Joe Clifford Faust's Blog, page 15

Curious Affectation

Okay, somebody explain why in the heck I do this.

It's something I've been conscious of for years, and it never seemed to bother me until a week or so ago. That's when I got an email that inspired this recent post. At one point, the correspondent said,

I go out and buy notebooks and pens and write short spurts here and there.

To which I replied, "Yeah, I do that, too."

And I do. Especially if I'm not working on a novel. An old idea bubbles up, or a couple of notions collide with each other to become an idea, and all of a sudden my brain is saying, This is it… workable novel idea.

What happens next is that I wander into the nearest grocery store, drug store or office supply outlet and buy a notebook or a notepad or a ream of blank paper. And if I don't have a Pilot G-2 handy, I buy at least one of those, too.

Then I sit down and start writing the book, by hand, because dang it, I really can't help myself.

I've started a great many books this way. Some of them have even been finished – The Mushroom Shift, for example. I've got about 20 handwritten pages of the UFO novel that I hope to pick up and start Officially Writing soon. I've got almost 200 pages of another novel spread over three or four notebooks that I need to pick up and finish at some point in the future. And I've got a ton of one, two, three, four, five page starts laying here and there, ideas begging to be fleshed out with another 500 pages of text.

Since getting the email the other day, I was amused to find out that I wasn't the only one who did that kind of thing, reading into his words the fact that he indeed underwent the same tortured process I went through.

But I started to become unhappy about it. Because I still don't know why I do this.

No, it's not a passing thing. After lunch with my wife and mother-in-law this afternoon, I found myself in a Walgreen's in that aisle because two notions collided – one of which was a bit I had written one paragraph of on another sheet of paper – and it wanted to come out.

So I weighed my options. I've been writing on a pastel green printer paper of late – it's easy on the eyes. But Walgreen's only has white. I pass over the spiral bounds – got too many of them at home. Ditto the yellow pads. Never was much for off-size stuff, either, although I used to draw in Steno notebooks.

Ah, there it was! A 120 sheet pack of looseleaf paper, college ruled, on sale for 97 cents. And I have plenty of three-ring binders at home! Huzzah! The planets have aligned!

But why do I do this? Not just sometimes. A lot. It's like part of my personality or something. A behavior pattern.

I've tried to do some quick self-psychoanalysis since this started bugging me and have come up with a handful of maybes on why I behave this way:

Idea validation. Maybe if the idea has reached the point where I feel compelled to start writing it, then it's proven its own merit and this is the way it preserves itself. But if this is the case, why don't I just fire up the word processor and have at it for a few pages? Why do I have to go and buy paper?

Connecting with the idea. Writing by hand gives writers a much more intimate writing experience. All of the VBS plays to this point have been done by hand before typing up the working copy. But couldn't I connect just as well with my fingers on a keyboard?

An old habit that refuses to die. Makes sense, since I was writing by hand before I was typing. But I wrote so much that my dad got me a typewriter when I was in third grade. So if this is common to writers, what happens to writers who are kids now and have grown up typing? Will they have to buy a new computer whenever they get an idea for a new book? Very funny.

Embedding the idea in the imagination. Since I tend not to write notions and ideas down, this is my punishment for not having file cabinets full of napkins, grocery store receipts and deposit slips filled with notes. It's always been my contention that if an idea is good enough, you won't lose it. It'll keep coming back to you.

A sign of some kind of mental disorder – ADD, OCD, some other alphabet soup thing. This may be closer to the truth than anything else. What are writers but bundles of nerves, held in check by the ability to create? Am I really this much of a sad sack?

A sign I need to be working on The Next Novel. This is probably it. I need to be writing and if I don't have some kind of outlet, I get these weird, random outlets. Sounds as good as anything else I've advanced.

I don't know. Is it just me and that guy who wrote to me, or do some of you other creative types go through this? Or have your imaginations concocted different types of tortures and torments?

I guess the bottom line is this: I know I am creative, and while I have accepted that and can live with it, I am still hopelessly at its mercy. And a happy Monday to you, too.

