WEbook Blog: A Writer's Resource

Q & A with James Brogden - Published Author

WEbooker James Brogen recently locked in a publishing deal with award-winning indie press Snowbooks for this horror/high fantasy novel, The Narrows. We're always happy to share the success story of a writer who's found a home for their book, so we're doing a two part question and answer series with James so he can share some info on his path to publication. 

We'll kick things off with a bit about The Narrows and James' writing process. In parts two, James will talk more about how he connected with Snowbooks. 

Tell us a bit about your novel, The Narrows. What genre best describes it? What’s the basic premise?

The Narrows is an urban fantasy novel with elements of horror, high fantasy and even a touch of dubious science fiction thrown in. It’s a bit of a mongrel, basically, but that’s entirely in keeping with the subject matter. The basic premise is that the Narrows are strange shortcuts through a shadowy otherworld lurking behind the alleyways and wasteland areas of the city, which are used by a community of vagrants and scavengers – called Narrowfolk - to travel and trade.

In their own words, the Narrows are places where the skin of the world is thin. The problem is that someone or something is closing the Narrows and kidnapping the Narrowfolk for arcane sacrificial purposes, and the story follows a young man from the ‘ordinary’ world who finds himself involved in this when he accidentally saves a Narrowfolk girl from abduction.

What inspired you to write this story?

I once held a job as a sales assistant in a big shopping centre in Birmingham, where the long shifts often had me commuting home by train late in the evening, and having read far too many horror novels than was good for me I naturally wondered what sorts of creatures were sitting out there in the darkness besides the tracks, watching my nice, bright, sane carriage going past with their flat eyes. One night my imagination upped the stakes and made a young homeless girl haul open the door next to me and climb up into the carriage, and of course I needed to know: who was she? Where had she come from? What was she running from? Everything in The Narrows spooled out from there. That scene appears in Chapter 4, and is probably the only part of the novel which has survived the endless rewrites and revisions pretty much intact.

The core of the story is an idea I had about a ley-line being like a length of rope buried in the beach; a child yanks the end of the rope and the whole length of it thrupps out of the sand. What would that be like on a geological scale and what would it do to anybody whom it hit? It got hooked in my brain and gave me the mechanism for how the Narrows work.

Tell us about some of the characters. Do you have a favorite?

All of the characters for whom I have any sympathy are the ones who recognise that they are in some way incomplete  – Andy as the everyman character having to deal with being catapulted out of his normal world; Bex for arguing the toss with everybody about everything and never taking no for an answer; even Carling, the main antagonists’ psychotic henchman, for embracing the truth that being a monster doesn’t necessarily have to make him evil. The antagonist, a geomancer called Barber, is evil because he has no doubts about the righteousness of his cause. I have no time for fundamentalists, whatever they believe in. I like doubters.

There’s also a number of supporting characters including an ex-policeman, ‘Rosey’ Penrose, who I enjoyed sticking in a campervan with Bex on the motorway and just letting them bicker; a couple of young 50’s era lads who are an experiment in what would happen if you put the Famous Five in a John Wyndham novel; and a pseudo-Celtic warrior called Edris who is there for a bit of high-fantasy, demon-fighting hack and slay.

As I said, The Narrows is a bit of a mongrel, genre-wise.

What was your writing process like? How many drafts did you go through before you felt it was “done.”

This is quite embarrassing. It took me a hell of a long time. All I’ll say is that I completely ditched it and started again from scratch in 2006, after realising that the reason it was taking me so long was that when I worked on a computer all I did was go back over and over the same scenes tweaking little bits here and there and not actually getting on with the narrative. I heard somewhere that Neil Gaiman writes all his stories in notebooks, so I decided to give that a go, and I found that it worked a lot better. I physically couldn’t go back and change the ink on the page (beyond a certain amount of scribbling), and so I was forced to move forward.

Also, they’re a lot more portable and I’m not particularly disciplined so it’s good to have one to hand when the mood or idea strikes. I’ve had to fit writing around having a family and a busy teaching career, so that’s my excuse.

‘Semi-chaotic’ probably best describes the process. I have a rough idea in my head of ‘acts’, where I want the story to be at the end of a certain act, and maybe one or two set piece scenes based on a particularly striking line of dialogue or image, like the rope-in-the-sand, and I’ll often engineer events to fit that hook without any clear idea of where to go next. The best I can do after that is just try to imagine what a person would realistically do given the circumstances.

