant advance, and must allow the author to retain copyright." Independent book publishers, who are accepting new books from new authors at a faster rate than major presses, are skipping advances these days. The Guild accepts members whose books are "published by an established American publisher... excepting small literary presses of national reputation."

So whatever agreement the Guild, major publishers and Google arrive at, it won't keep you from disputing when Google scans your small-press book and charges to read it. With exclusive eligibility requirements like these, Google is just ensuring that those left out of the agreement will probably welcome the online readership as a way to promote the books -- which will likely have links to online stores. That's where Google makes its money anyway, not in the per-reader charges.

Limelight burns more than Twilight

There's a great interview with Stephanie Meyer in Entertainment Weekly's Web site. The best-selling author of the Twilight series of teen vampire love said that being this successful -- first three books becoming movies, fans clamoring for more writing -- has blocked her on the project.

Everyone now is in the driver's seat, where they can make judgment calls. ''Well, I think this should happen, I think she should do this.'' I do not feel alone with the manuscript. And I cannot write when I don't feel alone. So my goal is to go for, like, I don't know, two years without ever hearing the words Midnight Sun. And once I'm pretty sure that everyone's forgotten about it, I think I'll be able to get to the place where I'm alone with it again. Then I'll be able to sneak in and work on it again.

While you work on your first book, you can be alone. But once a book hits with the splash that Twilight gave to Meyer, you'll never be alone again. This is the business side of writing, the one that creates fans, makes you a celebrity and rich. Meyer is about the same age as J.K. Rowling was when Harry Potter ascended. But the Twilight empire has emerged much faster (some say the writing is a little under-baked) and this is Meyer's first dance in the limelight. She talks of a new project she wants to work on that revolves around mermaids. You can look back at the movie careers of Quentin Tarantino, Orson Wells, even Kevin Smith after Clerks to see the challenge. The limelight was so hot that their second act was where the twilight fell on them.

You can climb back to the light, but it helps to be able to foresake the fame and quiet all those voices. An artist has to stay true to their own voice. If not, then your romance in the world of vampires might be dead to you.

As for waiting two years to release the next installment of Twilight, it's a period where her publisher gets to prove its faith. They may need to release an imperfect Twilight book to be able to let Meyer cast off the yoke of Edward and friends. Two years is an eternity for an impatient publisher. Time means something different to the undead, though. Last week Meyer was looking toward the movie screen, not the word processing screen. Her blog reported:

We only have to wait 71 more days until New Moon the movie hits theaters! In case you don't want to have to count the days on your calendar (like I just did) every time you think about Edward and Jacob, I've added a countdown widget to the New Moon Movie page

How hot is Twilight's limelight? Hot enough to withstand the wisecracks and endure self-parody. On Facebook you can find a group called Because I Read Twilight I Have Unrealistic Expectations in Men

Of course, that should be "expectations of men," but it's only English written by 266,000 fans in the group. This is fame and fun we're witnessing. And after 29 million copies sold, it would seem we're all witnessing.

Storytelling, journalism live on The Wire

Abby and I are reveling in the sweep and depth of HBO's The Wire. It's a piece of genius, 60 hours of entertainment that feels like reading a masterful series of crime novels. Or a week's worth of old-school newspaper reports, what was once called "a series" and now is a rare breed indeed.

The creator of these connected, 1-hour dramas started as a journalist at the Baltimore Sun, but after 13 years of crime articles David Simon aspired to say more than newsprint could carry about important issues. He wrote a non-fiction book in the late '80s that became the blueprint for Homicide, another TV show. In The Wire Simon, along with his ex-cop, schoolteacher creative partner Ed Burns, takes on big matters like poverty, crime, education, graft, politics both good and bad. They have created a Book That Makes a Difference and plays out on your DVD screen.

In his closing letter after the series wrapped, Simon points out that The Wire was built on interviews and details with experts. Once upon a time, he asserts, journalism at its best told this kind of story.

For those of us writing The Wire, a television drama, story research involved dragging the right police lieutenants or school teachers, prosecutors and political functionaries to neighborhood diners and bars and taking story notes down on cocktail napkins and paper placemats. To be more precise with their tales? To record it and relay it in a manner that can stand as non-fiction truthtelling? Yes, that's harder to do. But there was a time when journalism regarded that kind of coverage as its highest mission.

The true stories that The Wire traded in are out there, waiting for anyone willing to take the time. And it is, of course, vaguely disturbing to us that our unlikely little television drama is making arguments that were once the prerogative of more serious mediums.

