Writers Must (NOT) Read.
Okay, that title is sensationalism at work. Of course writers must read. Most of the time. And I do.
Among the single novel I try to always have going, and the single non-fiction book I have going at the same time, any given moment I’m also reading short fictions, poems, and articles and or blog posts from fellow bloggers.
Many of those posts are about writing. I subscribe to the feeds of several writers’s websites. Some posts I find via Twitter as well. Writing is a lifelong process, after all-a craft that is never truly mastered about which every honest sincere writer is always learning.
Yet just as some people take social media breaks, I’m considering an advice break.
There is great writing advice out there, but direct and indirect. Many sources from fellow author’s offer a great deal to their colleagues. I myself try to do this here on my blog on a regular basis. O hope some things I’ve said here have helped at least some of you some of the time.
Yet, reading about writing isn’t the same thing as actually writing. Reading about the art of writing, the marketing, the lives of words of successful authors is often an unconscious stalling tactic. Would-be writers spend all of their time reading about the writing life, and almost none living it.
This isn’t me, by the way. I continue to make steady progress on my writing goals, such as my upcoming mystery novel, this blog, and my freelance work. Not to mention private practice and journaling and such. I’ve not neglected my actual writing. Still, I sometimes wonder if I don’t need a break from all of the advice, the shared stories, the observations from other writers at different stages of success. Mightn’t the time I use making my way through my feed be better spend creating even more writing?
The answer is “perhaps.” I maintain that writer websites and articles therein are not only fun, but valuable resources of knowledge and guidance. But I don’t want to push it.
So, just to do an “advice cleanse” if you will, and dive more into what i already know and have already discovered as I write, I won’t be reading my writing related blog feed again until the end of April. Not on purpose, anyway. I’m sure I’ll slip up here and there, but I’ve announced my intention.
I will spend the time I would have spent reading on writing, of course, but also submitting. I’m behind on that as well, as per my own stated goals.
So, I’m off to read my feed for today, and begin my advice-free April. (Plus a few days in March.)
I’ll keep you posted on how it feels to isolate myself in this manner.
Beware Your Ides of March
“…as he was ambitious, I slew him.” –Brutus, Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, Act III.
Old Julius had his chance, didn’t he? At least in Shakespeare’s telling of said tale, a soothsayer told him to beware the Ides of March. But did Caesar listen? No.
He feared nothing, or claimed to fear nothing because he was Caesar, simple as that. Obviously that didn’t turn out well for him.
Yet one could argue he wouldn’t have been in that position so many March 15ths ago, had he not been overly ambitious, in his case for power and importance in Rome and beyond. He wanted to be a king eventually, and felt he deserved to be so, that he was qualified for such a position, he that had accomplished so much.
The forces around him didn’t agree.
Ambition in this country is seen almost as the primary virtue. The desire to advance in wealth, prestige, power, accomplishment is almost a molecule in the American DNA. It’s also a building block of advice within the world of writers.
“Get interviews, sell you book out of your car, hire publicists, get yourself out there, study the trends, go to conferences, remember to write something that can be made into a movie easily when you go to sell the movie rights. (And of course you do intend to market and sell movie rights to your work don’t you?)”
Ambition for the writer, or for anyone isn’t evil in its own right. We all need some of it, of course. But ambition is often conflated with persistence these days. The later is vital for success in writing and most other things. Ambition is secondary. If we’re not careful in fact, too much ambition is deadly.
Believe in yourself as a writer, naturally. Be proud of your work. Strive always to improve. But do so in pursuit of being a better writer, and contributing something to the world. Be willing to enjoy the accomplishments of today,before declaring where you want to be a year from now, (or further) lest the fall should be more damaging when we trip up, or don’t attain what we declared we desired so deeply.
Writing is a competitive field, yes. You always have to fight for the attention of readers. In this day and age of self-publishing that is an increasingly unlikely task. But the same zeal that could put you on top can always keep you from it.
Yes, there may be people out there who sabotage us when our ambition grows too large for our resources, but often enough we are our own undoing. We play the Brutus to our own Caesar, whether we realize it consciously or not. We juggle eggs at first, than knives, and despite a few cuts, we think we can handle chainsaws next.
You don’t need everything today, or even tomorrow, or next week. You’ve gotten this far, and you will get further, but don’t insist on taking from the world what it may not yet be ready to give to you. By all means work hard, push your boundaries, but don’t, like Caesar, assume that because of what you’ve done or who you are, you deserve to be crowned by society. You not only have work to do, but respect and temperance to display.
Of course, overnight, ambitious success stories happen, and I can’t swear you won’t be one of them by ignoring everything I just said. I do believe, though, that if you do too much inner horse trading with yourself, and with others in order gain more and more in less and less time, you’re likely to see yourself as more of a manufacturer and less of an artist. You run the risk of slicing your artistic heart right out of you, whether you succeed in your ambitions or not.
And that, friends, would be the unkindest cut of all.
“Murder, Theatre, Solitaire” Update
The fourth revision of MTS is well underway. This is a “read out loud” revision. I think a cozy mystery such as this is probably best served with sentences that are shorter and faster than much of my other writing, so I’m listening carefully to diction and such.
I just have to make sure I don’t edit out any of the clues!
I have one or two concepts I need to research for accuracy. I feel confident that I’ve gotten them right, but I want to be sure, because science. There isn’t much straight up science in the story, but if I mention it, i want to get it right, or at least structure it in a manner ambiguous enough to not be flat out wrong.
There are also some places where I want to foreshadow something more so than I have done so far. I of course don’t want give away the store too early.
