Scott Pratt's Blog, page 5

The Writer’s Predicament

I was working on “Injustice for All” when I got a call from Lukas Ortiz, the managing director of the Philip Spitzer Literary Agency. “I have some bad news,” Lukas said. “Kristen Weber is quitting.”

Kristen was my editor at New American Library. I was sorry to hear she was leaving because I liked her very much and she’d been so easy to work with. But I had no idea of the consequences of her departure. I thought NAL would hire someone to take her place and business would go on as usual.

“You’re an orphan now,” Lukas said.

“Orphan? What do you mean, orphan?”

“You have no editor.”

I didn’t know how the publishing business worked at the time. (I’m still not certain, to be honest.) I’d tried to figure it out, but nobody seemed to be willing to offer much information. I soon learned, however, that a writer’s editor is his advocate “in-house.” In other words, the editor champions the writer and the book to the myriad of corporate decision-makers at the publishing house. It’s very much like having another agent within the walls of the corporation. And since the larger houses publish hundreds, or even thousands, of titles each year, there is apparently some pretty stiff competition within the walls for such things as promotional, distributing, and printing dollars. If there’s no one there to compete on an author’s behalf, the books die on the vine, if they get to the vine at all.

Still, I remained optimistic. My first book had been well-received. Everyone who seemed to know anything about it said it was selling well. Kristen had edited my second novel, “In Good Faith,” and thought it was even stronger than “An Innocent Client.” “In Good Faith” hadn’t been released (the publisher moving at the speed of snail again), but I figured as long as NAL gave “In Good Faith” at least the kind of promotional support they’d given “An Innocent Client,” the snowball would continue to roll. I was hoping they’d give it more promotional support than “An Innocent Client,” because it would have made sense to do so, but I suppose I would have been satisfied with something similar.

Boy, was I wrong. When “In Good Faith” was released in June of 2009, the silence was deafening. I was in Nashville the day it came out because my wife was having one of her many breast-cancer surgeries at Vanderbilt. I walked down to a Borders bookstore (they’re gone now, and in my opinion, the rest are soon to follow) and started looking around for my new novel. I looked everywhere… couldn’t find it. It wasn’t even on the stack of books on the “newly-released mass market paperback” table. So I walked back to the mystery/thriller section of the store, and by golly, there it was, hidden among thousands of other titles. A needle in a haystack.

I thought, this can’t be right. There’s been some kind of mistake.

So I went to Barnes and Noble, where “An Innocent Client” had been prominently displayed (for a month) when it was released. Same thing. There were two copies of “In Good Faith” back among the stack, next to “An Innocent Client.” I called my agent and asked what was up. They didn’t know. Didn’t you have any idea of what kind of promotional commitment they were going to make? You’re my agent, aren’t you?

No, the agents didn’t know anything about it and just couldn’t seem to get a straight answer from anyone at NAL. As a matter of fact, NAL said they weren’t going to replace Kristen and hadn’t even decided which editor they would assign me to (traslate: which editor they would dump me on). Apparently, the fact that they bought the book and paid me an advance didn’t mean much. Once Kristen left, it was as though I no longer existed. And do you know what else? There wasn’t a damned thing I could do about it. I’d already signed a contract for another book and was almost finished with it. But if they’d bailed on “In Good Faith,” what would happen to “Injustice for All?” And what about a new editor? Were they even going to bother?

They bothered, finally. Next time, I’ll tell you about the new editor. You’re gonna love it.

The Writer's Predicament

So I wrote “An Innocent Client.” I’ve already told you about Renni Browne, the freelance editor who had started her own company and who had published a book about self-editing for writers. She had a few contacts from her days working in the publishing industry in New York, and back in 2007, you had to have an agent to be successful in publishing. That has changed, but I’ll get into that later.

Renni started sending my manuscript to agents. Several of them said no, some politely, some not so politely. After the second round of rejections, I made some major structural changes to the novel and Renni sent it to Philip Spitzer. He loved it. He called me and said he wanted to auction it.

I’d never heard of Philip Spitzer, but I soon learned that he was one of the most experienced, and most respected, agents in the business. He represents Michael Connelly and James Lee Burke and dozens of other authors. He specialized in crime fiction. He didn’t want a written contract. I liked him immediately. His cut was fifteen percent of what I made, which is standard in the industry.

It just so happened that my timing was lousy. The publishing industry was in an uproar over the digital revolution, and especially over Amazon and their new Kindle device. The big houses were buying very little, taking a wait and see attitude toward the future. More than twenty publishers passed on “An Innocent Client.” One of them, however, an outfit called New American Library, offered $50,000 for a two book deal. I took it. Before NAL came on board, however, a few foreign publishers made offers. I took them, too.

