Steven Pressfield's Blog, page 69

Breakdown Boards

 

Have you ever seen a “breakdown board” for a movie? You and I as novelists can learn a lot from it about the writing of first drafts.

Breakdown board with sliding panels

Motion pictures, as most of us know, are not shot in sequence. The first day’s filming may be the movie’s final scene, or a scene from the middle of the picture.

What dictates the order of shooting is efficiency.

Budget concerns.

If we’re shooting Zombie Apocalypse VI and we know we’ve got three scenes that take place in the abandoned warehouse down by the railroad tracks, let’s shoot them all back-to-back Monday-Tuesday-Wednesday, even though one is the opening scene, one is a scene from the movie’s middle, and the third is from the climax.

We save money because the production can set up in one location and stay there till that section of the film is in the can. No expensive moves.

Likewise if we’ve managed to convince George Clooney to take a 99% salary cut and appear in five scenes as the deranged high school principal, let’s schedule all his scenes back-to-back as well. That way he can give us three days in a block and then be free to go home.

Can we get him, just for three days?

The breakdown board is the production department’s tool to accomplish this efficiency/economy. The line producer and his or her team start by reading through the screenplay, seeking locations (INT. ABANDONED WAREHOUSE/ZOMBIE HIDEAWAY) that appear more than once. They rip the pages out of the script and stick them all in one place. Those scenes become one sliding panel, i.e. one unified block of shooting time, on the breakdown board

By the time the production team is done deconstructing the script, the sequence-of-scenes-as-story has been turned inside-out and upside-down. But it works in terms of bang for the buck. By filming out of order, we’ve just saved $1.2 million out of our $9 million budget. Maybe we can afford Clooney for an extra half-day.

But back to you and me as novelists slogging through our first drafts.

What law says we have to write in sequence?

Could we gain something by working out of order?

I’m a big believer in this, and my first reason won’t surprise you:

Resistance.

Resistance is the factor that (sometimes, not always) determines for me which scenes and sequences I’ll tackle first.

I want to do the hardest stuff early—meaning the scenes or sequences that will generate the most Resistance. Maybe it’s the climax that’s really, really tough. I can tell because I’m so daunted by it that I don’t even want to face it in outline form. That’s the scene, I know, that I should tackle first, or at least early in the first-draft process.

Remember, the last thing we want to do is save the really hard stuff for the end. (See this post about moving pianos.) What if we spend two years writing our Wordsworth Serial Killer story, get to the finish and find that we can’t make the Climax In the Ruined Bell Tower at Tintern Abbey work?

Write that scene first, or at least outline it, get it to a place where you know you can do it in crunch time and make it work. Force yourself to do this. How good will you feel, going forward, knowing that you’ve got those really tough scenes already in the bank?

There’s another compelling reason to work out of sequence.

The Muse.

Inspiration is not linear. The goddess slings her thunderbolts with no regard to logical story-progression. If I’m working on Page Four but find myself obsessing about a sequence in the middle of the narrative, I’ll drop everything and work on that. It’s great fun, I must say, to reach Act Three and discover, “OMG, I’ve got forty pages that I wrote on this last February and they all work!”

That’s the logic behind writing a first draft out of sequence. It works in the movies. It can work for you and me in books.

That said, there are equally compelling counter-reasons. I confess I often throw the out-of-order concept out the window because of these.

First is story logic. Sometimes it helps to write Scene 41 when you’ve got Scenes 39 and 40 fresh in your mind. Sometimes 39 and 40 trigger great stuff for 41 that we might not have thought of if we’d done 41 in isolation.

Then there’s momentum. Sometimes a story just wants to be told in order. It flows better that way. Its own velocity propels it forward.

Yes, I know. I’m talking out of both sides of my mouth on this issue.

Bottom line: the canny writer uses BOTH techniques. She knows how to roll in-sequence when that feels best. But she’s ready to break that habit and jump around in her story when working out-of-sequence seems to make more sense.

P.S. Don’t steal that Wordsworth Serial Killer idea. That’s mine.

 

 

 

 

Always Be Closing — A Promotional Steal

Finest Kind.

I’m stealing Shawn’s May 27th post — lock, stock and barrel — for this week’s “What It Takes” post.

Last week, Shawn advised readers to “Always Be Closing” when it comes to back cover copy.

Take what he wrote and apply it to promotional copy, whether for pitch letters, e-mails, web site content, or whatever else you’re cookin’.

That book you’re happy with? Don’t kid yourself into thinking the heavy lifting is over. Outreach copy is up next. It might not be as long, but it can sandbag your book.

This is a fundamental mistake (yes, Shawn, I’m stealing…) publicists and authors make again and again. The book is well-written and beautifully packaged, and then launched with half assed promo copy.

A half-ass example I’ve used in the past hit in 2006, following the death of Enron’s Kenneth Lay. Though it was ten years ago, my memory of reading about the pitch is still as clear as if it hit yesterday. Memorable. The pitch was sent to various media outlets, by a publicist who was pitching a book and an author. One of the columnists on the receiving end of the pitch took issue with it and shared it on the pages of BusinessWeek magazine. The following is the beginning of the pitch:

One of the top reasons why CEOs get fired is “Denying Reality.” In milder cases, a CEO will quit rather than let a horrible truth puncture their fantastical views. Or they’ll blame their workers or board. They’ll craft all sorts of psychological defense mechanisms to avoid shouldering culpability.