The Cliff's Notes Version of How to Be a Writer

A lot of my posts come from questions I get from aspiring writers struggling with some part of the writing process or another. The other day I got an email peppered with questions I had mostly already answered. However, it occurred to me that there might be others out there who, like this particular reader, who haven't had the chance to wade through the 700+ posts here to find what they want.

So instead of cutting and pasting a whole bunch of links to essays in this side, I went for the short answer, knowing I would post the results in a kind of Cliff's Notes version of this blog.

So here's the short answer version of many popular writer's questions. For more detail, see the rest of the blog.

(Note: questions in parenthesis are paraphrased by yours truly for the sake of brevity)

(Reader mentions different jobs he has had, including a recent stint in the military)

Thank you for serving in the military. I can't thank you enough for doing that.

It sounds you have a lot of different experiences, which is a good thing. A writer doesn't have to have experience in a lot of different jobs and rely solely on imagination, but I think experience helps. Your resume sounds a lot like my early one before I settled down.

(Reader asks about how one should go about tackling a writing project)

If you're reading my blog, you've probably found tons of information about writing from my particular point of view. You should hunt up some blogs from other writers to see how they're handling things. I'm a big proponent of finding out what works for you as a writer, because what works for me or another writer might not be your cup of tea. Plus, the way I write has evolved over the years.

I'm 39 and I've wanted to write my entire life but have yet to finish a book. I have multitudes of ideas streaming in my head with good ideas.

Yup, you've got it bad. Welcome to the club. Most writers have tons of ideas (I even do a writer's seminar called "The Idea Is The Easy Part" to show how easy it is to come up with a concept for a novel). Our big issue is time to do something with those ideas.

I have a friend who is a brilliant idea man. He's always coming up with a new idea for a book. His problem is, he gets these new ideas when he's supposed to be working on another book, and he gets so taken with the new idea that he abandons his in-progress for the new idea. Those writers who are published learned to discipline themselves and pick one idea, working on it until it's done. If the new idea is really good, it won't go away.

I go out and buy notebooks and pens and write short spurts here and there.

I do that too. I have notebooks with notes and starts of books all over the place. It's like buying a new notebook and/or pen validates the new idea. But again, that discipline is the key.

But I make excuses and think that I can't make money doing that.

It's hard. And it's hard for outsiders to understand that, for every Tom Clancy or Stephen King, there are 1,000 writers like me who do it for the love of writing, and of course, for a shot at that brass ring.

Fortunately, with the advent of the Amazon Kindle and other e-readers, it's become easier to make money on one's work by self-publishing. Good money. One woman just signed a $2 million contract with a major publisher based on the Twilight knockoff novels she was self-publishing. But it needs to be good. Or shamelessly commerical.

Do I need an agent?

There's a joke in the industry that you can't get a book sale without an agent, and you can't get an agent unless you have sold a book. If you want to get published by the Big Six, you need an agent. If you're willing to go the self-published route, no. If your self-pubbed stuff catches on, the agents will find you.

The story of how I got my agent is on my blog. It helped that I went in through the Science Fiction/Fantasy Door. That genre is more open to new writers and unsolicited submissions than the more mainstream stuff.

How do I get a book contract?

By writing a darn good book. And you do that by writing and writing and writing and writing. Every time you write you get better at it. No anabolic steroids necessary.

How can I get a publisher to pay me while I write?

1) Write a darn good book

2) Sell it to a publisher

3) While you are marketing the first book, start on the next one. This way you can tell your publisher you're working on a new book and they will understand that you're serious about writing.

4) If your book gets buzz, or hits it big, or perhaps even breaks even, your publisher will want to tie you down with a multi-book contract. When that happens, congratulations!

That's approximately the way to do it. Fortunately for us all, publishers want to make sure an author can go the distance and produce something both readable and salable before committing to their writing careers.

I'm sure some people have gotten contracts without going through some version of this, but they were either celebrities who could be hooked up with ghostwriters, or had established themselves as writers in another area (short fiction, journalism, etc.)

When you were writing the Angel's Luck series what was your writing process?