It was then that I began to learn how publishers operate. The first thing I learned is that they operate at the speed of snail. Once the agents agreed to the terms of the deal, it took six weeks to (longer for the overseas publishers) just to get contracts. When I looked at the contracts, I realized I was entering a world where I would be exploited. Royalties due to the author were fifteen percent for hardback, fifteen percent for digital, ten percent for trade paperback and eight percent for mass market paperback. I’d been told by my editor at NAL that they were planning on releasing my books in mass market paperback, which meant I was going to be in the eight percent royalty bracket. If they sold the books for $7.99 (which they eventually did) I’d receive a whopping 64 cents per book. Out of that 64 cents, my agent would take 10 cents, leaving me with 54 cents. Come the end of the year, the government would take another 16 cents, give or take a penny. So I would be netting around 38 cents per copy sold. That sucks. That’s exploitation.

I also learned that the publishing company could do whatever they wanted with the cover and the content. They could promote the book if they wanted or they could blow off promoting the book if they wanted. They were obligated to send me “royalty statements” twice a year, one in July and one in January. There was absolutely no transparency in their accounting systems. I asked my agent how the printing and distribution process worked and his response was that he’d never had an author ask questions like that.

And the advance money? The fifty thousand? This is how they doled it out. Twelve thousand five hundred on signing the contract, $7,500 upon final acceptance of the manuscript, and $5,000 upon publication. It was the same payout on the second and third books. But once I signed the contract, it took them two months to write me a check and send it to my agent. The agent then took his cut and sent what was left to me.

Then I learned that it would be at least a year before the first novel actually hit the shelves in bookstores. A year. It took them a year to edit, print and distribute the book. With that kind of efficiency, it’s no wonder Amazon is drinking their milkshakes. “An Innocent Client” was released in November of 2008. I had absolutely no idea how many books I’d sold until I got my first royalty statement (which was nearly indecipherable) in July of 2009. The publishers won’t tell authors how many books they’re selling. They won’t tell the agents. It’s a big secret.

When “An Innocent Client” was released, I was happy with the cover and the layout and the fact that the novel was displayed fairly prominently in the Barnes and Noble stores. I was relatively happy that the first print run was 55,000, which is a strong number for a newbie. The novel got a great review in Publisher’s Weekly. It was quickly selected as a finalist for a Macavity Award in the “best debut mystery” category. (It ended up losing to “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.) I was already finished with my second novel, “In Good Faith,” by that time and had signed a contract for “Injustice for All.” Things were going slowly, but they seemed to be going well.

And then my editor at New American Library, a very nice young lady named Kristen Weber, quit and moved to Los Angeles. Everything changed after that.

The Writer's Predicament

I said I was going to tell you about agents and publishing companies and such today, but before I do that, I want to go into the process of writing “An Innocent Client” in a little more detail.

James Scott Bell has a book out called “Plot and Structure,” and in it, he talks about the LOCK system. L is for Lead, O is for Objective, C is for Conflict, and K is for Knockout. His system works for me.

My first predicament was to come up with a Lead. I knew I wanted to write a mystery/thriller that involved a lawyer as the lead. Male or female? I chose male for the obvious reason that it would be easier for me to write from that perspective. Name? Age? Appearance? Background? Family? I decided on a handsome forty-year-old named Joe Dillard. He started out as Joe Bob Cooter, but I decided that was too hokey, and I eventually settled on Dillard. I wanted to make him likeable but frustrated, haunted by something in his past. I wanted him to be a good man in a bad world. I wanted him to be a dedicated father and husband, a hard worker, an idealist who had become jaded by the criminal justice system. But the most important predicament I had to solve was the question every author must answer: What does he want?

That question leads to Objective. What is your lead character’s objective? Getting a pizza for dinner is an objective, but it won’t sustain a novel. You have to come up with something that will hold your reader’s interest. The objective I came up with for Joe in “An Innocent Client” was that before he quit practicing law, he wanted to defend just one client who was truly innocent.

Next comes Conflict, which drives the difficult middle part of the novel. I tortured poor old Joe. His mother had Alzheimer’s and didn’t recognize him half the time, his sister was a drunk and an addict who was in and out of jail and Joe felt responsible for her, there was some pretty damning evidence against the client he thought was innocent, he was being stalked by the son of his client’s victim, another of his clients escaped from prison and committed a murder. On top of all this, he was up against a system that included arrogant judges and district attorneys and a crooked cop. It got to the point where I actually started feeling sorry for the guy, but I didn’t let that stop me. I just kept pouring it on, and if you write fiction, you have to do the same. Become a sadist. Have no mercy on your lead.