One could argue in Lay’s case that the truth he would be forced to confront (bankrupt company, displaced workers, destroyed nest eggs, prison, etc.) was so horrible, and so unavoidable, that his body simply shut down rather than confront a terrible reality.

Lay’s death may be the equivalent of a child sticking their fingers in their ears to avoid hearing something bad. But a lot more final.

XXX is CEO of XXXX, a Washington, D.C. based management consulting firm.

XXX has some interesting thoughts on the demise of Ken Lay and how others can avoid his fate.

Please let me know if you would like to speak with him.

Thanks for your time.

The publicist traveled a bridge too far with that copy. Just because you can sometimes force a circle into a square hole doesn’t mean you should.

So what should you write?

1. Keep it simple.

This isn’t the time to show off how many big words you know — or to try to be cutesy or over-the-top, or whatever your thing is. Stick to the facts.

2. Have a tagline at the top.

What’s that one-liner that describes your project? If you followed Shawn’s instructions, you should have it available for your back cover already. Bring it on over to your promo copy. Get that up top and then keep the inverted triangle of copywriting in mind. Important stuff at the top and then info. of decreasing importance toward the bottom.

Still struggling with that tagline? Think about how you’d describe it to a friend. For example, I’ve been recommending A Man Called Ove of late. My tagline for friends: The main character, Ove, is The Odd Couples’ Felix and Oscar rolled into one. Ove has Felix’s sensibilities and heart, mixed with Oscar’s quick wit, unfiltered mouth, and low-tolerance for idiots. The result provides a back-story for that grouchy neighbor we all know, and why he’s so obsessed with HOA rules.

*You might want to go shorter on your tagline, but one thing to pull from the above is that it features examples of people already know. Aim for a tagline that makes it easy to visualize what you’re offering. You can do this by tapping into characters, books, films, etc., with which readers are already familiar. Don’t try to create a new wheel.

3. Get in a short bio.

And by short, I don’t mean a full page. Deep-six your ego and stick to the important bits.

4. Include copy from your book.

Whether your book is fiction or nonfiction, choose specific excerpts. DO NOT send a full chapter. NO ONE is going to read your chapter.

For fiction, pull a short scene or two, such as the following, which appears on the first page, even before the title page, of my worn-out 1970 edition of M*A*S*H:

When the madcap surgeons of the 4077th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital (MASH) decided to send their houseboy to college, they weren’t going to let money stand in the way . . .

That night they decided to push their luck. The moon was bright, making helicopter flying possible, so the chopper pilots of the Air Rescue Squadron were enlisted. Hawkeye and Duke, with pictures, traveled by Jeep to prearranged points where the troops were in fair quantity. They announced the availability of personally autographed photographs of Jesus Christ, and their timing was perfect. At each point, as the sales talk ended, a brilliant phosphorous flare would be lit, and a helicopter would appear. Spread-eagled on a cross dangling beneath the chopper was the loinclothed, skinny bearded, long-haired and pretty well stoned Trapper John.

Any good act swings. The pictures sold. Back in The Swamp at 1:00 A.M. the loot was counted again. They had six thousand five hundred dollars.

“Let it go at that,” said the Duke. “We got what we needed.”

The packagers of my edition of the book used the story to sell the story. (Still stealing from Shawn… Nice line, isn’t it? “Use the story to sell the story.”)

If I was repping it, I’d pull bits from the pros from Dover section and the football game, too. As Hawkeye would say, I’d feature “finest kind” excerpts rather than chapters.

Thinking of movie trailers might help you with this one. They usually show the good bits, not drawn out scenes. If your book was a film trailer, what clips would you feature?

Same holds true for nonfiction and historical fiction. Pull specific excerpts and tie them to the headlines — without pushing circles into squares.

The following example is another one from 2006, this time related to the release of Steve’ The Afghan Campaign. I created a title for each section, then excerpted a section from the book, which was featured in italics and included the page number on which the excerpt resided. Each excerpt was then followed by a comment from Steve, which tied fiction to fact. Following are two excerpts from the press materials:

The Perpetual Challenge of Afghanistan

The beauty of Afghanistan lies in its distances and its light. The massif of the Hindu Kush, a hundred miles off, looks close enough to touch. But before we get there, hailstones big as sling bullets will ring off our bronze and iron; floods will carry off men and horses we love; the sun will bake us like the bricks of this country’s ten thousand villages. We are as overjoyed to be quit of this place as it is to see us go.

I scoffed, once, at [the god of Afghanistan]. But he has beaten us. Mute, pitiless, remote, Afghanistan’s deity gives up nothing. One appeals to him in vain. Yet he sustains those who call themselves his children, who wring a living from this stony and sterile land.

I have come to fear this god of the Afghans. And that has made me a fighting man, as they are. (page 363)

* * *

Afghanistan is a beautiful, historic, pitiless place. Few have conquered it for long. Alexander is among the greatest military strategists of all time and this place became his strongest challenge. The climate and the land the people come together to make this a bloody and most often regretted battlefield, from Alexander in 300 BC to the Soviet Union almost 2300 years later. And those are but two points on a long timeline. The place changes a little; it is indomitable forever.

