Warren Adler's Blog, page 21

Jeff Zentner

For as long as we have recorded history, one of humanity’s great projects has been to seek some form of immortality. Religions are oriented toward life eternal and resurrection. Conquerors haven taken to the field in search of a name that would outlive their bodies. Legends speak of wellsprings of everlasting life.

This pull toward immortality seems no less powerful than any of the other elemental survival urges that drive us, encoded in our collective DNA.

I believe it is this pull that drives humankind to create art. Art contains bits of us that live as long as the work survives, which might be long after we’re gone. There are cave paintings that are 32,000 years old. Who knows how old some of the stories we tell are? Maybe it was the first humans who created the archetypes that appear in our stories today.

If I’m being honest, this drive to create something that will outlive me is at the bottom of why I write. I want to make something beautiful that will echo after I’m gone. One of my favorite writers, Jim Harrison, died recently. He once said “death steals everything but our stories.”

I write to make things death can’t steal.

http://www.jeffzentnerbooks.com/ 

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Rachel Walmsley

I’ve always written. True stories. Stories that come from travel. I can’t write about what I don’t know so everything I have ever written has been a recount of something ridiculous that has happened to me from falling down a squat toilet in Nepal to commandeering a horse from local Mexicans for a tequila mission. For as long as I have travelled I have found myself writing. At first I didn’t realise I was writing because it was in the form of fold up letters and faxes, and then later email essays sent to a list of friends and family from internet cafes full of speed typing backpackers. Somehow telling the stories of my adventures validated the experience. Sharing them was just another way I could feel the moments play out again. I found myself with the desire to make people laugh and word had that power. Even in my diary I felt the need to play with words, add humour, be clever. I wasn’t sure why being funny was so important when I was going to be the only person to read these diaries. But what I was sure of was that I felt compelled to write. I have never considered the why behind writing before I just have. I think writing for me is reflex more than decision and that without it I would lose half my voice.

http://www.theworldbeneathyourfeet.com/

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Charlotte Karp

I couldn’t read or write until I was seven. Not because I struggled with the concept, but because I didn’t want to – I remember it really well. As my parents frantically tried to grapple with the idea of raising child who would surely struggle in life due to a profound lack of literacy skills, I carelessly went to school and paid no attention whatsoever. It wasn’t until grade two that I noticed my classmates were reading short novels, and I felt decidedly perturbed. I wanted in. That was the moment I decided to learn to read and write. In one year I moved up something like five reading groups until I was at the top and, funnily enough, went on to get straight A’s in all my creative writing pursuits throughout my entire academic career. Once I started, it was hard to stop. I wrote when I felt happy or sad, anxious, stressed – at one point (age 11) I had a diary where I literally tried to write every thought I was having right there and then – not for anyone to read, just to see if I could do it. I’m the first to admit that’s a pretty weird thing for a kid (or anyone…) to want to do, but as a fairly anxious person, I found I could write everything I struggled to say. I never stopped writing, and I love that I’ve made it my job, but I’d still do it even if no one were reading.

http://www.theglobalshuffle.com/

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Penelope Ward

I began writing in early 2013 after discovering a love for reading in the new adult genre. As the mother of a severely autistic child, both reading and writing became a means of escape from the stresses of daily life. It was also a way to manifest the fantasies that had always run through my vivid imagination since childhood. While I’d dabbled in poetry, I hadn’t taken a stab at fiction until that time—in my late thirties. After completing my first novel, I bought a book on self-publishing and taught myself how to actually get my book out there. At the time, I had no connections, no author friends, not even a Facebook page. I got lucky when after a free promotion on Amazon, several thousand people downloaded my first book, Gemini, and it garnered the attention of some romance blogs. Admittedly, the market was much less saturated a few years back, and I feel as though it was a bit easier than it would be today for a debut author to get noticed in this way. With each release, I have acquired more new readers and count myself so very lucky that something that started as a fun hobby has turned into a career. I certainly never expected to reach the top of the bestseller lists in my wildest dreams. Now, I couldn’t imagine a life where I wasn’t creating fictional characters and painting imaginary worlds.

www.penelopewardauthor.com

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PUBLISHER’S WEEKLY Profiles Warren Adler in “The Self-Publishing Pioneer: How an Early Adopter of the Model is Still Going Strong”

By Jennifer McCartney

Warren Adler is best known as the author of The War of the Roses, the 1981 million-copy bestseller about a divorcing couple that became a blockbuster film starring Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner. His latest release, Torture Man, comes 35 years after the publication of his first bestselling book. What readers likely don’t know about the prolific 88-year-old author is that since 1998, his 50-plus works of fiction have been self-published under his imprint Stonehouse Press.