It depends. The first book, Desperate Measures, was the first novel I ever wrote. During its writing I was going to college, getting married, and looking for a job. It was written piecemeal over the course of 4 1/2 years, and the original version was twice as long as what was published. While it was at market, I wrote A Death Of Honor, then The Mushroom Shift (about police work – I worked for a few years as a sheriff's dispatcher), then The Company Man. By then I was a better writer and was able to hack the mess that was DM into shape.

The other two books in the trilogy I was under contract to write. I had said I was never going to write a trilogy, but the characters wouldn't leave me alone. So I pitched DM to my editor as the first book, said a few words about what the other two books would be like, and Del Rey bit. I wrote those two as a full-time writer, and I treated it like a full-time job.

How many hours a day did you write?

Again, it depends. When I'm writing a novel, I tell myself my daily goal is 5 pages, and I take however long it takes to get there. Many days I'd get on a roll and write more in just a couple of hours. If I was having a bad day, I told myself I had to get through at least one page. More often than not, getting through the first page made it possible to write four more. But sometimes one was all I could struggle through.

WARNING: Telling friends and family that you are writing full time will often lead them to think that, since you are home, you are "not doing anything", and are therefore eligible to do things like help them move pianos.

How did you find a decent Editor to read your work?

I was marketing A Death of Honor, and since it was Science Fiction, I was going the Slush Pile route (SF is institutionally more friendly to unsolicited submissions than any other genre – although romances may be this way also… I wouldn't know). A bunch of smaller houses turned it down. A big house wanted it, but they wanted changes that I felt would have damaged the integrity of the story. My wife kept telling me to send it to Del Rey, and I kept saying no because they published Heinlein and Clarke – what would they want with me? She persisted. I gave in. And I can't count over the years how many times I have been grateful for my wife's encouragement.

I do want to write and I feel that is my talent.

If you really, really want to write, nobody can stop you. Not even yourself. All sorts of people have told me they wanted to write, but when it came down to it, no encouragement I gave could make them actually sit down and write. A few did and succeeded, but if they didn't have that spark inside driving them, they never would have made the commitment. Many others tried and gave up, or ended up not trying.

I said that it took me 4 1/2 years to write Desperate Measures. That's because I wanted to be a writer more than anything else. And I wrote whenever I could steal the time to do it. A lot of times it was a half-page, page, two pages here and there. It added up. When I finally finished, I learned that I could write a novel. I started to get an idea of how I worked as a writer. I learned that, every time I wrote, I got better at it. And I learned that, having done it once, I wanted to do it again.

And I'm still trying. I'm not where I'd like to be as a writer, either. But I haven't given up because I know how much writing means to me, and I know I'd rather be writing novels than anything else.

So steal what time you can to pile up those pages and see what happens.

—

And that is Volume One of the Cliff's Notes. Feel free to question or append in the comments.

Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders

Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders

by

Vincent Bugliosi with Curt Gentry

* * * *

Given the initial chaos, it's a wonder they got caught at all. And if I'm ever in trouble, I want Bugliosi to defend me.

Sometimes it's the Journey

Longtime readers know that I'm a proponent of The Power of the Ending. In other words, if you have an appropriate, satisfying and strong ending, your readers will tend to forgive some of the gaffes you may have committed in the middle of the book. So if you're all about commercial fiction, you're all about a knockout opening and a killer ending, right?

Well… except when the ending doesn't matter. Sometimes it's not the ending that makes the story worthwhile. Sometimes it's the journey you take to get to the ending… no matter what that ending is.

Let's take for example, one of my favorite songs, Gallo De Cielo by Tom Russell (although I prefer Joe Ely's live version1. It's a great piece about a man who steals a fighting rooster, sneaks it into the States, and begins to cash in on the bird's victories, all for a very noble cause. When I first fell in love with the song, I played it in the car for my wife – "You gotta hear this!" Less than halfway through the song, she looked at me and said, "The rooster dies, right?"

