Category: writing (Page 2 of 8)

Six Months Later

June 9, 2020 / admin / 1 Comment

Maybe I should just publish my personal journal. Everyone wants to know the thoughts of a privileged white man, right?

I’m a planner. Wasn’t always. When I was younger, due to age and circumstance I just did things without a ton of thought toward long-term goals. Back then, I didn’t have any. I was too busy surviving.

Over the past few years, though, I’ve become increasingly concerned with my and my wife’s futures. I’m in a better position to feel that concern, as our day-to-day survival isn’t as suspect as it once was. So, last year, when I was going through a particular vicious bout with existential dread, she and I sat down and made a three-year plan. In three years, I wanted to be making enough money off of my writing to do it full time, in addition to my wife’s day job, should I wish.

It’s been just over six months since I enacted the first parts of the plan (this website, a set writing schedule). How’s it coming?

Writing Discipline

On a good day, when I have a plan for what I want to write, I can knock out 1,000 words in an hour. This is good, because I usually only have an hour to write in the morning. Most days aren’t good days. That said, I only count my word count when it applies to my fiction writing. I don’t count the words written for this blog.

To maintain the presence I know is imperative to success online, I’ve set a personal record for most on-time updates, publishing two blogs per week (Tuesday and Friday morning, if you haven’t kept track) and one vignette per month. This is my 45th blog post in six months (or thereabouts), which isn’t super impressive on its own but means I’ve been disciplined and my planning ahead for many of these has been successful.

Two years ago I wrapped up my first novel, last year I wrote a novella (still being posted a chapter at a time at Wattpad, for those interested), and this year I’ve done the planning for and gotten a few thousand words into my next novel, in addition to focusing more on short stories. I’ve completed five short stories (between 1,500 and 4,500 words a piece) plus the number of vignettes I’ve done.

In terms of pure productivity (and considering the circumstances of, well, gestures broadly), I’ve done a good job of maintaining a certain pace. There have been lulls (I’m in one now!), but that’ll happen in the best of times, which these certainly are not.

Publishing

Because my focus has been on actual writing, attempts to get published haven’t been as successful. In fact, it’s been mostly rejections. Earlier in the year I was longlisted for a flash fiction contest, but wasn’t selected. Otherwise, it’s been a only rejections for short stories and in querying my novel.

Sounds dire, I know, but the numbers don’t play out in my favor. I’ve only attempted to publish short stories twice this year, which isn’t a large enough sample size to draw any conclusions.

The same goes with querying. I realized late last year that I may have been querying my novel to the wrong agents in the wrong genre. I’ve always thought of it as a science fiction story, but the more research I did into genre classification and the more feedback I got from people, the more I realized it falls into literary fiction with speculative elements. In other words, strictly in terms of language and style and not quality it has more in common with David Mitchell or Haruki Murakami than it does Ray Bradbury or Orson Scott Card. This required a change in approach. I researched a different set of agents and started to query again, all of which has led to more rejections, but it’s once again a fairly small sample size (five rejections of eight submissions, so far).

I’ve also dabbled in self-publishing. Obviously, my vignettes are self-published on this website, but I’ve also used Wattpad to start publishing my novella and a couple of short stories. And that brings me to…

Readership

My main goal over the next few years is to build an audience. How’s that coming? Here’s a graph that shows page views for this website:

Looks like the stock market somewhere around March 20th…

I know that’s kind of small and hard to read, but I essentially average between 0-3 page views per day. Those big spikes are the times I or someone I know has promoted the site on social media. In other words, I have a few dedicated readers that will check in on me frequently, otherwise most people only visit when I explicitly ask.

That’s to be expected.

I don’t really like promoting myself on social media. I really don’t like social media, in general, but that’s a subject for a rant sometime. And the best way to build your readership is to continually remind people that you exist. I had a three-pronged plan for building an audience:

Online Community: Join and participate in forums, build relationships with other aspirings, and generally be active enough that people find my work organically.
Writer’s Groups: Again, this is about being active. Get out in the world, join some writer’s groups, give and get feedback, and hope that the community gravitates toward my work.
Social Media: Use Facebook, Twitter, and Wattpad to promote myself and drive people toward this site.