In this I’m helped tremendously by having spent years of my life playing role-playing games with my friends. There’s absolutely no greater tool for me as a writer to have come up with what I think is a lovely watertight plot and then have real-life people playing characters who walk straight through the holes I didn’t know were there.

Once I’d filled 4 big journalists’ spiral-bound notebooks I burned a month typing it all up, revised once for major plot points and added/deleted scenes, once again for typos and fine-tuning the language, and decided that was enough. I was happy with it, I’d written a story which pleased me, and figured that if somebody wanted to publish it then that would be a bonus.

Stay tuned for more about James' story in the next post later this week. In the meantime, check out more on The Narrows on Amazon and Facebook.

About James Brogden:

James Brogden is a teacher of English in Worcestershire, UK, where he liveswith his wife, two daughters, one cat and far too much lego. When he's not writing or trying to teach children how to, he gets out into the mountains whenever he can, exploring the remains of Britain's prehistoric past and hunting for standing stones. Fortunately they don't run very fast. 

Author Joshua Gaylord on Writing Zombie Books

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Last April, Joshua Gaylord wrote about his genre-wandering tendencies. His first book, Hummingbirds, was a Manhattan prep-school novel, and his second book (published under the pseudonym Alden Ball) is a post-apocalyptic southern gothic—with zombies. The Reapers Are the Angels was released in August 2010. We are excited to have Josh back for another post! (This one much more zombie-oriented, of course.)

Whenever, as a storyteller, you decide to tinker with an existing mythology (vampires, werewolves, ghosts, zombies, Catholic schoolgirls), you have a number of decisions ahead of you—most of them having to do with which elements of the traditional mythology you are keeping in place, and which elements you are jettisoning. For example, maybe your vampires have no trouble with daylight but are still sensitive to garlic and holy water. Maybe your zombies are smart enough to have erudite conversations with each other, but they still want to eat your brains.

There are good reasons for both upholding and overturning these traditions. On the one hand, staying true to the mythology is a kind of narrative shortcut that keeps you from having to explain a lot of mundane things. If you introduce a vampire in your story, there are a number of assumptions that your reader will take for granted: drinking blood, immortality, sensitivity to crosses, etc. However, this shorthand fails when you are dealing with readers who aren’t familiar with the traditional mythology. For example, here’s one early non-genre-reader response to a draft of my zombie novel The Reapers Are the Angels: “So, wait, explain it to me again—how are zombies different from vampires?  Aren’t they both dead?” But this is the exception rather than the rule. For the most part, you can rest assured knowing that readers don’t need an explanation for why that shambling, grunting corpse is trying to eat your hero’s guts: that’s just what zombies do.

On the other hand, there’s some satisfaction to be had in surprising your reader by upsetting their expectations and undermining the traditional mythology. From the world of zombies, 28 Days Later gives us an example: for all of us who were used to the undead lurching along at a snail’s pace, it was startling to see them suddenly sprinting after their prey, even leaping across gaps and climbing over fences. Never had zombies been so spry.

Being a lifelong lover of zombie stories, it was a particular thrill for me to sit down and compose my own variation for The Reapers Are the Angels. There were certain zombie laws that I set for myself, some that maintained tradition and some that abandoned it:

1. No nostalgia. One of the background traditions of zombie stories is a built-in nostalgia for the times befo the zombie apocalypse—a dramatic longing for the once-great but now lost civilized world. But I’ve seen enough of that. And I never really believed it anyway; after all, who wouldn’t feel a little pleased to be one of the last survivors in a blighted world and have all that open landscape to yourself?  So in my book, the zombie apocalypse happened a quarter of a century ago, and my protagonist is fifteen years old. As a result, there’s no way she could be nostalgic for the “real world,” because she never experienced it.

2. Zombies defecate. Why wouldn’t they? I mean, they consume, they digest, and the waste product of that process has to go somewhere. It occurred to me that I had never seen a zombie go #2 before, so I thought I would introduce that notion. A proud moment indeed—I felt like handing out cigars.

3. Zombies move slowly. This was part of the tradition I decided to uphold. I like 28 Days Later, but running zombies aren’t for me. Every other monster I can think of is fast-moving—many of them can even fly. The brutally slow pace of a zombie is what makes it unique among other genre monsters. Why would I want to take that distinction away from them?