Once I got all these things going – I refer to it as spinning plates – then I had to figure out ways to resolve them and eventually go to the last step, which Mr. Bell calls the Knockout. You have to knock the reader out with a solid ending to the chin. You have to get all your spinning plates down off the sticks without breaking any of them. In “An Innocent Client,” I did that by resolving the conflict between Joe and his sister and then using the sister to turn the tables on the prosecution at the trial of Joe’s not-so-innocent client. I also used a devious but utterly likable woman named Erlene Barlowe to turn the tables on the crooked cop. She fought fire with fire and it worked. So did the LOCK system.

During all of this, I had to think about setting and tone and pacing and dialogue and points of view. I made hundreds of choices, solved hundreds of predicaments, during the writing of that novel. It consumed me for a year and a half, but that’s what it takes. I’ve written five full length novels and two novellas now, and it’s the same with every one of them. I wake up thinking about the story and the characters and I go to sleep thinking about the story and the characters. I even dream about them sometimes.

Besides story and characters and setting and tone and pacing and points of view, I thought a lot about themes. What kind of messages did I want to send to readers of this book? Telling a compelling tale is only part of the process. Getting a message or two or ten across without being obvious about it helps you connect with readers on a deeper level.

There were a lot of thematic elements to “An Innocent Client:” the injustice, or at least the arbitrary nature, of the criminal justice system is a theme that runs through all of my work, but I also dabble in man’s inhumanity to man, the dangers of extremism, the beauty of love and hope and forgiveness and redemption, the dangers of putting too much trust in government, and the arbitrary and terrifying nature of sociopathology. Some readers get it, some don’t, but it’s my opinion that whether readers “get it” isn’t nearly as important as whether they enjoyed the story. Telling a compelling story is Objective Number One. Keep that in mind, and it’ll serve you well.

Okay, so there’s a mini-seminar in the craft of fiction writing. Next time, I’ll get to those agents and publishers and Hollywood producers. It’s not glamorous. As a matter of fact, it can be downright ugly.

The Writer's Predicament

Okay, where were we?

Oh yes, back at the beginning, in January of 2006. I’d taken my son to a baseball camp at Vanderbilt University in Nashville and had picked up a copy of “The Lincoln Lawyer” to help me pass the time. When I finished the book, which was a bestseller and has since been made into a movie, I said to myself, “I can write something like this.”

It was a tumultuous time for me and my family. I’d been jailed and charged with contempt of court by a criminal court judge a month earlier. I’d been suspended from practicing law pending the outcome of a disciplinary proceeding. I was front page news in the paper and the lead story on television news broadcasts, all because of an email I sent to a client in which I said, “Everybody lies in criminal court.” It was true, but it was a monstrously stupid thing to say, especially in writing. The client to whom I sent the email gave a copy of it to the judge who was presiding over her case. The judge and I had been feuding for years. He saw an opportunity to stick it to me, and he took it. The entire situation was horrifying, degrading, humiliating, and, I believed, grossly unfair. I decided I would refuse to cooperate with the Tennessee Board of Professional Responsibility (the lawyer police) and that I would never practice law again.

But I had to do something. I made a good living practicing law until it all came crashing down that morning in November, 2005. I had a wife and two children who depended on me. I couldn’t just crawl into a hole and die, although I have to admit there were many, many times when that’s exactly what I wanted to do. When I returned from Nashville with my son that January, I sat down with my wife and said, “I’m going to write books.” She didn’t ask any questions, didn’t seem the least bit surprised. She just looked at me and said, “If that’s what you want to do, go ahead. I’m with you, baby.”

I’d worked as a journalist when I was younger and had written a screenplay about the infamous pirate Blackbeard, but I had never attempted a novel. The next day, I sat down at my computer at eight o’clock in the morning and I started writing. I knew nothing about plot or structure or conflict. I was a complete idiot when it came to writing a book. But I’d read a lot and I knew I had a certain knack for writing. I also knew I wanted to write legal fiction, mysteries or thrillers or both. It was a start.

About a month into it, my wife suggested that I get ahold of a woman named Renni Browne. I’d talked to Renni over the telephone because she hired me to defend an old friend of hers on a couple of drunk driving charges. Her friend was a delightful man with a serious drinking problem, and in the course of representing him I learned that both he and Renni were editors. Renni, he told me, had worked at a couple of big New York publishing houses before she packed up and moved to Greeneville, Tennessee, many years before. He was also an editor – a Princeton graduate, no less – and he’d worked for Renni for many years. So I called her, met her for lunch, and showed her a little of what I’d been writing. She read a couple of pages and said, “You can write.” That was all I needed to hear.