The online community, especially around Wattpad, seemed to show a little bit of promise, but I haven’t been consistent in hanging around the forums lately. It takes a lot of time that I don’t really have. Social media is good for short-term spikes, especially if I’m sharing something provocative, but not long-term readers. Writer’s groups was put to bed with Covid-19.

Promoting yourself is difficult, but necessary. How else will anyone find you?

What’s Next?

Initially, I had a plan to self-publish my novella by next month. I was going to use it as a test run in hiring and editor, going through the process for Kindle Direct Publishing, all that fun stuff. Considering I’m publishing it chapter-by-chapter on Wattpad right now, that plan has changed. I may still do all that, but it’ll be a different timeline.

I’d also like to self-publish a collection of short stories this year. By December I’ll have 12 vignettes published on this site that I’ll collect, put with a bunch of new short stories and visuals, and put online. Then I’ll swap out the vignettes for new ones every month until I’ve collected enough to do another collection.

Otherwise, I’ll continue trying to build an audience through participating in the writer’s community and (maybe) promoting myself on social media. Hell, maybe one day I’ll write something actually good and it’ll catch fire.

Then I’ll have it made in the shade.

Lessons From HELL OR HIGH WATER

June 5, 2020 / admin / 0 Comments

2016’s HELL OR HIGH WATER, written by Taylor Sheridan and directed by David Mackenzie, is damn near a perfect film. Beautifully directed, wonderfully acted, and expertly written, the movie exemplifies many of the aspects of storytelling that I think elevates the artform.

Begin in Media Res

If you seek out enough writing advice you’ll start to notice the same things being said over and over, but interpreted differently every time. The most egregious of these, in my opinion, is to start with action. Lots of writers interpret this advice as meaning to start with a fight scene, or someone being chased, and sometimes that works. But what the advice is really saying, and what HELL OR HIGH WATER does, is starts in media res. Meaning, we start with the story already in motion.

In this case, that means we’re starting with a bank robbery. Not the planning for the robbery. Not Toby picking Tanner up from his latest stint in jail and asking him for help. We learn the why and how of the robbery over the course of the film, but to begin we’re thrust into the most important moment of these characters’ lives, and the exact moment that puts the story in motion.

Begin in media res.

Building Empathy Through Relationships and Balancing Tone

Between the desperation of the characters, the actions they take out of that desperation, and the overall message of the film, it could have been bleak. We could have watched as one desperate father and his borderline sociopathic, irreparably damaged brother hurt people while robbing banks and being chased by a sad, nearly retired Texas Ranger with no hope for his future.

Instead, we get something else. Something that balances that heaviness with moments of levity that connects the audience to the characters by relating the characters to one another. One of the things that surprised me most on my re-watch (I initially saw it when it was first released four years ago) is how funny the film can be. Ben Foster’s character, Tanner, is especially charismatic. The way he ribs his younger brother and leans into the worst aspects of his personality to defect from the awfulness of his actions becomes endearing. This scene, for example:

The scene gets intense and violent, all because Tanner only knows how to escalate a situation. If you look closely at the scene, Tanner is prepared to shoot the kid before Toby intervenes. When Toby opens the door, you can see the gun at Tanner’s side. Despite the seriousness of the situation, he immediately diffuses his brother’s anger by making fun of him for forgetting to keep someone’s gun away from them earlier in the movie (“You remembered the gun! You’re getting old hat at this.”) and then busts his balls for buying Mr. Pibb instead of Dr. Pepper.

By seeing that aspect of their relationship, by understanding how Toby could so easily be swayed by Tanner’s humor, we’re won over, too.

Simplicity of Story in Service of Theme

The film’s story isn’t complex. There are essentially three main characters, and on major supporting character. There are no twists or turns. Everything happens as it does, in the order it does, and the consequences play out as they will. Motivations and rationalizations are clearly explained. The story is what it is, no unnecessary bells or whistles.

This simplicity streamlines the story, keeping the focus tight on the characters and the themes, and allowing the audience to be swept up into the journey. The themes of family, land, racism, and economic disparity are all complex, needing engagement from the audience to think on these things after the film. Keeping the story simple, straightforward, challenging the audience in a different way than a Chris Nolan film might (for example), allows for the focus to be on what’s most important. If the film had double-crosses, or was told in non-chronological order, that would be lost.

