Part One of this series was posted on aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com on August 3, 2010, followed by Part II on Aug 10
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/08/what-exactly-is-editing-part-ii.html
and Part III on Aug 17,
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/08/what-exactly-is-editing-part-iii.html
and now Part IV on Aug. 24, 2010
On the "vehicle" vs "payload" model of story structure, see:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/09/targeting-readership-part-one.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/08/plot-vs-story.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/07/6-tricks-of-scene-structure.html
We left off in Part III with several adages to ponder:
A) Writing Is A Performing Art (which I learned from Alma Hill)
B) Sounding Spontaneous is a Matter of Careful Preparation (an old stage adage which I learned from Robert A. Heinlein)
C) The Show Must Go On (which we all know).
D) Time Is Money (which we wish we didn't know)
Those who work in the film industry are all acutely aware of the cost per minute of leaving Union crews standing around doing nothing.
Bringing a project in on budget is all a matter of timing, management, thinking ahead, planning, and face it, just plain luck.
What writers don't always take into account is the cost to the publisher of producing their novel, and how that cost counts against their editor in terms of the editor keeping their job, and how each thing the writer does can increase (or decrease) the overhead of the publisher.
All those adages apply to publishing just as they do to film making, and they apply more and more precisely as time goes by.
Editing is more and more just like producing. It's a juggling act, and the most volatile and troublesome element is "the talent" -- actors, writers, director, people who see themselves as creating Art.
The rest of the people in the production process couldn't care a tiddly-wink about Art. They just want a paycheck on time.
Beginning writers often see themselves as selling their Art to publishers.
The Great Awakening into professionalism is the discovery that the publisher doesn't see it that way.
The publisher doesn't value their Art even as much as a film producer values chorus dancers.
For most beginning writers, just getting the contract signed is the goal-post or finish line. They learn quickly that signing the contract is the opening gun in the race not the victory lap.
Here's a tweet from the person running the twitter account for the huge line of Del Rey Spectra:
@DelReySpectra I just had back-to-back meetings, and my brain is now fried. And only 45 minutes to go, now
That's a glimpse of real life for your novel after you sign the contract and deliver. That's the state of the folks responsible for your success or failure as a writer.
That is why it's so hard to "break into" print. Good writers are a dime a dozen. Only a very few are able to run fast enough after the contract to make it to the finish line, to run with the big guys who have back-to-back meetings and can barely sit straight at their desks for that last 45 minutes.
For the publisher, the finish line is not contract signed, or even books in the stores, books in translation, or books made into films. The publisher's finish line is books in remainder and off the shelves, the film made from the book no longer sold in DVD/blu-ray/whatever.
The publisher's finish line is when the property is no longer bringing in revenue and rights revert to the author.
The publisher and the writer live in worlds that are that different. They have goals that are that different. That's why the personalities and character traits of editors, publishers, agents and writers are so different that rarely can one person do all those jobs successfully.
If you're half the writer you think you are, you've just invented a character who can do all those things!
What Exactly Is Editing?
Editing is the process of bringing those disparate goals in line, together, into harmony, or somehow getting them to co-exist.
The editor has a fractious, temperamental artiste on one side and a hard-nosed bean-counter on the other. One is yelling about their characters wouldn't do this or that, and the other is yelling about the stockholders demanding a higher dividend despite taxes.
And then there's the legal department. Those people think differently from anyone in the world (and few read any novels). The lucky writer has an Agent to deal with the legal department. The writer pays the Agent a hefty 15% to deal with lawyers. The Agent will put as much effort into legal work as the Agent thinks the writer's product will be worth. The Agent's business is a time=money business too. Lawyers bill by the hour. Their incentive is to make everything take longer. To the publisher, the legal department is just "overhead" and legal fees are part of every book's cover price.
Which brings us to another important point in the Editor's job description.
The publishing industry is governed more by custom than law.
What's written in the contract is not necessarily how things will work out. Writers who want the written contract to trump industry custom probably won't last long in the profession unless they are Amazon.com's #1 book for 6 weeks with every book they write.
Between the time the contract is signed and the time the final manuscript is put into "production" (sent for copyediting and given a publication date), the specifications for the vehicle that carries the payload - the writer's heart and soul - to the reader can change.
The changes can put an extra, emergency burden on the writer. It's a rewrite order that comes in as "drop everything, even the work under contract to a different publisher despite next week's deadline, and rewrite this and get it to us by Monday morning" work order.
Such an emergency rewrite order is an additional cost of production that the publishing company doesn't pay, doesn't account for, and doesn't care about. The writer must deliver.
The changes in the world that cause these expensive emergencies are not entirely under the control of the publishing company, or the editor.
Some have to do with economics - the price of cardboard in China, for example, determines the price Mass Market paperback printers must charge for paper. The price of ink changes with other non-publishing related events.
Some changes are controlled by upper level management decisions at a Publisher (upper level management of a publisher may be the management of a business that owns the publisher and really doesn't care much about publishing) - how many titles will be printed per month, how many reprints, how much promotion money will be spent and on what kind of promotion, how many colors of ink can be used in a cover.
A writer's publication date might be delayed (or moved up!) because another writer with a larger readership was late (or early) with a manuscript.
The editor who signed the contract might leave and be replaced by an editor who dislikes the writer's novel and bumps it down from Lead Title to 3rd, prints and distributes fewer copies, dooms it to low sales, cancels reprints of prior entries in a series, reaches out for a new writer from the slush pile.
Any of these events could mean the editor (or new editor) will issue new rewrite instructions such as make it longer, make it shorter, make the lead character female, make the lead character male, make the lead character human instead of Alien From Outer Space.
Longer or Shorter are always on the table, and should be no problem to a professional writer.
Major changes such as the gender of the lead or the setting (from alien planet to contemporary Earth, for example) are a totally different problem.
Sometimes, such rewrite instructions issued after the contract is signed are really negotiating techniques for getting the author to back out of the contract. That's what Agents are for.
The Professional Writer would look at drastic rewrite instructions from a different angle.
If massive changes are required, changes in the payload rather than just the vehicle, it isn't cost effective for the writer to invest the amount of time required to accomplish them on a work already crafted.
That's the professional attitude - cost vs. reward.
You don't put into a project more than you can get out of it.
You must get out of it more than you put into it. You must turn a profit.
That's the difference between amateur and professional. Profit. Calculate the effort/return ratio and act accordingly.
The professional writer does not withdraw a manuscript because she thinks she's so great nobody can touch her prose.
Words are strung together for sale at a profit.
Time is money.
The Editor needs 75,000 words that say this, not that.
It took six weeks to write 80,000 words which say that.
It would take another six maybe seven weeks to change that into this.
It would take maybe 5 weeks to write a THIS which is entirely new but exactly what the editor needs.
So instead of rewriting, the professional sends in a chapter and outline for a THIS to replace the THAT which is no longer marketable.
You can fulfill the contract with an acceptable THIS and still have the THAT to market elsewhere (at a profit).
You can do it, but only if you're a professional writer who knows what she's doing and can do it to deadline (and have a really good Agent to deal with the lawyers).
A writer is in business to sell word-strings. Time is money. Provide the editor what she needs when she needs it, and likely she'll buy from you again if she can. (it isn't up to her, remember that) But that can happen only if the sales on the current title pass scrutiny by the bean-counters.
So if the deal comes down to truly drastic changes that require more time than the creation of something new, HAVE that something new in the back files ready to produce at a moment's notice.
Professional merchants have stock on the shelf in the back room as well as out in the showroom.
"Sounding spontaneous is a matter of careful preparation."
It's also true that sounding "calm" is a matter of careful preparation. If you know you can supply whatever the higher management folks demand of the editor, your voice won't squeak when the editor tells you a whole line of novels, maybe a whole imprint, is being canceled and your novel was scheduled for that line, and the advance you received so far is the kill-fee.
Know what a kill-fee is? It's a fee you get when they decide to cancel a contract, especially a contract upon which you have delivered. Usually, if you get a kill-fee for a title, you can't sell that title elsewhere. It's dead. Killed. (there are exceptions to that of course - lawyers live in another world altogether)
So what does an Editor do for a living?
Pull the rug out from under hapless writers, that's what. That's part of the job description, Editor.
Really, tweaking and twiddling text and issuing rewrite orders is the least of what an Editor does. Even the time spent reading manuscripts doesn't eclipse the time and emotional energy spent dealing with the production chain, covers, marketing, blurbs, copy-editing, the accounting department that just doesn't get around to cutting the checks for the editor's starving writers, the power lunches placating the bosses, chatting up agents to get at the biggest name writers, and so on.
The writer never gets to deal with the folks on the committee which ultimately decides whether to contract a certain title, or not.
The editor is the face of the publisher turned to the writer, and the poor editor has to deal with all the changes in the world beyond the control of writer, editor, agent, or sales department, then deal with the emotional basket cases all those disruptions create.
The Editor's job is to orchestrate, manage, and connive, to flimflam all these disparate elements into seeming to cooperate so the higher ups never discover what chaos reigns in the editorial department from time to time (it's mostly pretty organized, but there are moments!)
Thus if the world suddenly changes, the publishing company gets bought, the editorial department head leaves, or the Fed manipulates the value of the dollar, it's the Editor that has to tell you about what that means regarding your manuscript in production, your title on the shelves, or your backlist title that was to be reprinted right before the sequel you're working on now.
It's part of the professional writer's job to understand what the Editor's job is (and is not), and have on tap a product that the editor can use instead of the product that has been contracted.
A cooperative, businesslike writer will ultimately get more work than a prima dona.
Because of that nature of the commercial fiction business, there are few prima donas around. There are, however, a lot of working professional writers in both publishing and film who probably know a lot about the editor or producer's job, but don't think about what they know when crafting a piece under rewrite orders.
Now, I'm being very severe here. Reality is never quite so black and white, and never at all static. What ever's true today will be untrue tomorrow, maybe tonight. There is no "Unified Field Theory" solution for human relationships, business or otherwise. When it comes to establishing and maintaining a relationship with editor or agent, we are all "pantsers" plotting our own success by the seat of our pants.
And we all climb a very steep learning curve. Editors and agents will "handhold" new writers for a while, but expect them to show increasing professionalism.
In Part V of "What Exactly Is Editing" (August 31, 2010) we'll look closely at 6 questions posed by professional writers when asked what they wanted to know about the secrets of rewriting to editorial deadline. And my answers will be extremely severe sounding to beginners.
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com
http://www.simegen.com/jl/
Showing posts with label Writing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Writing. Show all posts
Tuesday, August 24, 2010
Tuesday, August 17, 2010
What Exactly Is Editing - Part III
See Part I of this series,
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/08/what-exactly-is-editing-part-i.html
and part II
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/08/what-exactly-is-editing-part-ii.html
We left off in Part II with a Science Fiction Romance Editor, a character you yourself created, sweating over a stack of submissions trying to save her job.
The question is, "What Will She Do?" Which manuscript will she choose?
Now we up the ante.
On her desk are a stack of 1 page novel descriptions from her slush pile readers and a few pitches from Agents who have always done business crisply with her.
But the books from the Agents just haven't sold well enough to keep her job off the chopping block.
The clients of these top Agents are all seasoned professionals who rewrite to order, on deadline, never miss a deadline, and don't waste the Editor's time with gossipy phone calls or emotional hand-holding sessions. These are writers who won't "feel honored" to be chosen. They're craftsman proud of their work who will respect the editor who can see the quality in their product. They're ready to do business as equals, not toady to a power-figure.
She doesn't have to maintain a personal relationship with the clients of these top Agents. They are professional writers who know what they're doing and just do it - on time.
Experience has taught our editor (the hard way) that if she picks something out of the slush pile, the writer (who couldn't land an Agent) will then spend whole, long days of the editor's time on the phone basically asking for writing lessons.
Some editors are writers, too, but that's less and less common in the new publishing world. We'll discuss the difference between writer and editor later in this series.
Our editor can't afford to give writing lessons (though some editors do that even when they can't afford the time because they see $$$ if the produce can be perfected).
Our pressured editor, however, actually doesn't know how writers write or how to teach how to write, even if she is a good professional writer herself. She's trained and paid to recognize at the gut level the perfected result of good writing, not to examine the internal, subconscious mechanism by which this product is created.
She has no time, and her job is on the line.
And she's a corporate professional. She knows that she must not let either the Agents or their writers know that her job is on the line.
She needs a best-seller, and she needs it now. The authors of her former best-sellers haven't been selling so well lately. She doesn't know why. Where to turn?
What is she going to do?
Now, as a writer, you have walked a mile in your customer's high-heels. You can feel the starch in her shirt. You know how tight her pantyhose are and how expensive her haircut was.
Do some method-acting. Feel the roiling emotions, the sweating tension, the desperation that must not show.
You know now who you are dealing with.
Whether you connect with this editor via an Agent or through the slush pile, or at a convention tossing her an elevator pitch - you know what your customer needs from you because you can feel it.
Your customer needs to know that you understand the pickle she's in, won't ever - EVER - let anyone know that you know that things are tough - (never let them see you sweat) - and your customer needs to know that you have the solution to her problem.
Now get this straight.
Your customer needs to know that you have the solution to her problem, not that you JUST THINK you have but really do have it.
What is it that professional Editors do?
They keep their jobs so that they can license your next novel.
They keep their jobs by staying calm and producing concrete results that the bean-counters upstairs can use to keep their jobs!
So your job as "a professional writer" - is not just to produce solid prose the publisher can use to make a profit for the publisher, but your job is to keep your editor calm, collected, confident and successful.
How can you do that?
By assuring her that you are a professional writer with the following traits:
1) That you have totally divorced your emotional life from the string of words you have to offer her.
2) That these words are your personal self-expression, and that your Self is very close to the target audience that her salesman want to hit big with, and will hit that audience in the emotions because of it.
3) That even though these words started out very personal to you, you have attained a clinical distance from them (how you did that is none of her business)
4) That if anything in this work doesn't look to her as if it will fit through the marketing channel smoothly, you will change it to fit perfectly with only the vaguest wave from her to indicate where nips-n-tucks are needed and without further detailed direction from her.
5) That you understand the exacting (and ever changing) shape of the marketing channel she's got to feed and your goal is to produce a product that will fit neatly into that marketing channel and boost her career.
6) That you know she is a professional editor and therefore is not out to express her personal artistic message via your words
7) That she is your customer, is always right, and not in need of your instruction in how to do her job.
8) That you know exactly what you're doing and will produce results on deadline no matter what may be going haywire in your personal life. You are a professional writer, and keep your homelife out of the office (but you have a rich homelife and are stable and dependable in that context.)
Read that list of assurances again and mind the repetitions; they are important. Note that the face you turn to your editor is totally antithetical to the inner heart and soul of "a writer." It is the professional writer's face.
Read the list a third time. Think about this. An awful lot of the really big best sellers, writers with books that become movies and movies that become best selling books, were journalists first, or for years. What do journalists have that most aspiring novelists don't? Years and years and YEARS of working to a totally inflexible, absolute, do-it-or-die deadline.
A working journalist presenting a novel to an editor has an edge because the journalist will be assumed to make the production deadlines or die trying.
This is an increasingly rare trait in the modern world, and has thus become a saleable commodity in the prose marketplace. Get a professional credential that bespeaks a habit of living within deadlines and never missing them - and you have an edge against all the competition for an editor's (or producer's) attention.