4. Zombies eat all your viscera, not just your brains. Some zombies are only interested in brains. My zombies aren’t that discerning. They’ll eat all your gooey parts. Why? I think if zombies are only interested in brains, it gives them some iconic purpose or significance. The body metaphorically consuming the mind; maybe the mass culture’s threat to your creative individuality. I wanted my zombies to be more animalistic. They wouldn’t make distinctions between various kinds of offal in the same way that a jackal wouldn’t.

5. No smart zombies.  A lot of zombie stories (even George Romero’s) are interested in the idea of zombies learning and evolving, figuring out how to use tools, even beginning to communicate. But for my money, humanizing a zombie is bad business. The great thing about most zombie stories is that the zombies themselves are little more than background—which always makes the human story much more compelling by contrast. The more time you spend turning your zombies into characters, the less time you spend turning your characters into characters.

6. Zombies aren’t evil—and they’re not even really that scary. This is something that’s already implied by a lot of traditional zombie stories. Unlike soulless vampires or morally soiled werewolves, I like my zombies sans moral implication. They aren’t coming back from the dead because they’re evil: instead they’re just the result of an unfortunate glitch somewhere in the system. Their violence is like animal violence—you can’t really blame it. And (one of my favorite things about traditional zombie stories), they’re really only a threat in large groups.

So those were my rules. As you can see, my zombies are more traditional than not—which opens me up for criticisms of being derivative. But, then again, one of the reasons I rely so heavily on the existing mythology is that I don’t think the book is actually about zombies. And I don’t think this makes me unique. Most monster stories aren’t about the monsters themselves: they simply use the monsters as vehicles for what the story is really about. Dawn of the Dead is about the pitfalls of consumerism. 28 Days Later is about reckoning with your past. And The Reapers Are the Angels is about faith, sin and redemption.  

Ultimately, the zombies are just decoration, like rotting, corpse-smelling, blood-thirsty Christmas ornaments.

—Josh  

 

Joshua Gaylord is the author of two novels, Hummingbirds and The Reapers Are the Angels, which was released in August 2010. Josh graduated from Berkeley with a degree in English and a minor in creative writing. In 2000, he received his Master’s and Ph.D. in English at New York University, specializing in twentieth-century American and British literature. He teaches high school English in NYC.

Am I Worth A Damn, And How Do I Know?

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The WEbook guest author series continues with Victor Gischler, former English professor and author of four hard-boiled crime novels. His debut novel Gun Monkeys was nominated for the Edgar Award, and his novel Shotgun Opera was an Anthony Award finalist. His latest crime novel, The Deputy, was released in April. To learn more about him, check out his blogpocalypse or follow him on twitter @VictorGischler.

Take it away, Victor!

As a writer, I’m often curious about my place in the universe. Am I accomplishing anything? Is anyone noticing? Is anyone actually going to read these words I’m writing in my own blood? I would not presume to read J.K. Rowling’s mind, but it’s hard to imagine she has this problem. Ditto James Patterson. There are authors so wildly successful in this world that they could probably publish their grocery lists if they wanted to. But for every BIG HUGE AUTHOR there are a hundred guys like me, bouncing around the midlist, wondering if his next book will see the light of day, sweating sales numbers. (I also write comics for Marvel. If just ten percent of my comic book readers would buy my novels, I’d have it made.)
 

So I find myself wondering if anyone has heard of me. Sometimes, if I’m traveling in a strange city, I’ll wander into the book store, curious if they have any of my books on the shelf. I mean, am I actually accomplishing anything?
  

I suppose these questions weigh most heavily when I walk into my local Barnes & Noble – keep in mind this is my HOME TOWN where I’ve been reviewed in the newspaper—only to find they have none of my books on the shelf. This was a mere week after the publication of my brand new crime novel The Deputy. I found a dead-eyed drone at the information counter and asked if it would be possible to order a few of my books since I was a local author. You’d of thought I was asking for a kidney. After a mumbled phone conversation, I was told they’d order a few copies. Well, I came back two weeks later and guess what. Still no books. I asked a different drone what the deal was. Did they order books? The answer: “Books?  Naw, we didn’t do that.”
 