Social Commentary Done Right

HELL OR HIGH WATER has a very clear point of view. Banks and the already-wealthy are the real thieves in our society. Multiple characters point this out when discussing the morality of the robberies, but it’s really summed up with a short monologue by Toby near the end of the film:

Monologue starts around the 2:15 mark.

After spending the entire movie in poor, dying towns with boarded up buildings and billboards for debt relief dotting the land, Toby simply and eloquently sums it up: being poor is a disease. One he didn’t want to pass on to his children.

As I said, the film has a clear point of view. But it allows the audience to come around to that point of view on their own, only hammering the point home with this final scene. By spending time in those dying towns, watching the characters act out of desperation, we’ve already come to understand their plight. Toby’s vocalizing it doesn’t change that, he only reinforces it.

I think that’s how it should be done. Social commentary can easily be a turn-off for audiences if they’re beat over the head with it. Doing it subtly, with characters we understand and like, might make it stick.

Wattpad: A Detective Story

May 22, 2020 / admin / 4 Comments

I’ve known for a long time that the best way to build an audience is to be part of a community. Community, after all, is where we get the support we need to improve our craft, build word of mouth, and get picked up when we fall down. Since college I’ve done quite a few in-person writer’s groups, from large organized groups to a small cadre of like-minded friends from work (oh how I miss you, Scribe n’ Imbibe). What I haven’t done much of is find an online community.

Many writer’s forums are intimidating to dive into, or seem to be infrequently used. While listening to The Bestseller Experiment podcast, an author mentioned using Wattpad to build her reader-base into a career. Well, that’s exactly what I want to do. So I put on my detective cap and dove into Wattpad for an investigation. Here’s what I’ve noticed so far:

The straight dirt.

Let’s get this out of the way: Wattpad is a legitimate service. They don’t retain any rights, there are no fees (unless you’re paying for Premium or something), and you have complete control over what goes in your story, what happens with it, etc. We can argue the wisdom of putting your work up for free if you’re trying to get traditionally published, but that likely doesn’t matter for most of us. Wattpad also offers plenty of opportunity for writers. There are contests, an annual award called the Wattys, and top authors have been given publishing deals and even sold movie / TV rights.

As far as I can tell, there is very little risk to publishing on Wattpad. So, the question then becomes: without much risk, is there much gain?

It’s a lot.

Wattpad is huge. There are literally millions of books, tons of features across different payment levels, and millions of users who, collectively, spend 23 billion minutes on the site per month (according to Wattpad). This doesn’t include the forums, which is impossible to manage without carefully curating the settings to your interests. Luckily, Wattpad has lots of explainers and features to help newbies do just that. Still, it can end up being a lot of time and effort to find yourself drowning in content. And if you’re a writer, it’s akin to throwing a drop of water into the ocean hoping that a fish will find it.

Wattpad skews young.

Within a few days of bopping around the forums, searching for an online writer’s group for critiques, I ended up in a Discord chat with another aspiring author. She is a moderator for the chat and was orienting me with the group, and I made an offhand comment about my day job. After a lot of back and forth, I came to find that she was finishing her first semester of college, which meant she was maybe 18 or 19 years old.

Friends, I’m nearly old enough to be her father. (That’s only a slight exaggeration.)

In another interaction on a forum, I found myself giving writing advice to a 15 year old. I had to dig to find older writers on the site, and it’s unclear how many are active in the community itself. The vast majority of Wattpad’s users seem to be teenagers or young adults (according to this article from a successful Wattpad author, eighty-five percent are between 13 and 30 years old), so if you want to publish there keep that in mind. Your James Joyce-ian tome with alternating chapters from a woman on her deathbed and the ghost of her ancestor probably won’t appeal. Which brings me to…

Readers prefer very specific genres.

Wattpad added separate subgenres for “Vampire” and “Werewolf” fiction. That might be a hint as to the types of stories that are most popular on the platform. The most popular stories on the site seem to be absolutely dominated by romance. Specifically, billionaire romance, which is a subgenre of romance stories where one of the main characters is a billionaire. There is also a large fan fiction audience.

In short, unless you’re writing in one of those genres your story will have a tough time gaining readers. Not impossible, and there are some more literary writers that have wracked up tens of thousand of hundreds of thousand of views, but difficult.

Expectations.