Read that list a fourth time. Note what's missing: art, artistic value, intrinsic merit of the work, discussion of theme or content. Nothing in that list addresses your art. Nothing in that list captures your interest.
Everything important to you as a writer is in your art. You live for your writing, and all the rest is waiting. That's why you'll argue with editors about whether this character would or wouldn't do that thing - and whether this scene should be deleted or another scene added. That content is important to you.
No other functionary in the fiction delivery system cares about anything that's important to you. Knowing that in your bones makes you a professional writer.
You know that your readers (your fans and potential fans) want your heart, not the commercial formula packaging with which you have surrounded your heart.
But the packaging is necessary insulation to shape your story to the delivery system's tubes leading from you to your reader.
Your readers and fans will never see your heart beating gloriously unless you can package it to survive the 900 pound gorilla that lives in the back of the UPS truck and loads suitcases onto planes. That packaging that protects your heart is the commercial fiction structure, the formula, the trope that academics talk about. It's Blake Snyder's beat sheet and genres.
Read that list of traits a fifth time. It's all about your ability to package a story, not about the story itself.
What makes your product different from the product of other writers (the only real reason you ever write anything) is never mentioned. Nobody in the fiction delivery system is interested in what makes you different from other writers. The only thing of interest here is what makes you the same as all the others. That's what this desperate editor you've invented in your mind is looking for. Someone trust-worthy.
The fiction delivery system workers are all convinced that it's the packaging that sells product and makes a profit. The content is worthless, irrelevant, and perhaps even annoying or repellent. Packaging makes a best seller - but the packaging must fit the content like a glove so the whole thing slides right down the tubes of the distribution system frictionlessly. (friction costs money)
For more on the worthlessness of "content" or Intellectual Property see:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/02/fix-for-publishing-business-model.html
You and your editor discuss packaging - your heart stays out of the discussion.
It's up to you to create your story or novel such that your heart is deep, deep inside and no possible change an editor needs can touch it.
You, your Agent, and your Editor are dealing only in the packaging, not in the heart itself.
And that's how you can manage the clinical distance necessary to get through editing without wasting days pacing and crying your head off, or disputing the changes the editor has suggested.
No change an Editor might require would touch the part of the story that matters to you - you know that because you are a professional and you constructed the work so that the payload (your heart) is carried in a very sound commercial "vehicle" - a mechanism known to sell to the audience that you secretly know wants your payload.
Now your job (especially if your work has been discovered in the slush pile or captivated the interest of an editor in an elevator) is to convince the editor that you understand the difference between payload and vehicle, and that you are a total master of vehicle repair and maintenance.
That's where most new writers trying to pitch to an editor at a convention will fail. The new writer will tell the editor the story, focus on all the tangled character motivations and rich tapestry of backstory propelling these characters into adventure. But what the editor is listening for is, "I am a proficient vehicle mechanic and I build vehicles your readership has proven it loves." And all that editor is hearing is, "I'm different from all other writers because of my vastly detailed art and I wouldn't ever build a vehicle if my life depended on it."
Payload, heart, the actual story, is very important, but finding useful payload is easy. Good vehicle mechanics are rare.
The Editor will choose a payload that suits the target readership for the line being edited. That's a given. Picking out satisfying payload is the editor's talent and stock in trade, and the process is none of your business. That's why editors you interview always say "Just write a good story." or "I want interesting characters." or asked what makes a good story, they are reduced to something that says in effect "If I like it, it's good."
The payload (the emotional kick) of the story is not under discussion in the Writer-Editor transaction. That hurdle has already been crossed, and it's the reason you have an offer or a contract. This editor knows where to sell your payload and has the means to do so.
The vehicle, the mechanism that has to deliver that payload to the heart of the reader, is entirely mutable during the editing process.
What's the editor's job?
To produce 3 or 5 books every month that all travel in the same model vehicle.
The editor is running an assembly line that produces green Corollas. She might take your red Corolla, but will require a new paint job, and maybe matching interior at your expense.
The editor is running a circus that needs a High Wire Walker, and you got the job auditioning in spangled tights -- but this year's show has a Western theme and she hands you a hoop-skirt costume. It's still wire-walking. You're trained to that. You can do it even though you've never done it in a hoop-skirt before.
Writing is a performing art.
You are a performing artist.
The Editor is mounting a show. She needs singers, dancers, acrobats, a lead actor and actress, some supporting players, and a chorus.
You audition as a singer with one song you know well (your novel), but she hires you and asks for a more upbeat arrangement. You represented yourself as a singer. So re-arrange your song, sing the song her show requires and prove your professionalism.
The show must go on.
Next time we'll look at some of the obstacles to getting the show on the road and the nitty-gritty of what an author under the editing hammer faces in order to accomplish this task.
Readers who aren't writers will begin to suspect they ought to pay more for books than they do, given what writers go through to put those books into the reader's hands.
Part IV of this series posted on Aug. 24, 2010
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com
http://www.simegen.com/jl/
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/08/what-exactly-is-editing-part-i.html
and part II
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/08/what-exactly-is-editing-part-ii.html
We left off in Part II with a Science Fiction Romance Editor, a character you yourself created, sweating over a stack of submissions trying to save her job.
The question is, "What Will She Do?" Which manuscript will she choose?
Now we up the ante.
On her desk are a stack of 1 page novel descriptions from her slush pile readers and a few pitches from Agents who have always done business crisply with her.
But the books from the Agents just haven't sold well enough to keep her job off the chopping block.
The clients of these top Agents are all seasoned professionals who rewrite to order, on deadline, never miss a deadline, and don't waste the Editor's time with gossipy phone calls or emotional hand-holding sessions. These are writers who won't "feel honored" to be chosen. They're craftsman proud of their work who will respect the editor who can see the quality in their product. They're ready to do business as equals, not toady to a power-figure.
She doesn't have to maintain a personal relationship with the clients of these top Agents. They are professional writers who know what they're doing and just do it - on time.
Experience has taught our editor (the hard way) that if she picks something out of the slush pile, the writer (who couldn't land an Agent) will then spend whole, long days of the editor's time on the phone basically asking for writing lessons.
Some editors are writers, too, but that's less and less common in the new publishing world. We'll discuss the difference between writer and editor later in this series.
Our editor can't afford to give writing lessons (though some editors do that even when they can't afford the time because they see $$$ if the produce can be perfected).
Our pressured editor, however, actually doesn't know how writers write or how to teach how to write, even if she is a good professional writer herself. She's trained and paid to recognize at the gut level the perfected result of good writing, not to examine the internal, subconscious mechanism by which this product is created.
She has no time, and her job is on the line.
And she's a corporate professional. She knows that she must not let either the Agents or their writers know that her job is on the line.
She needs a best-seller, and she needs it now. The authors of her former best-sellers haven't been selling so well lately. She doesn't know why. Where to turn?
What is she going to do?
Now, as a writer, you have walked a mile in your customer's high-heels. You can feel the starch in her shirt. You know how tight her pantyhose are and how expensive her haircut was.
Do some method-acting. Feel the roiling emotions, the sweating tension, the desperation that must not show.
You know now who you are dealing with.
Whether you connect with this editor via an Agent or through the slush pile, or at a convention tossing her an elevator pitch - you know what your customer needs from you because you can feel it.
Your customer needs to know that you understand the pickle she's in, won't ever - EVER - let anyone know that you know that things are tough - (never let them see you sweat) - and your customer needs to know that you have the solution to her problem.
Now get this straight.
Your customer needs to know that you have the solution to her problem, not that you JUST THINK you have but really do have it.
What is it that professional Editors do?
They keep their jobs so that they can license your next novel.
They keep their jobs by staying calm and producing concrete results that the bean-counters upstairs can use to keep their jobs!
So your job as "a professional writer" - is not just to produce solid prose the publisher can use to make a profit for the publisher, but your job is to keep your editor calm, collected, confident and successful.
How can you do that?
By assuring her that you are a professional writer with the following traits:
1) That you have totally divorced your emotional life from the string of words you have to offer her.
2) That these words are your personal self-expression, and that your Self is very close to the target audience that her salesman want to hit big with, and will hit that audience in the emotions because of it.
3) That even though these words started out very personal to you, you have attained a clinical distance from them (how you did that is none of her business)
4) That if anything in this work doesn't look to her as if it will fit through the marketing channel smoothly, you will change it to fit perfectly with only the vaguest wave from her to indicate where nips-n-tucks are needed and without further detailed direction from her.
5) That you understand the exacting (and ever changing) shape of the marketing channel she's got to feed and your goal is to produce a product that will fit neatly into that marketing channel and boost her career.
6) That you know she is a professional editor and therefore is not out to express her personal artistic message via your words
7) That she is your customer, is always right, and not in need of your instruction in how to do her job.
8) That you know exactly what you're doing and will produce results on deadline no matter what may be going haywire in your personal life. You are a professional writer, and keep your homelife out of the office (but you have a rich homelife and are stable and dependable in that context.)
Read that list of assurances again and mind the repetitions; they are important. Note that the face you turn to your editor is totally antithetical to the inner heart and soul of "a writer." It is the professional writer's face.
Read the list a third time. Think about this. An awful lot of the really big best sellers, writers with books that become movies and movies that become best selling books, were journalists first, or for years. What do journalists have that most aspiring novelists don't? Years and years and YEARS of working to a totally inflexible, absolute, do-it-or-die deadline.
A working journalist presenting a novel to an editor has an edge because the journalist will be assumed to make the production deadlines or die trying.
This is an increasingly rare trait in the modern world, and has thus become a saleable commodity in the prose marketplace. Get a professional credential that bespeaks a habit of living within deadlines and never missing them - and you have an edge against all the competition for an editor's (or producer's) attention.
Read that list a fourth time. Note what's missing: art, artistic value, intrinsic merit of the work, discussion of theme or content. Nothing in that list addresses your art. Nothing in that list captures your interest.
Everything important to you as a writer is in your art. You live for your writing, and all the rest is waiting. That's why you'll argue with editors about whether this character would or wouldn't do that thing - and whether this scene should be deleted or another scene added. That content is important to you.
No other functionary in the fiction delivery system cares about anything that's important to you. Knowing that in your bones makes you a professional writer.
You know that your readers (your fans and potential fans) want your heart, not the commercial formula packaging with which you have surrounded your heart.
But the packaging is necessary insulation to shape your story to the delivery system's tubes leading from you to your reader.
Your readers and fans will never see your heart beating gloriously unless you can package it to survive the 900 pound gorilla that lives in the back of the UPS truck and loads suitcases onto planes. That packaging that protects your heart is the commercial fiction structure, the formula, the trope that academics talk about. It's Blake Snyder's beat sheet and genres.
Read that list of traits a fifth time. It's all about your ability to package a story, not about the story itself.
What makes your product different from the product of other writers (the only real reason you ever write anything) is never mentioned. Nobody in the fiction delivery system is interested in what makes you different from other writers. The only thing of interest here is what makes you the same as all the others. That's what this desperate editor you've invented in your mind is looking for. Someone trust-worthy.
The fiction delivery system workers are all convinced that it's the packaging that sells product and makes a profit. The content is worthless, irrelevant, and perhaps even annoying or repellent. Packaging makes a best seller - but the packaging must fit the content like a glove so the whole thing slides right down the tubes of the distribution system frictionlessly. (friction costs money)
For more on the worthlessness of "content" or Intellectual Property see:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/02/fix-for-publishing-business-model.html
You and your editor discuss packaging - your heart stays out of the discussion.
It's up to you to create your story or novel such that your heart is deep, deep inside and no possible change an editor needs can touch it.
You, your Agent, and your Editor are dealing only in the packaging, not in the heart itself.
And that's how you can manage the clinical distance necessary to get through editing without wasting days pacing and crying your head off, or disputing the changes the editor has suggested.
No change an Editor might require would touch the part of the story that matters to you - you know that because you are a professional and you constructed the work so that the payload (your heart) is carried in a very sound commercial "vehicle" - a mechanism known to sell to the audience that you secretly know wants your payload.
Now your job (especially if your work has been discovered in the slush pile or captivated the interest of an editor in an elevator) is to convince the editor that you understand the difference between payload and vehicle, and that you are a total master of vehicle repair and maintenance.
That's where most new writers trying to pitch to an editor at a convention will fail. The new writer will tell the editor the story, focus on all the tangled character motivations and rich tapestry of backstory propelling these characters into adventure. But what the editor is listening for is, "I am a proficient vehicle mechanic and I build vehicles your readership has proven it loves." And all that editor is hearing is, "I'm different from all other writers because of my vastly detailed art and I wouldn't ever build a vehicle if my life depended on it."
Payload, heart, the actual story, is very important, but finding useful payload is easy. Good vehicle mechanics are rare.
The Editor will choose a payload that suits the target readership for the line being edited. That's a given. Picking out satisfying payload is the editor's talent and stock in trade, and the process is none of your business. That's why editors you interview always say "Just write a good story." or "I want interesting characters." or asked what makes a good story, they are reduced to something that says in effect "If I like it, it's good."
The payload (the emotional kick) of the story is not under discussion in the Writer-Editor transaction. That hurdle has already been crossed, and it's the reason you have an offer or a contract. This editor knows where to sell your payload and has the means to do so.
The vehicle, the mechanism that has to deliver that payload to the heart of the reader, is entirely mutable during the editing process.
What's the editor's job?
To produce 3 or 5 books every month that all travel in the same model vehicle.
The editor is running an assembly line that produces green Corollas. She might take your red Corolla, but will require a new paint job, and maybe matching interior at your expense.
The editor is running a circus that needs a High Wire Walker, and you got the job auditioning in spangled tights -- but this year's show has a Western theme and she hands you a hoop-skirt costume. It's still wire-walking. You're trained to that. You can do it even though you've never done it in a hoop-skirt before.
Writing is a performing art.
You are a performing artist.
The Editor is mounting a show. She needs singers, dancers, acrobats, a lead actor and actress, some supporting players, and a chorus.
You audition as a singer with one song you know well (your novel), but she hires you and asks for a more upbeat arrangement. You represented yourself as a singer. So re-arrange your song, sing the song her show requires and prove your professionalism.
The show must go on.
Next time we'll look at some of the obstacles to getting the show on the road and the nitty-gritty of what an author under the editing hammer faces in order to accomplish this task.
Readers who aren't writers will begin to suspect they ought to pay more for books than they do, given what writers go through to put those books into the reader's hands.
Part IV of this series posted on Aug. 24, 2010
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com
http://www.simegen.com/jl/
Tuesday, August 10, 2010
What Exactly Is Editing - Part II
If you are in the PNR/SFR genre, don't miss reading this interview at Tor focusing on the editors of the genre:
http://www.tor.com/blogs/2010/08/editorial-roundtable-the-roots-of-paranormal-romance-urban-fantasy
If you're more on the SF side, read this article in Wired Magazine and the comments:
http://www.wired.com/geekdad/2010/08/is-being-a-geek-a-personality-trait-or-way-of-life/
Part I of this series on Editing appeared on Aug 3, 2010
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/08/what-exactly-is-editing-part-i.html .
It discusses what "writing" is and the effect a professional attitude has on our writing as an entry point into discovering what an editor is.