 

“Mission Accomplished” Banner Unfurled Prematurely in Alexander’s Campaign, Too

The fight, he says, will soon be over. All that remains is the pursuit of an enemy who is already on the run and the killing or capturing of commanders who are already beaten. We will be out of here by fall, he pledges, and on to India, whose riches and plunder will dwarf even the vast treasure of Persia. “That said,” Alexander adds, “no foe, however primitive, should be taken lightly, and we shall not commit that error here.” (page 77)

* * *

Alexander’s campaign is rich in lessons for every war effort that followed. Alexander failed to get to India as soon as he expected because the war in Afghanistan refused to end. There are and will always be enemies and campaigns that continue beyond what seems to be the conclusion of major operations. When the follow-up, the sweeping up—the so-called minor operations—stretches from days into weeks, months and years, it dawns on you that “major operations” has more than one definition. What appears to be a loose end can be pulled and pulled until you’ve unraveled a lot of what you’ve done.

 

Think about what would appeal to you and what would convince you to buy a book. Be honest. Would you really read a five-page, single-line spaced letter, using 8-point type, from a stranger? Don’t lie.

Always be closing — and then steal what you built and apply it to another venture in need of closing.

And: ALWAYS aim for finest kind.

“Just Write the Damn Thing!”, Part One

We’ve been talking for the past couple of weeks about first drafts. Bottom line message: Get through them fast and with aggression, even if the final product is imperfect and riddled with TKs (placeholder scenes, descriptions, and dialogue). In other words, “Cover the Canvas.”

Al Pacino knocks ’em dead in “The Godfather.” Before we start, we wanna be sure we’ve got a couple of scenes this good.

That’s fine. It works.

But what do we do before we cover the canvas?

Plunge in blindly? Start writing from Page One?

I’m gonna take the next few weeks to address these questions. What I have to say is purely my own idiosyncratic thinking and experience.

Okay? Here goes …

Before I start a first draft I lay out three files, to which I give the following titles:

1) Foolscap

2) 3Acts

3) 60Scenes

I also start a file called “Theme” and three more titled “Hero,” “Villain,” and “Payoff.” (And a few more that I’ll get into as we go along.)

Why am I doing this? I’m trying to get the story straight in my mind from CHAPTER ONE to THE END. I want a snapshot, a blueprint I can refer to. I’m asking myself, “Is this a good idea? Will anyone want to read this? Is it about something? Does it possess dramatic horsepower? Does it progress from A to Z? Does it pay off in the climax? Do I love it? Can I spend the next two or three years working on it?”

I won’t start the first draft till I can say yes to all those questions (and to a lot of others.)

I won’t start until I can “see the whole movie.”

Did I always work like this? No. For years I dove in on Page One, put my head down and started hammering keys. That’s not always a bad idea. Sometimes it works. But what usually happened for me was I’d get halfway through before it hit me that I was totally lost. Or I’d finish completely only to realize that I basically had to tear the whole house down and start over.

Working in Hollywood taught me to plan ahead. “Screenplays are structure,” William Goldman famously declared. I learned from writing movie scripts to pin sixty index cards to the wall, one for each scene, and to not type a word onto paper till I had those 3X5 cards all working and all in order.

I carry over that same thinking to novels, even though I know from experience that a long-form narrative will morph and evolve wildly over the two or three years it takes to complete it. “It wouldn’t be a plan,” they say in the Marine Corps, “if it didn’t change.”

In the next few weeks I’m gonna get into detail about “Foolscap,” “3Acts,” and “60Scenes.” But for today let’s start with another lesson from the movie biz: Paul Schrader’s theory of pitching.

Paul Schrader is the writer of Taxi Driver and Raging Bull and the director of eighteen movies including Light Sleeper, Affliction, and 2013’s The Canyons. Here’s what he wrote about pitching:

 

Have a strong early scene, preferably the opening, a clear but simple spine to the story, one or two killer scenes, and a clear sense of the evolution of the main character or central relationship. And an ending. Any more gets in the way.

 

Paul Schrader was talking (I think) about condensing for presentation a project that was already complete, at least in his mind. He was boiling it down to its pitchable essentials.

I use his technique the opposite way. I ask those questions at the very start, to test my new idea, to see if it might work. In other words, I ask myself Paul Schrader’s questions before I start a first draft.

Do I have a “strong early scene,” i.e. an Inciting Incident?

Does my story have a spine? Can I see a six-lane freeway propelling it from beginning to end?

Do I have at least a few killer scenes? Do I have Michael Corleone gunning down Virgil Sollozzo and Capt. McCluskey at Louis’ restaurant in the Bronx? Do I have the Indominus Rex breaking free and terrorizing thousands at Jurassic World?

Do I have a hero who evolves powerfully from the story’s start to its finish?

And have I got a gangbusters climax? Do Harry and Sally finally get together? Does Matt Damon get back safely from Mars? Does Jay Gatsby’s West Egg mansion devolve into a tragic ruin?

When I can say yes to all these, I’m ready to start putting together a formal Foolscap and to start thinking about “3Acts” and “60Scenes.”

We’re still a long way from “Just Write the Damn Thing!” But we’re getting closer. More on this next week.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Always be Closing

So you’ve got a cover image that you’re happy with.

Alec Baldwin in Glengarry Glen Ross…remember your ABCs

The title and the image Yin and Yang around the territory of the global theme of the work.