I’m only at the beginning of my Wattpad experiment. I’ve found the forums to be friendly and, in the case of my deciding on a cover to use for my posted story, helpful. My (admittedly limited) presence on the forums doesn’t seem to be translating to reads, but I’ve only posted two chapters within the past few days. I’m going to give it a bit of time, continue posting chapters and browsing the forums, and see if that translates to readers.

This investigation is ongoing.

Cheap plug.

Read my novella, A NIGHT OF CHAOS on Wattpad. I’ll be publishing it chapter-by-chapter for the next month or so. A brief description:

On the night of his bachelor party, disaffected Anh Nguyen is ensnared by wild child Amy Hess with the promise of a capital-A “Adventure.” Anh ditches his groomsmen to wander Buffalo, NY, with Amy and quickly finds that the adventure she promised is really a city-wide attempt at disrupting aspects of society, from the city’s community centers to the highest echelons of its power–all driven by a mysterious religion.

The nature of Amy’s mission forces Anh to question everything he knows about society, religion, and the trajectory of his life. As Amy introduces chaos everywhere she goes, Anh struggles to reconcile who he is with who he wants to be.

Unconscious Details that Reveal Character

April 24, 2020 / admin / 0 Comments

Screenshot from “Cheers.” Sam shows Norm the proper way to hold a ball before a pitch. It’s a perfect character moment, as I’ll explain if you’ll just keep reading. Go on. Keep going. I dare you.

A while ago I started a rewatch of Cheers on Netflix. It’s a show I saw a lot of as a kid because my father watched it whenever it was on (including reruns), but I don’t remember a lot of specifics about it. It’s a great sitcom, masterfully written, acted, and shot. The first thing that stuck out to me is its forward momentum and how it varies its use of a single location. The entirety of the first season takes place in the bar itself, only leaving the main bar area for the pool room or (in one episode) a bathroom a few times. But it holds your interest.

I was also struck by the ability of the actors to improvise. There are some comedic greats on the show, like Rhea Perlman, Shelley Long, John Ratzenberger, and George Wendt. Wendt, in particular, brings a lot to his role as Norm. And there is a character moment he shares with Ted Danson in the season two episode “Norman’s Conquest” that I think illustrates what he added to the role.

Throughout the series Norm is constantly joking about how terrible his marriage is to anyone that will listen. For a long period of time, he and his wife, Vera, are even separated. So when Norm, who is an accountant, brings an attractive client to the bar and she shows an interest in him, nearly everyone in the bar pushes him to cheat on his wife. Of course, hijinks ensue.

But the character moment that most stood out to me, while a direct result of that conflict, doesn’t hinge on it. At the climax of the episode, Norm and the bar’s owner, Sam, a former pitcher for the Boston Red Sox, are discussing Norm’s feelings for his wife in the pool room. Norm is leaning on the pool table, holding a pool ball, while Sam paces around the room. In the middle of their discussion, without changing topics or acknowledging what he’s doing, Norm turns his wrist like he’s pitching a baseball. Sam stops, adjusts his fingers, and then mimes the correct way to add english to the ball, all without missing a beat of their conversation.

This speaks volumes about the characters and their relationship, despite the action not relating to the substance of the conversation. Norm looks up to Sam, wants to be like him in a lot of ways (including being a womanizer until Norm admits that he loves his wife), and unconsciously treating a pool ball as a baseball in a moment of distress illustrates this desire. Sam taking a moment to correct Norm’s form plays into this. The way the action plays out is a minor thing without bearing on the situation at hand, but is so perfectly in character for both of them. My hunch is that this was totally improvised by George Wendt and Ted Danson.

For me, the lesson is that there are conscious and unconscious ways to communicate character and relationship to an audience. Conscious ways are big, broad actions and conversations. Whether or not a character saves a kitten stuck in a tree. An argument with a loved one about one being emotionally distant. These are big moments that illustrate, broadly, who someone is.

The small moments might be the way a character leaves a dirty glass in the sink as opposed to the dishwasher or just washing it immediately. Whether or not they make their bed in the morning. If they smile at a child while waiting in line at the grocery store while having a conversation with the clerk. Little things that we all do unconsciously everyday that illustrate the types of people we are.

If done right, these tiny actions might better communicate a character than any broad, dramatic argument.