If you are just writing for yourself, you don't need an editor. You never need to "rewrite" at all, and you certainly would never change a word you had produced to please someone else. The very thought is anathema!
If, however, you've crossed that divide between writing for personal therapy, writing for your own bottom drawer (or floor safe), writing a personal journal or diary complete with key-lock -- all the way over to writing specifically FOR other people, you have to begin the process of learning how to write "by successive approximations."
That is - learning to rewrite. To revise. To re-target. To self-edit.
For most of us, that's the first encounter with writing word-strings that then get changed.
It's a very disorienting experience. Change just one word of any paragraph or scene in your story, and you then find all of a sudden that other words must also be changed to match.
And self-editing has begun.
If you just do that to make it "better" then you've only begun your journey into professional editing, but it is a beginning and a very big step.
When you make changes in something you've written that nobody else has yet read, and you make those changes just to "make it better" the only criteria to judge "better" by is your own internal standard.
Many writers hang up right there. Looking at what they've written, they see that it "isn't good enough" and just never submit it to anyone. Or if they do, they accept the rejection of a professional editor as a decree that they can't write so they give up.
One element in "professionalism" is knowing that any word-strings you produce, however many times you have polished them to your own satisfaction, are basically worthless to the outside world.
The difference between an amateur and a professional wordsmith is the purpose to which word-strings are put.
Why are you writing?
If you write because you need to express yourself, you aren't yet writing professionally.
However, if you don't write to express yourself, you'll probably never write enough word-strings to make a profit, or a living.
So there's another step in the writing process that professionals take that amateurs or failures do not take.
It's a step that has to be "learned" -- just as a baby learns to walk by letting go and taking that first step toward Mama or Daddy.
It's a hesitant, wobbly step, a step requiring the coordination of internal mental muscles that aren't strong (yet).
Once those muscles are strong, and the autonomic nervous system has developed the capacity to coordinate all those internal balance mechanisms, the child just walks across the floor, eye on the goal not on the stepping process.
And that is an exact analog to learning to "write" professionally.
There are muscles and balance processes that professional writers learn that amateurs don't have to.
A professional writer is more like say, a tightrope walker, while an amateur writer is more like someone who just walks to do the shopping or exercise.
The tightrope walker is walking to entertain others with a high-precision version of a common skill, while the ordinary person walks just to live their own life.
From first, hesitant, wobbly step to tightrope walker is a different journey than from first step to Accountant.
So the difference between a writer and a professional writer is nothing more than the reason why they string words together and what they intend to do with the words once they are strung.
There are many professional writers, however, who would risk their lives to get a professional editor to say, "Change this and I'll buy it."
It's a long journey from mastering wordsmithing to your first contract.
And an even longer journey from making the first sale to signing contracts on the basis of a few paragraphs of a proposal.
So again, what is it that editors do for a living?
From the writer's point of view, the toddler-writer, even the pre-teen-writer, it looks like professional editors are "gatekeepers."
And it feels like editors (or actually slush pile readers) are in charge of saying no - and not for any good reason!
Editors say "no" much more often than "yes" because there is far more product for sale than there is need for product.
From the professional writer's point of view Editors are not "gatekeepers" -- Editors are customers.
That's another attitude change that distinguishes the professional from the amateur writer.
In today's world, many businesses have lost the maxim "The Customer Is Always Right" in favor of a new maxim, "I'm Entitled To Your Money."
But Editors, as your customers, still operate on the premise that they are always right and you are not entitled to anything, least of all money, unless you satisfy them.
Why should editors (purchasing editors especially) be the last holdout in this general philosophical shift?
Editors are still always right because the sellers who are thrusting word-strings at the editors have never been trained to understand exactly what the editor's job really is.
Worse yet, the editor's job has changed so drastically since the US Supreme Court forced anti-artistic change on publishing
http://www.sfwa.org/bulletin/articles/thor.htm
that many of the best editors have been driven from the field.
But that's a cyclical trend. Read this blog post about SF writers making a living at SF writing:
http://www.blackgate.com/2010/07/09/robert-silverberg-on-are-the-days-of-the-full-time-novelist-numbered/
At this time, though, the very changes that have changed the craft-skills that writers must master, that destroyed the "mid-list" and that drove novel publishing toward the film industry criteria have also changed the entire character of the editor's job description and skills.
The New Editor has become not so much an artistic gatekeeper, decreeing what is fit for others to read, but rather a bottom-line keeper, an expert in what will turn a profit.
The New Editor doesn't make decisions on personal taste (unless that taste has been honed to detect Blockbuster Sales potential).
The New Editor is entirely focused on keeping their job, or finding a better paying one.
And the only way the editor can keep a job as an editor is to please "the committee" that will accept or reject the handful of projects the editor presents for their scrutiny.
The key point here is that most of the committee members will not actually read the manuscripts being submitted for approval.
The committee will select one out of the handful to publish based on the "pitch" the editor makes to the committee, and that pitch is all about marketability.
To keep a job, the editor must be able to sift through the dross tossed up by the slushpile reader and detect which ones have a chance to get past that committee.
The committee is composed not of fans, or readers, but of art department, sales department, editorial management maybe in touch with accounting (noting which books are selling best right now).
As dismal as all this sounds, there is light at the end of the tunnel that may herald a change for the better.
I just ran into 3 folks on twitter running marketing tweets for a publisher who say THEY read the books they market. I had tweeted a reply to one of them saying essentially that alas marketers don't read books. They responded like so:
@HarperPerennial replied:
@JLichtenberg as a marketer, I'm a bit offended by the idea that marketers don't love reading books #dearpublisher
@HarperChildrens replied:
@JLichtenberg We can safely refute that! We're book marketers and we read like the wind. #dearpublisher
@markfergbk replied:
@JLichtenberg I'd respectfully disagree, but I can only speak for myself and all the marketers I know.
Well, these folks are dealing with books the committee has approved and they are looking at the finished package ready to be promoted to buyers.
They are working Web 2.0 and you all know how enthusiastic I have been for the changes in publishing due to interactivity among consumers and between consumers and product promoters.
I Love Web 2.0
I could wonder how many of marketers read the rejected manuscripts, just in case one of those might actually be a winner? But I am wondrously heartened to hear that the promoters to the public are now reading the product they promote.
Those of you in the film industry are beginning to recognize this description as an analog to the studio process.
Projects chosen to be presented to "the public" are sifted out of the clamoring mob solely by the commercialism of "the pitch."
The "Purchasing Editor" (before the Thor Hammer decision) used to be the editor who would see the project into print. That Editor had the sole power to accept or reject a project, and their job rested only in part on how many copies their choices sold. It also rested on critical acclaim, reviews, and "who" actually raved about given projects. That is, the Purchasing Editor had to gain "prestige" for the publisher as well as sales. The Purchasing Editor looked for artistic merit.
Now it's only sales volume.
The Purchasing Editor's job now depends solely on the ability to please a committee of non-readers and the accounting department.
This new discipline trains them to create a uniform product for a well defined market.
In Mass Market paperback, the editor's skills are becoming more and more identical to the skills that make a successful studio producer.
More precisely, Mass Market paperback production is more like studio TV Series production than it is like Feature Film production.
Hardcover and Trade Paperback are trending in the Mass Market direction, but haven't gotten there yet. There are still hardcover publications that do not become paperbacks.
Even the hardcover editor's job, though, is to find products that will sell big time in paperback.
Now, pretend you are writing a novel about an Editor. The main character is a Mass Market paperback editor threatened with being fired if they don't increase their bottom line in the next year.
Get into your character's skin. Feel the pressure.
Your character is a lifelong, voracious fiction reader. The greatest pleasure this character can imagine experiencing is putting a really good book into the hands of another reader.
To achieve that, your character must please a group of people who dislike reading, and especially dislike reading "that stuff" (whatever genre; let's choose Science Fiction Romance at random).
Lose that job, and your character will never again experience this sublime pleasure.
On her desk is a stack of "reports" from slush pile readers (these reports used by major publishing houses look very much like "Coverage" reports used by Production Companies.)
Her phone rings, and a major Agent she's done business with before pitches three novels in five minutes.
What is she going to do?
See Part III here next week.
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com
http://www.simegen.com/jl/
http://www.tor.com/blogs/2010/08/editorial-roundtable-the-roots-of-paranormal-romance-urban-fantasy
If you're more on the SF side, read this article in Wired Magazine and the comments:
http://www.wired.com/geekdad/2010/08/is-being-a-geek-a-personality-trait-or-way-of-life/
Part I of this series on Editing appeared on Aug 3, 2010
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/08/what-exactly-is-editing-part-i.html .
It discusses what "writing" is and the effect a professional attitude has on our writing as an entry point into discovering what an editor is.
If you are just writing for yourself, you don't need an editor. You never need to "rewrite" at all, and you certainly would never change a word you had produced to please someone else. The very thought is anathema!
If, however, you've crossed that divide between writing for personal therapy, writing for your own bottom drawer (or floor safe), writing a personal journal or diary complete with key-lock -- all the way over to writing specifically FOR other people, you have to begin the process of learning how to write "by successive approximations."
That is - learning to rewrite. To revise. To re-target. To self-edit.
For most of us, that's the first encounter with writing word-strings that then get changed.
It's a very disorienting experience. Change just one word of any paragraph or scene in your story, and you then find all of a sudden that other words must also be changed to match.
And self-editing has begun.
If you just do that to make it "better" then you've only begun your journey into professional editing, but it is a beginning and a very big step.
When you make changes in something you've written that nobody else has yet read, and you make those changes just to "make it better" the only criteria to judge "better" by is your own internal standard.
Many writers hang up right there. Looking at what they've written, they see that it "isn't good enough" and just never submit it to anyone. Or if they do, they accept the rejection of a professional editor as a decree that they can't write so they give up.
One element in "professionalism" is knowing that any word-strings you produce, however many times you have polished them to your own satisfaction, are basically worthless to the outside world.
The difference between an amateur and a professional wordsmith is the purpose to which word-strings are put.
Why are you writing?
If you write because you need to express yourself, you aren't yet writing professionally.
However, if you don't write to express yourself, you'll probably never write enough word-strings to make a profit, or a living.
So there's another step in the writing process that professionals take that amateurs or failures do not take.
It's a step that has to be "learned" -- just as a baby learns to walk by letting go and taking that first step toward Mama or Daddy.
It's a hesitant, wobbly step, a step requiring the coordination of internal mental muscles that aren't strong (yet).
Once those muscles are strong, and the autonomic nervous system has developed the capacity to coordinate all those internal balance mechanisms, the child just walks across the floor, eye on the goal not on the stepping process.
And that is an exact analog to learning to "write" professionally.
There are muscles and balance processes that professional writers learn that amateurs don't have to.
A professional writer is more like say, a tightrope walker, while an amateur writer is more like someone who just walks to do the shopping or exercise.
The tightrope walker is walking to entertain others with a high-precision version of a common skill, while the ordinary person walks just to live their own life.
From first, hesitant, wobbly step to tightrope walker is a different journey than from first step to Accountant.
So the difference between a writer and a professional writer is nothing more than the reason why they string words together and what they intend to do with the words once they are strung.
There are many professional writers, however, who would risk their lives to get a professional editor to say, "Change this and I'll buy it."
It's a long journey from mastering wordsmithing to your first contract.
And an even longer journey from making the first sale to signing contracts on the basis of a few paragraphs of a proposal.
So again, what is it that editors do for a living?
From the writer's point of view, the toddler-writer, even the pre-teen-writer, it looks like professional editors are "gatekeepers."
And it feels like editors (or actually slush pile readers) are in charge of saying no - and not for any good reason!
Editors say "no" much more often than "yes" because there is far more product for sale than there is need for product.
From the professional writer's point of view Editors are not "gatekeepers" -- Editors are customers.
That's another attitude change that distinguishes the professional from the amateur writer.
In today's world, many businesses have lost the maxim "The Customer Is Always Right" in favor of a new maxim, "I'm Entitled To Your Money."
But Editors, as your customers, still operate on the premise that they are always right and you are not entitled to anything, least of all money, unless you satisfy them.
Why should editors (purchasing editors especially) be the last holdout in this general philosophical shift?
Editors are still always right because the sellers who are thrusting word-strings at the editors have never been trained to understand exactly what the editor's job really is.
Worse yet, the editor's job has changed so drastically since the US Supreme Court forced anti-artistic change on publishing
http://www.sfwa.org/bulletin/articles/thor.htm
that many of the best editors have been driven from the field.
But that's a cyclical trend. Read this blog post about SF writers making a living at SF writing:
http://www.blackgate.com/2010/07/09/robert-silverberg-on-are-the-days-of-the-full-time-novelist-numbered/
At this time, though, the very changes that have changed the craft-skills that writers must master, that destroyed the "mid-list" and that drove novel publishing toward the film industry criteria have also changed the entire character of the editor's job description and skills.
The New Editor has become not so much an artistic gatekeeper, decreeing what is fit for others to read, but rather a bottom-line keeper, an expert in what will turn a profit.
The New Editor doesn't make decisions on personal taste (unless that taste has been honed to detect Blockbuster Sales potential).
The New Editor is entirely focused on keeping their job, or finding a better paying one.
And the only way the editor can keep a job as an editor is to please "the committee" that will accept or reject the handful of projects the editor presents for their scrutiny.
The key point here is that most of the committee members will not actually read the manuscripts being submitted for approval.
The committee will select one out of the handful to publish based on the "pitch" the editor makes to the committee, and that pitch is all about marketability.
To keep a job, the editor must be able to sift through the dross tossed up by the slushpile reader and detect which ones have a chance to get past that committee.
The committee is composed not of fans, or readers, but of art department, sales department, editorial management maybe in touch with accounting (noting which books are selling best right now).
As dismal as all this sounds, there is light at the end of the tunnel that may herald a change for the better.
I just ran into 3 folks on twitter running marketing tweets for a publisher who say THEY read the books they market. I had tweeted a reply to one of them saying essentially that alas marketers don't read books. They responded like so:
@HarperPerennial replied:
@JLichtenberg as a marketer, I'm a bit offended by the idea that marketers don't love reading books #dearpublisher
@HarperChildrens replied:
@JLichtenberg We can safely refute that! We're book marketers and we read like the wind. #dearpublisher
@markfergbk replied:
@JLichtenberg I'd respectfully disagree, but I can only speak for myself and all the marketers I know.
Well, these folks are dealing with books the committee has approved and they are looking at the finished package ready to be promoted to buyers.
They are working Web 2.0 and you all know how enthusiastic I have been for the changes in publishing due to interactivity among consumers and between consumers and product promoters.
I Love Web 2.0
I could wonder how many of marketers read the rejected manuscripts, just in case one of those might actually be a winner? But I am wondrously heartened to hear that the promoters to the public are now reading the product they promote.
Those of you in the film industry are beginning to recognize this description as an analog to the studio process.
Projects chosen to be presented to "the public" are sifted out of the clamoring mob solely by the commercialism of "the pitch."
The "Purchasing Editor" (before the Thor Hammer decision) used to be the editor who would see the project into print. That Editor had the sole power to accept or reject a project, and their job rested only in part on how many copies their choices sold. It also rested on critical acclaim, reviews, and "who" actually raved about given projects. That is, the Purchasing Editor had to gain "prestige" for the publisher as well as sales. The Purchasing Editor looked for artistic merit.