*sigh*
 

The books eventually arrived, but should it really be that hard? You can maybe start to see what I mean. It’s like pedaling a stationary bicycle. Pedal your ass off and you still get nowhere fast.
 

Fast forward six weeks.
 

The Pistol Poets—long dead and buried here in the USA—debuts in Italy, and I’m invited all expenses paid to a literary festival. I’m interviewed in newspapers. I’m interviewed on the radio. Book stores have my books and I sign at standing-room only events.  (It helps that I was touring with Joe Lansdale—ha ha.) The point? Somebody somewhere gave a flying hoot. It was a good feeling. I had to travel halfway around the world for it to happen, but it was worth it.
 
 

A few days ago, a nice fellow on Twitter told me how much he liked Gun Monkeys, my first novel. The book is ten years old. You never know when a reader will find you or how it will happen. So here’s the deal. Every day you wake up is another chance. Maybe something good happens. Maybe somebody notices.
 

Keep pedaling.

—Victor 

Better Living in the Land of Digital Publishing

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The WEbook guest author series continues with Daniel Morris. Daniel is the author of a noir horror novel called The Canal, which is available as an e-book. 

Currently, he lives in Los Angeles and writes movie trailers for a living. He is also at work on a book about time travel. You can learn more about Daniel and his other books on his website.
 

These days, anyone with a pulse and a manuscript can publish an e-book. For authors in general, this can be a great thing. Personally, digital publishing has come to my own rescue on two occasions, and in ways that would have been practically impossible five years ago. 

After I finished my novel, The Canal, I was fortunate enough to land an agent. I was ready to pop the champagne and start celebrating—surely a book deal was just around the corner, right? Unfortunately, the publishing industry wasn’t in a very giving mood. My novel ended up being a tough sell, the general verdict being that the book just wasn’t commercial enough (whatever that means—feel free to check out the book and give me your own opinion).

So I decided to publish the book myself. This is where the beauty of digital publishing comes in—it gives authors the one thing that they feel they so often lack: control. You get to take destiny into your own hands (for very little cost) and have your book made available from almost all the major web booksellers (a service like Smashwords is a decent place to start). And if you sell enough copies, agents and editors will notice.

Of course, it’s not all unicorns and rainbows. Just because you have a book doesn’t mean that people want to read it. Which is where old fashioned networking comes into play. If you’re a natural at that sort of thing: I congratulate you. If you’re not (like myself), the road will be tougher, and you may find yourself where I did—with a book you believe in that’s available in a number of formats, but with rapidly dwindling sales.

Fortunately, my situation has a semi-happy ending. Digital publishing hasn’t just helped self-publishing authors; it has also helped independent publishers and literary agents. The agency that represents me recently created an independent spin-off, the digital publisher Diversion Books. Diversion picked me up, and the e-book version of my novel is now in their hands. An agency with a related publishing arm is unorthodox (and some might say controversial, although I’m guessing it will become much more common in the future), but it illustrates what happens when publishing is available to all—anyone can step into the game.

If publishing is available and affordable for everyone, then a publisher’s main responsibility will be to produce works of a certain quality or particular interest. Which is what a good literary agent does anyway.*

Safe to say, as the popularity of e-books continues to grow, more alternatives to the traditional publishing model will arise. Best of all, they’ll provide platforms and opportunities for a much wider diversity of voices than ever before. Which, for us writers, can only be a good thing.

—Daniel
 
* I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the following: when it comes to agents and any terms/services they may offer, ALWAYS research their reputation and legitimacy. You can always start here.

Writer 2.0

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The WEbook Guest Author Series continues with Pagan Kennedy, author and editor of the website Writer 2.0, which is dedicated to tracking the death and re-birth of the publishing industry.

Pagan has written ten books; contributed to The New York Times Magazine, The NYT Book Review, The Village Voice, among others; and taught at writing conferences, Boston College, and Johns Hopkins. Currently, she is the Visiting Writer in Nonfiction at Dartmouth College.

Pagan was nice enough to give us some background on Writer 2.0. Take it away, Pagan!

Soon after I arrived at Dartmouth College, a girl appeared at my office door. “Professor, you don’t know me,” she said. “But I absolutely have to talk to you.” Her voice quavered, as if she might cry.
“Sit down,” I said, and gestured to the armchair near my desk. She flopped into it and dumped all her equipment around her. Then, she leaned toward me, fiddling with a strand of her long blond hair. Her cheeks were still pink from the cold. “I absolutely have to become a writer,” she moaned. “I want it so badly.”
 