As it turned out, Renni had started a company called “The Editorial Department” thirty years earlier. She’d also written a book called “Self Editing for Fiction Writers,” which was published in 1993 and is the best-selling book in history on the subject of writers editing themselves. We worked together for a year getting a workable manuscript together. I wrote six or seven hours a day for the first seven or eight months, but as I saw myself getting closer to the finish line, I started writing eight to ten hours a day. I tore out hundreds of pages, rewrote dozens of chapters, changed plot lines and characters. You name it, I did it wrong at least once. An early form of the manuscript made the rounds to a dozen agents. Everybody passed. I tore the book apart again and rewrote it. I read James Scott Bell’s “Plot and Structure,” which helped me tremendously. Thank you, Mr. Bell. I bounced everything off of Renni. She was expensive as hell (I wound up paying her ten thousand dollars and she got a percentage of the royalties after we sold the book) and I was quickly running out of money, but she’d become like a security blanket to me. I didn’t think I could do it without her. Finally, in August of 2007, “An Innocent Client” was born along with its protagonist, Joe Dillard, a.k.a. the alter ego of Scott Pratt. Renni sent it to Philip Spitzer on a Tuesday and he called me on Thursday and told me he wanted to represent me. I was excited, relieved and baffled. I had no idea what the next step would be.

Next blog, I’ll start telling you about my agent, my publisher, and the massive changes that were going on in the publishing industry back in 2007-08. I knew nothing of those changes at the time, but they’ve had a tremendous impact on me and on thousands of others like me, folks who find themselves in the Writer’s Predicament each and every day.

The Writer's Predicament

This will be the first of what I hope will be a long, long series of blogs about writing and publishing genre fiction and everything it entails.

I’ve been writing fiction since 2006 when I started a novel called “An Innocent Client.” Twenty months and five drafts later, an agent named Philip Spitzer called me and said he loved the book. He wanted to auction it. I was thrilled.

The auction didn’t work out, but in October of 2007, Philip sold the book to New American Library, which is one of the many companies that make up the Penguin Group. I got a two-book deal and a fifty thousand dollar advance. By the end of the year, Philip had also sold the book to major publishers in Japan, Germany, France, Holland and Bulgaria, which brought me another forty thousand in advance money. Philip had brought in an agent from Hollywood named Joel Gotler and I’d already talked to a wealthy, reputable producer on the telephone about turning my debut novel into a television series. I was on my way to fame and fortune, or at least I thought I was.

It didn’t work out that way. Four and a half years later, I’ve published seven novels. The first three were published by Penguin and I’ve published the last four myself. I’m currently in a pseudo legal battle, attempting to get the rights back to my first three books. I’m making a living, but not a very good one.

I’m still writing, though, and within the next year or two, that living I’m making will change dramatically. If you read this blog, I promise I’ll tell you exactly how it’s going. I won’t puff up numbers. I won’t low ball numbers. I’ll tell you how many books I’m selling, what kind of marketing I’m doing, what’s working and what isn’t. I’ll also take you along during the process of writing my next novel and the one after that and the one after that. There might also be some frivolous information about family and dogs. You’ll have to accommodate me, just a little.

I’m calling the blog “The Writer’s Predicament,” because if you’re a writer of genre fiction, you’re constantly facing predicaments. The definition of predicament, for the purposes of this blog, will be “difficult situation.” The choices I’ve made as a result of my never-ending chain of predicaments have had a profound impact on my life. If you do this for a living, you know exactly what I’m talking about. If you aspire to do this for a living, you’ll soon find out.

The first predicaments involve story, plot, characters, things like that. They’re the nuts and bolts of writing. Then you have to figure out how to fit writing into your life. How many hours a day do I write? When should I start and finish each day? How many words should I write? Once you get a manuscript together, or nearly together, then you have to figure out how best to get it edited and into final form. Do I pay a professional to edit? Do I rely on friends or family? If I pay, how much should I pay? Will it be worth it? Once that’s done, is the book ready, finally, to go out into the world? If it is, to whom should I send it?

Those are just a few – a very few – examples of the writer’s predicament. Over the next few years, I’ll give you every example I can. I’ll tell you what I faced, the decisions I made, and the affect those decisions had on my career, my pocketbook, my family and my psyche.

I intend to enjoy the ride, no matter how it turns out. I hope you will, too. Check back regularly. I plan to post every three days or so.