The Art of Titles

April 21, 2020 / admin / 0 Comments

Is there anything better than an artfully framed photo of books? The stories within the books themselves, you say? Well that’s one opinion…

So I’m going to say something controversial, yet brave: Titles are hard.

For me, titles have always been hit or miss (as you’ve probably noticed with my Vignettes). I’ve always just kind of gone with the first thing that I thought sounded good. Recently, though, a beta reader for a novella I wrote last year said that based on the title he expected to read a romantic comedy, which does not describe the actual story. That got me thinking about what titles should do and after paying more attention to some of the titles of things I enjoy, I settled on four things that I think a title should strive to do. Not always all at once, but in some combination that gets a reader’s attention.

BE DESCRIPTIVE, BUT NOT OVERLY SO

This is the trap I most often find myself falling into; my titles are too descriptive. My instinct is always to use my title to describe what the story is about. A good instinct! It’s important to offer a hint to the reader what they’re about to dive into. But being overly descriptive can also be bland, boring, and other bad things that may or may not start with “b.”

For example, Stephen King’s short story A Very Tight Place is very descriptive if you’ve read it, but not so descriptive as to give away the story or feel too familiar. Chuck Wendig’s Wanderers is also descriptive, but still holds an air of mystery that piques one’s interest. Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War describes the story by combining something we’re all familiar with–a war–with something that seems impossible–a war that never ends. In that way it feels fresh and interesting. Arthur C. Clark’s Childhood’s End is descriptive in a way that isn’t apparent until the last bits of the novel have been digested.

I think that’s the trick to these types of titles: They give a hint to the reader as to what they’re about while also meeting one of more of the next criteria.

HINT TO GENRE

As I mentioned above, the title I had settled on for my novella was descriptive, but misleading. Great titles can indicate what genre they are regardless of where they’re found.

No one would ever mistake The Twilight Zone for anything other than science fiction, for example. Ray Bradbury’s The October Country tells you exactly what sort of book it will be, and informs the read of its tone at the same time. Same with The Martian Chronicles. That title tells you its genre, what it’s about, and even its format (a chronicle of related but unconnected stories). In the horror realm, A Head Full of Ghosts by Paul Tremblay sets the expectation that his book is psychological with horror elements with its word choice.

People have expectations for the genre they’re reading and a title should reflect that. Word choice matters and lots of readers associate specific genres with certain words. When I say “dark” or “black” or “nightmare” you would assume I’m describing a horror or thriller. When I say “ship” or “planet” you might assume a space epic. These are all considerations to take when titling a story.

BE PROVOCATIVE

The most important thing a title can do is entice a reader to pick up the book. In that sense, it helps to be provocative. A little mysterious. Promise something that the reader may not have seen before.

Haruki Murakami achieves this with 1Q84. It’s familiar, a riff on Orson Welles’s 1984, but spins it just off-kilter to be interesting on its own. Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes makes the reader wonder just what is wicked and where it might be headed. I know that was enough for me to crack open the book. Maggie Shen King’s An Excess Male sounds counter-intuitive (how can there be excess people?) while also describing the plot.

Stories with something unique at their center, something specific to that story, often make good titles. Stephen King’s The Tommyknockers, for example. The Andromeda Strain by Michael Crichton. Or The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi.

Again, anything that will grab a reader’s attention.

SET THE TONE

A good title should clue the reader into the tone of the story. This is related to being descriptive and hinting at the genre, but is slightly different. Hinting at the tone can tell your reader if your story is heavy or lighthearted, serious or satirical, or any other number of things along this spectrum. Twilight Zone episodes, with each episode its own unique thing, excelled at this. For example, I know the episode “Nightmare as a Child” is likely to be heavier in tone than “The Rip Van Winkle Caper.” “In Praise of Pip” tells me the story is likely to be nostalgic, while “One More Pallbearer” is likely to be dark.

The October Country, mentioned earlier, is another great example of setting the tone for the (in this case) collection with the title. We have a specific idea of what October feels like and Bradbury leaned into that for the stories presented. Same with King’s Just After Sunset.

In short, in my opinion a lot of the heavy lifting a title does is setting reader expectations. Describing what sort of story they’re getting, hinting a plot, genre, and tone. Not every title needs to do everything, but I think that the more of these quadrants (because there are four?) you can hit, the stronger the title.