You’ve also got a solid short quote from a respected source and/or a respected figure in the book’s genre featured prominently on the front. Something like “The best book on extreme spelunking bar none!” –Lon Fuller

So you’re done right?

NOPE.

Don’t forget the back cover copy.

This is a fundamental mistake self-publishers make again and again.

They go all the way to the finish line and then they half ass the back cover.

Hey, I’ve done it myself. The back cover is the last battleground with book packaging Resistance. It’s the place when we just want the damn thing to be over with.

We’re exhausted. We went through 30 different cover ideas and almost destroyed our relationship with our designer.

We’ve burned every bridge possible calling in every favor we can to get advance quotes. Now we just want to get this sucker out in the marketplace so we can move on with our lives.

Totally understandable.

Now go have a cup of coffee and then close this sucker.  Burn through this last grind and don’t quit until you’re sure the copy is as good as it can be.

So what are you going to write?

Keep it simple.
Have a tagline at the top of the back cover.
Do two paragraphs of body copy that explain the three stages of the book (beginning hook, middle build, ending payoff) in a dynamic way.
End with an author bio (and perhaps photo too if you can make it look good).
Realize that it will never be perfect…

So Steve has a new book at the printer now that we’ll be bringing out very soon. (Don’t worry all of our peeps who are part of First Look Access, which you can sign up for here, will get preferential treatment before it goes wide…)

What did we decide to use as our tagline at the top?

FROM THE AUTHOR OF THE WAR OF ART…

We’re cool honing in on that single simple eight-word pitch because the book is perfect for anyone who’s read, heard of, or is mildly interested in The War of Art.

Steve’s new book isn’t for everyone…so we didn’t try and pitch everyone.

Obviously, you don’t need to read The War of Art to go mad for the new book. I won’t spoil it here, but let’s just say it has a very provocative title.

So the trick for the back cover copy is to CLOSE THE SALE!

So one way to CLOSE THE SALE is to speak to people you absolutely know will be ready to buy.

Don’t try and convince people who aren’t inclined to turn over the book and read the back cover!

Because guess what? They haven’t even made the choice to read the back cover copy. And if you write your copy for those who don’t really care…you might turn off your core audience.

There is nothing more off putting than generic back cover copy written to no one in particular. A book is an invitation to deepen a person’s relationship to the author…even if they’ve never read anything by him/her before.

So write copy that speaks to the reader you know will love the book.

If you’ve written a thriller about online gaming…use language that online gamers use so that those people will see the book as authentic. Not some lame attempt by a 50-year-old editor trying to get a piece of that hot new market. The copy needs to sound like something the reader has heard tangentially in his chosen area of interest or something he understands deeply.

So for those two body paragraphs after the opening hook of the tag line…use the strength of the book’s theme as represented by its inciting incident to compel the reader to just BUY THE THING ALREADY.

“What if an insatiable killer shark starting eating Hamptons summer swells and the only person capable of stopping the shark is terrified of getting into the water?”

“What kind of man has the inner fortitude to defend a society’s scapegoats from the prejudice and tyranny of a nation’s starving underclass?”

“Is there ever a time to forgive an unforgivable act of malice?”

Use the story to sell the story.

Lay down the landscape of emotional terrain for the reader with a juicy question for them to ponder so that they “get it.” They’ll understand the genre the book is living in just from that question. They’ll understand the stakes involved in the story (the central value inherent in each external and internal genre must be conveyed in the back cover copy) and they’ll understand what generally the ending payoff of the entire thing will be just from that question.

What you need to do with the back cover copy is build up the reader’s expectations and make them promises that you will pay those expectations off in ways that they will never see coming.

Use the back cover copy to Close the sale. ALWAYS BE CLOSING.

And if the book delivers on those promises, it will be discussed among the lovers of that particular genre. And it will gain word of mouth. It will live.

Lastly, if you have a renowned author with incredible bona fides, don’t waste them!

Put his/her bio (and if they’re interesting and warm looking too…their photo) on the back cover so that anyone still not sure to try it will be convinced by this last bit of salesmanship.

The subtext of the bio/photo is “Dude, this woman or man is awesome…you’re not going to find an expert better than her or him…so buy it!”

And keep the whole thing under 250 words.

Cover the Canvas

Is the first draft the hardest? Is it different from a third draft, or a twelfth? Does a first draft possess unique challenges that we have to attack in a one-of-a-kind way?

Cover it, baby!

Yes, yes and yes.

A first draft is different from (and more difficult than) all subsequent drafts because in a first draft we’re filling the blank page. And we know what that means: Resistance.

We were talking last week about the “Blitzkrieg method” for attacking a first draft. Here’s another way of thinking about it. This is my main mantra for first drafts:

“Cover the canvas.”

I think of myself as a painter standing before a big blank canvas. What is my aim in a first draft? I just wanna get paint on every inch of that canvas. I know I’m done when I can stand back and see color from end to end and top to bottom.

Imagine we’re Leonardo and we’re laying out “The Last Supper” (in other words, a first draft). Here’s what we want to do. We want to sketch in the apostles, get an outline of Jesus in the center, get the supper table down so it works nicely from left to right and right to left. And we want the perspective in the background. Beyond that, we will not sweat the details. It doesn’t matter if Matthew’s hair isn’t right, or Peter’s left hand has four fingers. We’ll fix that later. Get the picture down. Cover the canvas.