Editing and revising a mystery novel feels different than doing so for Flowers of Dionysus. No doubt part of it is that I am now more experienced. Plus my first novel was a fantasy, and this is a murder mystery. But what is it about a murder mystery that makes the process seem so different?
All stories are to a degree, a web. Even if told in chronological order, aspects and scenes touch each other in more than one way. That was certainly true for Dionysus, even though the events were told “in order.” The events of MTS are also told in order, but because of the nature of the genre, a lot more has to touch on multiple angles and possibilities, some of which are not clear until near the end. (As any good mystery should be.) Revising my first novel was like folding a paper airplane. Revising a mystery is like folding an origami bird; every crease takes on more responsibility to the whole, so I have to be tighter.
The analogy isn’t perfect, but it’s the closest I can come.
I’m also playing around, in a very broad sense, with designing my own e-cover. I know, most people are against that, and it may come to pass that I give up on the process, and rely on someone else once more. But everything is getting done earlier in the process this time, and I have plenty of time between now and my planned launch in June to mess around and see what I can do, and still have time to get bailed out as needed by someone who knows what they are doing.
Right now, I am maybe a fifth of the way through the book in this revision. I think only one more after this should suffice. Two on the outside.
Critique of Critique
I haven’t been to the writing critique group of which I am a member, and technically an organizer for over a year. One reason is quite frankly because a jerk that is as arrogant as he is poor at writing fiction opted to take over without anyone’s blessing, bulldozing his way over my head, and that of a fellow organizer. As is often the case in such groups, the behavior was tolerated by most, and a new crop of people showed up to fill the seats, who didn’t know about such things.
Since this time, other moderators have also taken on part of the running of the group, and have done so with actual common sense, and concern for the quality of writing and the conversation around it. If not for the fact that the previously mentioned hack still attended every meeting, I might return on a regular basis.
Note that I said might. The truth is at this point, I must confess what some writers might consider either a heresy or even hubris; I’m no longer a fan of the group critique process, regardless of who runs it, and where it is.
I assure you this is not because my work is beyond critique. As a matter of fact, it is because I would value honest critique from someone I trust that I no longer trust the critique via committee (in this case MeetUp ) approach.
I write a short piece when my turn comes up, and a table full of people, some of whom I may have met before, and some I have not, that hopefully have read my work before sitting down that moment, give me a list of first impressions. I maybe answer a few questions they have. And then, my turn over, nobody thinks about the story ever again.
Yes, there are other ways of proceeding with such a group, and yours may be totally different from what I described. But for me it often feels more like an interview in such settings, at least since the original crop of dedicated writers drifted away. Writing is hard enough without hearing what someone I either never met or don’t particularly respect give their details “concerns” about my piece simply because it happened to be their turn to talk.
A growing familiarity with one another I think is the key to the most useful type of writing group. The group I am in was like this at first. I could see myself being perhaps a part of a permanent small writing group, with the same folks getting to know one another’s work and aspirations. If someone gets a feel for not just what I turned in today, but what I am about as a writer, their perceptions on my work carry a great deal more value to me.
That’s why I want to instead find a beta reader or two. Someone, probably another writer, who will take seriously the responsibility to read my work, form thoughts and questions about it, and meet me in a low pressure environment to discuss them. Someone for whom I would be willing to do the same thing. Though I have had friends read early drafts of my work in the past, a regular beta reader willing to commit would be even more constructive, I think.
But I’d want to know them, not draw them out of a hat on a website or something. A smaller group of people I liked a few years ago that sprung from the main group spent a month reading and offering thoughts on my first novel, and that was quite helpful. Those same people aren’t available now, but I’d like to get back into that sort of more intimate arrangement, where any of us can tell the other, “Will you take a look at this latest story?” or “I’m messing around with something in this novel, what do you think?” Not surprisingly, I prefer the quiet, deeper approach.
Writer’s groups do a lot of good for a lot of people, and the more people that get together to encourage people to write, the better. It helped me early on. But just as one’s fiction goes through stages from early draft to final form, so too can one’s process, and I feel my process no longer is suited for the random bi-weekly critique style mixed bag of colleague, friends, strangers and fools, depending on what day it is.
Title Reveal
As you know, my next novel is my first murder mystery. A cozy mystery, in fact. I wrote the first draft about two years ago as part of Nanowrimo, and let it sit for a while. Over the last six months I’ve been revising. There is more revising to do between now and my planned summer release date.
But, it now has a title, other than Mystery Novel which is what I’ve been calling it. It’s working title among my notes and files has been Exeunt. But no more. Henceforth, I shall refer to my upcoming title by its recently selected proper title:
Murder, Theatre, Solitaire.
I recently sat down and compiled a list of 30 possibilities for titles. I put no restrictions on my imagination for this list. If it sounded like a title, I put it on the list. A few were cheesy to the point of embarrassing. Most were just boring. About five really spoke to me, but this title won out in the end because I like the diction, and the simplicity. I like how it indicates right off that it’s a mystery novel. (Something I decided was important for marketing purposes.) And I’m using the “less American” spelling of “theatre” because that’s how I’ve always spelled it. I didn’t for my previous novel, but this is a title we’re talking about!
It also describes some other aspects of the story. Which ones? No spoilers here.
As I said a few posts ago, it’s time for me to get this name out there, and to talk up the process of this novel. I’ll be mentioning things about it over the coming months, updates and such. I will likely chose to call it MTS for short much of the time, so just be ready for that. And since that’s not actually the title, but just some letters, I won’t bother with underlining that every time. Just laying out the ground rules here.
No to update my various social profiles with this title and release time. It will be in June, but I don’t want to set the exact date in stone just yet.
So now that my mystery’s title is no longer itself a mystery, I’m off to do some updating.
Stay tuned.
Ty Unglebower 