Like Stonehouse Press, Adler’s adjunct company Grey Eagle Films, which controls film rights to all his projects; Writers of the World, his online hub for new writers; and his social media program, with 200,000-plus Facebook fans, are all relatively new endeavors. Adler started his writing journey as the Washington correspondent for Armed Forces Press Service in the Pentagon during the Korean War. Following his military service, he founded his own PR agency, a career that evolved to see him take ownership of three radio stations and a television station before he turned his full attention to writing. After his blockbuster The War of the Roses and numerous successful follow-ups, Adler’s entrepreneurial spirit drove him to take a chance that would change the course of his writing career. He decided to set up his own company to publish and market his books.

Adler owns the print and digital rights to his entire backlist—something he says was easy to accomplish even as a bestselling author. This is because his initial contracts with traditional publishing houses allowed rights to revert back to the author once books were no longer in the warehouse. Even rights to his worldwide bestseller The War of the Roses, which was originally published by Warner Books, now belong to him. Perhaps more astonishing is that he engineered these rights reversions in the early 1990s—well before e-books and the rise of self-publishing. “Publishers hadn’t the vision to see what was happening,” he says. He saw it as an opportunity to control his own destiny as a writer. “It was both psychological and entrepreneurial,” Adler says of his decision. As a child of the Depression, Adler had seen his father struggle to find and hold a job, and he vowed never to be dependent on others for his living. “All things considered, [self-publishing] does provide an enormous amount of freedom, which many might deem priceless,” he says.

Adler’s drive to self-publish came during an age when doing so was considered career suicide. Self-publishing in print was expensive and distribution near impossible. Digital publishing existed via myriad file types and hardware systems. Hypertexts were available on floppy disks. Niche business markets created digital content for distribution on CD-ROM—which readers could “read” on Sony’s Data Discman. Adler’s foresight, however, has made him a pioneer of modern self-publishing. His gamble paid off. “Ultimately, I got tired of waiting for calls that determined whether or not I could tell my stories,” he says. His books are now published and distributed through RosettaBooks, and they continue to sell—more than 30 years after their initial publication, in some cases. He says he’s surprised that his books are appealing to millennial audiences—but this appeal is something he’s worked hard to cultivate. His theatrical adaptation of War of the Roses is still performed internationally. Next on his agenda for 2016 is creating audiobooks for all of his titles.

Embracing technologies and finding new readers are important focuses for Adler. He’s interested in the idea of an author’s legacy. Books that are forgotten by one generation can be revived by another, he notes. If an author plans well, books can be remarketed to audiences year after year, making them evergreen. But this discoverability depends both on technology and how the author manages his legacy. “The continuation of my company and my son’s production company will hopefully constitute the next phases of my career, which is to keep my authorial name alive beyond my lifetime,” he says.

Adler’s latest release, Torture Man, explores terrorism and a hostage situation from multiple viewpoints. As with all his new publications, Adler is marketing the book on Facebook, Twitter, Goodreads, YouTube, and with a book trailer. “It’s important to me to tie the topics I tackle in my novels to current events,” he says. “At 88, I’m constantly in the creative ballgame and have no intention of stopping.”

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J Kim Wright

I write because I have stories to tell. As a shy young girl, I was afraid to talk to people, but I could write. I poured my heart onto paper, creating new worlds for myself and occasionally for my teachers who encouraged me to write more.

Later, I became a lawyer who integrated peacemaking and healing into my divorce practice. I was asked to teach other lawyers to transform their practices. It was hard for most lawyers to picture a new way of being, but the stories of how I practiced helped them to see a path for their own practices. Stories became the tools of my trade, the way I showed them how they could be problem-solvers and create their own worlds.