Almost all of my adult life, I’ve made my money from books, articles, journalism, and film options. Now, in 2009, Dartmouth College had hired me for a year-long stint as a professor. The students knew I had managed to transform words into paychecks. And they wanted to do that too. 

This girl turned out to be just the first in a parade of students who came to me. Over and over, the students asked, “How did you get started?”
 
 I’d sigh, and say, “The way I got started doesn’t exist anymore. When I was just out of college, I wrote for the alternative weeklies, like the Village Voice.” I would explain that the Voice used to be as fat as a prime steak, and so heavy that it made a huge “thunk” when it hit the floor. It paid. It hired hundreds of writers.  Once upon a time, thousands of us had worked for the alternative weeklies in America.
 
But now that was gone. Poof! Gone with the internet. And writing books had also paid a lot more, once upon a time, but now the industry had been ravaged. The Old Media was dying. New forms of literature and journalism would rise up, eventually. It would be like when a fire rages through a forest, and then, in the charred wasteland, new shoots sprint up, and baby trees take root. A new publishing industry would arise – and it would pay people. But we weren’t there yet. We were still in the charred-forest, wasteland period.
 
“So what should I do?” the students would ask, when I told them they couldn’t follow my path.
 
“You have to figure out what the publishing industry will look like in five years, and then go in that direction.”
 
During my year at Dartmouth, I repeated that sentence over and over again. And then, one day, I realized that I, too, would have to take the advice. Part of my job as a working writer would be to figure out what a book would look like in the future—would it be paper, a text file, a phone app, or an audio file, or all of these? And who would sell books?  Ditto newspapers and magazines. And so, I began compulsively researching the industry—and thinking hard about the way we will read and write.
 
That led me to start a web magazine about the future of publishing, aimed at writers: www.writer2point0.com.
 
I welcome readers, contributors and comments. Please come by and join the think tank! 

Ideas from History

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The WEbook guest author series continues with Mary Doria Russell, author of four novels—two science fiction and two historical fiction. Mary's subjects have varied from alien species to Winston Churchill, so she decided to write her post about how she chooses her topics.

Take it away, Mary!

Authors are always asked, Where do you get your ideas? From history, is my answer, even though my first two novels are science fiction.

The Sparrow was my response to the 500th anniversary of Columbus landing in the New World, and to the historical revisionism that started up in early 1992. Suddenly, Columbus wasn't a hero anymore; he was a disease-ridden capitalist exploiter who came to America to plunder, rape and kill. Now, granted: things got ugly fast in the Americas, but it's not like Columbus woke up one morning and thought, “Depopulating a couple of continents might be fun... I think I'll get a ship and sail west.” He thought he was going to Japan.

The Sparrow put modern, intelligent, well-meaning people into the same position of radical ignorance that Columbus and his men faced. Children of God was set on another planet, but that story drew on the 1917 Russian revolution. A Thread of Grace got its start when I read that 85% of the Jews of Italy survived the Holocaust. (I'll be damned, I thought. What went right in Italy?) While my nephew was commanding a platoon of Marines in Al-Anbar Province, I wrote Dreamers of the Day, tracing the roots of the Iraq war back to the 1921 Cairo “peace” conference, when Winston Churchill, Gertrude Bell and T.E. Lawrence invented the modern Middle East.

While watching the movie “Tombstone,” I wondered, How much of that was real? I started with biographies, and fell in love with Doc Holliday. Or, more accurately: I fell in love with Alice Jane Holliday's shy, frail, brave little boy, John Henry. Doc is his story, and he is going to break...your...heart.

So that's how it works for me. I hear something surprising. I'm reminded of something I accepted without question as a child. I start reading and sometimes... I fall in love. I hear dialog in the middle of the night, or while I'm standing in the shower. I accumulate scraps of paper with scribbled notes. Finally I open a file and get to work.

Of course, I don't always get that far. When Fess Parker died, I read about Davy Crockett, the iconic frontier figure Parker played on TV in the 1950s. I realized that David Crockett was the precise 19th century analog of Sarah Palin, but I quit on the subject because I didn't love David Crockett or anyone around him. Not even a little. There's a novel in Crockett's political life, but someone else will have to write it.