The Writer’s Predicament

So I wrote “An Innocent Client.” I’ve already told you about Renni Browne, the freelance editor who had started her own company and who had published a book about self-editing for writers. She had a few contacts from her days working in the publishing industry in New York, and back in 2007, you had to have an agent to be successful in publishing. That has changed, but I’ll get into that later.

Renni started sending my manuscript to agents. Several of them said no, some politely, some not so politely. After the second round of rejections, I made some major structural changes to the novel and Renni sent it to Philip Spitzer. He loved it. He called me and said he wanted to auction it.

I’d never heard of Philip Spitzer, but I soon learned that he was one of the most experienced, and most respected, agents in the business. He represents Michael Connelly and James Lee Burke and dozens of other authors. He specialized in crime fiction. He didn’t want a written contract. I liked him immediately. His cut was fifteen percent of what I made, which is standard in the industry.

It just so happened that my timing was lousy. The publishing industry was in an uproar over the digital revolution, and especially over Amazon and their new Kindle device. The big houses were buying very little, taking a wait and see attitude toward the future. More than twenty publishers passed on “An Innocent Client.” One of them, however, an outfit called New American Library, offered $50,000 for a two book deal. I took it. Before NAL came on board, however, a few foreign publishers made offers. I took them, too.

It was then that I began to learn how publishers operate. The first thing I learned is that they operate at the speed of snail. Once the agents agreed to the terms of the deal, it took six weeks to (longer for the overseas publishers) just to get contracts. When I looked at the contracts, I realized I was entering a world where I would be exploited. Royalties due to the author were fifteen percent for hardback, fifteen percent for digital, ten percent for trade paperback and eight percent for mass market paperback. I’d been told by my editor at NAL that they were planning on releasing my books in mass market paperback, which meant I was going to be in the eight percent royalty bracket. If they sold the books for $7.99 (which they eventually did) I’d receive a whopping 64 cents per book. Out of that 64 cents, my agent would take 10 cents, leaving me with 54 cents. Come the end of the year, the government would take another 16 cents, give or take a penny. So I would be netting around 38 cents per copy sold. That sucks. That’s exploitation.

I also learned that the publishing company could do whatever they wanted with the cover and the content. They could promote the book if they wanted or they could blow off promoting the book if they wanted. They were obligated to send me “royalty statements” twice a year, one in July and one in January. There was absolutely no transparency in their accounting systems. I asked my agent how the printing and distribution process worked and his response was that he’d never had an author ask questions like that.

And the advance money? The fifty thousand? This is how they doled it out. Twelve thousand five hundred on signing the contract, $7,500 upon final acceptance of the manuscript, and $5,000 upon publication. It was the same payout on the second and third books. But once I signed the contract, it took them two months to write me a check and send it to my agent. The agent then took his cut and sent what was left to me.

Then I learned that it would be at least a year before the first novel actually hit the shelves in bookstores. A year. It took them a year to edit, print and distribute the book. With that kind of efficiency, it’s no wonder Amazon is drinking their milkshakes. “An Innocent Client” was released in November of 2008. I had absolutely no idea how many books I’d sold until I got my first royalty statement (which was nearly indecipherable) in July of 2009. The publishers won’t tell authors how many books they’re selling. They won’t tell the agents. It’s a big secret.

When “An Innocent Client” was released, I was happy with the cover and the layout and the fact that the novel was displayed fairly prominently in the Barnes and Noble stores. I was relatively happy that the first print run was 55,000, which is a strong number for a newbie. The novel got a great review in Publisher’s Weekly. It was quickly selected as a finalist for a Macavity Award in the “best debut mystery” category. (It ended up losing to “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.)  I was already finished with my second novel, “In Good Faith,” by that time and had signed a contract for “Injustice for All.” Things were going slowly, but they seemed to be going well.

And then my editor at New American Library, a very nice young lady named Kristen Weber, quit and moved to Los Angeles. Everything changed after that.

The Writer’s Predicament

I said I was going to tell you about agents and publishing companies and such today, but before I do that, I want to go into the process of writing “An Innocent Client” in a little more detail.

James Scott Bell has a book out called “Plot and Structure,” and in it, he talks about the LOCK system. L is for Lead, O is for Objective, C is for Conflict, and K is for Knockout. His system works for me.