My own stories didn’t have the depth and breadth of experience that would apply to all law practices. I needed more stories to inspire my growing audience. I gave up my law practice and became a nomad — for eight years. I have traveled around the world, having adventures and meeting lawyers who have found new ways of practicing, against all odds. I’ve chronicled the development of a movement of peacemaking lawyers, sharing the stories of pioneers and trailblazers on five continents.

Those stories led to two books for the American Bar Association. A third book is on the way. I feel blessed to have an audience for my stories and to write stories that inspire and empower lawyers to practice in new peacemaking ways.

www.jkimwright.com

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Jason Erik Lundberg

The writing bug hit me at seven years old, when I created a story about ninjas stealing my mother’s car, and it never really let go. Writing is the main thing that enables me to make sense of this weird world, and I often discover what or how I think about a given subject as I write about it. Publication has been quite rewarding, but even more so is when readers approach me to relay how much my work has meant to them, and how it has actually helped them get through a difficult part of their lives.

http://jasonlundberg.wordpress.com

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The Writer’s Dilemma: How Much Physical Description is Enough in the Characters We Create?

One of the imponderables of the fiction writing trade is just how much physical description is enough in order to fully flesh out a character’s identity. In years past many novels contained illustrations that purported to show images of the characters as conceived by the author. A prime example would be the work of Hablot Knight Brown “Phiz” who illustrated the works of Charles Dickens. Such illustrations were not mirror-image portrayals of Dickens’ characters but imaginary images conceived by the illustrator. Apparently Dickens, who approved the work of the artist, thought they were representative enough.

As technology expanded its reach into photography, film, television and now the world of digital media, adaptors of literary works chose either live actors or imagined cartoon characters to represent those characters created in the mind of the author. They made their choices based on their own imaginary representations choosing actors who they thought might best pass a loose test of authorial authenticity with a canny eye out for commercial appeal.

Most storytellers from time immemorial compose their material as a kind of roadmap conceived in their imagination to communicate their vision to the imagination of the reader. The author’s expectation is that exposition, dialogue, character interaction, emotional contact, descriptive details of the environment, authorial insights, and perhaps a sketchy outline of the characters’ physiognomy are all enough to create an image of a character’s appearance in the reader’s mind. The reader would be well aware of the approximate age of the characters by their impulses and desires, especially in those stories that deal with the mysteries of physical love and motivational impulses like ambition, faith, rapaciousness, depression, yearning and other emotions. In terms of the actual physical description, the physiognomy was and is often left to the reader’s imagination.

Characters in the Bible 

For example, in the Bible we are well aware of the characters and their motivations, but do we know what they really look like from the text? When we first encounter David, we know he is a young shepherd physically adroit, obviously chosen because he is skilled master of the slingshot.

With little physical details in the text, Michelangelo has imagined David as a stunning image carved in marble, fourteen feet tall. He is portrayed by the great sculptor as the most beautiful male figure on the planet, every part of him molded to represent the physical pinnacle of the gender.

Examples of such transference are legion. It is also true of the iconic painted and sculpted visions of Jesus Christ as an imagined human being and his depiction on the cross. Such physicality is not described anywhere in the new Testament.

There are so many examples of “left out physiognomy” descriptions that I’ll have to cherry-pick from my recollections.

Charles Swann and his mad passion for the courtesan Odette in Proust’s magnificent Swann’s Way is another interesting instance where the prime example of her physiognomy is Swann’s memory of Botticelli’s rendering of Moses’ first wife Zipporah.

Thus the reader must accept Swann’s memory of the painting, via the representation conceived by Botticelli, who imagined her from a brief mention in the old testament. Is anything more needed from Proust to fix Odette’s physical presence in one’s mind? Perhaps not.

Emma Bovary is another good example. Flaubert conceives of Emma with rich details of her psychology, her actions, even her inner thoughts, but the actual physical description is somewhat sketchy: black hair, big eyes, a birdlike walk. We know, of course, that she is a romantic, sexually frustrated and extravagant and obviously sensual and attractive but there are few concrete details.