Is that you? Tell people you got the idea from WEbook!

Mary Doria Russell's published novels include The Sparrow, Children of God, Thread of Grace, and Dreamers of the Day. Her fifth novel, Doc, will be published in May, 2011, by Random House. Learn more about Mary at www.marydoriarussell.net or join her facebook fan page.

Travel and Dog-eared Pages

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The WEbook Guest Author Series continues with non-fiction author and journalist Sam Sheridan. Sam has written two books about fighting, one a memoir and one a collection of essays, A Fighter’s Heart, and The Fighter’s Mind, respectively. To learn more about Sam, visit his website or follow him on Twitter @fightersmind.

“Don’t tell me how educated you are, tell me how much you traveled,” Mohammed said. Travel is the cornerstone of an education. It’s not tourism; there’s a purpose, a job, or a goal. It’s months and years, not days or weeks. A vacation is short, pleasant, and ultimately forgettable, while travel is none of those things.

After college, I worked and traveled for more than ten years straight—I circumnavigated the globe on private yachts as crew, worked construction at the South Pole Station in Antarctica, and fought wild-fires all over the American West. There’s no magic trick to it, and I wasn’t independently wealthy. Half the things I did paid for the other half. I would go after ten or fifteen different jobs, call around, write letters and fill out applications; and one might pan out.

I lived at a kickboxing camp in Thailand and fought a professional fight there, and that experience eventually led to a magazine article, then another, which led to a book. For a writer of non-fiction, all that you have to offer (and monetize) is your perspective. Travel, in-depth working travel, is one of the few things in your control that grants perspective. Being an outsider forces you to have fresh eyes, and returning home having seen other ways and spoken other tongues grants another freshness. In that vein, joining the Peace Corps is probably more important than getting a degree in writing, if you want to be a writer.

But that doesn’t mean you don’t have to study good writing. I only took one creative writing class in college (coincidentally that was my only A in college) and it shows. My growth as a writer has been glacial, one step forward, two steps back.

Having written two books, when people ask me about writing I feel like I should have something profound to say by now. Instead I come up with gems like “Read all the time, write all the time.” Fantastic stuff, I know.

You’re producing a commodity that people will pay for. It’s not quick and easy, it doesn’t spring fully-formed from your forehead and land on the page, “Aha!” It’s work. You need to do all the work, all the mental heavy lifting, painstaking revisions and ‘page one’ re-writes. I obsess about a subject for five or six years, researching, thinking it through, so you the reader won’t have to. You can read it easily over a week and enjoy the fruits of my labor.

When pushed on a “writing tip,” all I’ve got is actually about reading. When I read I make notes. If there’s something good, some interesting idea, or eloquent passage on the page, I dog-ear the bottom. Upon finishing the book, I go back through and re-read every page that has the bottom dog-ear, and I transcribe lines or entire passages. It’s laborious, but then I have a database of quotes, the gist of the whole book, in my files. It’s a way to study whatever it was that first grabbed your eye, the line or the idea behind it. It’s a way to absorb language and nuance from better writers. I was an oil-painter in college and one way painters improve is to copy great works.  Writing is not a gift, it’s a muscle and the more you do it the better you get.

So read all the time, and write all the time. David Mamet said, “..let’s say Sophocles took eighteen years to write ‘Oedipus Rex.’ It’s not under your control how long it takes you to write ‘Oedipus Rex,’ but it is under your control whether or not you give up. It doesn’t have to be calm and clear-eyed. You just have to not give up.”

—Sam

Thanks for the insight, Sam! If you're looking for some more writing advice, read some previous Guest Author posts. Or, if you want to judge some writing for yourself, head over to PageToFame and read a few entries!

Got Tough Skin?

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The next Guest Author on the WEbook blog is Natalie Whipple. Writer of Young-Adult fiction and awesome blog entries. Natalie was nice enough to take a short break from her blog and spend some time at WEbook writing about how to take rejection in the publishing world.

Take it away, Natalie!

Even if you’ve just barely jumped into publishing, you’ve probably heard something like this: You have to develop a tough skin to make it in this business. Rejection is just part of the process. Deal with it.
 
