Malcolm R. Campbell's Blog, page 136

What’s a writer’s first goal: sharing ideas or making money?

“Recently, though, it occurred to me that the end goal for aspiring writers always seems to be ‘getting a book deal’ or ‘getting published,’ and the more I thought about it, the more I realized I might not be entirely happy about that.” – Paul Hogan in his writing newsletter “Destroy Your Safe and Happy Lives.”

Hogan, a successful writer, writing consultant, and blogger at the granddaddy of literary blogs (Beatrice) finds it interesting that a lot of people pick up hobbies such as painting or guitar playing with no thought whatsoever of becoming an illustrator, performer, composer, or anything else that has to do with making money. Yet, when people decide to start writing, they soon turn toward the question of becoming a professional one way or the other.

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If this is your number one goal, you might be putting the cart before the horse.

I might speculate that with traditional writing and diary keeping being less of a fad these days than they were in our parents’ and grandparents’ and great grandparents’ eras, people don’t generally perceive writing as a form of recreation. While painting and guitar playing are a form of communication, people als0 see them as relaxing ways to play. Somehow, writing as relaxation falls away in people’s minds. They see it as communication. And not long afterwards, a way of making money whether they have a monetized blog, write freelance articles, or turn to fiction.

Hogan thinks aspiring writers will be happier if they are less frantic about making money and more interested in deciding why they are writing. He suggests discovering your passions (and possibly yourself) and developing those as something you wish to share with others. Is all this fulfilling? If so, then perhaps it leads to something that makes money at some point. If a writer begins that way and ultimately becomes a professional, s/he might be better off in the long run–and happier on his/her way to wherever that passion might lead.

An article in The Guardian “Writing at risk of becoming an ‘elitist’ profession, report warns” notes that working writers’ incomes are continuing to fall making it more necessary for professionals to be subsidized. The subsidy usually comes through the writer’s primary job and/or from the money brought into the household by a spouse or other partner. One point of the article is that people with lower paying jobs won’t have enough money to subsidize the kind of writing schedule required to a professional author.

The falling income part of the equation might make writers focusing first on profits and salability to be frustrated and frenzied than those who begin by developing and sharing passions before becoming overly concerned about writing income.

Hogan makes a good point when he suggests that getting a book deal shouldn’t be the first thing on an aspiring writer’s TO DO list.

—Malcolm

Malcolm R. Campbell’s novels include The Sun Singer and Conjure Woman’s Cat.

 

 

Our writing takes us back to our childhood

“Other than childhood, what was there in those days that is not here today?” – St-John Perse from “To Celebrate a Childhood”

Perse is not well known today. I know his work because my mother bought a copy of one of his books in 1944, and I found his memories of childhood to be similar to mine in tone as I left home, grew older, and thought back to those formative years before I grew up and started losing my innocence.

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Photo by Kal Visuals on Unsplash

If my parents were still here today, they would tell you that I was dragged kicking and screaming out of the Pacific Northwest into the Florida Panhandle just before entering the first grade. If the acronym had been around in those days, I would have been shouting WTF–and probably incurred the wrath of everyone!

Oddly enough, Florida won me over. I “blame” the Boy Scouts and their camping trips for this as well as friends who had beach cottages, and my mother, too, who organized family day trips to all kinds of tempting places.

Florida has been showing up in my work of late. I set my first novels in Montana and then placed a satire in Texas. But I finally came home, and I guess I think of Florida that way now, and concentrated on the world where I grew up. My childhood in Florida was actually quite good once I started looking around at the neighborhood and finding an environment I liked. Basically, I grew up on the beach and in the piney woods.

Now, as those days draw me back now in my fiction, I wonder how many other authors discover that not only can they go home again, but that that is where their most powerful inspiration can be found. Childhood is such an impressionable time that it variously haunts us or inspires us for the rest of our lives. So many people are writing memoirs these days as though the writing itself helps them understand where they came from and what happened there. We do that in our stories as well.

Then, as now, I was struck by the conflict between the land and its beauty and the politics of Jim Crow. That disconnect still makes no sense to me. So, I write stories about it and try to figure it out. I have a feeling a lot of other writers are doing the same thing in fiction and nonfiction. We want to understand what turned us into the people we are today. Nature? Nurture? Probably both. For all I know, fate dragged me to Florida so that I would one day write Conjure Woman’s Cat.

That’s probably not the case. For one thing, I don’t believe in fate. But I do see that childhood wields a lot of power over us and that try as we might, we can never really escape it–supposing that we want to. I don’t want to, though I once did. Stories from a writer’s childhood are always there waiting to be told, to influence what s/he writes many years into the future. Those stories hold a lot of power over us and, frankly, life is much easier if we listen to them and share them with others.