Now it's only sales volume.
The Purchasing Editor's job now depends solely on the ability to please a committee of non-readers and the accounting department.
This new discipline trains them to create a uniform product for a well defined market.
In Mass Market paperback, the editor's skills are becoming more and more identical to the skills that make a successful studio producer.
More precisely, Mass Market paperback production is more like studio TV Series production than it is like Feature Film production.
Hardcover and Trade Paperback are trending in the Mass Market direction, but haven't gotten there yet. There are still hardcover publications that do not become paperbacks.
Even the hardcover editor's job, though, is to find products that will sell big time in paperback.
Now, pretend you are writing a novel about an Editor. The main character is a Mass Market paperback editor threatened with being fired if they don't increase their bottom line in the next year.
Get into your character's skin. Feel the pressure.
Your character is a lifelong, voracious fiction reader. The greatest pleasure this character can imagine experiencing is putting a really good book into the hands of another reader.
To achieve that, your character must please a group of people who dislike reading, and especially dislike reading "that stuff" (whatever genre; let's choose Science Fiction Romance at random).
Lose that job, and your character will never again experience this sublime pleasure.
On her desk is a stack of "reports" from slush pile readers (these reports used by major publishing houses look very much like "Coverage" reports used by Production Companies.)
Her phone rings, and a major Agent she's done business with before pitches three novels in five minutes.
What is she going to do?
See Part III here next week.
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com
http://www.simegen.com/jl/
Tuesday, August 03, 2010
What Exactly Is Editing? Part I
We call ourselves professional writers.
How does that differ from amateur (fanfic?) writers? Or creative writers? Or just plain writers?
Professionalism in writing is an attitude more than it is a result, or so I've always held.
Professional writers organize words into a flow of meaning. It is the flow of meaning that has value since almost all the words we use are in the dictionary and thus pubic domain.
Our word-strings are our product, and those strings may be either "for sale" (work for hire) or "for license" which is what most book contracts are, a license to copy the work and sell copies but not sell the work itself.
Once you have attained the attitude that your very specific string of words is a product (like a lamp you carved or a potato you grew) that is for barter, trade, sale or license - a product which you have no interest in keeping in a dark drawer, a product you intend to gain a profit from, then you have become a "professional."
That attitude is often attained by fanfic writers fairly easily.
Creative Writers have a much harder time attaining the attitude necessary to accept the "beta-reader" input and use it constructively. "Creative" writing is really more about self-expression, with an emphasis on artistic creativity.
That means it's the "creative" writer, the academic, who forges into new territory with regard to the "trope" underlying storytelling. Creative writers have very small, very specialized audiences, and play to that audience with laser-beam precision. To become a part of their audience, a reader must have a wide and deep education, usually in "Literature" and related fields.
The "Creative" writer contributes experiments to the art of "writing" without personally focusing on attaining a huge, mainstream audience with diverse educations, talents and interests. The "Creative" writer is not aiming at the "common denominator" that makes a product marketable across national boundaries (think of the film AVATAR).
So the "Creative" writer is more self-involved than audience-involved and seeks an audience as close to that "self" as possible to allow latitude for creativity.
To get a handle on the difference, read the comments on Amazon to Blake Snyder's SAVE THE CAT! and my review there. Here's a link to the pages of all my Amazon reviews. Scroll down to find SAVE THE CAT GOES TO THE MOVIES and SAVE THE CAT - click the links to go to the product pages and read other review:
My Amazon Reviews
Many film students very committed to the Independent Film community were uncomfortable with Blake's approach because it simply does not apply to their goals. But they didn't seem to me to understand why they were uncomfortable.
They are "creative" film makers, trying to break out of the box. They really shouldn't be training to play inside and push the walls wider.
Blake's books show you how to discover where the walls of the box are, and how to work inside that box to reach the broadest audiences and ultimately how to push the walls wider.
His specific tips will soon have gone stale, but he lays out his process so you can repeat it to keep up with the ever changing field of the Blockbuster.
Screenwriting and novel writing are on a collision course. The Producer/Director and the novel Editor do very similar jobs and the similarity is growing.
I've said many times here that I learned from Alma Hill that "writing is a performing art." The addictive lure of "sawdust" or "grease paint" - the heady lure of applause from an audience, applies to writing as well. Get a taste of positive reader-response and you're hooked forever.
In fandom, the correct term for the feedback a fan writer gets from fellow fans is "ego-boo" or egoboo. A boost to the ego. It's the fuel we run on, the food for the higher soul, contact with other people on a very special level.
Fanfic writers often take film or TV characters, story lines or worlds and blend that with narrative fiction. And so I think fanfic is a phenomenon that signifies and perhaps leads the blending of these two parts of the fiction delivery system.
Fanfic writers often reach a level of skill where they accept "editing" possibly from a band of "beta-readers" who will read raw copy and copyedit or pick logic holes, so the work can be rewritten to add entertainment value.
When a fanfic writer reaches the point where they care about the reputation of their byline among their readership, where they become meticulous about details, and where they can tell the difference between a beta-reader's response to matters of "taste" and the response to a sloppy bit of craftsmanship, that fanfic writer has reached "professionalism."
The fanfic writer cares deeply about communicating the exact effect intended to the reader because there's a transaction between them. The fanfic "professional" is bartering strings of words for something of value to the fanfic writer.
The reader comes to this writer with expectations, spends their time reading, and expects value for their time.
The writer expects the reader to "pay" in their time by giving feedback. In today's online posting world that may only be a return visit to the byline to read other things, driving the hits or downloads count upwards, bringing that writer to prominence. Or sometimes it's blogging or tweeting about the writer.
There's an attitude of professionalism in trading value for value. You get what you want; I get what I want.
To read more about fanfic read this writing lesson based on White Collar fanfic:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/05/tv-show-white-collar-fanfic-and-show.html
Yet many fanfic writers looking to sell to mass market publishers find themselves literally devastated by an encounter with a professional editor.
A professional editor is not a beta-reader, and very often isn't even a "reader" (i.e. a fan of either the subject or of this writer's slant on the subject). A professional editor won't give the writer the kind of feedback I did for that White Collar story.
A professional editor has a job which performs a function that isn't needed in or relevant to fanfic (or Creative Writing), and isn't even relevant to a lot of "self-published" projects (depending on the kind of project of course).
What exactly does a professional editor do and why do writers need them?
I've made some readers of this blog happy by splitting my entries into shorter pieces, so this one ends here, and Part II will discuss the editor's job.
Trust me, you need to understand what an "editor" is doing that's different from what you are doing, and what your beta-readers do (even pros need beta-readers) in order to learn to rewrite to editorial specification within deadline, and without making yourself totally crazy. Misunderstand what the editor does for a living and you'll never (ever) make deadline for say a Mass Market novel rewrite order.
Meanwhile, contemplate this.
Robert Heinlein taught us in DOUBLE STAR, the old stage adage, "Sounding spontaneous is a matter of careful preparation."
Apply that to "Writing is a Performing Art" and see what you come up with.
Put those two together, and you may already know what I'm going to show you. Knowing it and doing it aren't the same thing, of course.
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com
How does that differ from amateur (fanfic?) writers? Or creative writers? Or just plain writers?
Professionalism in writing is an attitude more than it is a result, or so I've always held.
Professional writers organize words into a flow of meaning. It is the flow of meaning that has value since almost all the words we use are in the dictionary and thus pubic domain.
Our word-strings are our product, and those strings may be either "for sale" (work for hire) or "for license" which is what most book contracts are, a license to copy the work and sell copies but not sell the work itself.
Once you have attained the attitude that your very specific string of words is a product (like a lamp you carved or a potato you grew) that is for barter, trade, sale or license - a product which you have no interest in keeping in a dark drawer, a product you intend to gain a profit from, then you have become a "professional."
That attitude is often attained by fanfic writers fairly easily.
Creative Writers have a much harder time attaining the attitude necessary to accept the "beta-reader" input and use it constructively. "Creative" writing is really more about self-expression, with an emphasis on artistic creativity.
That means it's the "creative" writer, the academic, who forges into new territory with regard to the "trope" underlying storytelling. Creative writers have very small, very specialized audiences, and play to that audience with laser-beam precision. To become a part of their audience, a reader must have a wide and deep education, usually in "Literature" and related fields.
The "Creative" writer contributes experiments to the art of "writing" without personally focusing on attaining a huge, mainstream audience with diverse educations, talents and interests. The "Creative" writer is not aiming at the "common denominator" that makes a product marketable across national boundaries (think of the film AVATAR).
So the "Creative" writer is more self-involved than audience-involved and seeks an audience as close to that "self" as possible to allow latitude for creativity.
To get a handle on the difference, read the comments on Amazon to Blake Snyder's SAVE THE CAT! and my review there. Here's a link to the pages of all my Amazon reviews. Scroll down to find SAVE THE CAT GOES TO THE MOVIES and SAVE THE CAT - click the links to go to the product pages and read other review:
My Amazon Reviews
Many film students very committed to the Independent Film community were uncomfortable with Blake's approach because it simply does not apply to their goals. But they didn't seem to me to understand why they were uncomfortable.
They are "creative" film makers, trying to break out of the box. They really shouldn't be training to play inside and push the walls wider.
Blake's books show you how to discover where the walls of the box are, and how to work inside that box to reach the broadest audiences and ultimately how to push the walls wider.
His specific tips will soon have gone stale, but he lays out his process so you can repeat it to keep up with the ever changing field of the Blockbuster.
Screenwriting and novel writing are on a collision course. The Producer/Director and the novel Editor do very similar jobs and the similarity is growing.
I've said many times here that I learned from Alma Hill that "writing is a performing art." The addictive lure of "sawdust" or "grease paint" - the heady lure of applause from an audience, applies to writing as well. Get a taste of positive reader-response and you're hooked forever.
In fandom, the correct term for the feedback a fan writer gets from fellow fans is "ego-boo" or egoboo. A boost to the ego. It's the fuel we run on, the food for the higher soul, contact with other people on a very special level.
Fanfic writers often take film or TV characters, story lines or worlds and blend that with narrative fiction. And so I think fanfic is a phenomenon that signifies and perhaps leads the blending of these two parts of the fiction delivery system.
Fanfic writers often reach a level of skill where they accept "editing" possibly from a band of "beta-readers" who will read raw copy and copyedit or pick logic holes, so the work can be rewritten to add entertainment value.
When a fanfic writer reaches the point where they care about the reputation of their byline among their readership, where they become meticulous about details, and where they can tell the difference between a beta-reader's response to matters of "taste" and the response to a sloppy bit of craftsmanship, that fanfic writer has reached "professionalism."
The fanfic writer cares deeply about communicating the exact effect intended to the reader because there's a transaction between them. The fanfic "professional" is bartering strings of words for something of value to the fanfic writer.
The reader comes to this writer with expectations, spends their time reading, and expects value for their time.
The writer expects the reader to "pay" in their time by giving feedback. In today's online posting world that may only be a return visit to the byline to read other things, driving the hits or downloads count upwards, bringing that writer to prominence. Or sometimes it's blogging or tweeting about the writer.
There's an attitude of professionalism in trading value for value. You get what you want; I get what I want.
To read more about fanfic read this writing lesson based on White Collar fanfic:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/05/tv-show-white-collar-fanfic-and-show.html
Yet many fanfic writers looking to sell to mass market publishers find themselves literally devastated by an encounter with a professional editor.
A professional editor is not a beta-reader, and very often isn't even a "reader" (i.e. a fan of either the subject or of this writer's slant on the subject). A professional editor won't give the writer the kind of feedback I did for that White Collar story.
A professional editor has a job which performs a function that isn't needed in or relevant to fanfic (or Creative Writing), and isn't even relevant to a lot of "self-published" projects (depending on the kind of project of course).
What exactly does a professional editor do and why do writers need them?
I've made some readers of this blog happy by splitting my entries into shorter pieces, so this one ends here, and Part II will discuss the editor's job.
Trust me, you need to understand what an "editor" is doing that's different from what you are doing, and what your beta-readers do (even pros need beta-readers) in order to learn to rewrite to editorial specification within deadline, and without making yourself totally crazy. Misunderstand what the editor does for a living and you'll never (ever) make deadline for say a Mass Market novel rewrite order.
Meanwhile, contemplate this.
Robert Heinlein taught us in DOUBLE STAR, the old stage adage, "Sounding spontaneous is a matter of careful preparation."
Apply that to "Writing is a Performing Art" and see what you come up with.
Put those two together, and you may already know what I'm going to show you. Knowing it and doing it aren't the same thing, of course.
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com
Tuesday, April 27, 2010
7 Pursuits To Teach Yourself Writing Part II
This is Part II, continued from Tuesday April 20.
3) What Is Your Favorite Story
Of all the stories you have floating around inside you, which one(s) are your real favorites?
Which universe have you created that you really live in, while just visiting our shared reality occasionally?
Which character pops up leading your stories most often?
Oh, yes, you have dozens, right?
Probably not. Probably, if you are like most writers, for long stretches of your life you will actually write only one story, about one character, with one problem.
Those Literary Criticism writers I discussed above actually do produce some useful information as they compare works from a given writer over a lifetime.
One thing that turns up among many prolific writers is very similar to what movie critics find about Lead Actors -- there is a single character or "type" and a single story-theme that the writer or actor does with exceptional audience "reach" (breadth of appeal).
And as I have said that I learned from my first writing teacher, Alma Hill, Writing Is A Performing Art.
Writing and Acting are really the same profession.
The skills of one apply to the other.
Very likely, your favorite story will be the story you can craft with the broadest possible "reach."
In Hollywood marketing, "reach" is the measure of how many different demographics will pay to see a work. Does it appeal to 15 year old boys AND 30 year old women, AND 25 year old men and women, and Parents taking their kids, AND 20 year olds taking a date? Can you get them all into the theater? Then you have "reach."
Or you might be in a "niche" market, and not have a very broad reach but really, really REALLY hit that single demographic, 15 year old boys who will drag their date into the theater whether she likes it or not.
And woe betide her if she says she doesn't.
If you read enough biographies, you'll find a lot of very popular writers have been shocked and surprised by the explosion in popularity of a particular thing they've written. Some can duplicate that success, and some can't. I think mostly those who can't are those who have written something very well indeed, but it isn't a favorite inner story of their own.
Why are we talking about this? Because one pursuit you can't stray from is the pursuit of the right mentor for you at this particular time in your development.
That mentor will be someone who is currently selling your favorite character in your favorite story.
If you pursued the study of archetypes, you will be able to see why you resonate to that author's work. Your story, inside of you, is somehow also the same as this author's. But the similarity will be on the highest abstract level, and the differences will mask that similarity in every way possible.
It's the differences that you have to sell. That's your stock in trade.
But what makes your stuff sell is the "vehicle" - the archetype behind it all.
Well mastered craftsmanship lets you showcase the differences and hide the similarities. And that's what gives you penetrating power into an existing market.
If you can't find books on writing by a writer whose work tells you that you belong in his orchestra, in his classroom, among his peers, playing his song, then you must learn by studying how and why you respond to his stories.
A "pantser" learns best by studying what others have externalized. A plotter learns best by studying what's inside themselves. I do both.
4) What Is Your Natural Trope?