The lesson to take away here is the drive for details, usually accumulated through personal contact. Efforts to connect with resources in this way will make a story stronger, whether it's drama or non-fiction or the creative non-fiction that blends both. (There's also the lesson about journalism fundamentals being a sound foundation for fiction, but this old newspaperman will not wax on too long about that bromide.)

By the way, if you rent The Wire, be sure to turn on the subtitles. It adds a level of richness for a writer, or anyone who enjoys a good read.

Popular and good writing can be exclusive

A USA Today story reports that Stephanie Meyer of the Twilight series is now "dominating" the paper's bestseller list. These books of the undead, and the movie franchise they've spawned, are lively enough to have earned her publisher Little, Brown $40 million already. So the author has her own $4 million in royalties to bank.

By most accounts, though, the writing is weak. Especially compared to the Harry Potter series, which USA Today was quick to compare to Twilight. Bestselling seems to be the only point in common. A reading teacher reports as much in the comments on the USA Today site.

I'm a Reading teacher, its my job! And I must say JK Rowling's books are far superior in writing, character development, plot, and readability, just to name a few things. Meyer is good, but Rowling is great! I put Breaking Dawn down utterly disappointed, compared to the tears of joy and sorrow that were gushing from my eyes when I put The Deathly Hollows down. Meyer may break records, but overall Rowling is Queen.

Does Stephanie love it, and live the creating like Rowling did? Her publicist reports that she's taking a break from the romance of vampire passion.

When Meyer might publish a new novel isn't known, says Megan Tingley of Hachette's Little, Brown Books for Young Readers. She's "enjoying the writing process without a deadline or targeted publication date.

What writer wouldn't enjoy that kind of writing life? Wealthy beyond her dreams, with only millions of Potter fans and the reading teachers of the world to sniff at her work. As for the publisher, they want the books as fast they can get them, to piggyback on the publicity. As the article points out, Stephanie has tapped the motherlode of young female readers with Twilight, Edward and vampire fantasy. If you desire good and popular writing all at once, working for the first might be a better place to start to get to the second. Unless you're plugged in to the fantasies of YA-reading women. They buy a lot of books.

I'm reminded of the line from Citizen Kane, when his business manager Bernstein is interviewed. "Making a lot of of money isn't difficult, if all you want to do it make a lot of money." I'd be wary of starting a vampire novel just about now, though. When every publisher wanted the next DaVinci Code when it was soaring, imagine how many candidate queries poured in trying to be just like the Flavor of the Last Three Months. The time of just-average writing of vampire teen romances is gone by now.

Know what your story desires to tell

NPR has a great interview with Richard Russo you can listen to on its site. The author of the divine Empire Falls (a Pulitzer winner) has a new book, That Old Cape Magic. The book is about a writer, a device that lets Russo explain a common author's problem, for those still learning the craft. It's not easy understanding what a story needs to say.

In his novel, [his character] Griffin decides to write about his childhood on the Cape -- including his love for a neighboring family. But his first draft of the story isn't any good because the characters don't come to life.

Russo, who used to teach fiction writing, says this is a problem that he frequently sees in beginning writers.

"The deepest failures any fiction writer is likely to have are failures of not quite comprehending the truth of the story that he or she is telling. And I think that's why Jack Griffin can't write this story ... there's something about himself that he hasn't quite recognized."

Russo says this idea of missing the point is as common in life as in novels. And as memories corrode or morph, people -- parents and children, husbands and wives -- tend to form different ideas of the past.

How to avoid this pitfall? Keep crafting that three-paragraph synopsis, if it's a longer work like a book. In this format, paragraph one describes the inciting event. Two tackles the expansion and evolution of the story. Three delivers the Big Message: Why your readers should open the book, to learn a larger story, like how faith can overcome fear of the future.

Big truths of stories cover common ground, so a reader has empathy with the lesson: "Hey, I lived that one." Or knew someone who did. Or failed at the lesson.

By the way, Russo sounds like a dynamite interview subject on the radio. A voice as crackling as his characters.

When a book is finished

I've taken a couple of months away from this blog and the manuscript workshops to complete Viral Times. It's been a process of learning craft and considering workshop responses over more than six years to finish this first novel. (Thanks to all who read this in progress; you'll be in the foreward.) Although it took longer to finish than I expected, it feels delicious to have transformed my creative work from a project into a book.