Well, right. But I tried – and failed to properly explain – that this was not the point of the song. It was the way that Russell spun the words together, and the way that events build and build and build toward what may be an inevitable conclusion, and the lingering effects of what happens after Gallo del Cielo's last fight. Russell even plays games with the point of view during the song. Yeah, the rooster does die, I said. But it's the way it happens. I guess I was trying to justify the ending because I know that my wife doesn't like unhappy endings.2

But the ending of this song doesn't need justification. It's all about the journey – literally, as Carlos Saragosa wanders the American southwest, putting his bird up to fight and netting increasing amounts of money – all for his Mission3. Alas, he fails, right when it matters the most, right when victory is in his grasp.

Saragosa's story is a tragedy, one of those rare genres where the ending isn't going to make up for what happens in the middle of the book, so the middle better be darn good. Why even bother with tragedy? For the journey. And before you say it can't be done, have you seen Hamlet lately?4

I suppose there are other novels without much of an ending – much of a plot, even – where it is all about the Journey. Not even necessarily tragedies. Some of Vonnegut's early stuff would qualify, although he was always better when he had a real plot and a real ending, as in Slaughterhouse Five.

So if you're going to insist on a realistic ending, then your Journey had better be a darn good one. And if you have a gripping start, a great Journey, AND a great ending… that's going to be some book.

However, t's not for beginners. So if you are one, finish what you're working on now. But you might want to start planning now.

—

Ely being one of three country artists that I have more than one song or album by – as much country as a guy can be who opened for The Clash on their London Calling tour and sang backup on the song "Should I Stay or Should I Go". A colleague of mine says Ely isn't country… "He's Texas." I can't argue with that.
This being the same woman who, as we watched Lady and the Tramp with our children one evening, leaned over to me and whispered (so the kids wouldn't hear), "This really would be a better story if Trusty died at the end." And like me, you know in your heart that she's right.
With a capital M.
Kenneth Branaugh's full-text film is highly recommended.

The Longest Day: June 6, 1944

The Longest Day: June 6, 1944

by

Cornelius Ryan

* * * 1/2

A pop culture history of the Normandy invasion. For beginners.

Something is Happening

Okay, it's finally time to say something because it's all getting close.

I'm in for a writing career reboot here, and it'll likely all start happening by the end of the month. The retooling of this web site some months ago was the first step, but now there are others. I've slowly been putting things into motion, but it looks like they're all going to converge at once.

So I have not one, but two major announcements — and a minor one.

First, my new novel, …and that's the end of the news, is almost done. I mean it for sure this time. After 10 years, a long hiatus to take care of my mother (during which time I tried to re-imagine myself as a songwriter and learned that I hated performing live) and four drafts, I've gotten the book where I want it, where it should be. So it's soon to be going out in search of an agent and/or publisher.

This book has been with me for so long that it's hard for me to look at it as "the new book", but it'll be new to the 99.99% of you who haven't had some kind of preview or were pressed into service as an early reader. Anyway, once and/news goes out into the marketplace, it will be time to start what really will feel like a new novel. This will likely be the project that I have discreetly code-named "The UFO Novel."

Which brings me to the minor announcement. Just for grins, I thought I would post very short excerpts from The UFO Novel as status updates on my Facebook Fan Page. There'll be one excerpt from each chapter as I finish writing it, and there will be lots of chapters. It should be fun. Or not. Tantalizing, perhaps? That's the idea. So become a fan now and get miniscule glimpses of a book in progress (or be tormented by them – your choice).

So now it's time for Major Announcement number two. If you're one of the lot who has been to my Facebook Fan Page, you may have seen the fanciful logo for an outfit called Thief Media (you can see it now in the upper right hand section of this page). That's the imprint that I have started to release my old, out-of-print novels for the Amazon Kindle and in epub format for all the others. This will begin with my first published novel, A Death of Honor – which I hope to have out by early March – to include all 7 novels over the course of the next year or so.

(Actually, they will appear as only 6 novels – Ferman's Devils and Boddekker's Demons will be issued as one novel, which was my original intent.)

A Death of Honor's new look for the e-book market.