I’m working on a first draft right now. I’m into it about two months. It’s half done. I’ve got one scene that I know in finished form will be about two pages long. Right now it’s twelve. I’ve got repeats, digressions, all kinds of weird stuff in there. It doesn’t matter. I’m happy. I’ve got paint on that part of the canvas.

Another sequence in finished form will be probably forty pages. Right now it’s one sentence. It’s a big TK (“to come.”) I’m fine with that. At least I’ve got SOMETHING as a place holder. I’m covering the canvas.

Why is it so helpful to think of first drafts in these terms? Because in the first draft, Resistance is at its most powerful. First drafts are killers. The blank page, day after day is a monster. Fighting that fight, we give Resistance ten thousand chances to come up with reasons for us to quit. If we dawdle on our first draft, even good external news can destroy us. A raise, a new baby, a winning lottery ticket. Aw hell, there goes our symphony.

Some smart son of a gun once said, “There’s no such thing as writing, only re-writing.” He was wrong. The first draft is writing. Pure blue-sky, blank-sheet writing. But he was right too. Because after Draft #1, it’s all rewriting.

That’s our goal in a first draft: to get to the point where we can start re-writing.

Lemme say it again: Our enemy as artists is Resistance. If we make the mistake in our first draft of playing perfectionist, if we agonize over syntax and take a week to finish Chapter One, by the time we’ve reached Chapter Four, we’ll have hit the wall. Resistance will beat us.

But if we can stay nimble and keep advancing, slapping paint on the canvas and words on the page till we’ve got something that works from east to west and north to south, however imperfectly, then we’ve done our job.

Remember, we’ll probably do ten drafts or more before we’re done. Those drafts are for fixing the stuff we laid in roughly in Draft #1. But by putting paint in every square inch, we’ve laid the groundwork for those subsequent drafts. There’s lots left to do but we’ve established a beachhead now. We’ve got something we can work with.

Cover the canvas. It works.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Don’t Swing Big All the Time

In The Science of Hitting, by Ted Williams and John Underwood, there’s a a section titled “Smarter is Better,” which starts out by talking about Frank Howard, then of the Senators.

“He hit a lot of home runs, he’s the strongest man I’ve ever seen in baseball, but he wasn’t getting on base nearly as often as he should. He struck out a lot, he swung at bad pitches, he swung big all the time.”

When Williams finally had an opportunity to work with Howard, they focused on NOT swinging big all the time.

“Halfway through the 1969 season he had almost as many walks as he drew the entire previous season. He wound up with 102 and cut his strikeouts by a third. His average was higher than ever, he scored more runs, and he still hit more home runs, some of them out of sight. In 1970 he led the league in home runs (45) and RBIs (140) and walked 130 times.”

For the non-baseball fans, this boils down to one thing: Once Howard stopped trying to crush every ball that came his way, his stats improved.

I met another author last month, whose goal was to make it to the New York Times bestseller list. He knows that first-time authors have made the list. He ignores the greater number of first-time authors that haven’t made the list, as well as the long-time successful authors who haven’t made the list.

His goal is to hit home runs and only home runs.

As Williams wrote, “you can’t beat the fact that you’ve got to get a good ball to hit.” For publishing, it might mean you have an amazing book, but the time just isn’t right for it. Think of the long list of artists that didn’t gain recognition until after they died. In baseball terms, you could be an amazing hitter, but you need “a good ball to hit.”

If you ask a group of Little League player their goals, you’ll hear many of them say they want to hit homeruns. Their goal, instead, should be to get on base.

That should be your goal, too — even if it means getting there because a pitcher sent four balls your way and you walked to first base.

Too often the goal is the New York Times bestseller list, when it needs to be “to get on base.” Get in the game first and then adjust your goal. You’ve got to be able to play at the basic level in order to reach and maintain higher levels.

Or, you could be like Frank Howard was, swinging hard every time, but not always getting on base. Once he mastered more than one way of responding to the pitch, he changed his game.

So what does that look like for authors?

It means walking and advancing on errors, and all the other ways to get in the game that aren’t as sexy homeruns. It means writing op-eds and articles for small publications as you grow toward the big ones, publishing’s version of playing in the minor leagues before making it to the majors. It means learning about all aspects of publishing at a lower level, so that you have what it takes to advance at the higher level. It means building your platform, starting at zero.

When Howard played for the Dodgers, he struggled to the point of submitting a letter of resignation, stating he was quitting baseball. Instead, a change of mind and a trade landed him in Washington, D.C., with the Senators and Williams. The rest is history.

Remember: Homeruns get the crowds cheering, but what get’s them sticking with you is consistency and quality, of you showing up and getting into the game series after series, and season after season. Fans are fickle. If you want to be a one-hit wonder, they’ll stick with you for a while, but if you want a career, you’ve got to show them you have the chops and discipline to maintain it.

The Blitzkrieg Method

Continuing our new series on First Drafts …

Gen. Israel Tal of the Israel Defense Forces, before a Merkava tank which he designed

Blitzkrieg is German for “lightning war.” It’s a technique of battle that was developed in the ‘30s by certain German and British generals, foremost among them Heinz Guderian, and put into practice with spectacular success by the Germans in the assaults on France, Poland, and the Soviet Union at the start of WWII.