At the end, in the last gallop to the wire, I used Scrivener on my iMac to make a pack of 51 chapters into a cohesive narrative. I'd been searching long and hard for a piece of software that would take dozens of Word documents (one per chapter) and line them up in my sequence of plot. The most brilliant part of Scrivener is creating what's called scrivenings: an test-run of scenes and sequel to make up a chapter, or a proposed set of chapters to devise a book. Highly recommended, Mac only, but there's a similar tool for Windows in Page Four.

I'm lucky in being able to bull my way to the finish with the Mac and Scrivener. Some of this fortune comes from earning a journalism degree rather than an English degree more than 25 years ago: the journalism pays for things like the 24-inch iMac and provides time to work on the book. I figured, back in 1980, that learning journalism would give me a better chance to earn a living than a proper literature degree. While I had to learn the craft of fiction over the past six years (a education in process), I was at least writing all the while to run a house and a business.

Now I'm in the rather comfy spot for awhile of waiting on an agent's response. A lucky connection with Cameron McClure of the Donald Maas Agency netted a request for 100 pages. Big chunk of a 293-page book, good agency, and an agent who sells stories like this future fiction tale of mine. No promises, but the book is on its way to whatever it will be in the months and years to come.

When is something this large really finished? You never can be sure, and I still think of what could have gone into it, or been cut out. Those things might still happen (and probably will) as the book moves toward publication. But one marker of completion is length. Scrivener helped in an enormous way with this. Few books should be longer than 120,000 words, with the rare exception. Fewer still will sell at under 70,000. Those numbers come from the Maas Agency, where one of the agents posted a great article on book length.

And now that Viral Times has come in at 98,000 words, I can look forward to my manuscript workshops of this fall. By the time we've met for half of the 8 monthly sessions, I'll have read and responded to 100,000 words. I come back to that work renewed and ready after my summer vacation.

Slow and careful writing about love

I finished reading The Handmaid's Tale this month. Margaret Atwood's story about a future America dominated by religion and males, with women subjugated and forced to bear children, does contain love and passion, too.

I was struck by the passage below, so beautiful that I made a note of it in my Kindle copy of the book. The writing shows off how loving Atwood is with words of love. Here, the heroine of the book describes her illicit, secret lover, her respite after she's lost the memory of her husband Luke.

I want to see what can be seen, of him, take him in, memorize him, save him up so I can live on the image, later: the lines of his body, the texture of his flesh, the glisten of sweat on his pelt, his long sardonic unrevealing face. I ought to have done that with Luke, paid more attention, to the details, the moles and scars, the singular creases; I didn’t and he’s fading. Day by day, night by night he recedes, and I become more faithless. For this one I’d wear pink feathers, purple stars, if that were what he wanted; or anything else, even the tail of a rabbit. But he does not require such trimmings. We make love each time as if we know beyond the shadow of a doubt that there will never be any more, for either of us, with anyone, ever. And then when there is, that too is always a surprise, extra, a gift.

Five summers ago I took a Novel seminar at the Iowa Summer Writing Festival, where we studied Atonement. Our instructor advised us to deliver the details of a body your character has come to know and love. Atwood gives us this as well as anybody I've read.

Short Roth stories long on quality

I just finished reading a short story from Goodbye, Columbus, the collection that launched Phillip Roth's career 50 years ago this month. The gem included in the Norton North American Literature Anthology was Defender of the Faith, a tight, plainspoken tale about three Jewish Army trainees and the Jewish sergeant who both learns and teaches a lesson about the boundaries of faith.

Roth has plenty of acclaimed long works to his name, having won a Pulitzer and a National Book Award. But like so many great novelists, he honed his craft on short stories. About himself writing Goodbye, Columbus, he said in a 30th Anniversary Edition:

With clarity and with crudeness, and a great deal of exuberance, the embryonic writer who was me wrote these stories in his early 20s, while he was a graduate student at the University of Chicago, a soldier stationed in New Jersey and Washington, D.C., and a novice English instructor back at Chicago following his Army discharge. Eisenhower, who was president, the embryonic writer despised, though not nearly as much as he was to despise Eisenhower’s Republican successors.

His cultural ambitions were formulated in direct opposition to the triumphant, suffocating American philistinism of that time: he despised Time, Life, Hollywood, television, the best-seller list, advertising copy, McCarthyism, Rotary Clubs, racial prejudice and the American booster mentality. Among the writers he was reading when he wrote these stories in the 1950s — and he was reading all the time, all kinds of books, dozens and dozens of them — were David Riesman, Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, John Cheever, James Baldwin, Randall Jarrell, Sigmund Freud, Paul Goodman, William Styron, C. Wright Mills, Martin Buber, George Orwell, Suzanne Langer, F.R. Leavis, David Daiches, Edmund Wilson, Alfred Kazin, Ralph Ellison, Erich Fromm, Joseph Conrad, Dylan Thomas, Sean O’Casey, e.e. cummings — who collectively represented a republic of discourse in which he aspired to be naturalized.