Well, my skin is about as tough as tissue paper. And not the nice stuff—more like the public restroom stuff that disintegrates if you look at it wrong. For a long time I thought this meant I wasn’t fit to be published or even fit to try. I pictured everyone in the publishing business as these strong people devoid of emotion. They would laugh at weakling me if I even thought about crying.
 
After chickening out for several years, I finally decided to attempt the whole finding-an-agent thing. I figured maybe I’d develop this tough skin that I supposedly needed.
 
Every time I got a rejection, it stung. I held out hope that one day maybe it wouldn’t hurt. Maybe I just needed a lot of rejections to make my skin stronger. So I kept going, secretly ashamed that a partial rejection could make me cry so much. Real writers don’t cry!

But then I started hanging out with other writers, and I discovered a wonderful thing—rejection made them feel bad, too! Not that I was happy they felt sad, it’s just that I wasn’t alone with my shameful sensitivity. All of these “soft skinned” writers have been quite successful, and it gave me hope that I might see that success as well.

That’s not to say the idea of tough skin is completely wrong; I just think we often misread it as meaning strong and impenetrable. To make it in this business, I would say you need a different aspect of tough skin: Resilience.

Resilience doesn’t only come through toughness, though. You can be one of those Bobo dolls that always gets knocked over but pops right up again. Or you can be like Wolverine, who gets wounded often but heals up quick. Or you can be a ninja, who poison darts anyone who resists…wait, no, don’t do that. Maybe stick with the Bobo doll in this case, I’m getting caught up in weird analogies again.
 
The point is, I still cry sometimes when I get rejections or bad critiques or whatever. It hurts me. I’m not proud of that, but I’ve learned it’s okay to feel that way. I don’t have to be tough-skinned to make it in publishing. After my pity party, I just have to pick myself up and keep moving forward.

And carry a few poison darts. Just in case.

Natalie Whipple is a YA writer represented by Nathan Bransford of Curtis Brown, Ltd. When she's not writing she spends most of her time keeping her two little ninjas out of trouble, which is as hard as it sounds. Ninjas love trouble. Check out her great blog at betweenfactandfiction.blogspot.com or follow her on Twitter @nataliewhipple.

Sell the Sizzle, Not the Steak

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WEbook's Guest Author Series continues with Grace Coopersmith, author of Nancy's Theory of Style, which will be released on May 18. A bit about the book:

Lively, pretty young socialite Nancy Carrington-Chambers has always believed that an excellent sense of style and strict attention to detail are what it takes to achieve a perfectly chic life. Now, however, her own haute couture marriage is starting to resemble a clearance rack, as husband Todd manifests more and more symptoms of a dread disease—incurable tackiness.

And now, Grace writes about how to make your book sizzle!    

My first job out of college was a publicity internship for a summer rep theater. I was young and had splendid ideas about standards and art, so I wrote stories about the plays’ themes, symbols, and historical context.

Oddly enough, my boss kept rejecting my pieces.

I was annoyed, so I dashed out a satirical promo story using every publicity cliché I could think of. (In those days, I didn’t split infinitives, but language evolves and so did I.) A jaded coworker who smoked too much, drank too much, and played the saxophone very badly grabbed the column before I submitted it. He sat me down and explained that we were selling the sizzle, not the steak. 

Learning what he meant was painful, but eventually I came to see using terms like “wacky, love-struck comedy” was not a moral failing. I discovered that I did not immediately turn to ash if I used exclamation marks and arbitrary capitalization. I found that I could take an ambivalent review and select individual words for a positive blurb, just as one might pick out the grilled prawns from an otherwise lackluster buffet.

Aspiring writers frequently ask me for advice on their agent query letters. A common problem I see is writers trying to tell every detail of the novel in a one-page letter. However, the agent is only interested in reading the menu now. The steak may be divine, but no one is going to order from crayon scrawl on a grimy sheet of cardboard.

The writers should be selling the sizzle. What makes this book different, irresistible, compelling? What makes the author different, irresistible, compelling? Does the writer have a blog with thousands of daily readers? Has the writer landed a plane in the Hudson River? Is the writer a member of a large cult with a lively book club? Is the writer involved with any organization that will assist in promoting the book?

No matter what stage you’re at with your book, you should begin working on the sizzle now. Start a website with a blog. Join online groups and clubs. Attend book signings. Go to bookstores and talk to the staff, who know what sells and doesn’t sell and why. Interview other writers. Submit articles and columns to your local newspapers and magazines. Promote others and provide advice.