—Malcolm

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The ‘Rules’ on Writing Inner Thoughts in Books

Sometimes a disagreement gives me pause to explore how I see a certain style of writing and why. In this case, a member of my critique group and I differed on the use of italics for inner dialogue, or thoughts. He hates them. I use them. It has caused some strong discussion. (Yes, we remain good friends.)

Source: The “Rules” on Writing Inner Thoughts in Books ‹ Indies Unlimited ‹ Reader — WordPress.com

Basically, how you approach a character’s thoughts comes down to personal preference unless your work is going to a publisher with a strong editor and/or a strong style sheet.

In my novel Conjure Woman’s Cat and its two sequels, I used italics to indicate that the cat was using telepathy to talk to the conjure woman. My editor thought I didn’t need to do that, but I didn’t want to go through entire pages of “thought speech” with “Lena thought” and “Eulalie thought” tied onto all the lines. That might make readers think they were just thinking about those things when they were communicating them.

Italics becomes a bit of a problem when passages become lengthy. It’s generally considered harder to read–or a “put off” to readers–when it covers entire pages.

This piece in Indies Unlimited is, I think, a catalyst for us to think about what we’re doing when we write.

–Malcolm

 

Remembering the film ‘Body Heat’

“Body Heat is a 1981 American neo-noir erotic thriller film written and directed by Lawrence Kasdan. It stars William Hurt, Kathleen Turner and Richard Crenna, and features Ted Danson, J. A. Preston, and Mickey Rourke. The film was inspired by Double Indemnity.” – Wikipedia

[image error]My wife and I saw this film in a theater with another couple soon after it was released. Our first comments outside the theater afterwards were about the silence of the audience during the sex scenes. You could have heard a pin drop. It was like nobody dared to breathe. The mood was that intense.

Sex, nudity, body heat, the heat of a Florida summer, the music with the moaning saxophone, the pitch-perfect performances, and the very strong film noir style brought this story together as a very unforgettable film. I think every author hopes, should his work be adapted to film, that the ambience will be this overpowering.

I’m a long-time fan of film noir. I’ve seen most of it. There’s a brittle, hopeless nostalgia surrounding such films. Fate, too, I guess.

My wife and I have seen “Body Heat” on TV several times. It remains strong after all these years. But sitting in our living room, the experience is not as intense as that of a small-town movie theater.

What impresses me with such films is their intensity and the fact that the audience is dragged into them with no exit even after the final credits fade from the screen. I’m impressed by the direction, cinematography, music, and acting that come together to present such a powerful experience.

I thought of the intensity of the film as I read Temptation Rag, reviewed in my previous post, and recalled Doctorow’s novel (and feature film) Ragtime. Some films and some novels, even those not highly reviewed by the critics or remembered by prizes and awards, pull readers into their stories–with or without their consent, perhaps–and those are the books I remember.

Authors hope their audiences will lose themselves in their stories just as surely as many of those in the theater were lost in “Body Heat.”

—Malcolm

Review: ‘Temptation Rag’ by Elizabeth Hutchison Bernard

Temptation Rag by Elizabeth Hutchison Bernard

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Temptation Rag immerses readers into a historical novel set during the heydey of ragtime (1895-1919) and vaudeville (1880 – 1920) with a cast of real and fictional characters grappling for love, freedom, and artistry in New York City. Ragtime gave way to jazz and vaudeville gave way to the cinema so, like almost every period in music and theater, the times were short, competitive, and bittersweet as talents and fortunes rose and fell depending on the inequalities imposed by the rich and famous, public taste, and racial/gender barriers.

Bernard’s story has a large cast of characters all of whom come across as multi-dimensional in her well-researched tableau. May Convery is a young woman from a rich family, who’s briefly smitten with vaudeville theater musical director Mike Gilbert at the beginning of his rise to fame as a ragtime composer and performer. Their lives criss-cross throughout the novel as they did in history in a soap opera basket of emotions that manages to haunt both of them forever.

As May finally comes into her own as an author and a volunteer in many causes, Mike’s life while seemingly larger and financially richer appears more brittle. Among all the vicissitudes of a musical career in the public eye, Mike is constantly compared with the popular performer Ben Harney who claims to have originated ragtime itself. Scott Joplin (“Maple Leaf Rag” and “The Entertainer” both brought back to public attention in the 1973 movie “The Sting”) is in the stratosphere of rag, talked about in the novel but not a character.

May’s friendship with African-American singer Abbie Mitchell and African-American composer J. Rosamond Johnson gives strength to a primary theme of the novel: racial/gender inequalities. While the barriers were historically real and are well-shown in the novel, some of May’s feelings appear to have been slightly influenced by contemporary attitudes about race relations.