My first predicament was to come up with a Lead. I knew I wanted to write a mystery/thriller that involved a lawyer as the lead. Male or female? I chose male for the obvious reason that it would be easier for me to write from that perspective. Name? Age? Appearance? Background? Family? I decided on a handsome forty-year-old named Joe Dillard. He started out as Joe Bob Cooter, but I decided that was too hokey, and I eventually settled on Dillard. I wanted to make him likeable but frustrated, haunted by something in his past. I wanted him to be a good man in a bad world. I wanted him to be a dedicated father and husband, a hard worker, an idealist who had become jaded by the criminal justice system. But the most important predicament I had to solve was the question every author must answer: What does he want?

That question leads to Objective. What is your lead character’s objective? Getting a pizza for dinner is an objective, but it won’t sustain a novel. You have to come up with something that will hold your reader’s interest. The objective I came up with for Joe in “An Innocent Client” was that before he quit practicing law, he wanted to defend just one client who was truly innocent.

Next comes Conflict, which drives the difficult middle part of the novel. I tortured poor old Joe. His mother had Alzheimer’s and didn’t recognize him half the time, his sister was a drunk and an addict who was in and out of jail and Joe felt responsible for her, there was some pretty damning evidence against the client he thought was innocent, he was being stalked by the son of his client’s victim, another of his clients escaped from prison and committed a murder. On top of all this, he was up against a system that included arrogant judges and district attorneys and a crooked cop. It got to the point where I actually started feeling sorry for the guy, but I didn’t let that stop me. I just kept pouring it on, and if you write fiction, you have to do the same. Become a sadist. Have no mercy on your lead.

Once I got all these things going – I refer to it as spinning plates – then I had to figure out ways to resolve them and eventually go to the last step, which Mr. Bell calls the Knockout. You have to knock the reader out with a solid ending to the chin. You have to get all your spinning plates down off the sticks without breaking any of them. In “An Innocent Client,” I did that by resolving the conflict between Joe and his sister and then using the sister to turn the tables on the prosecution at the trial of Joe’s not-so-innocent client. I also used a devious but utterly likable woman named Erlene Barlowe to turn the tables on the crooked cop. She fought fire with fire and it worked. So did the LOCK system.

During all of this, I had to think about setting and tone and pacing and dialogue and points of view. I made hundreds of choices, solved hundreds of predicaments, during the writing of that novel. It consumed me for a year and a half, but that’s what it takes. I’ve written five full length novels and two novellas now, and it’s the same with every one of them. I wake up thinking about the story and the characters and I go to sleep thinking about the story and the characters. I even dream about them sometimes.

Besides story and characters and setting and tone and pacing and points of view, I thought a lot about themes. What kind of messages did I want to send to readers of this book? Telling a compelling tale is only part of the process. Getting a message or two or ten across without being obvious about it helps you connect with readers on a deeper level.

There were a lot of thematic elements to “An Innocent Client:” the injustice, or at least the arbitrary nature, of the criminal justice system is a theme that runs through all of my work, but I also dabble in man’s inhumanity to man, the dangers of extremism, the beauty of love and hope and forgiveness and redemption, the dangers of putting too much trust in government, and the arbitrary and terrifying nature of sociopathology. Some readers get it, some don’t, but it’s my opinion that whether readers “get it” isn’t nearly as important as whether they enjoyed the story. Telling a compelling story is Objective Number One. Keep that in mind, and it’ll serve you well.

Okay, so there’s a mini-seminar in the craft of fiction writing. Next time, I’ll get to those agents and publishers and Hollywood producers.   It’s not glamorous. As a matter of fact, it can be downright ugly.

 

The Writer’s Predicament

Okay, where were we?

Oh yes, back at the beginning, in January of 2006. I’d taken my son to a baseball camp at Vanderbilt University in Nashville and had picked up a copy of “The Lincoln Lawyer” to help me pass the time. When I finished the book, which was a bestseller and has since been made into a movie, I said to myself, “I can write something like this.”

It was a tumultuous time for me and my family. I’d been jailed and charged with contempt of court by a criminal court judge a month earlier. I’d been suspended from practicing law pending  the outcome of a disciplinary proceeding. I was front page news in the paper and the lead story on television news broadcasts, all because of an email I sent to a client in which I said, “Everybody lies in criminal court.” It was true, but it was a monstrously stupid thing to say, especially in writing. The client to whom I sent the email gave a copy of it to the judge who was presiding over her case. The judge and I had been feuding for years. He saw an opportunity to stick it to me, and he took it. The entire situation was horrifying, degrading, humiliating, and, I believed, grossly unfair. I decided I would refuse to cooperate with the Tennessee Board of Professional Responsibility (the lawyer police) and that I would never practice law again.