And if you should get annoyed about something, imagine that you’ve got a jaded coworker nearby, reeking of booze and cigarettes and experience. He’d tell you to step away from the computer, play a hand of gin rummy, and calm down. Then get back to selling the sizzle. 

Grace Coopersmith's novel, Nancy's Theory of Style, will be released May 18. She's been a frequent contributor to the San Francisco Chronicle, the Contra Costa Times, and Spaces Magazine. She's a graduate of Stanford University, where she studied creative writing and theater. Under the name Marta Acosta, she's written the comic Casa Dracula series, which was a BookSense Pick and Catalina Magazine Humor Book of the Year. Simon and Schuster will publish Haunted Honeymoon at Casa Draculain October 2010.To learn more about her books, please visit her websites, www.gracecoopersmith.com and www.martaacosta.com.Or, follow her sizzle on twitter @GraceCoopersmit.

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Author Joshua Gaylord On Dilettantism

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WEbook's guest author series is back and featuring Joshua Gaylord, author of two novels, Hummingbirds and the forthcoming The Reapers Are the Angels. Josh graduated from Berkeley with a degree in English and a minor in creative writing. In 2000, he received his Master’s and Ph.D. in English at New York University, specializing in twentieth-century American and British literature. He teaches high school English in NYC.

Take it away, Josh!

My first book, Hummingbirds, is a New York girls’ prep school novel.  My second, The Reapers Are the Angels (coming August 3, under the pen-name Alden Bell), is a post-apocalyptic southern gothic—with zombies. I have older manuscripts (which remain sitting in drawers, wisely unpublished) that include: an update of an eighteenth-century picaresque, a philosophical novel based upon the humors of the body, and, of course, a memoir about growing up as a child of divorce in California. 

I am sometimes asked what it’s like to shift gears so dramatically from book to book—which, I take it, is actually a beard for an unkinder question: Don’t you think you’d be a better writer if you stuck to one kind of book? The answer to that question is easy: Absolutely. After all, the more you do one thing, the better you become at it—right? On the other hand, since being a good writer is second on my list of literary priorities behind being a writer who enjoys writing, I will happily and proudly don the dunce cap marked D for dilettantism.

Part of the problem is that I’m very susceptible to suggestions of style. When I read an author who awes me with his or her craft, I find myself wanting to get inside it. It’s not enough for me to cover myself with Tom Drury as though it were a blanket, closing my eyes under the immense power of his prose; when I read something like Hunts in Dreams, I want to poke at it, I want to get behind the scenes, see how it works, imagine myself at the controls of it, steering that story myself, being the one who puts those words on the page. And so it’s not surprising that if I’m writing a book while I’m reading Tom Drury, the influence of Tom Drury can be felt on every page, throughout the plot, the style, the characters.  Hummingbirds is my Muriel Spark book. The Reapers Are the Angels is my Cormac McCarthy book.

Another part of the problem is that I may have taken too much to heart the lesson I learned from the powerhouses of the Western Literary Canon. Go ahead, go back and reread James Joyce, William Faulkner, Virginia Woolf, Thomas Pynchon—you’ll hear the message loud and clear: You can do whatever you want. It may not lead you to literary fame and fortune (always already a somewhat specious goal), but this is a lesson that, if followed, is sure to lead you to what Thoreau called a “success unexpected in common hours.” Do what you want, because readers and agents and editors and publishers are a vast and fickle group—and extremely difficult to please even when you set out to enslave yourself to their desires. Do what you want, because writing is like sex: You have to figure out how to please yourself before you can set out to please others. 

Ugh. That’s a shameless metaphor, and I apologize for it. Let me try to answer the original question more simply. What’s it like writing such different kinds of books? It’s thrilling, invigorating, terrifying—all the more gratifying precisely because you are not becoming a weary master of the craft.  You feel out of your depth, likely to go under at any moment—but if you manage to stay afloat, well, then, you feel like you’ve done something true and good.

Thanks for the insight, Josh! If this post put you in the mood to read stuff from all different kinds of genres, then rating some PageToFame pages is probably a good next move. If you're now in the mood to brave uncertain literary waters yourself, grab a pen/ keyboard and get to it!