Blitzkrieg is also a great way to write the first draft of a novel.

The first principle of blitzkrieg is break through the enemy and drive as fast as you can into his rear areas.

In blitzkrieg, the attacking force stops for nothing. If it encounters heavy resistance in one area, it simply bypasses that area and keeps advancing. This works in war because the bypassed enemy, fearing it will be cut off from resupply and reinforcement, often packs up and runs without firing a shot.

Blitzkrieg is psychological as much as physical. The attacking force is energized and empowered by its orders to be aggressive, to strike hard and fast, to keep moving no matter what. The attacking force is fortified emotionally by the knowiedge that it possesses the initiative, it is dictating the action. The enemy can only react. We, the attacking force, can act.

This is exactly the mindset that the novelist needs in writing a first draft.

Those empty pages that lie before us … they are not neutral. They are dug in, ready and eager to resist us. Their power is Resistance. Those blank pages are the equivalent of hundreds of miles of barbed wire, minefields, bunkers and powerfully-entrenched defensive forces.

How are we going to overcome these forces, particularly when we ourselves may be outnumbered, outgunned, out-resourced?

Blitzkrieg.

Hit the enemy fast, hit him hard, get into his rear and throw his forces into confusion.

In last week’s post, we cited a technique described by novelist Matt Quirk. He calls it “using TK,” meaning the editor’s mark for “to come.” When we hit a difficult spot in our first draft, Matt says, simply write “TK” and keep moving. We’ll come back later, he says, and mop up that pocket of resistance.

This is blitzkrieg.

This is lightning war.

The weapons of blitzkrieg are illuminating for us novelists as well. They are weapons of speed and mobility, weapons meant to move fast rather than bring to bear overwhelming firepower. Tanks, aircraft (particularly dive bombers and fighter planes used in close support of ground troops), and mechanized infantry are the arms of blitzkrieg. Their role is not to pulverize the enemy in a straight-up slugfest, but to break through his defenses using speed and audacity and to drive as quickly and as deeply as possible into his rear areas.

That’s your job and mine as novelists in a first draft. Start fast. Roll hard. Stop for nothing. Bypass strongpoints of the enemy. Get to the final objective—THE END—as quickly as we can, even if it means we’re ragged and exhausted and running on fumes.

In June of 1967, the Israeli armored division under Gen. Israel Tal lay poised on the Egyptian frontier, knowing it was going to have to drive through seven enemy divisions to reach its objective, the Suez Canal, on the far side of the Sinai desert. Here is how Gen. Tal concluded his address to his troops:

 

Now I’m going to tell you something very severe. En brera. “No alternative.” The battle tomorrow will be life and death. Each man will assault to the end, taking no account of casualties. There will be no retreat. No halt, no hesitation. Only forward assault.

 

Our novel, yours and mine, is life and death too. The enemy, Resistance, will employ every ruse, every stratagem, every dirty trick to sap our will and break our momentum. His ally is time. The longer he can drag out the fight, the more likely you and I will be to run out of resources, to lose our will, to quit.

The last thing you and I want, embarking on the first draft of a novel or a screenplay, is to get bogged down in a war of attrition. Resistance is too strong. It will defeat us if we let it suck us into a grind-it-out struggle in the trenches.

Strike fast. Strike hard. Stop for nothing till you reach the objective.

Momentum is everything in a first draft.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

My One Fail-Safe Rule for Packaging

If I had to give one and only one piece of advice about how best to generate a cover for a book, it would be this:

Yin and Yang the Image/s and the Word/s.

Huh?

Here’s Chip Kidd’s cover for his book on graphic design that I highly recommend…

It’s supposedly for kids and kids will absolutely love it, but I find it remarkably helpful too. And I’m on the back nine of my life:

See what I mean? It even works in translation…

The image and words don’t match, which is inherently intriguing.

Here’s one more example.

The paperback cover for The War of Art features an image created by the master of design…Milton Glaser, he of the I Love New York campaign and an absolute hero in innumerable ways.

I would love to take credit for the vision behind the paperback cover of The War of Art but I had nothing to do with it.

Back in my Rugged Land days (the perfectly aligned long-tail publishing company I started up before the ubiquity of Internet commerce, sometimes you get ahead of the market, timing is everything…) I published The War of Art in a super tricked out hardcover edition. The book sold well (a little under 10,000 hardcovers) but as a newbie publisher I decided to license paperback rights to Grand Central Publishing. GCP is a division of Hachette, one of the Big Five.

I’m the first to criticize Big Five’s standard operating procedures, but in this case, the process and professionalism of GCP’s art department and the editor who acquired the rights (Emily Griffin) really paid off. Emily is now at HarperCollins.

What my art director (the brilliant Timothy Hsu) and I went for the hardcover was to create a book that required the reader to self examine. So the cover was a sleek grid-like mosaic that had three tiny mirrors embedded. It was “paper/grid over boards.” The idea was to attract artists from any and all walks of life. I’m pleased with how it worked and it certainly did enough business to attract a major publisher’s paperback interest.

What Emily and GCP did though was to focus the book and target a very reliable market.

They decided that the paperback edition would be best served by directing it to writers. This makes absolute sense because paperbacks back then (and now) are quickly categorized in bookstores and stuck in particular shelves. Remember that this was the era of Amazon.com as a cute little online site…not the powerhouse it is today. There were no search engines that instantly gratified back then.