Another Workshop Finalist

We received word this week that Gordon Rives Carmichael has landed in the finalist pool in the Writer's League of Texas Manuscript Contest. Gordon's work has come past our manuscript table here for more than a year, with lots of evidence of polishing and extending his skills.

Gordon, we congratulate you. Best of luck in the finals selection; the conference is June 26. Even being nominated, as the Oscar winners say, is an honor.

This sort of milestone can only happen if you get your writing out there, in front of readers. Offer something up soon.

Fast finds for definitions

This morning I stumbled across Memidex, the free online "dictionary, thesaurus and more." If you ever need to know the difference between rhinoviruses and arborviruses, or what contiguous means, or a synonym for incipient, Memidex (memidex.com) finds it fast.

What I liked about this online tool was its relentless linking. The definition for arborvirus is teeming with medical words all linked to other definitions.

The unique features of Memidex include:

• detailed information for each sense
• more cross-references
• convenient hierarchical links
• full listing of inflected forms
• no obscure abbreviated labels
• quick search for exact matches
• complete, easily browsable index
• easy-to-link-to URLs
• clear, simple, uncluttered layout
• frequent, recorded updates
• fast average page access time

Are we reading differently?

The evidence in today's audience suggests the answer is yes. A fun article on Tim Bray's Ongoing blog suggests that our language skills are hard-wired to grasp conversational writing, because 90 percent of human language history used only talk to communicate.

There’s nothing much on the Net that’s without precedent in spoken language. What’s new is that written discourse is becoming less like oration and more like conversation. It’s not clear that this is bad.

Then there's Karleen Koen, a novelist who's working on her fourth book, historical fiction based in France. She writes on her blog

As I polish (which means cut, smooth out, delete, write new things that make the reading slick) I do believe people are reading differently, with less patience -- and the inherent problem with a historical novel is that a writer has to set up the background so the reader understands the world he or she is entering, and that can’t be done in a quick paragraph or two. Or at least I can’t do it.

There will be readers who love to immerse themselves in a book, get lost in the pace. But are there enough of them now, growing up in a Twitter generation, to give writers a livelihood? Bray notes that books are losing market share and adds, "Unsurprising, because when you start at 100 percent, there’s nowhere to go but down. Books are now competing, on a fairly level playing field, with the Net media: blogs and Twitter and mailing lists and fora of other flavors."

But a certain kind of story can only achieve its potential as a book. A good friend of mine just landed a nice contract for a first book. It will be an impressive debut when she finishes. A literary pace will probably govern her writing, though. Are you patient enough to give yourself over to a pace that will match your vision for your work? One clue: How long can you sit in the chair and just write, or just revise? I don't know many novelists who tweet on Twitter.

Hooray for a Pulitzer's worth of stories

Short stories get short shrift. These gems of tales, usually less than 3,000 words, usually can't find a publisher or a publication, but everybody professes to enjoy reading them. Count among the satisfied the jury of the Pulitzer Prize, which awarded the 2009 fiction prize to a collection of stories by Elizabeth Stout, Olive Kitteridge.

To be precise, this lovely book is a "novel in stories," a collection of tales with recurring characters but not bound up with a narrative though-line. Reading a novel in stories is easy for people who only read once in awhile. You always feel like you've gotten everything there is to tell in a novel in stories, so long as you finish the chapter you're on. Every chapter is a self-contained story.

Six years ago, I saw a novel-in-stories slammed by a prize-winning novelist. Ann Patchett came to Austin to give a keynote speech at the Austin Writers League "Why Fiction Matters" conference. Patchett spoke knowing she'd just won the PEN/Falkner award for her novel Bel Canto. In the course of her talk Patchett said in passing, "and then there's the novel-in-stories, a form I loathe, by the way." We didn't all want to know what she liked to read, or thought was worthy. But some of us knew something Patchett didn't. The conference organizer Karen Stolz had published a successful novel in stories, The World of Pies.