But I had to do something. I made a good living practicing law until it all came crashing down that morning in November, 2005. I had a wife and two children who depended on me. I couldn’t just crawl into a hole and die, although I have to admit there were many, many times when that’s exactly what I wanted to do. When I returned from Nashville with my son that January, I sat down with my wife and said, “I’m going to write books.” She didn’t ask any questions, didn’t seem the least bit surprised. She just looked at me and said, “If that’s what you want to do, go ahead. I’m with you, baby.”

I’d worked as a journalist when I was younger and had written a screenplay about the infamous pirate Blackbeard, but I had never attempted a novel. The next day, I sat down at my computer at eight o’clock in the morning and I started writing. I knew nothing about plot or structure or conflict. I was a complete idiot when it came to writing a book. But I’d read a lot and I knew I had a certain knack for writing. I also knew I wanted to write legal fiction, mysteries or thrillers or both. It was a start.

About a month into it, my wife suggested that I get ahold of a woman named Renni Browne. I’d talked to Renni over the telephone because she hired me to defend an old friend of hers on a couple of drunk driving charges. Her friend was a delightful man with a serious drinking problem, and in the course of representing him I learned that both he and Renni were editors. Renni, he told me, had worked at a couple of big New York publishing houses before she packed up and moved to Greeneville, Tennessee, many years before. He was also an editor – a Princeton graduate, no less – and he’d worked for Renni for many years. So I called her, met her for lunch, and showed her a little of what I’d been writing. She read a couple of pages and said, “You can write.” That was all I needed to hear.

As it turned out, Renni had started a company called “The Editorial Department” thirty years earlier. She’d also written a book called “Self Editing for Fiction Writers,” which was published in 1993 and is the best-selling book in history on the subject of writers editing themselves. We worked together for a year getting a workable manuscript together. I wrote six or seven hours a day for the first seven or eight months, but as I saw myself getting closer to the finish line, I started writing eight to ten hours a day. I tore out hundreds of pages, rewrote dozens of chapters, changed plot lines and characters. You name it, I did it wrong at least once. An early form of the manuscript made the rounds to a dozen agents. Everybody passed. I tore the book apart again and rewrote it. I read James Scott Bell’s “Plot and Structure,” which helped me tremendously. Thank you, Mr. Bell. I bounced everything off of Renni. She was expensive as hell (I wound up paying her ten thousand dollars and she got a percentage of the royalties after we sold the book) and I was quickly running out of money, but she’d become like a security blanket to me. I didn’t think I could do it without her. Finally, in August of 2007, “An Innocent Client” was born along with its protagonist, Joe Dillard, a.k.a. the alter ego of Scott Pratt. Renni sent it to Philip Spitzer on a Tuesday and he called me on Thursday and told me he wanted to represent me. I was excited, relieved and baffled. I had no idea what the next step would be.

Next blog, I’ll start telling you about my agent, my publisher, and the massive changes that were going on in the publishing industry back in 2007-08. I knew nothing of those changes at the time, but they’ve had a tremendous impact on me and on thousands of others like me, folks who find themselves in the Writer’s Predicament each and every day.

The Writer’s Predicament

This will be the first of what I hope will be a long, long series of blogs about writing and publishing genre fiction and everything it entails.

I’ve been writing fiction since 2006 when I started a novel called “An Innocent Client.” Twenty months and five drafts later, an agent named Philip Spitzer called me and said he loved the book. He wanted to auction it. I was thrilled.

The auction didn’t work out, but in October of 2007, Philip sold the book to New American Library, which is one of the many companies that make up the Penguin Group. I got a two-book deal and a fifty thousand dollar advance. By the end of the year, Philip had also sold the book to major publishers in Japan, Germany, France, Holland and Bulgaria, which brought me another forty thousand in advance money. Philip had brought in an agent from Hollywood named Joel Gotler and I’d already talked to a wealthy, reputable producer on the telephone about turning my debut novel into a television series. I was on my way to fame and fortune, or at least I thought I was.

It didn’t work out that way. Four and a half years later, I’ve published seven novels. The first three were published by Penguin and I’ve published the last four myself. I’m currently in a pseudo legal battle, attempting to get the rights back to my first three books. I’m making a living, but not a very good one.

I’m still writing, though, and within the next year or two, that living I’m making will change dramatically. If you read this blog, I promise I’ll tell you exactly how it’s going. I won’t puff up numbers. I won’t low ball numbers. I’ll tell you how many books I’m selling, what kind of marketing I’m doing, what’s working and what isn’t. I’ll also take you along during the process of writing my next novel and the one after that and the one after that. There might also be some frivolous information about family and dogs. You’ll have to accommodate me, just a little.