So Emily asked Steve if she could tweak his subtitle which was WINNING THE INNER CREATIVE BATTLE for the hardcover edition to: BREAK THROUGH THE BLOCKS AND WIN YOUR INNER CREATIVE BATTLES for the paperback.

Steve’s attitude then (and it still is today) is to cede control over the work he’s created to passionate professional advocates…even if he’s not 100% sure of what they are suggesting.  Especially if he isn’t.

Emily Griffin was madly in love with The War of Art and she made a very strong case why we needed to change the subtitle and laser focus on writers. Her argument was air tight.

Obviously, the easier it is to get your book into a bookstore shelf, the better the chances of the book actually selling. Every single bookstore has a reference/writing section. If we marketed the book primarily to writers, we’d stand a good chance of getting slotted in that self-selecting section of the bookstore.

Steve signed off willingly.

And then they sent us the cover, which we both knew was perfect. It was perfect because it softened the title.

The image (a flower growing out of a block of cement) was the Yin to the title’s Yang.

Don’t forget that Steve spent years in advertising and he’s no rube when it comes to packaging, marketing, advertising etc. When he was flat broke, he was always able to get a job on Madison Avenue to refill his coffers. He’s a pro and no pushover.

The thing about the title The War of Art that Steve and I feared when we debated it is that creatives/artists are often resistant to the word WAR.

Conflict (even though it’s indispensable to any art) is not the thing people associate with art. Or want to. They want to think of art as beauty, which it certainly is. But conflict begets beauty. Ask any woman who has given birth if the process was conflicting… And no matter how odd looking, there isn’t anything more beautiful than a new baby.

I know it’s an unreliable generalization to say that creative/artists don’t want to think of the creative process as “War.” And it’s obvious untrue today after the hundreds of thousands of copies that The War of Art that have sold, but back then it was a real concern.

The title really could have backfired on us and destroyed the book’s ability to find an audience. Seriously, sometimes a title kills a book. Or the image on the cover does.  But if you can Yin and Yang them, chances are they’ll intrigue…not repulse.

So back to my one ironclad, fail safe packaging rule. When in doubt, make your cover image “say” something antithetical to the title.

 

 

 

 

The Magic of TK

 

On Shawn’s storygrid.com this week there was such a great piece that I’m ripping it off lock-stock-and-barrel here to share with my peeps. It’s on the subject of writing a first draft.

Matt Quirk, author of “The 500” and “Cold Barrel Zero”

Matt Quirk is a novelist (The 500, The Directive, Cold Barrel Zero) and a friend and client of Shawn’s. Here’s his secret weapon for getting through a first draft:

 

Use TK. This is the essential lubricant of the rough first draft. It’s a habit I learned from working as a reporter, but didn’t realize the novel-writing magic of it until I read this advice from Cory Doctorow. TK is an editing mark that means “to come” and is equivalent to leaving a blank or brackets in the text (It’s TK, not TC, because editorial marks are often misspelled intentionally so as not to confuse them with final copy: editors write graf and hed for paragraph and headline).

Can’t figure out a character’s name? “EvilPoliticianTK.” Need to describe the forest? “He looked out over the SpookyForestDescriptionTK.” Need that perfect emotional-physical beat to break up dialogue? “BeatTK.” Just keep writing. TK a whole chapter if you want. Those blanks are not going to make or break anything big picture. Come back for them once you’ve won a few rounds against the existential terror of “Is this whole book going to work or not?” There’s no sense filling in the details on scenes that you’re going to cut.

 

I’m onboard 100% with this trick of Matt’s. What he calls “the existential terror of ‘Is this whole book going to work or not?’”, I would call Resistance.

The enemy in a first draft, remember, is not faulty dialogue, substandard characterization, or lack of expositional detail. The enemy is Resistance.

Resistance will try to break our will by overawing us (by its voice that we hear in our heads) with the length of the project, the scale of its ambition, the hell of the interminable slog to get from CHAPTER ONE to THE END.

Our ally in this struggle is momentum.

Get rolling and keep rolling, that’s our mantra. Let nothing stop us. Don’t slow down for anything. Keep going at all costs. Get to the finish of Draft One, no matter how lousy it is or how full of holes.

That’s the genius of TK.

As Matt says, when you hit a sticking point, don’t bog down slugging it out. That’s what Resistance wants us to do. Resistance wants us to lose momentum. It wants to wear us out fighting hand-to-hand in the trenches.

Instead slap in a quick “TK” and keep rolling.

I’m working on a first draft now myself and, trust me, it is loaded with TKs. Some of my TKs are forty pages long. I’ve got one giant sequence that I’m sure will take me a month to write. Right now it’s just a big TK.

Have you read David Allen’s book Getting Things Done? It’s probably the best time management book ever written. Mr. Allen’s key concept is that he sets up a system whereby, when Something You Have To Do But Don’t Have Time For Right Now comes in, you simply slot it into a “place holder” position. In other words, a TK. Then you drop it from your mind and go back to work.

This succeeds brilliantly because, with that Something We Have To Do securely tucked into the System, we know we won’t forget it. We’ll come back to it when we have time and we’ll take care of it. What we’ve achieved by slotting it into the System is we’ve robbed it of the potential to disrupt our flow, to break our momentum.