So maybe — since Stout's novel in stories won the Pulitzer, like fiction of Phillip Roth and Michael Chabon — Patchett might want to revisit her judgment about the worth of novels in stories. She could reconsider while she's dusting off the section of her bookcase that's still waiting for a Pulitzer prize. Bel Canto is based on the Lima Crisis news event, but Olive Kitteridge doesn't need that kind of based-on-a-true-story leg up. It's Elizabeth Stout's world of coastal Maine residents. Booklist said in a starred review

But appalling though Olive can be, Strout manages to make her deeply human and even sympathetic, as are all of the characters in this “novel in stories.” Covering a period of 30-odd years, most of the stories (several of which were previously published in the New Yorker and other magazines) feature Olive as their focus, but in some she is bit player or even a footnote while other characters take center stage to sort through their own fears and insecurities. Though loneliness and loss haunt these pages, Strout also supplies gentle humor and a nourishing dose of hope.

Never let it matter that anyone, no matter how awarded their career might be, reviles your writing style. You can find single-star reviews for Bel Canto on Amazon, after all. Be your own judge and let yourself — not just your writing or publishing — be the beauty in the world.

Google gets all the books to search?

Over at the Boing Boing blog, the writers complain about the new online book search rights that Google just won in a class action suit settlement. It's a little tricky to parse out what this means, but it looks like if you have a book in print now, or ever did, Google can include its contents in a search result. This sentence kind of sums it up: "Google is the only company in the world that will have a clean, legal way of offering all these books in search results."

Google, in acceding to the Authors Guild's requests, have attained a legal near-monopoly on searching and distributing the majority of books ever published.

The Authors Guild -- which represents a measly 8000 writers -- brought a class action against Google on behalf of all literary copyright holders, even the authors of the millions of "orphan works" whose rightsholders can't be located. Once that class was certified, whatever deal Google struck with the class became binding on every work of literature ever produced. The odds are that this feat won't ever be repeated, which means that Google is the only company in the world that will have a clean, legal way of offering all these books in search results.

We all love Google, don't we? From the "search the Web by speaking" iPhone application to the wonderful shopping vistas, Google runs the online universe. But if I had a book out, and I wasn't one of the select 8,000 Authors Guild members, I'd be scrambling now to find out if my book's online rights were still mine to control. As the article says, challenging this settlement in court is going to be costly.

Not something to worry yourself about if you're still doing the writing and editing. This doesn't affect the practice of your writing art. It might reduce your ability to earn a living off a book, though. That thunder you hear in the air is the sound of Google's scanners warming up, ready to hoover up the pages of your book for a free search result on the Internet. Yeah, Amazon is big. But Google is bigger, smarter and hungrier.

Time changes stories

There may be times when stepping back for awhile from a story or novel can provide a deeper understanding of what is vital to the tale. Up on the Web site for the literary journal Glimmer Train, the writer Erica Johnson Debeljak talks about writing her memoir twice, 10 years apart, first as journalism and much later as a novelization.

An honest writer of either fiction or nonfiction has to admit that the treatment of characters and situations — what is left in and what is left out — ultimately serves the meaning of the work, and that meaning can change over time. In other words, there is content (lived experience, impressions, imagination) and there is form (genre, story shape, the flow of words and sentences on the page), and the process of a writer funneling content into form will virtually always produce a different product depending on perspective and what meaning is being pushed to the fore at any given time.

She goes on to say this isn't a viewpoint that non-fiction writers will embrace easily. But she "made changes in chronology and cold hard facts" while creating the memoir Forbidden Bread, the second life of her story.

More than a few writers in our workshops have worked on fiction based in life experience, or even a novelized memoir. Letting time elapse between drafts might help you if you're working on such a story.

Celebrate our finalist!

Lisa Carroll-Lee, who's been in one of my writing groups for more than two years, has landed another short story as a Finalist in the Austin Chronicle 2009 Short Story Contest. The Chronicle has a really lean word limit, but Lisa has made it to the Top 10 with her story, Monsters of Nature.

We saw Monsters in October at our manuscript group meeting and gave her our responses to her flight of fancy about furry children. Congratulations to Lisa, and best of luck in the finalists' round. As they say at Oscar time, it's an honor just to be nominated.

Lisa has made the finalist cut before on the contest. The Chronicle will publish the top three of this year's 2,500-word gems on Feb. 13.

Free advice from Lukeman on writing the query

Early on in my writing life, I was sure that the synopsis was the key to earning a publishing deal. But a synopsis of 4 to 16 pages is too long for most agents to read. What these gatekeepers of the publishing world start with is a query letter. It's a business pitch, even if it promotes an artistic product.