One of the pursuits of a writer who wants to reach a broad and deep market, to extract money out of her audience, is the formal education in "literature."
Since the printing press is much older than the moving-picture, there's a lot more written about story-craft in reference to text-based stories than about films.
A film, though, is a story. It's a story in pictures. It's images and iconography, and in many ways far more powerful than the written word. But in other ways, pictures are less powerful than the written word.
But if you have studied the Shamanistic story telling, the Bardic tale, the living oral traditions that led to the Ancient Greek theater, to Rome, to Shakespeare, etc., you surely have noted that the genres created in each medium bear a haunting similarity to each other.
The Adventure, The War Story, The Costume Drama, The Coming Of Age Tale, The Hero's Journey.
Each prototype is adaptable to each medium we've invented so far.
Now, it seems 3-D is the next big thing, but it's so expensive that only the simplest, most visual stories (AVATAR) can be distributed in that medium.
So for the next few decades, I would suggest new writers perfect ways of crating their stories to blend both text and images. In time, distribution costs may come down to where a select few "classics" written for future media will reach future generations.
So, search the inventory of stories floating around in your mind, then learn the popular tropes, the genres, the rule-bound formulaic stories, and study how old genres evolve into new genres.
Consider the "Dime Novel Western," Hard Boiled Detective novel, the Bodice Ripper, the Gothic Romance, the Kickass Heroine SF-Romance, the time-travel Romance, the adventure, the soap opera, the sourcerer's apprentice and all the ever morphing forms.
Then contrast-compare those extant forms with the classic, eternal "storytelling" tropes.
Learn the forms that make classics, then search through the stories inside you and find out what you have in those forms.
Now, it may happen that almost all the stories inside you are of one or another classic form. That could make life easy because you already have inventory to sell. Or it could make life hard because you don't know which one to work up into selling form or where to market it.
But more likely, you will find your own stories are the same as the extant forms you imbibe a lot of. Your favorite entertainment shapes your inner dialogue, but you also gravitate to the extant form that most resonates with your own personal story.
I've discussed how and why this matching happens in several posts on Astrology Just For Writers, with a list of links to them here:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/03/pausing-for-you-to-catch-up-with-me_30.html
And in a discussion of Blake Snyder's SAVE THE CAT! series on screenwriting, is a discussion of what you can achieve with the knowledge of how your internal stories match (or don't) with the tropes that are most popular now, and classically.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/04/pausing-for-you-to-catch-up-with-me.html
If it happens that your internal stories just don't match any of the commercial genres, then you have at least three possibilities.
a) You can found a genre with a blockbuster they'll name the genre after.
b) You can whittle, craft, rearrange, develope, unfold, and morph your internal dialogue to match one of the currently extant genres.
c) You can develope a whole new internal dialogue.
Or you can do all of the above. None of this is a betrayal of your personal artistic nature or the gift you bring to the world. It's just mastering a craft, no more complex than learning to talk at age 2.
Storycraft is a language you can acquire as a native speaker -- without knowing grammar, spelling or punctuation. Or it's a language you can learn as an adult, a second language meticulously learned through grammar, vocabulary drill,and ennuciation.
If you speak story as a native, you become a pantser whose stories sell because your internal stories are already in the language everyone else speaks.
If you learn it as an adult, you become a plotter who tells only part of their internal story - the part that can be translated.
So when you've sifted the seething mass of stories inside you down to a set of those that match the external market.
So discovering your natural trope is the 4th pursuit in teaching yourself to write. If your natural trope isn't popular right now, that's a problem to solve by taking up the 5th pursuit, the study of your natural audience.
5) Who Is In Your Natural Audience?
You might think of this pursuit as "Where did everybody go?"
Or perhaps, when everyone is stampeding in the opposite direction from where you're going, you might ask, "What do they know that I don't know?"
As I noted above, actors and writers are really doing the same thing, and so spend a lot of time people watching, especially stampeding herds of people (i.e. trends in reading tastes).
Studying your audience, finding out what amuses them, what they laugh at, what they think about, what they worry about, is very likely the biggest life-long pursuit of a writer.
The commercial fiction writing craft is all about audience "reach" -- how broad an audience can you entertain? How little do they have to have in common with one another to enjoy your product?
But you don't have to be a commercial fiction writer to slice out a demographic of your own and entertain them fully and deeply.
Today, you have self-publishing options, and ebook publishers who are developing famous imprints in very narrow niche audiences.
Today you have many more choices for what to do with your internal story dialogue than ever before.
Find your natural audience, then ask yourself if you want to do what it takes to reach beyond that natural audience.
Very often, that might mean reducing the emotional impact on your natural audience in order to stir and fascinate a broader audience.
Once you've made that decision, you can choose a medium of delivery.
Today, there is a thriving independent film market beginning to develop niche audiences.
In any delivery medium, though, reaching your audience is all about cost, investment, up-front expense.
Part of your expenses as a writer include your education (not tax deductible yet), and the time spent on your day-job.
Who you want to write for, and what mechanism you want to use to reach that audience will shape and empower the fiction you produce.
For example, there was a time you couldn't write a sex scene in a YA novel. That world has changed. But the rules for YA sex and general audience sex scenes, and "Adult" sex scenes are still different.
So you will find yourself re-evaluating what audience you want to write for, and what medium to write in, for each individual work you tackle. Thus studying your natural audience, and audiences around the fringes of your natural audience will become a lifelong pursuit, not a single career decision graven in stone.
When you write a story, you are just like the oldest of old time storytellers. You are standing up before an audience, and what you say, how you say it, when you pause, and when you shout, all depends on how well you know the people behind the faces looking up at you from across the campfire.
Writers are just like actors, singers or dancers. It's the same craft performed in different media.
Writing is a performing art. To master it, you must perform.
And that doesn't mean just write a 1,000 words a day.
The story is not told until someone hears it.
The story is not written until someone reads it.
How well you can get your story to "go over" with your natural audience depends on practice - incessant practice.
But how well you can reach beyond your natural audience also depends on practice. A lot of that practice is practice at getting rejection slips and figuring out what to do about any comments on them.
Learning to reach beyond your natural audience, to reach enough people to justify book publication expenses, to justify a stage production or film production, takes persistent practice.
The more expensive the medium of production, the farther beyond your natural audience you must "reach." And so the more practice it takes.
Finding your natural audience is the first step in a long, involved pursuit. Once you identify your natural audience, you must figure out what they have in common with other audience-fragments you might reach with only tiny adjustments in your internal story's tropes.
And you have to do this over and over again for each story you want to tell. So again and again, it becomes a lifelong pursuit in teaching yourself to write.
However, just as telling your story can't happen until there is someone to tell it TO -- likewise, teaching yourself can't be done in total isolation.
6) Who Is Your Natural Mentor?
When you have done all you can do by yourself, when you have produced several works you have polished until you can't see a difference between your work and the other similar works in your genre, then you need a mentor.
Again, a mentor is not a teacher. A mentor is more like a drill instructor, a martial arts sensei, or a dance teacher or orchestra leader.
Before a mentor can help you at all, you must have the basics down pat, but not to the point where you believe you know it all, or where you've practiced your errors to be habits you can't change.
A mentor does something. You copy it. The mentor tells you what you did wrong, kicks your feet into allignment for the posture, drills you in the forms, tells you your note is flat, sets the tempo. You do it again and again and again until you conform your output to standard.
Who will you accept that kind of discipline from? How do you find that person? How will that person recognize you?
In teaching yourself to write, you will adopt many lifelong pursuits. Searching for your mentor -- and your next mentor and the next -- becomes a lifelong pursuit.
A mentor can't teach you. You can use a mentor to teach yourself, but only if you have defined what you must master and what you're willing to suffer through to master it.
The other 5 pursuits listed here help you define what you must master.
Only you can set limits on what you will suffer to achieve mastery.
Generally speaking, searching for a mentor will most likely not prove successful.
Mentors find you.
A potential mentor is someone who has just recently mastered what you now need to master.
People who are ready and willing to "pay it forward" - to pass on what they have internalized to a non-verbal understanding, will not generally go around looking for someone to mentor.
But they will be working in the field, demonstrating their mastery, cutting a swath through all the competition.
In the course of that, they may stumble upon your output, and recognize that the one thing it lacks is this newly mastered technique.
And they will offer a clue, a comment, a crumb, to help you recognize what's missing.
If you respond by accepting that casual input and putting it to use, incorporating it easily and quickly, and producing something ELSE to show them (not saying, "I made these changes. Is it right now?" but creating something new that does demonstrate an attempt at the technique) -- then perhaps you will capture this mentor's attention.
Once captured, you may not be able to shake that attention off so be careful who you respond to.
The flip side of the coin is that once you accept input from a mentor, you then must "pay it forward." You can't fail to offer that crumb to someone else who is lacking it.
Accepting a mentor doesn't cost money. It's much more expensive than that.
"By your students you'll be taught."
When you offer to mentor someone, you have to be vulnerable to what comes back at you because of it.
From that experience, though, will come your next great work.
Ultimately, that's where all our ideas come from -- other people.
Today, you can accept mentoring after a fashion via printed or ebooks on the craft.
But as with living, hands-on mentors, no one single source will inculcate everything you must master.
As I mentioned above, there are hundreds, maybe thousands, of books on screenwriting and on novel writing.
They all pretty much say the same thing, over and over, in different ways, just as living mentors impart their craft in different ways.
Which book is good for you will depend on who you are and where you are in the learning curve at the moment you pick it up.
You can read the same advice 6 times and think you have it -- then read a 7th book and WHAM finally get it.
It all boils down to little sayings all professional writers know -- such as "show don't tell" "conflict, resolution" "characters must arc" -- but exactly how you personally implement these sigils of the craft depends on who you are.
If you go to
http://www.triggerstreet.com/
Sign up, and then look for JLichtenberg, you will find about 19 in depth analyses that I have done of screenplays others have written (some of the screenplays are still available there for free reading - some subsequently rewritten).
Quickly look through the screenplays and what I singled out as the main problem, and you will find that the same thing happens with screenplays as with novels -- over and over, the real and only problem with beginning writers (and seasoned pros, too) is CONFLICT.
Identifying, developing, and resolving a single main conflict, a thread that runs right through the work as the backbone of the work, is the one thing necessary to sell a work, and the last thing writers master.
Really. All these books on writing try to convey ways, means and methods of getting your mind to grapple with a conflict in such a way that a reader/viewer can grasp that conflict and experience its resolution as the personal payoff to sitting through the storytelling.
Every trope and genre has a specific conflict, and a pattern of events that leads to a resolution of that conflict.
All our lives have a main conflict (the story of your life) -- read my posts on Astrology and Tarot for more specifics.
We resonate to fiction that discusses our main life conflict "off the nose" - subconsciously, or by distancing the issue.
It's CONFLICT that connects your internal stories to your audience's internal stories.
Showing rather than telling CONFLICT is the main technique all books on writing try to mentor new writers into realizing in their drama.
Here are some books that do a fine job of it - books recommended by Rowena Cherry. In my opinion, you would do just fine picking a book off the library shelves or out of the discard bin at a used book store.
7)Books others use or recommend.
Three suggestions from Rowena Cherry - the writer who started this co-blog:
-------
Laughing at myself. Some would say that I did not do a very good job of teaching myself to write... so my list might not be a good recommendation.
Ronald B Tobias's "20 Master Plots" is always close at hand when I draft a new book, but I tend to take two of his master plots at a time, and mix them, one for the hero, the other for the heroine.
"I rely heavily on "The Joy Of Writing Sex" by Elizabeth Benedict (I think), because I don't naturally enjoy writing about sex."
"Al Zuckerman's "Writing The Blockbuster Novel" has some excellent recommendations of blockbusters to read (Thorn birds, The Godfather, Gone With The Wind..." However, I have yet to write a blockbuster, so either the advice left too much to extrapolation, or I am a lousy student.
Probably the latter!"
"Orson Scott Card's "Characterization" book is excellent, but if you read "How To Write Science Fiction and Fantasy" you find the same great advice, pretty much."
--------
I would agree with all three of those.
Pray hard, close your eyes, pick a book, start reading in the middle of the book. You'll find the mentoring advice you need to get started on this pursuit.
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com
3) What Is Your Favorite Story
Of all the stories you have floating around inside you, which one(s) are your real favorites?
Which universe have you created that you really live in, while just visiting our shared reality occasionally?
Which character pops up leading your stories most often?
Oh, yes, you have dozens, right?
Probably not. Probably, if you are like most writers, for long stretches of your life you will actually write only one story, about one character, with one problem.
Those Literary Criticism writers I discussed above actually do produce some useful information as they compare works from a given writer over a lifetime.
One thing that turns up among many prolific writers is very similar to what movie critics find about Lead Actors -- there is a single character or "type" and a single story-theme that the writer or actor does with exceptional audience "reach" (breadth of appeal).
And as I have said that I learned from my first writing teacher, Alma Hill, Writing Is A Performing Art.
Writing and Acting are really the same profession.
The skills of one apply to the other.
Very likely, your favorite story will be the story you can craft with the broadest possible "reach."
In Hollywood marketing, "reach" is the measure of how many different demographics will pay to see a work. Does it appeal to 15 year old boys AND 30 year old women, AND 25 year old men and women, and Parents taking their kids, AND 20 year olds taking a date? Can you get them all into the theater? Then you have "reach."
Or you might be in a "niche" market, and not have a very broad reach but really, really REALLY hit that single demographic, 15 year old boys who will drag their date into the theater whether she likes it or not.
And woe betide her if she says she doesn't.
If you read enough biographies, you'll find a lot of very popular writers have been shocked and surprised by the explosion in popularity of a particular thing they've written. Some can duplicate that success, and some can't. I think mostly those who can't are those who have written something very well indeed, but it isn't a favorite inner story of their own.
Why are we talking about this? Because one pursuit you can't stray from is the pursuit of the right mentor for you at this particular time in your development.
That mentor will be someone who is currently selling your favorite character in your favorite story.
If you pursued the study of archetypes, you will be able to see why you resonate to that author's work. Your story, inside of you, is somehow also the same as this author's. But the similarity will be on the highest abstract level, and the differences will mask that similarity in every way possible.
It's the differences that you have to sell. That's your stock in trade.
But what makes your stuff sell is the "vehicle" - the archetype behind it all.
Well mastered craftsmanship lets you showcase the differences and hide the similarities. And that's what gives you penetrating power into an existing market.
If you can't find books on writing by a writer whose work tells you that you belong in his orchestra, in his classroom, among his peers, playing his song, then you must learn by studying how and why you respond to his stories.
A "pantser" learns best by studying what others have externalized. A plotter learns best by studying what's inside themselves. I do both.
4) What Is Your Natural Trope?
One of the pursuits of a writer who wants to reach a broad and deep market, to extract money out of her audience, is the formal education in "literature."
Since the printing press is much older than the moving-picture, there's a lot more written about story-craft in reference to text-based stories than about films.
A film, though, is a story. It's a story in pictures. It's images and iconography, and in many ways far more powerful than the written word. But in other ways, pictures are less powerful than the written word.
But if you have studied the Shamanistic story telling, the Bardic tale, the living oral traditions that led to the Ancient Greek theater, to Rome, to Shakespeare, etc., you surely have noted that the genres created in each medium bear a haunting similarity to each other.