I’m calling the blog “The Writer’s Predicament,” because if you’re a writer of genre fiction, you’re constantly facing predicaments. The definition of predicament, for the purposes of this blog, will be “difficult situation.” The choices I’ve made as a result of my never-ending chain of predicaments have had a profound impact on my life. If you do this for a living, you know exactly what I’m talking about. If you aspire to do this for a living, you’ll soon find out.

The first predicaments involve story, plot, characters, things like that. They’re the nuts and bolts of writing. Then you have to figure out how to fit writing into your life. How many hours a day do I write? When should I start and finish each day? How many words should I write? Once you get a manuscript together, or nearly together, then you have to figure out how best to get it edited and into final form. Do I pay a professional to edit? Do I rely on friends or family? If I pay, how much should I pay? Will it be worth it? Once that’s done, is the book ready, finally, to go out into the world? If it is, to whom should I send it?

Those are just a few – a very few – examples of the writer’s predicament. Over the next few years, I’ll give you every example I can. I’ll tell you what I faced, the decisions I made, and the affect those decisions had on my career, my pocketbook, my family and my psyche.

I intend to enjoy the ride, no matter how it turns out. I hope you will, too. Check back regularly. I plan to post every three days or so.

Shit happens. Sometimes the shit that happens is close to a miracle

Background: A month ago, a year-old teacup poodle named Chico, who we loved immensely, sneaked out of my truck when I was washing the truck at a commercial car wash. He got out into the road and was run over. It devastated my wife so badly that within ten days, we bought another teacup poodle. We named her Kiki. It turned out she was Chico’s sister, eight months old, and had been kept in a kennel because the breeder was going to use her for a concubine.

We brought her home and we all started getting used to each other. We have three other dogs, so the getting used to took some time and effort, but all was going relatively well. Yesterday, my wife had a doctor’s appointment at a Vanderbilt clinic in Nashville. We’ve been there dozens of times over the last three years. It’s located in one of the busiest shopping centers in South Nashville. We took three small dogs, including Kiki, and we stopped in Knoxville and picked up my daughter, Kody, along the way. She’s about to graduate from the University of Tennessee, but she had a few extra hours and wanted to go.

So we get there and go into the clinic, which is massive. After we’ve been there for about thirty minutes we are informed that the doctor Kristy is seeing is running an hour behind. Kody hears this and decides to go back to the parking lot and get a book out of the truck. When she goes, Kristy and I stay in the waiting room. About ten minutes later, I get a frantic call from Kody saying that as she was trying to get the book, Kiki escaped from the truck. Kiki didn’t know Kody very well since Kody lives in Knoxville, and wouldn’t come back to her. Kody chased her, and the nightmare was on.

The dog crossed a five-lane street, bumper to bumper traffic, and disappeared into a Home Depot parking lot. Kody was running after her but lost sight of her. Kody was running and yelling to dog’s name, and people began to help. Kody began to receive reports of sightings. The dog was back in the five-lane street, she was running north. Kristy and I joined in the chase. The cops became involved. We ran and talked to people. Eventually, Kody came back to the parking lot – she had the keys to our vehicle – and she and I took off to continue the search. Kristy had to go back inside to see the doctor. Kody and I talked to people, got reports of sightings. The dog was still alive, but she was running. Poor little thing didn’t know where she was running to, she was just running away from unfamiliar people and all those cars that were trying to run over her. Kody and I ended up in a neighborhood just east of Thompson Street about a mile from the Vanderbilt Clinic. We walked and called and left phone numbers. Eventually, we wound up in a huge cemetery, hoping the dog would have gone to the open spaces since we take her to a big park every morning. No dog. Two hours after the dog fled from the truck, just as we’re about to give up hope, Kody gets a call on her cellphone. A veterinarian has called a little dog and cat shop where we left a number and asked whether they knew anything about a teacup poodle that was lost near their shop. The woman said yes, and she called Kody and said, “They’ve got your dog at a vet clinic on Sidco Road.” Sidco Road was a couple of miles away. We drove there, and sure enough, Kiki, bruised and battered but ultimately healthy, was there.

There are good people in this world. Lots of them, and they helped us find that little dog. A woman whose name I do not know picked her up and took her to the vet. The employees at the vet clinic were compassionate and wonderful. We got the dog back, and we are so thankful to everyone who was involved. It was Nashville, rush hour, like finding a needle in a haystack. We found the needle, named Kiki, with the help of a bunch of beautiful people.

Thank you again to everyone who helped. My wife says it was a miracle. I’m a little more on the practical side and tend to believe it was a combination of quick work and good people. Either way, that little dog is resting on my wife’s chest right now, and I’m so very, very happy about that.