If you haven't sent off your query yet, here's the best description of every aspect of how to craft a query letter. Noah Lukeman has three fine books for writers, such as "The First Five Pages: A Writer's Guide to Staying Out of the Rejection Pile." His latest is "A Dash of Style: The Art and Mastery of Punctuation." And as a agent he's read 100,000 query letters. His Amazon Shorts book is a gift back to the writing community, available on Amazon as a free PDF file.

Here's the link to the Amazon page:

<http://www.amazon.com/How-Write-Great-Query-Letter/dp/B00122GU86/ref=pd_ys_shvl_1>

Yes, they ask for credit card data, but the charge is $0.00. It's a digital file, so there's no shipping. Get your free copy today.

I was pretty sure that a query letter was single-spaced. Lukeman confirms this. He also calls the letter a marketing task, but perhaps the only piece of writing you will ever get an agent to read. Marketing can be learned, he says. Easier than artistry, I add.

Ask These Five Questions Before the Query

From Making the Perfect Pitch, edited by Katherine Sands, this is Kristen Auclair's article about five crucial questions to answer before that query letter of yours goes into the mail or e-mail.

1. Is the book polished, error-free and professional?
2. Does the tone of your query letter reflect the tone of your book?
3. Are you sure the agent you're pitching works on this type of project?
4. Do you know your market? (Make comparisons, but not cliched ones, she says.)
5. Are you emphasizing the best aspects of your project?

The best aspect about this helper book is that it's written by a host of publishing professionals, with lots of Sands' writing in between. Auclair is a literary agent at Graybill & English in Washington, DC. She's handled both non-fiction and fiction projects.

Enter Amazon's tourney to get published

If you need a deadline to finish that long-malingering novel, Amazon provides one. In two months submissions start for the Amazon On-Demand publishing contest. Penguin Publishing Group and Amazon will accept up to 10,000 entries between Feb. 2 and Feb. 8. Sue Monk Kidd and Sue Grafton judge the finalists.

The beauty of this contest is that there are no entry fees. Amazon's Vine Voices reviewers get the first cut at winnowing the entries, but in the final two round, Monk and Grafton will do the choosing.

There's a $25,000 publishing contract as the grand prize. For complete information and an entry form, see the Amazon page that contains the Frequently Asked Questions file on the contest.

Contest submission period begins February 2nd, 2009 at 12:01 a.m. (U.S. Eastern Standard Time) and ends February 8th, 2009 at 11:59 p.m. (U.S. Eastern Standard Time), or when the first 10,000 Entries have been received, whichever is earlier.

To enter on February 2nd 2009, go to www.amazon.com/abna or www.createspace.com/abna, register and submit your entry following the instructions on the entry form. In the mean time, go to www.createspace.com/abna to sign up for contest updates and valuable online content that will help you get your submission ready. To register and enter you will need to submit:

• The full/complete version of your manuscript (the "Manuscript"), which must be between 50,000 and 150,000 words;
• Up to the first 5,000 words, but no less than 3,000 words, of text of that manuscript, excluding any table of contents, foreword, and acknowledgments (the "Excerpt");
• A pitch statement (cover letter/summary) of up to 300 word (the "Pitch")
• Other registration information as asked for on the entry page (such as name, contact information, book title), and
• An author photo (if desired), which must be in .jpg format (at least 72 dpi and 500x468 pixels)

Sol Stein on humanity and authority

My good friend and fellow novelist Larisa Zlatic sent me an excerpt from a good writing book by Sol Stein. Her excerpts from Stein on Writing include these:

The first step in revision is to make a judgment about your main characters. Character problems must be dealt with before beginning a general revision. This method of revision makes certain that you have humanized your characters.

Do you think about them in situations that are not in your book? If so, good. It means your characters are alive in your mind and should come alive in the minds of the readers. If you can’t think of an important character in situations away from the story that character may need more work. Ask these questions:

• What is about your character that you like especially? Is it also your own trait? If yes, it is a symptom of the autobiography trap, creating a character that is too like yourself. Resolution: give a character a trait (positive or negative) that you absolutely don’t have.

• If you’re going on a vacation how would you feel if your character were going along? Would you look forward to that? You may need to add some sparkle to your character, some interesting eccentricity, personality characteristic that will make his company more enjoyable.