The Adventure, The War Story, The Costume Drama, The Coming Of Age Tale, The Hero's Journey.
Each prototype is adaptable to each medium we've invented so far.
Now, it seems 3-D is the next big thing, but it's so expensive that only the simplest, most visual stories (AVATAR) can be distributed in that medium.
So for the next few decades, I would suggest new writers perfect ways of crating their stories to blend both text and images. In time, distribution costs may come down to where a select few "classics" written for future media will reach future generations.
So, search the inventory of stories floating around in your mind, then learn the popular tropes, the genres, the rule-bound formulaic stories, and study how old genres evolve into new genres.
Consider the "Dime Novel Western," Hard Boiled Detective novel, the Bodice Ripper, the Gothic Romance, the Kickass Heroine SF-Romance, the time-travel Romance, the adventure, the soap opera, the sourcerer's apprentice and all the ever morphing forms.
Then contrast-compare those extant forms with the classic, eternal "storytelling" tropes.
Learn the forms that make classics, then search through the stories inside you and find out what you have in those forms.
Now, it may happen that almost all the stories inside you are of one or another classic form. That could make life easy because you already have inventory to sell. Or it could make life hard because you don't know which one to work up into selling form or where to market it.
But more likely, you will find your own stories are the same as the extant forms you imbibe a lot of. Your favorite entertainment shapes your inner dialogue, but you also gravitate to the extant form that most resonates with your own personal story.
I've discussed how and why this matching happens in several posts on Astrology Just For Writers, with a list of links to them here:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/03/pausing-for-you-to-catch-up-with-me_30.html
And in a discussion of Blake Snyder's SAVE THE CAT! series on screenwriting, is a discussion of what you can achieve with the knowledge of how your internal stories match (or don't) with the tropes that are most popular now, and classically.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/04/pausing-for-you-to-catch-up-with-me.html
If it happens that your internal stories just don't match any of the commercial genres, then you have at least three possibilities.
a) You can found a genre with a blockbuster they'll name the genre after.
b) You can whittle, craft, rearrange, develope, unfold, and morph your internal dialogue to match one of the currently extant genres.
c) You can develope a whole new internal dialogue.
Or you can do all of the above. None of this is a betrayal of your personal artistic nature or the gift you bring to the world. It's just mastering a craft, no more complex than learning to talk at age 2.
Storycraft is a language you can acquire as a native speaker -- without knowing grammar, spelling or punctuation. Or it's a language you can learn as an adult, a second language meticulously learned through grammar, vocabulary drill,and ennuciation.
If you speak story as a native, you become a pantser whose stories sell because your internal stories are already in the language everyone else speaks.
If you learn it as an adult, you become a plotter who tells only part of their internal story - the part that can be translated.
So when you've sifted the seething mass of stories inside you down to a set of those that match the external market.
So discovering your natural trope is the 4th pursuit in teaching yourself to write. If your natural trope isn't popular right now, that's a problem to solve by taking up the 5th pursuit, the study of your natural audience.
5) Who Is In Your Natural Audience?
You might think of this pursuit as "Where did everybody go?"
Or perhaps, when everyone is stampeding in the opposite direction from where you're going, you might ask, "What do they know that I don't know?"
As I noted above, actors and writers are really doing the same thing, and so spend a lot of time people watching, especially stampeding herds of people (i.e. trends in reading tastes).
Studying your audience, finding out what amuses them, what they laugh at, what they think about, what they worry about, is very likely the biggest life-long pursuit of a writer.
The commercial fiction writing craft is all about audience "reach" -- how broad an audience can you entertain? How little do they have to have in common with one another to enjoy your product?
But you don't have to be a commercial fiction writer to slice out a demographic of your own and entertain them fully and deeply.
Today, you have self-publishing options, and ebook publishers who are developing famous imprints in very narrow niche audiences.
Today you have many more choices for what to do with your internal story dialogue than ever before.
Find your natural audience, then ask yourself if you want to do what it takes to reach beyond that natural audience.
Very often, that might mean reducing the emotional impact on your natural audience in order to stir and fascinate a broader audience.
Once you've made that decision, you can choose a medium of delivery.
Today, there is a thriving independent film market beginning to develop niche audiences.
In any delivery medium, though, reaching your audience is all about cost, investment, up-front expense.
Part of your expenses as a writer include your education (not tax deductible yet), and the time spent on your day-job.
Who you want to write for, and what mechanism you want to use to reach that audience will shape and empower the fiction you produce.
For example, there was a time you couldn't write a sex scene in a YA novel. That world has changed. But the rules for YA sex and general audience sex scenes, and "Adult" sex scenes are still different.
So you will find yourself re-evaluating what audience you want to write for, and what medium to write in, for each individual work you tackle. Thus studying your natural audience, and audiences around the fringes of your natural audience will become a lifelong pursuit, not a single career decision graven in stone.
When you write a story, you are just like the oldest of old time storytellers. You are standing up before an audience, and what you say, how you say it, when you pause, and when you shout, all depends on how well you know the people behind the faces looking up at you from across the campfire.
Writers are just like actors, singers or dancers. It's the same craft performed in different media.
Writing is a performing art. To master it, you must perform.
And that doesn't mean just write a 1,000 words a day.
The story is not told until someone hears it.
The story is not written until someone reads it.
How well you can get your story to "go over" with your natural audience depends on practice - incessant practice.
But how well you can reach beyond your natural audience also depends on practice. A lot of that practice is practice at getting rejection slips and figuring out what to do about any comments on them.
Learning to reach beyond your natural audience, to reach enough people to justify book publication expenses, to justify a stage production or film production, takes persistent practice.
The more expensive the medium of production, the farther beyond your natural audience you must "reach." And so the more practice it takes.
Finding your natural audience is the first step in a long, involved pursuit. Once you identify your natural audience, you must figure out what they have in common with other audience-fragments you might reach with only tiny adjustments in your internal story's tropes.
And you have to do this over and over again for each story you want to tell. So again and again, it becomes a lifelong pursuit in teaching yourself to write.
However, just as telling your story can't happen until there is someone to tell it TO -- likewise, teaching yourself can't be done in total isolation.
6) Who Is Your Natural Mentor?
When you have done all you can do by yourself, when you have produced several works you have polished until you can't see a difference between your work and the other similar works in your genre, then you need a mentor.
Again, a mentor is not a teacher. A mentor is more like a drill instructor, a martial arts sensei, or a dance teacher or orchestra leader.
Before a mentor can help you at all, you must have the basics down pat, but not to the point where you believe you know it all, or where you've practiced your errors to be habits you can't change.
A mentor does something. You copy it. The mentor tells you what you did wrong, kicks your feet into allignment for the posture, drills you in the forms, tells you your note is flat, sets the tempo. You do it again and again and again until you conform your output to standard.
Who will you accept that kind of discipline from? How do you find that person? How will that person recognize you?
In teaching yourself to write, you will adopt many lifelong pursuits. Searching for your mentor -- and your next mentor and the next -- becomes a lifelong pursuit.
A mentor can't teach you. You can use a mentor to teach yourself, but only if you have defined what you must master and what you're willing to suffer through to master it.
The other 5 pursuits listed here help you define what you must master.
Only you can set limits on what you will suffer to achieve mastery.
Generally speaking, searching for a mentor will most likely not prove successful.
Mentors find you.
A potential mentor is someone who has just recently mastered what you now need to master.
People who are ready and willing to "pay it forward" - to pass on what they have internalized to a non-verbal understanding, will not generally go around looking for someone to mentor.
But they will be working in the field, demonstrating their mastery, cutting a swath through all the competition.
In the course of that, they may stumble upon your output, and recognize that the one thing it lacks is this newly mastered technique.
And they will offer a clue, a comment, a crumb, to help you recognize what's missing.
If you respond by accepting that casual input and putting it to use, incorporating it easily and quickly, and producing something ELSE to show them (not saying, "I made these changes. Is it right now?" but creating something new that does demonstrate an attempt at the technique) -- then perhaps you will capture this mentor's attention.
Once captured, you may not be able to shake that attention off so be careful who you respond to.
The flip side of the coin is that once you accept input from a mentor, you then must "pay it forward." You can't fail to offer that crumb to someone else who is lacking it.
Accepting a mentor doesn't cost money. It's much more expensive than that.
"By your students you'll be taught."
When you offer to mentor someone, you have to be vulnerable to what comes back at you because of it.
From that experience, though, will come your next great work.
Ultimately, that's where all our ideas come from -- other people.
Today, you can accept mentoring after a fashion via printed or ebooks on the craft.
But as with living, hands-on mentors, no one single source will inculcate everything you must master.
As I mentioned above, there are hundreds, maybe thousands, of books on screenwriting and on novel writing.
They all pretty much say the same thing, over and over, in different ways, just as living mentors impart their craft in different ways.
Which book is good for you will depend on who you are and where you are in the learning curve at the moment you pick it up.
You can read the same advice 6 times and think you have it -- then read a 7th book and WHAM finally get it.
It all boils down to little sayings all professional writers know -- such as "show don't tell" "conflict, resolution" "characters must arc" -- but exactly how you personally implement these sigils of the craft depends on who you are.
If you go to
http://www.triggerstreet.com/
Sign up, and then look for JLichtenberg, you will find about 19 in depth analyses that I have done of screenplays others have written (some of the screenplays are still available there for free reading - some subsequently rewritten).
Quickly look through the screenplays and what I singled out as the main problem, and you will find that the same thing happens with screenplays as with novels -- over and over, the real and only problem with beginning writers (and seasoned pros, too) is CONFLICT.
Identifying, developing, and resolving a single main conflict, a thread that runs right through the work as the backbone of the work, is the one thing necessary to sell a work, and the last thing writers master.
Really. All these books on writing try to convey ways, means and methods of getting your mind to grapple with a conflict in such a way that a reader/viewer can grasp that conflict and experience its resolution as the personal payoff to sitting through the storytelling.
Every trope and genre has a specific conflict, and a pattern of events that leads to a resolution of that conflict.
All our lives have a main conflict (the story of your life) -- read my posts on Astrology and Tarot for more specifics.
We resonate to fiction that discusses our main life conflict "off the nose" - subconsciously, or by distancing the issue.
It's CONFLICT that connects your internal stories to your audience's internal stories.
Showing rather than telling CONFLICT is the main technique all books on writing try to mentor new writers into realizing in their drama.
Here are some books that do a fine job of it - books recommended by Rowena Cherry. In my opinion, you would do just fine picking a book off the library shelves or out of the discard bin at a used book store.
7)Books others use or recommend.
Three suggestions from Rowena Cherry - the writer who started this co-blog:
-------
Laughing at myself. Some would say that I did not do a very good job of teaching myself to write... so my list might not be a good recommendation.
Ronald B Tobias's "20 Master Plots" is always close at hand when I draft a new book, but I tend to take two of his master plots at a time, and mix them, one for the hero, the other for the heroine.
"I rely heavily on "The Joy Of Writing Sex" by Elizabeth Benedict (I think), because I don't naturally enjoy writing about sex."
"Al Zuckerman's "Writing The Blockbuster Novel" has some excellent recommendations of blockbusters to read (Thorn birds, The Godfather, Gone With The Wind..." However, I have yet to write a blockbuster, so either the advice left too much to extrapolation, or I am a lousy student.
Probably the latter!"
"Orson Scott Card's "Characterization" book is excellent, but if you read "How To Write Science Fiction and Fantasy" you find the same great advice, pretty much."
--------
I would agree with all three of those.
Pray hard, close your eyes, pick a book, start reading in the middle of the book. You'll find the mentoring advice you need to get started on this pursuit.
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com
Tuesday, April 20, 2010
7 Pursuits To Teach Yourself Writing Part I
My posts are always too long, so this time I'll try an experiment. I'm going to post this one in 2 parts, Part I and Part II, posted a week apart, even though it's a single long piece. How many of you who want to read Part II will forget to?
http://www.amazon.com/review/RSRPV96SU9D4W/ref=cm_cr_rev_detmd_pl?ie=UTF8&cdMsgNo=3&cdPage=1&store=books&cdSort=oldest&cdMsgID=Mx1S6NK71GGPZ5F#Mx1S6NK71GGPZ5F
Is a comment on a review I wrote of SAVE THE CAT!
The review I wrote has drawn 3 marvelous compliments from readers (and from Blake Snyder when he first published the book). This third comment though asks for a list of (currently available) books on screenwriting that would teach what you need to know before SAVE THE CAT!
Any list I could give you would probably be useless in a year or so because many of the titles would be out of print unless they were e-books. And even then, they would likely be out of date in some way because the entire field of "commercial entertainment" is always morphing. I will put a list though at the end of Part II.
And the truth is, though I've read countless books "on screenwriting" (started in grammar school and High School too, reading every book on playwriting the library would stock - inter-library loan books too) I've never read a screenwriting craft book that actually taught how to write a STORY.
Writing a script (stage play or screenplay) is a secondary skill.
You've seen any number of screenplays "based on a story by" -- screenplays have to be based on a story! Before you can write the screenplay, you must craft the story itself or find one already crafted.
Creating that story is actually a separate craft from screenwriting, and it is best learned by studying books on novel craft.
Yet a novel is structured differently than a play.
You have to learn that difference in order to write a story that would be useful to a screenwriter, yourself or someone else.
There is a way to teach yourself that difference and how to leverage that difference into a blockbuster screenplay based on a story by you.
So I'm going to give some examples of where to look, and how to identify a writing textbook that can help you -- but with a focus on what to do with those texts and how to do it.
The reason there are so many books on screenwriting is twofold.
a) there is no "one thing" to master and then you can do it. No two writers are alike, no two people master any performing art the same way, or in the same order. The ones who will sell scripts generally go this route, selecting a few courses, reading a lot of books because multitudes of approaches are needed.
b) there are multitudes of people who want to "become" screenwriters and will read books to dream about it, but will likely never finish any script. They keep buying books and paying for courses so the field grows. The ones who will sell scripts generally don't do it via this route, taking lots and lots of courses and buying lots and lots of books.
How do you teach yourself writing craft for storytelling in any medium?
Story craft is a huge subject. To master it, you must understand that the subject is bigger than you are.
Marion Zimmer Bradley had a 3X5 card tacked over her desk saying nobody ever told you not to be a plumber.
There are more efficient ways of making a living. Writing is the hardest work and the most underpaid except maybe ballet dancing.
Except for the top 1 to 5% of writers, the best paid working writers make less than minimum wage if you add up all the hours spent at it over a lifetime.
Writing is a vocation not an occupation.
It's a Calling.
You must dedicate your whole life to it and be willing to sacrifice everything else (sometimes your sacrifice isn't accepted and your family will miraculously stick by you no matter how you neglect them; but you must be willing, often savagely willing).
Read a lot of biographies. You'll see every really famous writer's biography includes a myriad occupations, all apparently disconnected. The career of writing is composed of odd jobs and a life of study.
So I'm going to list some of the pursuits that might lead through that myriad occupations to a career in writing. And from all this you may discover how to find the books on writing craft and screenwriting craft that will synthesize these pursuits into a sellable screenplay or novel (or both).
1) What is storytelling?
The first pursuit is to define what you are pursuing.
There is a craft called "storytelling" which is a theatrical discipline, and a folk-art.