The characters are strong enough and complex enough to pull readers through this well-written story almost as though we’re watching their lives play out in modern times on the television news. When the novel’s last lines scroll past its readers’ eyes and Temptation Rag is stowed away on the bookshelf, May will remain in mind one way or another.

View all my reviews

—Malcolm

BigAl’s Books and Pals Review: ‘The Sun Singer’ by Malcolm R Campbell

This is one of Campbell’s earlier books (first published 2010) and already his gifts for drawing warm characters and laying out a story so it flows towards and immerses the reader are well developed.

Source: BigAl’s Books and Pals: Review: The Sun Singer (Mountain Journeys Book 1) by Malcolm R Campbell

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First Edition

Seeing this unexpected review appear on my Facebook news feed this morning makes my week (much more than yesterday’s after-supper lawn mowing), brings back a ton of nostalgia, and makes me wonder once again whether I made a very bad decision pulling it away from the agent who had my typewritten manuscript for the book in the 1980s.

The reviewer mentions that the book was inspired by the mountains of Glacier National Park Montana where I worked two summers as a hotel bellman. Those of you who have read my blogs for years also know that it was also inspired by a famous statue called “The Sun Singer” which I saw at Allerton Park, Illinois when I was (I think) in junior high school.

The novel is a bit earlier than the reviewer knows. I wrote it in the 1980s, got it accepted by a small but influential agent, and then waited for almost a year with no word. She liked the novel, but her small agency had also taken on a novel that turned out to be as huge then as The Game of Thrones is now. (I refuse to mention the title of the book or its sequels.) She said my wait would be an even longer one, so I took the manuscript back.

Was that a mistake? I guess I’ll never know. She might have found a publisher when she finally got around to actively shopping it, or she might not. The fact that an agent liked it led me to believe I could find a publisher who liked it. That took 24 years. I was gratified by the fact the book’s 2004 first edition was a “Foreword Reviews” book-of-the-year finalist but less than pleased that my publisher was iUniverse, a vanity press. But I would always wonder if the book might have received a wider audience in less time if I’d left it with that agent.

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Current Edition

Later, several small traditional publishers wanted it, and this led to the 2010 edition. That publisher and I ultimately had a contractual disagreement, and that led to the current (2015) Kindle edition.

It’s interesting to me that several passages in the novel that happened more or less simultaneously were typeset by iUniverse in side-by-side columns. Nobody else has been able to do that since, including several other prospective publishers. I grew up in a letterpress-evolving-to-offset printing world where those columns wouldn’t have been a problem. “Progress” into a print-on-demand/Kindle world has taken away an option for small-press authors.

Nonetheless, this weird history of the novel doesn’t take away my gratitude that a reviewer found and liked the book after all these years. With a bit of luck, maybe my first novel will find a few more readers.

—Malcolm

 

 

Now that we’ve moved past the author’s newsletter idea. . .

. . .we’re back to being content to write a blog, maintain a website, and keep up with an author’s page on Facebook.

I read an interview this morning with an author whose focus is memoirs and essays. The interviewer said he thought she tended to use an extraordinary amount of personal material in her nonfiction. And she said, when she cared enough to write about an issue, it was usually because she had personal experience with that issue and so all her fears, battles, and second-guessing of herself flowed into the essay making it very personal.

[image error]I’m afraid that would happen if I wrote a newsletter. The thing is, a newsletter–like most of an author’s promotional efforts–is supposed to be all about you (the prospective reader) and not all about me (the author).

So, a newsletter filled with all my personal demons really isn’t going to cut it. When I see interviews with emerging authors, I really want to see more about the work they’re focussing on rather than memories about their experiences in English classes when they first wrote fiction or poetry. I want to know about their work, not their demons.

I’ve written elsewhere about the mistakes nonprofit organizations make when they advertise events and focus their news releases on how worthy their causes are rather than on what the public will get out of paying to attend the events. While it sounds crass to put it this way, when most of us see a news story about a book or a concert or even about a product, our primary consideration usually includes asking what’s in it for me? Will I enjoy the event? Is this my kind of book? Do I really have a use for the product?

So, like other small-press authors who don’t have a heavy schedule of events to publicize, a newsletter could quickly degenerate into an all about me kind of thing. That seems presumptuous. And, if those receiving the newsletter make book selections like I do, they buy a book because it looks entertaining, not because the author had to take three Xanax a day to get the thing written.

Most small-press authors don’t have enough news to put in a newsletter, so considering starting one requires a lot of thought. If you send out a newsletter too often, people start thinking they’re getting SPAM. If you don’t send out a newsletter often enough, then they probably won’t remember signing up to get the thing. So, if an author isn’t prolific and/or doesn’t have a heavy schedule of appearances, it’s doing to be difficult thinking up enough news to justify mailing anything out.