I have Stein's How to Grow a Novel on my bookshelf, and Chapter Eight offers on advanced point of view. He summarizes the explanation of how to distinguish first from third from omniscient, then he says, "I can't recall a manuscript that didn't have a couple of glitches in the handling of point of view. Sometimes dozens. The need to be caught in revision. The novelist's authority depends on it."

Authority in writing transmits the "dream state" to the readers, the means to lock them into the world you've created. And believe me, I'm working on maintaining authority in Viral Times right now.

Keep a query professional

The Kristen Nelson Literary Agency has a helpful newsletter for the writer who's nearing a query letter date. That's the deadline I'm approaching for Viral Times, once the revisions are finished. One of the agents at the Nelson Agency offered this advice about writing the query.

Advice of this type often tells a writer not to do silly things, like mail chocolates along with a letter. But at least the agency's Sara Megibow (at left) affirms some things you should do in a query to an agent.

• State that you found our agency through agentquery.com or Preditors and Editors, or aar-online.org, etc.
  

• Note that you have looked at our website and have read the submission guidelines
  

• Mention any of the books represented by Nelson Agency which you may have read
  

• Repeat your contact information right in the body of the query letter (you can hardly ever put your name, title of work and email address in too many places).
  

These are all things that one might do in a job interview too, and following these guidelines always come across as professional to me.

In order to stay professional, try to avoid these common mistakes:

• Don’t be overly self-deprecating (i.e. “I know I have no experience and I am sure you don’t have time to read my work, but…”)
  

• Don’t be too casual (i.e. “Yo! I love to write and I think my stuff rocks!”)
  

• Don’t include religious blessings or quotes in the official query letter (although many people do have these kinds of quotes at the ends of the email as a footer, and that seems fine to me)
  

• Don’t be cutesy (we find that fancy fonts or colorful backgrounds do not help the professional tone of the query letter)

Harder to return than arrive

The journey is the destination, but making a living as a writer requires you to arrive at a moment when someone else invests in your talent. You might be a fiction writer selling a novel, or a non-fiction writer getting a proposal picked up, or a screenwriter seeing a treatment accepted with the follow-on screenplay assignment.

Of if you're looking at self-publishing, the PayPal purchase notices and checks from readings go into your bank account. But you have arrived. Enjoy the moment. This might not be the hardest route to complete on your journey as a writer, says the screenwriter of W.

The movie that opened this weekend was written by Stanley Weiser. He wrote the screenplay for Wall Street, another Oliver Stone film. Weiser has this to say, in an interview with the Web site StoryLink, about what a writer faces after first success:

It was hard miles in the beginning. The problem is that once you start out and you have a movie, you think you’ve arrived. But once you have the break, it’s harder to come back than it is to arrive. It’s a long road. You have to keep reinventing yourself.

I've heard this second-book effect described another way, from the perspective of being in your first book, completing it and getting though publication. This first arrival is the only time in your career that you're writing with no expectations from the public, a publisher, editors and reviewers. You get to invent yourself as a writer and your story as you know it. The next time out, you will be measured not only by that internal conscience of a creator, but the readers, viewers and your business partners, all of whom will look to your prior work.

Choosing qualified SF markets

Having a book published is a milestone for every author, no matter who does the printing and selling. But not all publishers are equal in the eyes of the professional writing guilds. I started to look into membership in the Science Fiction Writers of America. SFWA is a lot like the other pro writing associations: The Author's Guild, or the Writer's Guild of America (for film). These groups take you in, but only after you're published or produced.

If that sounds like chicken and egg thinking, it might be, until you land your first sale. But not just a sale to anybody, for the SFWA. The group's Web site lists specific publishers which do not qualify a writer to gain entry into SFWA. The list as of this year:

The following markets may not currently be used for membership purposes. If/when any of these are determined to meet the applicable criteria, they will be moved to the list of qualifying markets. No judgment as to the quality of these markets as publishing venues is in any way expressed or implied by their inclusion on this list.

• American Book Publishing
• Armitage House
• Barbour Publishing
• Creeping Hemlock Press
• Crossquarter Publishing Group
• Embiid Publishing
• Fairwood Press / ElectricStory.com
• Fictionwise.com
• Gardenia Press
• Great Plains Publications
• Golden Gryphon
• Gothic.net (for dates after 2/2003)
• ImaJinn
• iUniverse
• Medallion Press
• Oak Tree Press
• Oceans of the Mind
• OnSpec
• Paradox
• PublishAmerica
• Silver Lake Publishing
• Small Beer Press
• Spectrum SF
• Unbelievable Stories (Quill-Pen Press)
• The Urbanite
• Vestal Review
• Wheatland Press (e.g. Polyphony anthology series)
• Wildside Press
• Xlibris.com
• Zumaya Press

There's not much explanation about why these presses don't earn a writer entry into SFWA — but seeing Xlibris and iUniverse among them indicates a bias against the self-publisher or cooperative publisher. (That latter one is a house where you bring money to invest, in addition to your well-polished MS.)