Storytelling specifically refers to a person who stands up before a live audience and creates with words and dramatic delivery a story usually with a moral or lesson. It is perhaps the most ancient form, and most respected. The original objective may have been cultural continuity, bringing the young into the community.
It isn't exactly what I'm referring to as "storytelling," but all of its craft disciplines are very specifically relevant to learning to teach yourself the craft of commercial fiction writing for text or dramatization.
The most important lesson you can learn from storytellers is audience awareness.
A person who simply mouths off about their own internal fantasies is not story-telling. The "telling" part involves connecting emotionally to the audience and that means being aware of the audience's main fantasies. More about that later.
So the first "pursuit" on our list is to study storytelling from shamanistic origins through Broadway stageplay, even perhaps including folk music performances and today's popular rap forms until you understand exactly what you are aiming to master.
Storytelling is the core origin of "entertainment" - the kissing cousin of the Bardic Craft (traveling living newspaper and history book all wrapped in poetry and a rousing well lubricated singalong).
And all of these living person delivery systems are bundled up today in the "Classroom Teacher" from Kindergarten through 16th Grade. The school librarian or public children's librarian is another manifestation of this. Some even play guitar and sing to the tots!
These teachers are usually our first contact with live entertainment, the first ignition of the desire to share our fantasies, our inner lives, with others.
Teaching is entertainment at its best.
So to teach yourself, you must entertain yourself.
Learning is something else altogether.
I have held elsewhere that there is no such thing as "teaching" -- that one person can not convey either information or a world-view by force into an unwilling or disinterested mind. Even indoctrination doesn't work very well without an entertainment aspect.
But there is "learning" -- and "learning together" as a group activity.
As in "The King And I" -- "by your students you'll be taught" -- if you don't open yourself to absorbing lore from your students, they can not and will not absorb anything from you. So be careful who you set out to teach.
The English words "teaching" and "learning" imply one-sided activity, each disconnected from the other, each able to exist in isolation.
This is a property of the English language, a way of dividing the world into compartments that is distinct from the way languages from other Language Families divide the world.
The formal study of Linguistics, especially neurolinguistic programming, is highly recommended as a pursuit under this first category of pursuits. If you are to use language to tell a story, you might be more successful if you know how language works and why it works that way.
Screenplays are "a story in pictures" - and pictures are also language. See my blog entry on the new iconography:
TURNING ACTION INTO ROMANCE
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/04/turning-action-into-romance.html
It's about a new Iconography of the modern action-romance, images reveal theme: TOUCHED BY AN ALIEN DAW Books Cover image vs. a still from the movie FACE OFF.
So if the concepts teaching and learning are actually just artifacts of the English language, what really does happen in a classroom or when you read a book about how to do something? How are skills transmitted in real life?
A real life transmission situation is better described in terms of music and resonance.
A classroom is more like an orchestra than it is like a mother bird feeding chicks.
I think those who participated in Blake Snyder's screenwriting workshops got that impression of playing in an orchestra he was directing. And orchestral directing is, like writing, a performing art.
In the transmission of an artform from generation to generation, the vast majority of what is transmitted is non-verbal, even sometimes spiritual. And that's true of a verbal artform, so transmission is best done in person.
My own hands-on, in person, orchestra leader was Marion Zimmer Bradley.
No two writers could possibly be more opposite in nature and function than Marion Zimmer Bradley and Jacqueline Lichtenberg, but I absorbed things from her that can not be put into words.
I was recently reminded of all she ignited within me by a query that came to me on twitter after a #scifichat,
(for how to participate in twitter online chats see
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/02/strange-benefit-of-social-networking.html )
@All_Day_SCIfi asked me if I knew of any good books on literary analysis.
Since High School, I've had many encounters with "literary criticism" and none have been informative or useful - perhaps because I'm an originator of the "literary" that others "criticise."
The query did say "analysis" which is what I do to stories, but not just to "literary" stories -- I devour stories delivered in any medium and analyze what makes them work, or not work, and what I would choose to do to the story to make it work or work better.
Many years ago, I was a Guest at The Conference On The Fantastic that Margaret Carter reported on this year:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/03/international-conference-on-fantastic_25.html
I attended several memorable panels, talks and paper readings at that event, met Stephen King, and had other remarkable experiences all in the space of a few days.
One of them was a paper on Marion Zimmer Bradley - of course I couldn't miss hearing that so I was one of the first to arrive, and got a front seat and listened with absolute attention.
At that time, the Conference was new, and Professors didn't write papers on mass market original novels, nevermind SF or Fantasy. The Conference on the Fantastic has changed my world in that regard.
This particular paper drew some very deep and searching conclusions about Marion, her work, her worldbuilding, and the substance of the themes she was working with. Almost all the conclusions and assumptions in the paper were based on the final paragraph of one Darkover novel.
As it happened, I knew something the writer of the paper did not know, and according to the rules of literary criticism was forbidden to research and discover. What I knew, invalidated everything in the paper resoundingly.
I knew that the final few lines of that novel were not written by Marion, but by an editor. I knew because I'd seen the original and Marion told me how the ending got changed, not because she was incensed about it but because she was illustrating a point about how to work with themes, how to craft a beginning and an ending that match (just as in a symphony -- she was a student of opera, another pursuit I'd recommend).
The change in wording of the final sentence changed the theme drastically. It changed it to a theme she personally did not want her byline associated with but which the editor thought would sell better, and which the editor thought was what she really meant anyway.
She discussed it with me also to illustrate what it means to be a professional fiction writer working in the mass market paperback medium, as opposed to hardcover original where writers have more authority.
It was, at that time, very common for a mass market paperback editor to change a writer's words (legally, it was in the contracts that they could do so) without the writer's knowledge or consent and then print the book. Even when that wasn't in the contract, it was career death to object publically.
The reason for this is simply deadlines. Mass Market moves production faster and on a lower budget with less time and fewer people, and little or no cross-checking at every step. That makes it oddly like film production where, though there is much checking and changing, the writer is simply out of the loop after delivering the script. The pace is frantic for time is money, and decisions are made not on the basis of the art but on the basis of cost.
Objecting to such routine practices in production is the difference between an "artist" and a "commercial fiction writer."
An artist's work depends on every punctuation point and even misspelling - every paragraphing choice and every word choice. Nothing can be changed without destroying the artistic effect.
A commercial fiction writer buries the important stuff, the art, so deep these commercial changes made by many hands along the production channel don't matter.
In this particular case Marion ran into, the change in the ending mattered a lot -- but Marion settled it privately and never had that happen to her again by that editor.
The professor writing a paper about Marion based on that ending could have discovered the origin of those words by asking Marion (she was still alive then and easily reached).
But that's against professor rules. You can't ask an author what they meant to say, even if the author is still alive, and derive a point of "literary criticism" from what the author says they meant to say. You have to work from the printed text.
My personal opinion of literary criticism and scholarship in general reached an all time low at that point, and has stayed there.
Maybe I should change my opinion now that the Conference on the Fantastic has changed my world. It's possible that analyzing mass market work has caused professors to change their rules of evidence, and that would change my opinion.
But I did learn the lesson Marion was demonstrating. Master the layered construction of a story and learn what "they" will change during production, and what you can sneak past them. But also learn how to react professionally when something turns out differently than you intended.
And that's what "storytelling" really is.
The story you have inside you to tell will stay inside you unless you can master the craft of delivering that story to an audience, and Marion's experience with having her ending changed demonstrates what the writer goes through to deliver a story to an audience.
StoryTELLING - delivering - is a mechanical craft that anyone can learn.
But I've never seen anything like this lesson written down in books on writing, or screenwriting.
Many books on screenwriting are only annecdotes about personal experiences and cheerleading to inspire dreams of success. One book like that, more storytelling than instruction, is WRITING THE KILLER TREATMENT (selling your story without a script) by Michael Halperin.
From the title, you'd think it was about how to extract the working parts of your story into an outline that a skilled screenwriter could use to craft a completed script "based on a story by."
But no. It doesn't tell you how to do it. It tells you that you must do it and how much fun and profit there is when you do. It's a $15 book I found to be a total waste of time and money - not because it's a badly written book. No, it's a very entertaining, lively, and zestful bit of inspirational writing. It's the title that's misleading (to me). Others might construe it to mean something more like what's actually inside the book.
Marion's lesson to me in telling me about how the last lines of a novel got changed without her having a chance to object or negotiate was tossed at me in response to something I had said or done -- and in the context of my learning curve, because the lesson was chosen and tailored for me at that time, I learned a thousand things from it.
If you pick up WRITING THE KILLER TREATMENT at the right point in your learning curve, you may learn a thousand lessons and sell screenplay because of it.
A good book on writing craft is one you are ready for.
A bad book on writing craft is one you are beyond - or one you aren't ready for.
If you run into a "bad book" on writing craft, put it on your shelf. There may come a day you need it -- or a day you will refer a student to it because it's just what they need at that point in their learning curve.
Marion also said many times, anyone who can write a literate English sentence can write and sell fiction.
You can teach yourself. You don't need to pay thousands of dollars for classes, or hundreds of dollars for books on writing (libraries are full of craft books for free reading and the internet is replete with hints, tips, and blogs like this one, even online courses that aren't very expensive.)
So where do you start teaching yourself?
Well, once you are well launched on pursuit #1, "What is Storytelling?" you are ready to ask yourself a group of questions that will launch you into more pursuits, some of which may turn into occupations.
Question-asking is the major technique of the storyteller, and I don't just mean the Socratic Method.
The answer to any question lies in the formulation of the question. Get the formulation wrong, and you will never find the answer.
The best place I know of to learn questioning is in the pursuit of an education in the sciences.
Philosophy is another subject area, especially religious philosophy, that trains the mind in questioning.
See my blog entry on Theodore Sturgeon's motto, Ask The Next Question for more on that:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/08/theodore-sturgeon-ask-next-question.html
So "What is Storytelling?" naturally leads me to ask:
2) What Stories Are You Telling Yourself?
I know of 3 kinds of writers: Deliberate Plotters, Pantsers, and Hybrids.
Deliberate plotters need to know consciously, exactly what they're doing, why and how all laid out in an outline before they do it. They make great formula mystery writers.
Pantsers (the majority, I think) write "by the seat of their pants" -- just make it up as they go along, do what the characters dictate, follow the character's nose through the story. Marion was that kind of writer; completely subconscious.
Hybrids, like me, do it both ways at once, and vacilate back and forth without rhyme or reason. But I've trained myself to be more of a plotter, and Marion often said how she admired my ability to plot.
But what is it that you are doing when you write a story? Is it just plotting?
Most writers (commercial and otherwise) have thousands of stories bursting inside their heads, dream bits in different universes every night, and have a hard time choosing one story to write and finish.
In fact, that's one way to tell if a young child is going to "be a writer."
Marion often said, perhaps quoting Robert A. Heinlein, the only reason to be a writer is that you can't do anything else.
Writers write. And if they can't write, they stare at a blank wall and tell themselves stories. Incessantly.
It is the nature of a writer to glance at a cereal package and leap off into a whole story.
Writers, like actors, sit on shopping mall benches and people-watch, guessing what soap opera each passer-by is wound up in.
Writers don't strain for story ideas. They don't hunt for them. They don't go somewhere else to "get an idea." They have to beat the ideas off with a stick.
For commercial fiction writers, that stick is made of the filter question, "Can I Sell This Story?" "What's the market for this story?"
For the screenwriter, the filter is not about the story at all -- nor even about the idea. The screenwriter searches for "High Concept" which is a wholly different animal than a novelist tames.
Here is one place I discussed the High Concept in screenwriting:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/05/medium-is-message_19.html
And here I discuss how concept distinguishes a novel from a screenplay
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2006/11/converting-novel-to-screenplay.html
So before you can choose a filter, you have to know which kind of story your mind keeps generating. You have to inventory, contrast, compare, examine, slice and dice, what's floating around inside your mind.
Unless, of course, you're a "pantser" by nature, and looking too closely at the content of your internal stories would be like asking a centipede how it walks.
In that case, you need to focus more externally and examine closely what you do for relaxation, for entertainment. What do you do when you're doing nothing? What carrot do you put on a stick and chase through your daily chores so you can get it for a reward?
Is it a TV show, a movie, a book, all of the above multi-tasked?
Since you are selling FUN, you need to have some in stock to sell. Go have some fun. Acquire that fun, intellectually, emotionally, and/or non-verbally. Repackage it and sell it.
The pursuit of the contents of your internal stories will, most likely, lead you to the pursuit of the study of archetypes, of THE HERO'S JOURNEY and similar insightful works.
Psychology, socialogy, and every kind of -ology listed in any university catalogue can be applied to sorting, categorizing, and warehousing your inventory of internal stories.
One or another of those thousands will have commercial potential.
Why? Because one or another of your stories actually also resides within thousands and thousands of other people.
Those stories that reside in thousands, millions, or everyone are either based in archetypes or they are pure archetypes.
That's why so very often we hear the cries of, "They Stole My Idea!"
They didn't steal it, they got it the same place you did -- "up there somewhere."
I've done twenty posts on Tarot Minor Arcana which discuss slicing and dicing archetypes and how a writer can employ these principles in the process of writing. The posts are listed in these posts:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/03/pausing-for-you-to-catch-up-with-me.html lists Suit of Swords
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/03/pausing-for-you-to-catch-up-with-me_23.html lists Suit of Pentacles
All of this came out of my own examination of my internal stories.
My external stories, what's been professionally published, are very different - but not unrecognizable.
See next week, Tuesday, on this blog for part II.
This is short, right? *sigh*
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com
http://www.amazon.com/review/RSRPV96SU9D4W/ref=cm_cr_rev_detmd_pl?ie=UTF8&cdMsgNo=3&cdPage=1&store=books&cdSort=oldest&cdMsgID=Mx1S6NK71GGPZ5F#Mx1S6NK71GGPZ5F
Is a comment on a review I wrote of SAVE THE CAT!
The review I wrote has drawn 3 marvelous compliments from readers (and from Blake Snyder when he first published the book). This third comment though asks for a list of (currently available) books on screenwriting that would teach what you need to know before SAVE THE CAT!
Any list I could give you would probably be useless in a year or so because many of the titles would be out of print unless they were e-books. And even then, they would likely be out of date in some way because the entire field of "commercial entertainment" is always morphing. I will put a list though at the end of Part II.
And the truth is, though I've read countless books "on screenwriting" (started in grammar school and High School too, reading every book on playwriting the library would stock - inter-library loan books too) I've never read a screenwriting craft book that actually taught how to write a STORY.
Writing a script (stage play or screenplay) is a secondary skill.
You've seen any number of screenplays "based on a story by" -- screenplays have to be based on a story! Before you can write the screenplay, you must craft the story itself or find one already crafted.
Creating that story is actually a separate craft from screenwriting, and it is best learned by studying books on novel craft.
Yet a novel is structured differently than a play.
You have to learn that difference in order to write a story that would be useful to a screenwriter, yourself or someone else.
There is a way to teach yourself that difference and how to leverage that difference into a blockbuster screenplay based on a story by you.
So I'm going to give some examples of where to look, and how to identify a writing textbook that can help you -- but with a focus on what to do with those texts and how to do it.