Better to leave people alone, I think, and hope they find my blog or website or Facebook page.

—Malcolm

Those gurus, bless their hearts, say I need a newsletter

When I went away to college, my parents expected me to write home every couple of days. I said I wasn’t going to do that because I had nothing to say. That was true enough because every day was just like they day before it: I sat in a classroom, ate meals, studied, watched TV, went to bed, got up the next morning and sat in a classroom.

Some writers’ newsletters sound about like that. When they do, they’re so boring we can’t bring ourselves to write them, much less expect you to suffer through reading them. It’s hard enough thinking of something reasonably interesting to put in this blog. Heaven help me if I had to turn out a newsletter three or four times a month.

[image error]I’ve toyed with the idea of a fake newsletter. I could name it Trigger Warnings and fill it full of stuff that will push a lot of buttons that shouldn’t be pushed. Some folks used to argue that if a person put something nasty in quotes, they couldn’t be blamed for saying it. Trigger Warnings would be like that. I warn you with some introductory boilerplate, say stuff you don’t want to hear, and then hit the send button.

That kind of thing strikes my fancy because I have a trickster approach to life. If one just doesn’t say a thing, I want to say it.

Since quotation marks absolve me of misspeaking–as politicians often say–I could begin my newsletter with “Dear Bastards” and it would be okay. So then I could say, using an old-fashioned grin symbol that while I appreciate your “congrats,” “great story,” and other fine comments on Facebook about my novels, I want to point out that if you don’t leave an Amazon reader review, my book is toast.

My wife–who has known me since 1979–is often surprised at what I say while we’re talking to “normal people.” Those “normal people” tend to get drunk after talking to me because I love saying what shouldn’t be said.

Trigger Warning: This might make you sick

Presumably, “normal people” would sign up for my newsletter and then immediately unsubscribe the first time I wrote about roadkill salad. On the plus side, roadkill salad is free unless you add mayo. And chopped pecans.

But I would want to be honest. That means if I was thinking about writing a poem about “roadkill salad,” I would have to tell you that and see what you thought. Sure, you might need a couple of Xanax to get through the newsletter, but it would still be liberating. See, that’s what tricksters do. We liberate you from everything that makes you sick, embarrassed, crazy, and politically inept.

Or, I might suggest that every subscriber had to buy 1,000 copies of my books and give them to relatives, prisoners, and random people on the street.

You can see, can’t you, why I don’t really think this newsletter is a great idea?

—Malcolm

 

 

 

Zero Tolerance: White Supremacists Take Over D.C. Bookstore Reading

White supremacists briefly took over a reading by author Jonathan Metzl at the flagship location for Politics and Prose Bookstore in Washington D.C. on Saturday, shouting “this land is our land” and marching through the store yelling the name of a group that helped to organize the 2017 Charlottesville Unite the Right rally.

Source: White Supremacists Take Over D.C. Bookstore Reading

I am worried about the future of free speech because this kind of crap marks people of either major political party as targets for disruptive actions. That makes it harder for a person to speak out–or to have the guts to speak out.

As my novels suggest, I have zero tolerance for racism and white supremacy in any form. I also have zero tolerance for jeopardizing the right of anyone to speak out whether it’s from threats of violence at planned speeches by members of either party at campuses and other venues or hate campaigns against authors/bloggers online.

If a person or a group won’t even let the opposition speak, that person or group is bankrupt and without any value whatsoever.

–Malcolm

 

National Poetry Month: ‘Ariel’ by Sylvia Plath

“The collection contains some of her most celebrated poems: Lady Lazurus, Daddy; The Moon and the Yew Tree and the titular piece Ariel.  Many of these are poems written in a burst of creativity shortly before she took her life. They are poems I’ve read many times over, but only ever as individual pieces of work. When you read them as a collection, the intensity and darkness that’s visible in an individual poem is heightened and magnified many times over.”

Source: Ariel by Sylvia Plath: #1965club read ‹ BookerTalk ‹ Reader — WordPress.com

[image error]I first read Plath’s novel The Bell Jar and her collection of poems entitled Ariel when they first came out in the United States. Their combined impact on me was enormous. and, to this day, “Ariel” remains my favorite poem, second only to “Fern Hill” by Dylan Thomas.

The original edition of Ariel was published after Plath’s death wasn’t what she intended. Her husband, poet Ted Hughes, changed the selection. I see that as a travesty and an arrogant intrusion into her work. I still have the original version of Ariel on my bookshelf. But if you want what the poet intended, take a look at the restore edition from 2004 shown here.

—Malcolm