There's even a method to submit a publisher for consideration by the SFWA, to be added to its next "membership-earning" list. Noteable for the Austin-based writer: The SFWA gave its 2008 awards, the coveted Nebulas, at the Omni Hotel here in the spring. A fellow named Michael Chabon walked off with the Novel prize for The Yiddish Policemen's Union, a great SF novel hiding out as an alternative history. Chabon, of course, took the Pulitzer home for The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay.

Why care about SFWA membership, or membership in the Romance Writers of America? This kind of credit gets you extra attention and perhaps a pass upward to the next level at the Kristen Nelson Literary Agency. Probably plenty of other agents, too. Since you need a sold book, or a few sold short stories, this might be a Catch-22 unless you're submitting to the short story markets. The SFWA site has a list of qualifying book publishers, too.

Membership in things like the RWA and SFWA is not a requirement to be considered for this agent. But it's among a list of things to put into a query to the agency. What's more, the list is something to consider when engaging an agent, like "can you get me into a publishing house that's on the SFWA list?" This is the big-time tent, if you're aiming for that.

Publishing can take years, but persevere

The Austin Writer's League left behind its history, years ago, to become the Writer's League of Texas and have statewide reach. But way back at the start of the decade, the annual Manuscript Contest for the AWL caught a winner who's now won a book contract from Holt. From the League's newsletter, by way of the author:

Jacqueline Kelly of Austin sold her first novel to Holt. The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate will be published in the spring of 2009. She won the 2002 Manuscript Contest Mainstream Fiction category with the first chapter of this book.

The news arrived in a PDF version of the League's newsletter Scribe, which was once a monthly printed item but now will show up in our e-mail in-boxes every other month. It's great to hear of a book success so long after winning a contest. Making a contest cut is good. A deal is another step up. And Holt is, well, a step up from Xlibris, Authorhouse and other help yourself subsidy houses.

As Gilded Age publisher Henry Holt once observed, a "book is a thing by itself. There is nothing like it, as one shoe is like another, or as one kind of whiskey is like another." There's nothing like a book, guilded with a fine cover and bound to be bent in the bed or the bathroom.

Six years to a deal, seven years and more between starting and publication. Keep at those keyboards, join those groups and work your manuscripts. Persevere, or continue in a course of action even in the face of difficulty or with little or no prospect of success. Have faith that by the time your book gets a deal, paper and ink will still be the dominant medium of writing and publishing. Not that there's anything wrong with PDF publishing — but many of us aspire to something with a spine.

Do I really need that prologue?

Writer's Digest posts a Literary Agents blog with good advice. Today I got an e-mail that expanded the "pet peeves" of five agents.

"Most agents hate prologues. Just make the first chapter relevant and well written."
- Andrea Brown, Andrea Brown Literary Agency

"Slow writing with a lot of description puts me off very quickly. I like a first chapter that moves quickly and draws me in so I'm immediately hooked."
- Andrea Hurst, Andrea Hurst Literary Management

"Avoid any description of the weather."
- Denise Marcil, Denise Marcil Literary Agency

"I don't like it when the main character dies at the end of Chapter 1. Why did I just spend all this time with this character? I feel cheated."
- Cricket Freeman, The August Agency

"A cheesy hook drives me nuts. They say 'Open with a hook!' to grab the reader. That's true, but there's a fine line between an intriguing hook and one that's just silly. An example of a silly hook would be opening with a line of overtly sexual dialogue. Or opening with a hook that's just too convoluted to be truly interesting."
- Daniel Lazar, Writers House

" 'The Weather' is always a problem - the author feels he has to set up the scene and tell us who the characters are, etc. I like starting a story in media res."
- Elizabeth Pomada, Larsen-Pomada Literary Agents

Viral Times has a prologue of 900 words. Does my novel need it? I believe it, which represents another tip of publishing and writing: Follow your voice, especially if you have tried alternatives. For my book, there's too much sweep of character and time and place to get a sense of what's at stake, and the state of the world 20 years from now.

But you can choose for yourself. Making choices is the artist's work, after all. And your joy, if you can embrace the choosing.