The reason there are so many books on screenwriting is twofold.
a) there is no "one thing" to master and then you can do it. No two writers are alike, no two people master any performing art the same way, or in the same order. The ones who will sell scripts generally go this route, selecting a few courses, reading a lot of books because multitudes of approaches are needed.
b) there are multitudes of people who want to "become" screenwriters and will read books to dream about it, but will likely never finish any script. They keep buying books and paying for courses so the field grows. The ones who will sell scripts generally don't do it via this route, taking lots and lots of courses and buying lots and lots of books.
How do you teach yourself writing craft for storytelling in any medium?
Story craft is a huge subject. To master it, you must understand that the subject is bigger than you are.
Marion Zimmer Bradley had a 3X5 card tacked over her desk saying nobody ever told you not to be a plumber.
There are more efficient ways of making a living. Writing is the hardest work and the most underpaid except maybe ballet dancing.
Except for the top 1 to 5% of writers, the best paid working writers make less than minimum wage if you add up all the hours spent at it over a lifetime.
Writing is a vocation not an occupation.
It's a Calling.
You must dedicate your whole life to it and be willing to sacrifice everything else (sometimes your sacrifice isn't accepted and your family will miraculously stick by you no matter how you neglect them; but you must be willing, often savagely willing).
Read a lot of biographies. You'll see every really famous writer's biography includes a myriad occupations, all apparently disconnected. The career of writing is composed of odd jobs and a life of study.
So I'm going to list some of the pursuits that might lead through that myriad occupations to a career in writing. And from all this you may discover how to find the books on writing craft and screenwriting craft that will synthesize these pursuits into a sellable screenplay or novel (or both).
1) What is storytelling?
The first pursuit is to define what you are pursuing.
There is a craft called "storytelling" which is a theatrical discipline, and a folk-art.
Storytelling specifically refers to a person who stands up before a live audience and creates with words and dramatic delivery a story usually with a moral or lesson. It is perhaps the most ancient form, and most respected. The original objective may have been cultural continuity, bringing the young into the community.
It isn't exactly what I'm referring to as "storytelling," but all of its craft disciplines are very specifically relevant to learning to teach yourself the craft of commercial fiction writing for text or dramatization.
The most important lesson you can learn from storytellers is audience awareness.
A person who simply mouths off about their own internal fantasies is not story-telling. The "telling" part involves connecting emotionally to the audience and that means being aware of the audience's main fantasies. More about that later.
So the first "pursuit" on our list is to study storytelling from shamanistic origins through Broadway stageplay, even perhaps including folk music performances and today's popular rap forms until you understand exactly what you are aiming to master.
Storytelling is the core origin of "entertainment" - the kissing cousin of the Bardic Craft (traveling living newspaper and history book all wrapped in poetry and a rousing well lubricated singalong).
And all of these living person delivery systems are bundled up today in the "Classroom Teacher" from Kindergarten through 16th Grade. The school librarian or public children's librarian is another manifestation of this. Some even play guitar and sing to the tots!
These teachers are usually our first contact with live entertainment, the first ignition of the desire to share our fantasies, our inner lives, with others.
Teaching is entertainment at its best.
So to teach yourself, you must entertain yourself.
Learning is something else altogether.
I have held elsewhere that there is no such thing as "teaching" -- that one person can not convey either information or a world-view by force into an unwilling or disinterested mind. Even indoctrination doesn't work very well without an entertainment aspect.
But there is "learning" -- and "learning together" as a group activity.
As in "The King And I" -- "by your students you'll be taught" -- if you don't open yourself to absorbing lore from your students, they can not and will not absorb anything from you. So be careful who you set out to teach.
The English words "teaching" and "learning" imply one-sided activity, each disconnected from the other, each able to exist in isolation.
This is a property of the English language, a way of dividing the world into compartments that is distinct from the way languages from other Language Families divide the world.
The formal study of Linguistics, especially neurolinguistic programming, is highly recommended as a pursuit under this first category of pursuits. If you are to use language to tell a story, you might be more successful if you know how language works and why it works that way.
Screenplays are "a story in pictures" - and pictures are also language. See my blog entry on the new iconography:
TURNING ACTION INTO ROMANCE
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/04/turning-action-into-romance.html
It's about a new Iconography of the modern action-romance, images reveal theme: TOUCHED BY AN ALIEN DAW Books Cover image vs. a still from the movie FACE OFF.
So if the concepts teaching and learning are actually just artifacts of the English language, what really does happen in a classroom or when you read a book about how to do something? How are skills transmitted in real life?
A real life transmission situation is better described in terms of music and resonance.
A classroom is more like an orchestra than it is like a mother bird feeding chicks.
I think those who participated in Blake Snyder's screenwriting workshops got that impression of playing in an orchestra he was directing. And orchestral directing is, like writing, a performing art.
In the transmission of an artform from generation to generation, the vast majority of what is transmitted is non-verbal, even sometimes spiritual. And that's true of a verbal artform, so transmission is best done in person.
My own hands-on, in person, orchestra leader was Marion Zimmer Bradley.
No two writers could possibly be more opposite in nature and function than Marion Zimmer Bradley and Jacqueline Lichtenberg, but I absorbed things from her that can not be put into words.
I was recently reminded of all she ignited within me by a query that came to me on twitter after a #scifichat,
(for how to participate in twitter online chats see
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/02/strange-benefit-of-social-networking.html )
@All_Day_SCIfi asked me if I knew of any good books on literary analysis.
Since High School, I've had many encounters with "literary criticism" and none have been informative or useful - perhaps because I'm an originator of the "literary" that others "criticise."
The query did say "analysis" which is what I do to stories, but not just to "literary" stories -- I devour stories delivered in any medium and analyze what makes them work, or not work, and what I would choose to do to the story to make it work or work better.
Many years ago, I was a Guest at The Conference On The Fantastic that Margaret Carter reported on this year:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/03/international-conference-on-fantastic_25.html
I attended several memorable panels, talks and paper readings at that event, met Stephen King, and had other remarkable experiences all in the space of a few days.
One of them was a paper on Marion Zimmer Bradley - of course I couldn't miss hearing that so I was one of the first to arrive, and got a front seat and listened with absolute attention.
At that time, the Conference was new, and Professors didn't write papers on mass market original novels, nevermind SF or Fantasy. The Conference on the Fantastic has changed my world in that regard.
This particular paper drew some very deep and searching conclusions about Marion, her work, her worldbuilding, and the substance of the themes she was working with. Almost all the conclusions and assumptions in the paper were based on the final paragraph of one Darkover novel.
As it happened, I knew something the writer of the paper did not know, and according to the rules of literary criticism was forbidden to research and discover. What I knew, invalidated everything in the paper resoundingly.
I knew that the final few lines of that novel were not written by Marion, but by an editor. I knew because I'd seen the original and Marion told me how the ending got changed, not because she was incensed about it but because she was illustrating a point about how to work with themes, how to craft a beginning and an ending that match (just as in a symphony -- she was a student of opera, another pursuit I'd recommend).
The change in wording of the final sentence changed the theme drastically. It changed it to a theme she personally did not want her byline associated with but which the editor thought would sell better, and which the editor thought was what she really meant anyway.
She discussed it with me also to illustrate what it means to be a professional fiction writer working in the mass market paperback medium, as opposed to hardcover original where writers have more authority.
It was, at that time, very common for a mass market paperback editor to change a writer's words (legally, it was in the contracts that they could do so) without the writer's knowledge or consent and then print the book. Even when that wasn't in the contract, it was career death to object publically.
The reason for this is simply deadlines. Mass Market moves production faster and on a lower budget with less time and fewer people, and little or no cross-checking at every step. That makes it oddly like film production where, though there is much checking and changing, the writer is simply out of the loop after delivering the script. The pace is frantic for time is money, and decisions are made not on the basis of the art but on the basis of cost.
Objecting to such routine practices in production is the difference between an "artist" and a "commercial fiction writer."
An artist's work depends on every punctuation point and even misspelling - every paragraphing choice and every word choice. Nothing can be changed without destroying the artistic effect.
A commercial fiction writer buries the important stuff, the art, so deep these commercial changes made by many hands along the production channel don't matter.
In this particular case Marion ran into, the change in the ending mattered a lot -- but Marion settled it privately and never had that happen to her again by that editor.
The professor writing a paper about Marion based on that ending could have discovered the origin of those words by asking Marion (she was still alive then and easily reached).
But that's against professor rules. You can't ask an author what they meant to say, even if the author is still alive, and derive a point of "literary criticism" from what the author says they meant to say. You have to work from the printed text.
My personal opinion of literary criticism and scholarship in general reached an all time low at that point, and has stayed there.
Maybe I should change my opinion now that the Conference on the Fantastic has changed my world. It's possible that analyzing mass market work has caused professors to change their rules of evidence, and that would change my opinion.
But I did learn the lesson Marion was demonstrating. Master the layered construction of a story and learn what "they" will change during production, and what you can sneak past them. But also learn how to react professionally when something turns out differently than you intended.
And that's what "storytelling" really is.
The story you have inside you to tell will stay inside you unless you can master the craft of delivering that story to an audience, and Marion's experience with having her ending changed demonstrates what the writer goes through to deliver a story to an audience.
StoryTELLING - delivering - is a mechanical craft that anyone can learn.
But I've never seen anything like this lesson written down in books on writing, or screenwriting.
Many books on screenwriting are only annecdotes about personal experiences and cheerleading to inspire dreams of success. One book like that, more storytelling than instruction, is WRITING THE KILLER TREATMENT (selling your story without a script) by Michael Halperin.
From the title, you'd think it was about how to extract the working parts of your story into an outline that a skilled screenwriter could use to craft a completed script "based on a story by."
But no. It doesn't tell you how to do it. It tells you that you must do it and how much fun and profit there is when you do. It's a $15 book I found to be a total waste of time and money - not because it's a badly written book. No, it's a very entertaining, lively, and zestful bit of inspirational writing. It's the title that's misleading (to me). Others might construe it to mean something more like what's actually inside the book.
Marion's lesson to me in telling me about how the last lines of a novel got changed without her having a chance to object or negotiate was tossed at me in response to something I had said or done -- and in the context of my learning curve, because the lesson was chosen and tailored for me at that time, I learned a thousand things from it.
If you pick up WRITING THE KILLER TREATMENT at the right point in your learning curve, you may learn a thousand lessons and sell screenplay because of it.
A good book on writing craft is one you are ready for.
A bad book on writing craft is one you are beyond - or one you aren't ready for.
If you run into a "bad book" on writing craft, put it on your shelf. There may come a day you need it -- or a day you will refer a student to it because it's just what they need at that point in their learning curve.
Marion also said many times, anyone who can write a literate English sentence can write and sell fiction.
You can teach yourself. You don't need to pay thousands of dollars for classes, or hundreds of dollars for books on writing (libraries are full of craft books for free reading and the internet is replete with hints, tips, and blogs like this one, even online courses that aren't very expensive.)
So where do you start teaching yourself?
Well, once you are well launched on pursuit #1, "What is Storytelling?" you are ready to ask yourself a group of questions that will launch you into more pursuits, some of which may turn into occupations.
Question-asking is the major technique of the storyteller, and I don't just mean the Socratic Method.
The answer to any question lies in the formulation of the question. Get the formulation wrong, and you will never find the answer.
The best place I know of to learn questioning is in the pursuit of an education in the sciences.
Philosophy is another subject area, especially religious philosophy, that trains the mind in questioning.
See my blog entry on Theodore Sturgeon's motto, Ask The Next Question for more on that:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/08/theodore-sturgeon-ask-next-question.html
So "What is Storytelling?" naturally leads me to ask:
2) What Stories Are You Telling Yourself?
I know of 3 kinds of writers: Deliberate Plotters, Pantsers, and Hybrids.
Deliberate plotters need to know consciously, exactly what they're doing, why and how all laid out in an outline before they do it. They make great formula mystery writers.
Pantsers (the majority, I think) write "by the seat of their pants" -- just make it up as they go along, do what the characters dictate, follow the character's nose through the story. Marion was that kind of writer; completely subconscious.
Hybrids, like me, do it both ways at once, and vacilate back and forth without rhyme or reason. But I've trained myself to be more of a plotter, and Marion often said how she admired my ability to plot.
But what is it that you are doing when you write a story? Is it just plotting?
Most writers (commercial and otherwise) have thousands of stories bursting inside their heads, dream bits in different universes every night, and have a hard time choosing one story to write and finish.
In fact, that's one way to tell if a young child is going to "be a writer."
Marion often said, perhaps quoting Robert A. Heinlein, the only reason to be a writer is that you can't do anything else.
Writers write. And if they can't write, they stare at a blank wall and tell themselves stories. Incessantly.
It is the nature of a writer to glance at a cereal package and leap off into a whole story.
Writers, like actors, sit on shopping mall benches and people-watch, guessing what soap opera each passer-by is wound up in.
Writers don't strain for story ideas. They don't hunt for them. They don't go somewhere else to "get an idea." They have to beat the ideas off with a stick.
For commercial fiction writers, that stick is made of the filter question, "Can I Sell This Story?" "What's the market for this story?"
For the screenwriter, the filter is not about the story at all -- nor even about the idea. The screenwriter searches for "High Concept" which is a wholly different animal than a novelist tames.
Here is one place I discussed the High Concept in screenwriting:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/05/medium-is-message_19.html
And here I discuss how concept distinguishes a novel from a screenplay
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2006/11/converting-novel-to-screenplay.html
So before you can choose a filter, you have to know which kind of story your mind keeps generating. You have to inventory, contrast, compare, examine, slice and dice, what's floating around inside your mind.
Unless, of course, you're a "pantser" by nature, and looking too closely at the content of your internal stories would be like asking a centipede how it walks.
In that case, you need to focus more externally and examine closely what you do for relaxation, for entertainment. What do you do when you're doing nothing? What carrot do you put on a stick and chase through your daily chores so you can get it for a reward?
Is it a TV show, a movie, a book, all of the above multi-tasked?
Since you are selling FUN, you need to have some in stock to sell. Go have some fun. Acquire that fun, intellectually, emotionally, and/or non-verbally. Repackage it and sell it.
The pursuit of the contents of your internal stories will, most likely, lead you to the pursuit of the study of archetypes, of THE HERO'S JOURNEY and similar insightful works.
Psychology, socialogy, and every kind of -ology listed in any university catalogue can be applied to sorting, categorizing, and warehousing your inventory of internal stories.
One or another of those thousands will have commercial potential.
Why? Because one or another of your stories actually also resides within thousands and thousands of other people.
Those stories that reside in thousands, millions, or everyone are either based in archetypes or they are pure archetypes.
That's why so very often we hear the cries of, "They Stole My Idea!"
They didn't steal it, they got it the same place you did -- "up there somewhere."
I've done twenty posts on Tarot Minor Arcana which discuss slicing and dicing archetypes and how a writer can employ these principles in the process of writing. The posts are listed in these posts:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/03/pausing-for-you-to-catch-up-with-me.html lists Suit of Swords
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/03/pausing-for-you-to-catch-up-with-me_23.html lists Suit of Pentacles
All of this came out of my own examination of my internal stories.
My external stories, what's been professionally published, are very different - but not unrecognizable.
See next week, Tuesday, on this blog for part II.
This is short, right? *sigh*
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com
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