In first drafts, remember, velocity is everything. Quality can come later. Slug in those TKs and keep motating.

[Today’s post, by the way, marks the end of our series on Theme. For the next few weeks we’re going to talk about nothing but first drafts.]

 

 

 

 

 

The Social Media Skinny

Last month a nonfiction author-in-progress told me she has over 20,000 Twitter followers, which she interpreted as a sales forecast. While she knows 20,000+ followers might not equal 20,000+ book sales, to her, 20,000+ followers do equal thousands of book sales.

I gave her my spiel about being careful to avoid equating social media numbers with sales, that followers often “like” and “tweet,” but don’t always take action. She replied that she might be the exception, as many of her Twitter followers are journalists who follow her work. In the sage words of Bart Simpson, “au contraire mon frère.” Those many journalists are actually a guarantee that she isn’t the exception, but the rule, as journalists are known for contacting publishers/authors to obtain free books.

However, while the journalists can’t be counted on to buy books, they can seed and feed conversations, which will help generate book sales.

While she’s writing her book, I suggested that she place an op-ed here and there, connect with different journalists about her work, establish herself as a source for a wider group of journalists. Get them digging and talking. Same can be done with her other followers. Give them something to talk about. Don’t wait for the book. Get them chatting now.

From her current mountaintop, the author-in-progress still expects the journalists to buy her future book. What she needs is for the journalists — and all others Twitter followers — to start conversations about her book.

You Need A Conversation

Conversations spark the success of products and ideas, helping them garner new fans and break into different markets.

After Jon Snow rejoined us for Sunday nights, social media exploded with comments about the character’s future. Similar, and earlier, conversations about Game of Thrones are what brought me to the show a few seasons late, and led me to purchase and listen to every audiobook in the series.

After my car battery died during rush-hour traffic, with two kids freaking out inside it, I found myself frazzled and a block down the road from two garages. I walked up to the one friends had shared stories about — conversations related to the garage’s quality service and reasonable prices. Later, when I looked the garage up online, I found its Twitter account with a small handful of followers. Low numbers, but high conversation.

Don’t ignore the numbers, but don’t make them your focus, either. Put your eggs in the conversation basket.

You Need To Connect

Last week, another author told me he’d heard that social media is important. First-time author, older demographic, not of the Social Media generation. Knows about it, doesn’t use it.

This author is in for the long-haul. He’s in the nonfiction world, interested in writing more books and related products, and in setting up his own site with a storefront.

He’s known within the sector in which he works, so I suggested starting there, with e-mails, personal letters and phone calls. The movers and shakers on his list are within his age group, and they aren’t hanging out on social media. Get them to create/share conversations about the book. Then, on social media, use it to find like-minded individuals. Instead of posting something and waiting to see if anyone will run across it, look for people who are posting/sharing similar work/ideas. Then get to know them, gain their trust.

For example, I “like” Neil Young’s Facebook page, but it was an e-mail from his website that alerted me to his new album “Earth.” I’m not on Facebook and Twitter and everything else enough to catch every share that hits my feeds – and that’s true of so many of us. Unless you’re counting on all followers being glued to all screens, social media will be a hit and miss game.

But, if you connect with a potential customer, and the customer then signs up for your e-mail (which many of us do check every day), you’re likely to up the hits and minimize the misses.

For Steve and Black Irish Books, we’ve used social media to connect with readers. While we share new posts and products on Facebook and Twitter, we know that our readers don’t live on those screens 24/7 (and we would be upset to find out if they did), that we won’t catch them that way, so most of our efforts are on the site, growing the e-mail list and creating value.

This is the approach I’d suggest to first-time authors in particular. Don’t hop on social media and start sending tweet and post after post out about your book, how to buy your book, a new discount about your book, etc.

You Need to Value Your Time

Last weekend I spent a birthday party watching my kids and listening to another parent talk about hacking rush-hour traffic. He used historical data from his GPS device to determine the best times to drive into and out of Washington, D.C., every day of the week, down to the exact minute. He knows that Tuesday is the worst day to commute in/out of D.C., and knows when that ten minute delay getting out the door in the morning will mean an hour delay once he hits 395. So, if he’s running late, he knows if he should wait another half hour before leaving, which would mean waiting out traffic in his home instead of his car, and then arriving at work at the same time.

While he spoke, and more so once he pulled the spreadsheet up on his phone, I alternated between thinking that he was crazy and that he was brilliant. I left the party thinking he was brilliant.

The spreadsheet he created is on the intense side — and the time he put into it is on the high side, but… He found traffic trends and reclaimed chunks of his time.

Similar to rush-hour traffic, social media will eat you alive. It will suck the time out of your life.

You don’t need to be on it all the time, so figure out what makes sense, what’s the greatest ROI, and then get in and get out.

An example: For Black Irish Books, we’ve found 9 AM ET to be a good time for sending out e-mails. We’ve tried different times, but with this one, we catch the international crowd, the East Coasters and the early-rising West Coasters, and we’re all awake and working by that time in case disaster accompanies an e-mail campaign. It’s like the rush-hour hacker knowing his ten-minute window. We know what times work well for others, but we know how we fit within those times and how they work for us, too.

The Social Media Skinny Roundup: Create something of value, give them something to talk about, gain trust and protect/reclaim your time.