Book Adaptations

In today’s pop culture, the authors who have their books adapted to film have little choice but to accept the film makers’ physical version of their conceived characters. In Hemingway’s novels, for example, Gary Cooper was chosen to represent both Frederic Henry in “A Farewell to Arms” and Robert Jordan in “For Whom the Bell Tolls.” People of my generation have it fixed in our minds that Gary Cooper is the physical image of Hemingway’s conception.

The list of these “transferences” go on and on. Vivien Leigh is Scarlet O’Hara. Clark Gable personifies Rhett Butler. Did Margaret Mitchell conceive them physically as such? Detectives, cowboys, political figures, gangsters, courtesans, fairy tale characters, heroes and heroines of every conceivable category conceived in the imagination of authors are physically portrayed by actors. Indeed, this is not confined to fiction. “Based on a true story” has become a kind of logo to signify what is recycled as “real events.”

The question for the author is: how far he or she should go to individualize his or her character’s physical description? What is absolutely necessary for the depiction? Think of the possibilities. The color of the eyes, so varied and rich with meaning. The hair color: its length and style. The voice: its pitch, depth and rhythm. The skin hue: so fraught with genetic clues. The configuration of lips in a smile or pout. Height, posture, carriage, girth, age, gait, disfigurement, handicap and a limitless number of specific physical identifiers.

Is it a conscious decision of the author to leave out the physical descriptions deliberately to allow the reader to imagine his own images? As an author of many works of fiction, some highly descriptive of the characters’ physiognomy and some merely sketchy or non existent, I must confess that I am still somewhat ambivalent about such a choice but I raise the issue largely to solicit opinion from my fellow scribblers.

Just how much physical description is enough? Share your opinion in the comment section below.

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Historical Novel Society Reviews Bestselling WWII Historical Thriller TARGET CHURCHILL

 

Previous publications of Warren Adler (The War of the Roses) and James C. Humes (Churchill: The Prophetic Statesman) promise an educational and pleasurable read in this historical thriller, and it delivers. Target Churchill, set in the 1940s, has all the breathless pacing of a strong thriller, but adds historical accuracy and insights into the character of Churchill and others that give the book a satisfying sense of completeness. A few chapters in the beginning give the feel of “OK, your turn now,” as nasty Soviets and Nazis give way to celebration of Churchill that can’t resist just another quote or anecdote. But soon things settle out as we go from one location and cast of characters to another, all converging on Churchill’s famous Iron Curtain speech in Fulton, Missouri on March 5, 1946.

Adler and Humes skillfully interweave details and show us both the process of a famous statesman crafting an important speech and the human beings behind the “stock characters” of spies and assassins and those who protect us from them. The pacing (beyond the opening awkwardness) is masterful, and an afterword surprises with historical details I thought were imagined for the sake of the thriller…” Continue Reading on Historical Novel Society

TARGET CHURCHILL Book Trailer

http://www.warrenadler.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/Target-Churchill-A-Thriller-Torn-from-the-Pages-of-History-Book-Trailer-HD.mp4

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Lindsay Hunter

Growing up, I wanted to be an actress. I studied theater in college and even spent time at the Lee Strasberg Theater Institute. When I realized I wasn’t very good and didn’t have the desire to get any better, I had to ask myself why exactly I’d pursued acting for so long. What about it intrigued me, other than the rare shot at fame and fortune?

I realized it was the opportunity to make people feel, to affect somebody. I began to wonder if writing was another way to reach people. I’d written stories and poems my whole life, had a zine in high school, dreamed of writing a novel, but I never considered it a serious passion. It was just something I did, something I enjoyed doing. After leaving New York, I decided to find out if writing was my true calling. I changed majors, got my degree in English/Creative Writing and eventually got a Master’s in Fine Arts in Writing. I’ve since published three books and a fourth is in negotiations now.

When I’m writing a novel or a story, I have a faceless reader in mind, someone I want to grab and hold for pages and pages. I want to entertain, affect, reach. I want what I write to linger. We’re in this story together, and I’m talking to you.

http://lindsayhunter.tumblr.com/

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