All of the novels will have new cover art, and all except for the Angel's Luck trilogy will have some kind of bonus material included. A Death of Honor will feature the original epilog that I cut from the book before publication. The Company Man and Ferman's Devils will feature short stories that overlap into the respective book's universe.

In addition to my out-of-print titles, Thief Media will also be releasing two previously unpublished JCF novels. The Mushroom Shift is a profane and darkly funny novel about police work that was written between Honor and Company and will be released between them. Trust is a political thriller written in hopes of being published in time for the 1996 election. It will be released before Ferman's Devils.

To celebrate this in a small way, I have changed the graphic in the banner above to a section of corrected page from the third draft of …and that's the end of the news. There may or may not be other surprises and releases, but I'm going to leave things at this for the time being. After all, I have a lot of work to do right now.

The Elephant to Hollywood

The Elephant to Hollywood

by

Michael Caine

* * * * *

Without being self-serving, Caine tells his story in an affable manner. He comes across as a regular bloke who stumbled into something wonderful – which, I suppose, he is.

Five Reasons Why I Don't Do the Grammys

"And lo, all across the land there was a great ourcry,

with wailing and gnashing of teeth and shaking of fist,

for in the west it was the time of the gramophone,

and the people, while they were vexed at what they saw,

could not help but watch."

Once again we find ourselves in the aftermath of the Grammy Awards. I didn't even know they were on until this morning, when I opened up Facebook and found several friends posting about the results in dismay. As if they couldn't have guessed what was going to happen. Can the leopard change its spots, after all? What else do you expect from an event that, each year, gives Lady Gaga the chance to dress like an animal rights activist's nightmare?

As a recovering Oscar addict, I know what it's like to succumb to the allure of the cult of personality (to coin a phrase). But the Grammies have never held much allure for me, even though I'm big on music. Maybe it's because they've never been big on the same kind of stuff I was.

But just for the sake of reference, here are five reasons why I don't bother with this annual pat-yourself-on-the-back fest. Reading and acknowledging them is the first of twelve steps to freedom:

1) Any time any industry gives an award to itself, it is immediately suspect. They tend to be petty and incestuous. Trust me on this. I work in advertising, an industry that has nothing on Hollywood when it comes to giving one's self awards. Also, I used to be able to vote for such an award in a different part of the entertainment field, and there wasn't a year that went by that wasn't filled with bile, backstabbing and brutality.

2011 Best New Artist Winner Esperenza Spalding. One of the rare years the Grammys got it right. Still, if I were her I'd be worried about my career.

2) 1979 – The band Taste of Honey – those perennial favorites – win the Grammy for Best New Artist. The losers that year? A bunch of folks you've probably never heard of: Toto, The Cars, Chris Rea and Elvis Costello.

3) 1989 – For the first time, the Grammys give an award for best Hard Rock/Metal Performance. The winner? Not Jane's Addiction. Not Metallica. The award went to… Jethro Tull. Now don't get me wrong, I likes me some Tull, but Metal they ain't. (When Metallica did win a couple of years later, they thanked Jethro Tull for not having an album out that year.)

4) 1990 – Best New Artist: Milli Vanilli. Enough said.

5) The Grammies are named after a useless and out of date piece of technology. Maybe they should be named after the Phonograph… the Phonies? Ooops. How about the Compact Disc? The Seedies! Oops again. Well, then they have to be renamed after their big bone of contention, the mp3. The "Mpties." Well, maybe they should stick with Grammy.

How to Avoid "Automatic Rejection" of Your Mystery Novel (via Global Mysteries)

More great advice from Nancy Curteman that actually applies to any novel. And as always, she says it in a lot less words than I would have.

When you submit your mystery novel to an agent or publisher you hope to some day see it on a bookstore shelf. Then why do so many excellent novels end up in the slush pile? The answer is many novelists sabotage themselves and end up with what I call an "automatic rejection." This kind of rejection has little to do with your storyline. It has to do with carelessness on your part. The best way to avoid the "automatic rejection" of your mystery nove … Read More

via Global Mysteries

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest

by

Stieg Larsson

* * * *

A fitting and satisfying end to the Millennium Trilogy.